Page 7 of Knocked Up

"Is he…"

"He's alive."

His face did something. He put it away as fast as a man can put a thing away. He wasn't fast enough. I saw it, and I wish I hadn't.

"Stable. Guarded. Those are two different words and I mean both." I looked at the chart, which I did not need to look at. "Pressure's holding. He threw some extra heartbeats around four, which is normal after a spleen comes out. We're watching it. He's on oxygen because he earned it. The mass goes to the lab today. It's either the thing that's already everywhere or it's the thing that isn't. I'm not going to give you the odds, because odds are for a thousand dogs and you have one."

"You say okay like other people breathe."

"Okay," he said.

He looked back at me with a face that could have been printed on a bank building.

"You can see him. Two minutes. Don't put your fingers in the cage."

He stood up. The blanket slid off him. He caught it and folded it badly and set it on the chair.

Bear was in the cage on his side in the blue light with a shaved belly and a line of staples and a catheter.

And his ear moved, just the ear. He didn't lift his head and he didn't open his eyes. He heard him.

Beckett went down on one knee in front of the glass and put his forehead nearly against it.

"Hey, bud," he said.

For about four seconds, standing behind him with a clipboard, ten years was not there. I was twenty-one and it was a hot afternoon in August. This was the person I was going to be with. That was not a hope, it was a settled fact, like the sky.

Then the oxygen concentrator kicked on with a bang and I came back into my body.

"Two minutes," I said, to the chart. "I have a bulldog."

And I went and stood in a room with a bulldog who did not need one thing from me.

Chapter 3: Beckett

I left. I went to the house at seven-thirty and showered. I put on the gear and drove to the rink. I took the ice for the first practice of my Denver career and stopped pucks for ninety minutes. I was back in the lot at Reeves Rescue by two.

Then I did it again Wednesday. Then Thursday.

By Friday Marisol had stopped asking who I was there for.

"He's in three," she'd say, without looking up. "Two minutes."

"It's been two minutes for four days."

"Then you're due for a raise."

I sat in that waiting room long enough that it stopped being a waiting room and became a place. The phone rang in clusters of three. The fish tank filter clogged on Thursdays. A woman named Deb came in every afternoon at four with a Pomeranian named Sergeant who did not need anything.

"He's been off," Deb told me on the second day. "Since Sunday."

Sergeant was standing on Deb's purse, vibrating slightly, at what appeared to be full operating capacity.

"He looks fine to me."

Deb gave me a look I had previously only received from officials.

"You're not a doctor."