Amber's coworker at the garden center moved a rodent nest. When the babies crawled over his hand, he reacted with a terror only fractionally removed from pesticide.
Amber says, "The mother" -- a fiend who had nibbled the heads of the sunflowers in the greenhouse -- "won't be able to find them if I move them, right?" They meant this as a question but only wanted me to assure them it was true. My spouse is not one given to questions for which they have already established the answer.
I tell them I can't know that, but I have my doubts the mother would bother recovering missing pups (or whatever the proper term for baby mice is) when she exists in a world of month-long gestation; there is always another brood to rear, and most baby rodents in the wild do not make it to their quick adulthood.
They ask if they should leave the babies there or catch them and bring them to our home. I cannot tell my spouse to leave babies to die of starvation.It is beyond their character to allow nature to be apathetically cruel.
The babies' enclosure is a tea tin, the bottom covered in an inch of wood shavings from the two-by-one foot brick Amber brings. They had hidden the mice in a corner at their job, hoping none of their coworkers would notice or disturb them. There may have been more babies, but Amber could find only three when the day was done.
Three survivors beats two, though it is a far cry from four.
The moment I see them, I label them jellybeans, upgrading this to fuzzy jellybeans after a day of growth. They are hardly ambulatory, falling onto their sides with every few steps. Their eyes are shut fast, these featureless obligations hanging over our weekend. I don't want to name them because the act of naming implies attachment that I am not ready to give anything whose mortality I fear.
These rodents are coddled, warmed by a clay heating pad, and fed on puppy milk and Pedialyte to make up for what their birth mother can no longer give. Neither liquid is served cold. Amber microwaves a bowl of water and places the jar within, the elixer squeezed into reluctant mouths. My spouse does this every four hours, waking as needed. By the second night, they are sick and sleepless but committed to their schedule.
They say we will release them into the wild--somewhere far from their nursery--when they can make it on their own, but I don't know who Amber thinks they are fooling.
I came home from a walk Friday and felt dread that I would have to feed the babies without Amber. I call them to make sure I am missing no steps and that nothing regrettable will happen to the babies on my watch. In short order, I abandon the barrier of a towel for the warmth of fur on skin, holding them curled between my thumb and forefinger. One resists the hardness of the eyedropper, which brings me near to panic until I can coerce a few squirts of liquid in his mouth--as well as some on his fur, which I dab off with a tissue. The others only fight me for a second before parting their toothless mouths to receive their meal.
I dip a cotton swab in the hot water and, in miniature of what I have seen people do with newborn kittens, rub its tip in a circle until the animal voids his bowels. In nature, their mother would do this with her tongue, as I understand it, but it is far too great a commitment to ask from a stranger. In general, I keep excretion far from me, but I feel accomplished that I can nurture them.
I have held babies and owned pets, but I have never felt so accountable for something so helpless, knowing we fought against a near-certain death had Amber left them. For that, I cannot resist beginning to love them. These are no longer just any rodents. They are our responsibility.
When Amber returns home, they tell me they had read up on mice and, based on the babies' short tails and stubby ears, proclaim them likely voles. My only experience with voles was a skeleton I assembled from an owl pellet in sixth grade. I glare down at one for daring to be other than a proper mouse, but he is so off-kilter and top-heavy that I cannot help but forgive his racial disadvantage. I rub his wrinkled belly with the edge of my thumb when he topples over again.
I look at a picture of an adult vole and know I have helped dozens out of my apartments.
Amber upgrades them from their tea tin, putting them in the plastic carrying cage that had come with our hermit crabs. It would be cramped if they didn't spend most of their time nestled together in the shavings as though they still shared a womb.
We stop at the pet store the next day. Amber fantasizes about the toys on which the three will cut their teeth--once they can be said to have proper teeth--buying a pack containing a few wooden beads, a loofah slice, and a rope ball. I eagerly imagine the babies gnawing these into dust.
Amber revives their conversation about getting a degree so that she can be a vet tech, which comes up every few months.
"There is a certificate to be a wildlife rehabilitator," they say, excited despite themselves.
"I'm not sure we could handle regular infusions of sick and needy animals."
That night, I am seated beside Amber, getting ready for bed while my spouse feeds them when I hear their slightest gasp. They whisper that the vole is not breathing. I don't know what to do that isn't useless. His body is too small for my hands. Still, I press on his overripe stomach, feeling the fragility of its ribs under the crepe paper skin. Amber attempts rescue breaths, this tragicomic gesture of their lips engulfing him.
"I'm so stupid," they say. "I gave him too much milk. He drowned."
"You said it yourself: ninety percent of baby voles die."
We obtain a trowel from Amber's car, which has dug for countless plants. Amber will relinquish neither the shovel nor the departed, jabbing into the ground one-handed as rain leaks from the sky. The blade of the trowel dings off rocks in the hole on the edge of the woods, but Amber only groans and pushes on.
I feel part of some cosmic script--tiny corpse, spitting rain, moonless night, overwhelmed spouse--and unable to buck my part. I almost offer to say a few words, but what do I have to say? I've known this creature only a hair over twenty-four hours. His death is heartbreak to me, a lamentable act whose solution I didn't know.
Amber hesitates, placing him in the ground. They massage his rigid limbs. "I thought... For a second, I thought he got soft again." They place him tenderly in his grave. "I don't want to bury him alive."
