No such luck.
“Mom, it’s bleeding,” Julie cried.
Jane ran after her, past a small, concrete pond set in the space in front of the pavilion. Clouds moved swiftly across its still surface. Somehow it was as if she had never left her desk, as if she were still inside an imagined world. The closer they got to the squirrel, the more strongly she experienced its suffering as it shot up in the air and fell back, again and again. And with it, the realization that it wasn’t even smart enough to put its pain into context. She knew Julie felt more or less the same. Jane had had to accept that empathy was probably not part of the human inheritance; she and Greg had been doling it out in regular doses, like teaspoons of medicine, throughout Julie’s childhood. But by now, the medication had done its work and Julie was ready to suffer with everyone else.
“Mom, do something!”
They stopped on the edge of the large, virtual circle surrounding the convulsing squirrel, Jane holding her arms protectively in front of her body while her hands attempted to mimic sensible things to do. They both turned away, repulsed, unable to watch, then forced themselves to look, screaming in unison.
And then it was all over. The squirrel lay still, its white belly up and its front paws folded.
Jane wanted the whole thing to be over and done with as soon as possible. She would have flicked the squirrel into the bushes with a stick, but suggesting it made Julie wail. Instead, Jane had to pick it up and carry it in her hands all the way through the park. She had thought it would be like picking up a kitten, but the wrecked little creature rested on her palms like an oozing bag of skin.
On the way home, the squirrel lay on the rubber mat between Julie’s feet. The girl was beside herself. Jane had to phone Mrs. Gurzky and cancel the piano lesson.
They left the squirrel in the car to rummage in the attic for a coffin suitable for a small rodent.
“I know we have a shoe box in here somewhere,” Jane said, trying to bring some normality back into her voice.
But the search resulted in only one possibility, a flat gift box from Brooks Brothers. They would have to squash the corpse to fit it in, Jane said.
“Perhaps it should lie in the ground without a coffin? Just like other dead animals?”
“No-o!” Julie sobbed.
Jane had to remind herself that she was a grown-up and mustn’t let go and collapse, kicking and screaming, on the floorboards. In the end, she persuaded Julie that a decorative plant pot with cotton wool on the bottom would be right.
Greg arrived while they were unlocking the tool shed to get the spade. When he pointed out that it wouldn’t be in the shed but was leaning against the wall near the patio door—as always—she snarled at him.
“So why have a fucking shed, then?”
It was so typical of Greg to turn up on the scene once the hardest part was over. Now all they had to do was conduct a small burial ceremony for a dead squirrel.
Later, when a hole had been dug under the copper beech in the back garden and all three of them were standing by the graveside, she felt that Greg was being infuriating on purpose.
“You give the oration since you’re the writer.”
Greg knew very well how much it annoyed her when people assumed that writers would be thrilled to deliver a spontaneous speech and, anyway, were especially gifted in something like that.
Julie held the plant pot tight and looked from Greg to Jane and then back again. Greg sighed a little.
“All right,” he said and then, of course, spoke beautifully about the squirrel’s brief life and its tiny squirrel heart, adding light touches of irony and sweet references to familiar critters like Chip ’n’ Dale, all done with such subtlety that Julie kept nodding in agreement. So easy for him, who hadn’t seen the silly little beast flapping on its ruined limbs.
After dinner, Greg pulled on his jacket and said he was going over to Tom’s. They were going to watch a film about Alaska.
“But I’m leaving early tomorrow morning, remember?”
“We’ll meet up in the morning before you leave.”
“Before four-thirty?”
“Then we’d better say goodbye now.”
He leaned over her to kiss her and she turned her cheek to him.
The whole squirrel performance had left her irritated and anxious, feelings that stayed with her all evening as she prepared for her talk at the Newberry Seminar, packed her suitcase, and went through a bundle of school handouts that Julie had kindly remembered to pull out of her schoolbag at a quarter past nine. When Julie—forty-five minutes later and still not in her pajamas—followed her into the bathroom and stood behind her insisting that she needed help painting her nails because tomorrow, in the social studies lesson, she was part of a presentation on women’s suffrage, Jane was too fed up to mention the flawed logic of this—or to say no. She snatched the nail polish from Julie’s hand and pushed her against the washstand. When she had done the nails on Julie’s left hand, she said between her teeth:
“Next.”
But Julie was staring absently into the mirror.
“Julie!”
“Sure.”
She gripped the girl’s right wrist hard and started on the thumbnail. Her movements grew brisker, and more determined. When she was ready to start on the ring finger, Julie cautiously freed her hand and said in a small voice that it was enough. It was fine like that.
17
DURING THE ENTIRE third day in the mountains, Jane had nothing to look at except Ulf’s rucksack and muscular legs. He walked through the mist guided by a compass. She was a three-year-old trailing after an annoyed grown-up.
They put up the tent in streaming rain. She held the sheets down against the gusts of wind while Ulf attached the guys to the tent pegs. He had made no new attempts to get close to her and barely uttered a word or two all day. Then, inside the tent, he suddenly said something nice.
“Jane, we’re quite different people, you and I. But we share this: we are in the middle of a windy wasteland far from people. In a figurative sense as well.”
Then he produced a plastic bottle from somewhere and poured liquid from it into two small, metal cups.
“I remember from the plane that you like whiskey,” he said.
“If I had known what we had to look forward to, I would’ve walked faster.”
She had trudged along behind Ulf and popped pills as if they were off to a wilderness rave party. Valium didn’t seem to do much for her anymore.
“Jane,” he said without looking at her, and then shook his head slowly. Now he was either about to explain or admit something.
“Ulf,” she said in the same tone of voice.
He put the cup down on the groundsheet but kept holding on to it.
“You realize, don’t you, that you must face up to things? That you can’t go on like this in the long run?”
She held out her cup.
“With this cold…” He hesitated while he poured her more whiskey, so she completed his sentence.
“…somehow resigned approach to life.”
“That’s exactly what I was going to say.”
The wind tore at the top sheet and made the layers of the tent slap against each other.
“Do you refuse to let yourself think about them?”
“No,” she replied. “I refuse to let myself begin to forget them.”
It was getting dark quickly now. Ulf’s face, full of shadows, looked handsome. Ulf was not so bad. She had met only a few people who were actually evil. People were like characters in novels, beautiful in their fragile inadequacy. Using whatever weapons at hand, they fought to join history for a while without screwing things up too much, and always failed somehow.