Six
FERN AND I were down by the creek. She was standing on a tree branch above me, bouncing it up and down. She was wearing a pleated tartan skirt, the kind that needs a large pin to hold it together in the front. Fern’s had no pin, so the skirt flapped like wings around her legs. She was wearing nothing else. Her potty training had improved and she’d been out of diapers for months.
On the down bounce, I could sometimes, by jumping, reach her feet. That was the game we were playing—she would dip the branch and I would jump. If I touched her feet, I won. If I didn’t, the win was hers. We weren’t keeping score, but we were both pretty happy, so we must have been about even.
But then she tired of the game and climbed out of my reach. She wouldn’t come down, only laughed and dropped leaves and twigs on me, so I told her I didn’t care. I went off purposefully to the creek, as if I had important business there, though it was too late in the year for tadpoles, too early in the day for fireflies. On the ledge, I found the cat and her kittens.
I took the gray one and I didn’t give him back even though his mother was crying for him. I took him to Fern. It was a way of boasting. I knew how much Fern would want that kitten, but I was the one who had him.
She swung down as fast as she could. She signed for me to give him to her, and I told her he was mine but I would let her hold him. The moon-eyed mother had always been skittish around me, but she’d never gone anywhere near Fern. She would never, even in the hormonal soup of motherhood, have allowed Fern to take her kitten. The only way Fern would ever have gotten her hands on that little gray was if I gave him to her.
The kitten continued to mewl. The mother arrived, and I could hear at a little distance the two blacks down by the creek, bawling on the ledge where she’d dropped them. Her hair was up and so was Fern’s. What happened next happened fast. The mother cat was hissing and spitting. The gray kitten in Fern’s hand was crying loudly. The mother struck at Fern with her claws. And Fern swung the tiny perfect creature against a tree trunk. He dangled silently from her hand, his mouth loose. She opened him with her fingers like a purse.
I watched her do so in my memory, and I heard Lowell saying again how the world runs on the fuel of an endless, fathomless animal misery. The little blacks were still crying in the distance.
I took off, hysterical, for the house to get our mother, make her come and fix this, fix the kitten, but I ran smack into Lowell, literally right into him, which knocked me to the ground and skinned up my knees. I tried to tell him what had happened, but I was incoherent with it and he put his hands on my shoulders to calm me. He said to take him to Fern.
She was not where I’d left her, but squatting on the bank by the creek. Her hands were wet. The cats, living and dead, were nowhere to be seen.
Fern leapt up, grabbed Lowell by the ankles, somersaulted clownishly through his legs, her freckled butt exposed and then decorously covered as her skirt fell back into place. There were burrs in the hair on her arms. I pointed those out to Lowell. “She’s hidden the kitten in the brambles,” I said, “or she’s thrown him into the creek. We have to find him. We have to take him to the doctor.”
“Where is the kitten?” Lowell asked Fern both aloud and with his hands and she ignored that, sitting on his toes, arms wrapped around his leg. She liked to shoe-ride that way. I could do the same with our father, but was too big for Lowell’s feet.
Fern rode a few steps and then bounced off with her usual feckless joy. She grabbed a branch, swinging away and back again, dropping to the ground. “Chase me,” she signed. “Chase me.” It was a good show but not a great one. She knew that she’d done something wrong and was only pretending otherwise. How could Lowell not see that?
He sat on the ground and Fern came, rested her chin on his shoulder, blew in his ear. “Maybe she hurt some cat by accident,” Lowell offered. “She doesn’t know how strong she is.”
This was intended as a sop to me; he didn’t believe it. What Lowell believed, what Lowell has always, to this very day, believed, was that I’d made up the whole thing just to get Fern in trouble. There was no body, no blood. Everything was fine here.
I searched through the ragweed, purslane, dandelion, and horse nettle. I searched through the rocks in the creek and Lowell didn’t even help me look. Fern watched from behind Lowell’s shoulder, her huge, amber eyes glittering and, or so I thought, gloating.
