“Carly might not make it through the night.” He said it casually, as though he were talking about some mediocre tidbit of gossip. He was always trying to be suave, detached.

I turned to Mike and considered what he said. The fourteen-year-old Australian shepherd mutt had been lethargic and ill all day, but I had hoped it was only the result of the summer heat or something she’d eaten. We’d thought several times in the past few years that her end was near, and always the old dog sprang back just fine. Why would tonight be any different?

We had just watched a movie outside on the projector. The summer evening was pleasantly cool after the stifling heat that had suppressed us that afternoon. I limped back to the house, my left foot sore and unbearably itchy after bearing my weight all day. I sighed, knowing that I’d brought the pain on myself by walking barefoot everywhere. Of course I’d step on a bee from time to time.

I trudged beneath the inky-green towers of the cedar trees around me, their silhouetted boughs brushing against each other as the trees whispered amongst one another. I shivered. Normally I would have called such a night peaceful. Tonight the quiet stillness only seemed the calm before the storm.

When I finally reached the house where it sat overlooking the river, I found Carly in the exact position she’d been in the last time I’d seen her. She lay in a drying puddle of urine in Mike’s room, and her eyes gazed blankly ahead at nothing. I paused, as I had come to do by habit, until I saw her bubbly belly rise and fall. I breathed a sigh of relief. She was alive.

 Now I refilled her water bowl and brought it beside her, along with some food in her old, plastic bowl. When I realized she couldn’t sit up, I lifted her head and held the large, gaping water dish to her. She lapped thirstily but remained indifferent to her faded food bowl. That had become too common.

I was going to leave her then, having completed my duty, but my conscience itched with guilt. I ran downstairs and fetched her some jerky treats—her favorite—which I held before her snout when I returned to her side. Her mouth fell ajar and she gingerly accepted the treats from my hand, chewing them slowly and deliberately. Her eyes remained glazed in what I could only describe as a thousand-yard stare.

Pushing myself off the floor of Mike’s room, I retrieved the old couch cushion used as a dog bed and set it down beside Carly. Lifting the limp, ragged dog, I edged her onto the cushion into what I hoped was a comfortable position and tucked an old towel under her head for added comfort. I stroked her ears, whispered goodnight, and retreated to my room to sleep, eager to finally get off my swollen foot.

 I heard Mike come in from outside and go to his room. Carly wasn’t much to look at—graying and lumpy, with mottled fur that stank from her loss of control over her bodily functions. I know his first glance at her must have yanked his suppressed, sensitive heart to life, for within minutes he had dialed up the nearest emergency vet and announced that he was taking Carly in.

            “Do you want me to come?” I called from my bed, sitting up.

            “Sure, you can come if you want,” he replied dismissively, trying, I think, not to sound relieved.

 I jumped over our other dog and out of bed, trading my flannel pajamas for sweatpants and a t-shirt, and stuffing my sore foot into a tennis shoe again. Mike carried Carly to Mom’s car, laying her down in the backseat beside me. We pulled out of the driveway at 11:58.

Apparently the only vet open was in the next town over. The car ride was a daze—both too long and surprisingly short. We parked at 12:24 and leapt out of the car, landing in the waiting room with a peerless sense of urgency. Muttering beneath his breath, Mike impatiently signed Carly in and filled out paperwork while I kneeled on the tile floor with her, stroking her head in my lap. This could be it. I might not have more time to redeem myself for how much I’d ignored her over the years.

Once the paperwork was done, Mike paced the waiting room, intolerant of a second’s delay. A middle-aged couple with a small dog emerged from an examination room and passed by us on their way out. “Good luck,” the woman whispered down to me with an encouraging smile. I smiled back, appreciating the sentiment, but I knew why we were really here.

At last we were given an examination room to, as Mike said, “wait some more.” The room was tastelessly decorated with a slipshod collection of animal pictures—some amateurish paintings and a few old photographs—plus a bronze coat-hook shaped like a deer head and positioned pointlessly between two pictures. Mike and I managed to laugh about the room as we waited, mocking the paintjob and ornamentation, all the while glancing at the dying dog on the floor.

After we’d nearly fallen asleep, a vet tech knocked on the door and entered. I sat up hopefully, but to our disappointment, the woman announced there was an error on our paperwork. As soon as it was fixed and the technician left, Mike grumbled contemptuously, “At least now we know they have their priorities straight.” He stiffened with impatience in his chair.

Another interminable wait followed. Mike and I had almost squeezed in another nap when the doctor finally opened the door. Mike and I sat up, rubbing sleep from our eyes, to see a stout man with a balding head, a rough, umber beard, and a high, forced voice rife with nerves. I glanced at his nametag and couldn’t pronounce the name it bore. The vet examined Carly in unbearable silence until at last he began his spiel. She was dehydrated, he said; she had a fever; her breathing was irregular; she’d obviously lost a lot of weight recently…the list continued, followed by a shorter, grimmer list of options—take her home with painkillers…run some tests…leave her at the vet for monitoring…euthanasia.

Mike clung to his composure, pretending not to be nervous or exhausted or distressed, and told the doctor that we needed to make some calls. Nodding, the doctor excused himself and Mike called our older brother Nathan, Carly’s original owner. When he moved out, he had resigned Carly into mine and Mike’s care. Now he did the same. “It’s your decision,” he said sleepily over the phone, the static of the call cutting into the quiet exam room. “Either way.” He hung up.

