Someplace Like This, page 7
“This is the answer!” he says. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of it last night.” He is shaking his head, smiling about what a numbskull he has been. I try to guess what time he had to have gotten up to accomplish this feat, or if it was the outcome, not of will, but merely of circumstance, and, instead, his brainstorm was a by-product of an inability to sleep.
“Didn’t you sleep?” I am feeling guilty. I slept long and hard.
“Off and on,” he says, but he is no longer thinking about such things. He is on to feeding the squirrels.
Downstairs, Evan fills the bottles with milk he had set out before he left.
The squirrels are sleeping, but at the sound of our footsteps the wailing begins.
Evan holds the first squirrel between his thumb and index finger and guides the nipple into its toothless, pink mouth. The milk dribbles across the little nubby face, down its neck onto Evan’s arm and onto his shirtsleeve. He picks up another bottle and tries again. Same thing. He seems to decide that particular squirrel is defective. He places it gently back into the box and lifts another from the nest of blankets. Drop by drop. He waits until its mouth is open and then squeezes the bottle. Drop. But by then the mouth has closed again and the milk is on its journey towards Evan’s sleeve. Some has gotten into this one, he is certain, he says. He is triumphant.
“They’ll live,” he declares. It is as though he’s the doctor and the squirrels are a dozen of the world’s most hopeless jungle fever patients. Each in turn is, drop by drop, showered by and infused with milk. What seems to be an increase of cooperation on the squirrels’ part is actually evidence of the honing of Evan’s skill. Gradually, as each baby is placed back in the tissue box, somewhat sated, or merely exhausted from the ordeal, they go to sleep. They nuzzle into each other, tie themselves into little squirrel-knots, and are silent. The process takes an hour and a half. Evan is exhausted.
In the kitchen we have our coffee and nearly swallow whole the half-dozen sweet rolls that Evan picked up on his way back from the 5 & 10. We eat quickly and unappreciatively. Then, we too are ready for a nap. We drag ourselves into the living room and huddle on the sofa. We are asleep within moments.
In almost no time, we are awakened by the clamor.
We run out to the porch where we have put the babies for air, certain that some carnivore has gotten them. But there is nothing there but the babies themselves, squiggling about in the box and screaming their high-pitched scream. They are only babies. They are helpless. It is feeding time again.
We take turns, Evan and I. Squirrel duty. They have established a four-hour schedule. Their body clocks. Our body clocks dictate at least eight, but it does not matter what our own bodies tell us. The squirrels will die if we do not feed them. We are obliged. We’ve started this thing and we can’t stop now.
The squirrels are sick.
By evening they are bloated, bellies like balloons, but hard, ready to burst. They are no longer shitting; the nest is almost clean. They are plugged up, they are screaming, and they will die. It is all we can think of.
By one o’clock, the most docile of the babies is dead. We are devastated. We have failed. We are incompetent. How could we have presumed to take responsibility for such small, such fragile lives?
Evan calls the vet. The man is kind and patient over the phone, but he makes no secret of the fact that we are not likely to succeed in saving the babies.
While Evan talks, I watch the mother squirrel pacing the yard, a good distance from the porch. She sits on her hind legs and looks towards the house. Even in the dark, the teats on her white belly are plainly visible. I can see her with my eyes closed. How can we not keep trying? I have never felt so helpless. I cannot look at the mother squirrel.
Dr. Micherson suggests that we give the squirrels goat’s milk, that perhaps the cow’s milk is what is causing the plugging problem. Or maybe baby formula. They need enemas, he tells Evan. Enemas! To clear their anal passages, relieve the pressure, to give them a “clean” start. Evan remembers to tell me about the pun, though he swears the vet was not being insensitive, swears he didn’t even realize he’d made the joke.
How the hell do you give an enema to a squirrel the size of your thumb? Jesus Christ. The man is trying to make fools of us.
So fools we will be.
Warm soapy water. Evan digs the eyedropper out of the medicine cabinet. He boils it, but it is too big. Much too large, maybe two or three times too large. This is impossible.