I thought Fern looked guilty. Lowell thought I did. He was right about that. I was the one who’d taken the kitten from his mother. I was the one who’d given him to Fern. It was my fault what had happened. Only it wasn’t all my fault.
I can’t blame Lowell. At five years old, I’d already established a reliable reputation for making things up. My aim was to delight and entertain. I didn’t outright lie so much as add drama, when needed, to an otherwise drab story. The distinction was frequently lost. The Little Girl Who Cried Wolf, our father used to call me.
The more I searched, the angrier Lowell got. “Don’t you tell anyone else,” he said. “Do you hear me, Rosie? I mean it. You’ll get Fern in trouble and I’ll hate you. I’ll hate you forever. I’ll tell everyone you’re a big fat liar. Promise you won’t say anything.”
I truly meant to keep that promise. The specter of Lowell hating me forever was a powerful one.
But keeping quiet was beyond my capabilities. It was one of the many things Fern could do that I could not.
A few days later, I wanted to go into the house and Fern wouldn’t let me. It was another game to her, an easy game. Though much littler than I, she was also faster and stronger. The one time I got by, she grabbed my hand as I went past, yanked me back so hard I felt a pop in my shoulder. She was laughing.
I burst into tears, calling for our mother. It was the effortlessness of it all, Fern’s easy win, that had me crying in rage and frustration. I told my mother Fern had hurt me, which had happened often enough that, since it wasn’t a serious injury, it wasn’t a serious allegation. Children roughhoused until someone got hurt; it was the way families worked. Mothers, having warned everyone that this was what would happen, were generally more irritated than concerned.
But then I added that I was scared of Fern.
“Why in the world would you be scared of little Fern?” Mom asked.
And that’s when I told.
And that’s when I got sent to my grandparents.
And that’s when Fern got sent away.
Seven
BACK IN THE interrogation room, this memory moved like a weather system through my body. I didn’t remember it all that afternoon, not the way I’ve told it here. But I remembered enough and then, strangely, by the time it passed, I’d stopped shaking and crying. I didn’t feel hungry or cold or in need of a lawyer or a bathroom or a sandwich. Instead I had an odd sense of clarity. I wasn’t in the past anymore; I was acutely in the moment. I was composed and focused. Lowell needed me. Everything else would have to wait.
I felt like talking.
I picked up the pill bug, which made it curl tightly again, remarkably spherical, a piece of art like something Andy Goldsworthy would make. I put it on the interrogation table next to the plate with my leftover tuna fish, because I figured when I was finally released, Lowell wouldn’t want the bug left behind. Double bonus for insects. This room was nobody’s home.
My plan was to stick with my go-to story—my grandparents and their soap operas, the trampoline and the man in the little blue house and the woman trussed up like a turkey—only tell it with bigger words. Mimesis, diegesis, hypodiegesis—I would not only tell the tale but also comment on it. I would dissect it. And I’d do all this in such a way as to make it seem at every moment that I was just about to answer the questions asked, just about to get to the real, to the relevant. My plan was a malicious compliance.
I’d seen that done often enough. Teenage Lowell had been a Jedi master.
But the interrogating officer never reappeared. Snap! Like the devil, he was gone.
Instead a broad-hipped, listless woman came to tell me I was free to go, and that’s not an errand you assign to the implacably evil. I followed her down the hall and out into the night. I saw the lights of a plane overhead, aimed at the Sacramento Airport. I knelt down and put the little ball of bug in the grass. I’d been inside that interrogation room for about eight hours.
Kimmy, Todd, and Todd’s mother were all waiting for me. They were the ones who told me Lowell had not been caught.
Someone else had.
• • •
ON THE PREVIOUS EVENING, while I’d celebrated the end of the quarter with an early bedtime, Ezra Metzger had tried to break into the primate center at UC Davis. He’d been arrested on site, various implements needed for picking locks, cutting wires, rerouting electrical signals all hanging on his belt if not in his actual hands. He’d managed to open eight cage doors before he was stopped. In the newspaper later, anonymous UC officials described the monkeys as traumatized by the intrusion. They were screaming bloody murder, one unnamed source had said, and had to be sedated. The saddest part of the news story was this: most of the monkeys had refused to leave their cages.
