“Mad at her for being in love?” I asked.
“Mad at her for being stupid.”
“Stupid,” the parrot repeated.
I left long voice mails on Lizzie’s cell phone, most of them begging her to come home. She didn’t call back, but she sent another postcard that said she was happy with Soda, and that he was helping with her sleepwalking episodes. She said I should leave her alone.
I remembered Lizzie on the boat, laughing with Soda. She had looked happy. He had told her she was pretty when she laughed, and she didn’t have eyebrows that week. But even if she was happy with Soda, she should be at home with us, with her family.
“Dad, why don’t we go get her?” I asked. “We know where she is.”
“She’d run again.”
“So we’d go back and get her again.”
“Some Alabama teenagers run a lot farther than Guntersville. If she ran to New York or California, we’d never get her back. I know she’d run. She has to come home on her own. She will.”
“Okay,” I said. “I still think we should go get her.” I didn’t want to give it the summer, no matter what Miss Ida had said.
“Your opinion is noted,” Dad said, which meant the conversation was over.
Later that night, I read online that the families of runaway teenagers have feelings of indescribable grief and confusion. I wondered if I should start another grieving chart, but I didn’t know how many months I should put down. If Lizzie was gone, but alive, I didn’t know how long it would take to stop missing her, if that would take more or less months than a death.
I was volunteering at the zoo as often as I could, because Dad kept saying there was nothing I could do about Lizzie. He said maybe I should work on Mom’s book, so I checked out a few books from the zoo’s reference section. I learned that giraffes can go weeks without sleep, and birds slept with only half their brain, leaving them half-awake and able to fly. I wondered if sleepwalkers sleep with half their brain too.
There had been a few new additions to Serengeti in the weeks of my suspension; zoos are always swapping animals. We had a new giant anteater with a huge plumed tail and a trunked snout. A dozen northern red-bellied cooters had been born as part of the turtle conservation program and were to be released into the wild at eight months. The musk ox was pregnant, and we had a new Amur leopard; only thirty were left in the wild. He panted in his cage like a dog.
Pamela introduced me to the new three-legged meerkat, Cletus, whose mob had turned on him in a zoo in Cincinnati. Meerkats are social animals, but Cletus would have to live alone from now on; it’s too hard to introduce a meerkat to a new mob. It made me sad for him, but Pamela said we’d be sure he got a lot of stimulation: chew toys and cardboard jungle gyms. I fed Cletus six live mealworms with a pair of tweezers. He barked after me when I walked away.
Even though I was happy to be at the zoo, there was always the pit in my stomach because I knew Lizzie wasn’t at home watching TV on the couch. I tried to figure out what Mom would do if she were around. Mom would have probably driven to Lake Guntersville straightaway and dragged Lizzie to the car.
When I finished my shift, Dad would pick me up in his truck, and when I’d get in the cab he and the parrot were usually both silent. Dad had become morose again since Lizzie had left, and Ernest seemed to take it personally. I knew if Lizzie had been around she would have joked that the honeymoon was over, but Lizzie wasn’t around. She hadn’t even called.
After Lizzie had been living with Soda for two weeks, I was assigned to work with Cleopatra, the pygmy hippo. She had turned against many of the other volunteers.
“Cleo’s a diva,” Pamela said. “She wants things her way. She only likes women, and no gray hair, no jewelry, no perfume. She must be kept in her own pen at night.”
As I raked up Cleopatra’s old hay, visitors would ask me questions about her over the fence. Many visitors hadn’t known pygmy hippos existed, and they thought Cleopatra was a baby hippopotamus. At six years old and fully grown, she was only the size of a pig. Except for her occasional temper tantrum and her dislike of perfume and silver jewelry, Cleopatra was pretty docile during the day, asleep most of the time. She had to be housed alone after the night of the incident, when she’d killed the African spoonbill who’d shared her enclosure.
