Chapter Three: The Lindas

It happened by accident. Or, this was their destiny. Depending upon 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 they 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 her wound wasn’t visible to them. And they weren’t about to try moving her to find it. 

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. 

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 Lindas, who, by instinct, had taken hold of each other’s hands. One began to cry. The other refused. 

Lying as still as they’d 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 completely different reasons.” 

Sitting side by side in the parlor they call their Visiting Room on a thrice-reupholstered daybed—something else they rescued and rehabilitated—the Lindas tell this story together. They have told it many times. So many, it has taken on the quality of a myth. 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. 

“There had been so many little synchronicities. It had all seemed so significant. You know, the way the events of the day lined up. Basically led us to one another. Like, for instance, I left the house late. And I’m never late.”

“It’s true, she’s never late.”

“But my sister called and, gosh, I don’t remember why now, but it felt urgent then, it couldn’t wait, so I was late.  And then traffic was so backed up on Virginia Dare, I took North Croatan, which I never do.”

“Still never does.” 

“And, plus, it’s strange that I even noticed her, Opie, that’s what we named the possum. Because, I wasn’t in the habit of looking for them, the way I am now. But I did! I saw her. At just the perfect moment. So it felt, how it all came together, it felt like, I don’t know, a conspiracy was afoot. You know? But then, when it looked like, when it was clear, that Opie wasn’t going to make it, then I didn’t know what it had all been for, all that kismet. It felt like a broken promise, you know?” 

“Oh yeah,” Kim’s daughter says, “I know what that’s like. When you figure out the universe doesn’t fucking care if we live or if we die.” 

The Lindas both note how Kim stiffens at Desirée’s language, at her rage. How she blinks and sits back and draws her legs together, ankles crossed—the body language of retreat. 

They rescue more than animals, the Lindas do. The one who studied fiber arts at SCAD teaches a knitting course at the women’s correctional facility in Deerfield the second Tuesday of every month, and the one who is sixteen years sober hosts a weekly meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous in the pink room at the Manteo Rec, which is where Kimberly Lane first appeared to them three years ago, newly arrived on the island and just as newly sober. Many of the Lindas’ rehabbers have come to them this way, in a cycle of care-taking that they fondly describe as poetic.  

In the presence of her newly-met daughter, they observe, Kim’s personality has reverted to that of 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 to anyone. 

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

The Linda who frowns on superstition nods. “You’ve hit the nail on the head there. But, I felt the same way she did. For my own reasons. Because: death is a loss. The way I see it, it doesn’t need to be more complicated than that. Something wonderful, something wild, something innocent, something that had been was about to be no more. For no good reason, because there’s never a good reason—”

“Yeah, it’s senseless,” Desirée says.

“Yes, exactly, senseless. So, despite our different—you might say, opposite—theologies, we had the same thought: No!”

“We were thinking, Why?”

“What’s the use?”

“What’s the point?” 

“We were defeated.” 

“Thinking, well, 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 a new dawn. When crisis forces a metamorphosis.

There they stood, marooned in despair, waiting for the doctor to become an executioner, to produce those two syringes that would usher Opie into the next world or else nothingness. But, instead, she became a magician, became a midwife, placing her hand upon Opie’s abdomen, then reaching through it, through the slit The Lindas hadn’t thought to think of, which wasn’t a wound but a womb, disappearing inside her pouch to withdraw one, two, three, four, five, six—count em!—seven young. And how very young they were. Pink peanuts of flesh, skin still translucent, eyes just dark whispers of what they would become, still taking form beneath that dermis. Fetal, the most vulnerable beings either Linda had ever witnessed. 

“She asked, but she didn’t have to ask.”

“We all knew that we would take them.” 

And that’s how it began! They brought the seven back to the house of the Linda who was single, and there, in the ensuing months, they learned what rehabbing takes. How to tube-feed, mix formula, guard against bloating and dehydration, recognize the onset of metabolic bone disease and, once the babies had begun to eat solids, mix bone with their food to avoid it. How to clean them as their mother would, and, as she also would, stimulate them to urinate and defecate. And, through it all, how to keep meticulous records of their progress. 

They had to learn another lesson, too, when Six and then Two grew unresponsive, weak. How sometimes no effort is enough. How to know when this is so and make the call that will relieve them of their pain. How to weep and keep working. They learned caring comes at a cost. 

But comes with a reward, as well. At last they got to learn how to do the other kind of letting go, the joyous kind, releasing the five survivors into the wild. Watching them stand confused for moment and then take off scampering into the field behind the trampoline park, their funny naked tails 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?”

“Possums, rabbits and squirrels, for the most part.” 

“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 birdcall of an alarm. 

“Desirée, would you like to learn how to feed a baby squirrel?” the other asks. 

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. Give it a go!” 

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

While the Linda with the hair gone grey moves to the kitchen to prepare four syringes, capping them with rubber nipples, assembling them with a dish of warm formula on a tray, the Linda who colors her hair a 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. 

“What goes in must come out,” Kim explains. 

“Dude, gross!” 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 and 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 of 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 the 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 Kimberly Lane 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.” 

“Classic Kimberly. You have all the reason in the world to expect an apology—or, ten—and you haven’t even given it a thought.” 

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

“That’s why I stopped.” Hazard at last steps fully into the room, seeming to have found his footing, seeming to have found his resolve. “I saw your car. The 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, Kim, I saw your car here, and what a relief, what a revelation. I realized I could start with you. I knew you’d understand.” 

The Lindas’ life could be described as constant triage. With so many needy beings in their care, they are always having to ask: Whose case is most critical? Which one needs our help now? As Hazard declares his intention to make amends to Kim on the spot, they each perform a mental calculation. His need is obvious and acute, but Kim’s is no less real. If this reunion with her daughter goes poorly, her recovery could be in jeopardy. And what if whatever Hazard is about to say scares off Desirée? On the other hand, if they ask him to wait just when he feels he has found his way into making amends, will the setback be too much?

Is Kim running these same equations in her mind? It seems like something else happens. It seems like she hears Hazard’s need and simply forgets about her own. Which would be just like her.

“Of course, Hazard,” she says. “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 the time I love-tapped the back of your automobile, 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 should never have said what I said about your solo. It isn’t true, your voice is honey, I’m just mean when I’m blitzed, which is no excuse, which is inexcusable. And then, 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 is staring at her mother, who is staring at Cindy, who is 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 longer 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, quirks and beliefs. 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.”

“Does Kim have the strength for it? 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.