I am ready to give up, but Evan is on the phone again. When he comes back into the room, he has the car keys in his hand. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he says on his way out the door.
“Where …?” But the sound of the car door replaces his response.
In less than an hour he is back, carrying a plastic bottle with an arched needle-nose on it. Looks a lot like a disposable douche bottle to me. But this tip is the tiniest imaginable. A chemlab bottle, he tells me. From the vet. “He wishes us well.”
Evan cleans the bottle and fills it with warm, soapy water.
And it works!
Evan holds the babies firmly, lays their bulk against his palm, steadies their heads, their wiggly necks, between his fingers and he inserts the tip of the bottle. A slip would be a hideous disaster. He gives just the tiniest of squeezes and then pulls the bottle away, massages the tummy—and it does work! It really works!
Six times he goes through this process. Evan’s face carries the weight of the world, of war, of life and death. The smallness of these lives is no measure. They are lives. Evan is wonderful.
We change their bedding and fall into our own and we all sleep, sleep like wasted children.
Each day is full.
We change their bedding with each feeding, split feeding shifts, though Evan, certainly better at it than I am, is more willing to make the night treks, more willing to force himself awake, to handle them gently and lovingly despite weariness and exasperation.
The squirrels get used to the routine, used to us, and feeding time gets progressively more clamorous. Now, no four hours pass without the sound of that same thousand birds rattling through this house. We respond like fire fighters to the sound of their alarm. We are needed, pushed to capacity, running on whatever extra comes with a situation such as this.
Evan finds the second fatality two days later. I find him carrying the tiny body out to the backyard in the palm of his hand. He is carrying it as carefully as he would were it still alive. He is burying it in the back where he hopes the mother squirrel will not find it. He would like to cry, but he will not. He is apologetic.
“We lost one,” he says.
I mean to tell him that it’s not one, it’s two now, but I don’t have the heart. Evan is in mourning. It is sad to see. I am bilious with grief as I watch his back.
The next day is cooler and we move the tissue box to the top of a metal pail that has been turned over a light for warmth. The whole set-up is in the garage. We are cautious, wary now, and at every feeding we are braced for more deaths. The squirrels, though, are lively, eager eaters. Their swallowing action is good now and their tiny tummies fill and bulge healthily after each feeding. When they are through, they curl up and try to sleep in our palms. They complain bitterly when we set them back in their box. They are seeking the warmth of our bodies, or perhaps just the contact. They nose, now, between our fingers each time we pick them up. Evan says they are instinctively looking for nipples, nudging, scooching forward, low, eager, their warm, soft little bellies smoothing against our palms. They are developing personalities.
By the weekend, one baby is left.
Perhaps it is just his age—he is older, he has had time to develop—but this one has real character, a distinct personality. He is growing hair, a sort of mouse gray-brown. He is beginning to look more like a fuzzy creature, now, than an immature alien. It has been three weeks since the limb fell. He just may live.
“Don’t get your heart set on it,” Evan tells me. “Please, Dore. Don’t bank on it.”
We name him Banker and we give him a party. We bring his box into the front room. We light a fire. Evan cracks open a bottle of champagne and we snuggle close, with the box on the table, in full view. We toast him, “To Banker!,” and he is sleeping when we go to move him, so we leave him until his next feeding.
He is adorable, curled up tightly like the smallest of cinnamon rolls. We have accomplished something, Evan and I. We have saved Banker. He is robust and spunky. Banker is bound to make it.
This night, when we turn out the porch light, the mother squirrel is nowhere to be seen.
VIII
FOURTH OF JULY: HOPE
The jay here and the jay there seem to be communicating. Their voices are as rough as sand and stone gravel; their sentiments are gargled. Their knees, twig-like and backwards, flex and bob, and their blue rock bodies buoy like fat kelp polyps in the tides. I am fascinated by their babble, lured by their confidence. Their song is a code that excludes me, teases me. Sometimes I truly believe I am on my way to deciphering it. But jays and codes will have to wait. Right now, other things call. The jays will be there. They always are. Squawking their secrets into the air.
