Unlikely Companions

by Laurie Hess

  When Claudia had been diagnosed with cancer eighteen months before, however, she’d stopped traveling. Marnie still made trips out to Los Angeles, but she always returned plagued with guilt and regret that she wasn’t more available for her sister. I empathized with her feeling of helplessness; I’d watched my own grandfather advance through the debilitating stages of the disease. I understood and appreciated that an opportunity to work at an esteemed exotic hospital in Los Angeles was a blessing for both Marnie and Claudia.

  Still, I wasn’t ready to be an understanding friend. Not quite yet.

  “I do understand what this opportunity means,” I said, attempting to regain some maturity. “And I want to support you. But honestly, Marnie, we just put Mathilda down an hour ago.” I ran my hands through my tangled mane and willed myself to remain steady. “I’ve had as much bad news as I can take today. I can’t do this now too.”

  “Sure, okay,” she said softly as I stood up. I could feel her eyes on me as I turned and walked out of the room.

  5:30 P.M., BEDFORD ROAD

  I WAS HALFWAY home when I began to feel nauseous and jittery. I grasped the steering wheel, realizing I hadn’t checked my blood sugar in several hours. It was undoubtedly very low, as I’d missed my afternoon snack and had eaten very little with all the activity at the hospital. How utterly neglectful, I scolded myself. Laurie, you know better than this. My hands began to tremble. I knew that once it started, the trembling would be hard to keep under control, and continuing to drive would be unsafe. I pulled off the road and fumbled around in my purse, my hands frantically searching for the protein bar I’d dropped in it this morning. I found it, tore back the wrapping, and jammed it into my mouth. I also pulled out the glucose tablets that I reserve for super blood sugar lows. I popped four of them onto my tongue and swallowed hard. I’m always surprised at how sour they taste, like the SweeTarts candies I craved as a treat as a kid and now rely on as an adult to survive. I thought, who am I, really, to lecture anyone on the importance of preventive care when I don’t extend it to myself? Peter’s words throbbed in my head. It’s all about balance, Laurie. I wouldn’t tell him about this. I couldn’t tell him about this. Not so soon after our argument, and makeup, last night. It would only lead us into another fight. After my blood sugar had normalized nearly ten minutes later, I pulled back onto the road.

  I arrived home, turned off the ignition, and sat in the parked car. I recounted the many times like this, after especially long and emotionally difficult days at the hospital, when I’d willed myself to pull it together before going into the house. Marnie had once said, “I think we deal with the pain, heartache, and grief at the hospital the best we can, and then we take the rest of it home. On second thought,” she continued, “I actually take it in my car with me. Sometimes I cry all the way home. It’s like a bad country-and-western song. By the time I’m done, I’m home!”

  I got out of the car, walked up our long driveway, and kicked off my boots as soon as I walked through the back door.

  “Is that you, Mom?” I heard Luke ask.

  I appeared in the doorframe and forced a cheery smile. Peter and Luke looked up at me from the kitchen table.

  “You’re home early,” Peter said, surprised.

  I walked over and gave him a kiss. “’Bout time, don’t you think?”

  “This doesn’t count as our date night, you know?”

  I returned his playful grin. “Yes, I know that.”

  “Mom’s here now, so she can help me,” Luke said to Peter.

  “Well, excuse me,” Peter said with exaggeration and motioned me over to a chair. “Please, join us.”

  I sat down between the two of them and tousled Luke’s hair. “Your eyes look better today. Hardly pink at all, but keep taking your eye drops, okay, for the full seven days?”

  Luke nodded.

  “So whatcha working on?” I changed the subject.

  “We’re bickering over Luke’s science project,” Peter answered. “I’m trying to give him a lesson on the law of inertia, the simple concept of friction and motion.”

  Luke rolled his eyes. “Dad’s trying to talk like some scientist, and I have to get this done by tomorrow.” He sat back in his chair with the same expression Peter gets when he can’t figure out the Sunday crossword. I warmed at their resemblance.

  “Remind me what project this is?” I asked Luke.

