Rachel Alexander 05 - The Wrong Dog

giving her fluids and keep an eye on her. We just have to wait and see if she has it in her to rally.”
    “The injury?”
    She shook her head. “It’s not that. The ice pack took the swelling down. But she’s an old dog and she’s had a lot of hard knocks, some more painful than a blow with a gun.
    I’m sorry to have to ask you this, but will you be responsible for the bill?”
    “Yes, but I’m not leaving her.”
    “I understand. I’m here in case you need me.”
    Chip was waiting for me in the car. When he saw me carrying Blanche, he got out and opened the door for me. I slid into the backseat, Blanche on my lap, not saying a word.
    When we got home, he helped me get Blanche and the other dogs inside, then went to park the car. I lay Blanche on a folded quilt on the living room floor and gave Dash and Bianca fresh water outside. Then I began to prepare the raw food for all the pets, putting Blanche’s portion in the blender until it had the consistency of baby food. When it was ready, I took a small portion of it and sat next to Blanche, talking to her and stroking her until she opened one whale eye and looked up at me, then I fed her , what I could from my finger, offering small enough amounts so that she could swallow without lifting her head.
    When she had eaten as much as she wanted, I lay down on the quilt along the line of her back, putting an arm across her side, my hand curled under her front leg and against her chest, feeling her breathe, whispering in her ear as she did. I heard Chip come in and take the food outside for Dash and Bianca and walk back in to where I lay on the floor with Blanche.
    “Do you know what she said as I was leaving?”
    He knelt, resting one hand on the top of Blanche’s head. “She said, ‘At least you have the clone. It’s not like losing her altogether.’ ”
    “You told her?”
    “Everything.”
    He closed his eyes and shook his head. “I knew there was something wrong with that woman when she didn’t attend my talk.”
    “Is that what people really think, that a clone is the original? That would make twins interchangeable, wouldn’t it? It doesn’t account at all for the development of character, of soul. You can’t duplicate those things.”
    “There’s some more bad news, Rach.”
    I slid my hand out from under Blanche’s leg and sat up. “What?”
    “I don’t imagine you saw today’s paper yet.”
    “No, of course not.”
    “They did some tests on Dolly and found that her telomeres were shorter than they should be.”
    “In English please.”
    “The telomeres are attached to the chromosomes and they get shorter each time a cell divides until eventually the cell dies. Dolly’s shortened telomeres might reflect the age of the cell from which she was cloned.”
    “You really can’t fool Mother Nature.”
    “It looks that way. At least for now. But this technology is moving faster than we can absorb it. They may, one day, find a way around this problem, too.”
    “But meanwhile, Bianca was cloned from a nine-and-a-half-year-old dog.”
    “That’s right, Rachel. But so far, she’s fine. She seems healthy and acts appropriately for her chronological age, exactly the way an adolescent should act.”
    I looked back down at Blanche, sleeping again.
    “No matter how many ways we try to play God ...“
    “Only God can make a tree?”
    “Correct.”
    He put his hand on the back of my head, leaned forward, and kissed my forehead.
    “You should get some rest, Rachel. You had some night.”
    “He saved my life,” I said.
    He nodded.
    “He did it deliberately, pulling me around behind him when he saw Joe, or whatever his name turns out to be, with the gun. And he said something so strange, Chip. He said, ‘I told him he’d already gone too far.’ Him who?“
    “Are you going to . . . ?”
    “I was hired to contact Side by Side, to tell them the talent they were cloning for did not translate, that the cloned dog wasn’t alerting. But Bianca wasn’t alerting because the job was taken. She wasn’t needed. Blanche was doing the job for her. But when Blanche was incapacitated, and Mel...” I stopped and took a few breaths, thinking of Mel lying in my arms, bleeding to death, thinking how easily that could have been me. “When Mel was about to seizure from loss of blood, Bianca alerted him. She knew.”
    “So there’s no need for you to find Side by Side.”
    “I think what Sophie would want—God, I hate it when people say that,