I see you everywhere (31 page)

Julia Glass

us, whenever an animal has to be tracked or brought down—sedated—

without the use of a trap. (He says he thinks of this work as “karma correction.” He likes to see if anyone thinks he really means it.) So I did not look forward to meeting this guy. I couldn’t imagine how I’d collaborate with someone who’d killed for sport; I don’t care if his gun license paid for the microscope on my desk or if deer need periodic

“culling.” I know these things and don’t want them shoved in my face. That first week, we were all in the field and it poured for two days straight. We made camp and sat there huddled in our ponchos and tents, even though we were drenched to the core. R.B., Jim, and a couple of interns told jokes. I was poker-faced the whole time. My humor had been soaked right out of my marrow. I was thinking,
I left the ocean be-
hind for this?
Later, on the trail, R.B. asked if I was a lily-white squirrelhugging liberal or just a judgmental bitch. It’s hard to shock me, but I was shocked. All the same, I had to laugh. “Both,” I said.

“Maybe ’cause somebody named you after a mollusk.”

“It’s Clem,” I said. “With an
e,
as in
educated.
Clement.”

“And are you?”

I get this jokey little question about my name more than you’d think.

“You’ll never know me well enough to find out otherwise,” I said. “So I could ask you back, what kind of a mother named you after a fast-food joint?”

“Touché, doll,” he said. “Well, you can call me Rex, or you can call me Bwana.”

“Oh. So either way, you’re in charge. How clever is that.”

For the rest of the day, we communicated purely through sarcasm, knowing we’d made an alliance, each of us recognizing in the other the camouflage of insolence. We’re good at pretending we don’t give a damn what others think. Maybe he really doesn’t.

On my side, there’s a bizarre admiration: what I’ve come to see is that R.B. knows animals as well as any conservationist, but he’s free of all the bullshit. We talk a lot about survival and extinction, how people interfere with both. R.B. says our so-called interference, the selfish heedlessness we exert on other kinds of life around us, is as natural as any other force Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 209
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in the cosmos. But we have to face it. If we hunt elephants or tigers to extinction, he says, there’s a sadness to cope with—maybe even regret is fair—but don’t tell him it’s outrageous or criminal or some kind of abomination. Though he’s not the least bit religious, he likes to tell the story about the woman at a contentious hearing who stood up and said, more matter-of-fact than belligerent, “Maybe God’s just calling all these creatures home.” The way a rancher brings in his sheep or a suburban teenager calls her cat out of the night before she goes to bed. This is a famous story in preservation circles, where it’s held up as proof of the stupidity and navel-gazing we have to deal with, those of us fighting for ferrets and wolves, lady’s slippers and monarch butterflies. But when R.B. tells the story, he shrugs and says, “Who the hell’s to say the lady’s wrong?”

Maybe meddling to help these animals “survive” is just as benighted, just as selfish, as letting them expire. In Florida, animal-rights activists are trying to stop biologists, a team like ours but more aggressive, from taking panthers out of the most polluted part of the Everglades, from artificially broadening the gene pool with puma sperm, even though such schemes might mean, twenty years from now, the difference between survival and extinction.
Let them be,
the activists are saying.
Just BE.
Which would translate as, almost certainly,
Let them go.
Louisa and I, we were never taught to let things be or even let things go. Maybe our dad, on his own, would’ve been a more Zen-like kind of parent, but don’t try that stuff on our mom. She may give genteel dinner parties where some of the guests own yachts, but she learned to drive a tractor the minute she was tall enough to step on the gas. She’s a scrapper, an adapter, an act-first-think-later kind of woman. We never heard
Haste makes waste.
We heard
What thou doest, do quickly.
In for a penny, in for a pound.
Never
All that glitters is not gold.
Louisa left me those three phone messages because she’s both furious and heartbroken about what the chemo’s doing to her body, but not the stuff you’d expect, not the stuff that will pass (going bald, feeling queasy, losing touch with fingers and toes). She needed to rant as maybe you can only rant to family; let out all the stops on self-pity, contempt for Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 210 210

Julia Glass

hope and courage, loathing for the kind of sympathy offered by all the healthy friends around you. When I called her back last night, she sobbed into the phone that a friend of hers just had a baby in the same hospital where she goes for her treatments, so one day, after stopping in for blood tests, she took the elevator up to Maternity (the floor with the glorious views, of course). Just a week ago, Louisa realized that her period had stopped. She knows it’s stopped for good, that her chances of having a baby of her own are, but for a miracle, over. She held that friend’s baby and cried, pretending the tears were joy.

