— If he won’t take the rice water by morning and starts to weaken, call me right away, — he added. — They’re little. They can’t go long without food.
Eleanor wrote down that last sentence too. Underlined it.
She cooked the rice for forty minutes over low heat, stirring until it broke down into a white mush without a single whole grain left. Then she strained it through cheesecloth, let it cool until just warm, and drew it into the dropper.
Quiet lay in the corner of the crate, looking past her at the wall, at nothing, with that complete indifference sick animals sometimes have—the kind that’s worse than convulsions. Gray paced circles in the crate, whining, nudging Quiet, whining again.
Eleanor dripped the rice water from her finger slowly, one drop at a time, holding it right to Quiet’s muzzle. He didn’t lick. She waited. Dripped again. Waited. Twenty minutes went by that way. Then once, barely noticeable, his tongue touched her finger. Eleanor did not change position, did not pull her hand away. She gave him another drop.
At last Gray lay down beside Quiet, pressed right against him, side to side, and went still. He only kept looking up at Eleanor from below, the way you look at a person everything depends on when you’re not entirely sure you trust them.
Eleanor thought: they’re already a pair, these two. It was not a sentimental thought. It was an observation, as concrete as anything in the notebook. They could not be separated. Before, she had thought only in terms of “placing them somewhere,” one tidy phrase, like a line in an account book. Now that phrase no longer fit on one line.
At midnight Quiet still was barely eating. Eleanor sat on the chair by the crate and watched him in the weak light of the desk lamp. Breathing—that was the main thing. Breathing evenly, no wheeze, chest rising and falling in a normal rhythm. But sluggish. Eyes half-closed. Responding to the rice water every other time.
Gray was asleep with his head laid across Quiet’s side—heavily, the way something valuable gets set down. Quiet did not move away.
Eleanor thought: if he isn’t better by morning, then what? Dr. Harris said call. But Dr. Harris was in town, and the bus didn’t come till morning, and the pup was small, and Dr. Harris himself had said they couldn’t go long without food. She forced that chain of thought to stop. As long as he’s breathing, we work. Panic later.
She picked up the phone. Texted Daniel: “Quiet got sick. Watching him.” Sent it and laid the phone face down on the table, as if that would help her not wait for an answer. The answer came three minutes later.
“What happened?”
Eleanor typed an explanation: the food change had been forced, the cow was sick again, there was no milk, had to switch too fast, the vet said rice water. Her fingers no longer stumbled over the letters the way they had two weeks earlier.
“You’re not sleeping?” Daniel wrote.
“No,” she typed back. “You?”
“Me neither. Thesis.”
Silence. A minute, maybe a minute and a half. Then: “Want to talk?”
