by Ginny Rorby
“My mother knew about this?”
She must have raised her voice, because Mr. McCully glanced around, patted her hand, then quickly wrote, She knows Charlie left Sukari’s fate in your hands. I don’t think she knows about the trust fund. She never saw the will or wanted to discuss it.
“Did I have the right to decide what happened to her?”
“Yes.”
“Have I always had that right, even though I’m young?”
“Yes.”
“Why did Lynn let the zoo have her? And why did she let the zoo give her away? I don’t understand this.”
Mr. McCully reached across and took her hand in both of his. People had turned and were looking at them. The hostess started across the room but Mr. McCully waved her off.
Joey realized she was crying only when he handed her his handkerchief. She wiped her eyes. “Can we get her back?”
“Yes,” he said.
Joey stared at his lips. Had he really said yes?
YES, he signed, then scrawled another sentence and handed it to her: I have already filed an injunction to stop any further testing on her and a copy of the will has been sent to the Clarke Foundation’s attorneys.
When Joey looked up, he took the pad and wrote, The hitch is we have no one willing to house her.
“What do you mean?” she asked before she realized that she already knew the answer. If the zoo wouldn’t keep her and Lynn couldn’t and her mother wouldn’t, where else was left? She didn’t bother to read his answer. “Can we pay some place to keep her for a while?”
Possibly. Lynn thought of that but it costs thousands a year to feed and care for a chimpanzee. She didn’t have that kind of money. As long as Lynn thought Sukari was okay in the zoo, she abided by your mother’s wishes. But now … well, the situation has changed.
“Can we try again?”
I called some zoos. Not one wanted another chimpanzee. They are overwhelmed by the numbers needing a place to go. They keep the ones they have on birth control.
Joey remembered something Lynn had said about rehab places. At the time, it had had another association for her: Her father had been sent to one for alcoholics. He’d walked out after two days. “Lynn mentioned calling rehab places. What are they?”
They are permanent homes for animals nobody wants. Circus animals. Movie animals. Air Force chimps. Research facility survivors. Lynn tried them all, I think. No room there either.
“Do you know why I’m deaf?”
The question seemed to catch him off guard. “No. No, I don’t.”
“My father beat me.” She’d never said the words out loud before and was surprised at how easily they came. “If my mother had left him the first time he hit her, I wouldn’t be deaf.”
Slowly, thoughtfully, Mr. McCully wrote, It can be almost as dangerous to leave an abuser as it is to stay. It requires a lot of courage to make a run for it.
“Well, she’s definitely not brave. And she never cared much for Sukari, but she knew that I did, Mr. McCully. She knows I love her. I think she owed it to me not to let this happen.”
After breakfast, Mr. McCully told Joey he had a few minutes before he had to leave for his next meeting and asked if she’d like to see the city from the roof of the Hyatt.
The elevator opened onto a large room on the thirty-sixth floor. There was a bar, a dance floor, tables and chairs, and a bank of windows, from knee-high to the ceiling, with a spectacular view. Perhaps, on any other day, she would have appreciated him taking the time to bring her here. But right now, she didn’t have the heart to enjoy the view of cable cars, like miniatures, creeping up and down Powell Street, the colorful, curly gates of Chinatown, and the bay dotted with little white sailboats. She nodded politely and tried to smile when he pointed out Alcatraz on its barren rock, the fire-hose, nozzle-shaped Coit Tower, and the pointy-topped TransAmerica Building, writing their names for her in the condensation on the windows.
I have to go, he wrote. I’m happy to give you a ride back to the station, but I have one more thing for you and I thought perhaps you’d like some time alone.
What else? she thought. She did want to be alone, she was sure of that. “I’d like to stay, if it’s okay.”
Mr. McCully squeezed her shoulder and nodded, then took an envelope from his inside coat pocket. “This is for you.” It was addressed to her in Charlie’s shaky handwriting and dated September 29th, a little over a month after Sukari’s and Joey’s birthday party.