I read up on pygmy hippos during my lunch break. In my research, I found that pygmy hippos are nocturnal, solitary animals. Like their larger cousin, they close up their ears and nose underneath the water. They don’t have sweat glands. To keep cool in the jungle, they secrete something called blood sweat. It’s not blood and it’s not sweat, but a red foam that keeps them damp. There was an old legend that said that the blood sweat made the hippos impossible to pierce with arrows or bullets, but people insisted it was good luck to kill one, if you could find a way to do it. That was how pygmy hippos had become endangered, with very few left in the wild.
There was another folktale too, one that always excited the zoo visitors, which claimed that pygmy hippos lit fire to the West African forest at night, and in the morning they’d eat the charcoal dust left behind. It was hard not to think of Lizzie’s nighttime habits when I read that, but I knew she would have hated it if I compared her to a hippopotamus, even a pygmy.
On the walk out of the zoo, I wondered what nocturnal animals knew about the nighttime that I didn’t. I had never really thought my mom would kill herself—no matter what Miss Ida had predicted—until she was found in the river. And until Pamela told me, I never would have thought Cleopatra was capable of murder.
“Any word from Lizzie?” I asked Dad when I climbed into the truck.
“None,” he said. “She looks good though.”
“What do you mean?”
“I park at the public beach.” When we got home, he showed me a pair of binoculars tucked in his briefcase.
The next week, three weeks without Lizzie, Pamela told me that Dr. Rotherwood said he could use me in the exotic animal clinic for the next few days, since so much of his volunteer staff had gone on vacation. “He wants to make amends,” she said. “That means you should say you’re sorry.”
“I know what it means,” I grumbled.
When I got to the clinic, Dr. Rotherwood was rehabbing a coyote with a broken leg. The coyote had been hit by a car, and brought in by the driver, an animal lover. Dr. Rotherwood said that he had named the coyote Simon, and explained that if he healed well enough, Simon would be let go in six to ten weeks.
I hadn’t realized how many animals Dr. Rotherwood treated at the zoo and then released back into the wild, but he said that was his favorite part of the job. He rehabbed tons of gray squirrels, and Alabama had plenty of those. Dr. Rotherwood said all animals were precious, people included. I really felt bad I’d ever spat on him.
“Water under the bridge,” he said.
As we set Simon’s back leg into a cast, Dr. Rotherwood said that everyone in the clinic would have to be careful not to pay too much attention to Simon as he healed. Sometimes animals could not be reintroduced into the wild because they’d lost their ability to hunt, had come to rely on humans for food. “A tame coyote is a dead coyote,” he explained. A tame coyote would go into a person’s backyard, and more than likely get shot. “It’s best if coyotes remain afraid of humans.”
Dr. Rotherwood said that rehabbing wild animals could get depressing sometimes. He said every May, the clinic was overrun with white-tailed deer fawns. People would bring the fawns in thinking they’d been abandoned or orphaned, not knowing that mama deer often leave their babies during the day. That is why fawns have those dappled white spots, so they can better camouflage, remain hidden when they are left alone.
“It’s a well-intentioned kidnapping,” Dr. Rotherwood explained. “People name most of the fawns Bambi.”
Lizzie still hadn’t come home, and she hadn’t sent any more postcards, but Dad had reported that she looked good at the Silver Sand, tan and healthy. Maybe Soda really was helping wit
h her sleepwalking. She’d taken the rabbit cake pan with her when she ran away, and Dad planned to continue renting the walk-in freezer at the butcher. Lizzie could still work on being a world record holder if she wanted to, and maybe Soda would even help out with her baking.
Maybe it was kind of like a well-intentioned kidnapping. I liked the sound of that.
30.
Dad and I were getting used to being alone again, the way it had been in the months when Lizzie was at St. Cloud’s. I remembered what Lizzie’s friend Vanessa had said once, that it was okay to be glad that Lizzie was gone for a while. Dad and I had our summer morning routine down: I’d walk the dog while he packed our lunches, and then he’d drop me off at the zoo on the way to work.
Dad wasn’t morose anymore; he whistled as he got dressed in the morning. He still wore Mom’s lipstick and robe around the house sometimes, but he also was ironing his flannel button-downs before he left for work. He’d grown a beard, but he was keeping it neatly trimmed.