  “It’s the egg-drop project. I have to build a device out of paper and sticks that will keep the egg from breaking when we drop it off the roof at school tomorrow.”

  I stared at Luke. “Did you say the egg-drop project?”

  “Yeah, Mom, I just told you that.”

  I started to laugh at the irony. My son had his own egg-drop project, as if to punctuate the unexpected events of my day. Sometimes when you’re not planning for it, life goes splat! right before your eyes.

  “What’s so funny?” Luke knit his brow. “You’re acting weird.”

  I put my hand over my mouth and continued to giggle. And then my eyes filled with tears.

  “Are you all right?” Peter regarded me curiously too.

  I shook my head and started to cry.

  Both Peter and Luke watched me fall apart at the kitchen table. I choked, “The egg really did drop today.”

  Peter put an arm around me, and as the tears streamed down my face, I finally let myself feel the weight of it all—the day’s full range of disappointment, rage, fear, and loss.

  6

  PIECE BY PIECE

  SATURDAY, 8:39 A.M., HOME

  I’d slept late and awakened with achy bones, as if I’d been hit by a phantom car in the middle of the night. I squinted at the sunlight pouring in through the shutters of our eighteenth-century windows. Streams of light flooded in through the slats, settling in a warm pool on the wide pine floorboards. Bean, our daft tabby, chased the flickering beams of light around the floor as though they were goldfish just beyond his grasp. Where was Peter? Had he already left for work? I must have slept through his alarm, but how? His sports talk radio always jolted me awake if I wasn’t already. The testosterone-charged ribbing typically woke up everyone in the house—it often roused sleepyheads Luke and Brett in their bedrooms down the hall, and the banter also tended to rattle Dale, Quinn, Lennon, and Ringo in their cages. Dale would start first: “Good morning!” Then from the next room, Quinn would answer, “Hi, bird!” Then the canaries would start singing. The commotion would signal to the cats that it was breakfast time, and all four of them would begin racing from room to room, frantically meowing as they anticipated their first meal of the day. How had I slept through all the morning excitement? I eased back the covers and slowly sat up on the edge of the bed. Next to my empty teacup, I saw a handwritten note on the nightstand: “Stay in bed. Or else.” I smiled at Peter’s humor.

  I would have liked to stay in bed. I knew my body well enough, and it had officially reached the point of exhaustion. I was mentally fatigued, physically run down, and heartsick over the loss of Mathilda and all the other sugar gliders. And then there was Marnie’s surprise announcement that she’d been offered another job. I couldn’t take anymore.

  Last night, after I’d dissolved into sobs at the kitchen table in front of Luke and Peter, I’d gone upstairs and collapsed. Peter had discovered me an hour later in a wasted heap on the bed. I’d looked up at him through salty slits for eyes and divulged the grim details of how I’d lost Mathilda, my fifth baby glider, and that my best friend and colleague was, in another way, leaving me too.

  “I’m so sorry.” Peter had kissed me on the forehead and pulled a blanket over my limp body. “Get some rest,” he’d said and gone downstairs to make me some tea.

  In the morning light, I read his note again. If it were another day, I probably would take Peter’s advice to stay in bed, but I just couldn’t. I had to rally. I’d lost too many lives. How many more animals would become sick and perhaps even die on my examination table before I could determine
the source of this mysterious illness?

  I stood up and felt a light-headed rush of disorientation. I staggered and sat down. Maybe I’ll just lie back down for five more minutes. I collapsed onto the pillows and closed my eyes. Bean, joined by Bingo and Gizmo, jumped up on the bed and stretched out beside me like a patchwork quilt. As I floated into that fuzzy haze just before you fall asleep, I thought back to the Central Park turtle I’d treated.

  I was filling in for a resident doctor at the Animal Medical Center in New York City when I answered a call from the Midtown police. A huge snapping turtle had crawled out of the Central Park Turtle Pond at 79th Street and made his way all the way over to West 81st Street and Columbus Avenue, where a car had hit him as he had attempted to cross the street. I knew the intersection well, and it was always clogged with traffic.