A female accomplice was still at large. She had taken his car or Ezra might have escaped, too.
No, surely not. That last was unkind.
• • •
IN 1996, UC Davis had just created the Center for Comparative Medicine as a bridge between the medical and the veterinary schools, a way of bringing together all the research on infectious diseases that used animal models. The primate center was a critical component in this. Disease control had been studied there since its founding—specifically, the plague, SIV, kuru, and various zoonoses, like the Marburg virus, that move from monkey to human. The two separate accidents that had exposed Soviet lab workers to the Marburg virus were still relatively recent. Richard Preston’s nonfiction bestseller The Hot Zone was very much on our minds.
None of this made it into the newspaper articles, not even a hint. It came up quietly in pretrial, that this was not just a prank, that Ezra could have been letting more things loose than he knew.
Seven years later, in 2003, the university’s bid for a high-security bio-defense lab in which monkeys would have been infected with anthrax, smallpox, and Ebola, was lost when a rhesus macaque disappeared as her cage was being hosed down. She was never recovered. She’d made a clean escape.
The Davis primate center is today credited with significant advances in our understanding and treatment of SIV, Alzheimer’s, autism, and Parkinson’s. Nobody’s arguing these issues are easy.
• • •
FOUR THINGS KEPT me out of jail.
Number One was that Todd and Kimmy could vouch for my whereabouts on the previous night. I’d gone to bed early, they told the police, but they’d celebrated the end of the quarter by getting all Christmassy with a classics movie night. They’d rented Psycho, Night of the Living Dead, The Wicker Man, Carrie, and Miracle on 34th Street. They’d watched them in that order, mostly on the living room couch, with only occasional forays into the kitchen to make popcorn. There was no way I could have left the apartment without them knowing. Not unless I was Spider-Man, Kimmy told me she’d told the police.
“I said Tarzan,” said Todd. “But Spider-Man is good.”
Not unless I was Fern, is what I thought but did not say, even though I figured everyone must know about Fern by now. This was an inference based on a false belief. I’d underestimated the ability of the police to keep their mouths shut.
In fact, I don’t think anyone was all that impressed by Number One. Once they’d connected me to Lowell, the police were too sure they had their girl. We were probably all part of the same terrorist cell was how the police saw it, and of course we’d cover for each other. They’d had their eyes on our apartment building for quite some time. A nasty group of people lived on the third floor there.
Number Two was Todd’s mother. Some slacker had let Todd place a call prior to interviewing him. Todd’s mother was a famous civil rights lawyer in San Francisco; I probably should have mentioned that earlier. Picture William Kunstler, only not so lovable. Picture William Kunstler as a tiny female Nisei. She’d arrived by helicopter, generously expanded her threats to include me as well as Todd and Kimmy. When I finally stepped outside, she was there in a fancy rented car waiting to take us all to dinner.
Number Three was Harlow. Not Harlow herself, no one knew where she was, but Todd and Kimmy had said they had no doubt the woman the police were looking for was Harlow Fielding. The police went and talked to Reg and Reg told them he knew nothing, had seen nothing, had heard nothing, but it sounded like Harlow, pussy-whipping some guy until he actually did time for her.
It didn’t sound like something I would do, he’d added, which was certainly nice of him and I imagine he believed it. He didn’t know Fern had been doing time for me for years.
Ezra also told the police it was Harlow. I wondered what movie he was starring in now. Cool Hand Luke? The Shawshank Redemption? Ernest Goes to Jail? I wondered how easily and quickly he’d given Harlow up, but it never occurred to me that he’d done so to save me until Todd suggested that later. Not that Ezra liked me better than Harlow, because he definitely didn’t. But he was an honorable guy. He wouldn’t have let me be arrested for something he knew I didn’t do, not if he could stop it.