“Are you dating someone?” I asked, when Dad came downstairs smelling of cologne, the kind he used to wear on his anniversary dinners with Mom.
“I said I’d let you know if it’s serious,” he said. “Nothing serious.”
“Your risk for a heart attack goes down if you marry again. Remember what happened to your friend Bernie?”
“I remember,” Dad said. “I read the pamphlet my doctor gave me, too.” The pamphlet said that if Dad married again, he would tack an average of seven years onto his expected life-span. I didn’t think that was a statistic to be ignored.
“I’ve always wondered about the animals at the zoo,” Dad said one morning on the ride in to work. “Do you think they’re happy?”
When zoo visitors asked that same question, we were required to say: Yes, the animals are very happy. We feed them nutritious diets and we make sure they get plenty of exercise. You can make a donation at the front office to ensure the animals continue to get the care they need. You can also help by visiting our gift shop!
But how did you know if an animal was happy? Some of them probably didn’t mind the cages, didn’t know the difference. I didn’t think the frogs and the turtles were unhappy, or any of the inhabitants of the reptile house. The mice in Rodent Tunnel were probably happy enough, but then we had to kill them in that terrible way. And the bigger mammals? They didn’t have enough room to run, not really, and those were the ones whose happiness I was worried about. Most everyone had read that the orcas in SeaWorld were depressed. I was thankful we didn’t have any whales or dolphins at Serengeti Park.
Our lion, Seymour, was on large doses of Prozac ever since his mate died. He was the one who killed her; he broke the lioness’s neck. It was during visiting hours; Pamela called it a “media nightmare.”
“I don’t know if they’re happy,” I said.
“I bet they are,” Dad said, because he was uncomfortable with my answer. “You take such good care of them.”
“Yeah,” I said, and I leaned against the window and held my breath. It had been a while since I’d pretended to drown in the car.
When Dad dropped me off, I went straight to visit the sea otters. Clayton and Bernadette were the happiest animals I could think of. When I got to their enclosure, the otters were floating around in the water, holding hands. Last year, the zoo had held a wedding for Clayton and Bernadette, since they were visitor favorites. The otters each got a bucket of clams for the occasion, and there was cake and wine for all the guests who had made a donation. The wedding made almost $40,000, which went toward saving sea otters from oil spills.
Pamela had warned me I shouldn’t think that the zoo animals had human feelings, and I should remember that they were wild at heart. But I thought most people believed that animals had all the same emotions people did. Why else would everyone have given so much money to that wedding, unless they believed that Clayton and Bernadette really loved each other?
If the zoo animals were happy, and Dad was whistling in the morning, and Lizzie’s postcards said she was in love, what was I missing? Maybe my grief had turned abnormal, before the eighteen months were even up. I always felt as if I had swallowed something sharp, like a house key or a thumbtack, something causing a deep pain down in the pit of my stomach.
31.
July, August
On the first Friday in August, Dad had an early meeting with a carpet vendor all the way in Birmingham, so he couldn’t give me a ride to the zoo. When I called in, Dr. Rotherwood said he’d pick me up at home, he really needed the extra hands. I said thank you so much, and then I waited by the door, since I didn’t want Dr. Rotherwood to see what a mess our house was.
“Sweet cheeks,” Ernest said as I waited. “Gimme kiss.” Dad had left the parrot in his cage, had apologized to the bird, explaining that it was a no-parrots-allowed meeting.
I remembered once when Mom and I had been shopping for Boomer, looking for something to help with his arthritis. “Sweet cheeks,” she’d called across the store, “do you have any supplements for dogs with joint pain?”
“Did you just call Mr. Debbie sweet cheeks?”
“It’s an old joke.”
“Weird joke, Mom,” was all I’d said then, but now I began to wonder.
When Dr. Rotherwood pulled up in his Prius, I asked him if he could take me to Debbie’s Petland. “Our dog is running low on food.”
“Sure,” he said. “I don’t mind waiting in the car while you run in.”
“Did you have an affair with my mother?” I asked as I swung the glass door of the pet shop open.
Mr. Debbie sighed, wiping his forehead.
