I pictured all of this so well that the next night I walked to the only bookstore left open in town, which happened to specialize in hunting and survival texts. For an hour or two, I browsed through various survival guides, including books that promised to show me how to survive in any climate and on any terrain, and books that instructed me on brain tanning and field dressing and head and leg removal and flintknapping and on making primitive tools, like a primitive adze or a primitive vise, but ultimately I bought the book recommended to me by a man in his late twenties or early thirties, a pit bull of a man with a short, square haircut and tanned, rough-looking skin, who pulled a book off the shelf and handed it to me and told me if I was looking for a real and a really good survival book, the book I should use was this one, which he owned himself, and which he used when he air-dropped — I think he said air-dropped — himself into Southeast Asia with just a knife and some rope and a small pack and this book and spent six weeks living completely off the land before walking himself back out of the wilderness and into civilization.
He was an earnest-looking and trusting man, the kind of man who might have served several tours of duty in some part of the armed forces, eagerly, no doubt, and might be gearing up to serve yet another, and I felt a little guilty accepting his recommendation knowing what I had planned to use the book for, but not guilty enough to put the book back.
When I got back to my parents’ house, I ate a quick dinner, spoke only briefly to my father, my mother having long before fallen asleep, and then hurried upstairs to start learning all I could learn about survival in the wilderness. I flipped to the contents page and glanced briefly at the headings, and then flipped to the section on how to build a hobo shelter, and then flipped to the sustenance chapter and read the section on procuring a snake using a forked stick, and then I closed the book and placed it on the nightstand, and then never opened it again.
Which was what I told her, the girl with the lamp. Not the whole thing, but the bit about the zoo and the trails. I thought it might appeal to her, or to anyone, really, standing over me with a floor lamp in her hand. How dangerous is the guy who worked for a nature reserve? I told her this and then I began to tell her other things about myself, lying there on the ground, not sure what else to say or how, except to start from the beginning and as quickly as I could, until eventually I pulled us through the sludge of my recent past and into the mire of my present. I had come home again, I said, but I wasn’t sure why, and I had plans for one of these empty houses, but I wasn’t sure what plans. I said this one appealed to me, but I didn’t know why about that, either.
Then she told me about herself, which wasn’t much to tell. She had just finished school. She had left home when she was sixteen. She liked living in these old houses. She had stored some of her stuff in a few other old empties — she called them empties as if they were beer bottles — around town. She wanted to be a veterinarian. Her dad, before he died, had been a large-animal vet. It all seemed pleasantly run-of-the-mill, and so I stood up, finally, and lightly pushed aside the lamp, which had grown heavy in her arms and dragged along the floor, and leaned in to kiss her, and then a week later she made me leave the house, which I was afraid to leave, afraid I wouldn’t be able to find it or her again, but she forced me to go. “It’s been a week,” she said. “Your parents must be worried sick. You need to go see them.” And so I left.
I went back to their house and told them what had happened to me, and they were upset, my mother especially, though I can’t say for sure what upset her most, that I had been gone so long without telling them where I was and that I was okay, or that I was still alive yet living so recklessly. When I told them about Wendy and about our plans, my mother locked herself into her bedroom and didn’t come out again until after I left.
When I made it back to the house, I walked inside, afraid Wendy would have skipped out, that there’d be nothing left, no trace of her, and some small part of me worried I’d made her up entirely, but there she was, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and when she saw me, she jumped up and hugged me and then stepped back and looked at me and said, “I’ve missed you so much, I could just eat you up, like scrambled eggs.” Then she mimed cracking eggs into a skillet and stirring them around with a spatula and then eating them up with a knife and fork, and I said, “Who eats scrambled eggs with a knife and fork?” and then she punched me in the shoulder and then she kissed me, and I knew I was home.
We thought, Wendy and I, to make a home of the emptied house, mainly by rooting through the other houses on the same block, which I hadn’t considered might be as stripped bare as our own. When, after hours and days of house-looting, we returned empty-handed, I figured we would give up on the idea of furnishings and homemaking of that sort and that we would settle into a less permanent lifestyle, our possessions carried with us on our backs. Wendy wouldn’t have any of that, not since I first convinced her that I had serious plans to renovate and build in one of these houses. “We need something to sit on, at least,” she said. And when I came home with seats I’d stripped out of one of the abandoned cars in a body repair shop nearby, she smiled and kissed me and said, “Now we just need something to sleep on.”
What struck me now, though, about that first conversation, about our earliest confidences, and what worried me about this house full of animals she had claimed to have only just found, was that small detail of her life that I had at first thought pleasantly bland and unimportant. What girl, at one point in her life, doesn’t want to become a veterinarian? It had seemed a safe assumption that she had long since given up on the idea of becoming a veterinarian. It had seemed a safe assumption that this feckless and transient lifestyle had precluded any faint desire to make something of herself. But then she showed me this house she had found, and I wondered if she had found it or if she had made it herself.
The fact of the matter was: I didn’t have any actual experience judging homes or estimating what it would take to fix one up, but it was something that came naturally to my father, who owned a now defunct and practically empty hardware store, and I had always assumed that if you were to toss me into a hardware-and-repair sort of situation, push come to shove, a store of knowledge, buried but innate, would bubble up, and I would be just as good at it as he was. And it occurred to me that Wendy had at some point in her life hit upon the same flawed philosophy, that a skill or talent would necessarily pass from father to child, except that she expected to know how to fix these animals because her father had known how to take care of horses and mules.
I can’t say, then, that it surprised me too much when one night I woke up and turned to look at her and found that she had a bird. I asked her where she got that bird, and she said she couldn’t sleep with all the racket the bird had been making outside and that she’d gone to investigate and that this is what she’d found. It had broken its wing somehow, and she had gathered it to her and tended to it. There was a gentle way to how she was holding that bird that made me certain she had done this before. “Are you going to maybe put that one with the rest of them?” I asked. She shook her head and said, “Not tonight,” and then she put her lips to the bird’s beak, though I couldn’t tell if they touched, and then she said, “Tomorrow, you go into the house with the others, but tonight you sleep with us.”
The whole night it didn’t make a sound and she didn’t let go of it, and when I woke up, she was asleep but still with that bird in her hand. I sat up and pulled my pants on and then poured some water into a cup for the bird, but the bird didn’t stir, and I thought to myself, I don’t know you, bird, or how to fix what’s wrong with you, but I don’t doubt that you will soon be dead. And for a minute or two, I considered lifting it gently from Wendy’s hand and breaking its neck or smothering or suffocating it, though I didn’t know the first thing about going about suffocating a bird. I thought I should do this for her, anyway, for her peace of mind, and for me, I’ll be honest, for my own peace of mind. It would be harder on her when this frail creature died in a week or two weeks than if she woke up now to find it had died while she slept, but then Wendy began to shift and wake, and the bird lifted its beak and poked lightly at her finger, and my opportunity window had closed.