“She’s such a good person,” Lizzie said. She popped another one of the painkillers that the doctor had prescribed.
The phone rang the day after Christmas. It was Dr. Rotherwood.
“The animals are asking about you,” he said. “Where have you been? I’m up a creek without you.”
“Pamela fired me,” I said.
“What? Why?”
“I thought you knew. My sister broke into the zoo.”
“But you didn’t break into the zoo?”
“No.”
“Pamela can’t fire you for something your sister did. She’s not even your boss anymore. You’re my volunteer.”
“Okay,” I said. “So what should I do?” I was shocked that he’d said I shouldn’t have been fired.
“I’ll talk to Pamela. Can you come in tomorrow or do you have school?”
“It’s Christmas break.”
“Great,” he said. “I’ll see you in the AM.”
When he hung up, I clutched the phone to my chest. Something good had happened to me. The zoo belonged to me, and Lizzie hadn’t ruined it.
At the zoo the next morning, Pamela even apologized for firing me. “I shouldn’t blame you for what your sister did. I should know better, growing up with the brother I had.” She told me that her brother had burned her parents’ house down when he was young.
“Wow,” I said, and remembered how Pamela had given me the bucket of butternut squash and told me to be good to my sister. The zoo was taking my sister to juvenile court, but we didn’t talk about that. Then Pamela went back to her office, and Dr. Rotherwood showed me how to suture stitches on a zebra, a deep bite wound from someone else in the herd.
“I’m glad you’re back,” Dr. Rotherwood said. I felt really lucky to know someone like him. Thanks to Dr. Rotherwood, and to the zoo, I was no longer stuck in my sister’s shadow. I was my own animal now, the same way a red panda or a flying fox is its own creature. A flying fox is really a fruit bat, not a fox. Some scientists even used to think that flying foxes evolved from primates, because of their monkey-like features and behavior, but they’ve since found that out to be untrue.
When Dr. Rotherwood dropped me off at home after work, everyone was sitting in the living room with a woman wearing a gray sweater and a chunky gold necklace.
“This is Jana,” Dad said. “She’s the world record adju—how do you say it?”
“Adjudicator,” Jana said. “Lovely to meet you, Elvis.” Jana had a British accent and perfect white teeth. She looked like a toothpaste model. “I hear you had a large part in making this world record happen. Your sister said she couldn’t have done it without you.”
“Well, maybe I could have,” Lizzie said, turning red. “Elvis, you have dirt on your face.”
“Tough day at work,” I said, slowly realizing why Jana from the Guinness World Records office was here. I’d forgotten that Lizzie’s certificate was unsigned, and I think everyone else had too. Dad had already framed it.
“Jana was about to sign the certificate,” Vanessa said.
They’d all just gotten back from a tour of the walk-in freezer at J&M’s Meat Market. Lizzie told me later that Jana hadn’t counted each one of the cakes, she just gave the freezer a once-over. She hadn’t noticed that the collection was a little short of a thousand, only in the nine hundreds, because of the ones I’d smashed on the ground. The certificate claimed that the rabbit cake collection was one thousand cakes, and that wasn’t true anymore.
“There,” Jana said, after she’d stamped it. “It’s official.” She took a photo of Lizzie then, holding her official certificate on her lap. “Guinness is going to love the wheelchair,” she said.
“How did you end up working for Guinness?” Dad asked, looking more relaxed now that the certificate was signed.
“I’m actually a world record holder myself,” Jana said. “World’s largest collection of salt and pepper shakers.”
“Wow,” Dad said. “That I’d like to see.”
Jana said they were in storage, back in London. She had just relocated to Atlanta, where she was now the southern representative for Guinness World Records. “It’s an adjustment,” she said.
“It’s a long drive back to Atlanta,” Dad said. “Will you stay for dinner?”
“Sure,” she said, and Dad looked delighted. Atlanta was only an hour and a half away.
Vanessa made chicken-fried steak for dinner, which Jana said she had never had before.