  “We think it might have been a taxi,” the officer said, “but we can’t be sure since there weren’t any witnesses.”

  “How big is he?” I was curious.

  “About seventy pounds, I’d guess, which makes us wonder how any driver could have missed him. Unless it was a taxi,” he added. “They’ll do anything to make a light.”

  I silently agreed. I’d suffered my share of scrapes and bruises while the meter was running. Once I’d been sent headfirst into the plastic partition between the front and back seats when the driver stopped abruptly after flooring it through a yellow light.

  “Can we bring him in?” the police officer asked about the turtle. “He’s pretty, well . . . he’s pretty messed up.”

  “I can treat him medically, but if he survives he’ll need a licensed wildlife rehabilitator to further treat him before he returns to his home in the pond,” I said.

  “Well, right now what he needs most is someone who can put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”

  “Bring him in,” I said, wondering what I’d agreed to.

  Hugo, as I found out he was named, was a common snapping turtle whose upper shell was at least three feet long and just as wide. But by the time he arrived at the Animal Medical Center in a crunched-up heap, I thought he looked more like a prehistoric puzzle with a few pieces missing. Every part of his exterior body seemed to have been hurt by the accident. Both his carapace and his plastron, the upper and lower parts of his shell, respectively, looked as if they had been crushed by a wrecking ball, and his jaw was broken in so many places that it distorted his face. It was hard to recognize where his mouth was exactly.

  “Where do we start?” asked Dave, my intern at the Center.

  With his shell so fragmented, I really didn’t know. I was amazed that any animal in this condition could still be alive. Hugo tilted his head in my direction and slowly blinked his huge, sad eyes. He seemed to be asking me for help. I thought, what am I going to do with your poor shell? I needed The User’s Manual to Reassembling Broken Turtles, but as far as I knew, a guide like that didn’t exist. So I pulled on a pair of gloves, injected a mild tranquilizer into one of his legs, and began by carefully examining him from head to tail. His jaw was definitely broken, and his shell was in pieces, but thankfully he didn’t appear to have suffered any major internal injuries. He was breathing normally, he was able to move his limbs when I prodded him, and his gums were a healthy pink color, indicating that he hadn’t lost a dangerous amount of blood.

  I concluded that Hugo’s broken jaw was the first thing that would need fixing since he’d need to be able to eat properly to recover. Since the procedure would involve passing needles threaded with wire through the fragments of bone and placing screws and nuts through some of the larger fragments of his jaw, I would have to anesthetize him fully. Like any animal, reptiles feel pain, so I gave the poor crushed turtle a sedative and a painkiller and then passed a large breathing tube down his trachea to hook up the gas anesthesia. Dave and I monitored his breathing and heart rate carefully, and I began the meticulous process of screwing and wiring the fragments of Hugo’s broken jaw back together as if it were a broken piece of antique china.

  Once Hugo’s jaw was wired together and his vitals were stable, I began the laborious job of piecing back together his enormous shell. After all, a turtle is nothing without its shell, which is actually a living piece of bone covered with hard keratin plates, and Hugo would need his to be intact before he could return to the Central Park Turtle Pond. The question was, what would be strong enough to hold his shell together permanently so that it could withstand being in the water again? Surgical glue works fine on soft tissue, but on a turtle shell it wouldn’t do. Hugo needed a permanent and solid fix. It came to me in a flash: acrylic and epoxy. The stuff holds planes and ships together. The only problem: epoxy isn’t commonly kept in the medicine cabinet.

  “Dave! Can you run an errand for me?”

  “Sure. What do you want me to pick up? Coffee?”

  “Something stronger. Run to the hardware store down the street and pick up epoxy and liquid acrylic.”

  He arched his eyebrows. “Satin, matte, or gloss?”

  To re-create the most authentic turtle shell look, a faux finish in crackle would have been ideal, but since I was going for functionality rather than aesthetic appeal, I said, “It really doesn’t matter. Whatever they have.”

