Free Seaglass Summer by Anjali Banerjee

She rushes out to take a phone call, and I stand in the exam room, which suddenly seems smaller and darker than before. The wall clock has stopped at two-forty-five, and on the sink, the bottle of antiseptic soap is empty. A few strands of Marmalade’s orange fur still float through the air.

Chapter Seventeen
BRANDON
    I dream of old, skinny Marmalade. He’s sitting at the dining table, surrounded by plates of every kind of food—roast chicken, pumpkin pie, curried potatoes, mounds of rice, and filets of salmon. He’s wearing a bib, eating whatever he wants. But the more he eats, the smaller he gets. I frantically search for him everywhere, but he has disappeared. I wake up in a sweat. Stu is sitting next to the bed, his tail thumping on the floor. His brown eyes are saying,
Take me for a walk
.
    “Oh, Stu.” I hug him tightly; then I get dressed and run out to the beach. My dream drifts away, but I can’t forget Marmalade, the way he purred in Mr. Pincus’s arms.
    Monday morning at the clinic, a week after I first arrived, the waiting room is full, the phone is ringing, and a dog is barking in the kennel room.
    “Hey, Poppy, you’re here!” Hawk pulls me toward the treatment room. “You gotta check out this pit bull. His name is Brandon, after Brandon Roy, who played basketball for the Washington Huskies. Stepped on glass at a construction site.”
    Inside the treatment room, Uncle Sanjay is fixing the paw while Duff holds Brandon. We watch from the doorway. The dog’s back right foot has a big ugly bleeding cut with the skin hanging off. My stomach turns upside down.
    Uncle Sanjay is pouring liquid into the wound.
    “He’s getting the dirt out to prevent infection,” Hawk whispers. “He gave Brandon a local anesthetic to numb the area.”
    Blood drips onto the floor. My legs turn to rubber.
    Uncle Sanjay glances up at me. “You all right?”
    I am not going to pass out. “I’m fine,” I say. The air thickens. I’m having trouble breathing.
    “Come in and watch,” Uncle Sanjay says.
    Okay, here I go. We step inside.
    Uncle Sanjay smears liquid from a tube onto the flap of skin; then he presses the skin back onto Brandon’s foot and holds it there. “This is tissue glue. The army created it for soldiers in the field. If an animal is wounded, apply firm pressure, like this. Very important. If the blood is spurting, it’s probably coming from an artery, so you apply pressure above the wound.”
    The room begins to shrink. Does Uncle Sanjay realize he’s making me even queasier?
    “If it’s a steady flow, the blood is probably from a vein,” he goes on. “You need to apply pressure below the cut—”
    “Hey, Poppy’s looking kind of white,” Duff says.
    Hawk grins. “Yeah, she’s gonna faint.” I want to slap him.
    Uncle Sanjay looks up again, clearly surprised. “Oh, my dear niece.”
    Brandon begins to fidget and whine. Duff holds him tighter. She must see my worried face, because she says, “He’s mostly upset about being held. Half the time, that’s why an animal cries. Not because of pain. Some animals just hate being restrained. You only got so much time until they lose it. Hurry, Doc.”
    “I’ve got it.” Uncle Sanjay wraps Brandon’s foot in a purple and gold bandage. “You wrap from the bottomup; otherwise you cut off the blood supply to the paw, and the foot swells.”
    Brandon leaves wearing a cone, called an Elizabethan collar, around his neck, to keep him from chewing the bandage off his foot.
    I follow Uncle Sanjay into his office. “How do you do that? How come the blood doesn’t bother you?”
    “Oh, I’ve felt sick many times, but after a while, I learned to be calm, inside and out. When you’re calm, the animal calms down, too.”
    “But all the blood—”
    “I look past the blood, past the damage. Once, in the late stages of my training, I saw a cow that had its eye gouged out. The eyeball was hanging from the socket. I pictured what I could do to fix