For the next few weeks, I tried to ignore the toll that house full of animals took on us. But it wasn’t easy. She was never home, it seemed. She was always at the other house, or she was out searching for other injured or sick or stray animals to ensnare. Our house, the house we were living in, had begun to take on the other house’s smell. I don’t know how this happened. Maybe that smell grabbed hold of her clothes and her hair and her skin and snuck in that way, or maybe it followed her home, some physical thing trailing behind her like a cartoonish wisp of smoke. Anyhow, I could smell it and I mentioned this to Wendy and she shook her head at me (scattering wisps of stink everywhere) and told me it was my imagination. And more than once, I woke up to find her asleep with another animal tucked under her arm like it was a stuffed animal she’d been sleeping with since she was a child. How she managed to coax these creatures into these docile positions, I never understood. Nor did I know where she found them in the first place, and when she wouldn’t tell me — or told me only vaguely “Here and there” or “At the park” or “On the side of the road”—and when it appeared to me that some of them were less sick and more just stray, I began to suspect her of sneaking into people’s homes, or into pet stores, or into the neglected city zoo, and stealing these creatures to bring back to our house. And if I hadn’t become more and more engrossed in how angry this was all making me, I might have stopped to admire her way with animals, but in truth, I wanted desperately for them to die off or break free, but they didn’t seem to want to do either. And after a month of this, and of living in a house that became increasingly dirtier and dingier, I decided I should leave Wendy and this house, that I should let her have her animals and this other house she had found herself and return to my parents’ place before setting out in search of another abandoned shack where I could set up camp. Or maybe I would leave town altogether, start fresh again somewhere new.
Then, before I decided I would leave for good, she got sick. She was nauseated and throwing up, light-headed and weak and sweaty. I gave her some water. I stole into my parents’ house and found her some variety of pills — for headache, for sinus, for cough — but none of them helped much. In the end, she asked me if I could go on my own to the house with the animals in it and change their cages and administer their medicines. I wanted to ask her, Is that really a thing we need to concern ourselves with? Is this an exercise we need to be devoting our time to? Instead, I asked her what she wanted me to do and then how to do it, and she explained, retching and looking green and unwell, and then I said, “Do you need anything while I’m out?” and she shook her head and lay down, and I left.
It would be easy enough, I thought to myself, to show up at my parents’ house. To show up and let myself in and climb upstairs to my old room and go to sleep, and then to wake up the next morning and act as if nothing had happened, as if nothing more than a long walk, one really long walk that I’d only just now returned from, had happened. My mother would act diffident toward me, would refuse to smile at me, and would tilt her head my way and say, “You think you’re so funny, don’t you?” but she would be happy to have me home. That much I knew.
And there would be no consequences, either, nothing that might damage me, anyway, in leaving Wendy and those sickly creatures, and there would be potentially bad consequences in returning to them. I thought of all of this as I walked, and I knew I should have turned around and gone somewhere else, anywhere else, but I didn’t.
The house smelled, of course, as it was full of sick or dying animals, smelled of their fur, their hair, their feathers, of the mucous that dribbled from their noses or the pus-filled sores on their footpads or on their bellies, and it smelled of their piss and shit and of the disinfectant Wendy sprayed throughout the house to hide that smell, and of their breath, and of the animals themselves, whatever their smell was, a smell I associated with zoos and circuses, and, I supposed, this collection of monsters, ordinary monsters, was as close to a zoo as our small town was likely to see. But there was another smell, too. It was an overpowering and metallic smell that a part of me recognized at once as the smell of blood, but since there was no reason for there to be this smell in the house, I dismissed the idea.
Moving quickly through the house, hoping to root out the cause of the smell and get rid of it so that maybe the smell would have faded by the time I finished administering to the animals, I slid on something and fell forward, only barely throwing my hands out in front of me in time to break my fall. Turning to see what had tripped me up, I felt a wetness on my knees and saw a blooming red stain on my pants, and for a moment I was scared that I’d seriously hurt myself, hurt myself so badly that I couldn’t even feel the pain of whatever wound resulted in so much blood, but then I realized I’d fallen into a pool or a smear of blood, and that what had tripped me in the first place had been the metal gate to one of the cages, pulled apart, twisted and mangled and tossed into the open doorway.
Eventually I found five more cages with their doors also torn from their hinges. Studying these cages, I couldn’t remember what had once lived inside them, but they were empty now, the only sign that the cage was once home to some living thing being the trail of blood leading away from the bent or broken frame. The sight and the smell of all this carnage was upsetting enough that I quickly left that place without opening a single cage or refilling a single bottle of water, and when I finally walked back through our door, I found Wendy asleep on the floor, and, taking my pants and my shirt off, I went to lie on the floor next to her, but didn’t fall asleep until just before morning.
I didn’t tell Wendy what I had found. Instead I told her everything went fine, and then I asked her how she felt, and we went about our day, the secret of what was waiting for her at the animal house making me tense and nervous. I would act surprised, of course, shocked and devastated, would offer theories — It must have come in after me, whatever it was, early this morning, maybe? — when she told me what horrors she’d found, and then offer to help her clean the mess up and console her as best I could. But when the time came for her to go tend to her animals, she began to throw up again, and I left in her place.
By the time I arrived at the house, I had prepared myself to find there nothing but death and decay and had presumed that whatever hadn’t died naturally, or because of my negligence, would have been taken by whatever had taken the first five animals. But the animals weren’t dead. They seemed, in fact, energized by my arrival, as if they were hungry and thirsty and they knew that I was the one who had made them so.
I searched the house first, ignoring the cries and caws and barks of the animals waiting to be fed and watered, but I didn’t find any sign of a brutal struggle, and didn’t count any more among the missing. Feeling obligated to make up for my poor showing the night before, I opened the windows to air the house out and then began feeding the animals, giving them water to drink, and, one by one, cleaning their cages. I cleaned the blood on the floor as best I could, and I removed the empty cages, feeling that, had it been me, I wouldn’t want to live side by side with such a graphic reminder of the fragile nature of life, the inevitability of potentially violent death, and so on. I did all of this and felt somewhat cheered by the work, which was methodical and mechanical. Even handling the animals, which seemed to have been tamed by Wendy or else were simply too sick and weak to care who lifted them from their cages, calmed me. I enjoyed it, and while I didn’t think it was necessarily the right thing to do or that it would help any of them, I gave the animals the medicines as Wendy had instructed — medicines of a questionable origin and usefulness, I would add — and when I finished it all, I left.