  Twenty minutes later, I had the materials in hand. I cleaned out all the cracks in Hugo’s shell with surgical scrub, making sure they were as free of debris as possible—not the easiest task, given that the animal resided in a stagnant pond in Central Park and had just been run over with tire tread. I got him as clean as I could, and then I mixed the five-minute epoxy and layered it over small pieces of fiberglass mesh that bridged the cracks in the shell, joining them back together piece by piece.

  When I finished, Hugo’s face and shell were covered in wire, but at least he resembled a turtle. We turned down the anesthesia, and finally Hugo opened his eyes.

  “I think it’s going to hold,” I said to Dave, “but it’s going to take time.”

  I traced the jagged lines where I’d glued Hugo’s shell back together. The epoxy would need hours, if not days, to set and harden. In his current state Hugo was too fragile to return to the Central Park Turtle Pond. But I didn’t have enough room in the clinic to rehabilitate a seventy-two-pound snapping turtle. I left Hugo in the surgery room and called Chris, a veterinary technician friend of mine in the neighboring upstate town of Katonah, who was an excellent reptile rehabilitator. He would know what to do.

  As I’d hoped, Chris said he’d be more than happy to treat Hugo—under one condition: I’d have to keep him overnight and deliver him to Katonah myself in the morning.

  “I won’t have space for him until then,” he apologized.

  “No problem,” I said, not wanting to sound unappreciative, although I didn’t really have space for Hugo at the center either. I hung up the phone and considered the situation. Katonah was an hour’s drive from Manhattan but only a fifteen-minute freeway ride from my home in Mount Kisco. There was really only one option.

  I sent Dave back to the hardware store for a big plastic tub. Together, we filled the bottom with water, lined the bottom of my Toyota Highlander with newspaper, and hoisted the makeshift pool into the back of my car. Just like that, my car was transformed into a giant reptile tank.

  On the count of three, Dave and I hoisted Hugo into the back of my car as though we were deadlifting weight in a CrossFit class. Plop! He landed in the tub with a thud. Not the most graceful patient restraint I’d performed but enough to accomplish our goal. I jumped into the front seat and cranked up the heat so that Hugo wouldn’t catch cold. Reptiles need extra heat, especially when they’re sick or in recovery.

  I made my way toward FDR drive to the RFK Bridge. With every slight turn and bump along the way, water splashed as Hugo slid from side to side in the tub like a boulder. I took the Sprain Brook Parkway, and after I made it onto the Saw Mill River Parkway an hour later, I slowed down considerably and put my hazards on. I didn’t want to further upset Hugo after all he�
��d been through today: car accident, jaw surgery, and shell reconstruction. I stayed in the right lane, and we crept along like that for several miles until I saw red lights flash behind me, followed by the quick blast of a siren. Fantastic, I muttered to myself. Another obstacle in the road. I pulled over and waited for the officer to approach.

  “Good evening, ma’am. I noticed you have your hazards on. Is everything okay?”

  “No problem, really. I’m transporting an injured turtle to a wildlife rehabilitator. He’s rather large. That’s why I’m driving so slow.”

  The officer looked perplexed so I clarified, “I’m a vet. An animal doctor.”

  “Oh, okay,” he said, “that makes a little more sense. Do you mind if I take a look?”

  We walked to the back of the car, and I lifted up the hatch.

  The police officer took a few steps back in alarm. “Jesus, that’s a turtle?”

  Hugo looked up at the police officer and opened his mouth as if to say hello, revealing a Frankenstein display of bolts, screws, and wires. “He doesn’t much look like it, but yes, he’s from the Central Park Turtle Pond,” I assured him. “He decided to take a walk in Manhattan today and was hit by a car. Trust me, he looked a lot worse a few hours ago.”

  “I can’t imagine,” he said and promptly closed the hatch. “Given the unusual circumstances I won’t ticket you, but please do your best to drive the speed limit, okay, Doctor?”

  It took us nearly two hours, but we finally arrived home. I was in the garage, attempting to lift Hugo’s tub out of the car by myself and with the last grain of strength I had, when I heard a little voice behind me.