"We aren't."
They push dirt over him and say all the eulogy we can give him: "I'm sorry."
For a minute, we stand sobbing into one another, the midnight rain mixing with our tears.
We go back inside and get ready for bed. I hold my spouse close, and we cry anew. Amber blames themselves, and I am not prepared to absolve them of responsibility, though I know it isn't their fault and there was little that we could have done. I want this to be someone's mistake because then I can be other than sad, though I cannot hold this tiny death against someone more distraught and with better cause.
The babies don't have personalities yet, though Amber assures me they will soon. They tell me voles will even come when called once they have a few months in them. Nothing yet distinguished the deceased from the others, but he might have been longer or maybe fonder of stretching.
We are left with twins.
When I wake the following day, letting Amber sleep in to compensate for their four AM feeding, one of the voles is curled atop the shaving while his brother is burrowed close to the heating pad. I poke him with my little finger, but he does not move. I cannot stand that he has died, so I leave him for Amber to discover when they get up.
They set about preparing the morning feeding for the two. I wait impatiently, almost unable to look up at them. Once they start squirting the fluid into the babies' mouths, I see that both are alive and wiggling and immediately confess my cowardice, forgiven at once as only someone who shared my barely rational grief could.
After their feeding, I cuddle the babies in my hands as penance for my doubts, melting as they blindly try to poke their noses through my fingers.
As we drive down to Amber's mother's home with the animals in a cage on their lap, I say tentatively, "I've thought of a name: Voltaire."
"Which one is Voltaire?" they ask, but we don't have to speak it aloud to know the answer: the one who lives. I want them to suggest a name to match mine, feeling silently that the magic of names can shield them from tragedy.
Julie and Rebecca, Amber's mother and sister, respectively, do not seem impressed by our acquisition, though they dutifully look on as Amber and I play with them. As we coo over the voles, Julie says she is glad we aren't going to have human children.
After a few hours, we notice one of the voles has climbed above the shavings and is opening his mouth. He gapes like a baby crying without sound. I stick my finger near his mouth, his nascent teeth scraping the ridges of my fingerprint. Amber thinks he is hungry and feeds him, but he grows limp in their hands. Again, they try to urge him back from death. Julie cautions their child against putting their lips on the vole's snout, but fear of germs doesn't dissuade Amber.
"Your lungs are so much more powerful than his," Julie says, but they are not enough to pull him back to life.
Rebecca says we need to put the survivor, Voltaire, beside the deceased vole to let him know what has happened. These are stumbling, blind creatures, likely not a week outside the womb. Knowledge of the fickleness of life is beyond them, though Amber obliges, urging Voltaire to wake up his brother.
We bury this unnamed baby outside Julie's home, Amber digging a divot into the ground with a flat rock. They whisper a litany of *I'm sorries* through their tears, though they direct these to me. They worry that the milk was too hot. I had seen them daubing it on their wrist to check the temperature as mothers do on television, as their family assured them no one does in life. I promise them that he was struggling, even if I fondly misinterpreted it as infancy. We hold each other in the chill of this May day, weeping over another of God's creatures that wanted nothing but a parent.
When we return home with the cage containing only one, Amber declares, "We'll have to love this one extra much."
I sit on the floor, letting Voltaire nestle his head between my middle and ring finger. I cry without reservation, stroking his new fur with utter delicacy. I have not cried so much in a long while. I never before understood how much something could depend on me.
Amber leans over me, kissing the top of my head. "Are you crying over the others or because he is so small?"
How can they know so precisely?
They soon hear me sobbing in the basement, where I work to turn some of my thoughts into more coherent mourning. I pull them into my lap.
"I just thought that if I could turn their deaths into something beautiful, they wouldn't have died for nothing."
When I return upstairs half an hour later, I smell the tang of herbal smoke. "Were you doing witchcraft up here?"
They shrug. "I just want to give Voltaire any chance we can."
Amber wakes with me on Monday so that I can go to work and they can feed Voltaire. She brings him over, placing him in the valley of her thighs. She prods at him. He doesn't move.
"He seemed lethargic after his last feeding," they say, beginning to cry into my shoulder. "I thought I could keep one of them. After each of the others, I thought we'd still get to have one to raise. I failed them all. I wanted to give your story a happy ending..."
We dress hurriedly, getting the trowel again from their car. They are blurry from their tears, so I lead them close to where Voltaire's brother was buried thirty hours prior. They stab a hole in the ground and slip the final vole into his resting place. His name didn't do him much good. Our love could not keep him.
When I get to work, to purge myself of some of the emotions I couldn't let myself feel if I were going to get here on time, I write them:
I love you crazy much. This was a difficult weekend for us. I want you to know that I love you even more than I did Thursday. The voles nibbled out space in my heart so I could love them. Since they've left, that space is flooded with love for you.
Amber replies with:
I love you so much, too. Maybe even more once I get a good night's sleep again. Who knew we'd get so attached in under five days? We're saps. Well, I am a resin. I miss you and can't wait to cuddle you when you return home.
I can't hope to convince you this is other than insanity, mourning week-old garden pests so thoroughly. I believe any sensible person invests their compassion in the visibly innocent, those whom life has yet to visit with stain.
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.
