I flipped through outdated magazines with other solemn strangers. When the nurse called my name, I followed her to a dim, silvery room to view the x-rays. There is nothing like the moment you see the mass that will kill someone you love.
The doctor entered, slapped two dark films into the light board. There it was, round and huge and pale, a giant tumor in the abdomen of my best friend, a gerbil named Ivy.
It’s an odd life when anyone’s best friend is a gerbil.
This gerbil hadn’t seen a male member of her species since she was the size and texture of a pencil eraser, yet I’d convinced myself that her swollen belly housed five babies. Her immaculate conception must be verified at all costs.
I conceded it was an irrational belief. But that’s to be expected of a 23 year old girl who’d declared "Utter Confusion" as a major. Add to that a Melvillian connection to a missing mother with Bipolar Disorder. A bit of irrationality could be allowed.
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In the South in the sixties, poverty level women’s mental health was still treated with leaches. Somewhere between mental hospitals, clinics, the Everglade swamps and a greyhound bus station, I lost her.
And as my protector melted away into the shelter system, the monster that remained was free to inflict what ever damage his demons divined from a two liter jug of Carlo Rossi Chablis.
I learned about humans while trapped in a box of razor blades. Human parents and daughters were too confusing for me to contemplate, so Animals became my surrogates.
In the deep green of Olympia Washington, the Wildlife Rescue Center tended injured and orphaned foxes, owls, bats, elk and every other critter unfortunate enough to encounter humans. I mixed kitty chow, grapes and apple sauce for thousands of opossums. I suffered lumps and bruises inflicted by angry Canadian geese. When ever a deer was killed on Highway 99, I cut its massive heart into small pieces, then threw the broken heart high into the air for wobbly winged baby owls.
There are three distinct seasons for wild life rehab: Autumn is for gunshots, summer equals pesticides and spring means babies babies babies! Every spring the center filled with the orphans of Highway 99, the road that every wild creature on the Olympic Peninsula feels the need to cross in the dark without benefit of reflective tape wrapped around their antlers.
These babies would later be released into the wild once they got fat and I was done marveling at them. I wondered if they missed their moms.
Fawns can literally die of sadness. Every spring I’d feed twenty or thirty squealing fawns from bottles wedged between my knees, under my arms and in my pockets until they pushed me over and trampled me with their high heels, pissed off when the milk was gone and sucking on my shirt, my earlobes and my elbows. By late summer less than half would be alive. One by one, these fawns decided that life wasn’t worth living and picked a day to die.
A particularly odd fawn named 42 decided to die on a Saturday. His temperature slowly dropped through out the day, he made soap opera faces at any one who passed by, and unleashed a storm of flatulence so severe it drove his sympathizers away to smoke and talk about him from afar. As the temperature dipped on that Saturday night, the other staff went home saying "All we can do now is hope he decides to sleep in the heated shelter." But I couldn't accept that was all we could do. I spent that night in the wet grass in the open-air fawn hut, wrapped around him. He made it through the night; I woke covered in hives. But I was his mommy, just for a few hours.
That night, unable to sleep and cursing my altruism, a memory entered my body -- a feeling, the sensation of physical life simply slowing down and growing dim like an old flashlight battery. A roof and a bed, food and water at regular intervals, are not enough to keep some animals alive. No warm, big eyed doe had ever licked my scratches, or wrapped herself around me to breathe over my fuzzy neck. No mother had ever absent-mindedly petted my head while standing in the grocery line. No mother curled up in my bed and asked me what I dream or what I fear. No one showed me how to braid or write a letter or wrap a present.
I told all this to my therapist, who received it like some lopsided Popsicle stick art project from a second grader. Between her exaggerated "oohs" and "ahhs" (for which I should have killed her) she asked how much should a parent sacrifice for their child. Why had no one burned through their own pain, their own discomfort, their own chemistry, to take care of me? She never asked "What happens when a wounded deer leaves her fawn in the care of crocodiles?"
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I left Ivy at the veterinarian’s office. He promised me she’d go to sleep peacefully after the shot and that he’d take care of her. The city bus let me off three blocks from Deer Run apartments. Perched on the muddy two-foot shoulder of Highway 99, I waited for a chance to cross. Passing cars drenched me with asphalt rainwater. As each car rounded the bend, their headlights illuminated something in the road. A small lump. At the first opportunity I darted out to find a squashed opossum. And five tiny pink pencil erasers.
Cars honked and swerved in the rain. Headlights swirled through the blackness all around me. I had no reflective tape on my antlers. I picked up five bald and rubbery baby opossums. All five fit in the palm of one hand. I took them to a big tree a few feet off the road. They were already cool, so there in the pelting rain, I buried them in the pine needles and assured them that their mother did her best and never meant for this to happen.
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