Clues in the Dark
The bird entered our house in the cat’s mouth, a vague gray clump I couldn’t quite identify. I grabbed the cat by the scruff of his neck and forced his jaws open to release their catch. It was a pitiably ugly baby sparrow, its nostrils caked with blood and a cluster of parasite eggs on its half-bald head. He--for some reason, I assumed the bird was male--was hurt somewhere, for he could not stand up. Tiny red mites crawled over my hand as I held him, and he was breathing so rapidly that he vibrated.
Traumatized sparrows always seem determined to die, and in a few minutes this miserable specimen lay still in my palm, its weak neck crooked to the side. Checking for a sign of life, I let a drop of water trickle from my fingertip to the bird’s yellow beak. In a flash, the moribund mouth took the drop, then another. Two beady eyes popped open. Not only was he not dead, he insisted on living.
I plucked the nits from his head and made a splint for his broken leg with a cylinder of tape cut from a Band-Aid. It was like trying to splint a hair. I put him in a shoe box warmed by a radiator and fed him shreds of moistened dry cat food with tweezers. He ate all the time, like a newborn baby; instead of crying, he peeped. My husband worked nights then, and I made him take over the feedings while I was at work during the day. Sometimes I even phoned home to see how the foundling was doing. I called the bird Cheep Cheep, and in saving his life I reached a turning point in my own.
This was 20 years ago, in a city far from Los Angeles. Cheep Cheep was not the first fledgling I had tried to rescue from the jaws of fate, nor--despite my vow at the time--would he be the last. Ever since I established a grasshopper hospital in fifth grade, the maimed and dying small creatures of the world have forced on me the duties of a reluctant Mother Teresa. I am not, by nature, a particularly nurturing person. Yet my ears alone seem to hear their cries--the crippled cat in a distant gutter, the wounded bird far afield--and it seems that to me alone they come for rescue, or release from this corporeal world.
When Cheep Cheep appeared, I had been plagued for years by a recurring dream of kittens I had neglected and left in a closet, mewling and starving. The dream was so disturbing that I once asked a psychiatrist friend what it might mean. Perhaps I expected an interesting Jungian take on my dream. His interpretation, however, was more straightforward.
“That’s a very sad dream,” he said. We were walking along the beach north of San Diego, the gray-blue haze of Dana Point in the distance. “Is there something important in your life that you keep putting off? Something you really need to do?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “unless maybe it’s having kids.” I was 30 years old and secretly desperate for children, yet terrified of having them. My friend, the father of four gorgeous, well-adjusted offspring, didn’t understand this fear. How could he? He was a rich doctor in La Jolla who could afford household help and orthodontia, and I was a newspaper reporter working for a meager salary. The economics of the kid thing scared me. But so did everything else about it, including the potential for disaster.
“People say your life changes completely when you have children. Is that true?” I asked him.
“Sure it does. But what’s wrong with that? Is your life so great that you don’t want it to ever change?” His incredulity was obvious.
I thought of my own pleasantly predictable life, its surface as placid and smooth as the endless beach and the slow procession of joggers, each moving at their self-absorbed pace. “Actually, it is,” I said. “I like it just like it is.”
*
Defying my initial expectations, cheep cheep grew and thrived. His leg healed, though it remained gimpy, and he learned to perch on my finger like a parakeet. In a few weeks, he could fly all over the spare room--now the aviary. He began pecking my hand and struggling to get away when I returned him to his box.
The time to let Cheep Cheep go was approaching, but I worried that his bum leg would give him trouble. It was stupid to have raised him on a diet of cat food; I had visions of Cheep Cheep heading for the first cat dish he saw and initiating a fatal replay of his earlier feline encounter. I thought I had saved him, but maybe I had only postponed his inevitable doom.
In a pensive mood, I took Cheep Cheep in his box to the alley behind our house for his freedom flight. He pecked me when I took off the lid, and before I knew it he was flying . . . straight into the wall of a neighboring house. In horror, I watched Cheep Cheep flap to the ground. Then he sort of brushed himself off and took flight again, landing on a telephone wire. He wobbled, but his unsteady leg held. I couldn’t bear to watch anymore, so I threw his box in the trash can and went inside.
I felt empty, wrung out. For the first time I realized the depth of my obsession with Cheep Cheep, the chasm it sought to fill. Right then, I made two decisions. First, I would never, ever rescue a wild animal again. Second, I was going to have a baby--the sooner, the better.
Eleven months later, my first child was born. I had feared motherhood would obliterate the familiar shape not only of my life, but of my self, that I would melt, like butter on a hot stove, into someone I no longer recognized. I was afraid that I would be a miserable failure as a parent and become consumed with regret because of it. But none of those things happened. To my surprise and relief, life simply went on, sweeping me along with it.
Those were the years I stopped having kitten dreams, when I gave up playing Mother Teresa to the needy animals of the world, and their cries of distress ceased to reach my ears. Or perhaps I forgot how to listen. All I know is that, with two young children, my attention was elsewhere.
Slowly, imperceptibly, that changed, too. Recently I found an injured pheasant huddled on the ground. I took it in, hoping it would heal and rejoin the flock that frequents a nearby meadow. I fixed a comfortable pen, acquired a sack of chicken scratch, watched the pheasant closely. But it weakened and died the next day, leaving me saddened out of all proportion to the loss.
A few weeks earlier, I had dreamed of starving kittens once more. I am 52 now; surely these animal visitations no longer serve as an alarm on my biological clock. I believe they are a wake-up call of another sort--a subconscious warning, as my friend once suggested, of the danger of neglecting some unnamed but important business. A reminder that an essential part of ourselves can wither and die unless we remember to nourish it.
Maybe that’s why I’ve begun to work again on the chapters of a book that I started years ago but deferred to other, safer writing projects. It may turn out to be a small thing, this book, but for me it looms huge and imposing. Its blank pages threaten to chew me up and spit me out, insufficient to the task. All I can do is try, and hope for the best, and remember there are no guarantees. Cheep Cheep wasn’t the first to teach me that. So I’m not sure why that image of him keeps returning to me after such a long time--a stubborn sparrow wobbling precariously on a high wire, and not a thing I could do about it. I would have preferred a happier ending. But he and I, we tried.
In the dream, when I open the closet door and discover the kittens, there’s always a horrible moment when I think: Now what? Do I attempt to feed the ones that are still barely alive, or just shut the door? At that instant, poised between staying and fleeing, I wake up. Though I haven’t yet saved the kittens, at least I haven’t shut the door. That would be the saddest dream.