• • •
Number Four is that the police never read my Religion and Violence blue-book final.
• • •
TODD’S MOTHER TOOK us out to dinner, not in Davis, nothing fancy enough for her there, but into Old Town Sacramento, with its cobbled streets and wood-planked sidewalks. We ate that night at The Firehouse, where Todd’s mother urged me to get the lobster to celebrate my narrow escape, but I would have had to pick a live one from the tank so I didn’t. It would have looked like a very large pill bug on my plate.
She told me I could still go home for Christmas the next day even though I’d promised the police I wouldn’t leave town, so I did.
I thanked her many times. “No need,” she told me. “Any friend of Todd’s.”
“You caught that that was bullshit, right?” Todd asked me later, and for just an instant I thought the bullshit part was that we were friends. But no, he just meant that his mother liked to throw her tiny weight around and didn’t really care in whose service. I could see how that might not always be a good quality in a mother, but this didn’t seem to be one of those times. I thought there were moments to complain about your parents and moments to be grateful, and it was a shame to mix those moments up. I made a mental note to remember this in my own life, but it got lost the way mental notes do.
Weeks later, I asked Todd if we were friends. “Rosie! We’ve been friends for years,” he said. He sounded hurt.
The big black car took us back to the apartment and then slid away under the stars with Todd’s mother inside. The third floor was already whooping it up. The music was at a shattering volume; eventually the police would have to be called. Class notes had been shredded and thrown onto the yard like confetti, followed by a single desk chair, which lay across the walkway, its wheels still spinning. We took the front door in a hail of condoms filled with water. This was what it was like to live in a poorly managed apartment building. We would have to get used to that.
We sat around our own table, an island of sad reflection in an ocean of merry din. We drank Todd’s Sudwerk beers, and shook our heads over Ezra, who’d once wanted to join the CIA but hadn’t managed, in this his first (as far as we knew) commando operation, to free a single monkey. No one mentioned Fern, so I eventually figured out that they still didn’t know. But they did know about Lowell and they were pretty stoked to think they’d entertained such a dangerous guy in our very own apartment. They were impressed with me, too, having this whole hidden life. I had depths within depths, is what they thought, and they would never have guessed.
Todd apologized for having thought Lowell was ju
st a puppet in Harlow’s hands, when clearly the reverse had been true. “Your brother must have recruited her,” he said. “She’s part of his cell now—” which hadn’t occurred to me and I instantly disliked the suggestion. Anyway, I felt it was unlikely. Harlow’s heartbreak had been too convincing. I’d seen Harlow put on a show. I’d seen her not. I knew the difference.
And then we all watched Miracle on 34th Street again, Todd and Kimmy having confessed that actually they’d slept through much of it and several of the other movies, too, and I could have come and gone many times without them knowing.
Miracle on 34th Street is a very pro-lawyer movie. Not so kind to psychologists.
• • •
EVEN IF LOWELL hadn’t put Harlow up to it, he was still the reason she’d done it. We’re a dangerous family to know all right, only not in the way Todd thinks. Clearly, Harlow was trying to find Lowell by the only route she had, his breadcrumb trail. I wondered if she’d succeed. I wouldn’t have bet against her.
She wasn’t really his kind of girl; she only liked to pretend that she was. If she wanted Lowell, she’d have to get real now. No more drama major, everyone-look-at-me bullshit. But I thought she could probably do that. I thought they might even be happy together.
Late that night, when I opened the door to my bedroom, I smelled the ghost of Harlow’s vanilla cologne. I went straight to the powder-blue suitcase. Sure enough, Madame Defarge was gone.
Part Six
. . . I soon realized the two possibilities open to me: the zoological garden or the music hall. I did not hesitate. I said to myself: use all your energy to get into the Music Hall. That is the way out. The Zoological Garden is only a new barred cage. If you go there, you’re lost.
—FRANZ KAFKA, “A Report for an Academy”
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Page 21
