Hurt Go Happy (26 page)

“Do you like your new home?” Joey said into her ear.

Sukari put her head back against Joey's shoulder and looked up at her.

Joey signed, LOVE THIS HOME, YOU? Then spread her arms to take in the forest in which they sat.

YES, Sukari answered. J-Y LOVE HOME?

Joey's heart sank. NOT MY HOME.

Sukari lost interest and returned to watching the koi in the pond.

She shifted Sukari off her lap and put her on the bench so they were facing each other. “Sukari, listen to me.” J-Y GO HOME, SEE LUKE. Joey made circles in front of her face with the “L” hand, the modified sign for trouble, which she and Sukari had created as a sign-name for Luke.

Sukari scooted off the bench and held out her hand.

NO, YOUR HOME HERE, Joey signed. YOU STAY HERE.

WANT SEE LUKE. GO J-Y HOUSE.

NO, YOU STAY WITH HIDEY.

HIDEY WANT SEE LUKE. HIDEY GO J-Y HOUSE.

NO, YOU STAY WITH BABY BUG.

BABY BUG WANT SEE LUKE.

Joey caught her hands. “You have to wait here for me.”

GO J-Y HOUSE, SEE TURTLE.

Joey shook her head. Sometimes she was grateful that Sukari didn't understand death and at other times she wished she did. Joey had disappeared from her life and come back; how hard was it for her to believe that Charlie might come back, too? At least it made Joey hopeful that when she disappeared this time, Sukari would trust her to return. But what concept of time did Sukari have? Joey couldn't tell her she'd be back in June when school was over. Here in Miami, she couldn't even use the changes in the weather to explain that she'd be back when it was hot again. There were no discernible seasons: a little less hot, a little drier, that was it.

In the end, Joey just left. She stayed with Sukari until she was asleep, then Pam drove her to the airport. The air conditioner in the van was broken. Between her grief and the heat, Joey was wringing wet by the time she got there, as if she wept from every pore.

She waited until Tuesday to call Pam from school. At first, Pam tried to sound upbeat, but Joey begged for the truth, then broke down and cried when she got it. Sukari had spent all day Sunday watching the walkway from the office. On Monday, she stayed near the front of the cage, rocking, with Hidey in her lap. When anyone came to the fence that separated visitors from the cage itself, she'd look up expectantly, then resume rocking and signing to herself, WHERE J-Y? WHERE J-Y?

A week later the report was better. After eating nothing but raisins and Cokes, which resulted in terrible diarrhea, she'd finally asked to go on the afternoon walk. After that she acted normal. She resumed eating, and playing with and grooming Noelle. With that news, Joey's heart rested, but every day, when she was least prepared, some small scene from their past played out in her mind, like a special-delivery smile wrapped around a stone of longing.

 

EPILOGUE

FOUR YEARS LATER

AUGUST 29, 1997

Sukari died of liver cancer from the pesticide testing on August 29th. She was ten years old, less than a fifth of her way through her life span. During her last weeks, Joey, who'd taken time off from her biology studies at Gallaudet and preparations for applying to veterinary schools, moved her and Hidey into a small trailer that they'd rented and placed near the ficus tree. The trailer reminded her of life with her father, and she thought her own bad memories would meet her there but instead she felt cocooned. She read to Sukari and they talked about Turtle. Joey told her he'd been waiting and waiting for her and promised that she would see him soon.

WHERE TURTLE?

HIDING.

Sukari smiled.

On the last day of her life, she lay in bed and began to sign for things she wanted brought to her. It started with her stuffed turquoise Miami Dolphin, then her most recent issue of
Esquire
, then the doll Pam had given her—a Raggedy Ann with curly orange hair dyed auburn to match Joey's. She shivered, so Joey covered her with a blanket. She slept then with Hidey beside her, his face buried against her neck.

Joey sat across the room watching Sukari's thin chest rise and fall. “It's time, Charlie,” she whispered up at the water-stained ceiling. “Come take your little girl.”

Later, when Hidey stood, stretched, and yawned, Joey got up to check on her. She was gone.