Joey waved as Mr. McCully stepped into the elevator, then took her letter to a chair by the window.
Dearest Joey. I write this letter to you today but hope it will be years before you read it. Still, my health is failing so I don’t think I should wait much longer. When you do read this, I will be gone, or worse, no longer capable of making essential decisions. I am therefore placing a huge responsibility on your young shoulders. After I learned that Lynn was to marry Jack, I decided that it should be you who determines Sukari’s fate. Lynn will want to have children and though she loves Sukari, her own children will, of course, become her first priority. You will marry, too, someday, but by then you will have settled Sukari into a permanent arrangement.
Bryan will explain all the details to you. And you can say no. Nothing I am doing for you hinges on your accepting responsibility for her. But without your voice to protect her, I’m afraid of what might happen. Every day I am reminded that we have to be taught to be human, each of us in our turn. Other animals know what it is to be what they are. A cat knows what it is to be a cat, a dog a dog, a chimp a chimp. But Sukari has learned, better than some people, what it is to be human and for that I may not be forgiven. Without your guardianship, and perhaps intervention on her behalf, I fear whatever her future holds may be more dreadful for the fact of her understanding her condition.
I did not ask your mother’s permission; I knew what her answer would be. Hopefully, you will be much older than you are now when our fates befall us. I look forward to watching you grow strong and wise, but if you are reading this sooner rather than later, then let me tell you that my greatest regret will be having missed watching you become a woman. You are the grandchild I never had. I believe we were meant to meet that day by the creek. I’ll never know why this mean old man went unpunished, receiving instead a treasure. For Sukari and me, you were heaven-sent. I love you both terribly.
Charlie
Joey looked up from the letter and into the damp eyes of her reflection in the window. “Oh, Charlie, you shouldn’t have left this job to me.” She covered her face with her hands. “I don’t know what to do,” she sobbed.
A light mist was falling by the time she stood to go, soundless even to the hearing, with drops so small and fine that, at home, it turned spider webs into nets of diamonds. She put her forehead against the cold glass, nose to nose with the fuzzy image of her face. She swiped at her eyes with the heel of her hand and stared down at the ant-people. From thirty-six floors above the street she could see how puny and powerless humans really were: little squashable dots. She put her head back. Was Charlie up there, watching her now, and did he regret what he’d done? She thought suddenly of the song they’d been signing when her mother’s phone call came: “Climb Every Mountain.” She began to sign it to herself, then closed her eyes. In class, she’d remembered the music, but here she could conjure up only the image of Julie Andrews spinning in the sunlight on a green mountaintop. She looked out the mist-coated windows at the blurry city beyond. It seemed so important for her to remember. If she could, it might help her to know what to do. Instead, tears erupted and spilled down her cheeks.
* * *
By the time Joey came out of the Hyatt, the mist had turned into a heavy fog, her stepfather’s definition of a light drizzle. The homeless man and his cat were gone, and she caught herself worrying about where.
She looked up at the hotel and the surrounding forest of skyscrapers, many with their top floors invisible in the mist. If she’d felt ho
peless up there, down here, on the crowded street, with a lid of fog over the city, she felt doomed to fail.
For a while, she walked aimlessly, trying to decide what to do and where to go. She couldn’t go back to school, and she didn’t want to go to Michelle’s. Her only choice was to go home, but she wasn’t ready to do that, either.
The streets were crowded with people shopping for Christmas. She’d forgotten how close the holidays were: Thanksgiving was less than two weeks away.
For as long as she could remember, Joey had felt sad around the holidays—a dark moodiness usually reserved for adults. She and her mother had talked about it once. Ruth said it was because losses are remembered more vividly in seasons of so-called joy, and adults usually have more of them to count than young people do. Joey stood facing the brightly lit windows of Casual Corner, with its racks of colorful clothes, and tried to remember Smiley’s face.