“Welcome to the South,” Dad said.
Jana took only a few bites of the steak and mostly ate the green beans and the biscuit, but she laughed at all of Dad’s jokes, including the several he made about our saltshaker.
“My mum really deserves most of the credit,” Jana said. “She started the collection.”
“Our mom deserves credit for the rabbit cakes too,” I said. I told her about Mom, how she used to make rabbit cakes to celebrate every new beginning.
“You must really miss her,” Jana said.
“We do,” Dad said. “She was a wonderful wife and mother.”
Jana said it took her a really long time to stop wanting to call her mother every time she bought a new salt and pepper shaker, but finally the collection became her own thing.
“How many months did that take?” I asked.
“Oh I don’t know,” she said. “Almost two years.”
“Eighteen months?”
“Perhaps,” she said. “That sounds about right.”
Jana left after dinner, and Dad hugged her good-bye. I wondered if we would ever see her again. Mom would have liked her, I thought. Mom didn’t like fried food much either, she said the grease gave her a stomachache.
45.
December, January
It was the start of a new year, month nineteen without Mom. Our family was doing okay, but I was glad Ms. Bernstein had given me two bonus months on the grieving chart; I needed some more time to go on missing my mother, even if we were no longer stuck in the quicksand of her death.
Lizzie had promised she’d try to be less impulsive, and a new therapist was working with her on that. She and Vanessa made me a rabbit cake for my twelfth birthday, and no one got sick from it, and the cake didn’t flinch when she cut into it.
But Lizzie wasn’t perfect either, she never would be. Dad was pretty mad after he caught Lizzie and Vanessa making pot brownies again.
“They’re medicinal,” Lizzie argued. “My bones are broken.”
But Dad wouldn’t listen, of course, because he wasn’t stupid, and he was a better parent now that he’d had more practice. “Lizzie is an old dog, she has no new tricks,” he said.
The old dog who really worried me, that was Boomer. His muzzle was stippled with white hairs. He took forever to climb the front stairs after a pee. Sometimes I’d get frustrated and call for Dad to carry him up and down the front steps, even though I thought it hurt Boomer’s pride. He weighed only forty pounds, had lost seven. That was a lot to lose for a dog, I knew.
I called Dr. Rotherwood for advice; Boomer seemed to be getting frailer every day. Dr. Rotherwood said he’d give me some joint supplements and some pain medication, advised me to administer a hot water bottle on Boomer’s hips for fifteen minutes twice a day.
“In fact,” he said, brightening, “the pygmy hippo’s in labor. It’s going to take hours, and I could use an extra hand tonight. I know you’re not supposed to work off-hours as a volunteer, but then I can give you the meds for your dog. No charge, my gift to Boomer.”
Dr. Rotherwood was the kindest man I’d ever known. He always saw the best in people and in animals. Vanessa drove me to the zoo and Dr. Rotherwood let me in through the exotic animal clinic’s emergency entrance.
While Cleopatra groaned, Dr. Rotherwood drained the water tank, explaining that sometimes the baby hippos drowned. He built Cleo a nest of straw, although there’s no evidence that pygmy hippos nest in the wild.
“When’s your sister’s court da
te?” he asked.
“Next week.”
“I’m rooting for you. It’s not like your sister did any real damage.”
“She broke the Big Gulp machine.” I told Dr. Rotherwood about the sleepwalking defense, asked if he thought we had a case there.
“Sure,” he said. “Maybe. I didn’t know your sister had sleepwalking problems.”
“She’s not sleepwalking now, because her legs are broken, but I’m pretty sure she’ll start again once her bones heal. It’s genetic.”
“That’s what I’ve heard about sleepwalking.”
“Do you have anything that could help her? A pill or something?”
He sighed. “No, you’ll need a people doctor.”
“I thought so.”
Dr. Rotherwood said Cleopatra was getting closer to birthing, and we could start the real preparations now. He asked me to put on some music. He said sometimes that helped animals relax. “Classical,” he said. “Nothing too exciting or new. Something Cleo’s heard before.”
