The Night Listener : A Novel

easier on you. She went for the slow fade-out instead.” Like you, I thought. Leaving without ever saying it was over. You knew that was one more thing I don’t want an answer about.
    “But why would she do that?” I asked. “If it made her look like a liar in the process?”
    “Because,” said Jess, “she’s not the one you have to believe. Pete is.”
    I brooded for a moment, then made a feeble stab: “I saw his room, remember. His bed.”
    “You saw a bed. It could have been a prop. She must’ve expected that sooner or later someone would come looking for him. Or maybe it had been his bed—or someone’s bed—once upon a time.” Another silence betrayed my decision to surrender. Finally, I asked, “Has Findlay called again?”
    “Not that I know of,” said Jess.
    “He still thinks Pete is dead. He hasn’t even heard the latest.”
    “Why don’t you just leave it that way?”
    “Why?”
    He shrugged. “What’s the point? It’s not gonna change his mind about publishing the book. It just makes the whole thing more suspect than ever. And Findlay will just think you’re—” He cut himself off.
    “What? Being gullible again?”
    “Something like that.”
    He was right, of course.
    “Besides,” said Jess. “You don’t want to give away your best material. You’re gonna use all this in your book.” I flashed him a dead-eyed look.
    “You need to write, Gabriel. You’ll feel better when you do. You know that as well as I do.”
    “I do, do I?”
    “I bought you some paper.” Jess nodded toward the computer.
    “And there’s several more reams in the closet.”
    “I’ll be writing about you,” I said darkly.
    “Fine,” he replied with a smile. “I trust you.” I holed up in the aerie for two weeks, extracting the first chapter of this book. During that time, Hugo kept me constant company, hardly leaving his shepherd-shaped dent on the sofa. His efforts to pee outside were rarely successful, and the tortuous descent to the garden only made him yelp with pain. There was no longer any valid excuse for postponement, so I made a few inquiries with friends, then called Jess.
    “I can’t do this alone,” I said.
    “I wouldn’t let you,” he said. “Where do we go?”
    “This guy comes to the house, apparently.”
    “Well, that’s civilized.”
    “Yeah,” I said with a sigh. “Dr. Kerbarkian.” Jess laughed weakly, and the joke distracted us until the day of the deed, when I could no longer suppress the feeling, however irrational, that I was betraying Hugo. (A day earlier I’d been chiding myself for having held off too long.) To make it even harder, the dog was more active than usual that morning, shambling out to greet the gardener—his friend of more than fourteen years—who’d come to dig his grave beneath the tree ferns. I didn’t cry, though, until Jess arrived in his best leathers bearing a pretty Tibetan prayer cloth. “I thought we could wrap him in this,” he said solemnly, and the floodgates burst for both of us.
    Were we mourning more than Hugo that day? I don’t recall ever feeling that kind of primal, scouring grief. Maybe our other losses were just too vast to articulate, so Hugo, in his sweet simplicity, became the safest repository for our pain. Or maybe it had more to do with our fading dream of coupledom; this dog, after all, had been the closest witness to our bliss.
    Dr. Kerbarkian turned out to be a soft-eyed Chilean with a comically droopy mustache. There would be two shots, he explained, one to relax the dog, the other to do the job. So we spread the prayer cloth on the bed and lay on either side of Hugo, stroking him gently as the first shot was administered. Almost immediately his muscles relaxed and his face fell into what we chose to interpret as a smile.
    This gave us a minute to say our goodbyes, to fill his deaf ears with endearments and let him soak up the smells of his family.
    On the second shot, as we’d been warned, Hugo’s body stiffened in one brief, horrific spasm. When it was over, I glanced up at the doctor, who was holding the syringe in one hand and crossing himself with the other. Jess, thank God, missed this overt display of popery because his eyes were still fixed on Hugo. My own were lost in the gossamer web of tears dangling from Jess’s nose ring, the loveliest, silliest collision of tough and tender.
    I continued to write into February, extruding the details of my breakup with Jess, the solace I’d