For now, I expect Hope and Finch and the rest to take the place of bawdy jays.
I am wrong again.
They arrive at ten, but my smug blueprint for their arrival has missed the mark. I should not be so surprised, but that goes without saying. This, too, goes without saying: there are some conditions in life that work as the constants, the predictables, the givens that allow a person such as myself to slip into a sense of comforting security in a world of discomfiting flux, a sense of safety, false or not. Sometimes, times like this one, I feel as though I’ve walked into a kaleidoscope, the end where the tiny fragments of colored glass shift and remake themselves, re-design their position in the overall angular scheme of things there. Sometimes, sometimes I think I will never learn.
We rose late, Evan and I, and skittered our way around this house like insects, each with our own priority, our own direction. Then, finally, it seemed, I wiped the last of the toast crumbs from the drainboards, reset the matchbook under the leg of the table, set out the plastic glasses for the kids, cracked open the ice trays, refilled them to overflowing, and dug the cookies out from the back of the topmost cupboard where I had hidden them from myself. Then Evan fed Banker and exiled himself to the yard to swipe off the picnic tables, sweep off the benches, set right the exterior host-and-hostessing grounds. He is still out there setting things right when they turn our bend.
From the corner of the porch where I am munching coconut cookies, I see their wagon turn its blind face towards the house; its blunt beige nose points in our direction like a homely, hesitant animal. I stand and brush the crumbs from my lap, but the car stops abruptly at the edge of our property. Inside the car, a flurry of mime-like activity is visible, silent heads lip-syncing, arms rising and falling, bodies twisting and turning like fish in the sun. The gasp of the parking brake is the only sound I hear.
Hope glances for a moment in the direction of the house, but it is a gratuitous motion and she does not seem to see me. She is in the driver’s seat. I have never seen her drive the family before, and, in the face of this, my own invisibility is a strange sensation and it begins to embarrass me. So when she turns back to the hubbub in the car, I slip inside the house. I pour out the coffee I made only a quarter hour ago, and I make fresh. I wash my hands.
Something is up. They’re having a pow-wow out there.
When the coffeepot is plugged in and chugging again, I peek out the window. It is a case of What is wrong with this picture?
I count heads.
Wrong number.
Finch is not in the car.
I hurriedly scan the meadow around where they are parked, but he is not there, or not in sight. I cannot believe he didn’t come. He would not not come. We have something in common, Finch and I, and we both recognize it though we are unable to lay our communal finger on what it is. There is an affinity. Finch would be here, Finch is one of the givens. Finch with Hope. Both. Together. It is impossible that he would not come, that they might have come without him.
I step out onto the porch and start towards them. They are scrambling from the car by the time I am at the foot of the stairs and before I am even halfway there I can see that the smallest of the three children is whimpery. Robin, the youngest, is wiping his nose on the arm of his shirt. Anna, who is twelve now, and who has obviously tried to cut her own hair again, has streaks on her face where the tears have washed away the road dust. She looks up, sees me coming, and jabs at her face with her forearm, trying to erase the evidence. She is conscious of the self she presents, trying her own patience, I think, like us, in trying to make it better. She will not want to be caught crying. Twelve is a miserable, rotten age.
Hope’s hair is caught at the nape in a straw-colored ponytail; moist twine-like strands cling to her jaw, familiar thin ropes of hempy hair stuck to her sweaty skin. She looks so much like her brother. But she looks like hell today. I have never seen Hope look like hell before. It is the first time that I have glimpsed that the family, that anything at all, may be too much for her.
Doug is still in the backseat of the station wagon, rigid and motionless. I worry that he has been forced to come against his will, wonder if he is angry. He is at that age now, other friends, other duties. Relatives and outings like this one a pain in his ass. I am sorry if he has been coerced. He is so still back there that I would almost believe that he is asleep, almost, except that now he is waving half-heartedly, smiling as though he is being pinched.