“Hi Elvis.”
“Did you?”
He asked me to come to the aquarium room in the back. He said he didn’t want to bother the other customers. There was no one else in the pet shop, but I went with him anyway to the dark part of the store, our faces lit up by black lights. He spoke just loud enough so I could hear him over the sound of the aquarium filters bubbling.
“You’re probably too young to hear this,” he said, putting his hands on the back of his neck like his head might fall off. “But you’ve got me on the spot.” He said he’d been having an affair with my mom for two years before she died. That was why Ernest imitated her voice. It was a trick Mom had taught him. “Please don’t tell Mrs. Debbie,” he begged.
“Oh my God,” I said, backing into a tank full of clownfish, sloshing their water a bit. Mom used to say: Do it once, it’s a mistake; do it twice, it’s a habit.
Did my mom have affairs as a habit?
“You’ll understand when you’re older.” He turned around to skim a layer of algae off one of the tanks with a tiny green net.
I rolled my eyes, just like Lizzie would’ve, and turned to walk out of the store. As I walked through the aisles, I grabbed a bag of dog food, plus a squeaky bone for Boomer. I stopped just before the exit.
“You didn’t kill her, did you?” I asked.
“Who? Eva?” Mr. Debbie said. “God, no.”
“Did she ever mention any health problems? It’s very important that you tell me everything you know, Mr. Debbie, or I’ll have to ask your wife.”
“She did have awful headaches,” he said. “I sent her to my brother. He’s a doctor in New York.”
I remembered the trip Mom had taken to New York alone. She’d said it was for a conference.
“Do you have his number?”
“Look him up,” Mr. Debbie said. “Dr. Paul Debbie.”
“I will,” I said, and walked out without paying for the dog food. I thought Mr. Debbie deserved to be punished a little, since I wasn’t going to tell Dad about the affair. I knew it would really break Dad’s heart about Ernest if he knew the way the parrot had learned Mom’s voice.
In Mom’s life before, not in her past lives, but in her life before Dad-and-Lizzie-and-me, she had eaten a special kind of cactus at a music festival, a huge concert in Sedona, Arizona. Dad hated when she told this story t
o us, because he said it glorified drug use.
“They don’t know what peyote is, Frank. I never said anything about drugs.” The cactus made Mom hallucinate, she said, and she had walked down what she thought was a tunnel made of glass for miles and miles.
When she awoke, Mom was in the storage room of a crystal shop. The store was owned by Miss Ida, and there was a red-and-white Now Hiring sign in the window. Mom had run out of money, so she took the salesclerk job. She had six months before she’d be starting her PhD program, and she wasn’t about to move back in with her mother, not at twenty-four years old. Mom used to tell Lizzie and me stories about Miss Ida before bed.
Miss Ida liked to tell everyone she was from the Amazon, but she was really from Chicago. She was a psychic and a witch doctor; her customers didn’t expect her to be from Hyde Park. Mom told me that people often came to Miss Ida with tapeworms. So many people were eating bad meat from fast food restaurants, it was like an epidemic. The regular doctors would have no idea what was wrong, just prescribe Tums for heartburn.
Miss Ida would tell the person to fast for a week, to drink only water, and then come back. When her patient returned several pounds skinnier, she’d have him lie on his back, would place a bowl of warm milk on his chest. The starved tapeworm would smell the milk and crawl out from the mouth, or the nose, and inch toward the milk. Once the worm had reached the bowl, Ida would pinch it around the head and pull. Sometimes the tapeworms were several feet long.
“Ew.” I’d squirmed at that part.
“There’s billions of organisms inside you right now,” Mom had said. “There’s no telling the secrets the body holds.”
Mom might have held a secret tumor in her brain that would explain everything, her multiple affairs and her mysterious death, but I knew we couldn’t dig up her body for a second autopsy. Nothing could recover the truth; her body was scattered across the twelve miles between our home and the dam at Goat Rock. Mom was gone for good; we hadn’t even kept the dust she’d left behind. I wished we’d put her ashes into a jar instead, so I could ask questions to her remains.
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