The last time she’d seen her she was standing in the blowing snow, signing I-LOVE-YOU as her mother pulled away from the hospital, headed for their new life in Fort Bragg. Smiley had thrown Joey a combination Thanksgiving, Christmas, and birthday party on the day she left. She reached and traced one of the scars behind her ears, looking again at her reflection in the glass. That’s when she noticed a scruffy-looking man watching her from the other side of the street. Joey hurried away.
She’d gone a block or two when her skin began to prickle. She glanced sideways. The man, stoop-shouldered, dirty, and bearded, had caught up with her and was walking so close to her left elbow that her jacket sleeve brushed his arm. She jumped aside. His mouth moved and a palm-up hand wriggled like a dying roach in the space between them. She smelled the reek of his whiskey-breath and the filthy-ashtray stink of his fingers.
Joey jammed her hands into her pockets looking for quarters, then remembered she’d given them all away. He pressed closer. Joey gasped as if he’d grabbed her and turned sharply right into the path of another man, who squeezed her arm as he maneuvered around her. She stepped off the curb. Brakes squealed and a horn blasted. She jumped back. The driver shouted, “You idiot,” and zoomed away. She smelled the man again and felt her backpack pressed against his chest.
Joey swallowed and ran to the corner where one sign said DON’T WALK and the other flashed DON’T WALK. She stepped in front of a woman, putting her between the man and herself. The woman gave her a dirty look and pushed past Joey when the light changed.
Joey ran across the street. At the curb, she glanced back. The man was crossing slowly, sloppily. She felt like a mouse on one of those wheels in a cage. Her chest tightened and it was hard to catch her breath, but even in the cold, her underarms were wet with perspiration.
WALK flashed on the other corner. Joey darted across the intersection. She heard a horn blast and looked to see the man with his hand on the hood of a car. The driver honked again and shook a fist, but the man ignored the gesture and started after her again.
She ran toward the next intersection, where DON’T WALK flashed red. “Run,” her mother screamed, blood streaming from where the kitchen stool had split her eyebrow in half. She saw her father turn his fiery red eyes on her. “Run, Joey. Run,” her mother screamed again. She did, out the trailer door, past her father’s car with the door still open, the keys in the ignition, dinging. She crouched behind the car. He stood on the top step looking for her. When she peeked over the trunk, he saw her. “I’m going to fix you this time,” he roared. Her mother had his ankle. When he turned to kick her off, Joey ran for the woodshed, scrunched into a dark corner, and watched the shadow coming for her, swelling to blot out the light, then the stool leg coming down.
Someone bumped her. She screamed and raised her arms to protect her head. Nothing happened. No crushing pain. No darkness. She smelled exhaust fumes, not pine and cedar. She looked around. There were people everywhere. Passing silently, staring.
She walked, her heart still thumping crazily in her chest, to a windowsill outside a restaurant and sat down. The drizzle had covered her with a misty coating that looked almost metallic. She gulped air until her heart slowed, then she took her map and marker from her backpack. She circled Mason and O’Farrell, the corner where she was, in blue, then traced the most direct route to the red square that marked the bus terminal.
A pair of legs in dirty, ratty jeans stopped in front of her, close enough for the map to brush his pants legs. His stale, oily odor almost gagged her. When she looked up, he said, “Boo,” in a burst of whiskey breath.
Joey felt as if she were shrinking, like in the old movie where a man shriveled until he was forced to fight a spider with a straight pin. She pulled her head down between her shoulders and closed her eyes. Her mother, her forehead split and bleeding, her arm up to protect herself from another blow, kicked out at the legs standing over her. Joey wanted to bite one again, to feel the lump of flesh between her teeth, and hear her father howl, but she couldn’t move. Instead, she waited for the smell of cut, dry firewood, and the darkness that always ended this nightmare.
The stink of whiskey and stale cigarettes grew stronger. She grimaced, waiting for the sharp pain. When it didn’t come, she opened her eyes. The man leaned over her, one hand splayed against the window above her head for support, his face close to hers. He tapped her map. “Are you lost?”
She dodged under his arm. “Leave me alone.”
He laughed.