I could have said that it might not be for good, that the body’s unpredictable, or I could have said, ever so gently but firmly, that she knew this would probably happen—we talked about it while she was having her radiation, how on top of every other indignity and loss she might have to give this up as well—but I listened to her rage and mourn without once interrupting.

“I’m sorry, Louisa,” I said when she ran out of words. “I’m really sorry.”

She was quiet for a surprising stretch, though quiet in that heaving, sobbing kind of way. She knows me as someone with an explanation for just about everything, or else a retort, and that’s what she must have expected.

So finally she said, “Aren’t you going to tell me I can adopt, some platitude like that?”

“Lots of other people will tell you that, so I don’t need to,” I said.

“Besides which, you know that.” I asked her how Ray was doing with all this.

“He’s been away a lot. Working.”

“That’s too bad,” I said. “He calls you, doesn’t he?”

“Yes.” She blew her nose. “I’m sort of glad he’s away right now. I don’t think he really wants kids, so maybe this part’s a secret relief to him. And you’d sympathize, wouldn’t you?” That set her off again.

“God, Lou. Don’t you think I want you to have what
you
want?”

“You’re my sister. You’re supposed to want those things for me.”

“You can’t have it both ways, Lou. When things get bad, you can’t call Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 211
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me—which I’m glad about, I am!—you can’t do that and then imply I don’t give a shit about you.”

“That’s what I used to think.”

“I know.” I paused. Ending the conversation would have punished her for the way she brings up stuff that doesn’t matter anymore. But it would have brought all that stuff (grudges, regrets, ugly scenes) back to the surface again. “I guess the point is, what do you think now?”

“I think we . . . I think we’re beyond the growing up.”

“The growing up? What does that mean?” I asked her. “I’m nowhere near grown up, but I do a good job of hiding it.”

“Not that kind of grown up. Hardly! I mean we’ve reached this place where we understand why it’s all different from what we expected and that’s just the way it’s going to be. We’ve stopped assuming there’s justice.”

“Be in the I Don’t Know.”

“What?” she said, sounding irritated and weary.

“Zip,” I said. “Remember Zip?” Of course, I was the one doing the remembering, how life with Zip was my happiest time on the coast. I detoured to a memory of his favorite T-shirt, which said, in letters so small you could read them only when you were intimately close, The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living. He was generous and honest, and completely without meaning to, he made me feel increasingly unworthy.

“Oh, Zip,” said Louisa. “I liked him a lot.”

“Another good one I let go, right?”

“I didn’t mean that.”

Don’t start in about you, I warned myself. I said, “So. How’s life at the big lub-dub?” Louisa works at a glossy magazine called
Artbeat.

“Uneventful. Thank God. The August issue is thin. Curators are just like shrinks. They go to the beach, every single one, for the entire month.”

“Weird,” I said, “to have a job where you’re always living three months in the future.”

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This hell would be over. If it were August, I’d have all the bad news behind me.”

I was hungry and had been making myself a turkey sandwich while we talked. I couldn’t hold back any longer from eating it. Better than pointing out that, obviously, all the bad news is never behind you. The
big
bad news is always, in fact, out there waiting to claim you. The worst news comes last.

“I’m interrupting your dinner,” said Louisa.

“Not at all. I’m just eating between meals.”

Lately, that’s our code for having a nervous breakdown. She laughed.

“You laughed,” I said, my mouth full. “Are you going to be okay?”

“Menopausal, but okay. I have to be okay, don’t I?”

“Smile if it kills you,” I said, another of our mother’s signature sayings.