I didn’t realize until later how selfish he was being, leaving the decision to us—or rather, to Mike. A few days short of nineteen and still more a kid than an adult, he clutched the papers in his hands, the papers the vet had given him, the papers that really made the decision, the papers with the numbers. Leaving Carly there for tests and monitoring: $1700 for the night. That option was out. Taking her home with painkillers: $400. We might be able to manage that. Leaving without our dog: $175.

 Our eyes darted from the numbers to Carly, sprawled on the cool tile floor, her breathing labored, her fur rough, patchy, and smelly, her belly bloated, her eyes becoming dull. Our words were few and heavy; our breaths came in painful gasps. I fell to the floor, to Carly’s side, and hugged her. I couldn’t stop the shaky breathing and rampant tears. My nose was so plugged I couldn’t breathe through it. Mike clenched his hands and stood to face the wall, and I buried my face in my cheery, colorful shawl. That’s how the vet tech found us when she came to check on us—I don’t remember what for.

It felt like hours passed, yet at the same time the clock felt torturously stuck. I mostly remember weeping together with Mike and both of us trying to ignore the other’s tears. He mumbled and gave me a hug—something he never does—but the rarity of the gesture was lost on me. Giving Carly a quick pat, he excused himself to the bathroom.

My heart felt suddenly wrenched and I dug in my backpack for the little Bible, paging through it frantically to find a passage to read to my sick sister. “Take heart,” I finally whispered to her, settling on a page. “I have overcome the world.” Then I prayed, and I apologized to Carly for being so unkind to her through the years, and I told her I loved her, but I couldn’t tell if she believed me or not.

 At some point Michael came back in, and left again with a tearful gasp of a breath. Suddenly the endless night—and the past fourteen years of her life—hadn’t been enough time with Carly. I crouched anxiously before the motionless dog, knowing what was on the way. “Carly, Carly,” I said desperately. “Give me a kiss. C’mon, Carly.” I held up her head gently and put my nose to hers, but I heard the technicians coming now and it was too late. “I love you, girl,” I managed to whisper, or at least I think I did.

And then they were here. The two vet techs opened the door and lifted Carly onto the flat top of a high, stainless steel cart, and as they did, Carly sat up. Frightened, she cast her dark, sorrowful eyes—which had been blank and vacant for hours—at me, her soft, floppy ears framing her narrow face.

 “Wait!” I tried to scream, but a torrent of fresh tears blurred my eyes and rendered me breathless. I turned to the wall and leaned my hot forehead against it until my eyes cleared and I could breathe again, then I whisked around and stumbled out of the exam room in time to see the O.R. doors swing closed behind Carly’s gurney.

My face crumpled again and I thrust myself into a plastic waiting room chair to drown in snot and tears. My shoulders shook as I sobbed—how desperately I wanted to run into the O.R. and make them stop! How I wanted to tell Michael, “Don’t let them do it!” But it was too late. We’d murdered our dog.

A few minutes later, on the same steel gurney that took Carly away, the vet techs wheeled out a large, lumpy bundle wrapped in white cloth. “Maybe you’d better wait in the car…” Michael started to say, but I’d already seen it. The two technicians loaded the bundle into the car to the tune of my hiccup-y sobs and Mike’s quiet sniffling. “I’m sorry you had to go through this,” offered the older, wavy-haired vet tech, but I couldn’t manage even a squeak in reply.

Michael thanked the two ladies—for what, I’m still not sure—and we climbed slowly, unsurely, into the car without Carly—only a bundle in the trunk that I couldn’t get far enough away from. Michael turned on the Traveling Wilburys’ “End of the Line” and we slipped out of the parking lot into the empty streets. It was 2:20.

I tried to help Mike bury the dog once we got home, but he refused and told me he wanted to do it alone. I’m not sure if that was for his sake or mine. Either way, I waited by the house while he dug a hole at the far edge of the property. My mom emerged from the house in her pajamas and wrapped me in a hug I didn’t want, a hug that only made me hold my breath and struggle not to leave snot or tears on her shirt. I wiggled away and stood coldly alone while she watched helplessly. Mike had roused her from her sleep before we left, told her we were taking her car and where we were going, but she’d been so exhausted that I don’t think she actually realized what was happening until we’d left. Now she watched me cry and suggested we go find Mike.

Cold clumps of mud already smothered the ghostly white bundle by the time Mom and I joined him. He stood red-faced at the edge of a haphazard hole, a near-useless square shovel in his hand, having been unable to find a suitable digging tool. Mom tried to say something, tried to comfort us or have some degree of a funeral. “She’s in a better place now,” she told us, which I didn’t really doubt but still hated to hear. She praised us for “making the right decision” and for “taking such good care of Carly,” but I couldn’t bear her words. She unknowingly twisted a knife into the sore wound of guilt that bloomed from my neglect of Carly. How many times had I left her with no water? How many times had I shoved her off my bed but let the other dogs stay, or impatiently pushed her away when she only wanted love? How many times had I left her in solitude? I loved Carly, and sometimes I thought I could never bear to live without her, but she was a demanding dog and too often I avoided her company because of it. Stinging-hot tears retraced the familiar tracks down my cheeks. She didn’t deserve to be ignored like that.

 We stared at the depression in the earth and kicked in the last of the dirt. Not much was said; Mike and I were so exhausted, emotionally and physically, that we finished the task unceremoniously and trudged—limped, in my case—back to the house. I can only assume he cried himself to sleep, too.