Chapter Three: The Lindas

It happened by accident. Or, this was their destiny. Depending which Linda you ask. Was it God’s will at work, or a series of random events? Were they chosen for each other, or did they do the choosing? You’ll never get them to agree on How or Why. But neither would dispute that it was for the best. 

Picture it: two women standing on opposite sides of the freeway. They’d each seen the possum that, victim of a hit and run, had dragged itself—by instinct or accident—to the sparse green of the median and lay clinging, with the diminishing force of it nature, to this world. They’d each—one in her jet black SUV fresh from the carwash, the other in her rusted out clunker that once had been white—screeched to a stop on the perilous edge of this busy road. Which is where they found themselves seeing across eight lanes of traffic to their futures. The Linda who was shy gave a little wave of her fingers, and the Linda who was gregarious waved back with both arms. After which they were left waiting for a break in the traffic, which took so long, they began to laugh. The shorter Linda reached the possum first and was kneeling beside her when the taller Linda reached her side. 

It didn’t look good. 

“It doesn’t look good,” said the Linda with the darker skin.

The one with the lighter asked, “What should we do?” 

The animal between them was hardly moving, straining to breathe. If she was aware that two humans now crouched beside her, she gave no indication. There was a faint trail of blood along the path she had taken, but where that blood originated wasn’t apparent. And they weren’t about to try to move her to find out. 

Her menace was her teeth, that long snout full of them. And a powerful jaw, if she had the wherewithal to work it. 

“We’ve got to get her to a vet,” said the Linda who raised foster kittens.

“Mine’s not far,” said the Linda who owned five fox terrier rescues.

They had the same vet, they discovered. 

The Linda who was married took off her jacket, and the Linda who was single, with a daring and a deftness she had not known she possessed, scooted the denim under the stout marsupial body and swaddled her, wrapping her legs firmly within the bundle, folding the arms of the jacket around her snout, aiming to give her room to breathe but not enough to lash out at them. 

Together, already a team, the Lindas ran to one of their cars. They don’t remember which. The Linda who believed in the power of prayer took the wheel, while the Linda who trusted only in science sat beside her, holding their swaddling rescue in her arms, cradled—like the human child neither of them wished for or would ever have. 

One of the Lindas was about to miss her job interview at the Aquarium. The other was late to the dentist’s. Neither of them would remember these obligations until much later.  

As they drove they began to talk, as any strangers might, about the who-what-when-where-why of their lives. Quickly they found out how different they were. But what did any of that matter when what united them was: all creatures great and small.

“Do you think she’ll make it?” asked the Linda at the wheel.

The Linda in the passenger’s seat didn’t think so, but she wouldn’t say it aloud. She could feel, through the jacket, the warmth of the body she held, her slow if steady heartbeat, her subtly heaving, jagged breath. She could sense that vital force that one of them would have called a soul.

Marsupials’ metabolic rates are slower than mammals’. This fact is an asset to opossums in many ways. It takes less energy to sustain them, fewer nutrients, less food. This is thought to be the reason they can eat poisonous snakes—they don’t absorb the venom like a mammal would. 

But it also means they heal more slowly. Dr. Arnold explained their patient’s biology to the two Lindas, who, by instinct, had taken hold of each other’s hands. One began to cry. The other refused. 

Lying as still as they’s found her, freed of her swaddling, on the stainless exam table, not knowing or not caring where she was, the opossum made no motion to appeal when her verdict was handed down. 

“We thought—we were both thinking—this can’t be it. Right? Didn’t we think that?”

“Linda and I sometimes find we think the same thought for different reasons—” 

Sitting side by side on the floral sofa—something else they rescued, rehabilitated—in the room they call their Visiting Room, the Lindas tell this story together. They have told it many times. So many, it has taken on a mythic tone. This is their lore, their origin story. The birth of their wildlife rehabbing org, the Small Animal Protection Brigade. And the birth of their friendship, too. 

“It had all seemed so significant to me, the day’s events. Little synchronicities. Like how Abby, that’s my sister, rang me up, so I left the house late. And then traffic was all bottlenecked on Virginia Dare so I took North Croatan. Besides which, the woman I was then, it’s not like I was on the lookout for opossums in the median. That I even saw her…how it all came together…it felt like…a conspiracy was afoot, do you know? But then, when it looked like, when it was clear, she was going to die. What had all those little helping hands been for? It felt like a broken promise, do you know?” 

“Oh yeah,” Kim’s daughter says. “I know what that feeling feels like. Like: finding out the universe doesn’t fucking care if we live or if we die.” 