“It’s a long way from my heart,” she said. Still another.

“Maybe we need to update that one,” I said. “How about, ‘It’s a long way from your ovaries’?”

For a minute, I thought she might start crying again, that this was the cruelest joke I could have made, but she said, “That’s good, Clem. I like that. I’m going to use it on Ray the next time he complains about a headache or a sore neck.”

“I want you to be happy, Lou.”

“I believe you,” said my sister.

I look at R.B.’s clock: 4:33. Out the window beside the bed (a window smeared with paw prints), a faint chestnut haze gathers above the jagged butte. The sky will go from brown to red to fire to saffron to a bright buttery glow; if you watch like a hawk, you can see just an instant of green, like a new leaf, before the lasting blue appears. I know these colors all too well.

I get up as quietly as I can and go into the kitchen. I stand there pondering: coffee now and get dressed, or water and back to bed? My stealth was useless, since of course Rosie and June are at my side, expectant.

“Good girls,” I whisper, bending to stroke their necks. They begin Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 213
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their morning tap dance on the linoleum, hopeful that today involves a hunt: when people rise this early, there’s a very good chance. Their tails slap the cupboards in haphazard rhythm.

R.B. groans from the bedroom. He calls out, hoarse, “Miss Inky, get back here.” That’s his name for me on what he calls my dark mornings. It comes from Inclement, the name he’s given my black, insomniac, insideout self. My inner Tom Waits, the voice of decomposition, decay. I drink water from the kitchen tap, dry my hands on my T-shirt, and then I am under the covers again, pressing against him gratefully. He looks at the ceiling but holds me close. He is waiting for me to speak. I say, “How can you ever get happy again after bad news, I mean like permanent bad news, about yourself ?”

“What, like about who you are, your character? Like if you find out you’re a thief or a cheat?”

“No, no. I’m thinking about Louisa.”

R.B. sighs. We’ve talked about her cancer more than once. “It’s normal to freak out,” he says. “But she’ll get back on the trail.”

“Yeah, okay.” I decide that I don’t really want to discuss the kid thing with him. It might sound like it’s about me, not Lou. “But I guess I wonder how anyone gets happy. Tell me, bwana: what is this thing called happy?”

“Inky, you’re at it again.” He squeezes me hard against his side, rib to rib.

“At what?”

“Don’t bullshit me. You are chewin’ the wound raw. Ain’t she, Rosie Larosa, Miss June?” The hounds are staring at us, resting their long freckled snouts on R.B.’s side of the bed. They know he won’t tolerate whining, though prodding’s allowed.

“Seriously. Is it a stupid thing to wonder, Moronic Science oneoh-one?”

“Stupid to brood about.” R.B.’s free hand meanders toward my hip.

“Some people just make their own happiness, like a clean plain hotel bed, and lie right down in it. Hospital corners ’n’ all.”

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“Do you?” I say. “I mean, is that what you do? You seem happy.”

“All I do, doll, is get busy. Busy leaves no room for gloom.”

“You sound like my mother.”

“I’m more nurturing than you give me credit for.” He taps the hounds on their noses. “Scoot, girls,” he says, and they back off, disappointed but patient. He begins kissing my right ear. “Stop thinking,” he says to me. “You are always thinking, thinking, thinking. You’re gonna use up that overschooled little brain before its time.”

“Thinking’s busy.”

“Wrong kind of busy.” And he takes me down, like a submarine. Down, down, down we go, and finally I stop thinking.
Down periscope,
that’s the last thought I have in actual words.

I am riding in the first truck and begging myself not to cry, not in front of Sheldon. He might not notice, because his full attention is on the driving, negotiating ruts in the logging road. He can’t see me anyway, since between us sits Dave, the new intern, a towering grad student in ecology (the new, shinier, sexier biology). Dave’s head nearly grazes the top of the cab, and he is talking a mile a minute, high from the novelty of what he’s just seen. It’s his first time out in the field with the whole team, and he is blown away by the operation, from the darting and sedating to the taking of blood and hair samples.