*   *   *

A few days later, they all flew back to California, Hidey in his carry-cage strapped into the seat next to Joey and Sukari's ashes in a small oak box in Joey's lap.

She sat by the window and stared out at the slow-moving landscape below. She had seen so much of it from buses, trains, and cars, where it looked either junky and littered, settled with neighborhoods, or wild and pristine. From the plane, she couldn't see the trash, the community, or the beauty. Just squares of carved-up land, cities looking like bits of blown confetti, and highways, apparently empty, except for the occasional flash of light as if someone was signaling with a hand mirror to the sun.

Is this what God sees?
she wondered.
And if so, how will things ever change if what can be seen is either too much or too little?

She'd worn her new, small hearing aids to hear when her flight was called in the terminal and had numbly left them in, not sufficiently bothered by the discomfort of sound to seal herself back into a womb of silence. Throughout the flight, she was vaguely aware of the pilot's announcements of points of interest as they flew over. Though, even with her hearing aids, she could catch only a word or two, she'd glance out anyway.

“Below ---------- left ----------,” the pilot said.

When she looked down, a chill swept over her, raising the hairs on her arms. Below them was the deceptively pure pallor of White Sands, New Mexico.

“---------- Home ---------- first ---------- bomb.”

The home of large- and small-scale destruction. Joey snatched her hearing aids out and jammed them into her pocket.

*   *   *

Roses were Sukari's favorite flower, to smell and to eat, and red was her favorite color. Joey went to Heartwood Nursery and bought a red-rose bush. She planted it in the sunniest, warmest spot in the yard, and around the base she blended in half of Sukari's ashes.

Her mother, Luke, and Ray came out for the planting. Ray had constructed a wire basket to surround the bush to keep the deer from eating the flowers, but Joey took it off. It looked too much like a cage. Besides, deer fascinated Sukari and the roses would lure them right to her.

A misty rain was falling the day Joey took the rest of her ashes down the back trail to the very largest, oldest, tallest redwood on their property. There was a bench nearby, built when the property was an old-folks home by someone who must have loved this ancient tree as much as she did. She sat there for a long time with the little box of ashes on her lap, watching the creek and remembering moments with Charlie and Sukari, sorting through them like snapshots.

After a while, when the rain became sincere, Joey got up and emptied the box at the base of the tree, then went back to sit on the bench. She watched as the ashes were washed from the surface and deeper into the duff. When they were gone, she lay back, looked up its two-hundred-foot height, and imagined Sukari being gathered by its roots. She watched her scamper to join the flow of water up the xylem, intent on going as high as she could go. Twice, from branches held out like arms, she turned and smiled down at Joey. I-SEE-YOU, J-Y.

“I see you, too, sugar-butt,” Joey whispered, then closed her eyes to watch the moment when Sukari's spirit, in a molecule of oxygen, floated free at last.

 

AFTERWORD

Hurt Go Happy
is dedicated to John Hopkins, Lucy, and a dead dog, three individuals who changed my life, and to Belinda, who just needs to be remembered.

At first, when I began to consider the genesis of this book, I didn't go farther back than the 1988
Houston Chronicle
story about Lucy, a sign-language-using chimpanzee. But the longer I thought about it, the clearer it became that it really started, emotionally, at least, in the summer of 1959, when I was fifteen. I had a fifty-cent-an-hour job working at the Winter Park Day Nursery. Belinda was three years old and a victim of abuse in a time when no one reported things like that. What parents did to their children was their business. From the moment her massively large mother delivered her every morning until she picked her up in the afternoon, Belinda clung to me. I never saw her play with the other children. I certainly never saw her laugh. She was tiny even for three and her bottom and the backs of her little legs were routinely marked with yellowing bruises and the fresh red welts made by the belt her mother used to beat her. So painful were they that I would cradle her when she had to use the bathroom, so her little bottom didn't press against the toilet seat. I can't bear to think about what became of that child, or that I grew up in a time when dirty looks and the hatred I still carry for that woman was all the power I had. I have often wondered if three short months of kindness made it worse for Belinda. My nightmares are still of what the rest of her life must have been like and of what she became.