The Lindas see how Kim stiffens at Desirée’s language, at her rage. How she blinks and sits back in the patchwork armchair. Signs of shutting down. Signs of retreat. 

The women rescue more than animals. The Linda who studied fiber arts at SCAD teaches a knitting course at the women’s correctional facility in Deerfield, and the Linda who is sixteen years sober hosts an A.A. meeting at Manteo Rec, the same brightly lit hall into which Kim walked three years ago, freshly sober and freshly arrived on the island. Many of the Lindas’ rehabbers have come to them this way, a cycle of care-taking that one of them would call poetic. 

In the presence of her daughter, they observe, Kim has become again the woman they first met: tentative, bashful, a child peering out from behind a curtain of persona, doubting it will ever be safe to show her true face anywhere. 

“The world,” Desirée says, “is indifferent to the suffering of its inhabitants.” 

The Linda who frowns on superstition nods. “I’m with you. Let’s not ascribe intention where it isn’t. But I felt it too, for my own reasons. Simper ones, I’d say: just, death is a loss. Who could argue? That’s literal. And the loss of someone innocent, someone wild, someone just trying to live her life with humanity encroaching…”

“Yeah, it’s senseless,” says Desirée.

“Exactly, yes, senseless. So, in spite of our different—you might say opposite—perspectives, we had the same thought: No!”

“We’re thinking, why are we there?”

“What’s the use?”

“What’s the point?” 

“We’re defeated.” 

“Thinking, this is the end?”

“But obviously—”

“Since we’re sitting here with you.”

“It wasn’t the end.” 

“Just the opposite.”

At its climax, as in any good myth or fairytale, the Linda’s story takes a turn. Here is our moment of reversal, when the dark night of the soul gives way to new dawn. When crisis forces a metamorphosis.

As they stand marooned in their despair, expecting Dr. Arnold to now produce the syringe that will usher Opie into the next world or else nothingness, instead the veterinarian revealed herself to be a magician. Abracadabra, she reached right through the slit in the animal’s abdomen, which wasn’t a wound, and from it she pulled one, three, seven, ten pink peanuts of flesh, their skin still translucent, their eyes ghost eyes. Still fetal, the most vulnerable things either Linda had ever witnessed.

“She didn’t have to ask us.”

“We all knew we would take them.” 

And so it began. They brought the babies in a shoebox back to the house of the Linda who was single, and there, over the ensuing four months, they learned to mix formula and tube-feed, to guard against bloating and dehydration, to stimulate them to urinate and defecate, to clean them as their mother would, and to keep meticulous records of it all. They learned, too, the hardest lesson, of mourning those young who would not be saved by their love. And they learned the greatest joy: of watching those who would, who were, who had made it, take to the open field, their funny naked tales the last of them to disappear into the long grass. 

“And now it’s twenty years later!”

“Twenty-three.” 

“We’re fifty volunteers strong, including our Kim here. We take in, what, two thousand animals in a year?”

“Mostly possums, squirrels and rabbits.” 

“Mostly those. But anyone who needs us. We don’t discriminate.”

“Injured or orphaned. Young or old.” 

“It’s such an honor I think,” Kim says, “to get to care for something wild.”

Her daughter, who is, despite her expensive clothes and her expensive rings, her expensive hair and her expensive nails, quite clearly something wild herself, doesn’t respond right away. 

What is she thinking, they are all wondering. Of this obviously other world into which she’s stumbled, of which her mother is a part. 

Before the Linda who cuts to the chase can flat-out ask her. Before the Linda who goes gently can try to soften her words, the song of the Carolina wren interrupts them. Teakettle, teakettle, teakettle! Coming not from outside but there in the room. Coming from the coffee table. 

“Litter C,” says the Linda who is silencing her phone’s alarm. 

“Like to learn to feed a baby squirrel?” asks the other. 

“What, me?” Kim’s daughter looks to her mother, whom she has at least known longer than she’s known the Lindas. 

Kim nods, smiles, nods. “It isn’t hard. You’ll pick it right up. Try.” 

“I mean, sure?” Desirée says. “Yeah, why the hell not.” 

While the Linda with the hair gone grey moves to the kitchen to prepare four syringes, caping them with rubber nipples, assembling them with a dish of warm formula on a tray, the Linda who colors her hair fiery red ushers Kim and Desirée through a door to the east, kept closed while they were chatting so as not to disturb the room’s many inhabitants. 