I settled on a radio station playing Celine Dion. I knew the station never played anything too loud, nothing with curse words.
There’s one more legend about pygmy hippos, my favorite, even if it’s another reason why hunters want to kill the endangered animals: the pygmy hippo is said to carry a diamond in her mouth at night. She uses it to light her way in the dark, to keep her from tripping over roots, falling into sinkholes. The diamond shines brightest when the hippo swims underneath the water, and then, just before dawn, she swallows the gemstone whole.
Mom and Dad used to dance around the kitchen to a song called “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes.” That would be the perfect song for Cleo, something both upbeat and soothing at the same time. The song was on an album called Graceland, but it wasn’t Elvis Presley’s music, it was Paul Simon’s. It didn’t come on the radio, so I sang her the words I knew.
The pygmy hippo baby was born at ten thirty at night. Cleopatra collapsed into the pile of straw. Dr. Rotherwood let me hold the baby hippo, and when his back was turned, I slipped my finger into her mouth. I didn’t feel a diamond, only soft new gums.
I put the baby hippo onto the ground, and she stood up on wobbly legs. Cleopatra snorted in encouragement. Cleo lay on her side as the baby nursed, the straw sticking to the baby’s small wet body.
When Dr. Rotherwood dropped me off at home around midnight, Vanessa and Lizzie were still up working on visualization exercises. It was part of Vanessa’s homework; she was taking a winter term child psychology course at the community college. Vanessa wanted to be a guidance counselor, which I thought she’d be really good at, just like Ms. Bernstein. The homework was to interview someone under eighteen who had some sort of emotional or mental difficulty, to try to get them to visualize a better life.
“What do you think about before you go to sleep?” Vanessa asked.
“Well, I usually think about Mom dying,” Lizzie said, “and I think about what happened with Boomer, and sometimes I think about what if I drowned in my sleep too.”
Vanessa jotted down some notes on her homework worksheet. Sleep=Death, she wrote. “Before you go to bed,” Vanessa advised, “visualize a place where you feel safe, like a meadow full of poppies.”
“A meadow full of puppies?”
“Poppies, it’s a flower. It’s from The Wizard of Oz,” she said. “That movie makes me feel good, and it’s such a beautiful scene. Just think of something that makes you happy.”
“Okay.” Lizzie nodded. “I’ll give it a shot.”
That night, Lizzie used her wheelchair to sleepwalk into my room. She pushed herself out of the wheelchair and into my bed, where she curled up next to me, her arm draped around my middle.
For the next few nights after that, Lizzie continued to come into my room after she’d fallen asleep. Sometimes she slept in my bed with me, or sometimes on the floor with Boomer. She went back to her own bed before she woke up, but in the morning, she said she was sleeping better than ever, and her face did look more refreshed.
For three weeks after the birth, the zoo had a poll on their website on what to name the baby pygmy hippo. I thought that was a long time to live without a name, but Dr. Rotherwood said it was how the zoo kept the public involved, and invested. The poll finally settled on the name Zola, which means loved.
46.
The day when Lizzie had to go to juvenile court finally came. She wore a knee-length skirt, one Dad had to go out and buy her at the Auburn Mall, because she had never worn anything that conservative. She wore a blazer and a button-down shirt to go with it. Her big pink casts were like hippopotamus feet, but there was nothing we could do about those.
A doctor from St. Cloud’s testified. “She’s dangerous in her sleep, certainly,” the doctor said. “But she doesn’t know what she’s doing. She is not conscious. She did not have criminal intent, in my professional opinion.
“Sometimes I dream that I’m cheating on my wife,” the doctor added. “But that doesn’t make me a cheater.”
“Objection,” the zoo’s lawyer said, but I thought I saw the judge nod his head slightly.