For the first time, she saw his eyes. They were a watery blue with red rims and dilated pupils. There was no rage in them. He was in his thirties, she guessed, but he hadn’t been young for a long time, and his beard was only a couple of weeks old, probably grown since his last bath. He was her height. “You look like my father,” she said.
The man blinked.
Joey didn’t. “I can’t hear you because I’m deaf. He made me deaf.”
Two people stopped, so Joey knew she’d said that out loud.
“I’m not afraid of you. You can’t hurt me.”
The man shrank back and glanced at the people stopping. A woman took a phone from her briefcase and held it for the man to see as she punched in 911.
The small, bent stick of a man scuttled away, looking over his shoulder and shaking a yellow fist once before turning the corner.
The woman put her phone away. DEAF YOU?
Joey nodded.
SEE M-A-P. LOST YOU?
“I was just getting my bearings. I’m headed for the bus terminal.”
NOT FAR. ME WALK WITH YOU?
“No, ma’am. I’m fine now. How do you know sign language?”
SISTER DEAF. WALK WITH YOU, ME.
Joey shook her head. “I’m okay now. Really. I was scared, but not anymore. Thank you.”
She struck off down the street with a lighter step, as if the entire population of San Francisco had been lifted off her shoulders—with a single exception. Near the Hyatt, she stopped and looked up at the top-floor windows. “I can do this, Charlie,” she whispered.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The woman who had drawn the map for her was still at the Gray Line window. “Hi,” she said, then got a concerned look on her face. “Did you find the Hyatt?”
“Yes, thank you. Would you do me another favor?”
“Sure.”
“Please call my mother and tell her to meet the four-thirty Greyhound in Willits.” Joey handed her the number. “Call collect. She’ll accept,” she added, then thanked her and walked away. Joey could have made the call herself, through the relay operator, but she didn’t want to talk to her mother; she wanted her to worry and fret for the next four hours.
Even though they arrived late, the ride was not long enough for Joey. When she saw her mother’s car parked near the bus stop and the tip of her cigarette glowing in the dark, all the anger she’d tried to reason away on the trip returned to bang like a drum in her head.
“Are you all right? Are you sick?” Her mother reached to feel her forehead when Joey got into the car.
Joey
pulled away.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t want to talk about it here.”
Her mother started the engine. “There better be a good excuse for this.” She turned off the interior light and reached for the gearshift.
Joey clamped her wrist. “I went to see Mr. McCully today, Mom. I hope your excuse is a good one, too.”
Ruth smacked the steering wheel with one hand, then drove off.
* * *
Poor Hidey. Luke had taken over where Sukari had left off. When Joey came in, he was pushing the cat around the room in a wicker laundry basket.
After hugging Luke, Joey picked Hidey up and buried her nose in his fur. He used to carry traces of Sukari’s smell but now the odor was of the rich pine-needle duff of his cushy hiding place in the woods. He rubbed the sides of his face against her chin over and over and began to rumble against her chest.
When her mother brushed past her and headed for the kitchen, Joey tensed for the fight that was coming because she wasn’t going to let her mother avoid it. For Sukari’s sake, she couldn’t. Every minute counted. “Where do you want to go to talk about this, Mom?”
“No place. Dinner’s late,” she said, “and Ray’s on his way home. Tomorrow will be soon enough.”
“Soon enough for whom?”
“He had no right to call you.”
“I called him, Mom. And you’re the one who had no right here. I don’t understand how you could let something I love as much as I love Sukari be sent to a place like that.”
Luke wanted something and her mother opened the refrigerator, blocking Joey’s view of whatever she answered, if she’d answered at all. With her back to Joey, she poured him a glass of milk and gave him an Oreo.
“Did you answer me, Mom?”
Ruth turned. “I know you love her, but she’s not like the cat. She’s as big a handful as ten Lukes.”
Her milk-mustached brother looked up and grinned.
“We couldn’t keep her.”
“No one asked you to. But if I’d known about the will, I could have kept them from sending her to that place. It’s the worst one. Mr. McCully said so.”