This house that the Lindas share, from which they operate the Brigade and a Sunday soup kitchen, was the house that the Linda who was married lived in with her husband, before the divorce. He was happy to move out. And in the eighteen years since that split, the two women have transformed it entirely through their work. Every room bears evidence of their rehabbing, but this is the heart of the operation. The Menagerie, they call it. Its walls are lined with plywood shelves, lined with cages of various sizes and rehabbing supplies—more crates, dishes, blankets, bottles, syringes, nipple tips and hot packs. The whole house is pervaded by a gentle musk the Lindas no longer smell, but here in the Menagerie, where it originates, it is more pungent, the scent of a mossy glade, the scent of wilderness. 

The Linda with the limp goes to a cage in the corner, unlatches the door and lifts from it four five-week-old eastern grey squirrels, litter C—Candy, Cindy, Cora and Clyde. One-by-one she names them, passing two to Kim and one to Desirée, who instinctively cups the kit in her palms, holding it before her, at chest level, like a prayer. 

“Wow,” she says.

“Right?” says Kim. 

“Grab a towel for your lap.” Linda nods to a bin of them as they pass it. 

“They, ah, go potty while the drink,” Kim explains. 

“For real?” Desirée thrusts the baby away from her and walks the rest of the way with it held at arm’s length.

To cup the kit gently around its torso, allowing it to sit on its haunches and grip the edge of the nipple with its paws. To angle the syringe just so, and slip its tip into a skeptical mouth. Then to depress its plunger at a slow, steady rate. How many times have they taught this lesson? How many times watched anxiety give way to awe? Watched their student discover the same wonder they did, those two decades past. A revelation that never grows stale. An honor, as Kim said. To hold in your hands what is wild, to be entrusted with its safekeeping. It’s a responsibility one of them would call sacred, and the other would not disagree. 

They have given Desirée Cora to feed, an easy drinker, happy to do much of the work herself, forgiving of odd angles, and indeed she has grasped the rubber decisively and is sucking down her formula with gusto, the young woman hunched over her deep in concentration, barely flinching as a scattering of chocolate sprinkle-like droppings appear on the terry towel draped in her lap. 

“You’re doing so well!” Kim says to her newly met daughter, and in her excitement the Lindas can hear the reemergence that woman they have come to know as recovery has liberated Kim from the confinement of her old self loathing: a woman of robust enthusiasm, of unscrupulously compassion. A woman whose embrace would encircle the world, if the world were willing to be so loved.  

This moment, it feels like a moment. Like a scene the Lindas could include in some future account of good work The Brigade has done—not just for the animals whose rescue is its first mission, but for the rescuers, too. 

The trouble with moments, though, is that they are followed pretty quickly, moments later, by other moments. And in the Lindas’ house, where the door is always open, where anyone might enter in at any time, odds are that the next will not quite follow from the last. 

And so, like a law of physics fulfilled, well before Cora has lost interest in her syringe, and also before any further words can pass between Kim and Desirée, “Knock, knock,” says a man, standing in the Visiting Room’s doorway. 

Between the Lindas some winking ensues. “Hazard!” they chorus, suddenly the twenty-years-younger selves they were just describing to Desirée. Hazard is one of their favorite lost causes. Three months sober, a veteran of the War in Afghanistan, occasionally employed, performer of odd jobs, and a masterful baritone. Hard living has left Hazard more grizzled than would be expected of his early middle age, but he is still undeniably handsome. And unfailingly a gentleman. 

He now bows low to the women, straightens up and proclaims, “I shall impersonate a man! Come, enter into my imagination and see him. Bony, hollow-faced—eyes that burn with the fire of inner vision. He conceives the strangest project ever imagined—to become a knight-errant and sally forth into the world righting all wrongs!” And again he bows, with a flourish. 

“Bravo!” cheer the Lindas. Were there not squirrels in their hands they would clap. 

“Imagine us clapping!” 

“You’re a star!” 

His monologue comes from the musical Man of La Mancha, in which he will soon be starring, alongside their very own Kim in the role of Aldonza. Which the three women explain to Desirée, talking over one another, as Hazard himself hangs back in the doorway. 

“That’s cool,” says Desirée. “I’ve done a little acting.”

“Have you?” says Kim. “We’ll have to talk about that! Add that to the list!” 

Hazard’s presence has energized them all. But he himself remains reticent. After his dramatic entrance, he seems pensive. 

“Something on your mind, Haz?”

“I am working on Step Nine.” 