After the doctor got off the stand, it was my turn. I had convinced Lizzie’s lawyer to let me testify. “You’re just a kid,” Allan had said, when I’d first asked. But I knew how bad Lizzie’s sleepwalking fits could get, how out of control she could be, and then how normal in the morning. He finally agreed it would be a good idea, as long as I didn’t go off our script.
“Elvis Babbitt, can you tell the court what kind of behavior you’ve observed in your sister when she sleepwalks?”
I explained how Lizzie had tried to bake a cake in her sleep, how she had almost burned our house down, about the times she’d peed on the ficus, and how she’d tried to rip out Dad’s hair in the hotel room in Charleston.
“And your sister would never hurt you or your father when she was awake?”
“I’m her best friend,” I said, and I showed everyone the silver dog-tag necklace Lizzie had given me for Christmas.
I said that no matter what Lizzie had done in her sleep, it was not her fault. She hadn’t meant to, she didn’t remember. She was not a criminal.
“Were you with your sister the night of the break-in?” Allan asked.
“No,” I said. “She must have taken my ID badge when she was asleep.”
“And what were your first words to your sister when you found out that she had broken into the zoo?” Allan asked.
“Were you awake?” I said. “Did you mean to do it?”
“And what did your sister say?”
“She said she was asleep, she didn’t mean to, she doesn’t even remember what happened that night.”
Then I brought out the big guns: I could prove that the lion’s cage had never been opened, the way the zoo claimed it had been. She endangered the zookeepers and the public by leaving the lion’s cage door ajar, the zoo’s statement read.
But my ID badge didn’t open the lion’s door: the zoo volunteers weren’t trusted with Seymour ever since he’d killed his lioness; only certified zookeepers had the access code to Seymour’s cage. The zoo wasn’t telling the truth, at least about that part of the break-in.
I had lied under oath, but it was probably worth it, because Lizzie was acquitted of all charges, free to go. “That worked like gangbusters,” Allan said, pumping his fist in the air.
After the courtroom emptied out, we all went for ice cream. We asked Allan to come with us, but he said he had his son’s basketball game to go to. The parrot hadn’t come to the trial, because who knows what Ernest would blurt out, and Boomer was at home too, so it was just Lizzie, Vanessa, Dad, and me, alone at Suzy Sundaes.
“To being not guilty,” we cheered, clinking our ice-cream cones together like wineglasses.
“To Elvis’s testimony,” Lizzie said, raising up her vanilla cone with rainbow sprinkles.
“To Elvis,” Vanessa and Dad echoed.
It was a really happy
moment, but I guess that’s probably obvious.
47.
There were still parts of life that were terribly, awfully, horribly sad, even at the tail end of the grieving chart. By January 19th, Dolly Parton’s birthday, Boomer couldn’t walk anymore. I had Dad carry him up and down the stairs so he could go outside, and I gave him sponge baths when he peed on himself. He had stopped eating, wouldn’t lick a smear of peanut butter off my finger. I fed him water through a turkey baster when he wouldn’t drink from a bowl.
I slept on the floor next to him, with a pillow and blanket. I didn’t want him to be alone when he didn’t feel well. He was so skinny now, bones and fur. I gave him doggie painkillers wrapped in bacon, but I had to force the pills down his throat. He was getting worse, getting weaker, but when I pet him, he would thump his tail. He looked up at me with the cataract moon in his eye, and I kissed him on the white stripe of his nose.
Boomer had given me so much. He had never been selfish or mean. He’d wake me up with his nose if I overslept. When I’d had a bad day at school, he’d lick my face until I laughed. Boomer was the reason why I’d made it this far in the grieving chart, why I’d never had a problem getting out of bed. That part was simple: Boomer needed a morning walk.
Boomer had been afraid of Lizzie after she scratched him in her sleep, but he had forgiven her. He knew Lizzie didn’t mean to be bad. He didn’t hold a grudge when she didn’t let him out the night Mom drowned. He didn’t blame her. Dogs have a lot of things about life figured out; they aren’t afraid to let something go. Their hearts are always open to loving more.
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