Read Online Come Closer by Sara Gran - Free Book Online

scared of me than I was of him.
    “Fuck off!” I screamed. The idiot got up and ran away. I went home, washed my hand, wrapped it in a clean white dish towel, and called Ed, hoping he would drive me to the emergency room. He wasn’t in, so I called a taxi to take me instead. By the time I got to the hospital it hurt at least as much as I had imagined a dog bite would. I tried Ed again. Still out. For three hours I sat in the waiting room and tried to guess what the other people waiting had wrong with them. Some were obvious—hacking coughs, swollen appendages—but most I had to guess. Finally I was ushered into a brightly lit little examination cubicle, where a doctor washed the wound and then asked if I knew the dog who had bit me.
    “Why?” I asked.
    “Because if you don’t, you need to get two shots now, another in three days, another in seven, another in fourteen, and another in twenty-eight. Whenever there’s a bite by an unknown dog, there’s a chance of rabies.”
    “What if I’m really, really sure this dog doesn’t have rabies?” I asked.
    “If you don’t know the dog,” he said with irritation, “you’re not really, really sure. The only way to avoid the shots is to get a brain sample from the dog. Now this is going to hurt.”
    The doctor gave me a shot with a thick needle in my right hand, near the bite, and then another shot in the upper arm. The shots hurt worse than the bite had.
    It was obvious that a brain sample couldn’t come from a living dog. Good, I thought at first, serves the stupid fucker right. Then I thought of that dumb old dog, the fellow who used to be my pal, my best buddy, how he never gave up trying to seduce me, even after I made it clear I was married. I couldn’t. So on the third, seventh, fourteenth, and twenty-eighth day after the bite I went to the doctor’s office for more painful shots, and I never saw the dog again.

     
    ED WAS in a state when I got home at eleven that night, furious that I had let him worry. When I explained where I had been and showed him the ugly red puncture marks on my hand he relented and showed appropriate sympathy.
    “Really, though,” he said, after kissing my hand, “you should have called.”
    We were sitting on the sofa, curled up close. He gently held my bitten hand. For a few minutes we had been in love again. Friends again. And now this. He wants an apology, I thought. “I tried,” I told him. “Twice.”
    “Still, hon, I was worried.”
    Where was he? I thought. “I tried,” I said. “Where were you, anyway?”
    Ed made a face. “What do you mean, where was I? Working, you know that.”
    “Just asking. You ought to get one of those cellular phones. In case of an emergency. You’re out of the office so much these days.”
    Ed rolled his eyes. “I’m always out of the office a lot, Amanda, that’s half my job. You know that.”
    Then why not get a phone? “Then why not get a phone?”
    “Why, so you can keep tabs on me?”
    “No, not so I can keep tabs on you. So if I get bitten by a rabid dog you can drive me to the emergency room.”
    Ed dropped my hand. “Do you plan on doing this often? Bothering stray animals and then getting rabies? Because if so, maybe we can get you vaccinated or something.”
    We sat stiffly on the sofa, side-by-side now. “Yes, Ed,” I told him. “I plan on doing this often.”

 
    W HEN I WENT TO Dr. Flynn for my seventh day rabies shot, the story about fainting a few weeks before at the magazine stand came out. Dr. Flynn was my age and blonde. She had been Ed’s doctor for years. The first time I saw her, the day after my trip to the emergency room, I was immensely jealous. She wasn’t who I would have picked to examine my naked husband. But my own doctor, Jeff Winston, had died of a stroke two months before, and Ed raved about Dr. Flynn.
    She gave me a full physical, took blood for testing, and interrogated me for half an hour about the day I had fainted. What had I eaten?