“Step Nine is a humbling pilgrimage,” says the Linda who once, herself, had to make amends along the twelve-step road to recovery. 

“Mmmhmm. Kim, you are on my list.” 

“Am I? Oh! I wouldn’t have assumed.” 

“Textbook Kim. Every reason to expect an apology—or, ten—and you haven’t given it a thought.” 

“Well,” Kim says, blushing, busily repositioning Cindy on her lap. 

“That’s why I stopped in.” Hazard at last steps fully into the room, seeming to have found his footing, seeming to have found his resolve. “Saw your car. Truth is, I’ve been carrying this damn list around with me for…for…for too long. Man, it’s boring a hole in my heart! Wrote the thing, wrote my letters, then I froze. Just know, I guess, how real it’s going to get, when I say this shit out loud. Been hiding. But hiding ain’t no good! Every day, all day, all I think is how I’m not doing the thing I’ve got to do. Starts to seem like maybe that’s worse than just doing the thing. But, man, I don’t know how to start, do I? Haven’t known how. But then, I saw your car, Kim, in the drive here, and I knew. I could start with you. Because you understand. Plus, you’re so much nicer than you should be. Saw your car and I got it and I swerved right in, and here I am.” 

The Lindas’ life could be described as constant triage. With so many needy creatures in their care, they are always having to ask: But, who needs help now? Whose case is most critical? As Hazard makes known his intention to make amends to Kim right there, right then, they run the mental calculation. Where his need is obvious and acute, Kim’s is no less real. Her recovery, too, is in jeopardy if this reunion with her daughter goes badly. Could what Hazard is preparing to say tip things the wrong way? Could asking him to wait to get this off his chest knock him off the wagon? 

Is Kim running these same questions through her mind? It seems like something else happens: like she hears Hazard’s need and simply forgets about her own. Which would be just like the woman they have come to know.

“Of course I understand,” she says. “Of course I’d be happy to hear you.” 

Kitten of a man in the body of a bear, he nods solemnly and pulls a much-abused notebook from his back pocket. “Kimberly Lane,” he says, coming to stand an awkward foot in front of her, towering over her. Hands trembling, he thumbs through to the right page and proceeds to read: “Kimberly Lane, I know that my actions, when I was fucked up, and the stuff I said, it has caused you pain. And I would like to make amends.” The man reading this letter is worlds away from the playful actor who appeared in their doorway. He reads quickly, sometimes stumbling over his words, not looking up from the page. “I will now enumerate my wrongs, in no particular order. Firstly, there was there was the time I love-tapped the back of your auto, which is putting it mildly, I see the dent is still there, and you said it was okay, no worries, but I bet you feel sad about it, anyone would. In the second place, I shouldn’t have said what I said about your head voice. Your whole voice is lovely, and even if it weren’t that would’ve been out of line, across the line, but it wan’t true, isn’t true, your voice is honey, I’m just mean when I’m blitzed, which is no excuse, I know, I know. Inexcusable. And, thirdly, we all remember that time I got unhoused and you let me have your couch, and I sure bet you regret that because we know what happened to that couch, which I will not recount in polite society. And also your rug. And the lamp.” 

The nipple has slipped from Cora’s mouth but Desirée is unaware. She’s staring at her mother, who’s staring at Cindy, who’s nodding off in the well of her cupped palms. 

Trading a look, the Lindas move in quietly to collect the Cs, which action Hazard seems not to notice. He is on a mission—Hazard is always on a mission—and, once begun, he must complete it. 

In the Menagerie, the Lindas tuck the kits back into their crate where they will settle in for a siesta. Though they play it up, though it’s part of their schtick, they are no long such disparate people as they were when they met. Like an old couple might, they have grown toward one another, have come to share many habits, tics and thoughts. Where they used to argue, now they agree. 

“The girl is keeping a secret,” says the one who usually speaks first. 

“Secret pain,” says the one who’s happy to reply. 

“Secret pain.” 

“She didn’t come here for fun.” 

“Heavens no.”

“Will Kim—? Do we think?”

“Time will tell.”

“Time will tell. Have to find out some time.” 

“The trials always come sooner than we’d choose.” 

“That’s trials for you.”

“That’s trials.” 

The Lindas laugh quietly. They know trials! They have faced their own and witnessed others. Trials and revelations, that’s what it’s all about. There’s no denying it, no escaping it, whichever might be coming your way. There’s just squaring your shoulders and facing it. 

Or, as the Linda with the terminal diagnosis is doing, squirreling it away in the vain hope that, if no one else knows, no one else will suffer.