Unsaid: A Novel by Neil Abramson

intimacy that I blurted out the first solution that came into my mind.
    “Castrate the little bastard.”
    David first looked at me with that
Can you please be serious
expression he occasionally threw my way, but then I could see the thin tendrils of an idea take hold of him. He broke into a wide smile.
    “Castration. Of course. Thanks, honey.” He kissed me briefly on the lips and then spent most of that evening talking on the phone.
    In the end, David got Chris to agree to wear a microcassette recorder during all interactions with the offending creep. By the end of only one week, Chris had recorded enough of Whit’s comments about her physical appearance and invitations to out-of-town “educational seminars” (this last said with an audible smirk) to fill two tapes. She then handed David the tapes with disgust, as if they were something she’d found floating in a subway toilet.
    David played the tapes for Whit that very evening. When he was finished, David told Whit that he not only would have the tapesplayed at the next partners’ meeting, but would also deliver copies to Whit’s (second) wife. The price for David’s silence was relatively cheap: an immediate cease and desist of the behavior and a well-deserved “excellent” review for Chris.
    Three years later, Chris is now only nine months away from being voted on for elevation to the exalted status of partner, the tapes are secured somewhere in our home, and Whit is Chris’s biggest cheerleader (a result that may coincide with the fact that David sends Whit a blank microcassette tape through the interoffice mail about once a month).
    Sitting in David’s office now, Chris pulls out a folder full of notes. “Are you ready?”
    “Do I have a choice?”
    Chris shrugs. “Probably not one consistent with your remaining a partner at the firm.” Reading from the file, Chris recites a long list of matters and their status. David tries to stay focused, but I can see the struggle; his eyes keep sliding toward our picture on his desk.
    To my vestigial ears, Chris’s voice soon merges with the phones ringing and conversations taking place in the other offices until all these elements become simply a wall of overwhelming noise that forces me from the building.
    There were many things that made me devoted to Joshua Marks once he left the ivy-covered buildings of Cornell and became, like me, just a small-town vet. His loss had made him less certain about himself and his world. He took his patients and their well-being seriously, but no longer viewed himself as anything more than a journeyman veterinarian—“another schmo riding the bus,” he wouldsay. Now Joshua listened more, said little (and nothing about himself at all), and chose his words much more carefully. I felt comfortable in the silences that existed in the ever-growing gaps between his sentences. I was not the only one.
    Jimmy Rankin, a fourteen-year-old boy in a football jersey, waits for Joshua in our reception area. The office has not yet officially opened for the day, so the waiting room is empty except for the boy and the large cardboard carton in his lap.
    Jimmy has dark hair, bright blue eyes, a warm smile, only one ear, and a deep scar that cuts through the left side of his face. He lost the ear and gained the scar in the car accident that took his older brother’s life two years ago.
    After that accident, Jimmy somehow became a magnet for all types of stray animals. He found them—or they found him—in the most unlikely of places. Almost all these strays have found homes either through his own efforts or through the persistence of (okay, the guilt inflicted by) the people at our office. Invariably, Jimmy names every creature he finds—dog, cat, squirrel, raccoon, or bird—the same thing; he calls them all some variation on
Pete,
the name of his dead brother.
    “Any luck, Jimmy?” Joshua asks as he emerges from an exam room and greets the boy with a handshake.
    “Not so much, Dr. Marks.