Hope throws her arms around my neck. She is hot and welcome. “I’ve missed you,” she says breathily in my ear. She smells of sweat and slightly of despair. “Oh, Dore,” she sighs as she wraps her arms around my shoulders and presses her cheek to mine, “… what a ride.” To me, it sounds more like “what a life,” and her breath is long and heavy on the side of my neck.
“It must have been,” I tell her, warmly, I hope, but my arms careen from my sides and my voice becomes too insistent. “Where’s Finch?” I don’t give her a chance to tell me. “Why the hell did you park out here?” I’m rolling now, a ball of curiosity, of concern. “What’s the matter with Doug?” Then, before she can respond, Evan’s voice bursts from the front of the house: “HOPE!” He is striding out towards us, lanky and hot, mopping his face with his hands, then wiping his hands on his pants. He has been setting the old stone ducks aright at the back of the house. I can see the flakes of white paint on his pants, on his forehead. “Where’s Finch?” he says, craning his neck, looking for him, as he grabs Hope’s shoulders and gives her a squeeze. “You lose that guy again, Hope?”
Hope laughs, finally. She reaches up and playfully swats Evan on the side of the head with the palm of her hand. Evan’s reaction is that of a child; he would like to wrestle her to the ground.
“He’s in the car, nitwit brother. Give me a chance.” She shakes her head and smiles crookedly. “Lately he sleeps like the dead,” she says. “He’s, let’s say, difficult to wake up.” She is still laughing as though laughing explains it.
Evan laughs, too. “Willful bastard,” he says.
“We were going to put the screws to him out here,” she says, “before we got to the house. Dore caught us.” Hope talks as though this is normal procedure, as though Evan and I have simply forgotten the routine. Yet, no one is moving towards the car and Evan’s face is taking on a peculiar glaze. He looks at Hope and then over at the station wagon as though he thinks she may be lying.
“In the backseat,” Hope tells him while she inspects the sweaty palm of her own left hand. “He fell asleep sitting up. Then he fell over on Doug. Doug’s afraid to move. Smart kid.” She turns the hand palm out and wipes at her brow with its back. The perspiration leaves a turgid coating, like oil, on her hand. She looks at it, then dismisses it as though it will take care of itself. Only then does she look towards the car. Doug, still sitting there, is not looking back. Robin is wandering, bored already, beginning to stray towards the beach grove. His small hands are jammed into his pockets and he has managed already to shed a single shoe.
“Robert!” Hope’s head swings around and her hands fly to her hips, large bony, winged things perched there. Then, suddenly, she is no longer looking at him. “Come back, now,” she says. I have never heard Robin called Robert before, though that is his name. He has always been Robin. Hope’s Robin. Finch’s Robin. “Come here,” she says to him and draws him firmly to her side, holding his hand now as if all her control rests in that one grip.
It is too intense for me.
I interrupt her grasp, scoop Robin up, and let him straddle my hip. “Hi, Gooseberry,” I say to him and nuzzle his grimy cheek. “Your dad take a nap on you guys?” He looks down at the front of his overalls, gazes there as though something secret and precarious rests in the chest pockets. He says “Hi” solemnly while his finger corkscrews in his nose—it is obviously all he has to say for now—and then deftly the finger in question slides towards my blouse. I catch his hand and hold it. “OK, Kiddo,” I tell him. “OK.”
Anna appears before me with a gesture that says she will help me with Robin, that says she is used to helping with Robin. “Anna!” I chirp, and pass Robin, instead, to his mother again. He squirms like larva in her arms and she lets him slide to the ground where he wriggles at her feet. “You’ve grown!” I say to Anna and she smiles at the inanity, forgiving, tolerant of my unfortunate adulthood, and the tear tracks that divide both cheeks kink like bends in twin roads, and she holds back for a moment and then hops up to give me a short, quick hug. She is heavy, but knobby. “Heavy bones, kid,” I tell her, groaning happily under her weight, giving her a loud, smacking kiss on the end of her grubby nose.
“Hi!” she says directly into my face. It is as though no time at all has passed, no gap of two years, and this sort of horsing around is commonplace. “Did you make deviled eggs?” she asks. Priorities. I let her slip to the ground.
