Cheep
Up ahead, an opossum wriggles in the middle of the road.
“Mom, don’t hit it!” my sister yells.
Mom swerves off to the side and my sister jumps out of the red station wagon, about to ruin the start of our summer day.
“We need to save it,” my sister pleads, “it needs our help.”
I hate opossums, especially this one slow crawling towards the shoulder‘s gravelly rocks, hissing blood bubbles from its nose. My sister scoops the grisly lump into her beach towel and places it up on the backseat ledge, right behind our heads. I can hear it growling and clawing, its nails catching on loops of terry cloth, ripping out fuchsia and aqua threads. My sister pets its hairless tail, cooing, poor thing. I duck away from the wet wrinkle and try to play dead.
We drive to a wildlife sanctuary, in a suburb with tree-lined estates. The car winds through the driveway’s last s-curve. At the end of the blacktop, a gruff woman with choppy gray hair waves to us from under a tall, swaying sign: Northshore Animal Rescue. She’s dressed like a sailor in navy shorts and a white top but without spit-shine shoes. She’s barefoot and I can see purplish-brown liver spots on her ankles. All of her toenails are bruised. She approaches the car and squawks, “I’m Loretta. What’d ya bring me?”
We show her the bloody animal and she wrings the towel ends into a knot and carries the sack over her shoulder, to a room with a humming refrigerator. Loretta plops the bundle onto a stainless steel countertop and uncovers the lump. She gets close, peering into the opossum’s watery eyes.
“Not much you can do,” Loretta says and covers up the snouted thing. My sister reaches for a paw like it’s our cat, sleeping under a blanket; except this pet’s eyes are clouding and this pet’s screeching. The gasps shorten and the opossum’s towel stops heaving.
“It’s stopped breathing,” my sister says and Loretta shrugs, ignoring the news and redirects our attention. She shows us cages full of birds and raccoons. They resemble the stuffed animals we doctor while playing Vet School: creatures with small bandaged paws and wings; kerchief-slings wrapped around heads like cartoon toothaches. Loretta points out a fawn with an eye patch and a fox that whistles through the crack of its busted jaw. I run my hand across the wired cages, wishing I could adopt one of these broken pets. Loretta says, “I fix the animals as much as I can; but some don’t make it.”
We walk through the brick nursery until we reach a minty green door. Loretta kicks it open. We’re outdoors, on the other side of the rescue. There’s another—shorter—driveway, about twenty feet long that feeds into a road of sharp rocks that could easily cut my sandals. We stand at the nose of a white delivery truck. Its rusty back doors are flapped open and heaped around the back tires, we can see a big shallow dump of yellow birds, a fuzzy pyramid. We follow the buzzing flies swarming the pile. I feel bad for Loretta. She’s got her work cut out, fixing all these baby chickens. She dismissingly says, “Those are all dead.” But I see one move. I see one baby chick lift its head, disoriented and searching for its mama. The baby tries flapping its itty wing.
“Look, this one’s still alive,” I cry.
“We can save it.”
“Where?” Loretta says as she cranes her neck and squints.
I point to the chickadee, the one trying to squeak open its beak. Loretta steps forward, without clearing a path, and her bare feet snap a few necks and wings. She scoops the chick into her palm, gripping her fist around the bird’s twiggy legs and slams it to the ground, beak first, flinging it so hard the tiny skull smack-cracks beneath the bird’s feathery cap.
“It was still alive,” I say.
“Not anymore,” Loretta says. “Those birds are just feed, ya know. Foxes and owls gotta eat.”
I run back to the car, crying. I sit behind the window, waiting to kick my sister and I whisper curses at my mom for stopping the car in the first place. I would’ve saved the bird. I would’ve fed it worms. It was just a baby. We could’ve fixed it.