The rest of the story starts in 1981. I was a Pan Am flight attendant, flying to London on weekends and going to school during the week, working on an undergraduate degree in biology at the University of Miami. While away one weekend, one of my best friends, Joanne Mansell, found a dog that had sought shelter in the doorway of the Catholic church in Coconut Grove. The dog had been abandoned and was starving. While I was gone, Joanne fed it, trying to gain its trust. Her plan was to drug the dog sufficiently to pick it up and take it to a vet. After I returned, we scraped together all the drugs we could find between us, mostly Dramamine for airsickness and a Valium or two, and blended them into her can of dog food.

I have never gotten the image of that dog out of my mind as she struggled to her feet and came down the sidewalk toward us, tail wagging. She was young, skin and bones, with no fur left on her body save for a single long patch down the back of her neck. Maggots lived in the open sores on her sides, her eyes were diseased and opaque, and her head and ears were bloody from her miserable digging at the fleas and the flies.

We did the kindest thing for that dog. We took her to the vet and had her put to sleep, but the horror of her existence and how long it might have been since her people abandoned her ate me up. For a week or more, it kept me awake nights until finally, on a layover in London, I got up and wrote her owners an angry letter describing her end. Of course, I had no one to send it to, so it stayed folded in a pocket in my purse for over a year.

Let me say, to that point in my life I'd never written a single creative word. Not one. Being a writer was not a dream of mine; in fact it had never so much as crossed my mind. English was my worst subject in high school. I was good at math and science and had gone back to school with the intention of eventually becoming a vet.

In early August 1982,
The Miami News,
a now-defunct newspaper, was looking for pictures of the Everglade kite, an endangered South Florida hawk. I had some and took them to their offices. Only a couple of days earlier, I had been cleaning out that old purse and found the letter I had written. At the paper, I told the person who was reviewing my slides that if they could use the story, it might make people realize that animals treated like litter for someone else to pick up aren't always taken in. I scrawled
We Found Your Dog
at the top of the page and handed it over.

On August 11, John Hopkins, an editor with the
News,
called me at home. I was out, but my husband wrote the message down—a single sentence that would eventually change my life: “Tell her,” John said, “if she can write like that, we'll publish anything she writes.” I was pleased, of course, but my response was that I wasn't a writer. Thanks for calling.

While going through the UM catalog of classes for the fall semester, I saw a creative-writing class listed. On a whim, but with John's call in mind, I enrolled and learned in short order that I was a dismal failure as a writer—except when I was writing about children or animals, the powerless and dependent.

By acting on John's phone call, the direction of my college career changed and for the next few years I plugged along, finally graduating in 1985 with a degree in biology and English, i.e., creative writing. By then, with the encouragement of Evelyn Wilde Mayerson and Lester Goran, and a pat or two on the head by Isaac Bashevis Singer and James Michener, I was actually working on a novel, which eventually became
Dolphin Sky
(Putnam, 1996).

In 1988, I was still a year and a half away from finishing my flying career and getting ready to enter graduate school at Florida International University in their brand-new creative writing program.

On January 4, 1988, I was on a layover in Houston, Texas, and picked up the morning paper. In it was an article about Jane Goodall, who has dedicated her life to studying and protecting wild chimpanzees. On the same page was another story by the same feature writer, Bob Tutt. It was about Lucy, a chimpanzee raised as if she were a human child—a story that has haunted me ever since.

Lucy is the real-life Sukari. What happens to Sukari happened to Lucy. So, although this is a work of fiction, little of it is untrue. All the chimpanzees that you see as cute babies in commercials, or in movies, or in circus acts end up grown and unwanted. If they were raised as Lucy was, loved and cared for, eating her meals at the same table as her “owners,” then the tragedy of being unwanted is compounded, more so because Lucy used sign language. She could communicate her feelings, her love, and her pain.

The kindest thing we can do for chimpanzees is to protect them in the wild, stop using them in senseless commercials and stupid movies, and stop locking them in small cages to use as hairy test tubes. Our DNA is 98.4 percent identical to that of chimpanzees. You can help by supporting the people who are working to protect our closest relatives: