Listen to Christine Grillo read this excerpt.
For thirty years, Claire had talked about suicide the same way she talked about any of the other philosophies and spiritual modalities that she tried on in her quest for peace. It had always loomed as one more journey, one more option. But she’d been with the Santo Daime church for so long that I thought she’d gotten over her more morbid ideations. I hated when she talked so blithely about her
own suicide.
“Claire, stop,” I said. “Suicide is not for you.”
“Have you gotten a look at how ugly the world is right now?” she asked.
Nicky looked at me as if to ask, “Is this lady crazy or what?”
Both dogs arrived at the sliding glass door in the kitchen and barked.
“Oh, what does he have?” Claire said as she sidled toward the glass doors.
She slipped outside and admonished the dogs.
“Drop it, drop it now,” she said, and she smacked the dogs on their snouts.
Thankfully, she did not let them inside. She returned with something tiny in her hand and held it out for us to see. It was a tiny rabbit, the tiniest bunny I’d ever seen, and as a landscape architect, I’ve seen some tiny bunnies. This one’s eyes weren’t even open, and it fit in the palm of her hand.
“He brought this for me,” she said.
She pulled a paper plate from a cabinet and placed the bunny on it.
“Now look at this,” she said. “Who’s going to put it out of its misery?”
She looked at Nicky, as if it were his job.
“Whoa, whoa,” he said. “How do you know it’s terminal?”
“Maybe it just needs some water,” I said.
“Did you see the wound?” asked Claire. “This bun-bun won’t survive another day. It’d be cruel to prolong the suffering.”
“But you can’t be sure,” I said.
I didn’t want to kill the bunny. I didn’t want anyone to kill the bunny. I told Claire to give me the paper plate, which she did, and then I wetted a paper towel and dripped water into the bunny’s mouth. Nicky pulled a bandana out of his back pocket and used it like a blanket over the bunny, almost swaddling it.
“Let’s get the little guy comfortable,” he said. “He’ll be good to go in the morning.”
“Even if he lives, what will you do with him?” asked Claire. “You have no idea where his nest is, or how to find his mother.”
“We’ll deal with that in the morning,” said Nicky.
Claire shook her head. “City people,” she said.
I put the bunny in my room, with the door closed.
That night, after dinner—Claire was an excellent cook—Nicky told us about the dozens of volunteers who were planning to show up at the refuge at 5:00 am to rescue cacti.
“You got enough parking?” he asked.
“I mean, it’s Texas,” Claire said.
Then she went to bed.
“Hormones,” she said.
“Oh, I know,” I said.
That left me and Nicky on cleanup, and it was nice to have some time alone with him. He washed, and I wiped down the table and counters. As soon as we finished, he turned around from the sink, put both his hands on the sides of my face, and brought me close to him. Then he kissed me. It was a surprisingly good kiss, although I don’t know why I was surprised. Standing by the sink, we made out for a little while, I don’t know how many minutes.
When we took a break, he slid his hands down my arms and held my hands.
“I’m gonna shower you with so much affection, you won’t be able to live without me,” he said.
I responded with something lame and embarrassing, like, “Oh really?” or “Is that so?”
“Seriously, Rose,” he said. “I wear my heart on my sleeve. You’re gonna see it beating.”
Could it really be this easy? A man decides he likes you, he kisses you, he pursues you and decides that he wants you? It seemed unlikely to me.
I told him it was time for me to sleep, and we said good night. I checked on the bunny and saw that it was still breathing. Nicky’s bandana moved gently with each breath.
At 4:00 the next morning, Thursday, the bunny was still alive, still breathing. I left it where it had been, on my nightstand, and went downstairs. It was still dark, but the sun was rising, and Nicky was making coffee. Claire had given up coffee years ago, as it made her anxious to the point of hysteria. She drank green tea. Nicky warned me when I entered the kitchen that there was no cream for coffee.
“How’s the bun-bun?” Claire asked.
“Alive,” I said. “Breathing.”
“Poor thing,” she said. “It’s probably starving to death.”
“Or convalescing,” I said.
“They say that starvation is one of the most painful ways for an animal to die,” she said.
Nicky put his coffee mug down on the table with a thunk.
“Could you knock it off?” said Nicky.
“Or what?” said Claire.
“Or you’re gonna upset your friend here, this gentle Rose, who traveled all this way,” he said. “Jesus, you’d think you’d be a little more sensitive.”
“Oh, you’re giving me lessons on sensitivity? That’s rich,” she said. “The sensitive thing to do would be to drown it. Or crush its skull. Or even return it to the woods where it can die with dignity, not on some paper plate.”
I raised my voice. “Can we stop this?”
“It’s vulgar, making that poor thing suffer,” she said to him.
To me, she said, “Rose, he’s straight from the shtetl.”
Confused, I said, “I don’t think he’s Jewish.”
“I’m right here,” Nicky said.
Nicky and I went to my bedroom and dripped a little more water into the bunny’s mouth. We watched it breathe. Claire was right, but neither of us wanted to admit it. The animal was not getting better, and in fact it looked worse. I felt cowardly for letting it die so slowly, for letting it suffer, but I couldn’t make the
decision to kill it.
“I can’t do it, Rosie,” Nicky said, when I asked him. “Because, you know, maybe there’s a chance.”
We both knew there wasn’t a chance.
I loved that he called me Rosie.
We ignored the bunny and kissed, this time more slowly and imploringly than the night before. His hands clasped my biceps, then my forearms. I leaned and pressed against him.
“Kids, come on down,” yelled Claire from the kitchen, and it sounded as if she were banging two pots together. “We’ve got a cactus rescue to get to.”
Nicky kept kissing me.
“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” yelled Claire.
Claire and I got to the refuge riverbank at 5:00 am. Nicky had left there earlier and beat us there. He directed a team of about twenty volunteers in digging up precious species. They were botanists, enthusiasts, and native plant freaks, and they were hot, their clothes soaked with sweat. Everyone wore bandanas around their forehead to stop the sweat from dripping into their eyes. No one spoke much. They kneeled and squatted, trowels in hand, and worked wordlessly, their faces serious, sad. Two women and one man seemed to be crying silently; it was hard to tell, because of all the sweat on their faces. They placed the plants in containers and put those on the truck beds the volunteers had driven down.
Nicky worked the whole time, moving back and forth between the fence posts that designated where the border wall would go. He encouraged and praised the volunteers, calling out the Latin botanical names of the plants they rescued, following up with the more common names.
“Look at that wild peyote,” he said. “Beautiful.”
He mentioned the nipple beehive cactus, the hedgehog cactus, the heartleaf rosemallow.
“And look here, Asclepias prostrata, the prostrate milkweed,” he said. “It’s federally protected, but these criminals are going to doze it all down.”
While we all worked, low to the ground, two Border Patrol officers strolled up and down the stretch of riverbank we occupied. We all got good, long looks at their olive-green uniforms and their belts loaded with guns and tasers, walkie-talkies, handcuffs. Their scalps glistened with sweat through their buzz cuts, and their dark sunglasses hid their eyes.
On the river, a Border Patrol boat with two agents did the same thing. Up and down the river they went. These officers had rifles, which they leaned on the edge of the boat, pointing toward the Mexico side.
Claire pulled her wet shirt away from her bra and blew air down her chest . . .