What Comes After (17 page)

Hob kept swimming around our legs, with the occasional detour under the couch and behind the curtains. That’s where he was when the second ferret hobbled into the living room, one leg encased in a splint.

“There she is,” said Mrs. Tuten. “That’s Jill. Her leg got caught in the springs of Mr. Tuten’s recliner.”

“The chair out by the street?” Mindy asked. There was an empty space in the room next to the couch, and four small indentations in the carpet where the chair legs must have been.

Mrs. Tuten nodded. “I’ve told Mr. Tuten and told him and told him, ‘Check the springs before you lean back in your chair.’ Poor Jill got a hairline fracture of the femur this morning. We’re lucky it wasn’t worse.”

Jill studied us intently from her spot on the rug. She had a Styrofoam peanut clinging to her fur to match the ones in Mrs. Tuten’s hair. Hob left the curtains and went over to sniff the splint. It was almost tender, but it didn’t last long. All of a sudden Hob jumped back, arched his spine, flared his nostrils, and strained his eyes so wide you could see white all the way around his little black irises. Then he started thrashing his head from side to side as if he was possessed.

This went on for about a minute, until I thought his head would fly off. Then he stopped, rose up on his toes, arched his back even higher — so high he practically folded himself in half — and started hopping wildly, sideways, over and over, a foot in the air each time. Jill tried to do the same thing — the arched back, the flared nostrils, the crazy eyes, the thrashing head — but fell down because of her splint. Hob kept going, crashing into a chair leg, then into a wall, then tripping over his own feet. He panted, hissed, and clucked like a chicken.

Mindy drew her legs up onto the couch, shoes and all. Hob slammed into mine, but it didn’t hurt, so I didn’t move. Mrs. Tuten pulled out her cell phone and aimed it at him. “Oh, this is wonderful! I have to get this. Mr. Tuten will love see ing this.”

“What is it?” Mindy asked.

“It’s called a weasel war dance,” Mrs. Tuten said.

“But these are ferrets,” Mindy said.

Mrs. Tuten kept filming. “It’s just what people call it. The thing that they’re doing with their backs — that’s known as a piloerection. And the noise — that clucking — that’s dooking.”

Mindy had her legs pulled so far up on the couch that it looked as if she was trying to bite her own ankles. “Dooking?” she said.

Mrs. Tuten smiled. “They do it all the time. Well, not all the time. Mostly they sleep. This is just a special thing, because we have visitors and they’re excited. We don’t ordinarily have visitors. They’re usually the most active at dawn and dusk.”

“At dawn?” I said, finally breaking my silence. “When people are still sleeping?” Mindy looked at me sympathetically.

Mrs. Tuten said, “Yes, that’s right. And at dusk. They’re what you call crepuscular.”

“What does that mean?” Mindy asked.

Mrs. Tuten shrugged and smiled again. “It means they’re the kind of animal that sleeps most of the day but are most active at dawn and dusk.”

I turned the word over in my mind:
crepuscular.
It sounded like an oozing infection. And that other word,
piloerection,
sounded creepy and perverted.

Hob finally stopped. He might have knocked himself out. Jill had exhausted herself as well trying to keep up on her bad leg.

Mrs. Tuten shut off her phone and picked them up. She draped Jill over her shoulder and let Hob hang limp over her arm.

She smiled at me. “Wasn’t that something?” She reached for my backpack. “Well, now that the show is over, how about we take you back to see your new bedroom and get you all settled?”

The bedroom smelled like potpourri — there was a bowl of it on a little pink desk — which was even worse than the stink of the ferrets. Mindy took a quick look around, then gave me a side hug. “Don’t worry, Iris,” she said. “Everything is going to be fine.”

Mrs. Tuten pointed out the closet, a dresser, the desk. “These are all for you, Iris. You can put your things wherever you’d like. Hanging clothes here in the closet. Folding clothes in the dresser, of course. Your school things on the desk.”

Then she went into the kitchen to sign some papers.

“I had an aunt who used to keep ferrets,” Mindy said. “They really are supposed to be very nice and cuddly.”

“They’re illegal in New Zealand,” I said. Dad had told me that. “The government brought them there to kill rabbits, but since they don’t have any natural predators, now they’re killing off all the wild birds.”

Mindy patted me on the back. I hated when people did that, and I decided if she told me to “Hang in there,” I was going to do something violent.

“Hang in there, Iris,” Mindy said.

I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek.

Mrs. Tuten came back in the bedroom and handed over the papers to Mindy. She patted me on the back, too. “I’ll have to show you where we keep the ferrets’ food. It’s right out through the kitchen in the laundry room. Their litter box, too. And it’s just about time for their laxative. We need to give them that. They ingest a lot of their own fur and have a hard time expelling it.”

Mindy made a face behind Mrs. Tuten’s back as we walked her to the front of the house. She said she would call me the next day to check on things. The door made a dull, solid sound as it closed behind her. My heart sank, and I felt heavy again, the same way I’d felt in the hospital.

Mrs. Tuten led me to the laundry room. My feet moved themselves. The rest of me wanted to crawl into bed. I usually held animals close to me when I helped Dad give them medicine or if they needed shots. I couldn’t bring myself to do that with the ferrets, though, with their crusty fur and their stench, so I held them out to Mrs. Tuten at arm’s length as she rolled their laxatives in peanut butter and poked the pills into their weirdly grinning mouths.

I stepped in poop twice, because even though ferrets can be trained to use a litter box, they don’t always remember it’s there. Mrs. Tuten pulled two identical ferret leashes off a nail by the door — little H-shaped harnesses that buckled over their front shoulders and around their front legs.

She handed them to me, and I slipped them easily onto Jill and Hob, even though they wouldn’t stop squirming.

“You’re a natural,” Mrs. Tuten said. “I can see you grew up around animals. It really shows. I think we’ll make this one of your jobs in the afternoons.”

“Putting on their leashes?”

“Well, yes.” Mrs. Tuten scratched Hob and Jill behind their ears. “And taking them for their walks around the neighborhood. But we do have to keep them on their leashes because they’re so friendly. They’re so trusting. Almost foolishly so. We have to watch out for them constantly, to be sure they’re safe out there in the world.”

I couldn’t help thinking about the goats back at Aunt Sue’s farm while she talked, especially the wethers.

They had trusted me to take care of them. I had let them down.

I met Mr. Tuten when he came home from work — a small, round man in a white shirt and striped tie. Mr. Tuten worked at the Department of Transportation; he talked a lot about problem intersections. We had dinner — beef Stroganoff with cooked carrots on the side — but I had a hard time focusing, and they kept having to repeat everything they said to me until eventually they just gave up. I didn’t bother mentioning that I was a vegetarian. I couldn’t eat, anyway.

I finally just excused myself and asked if I could take a shower.

“Why, of course you can,” Mrs. Tuten said. “I already laid out a bath towel and a hand towel and a washcloth for you on your bed. And there’s new shampoo I bought for you already in the shower on the tray. Be sure to put down the bath mat. It’s hanging over the side of the tub. You’ll see it.”

I thanked her before she could give me any more instructions, or offer me a loofah, or soap on a rope. Hob and Jill followed me to the bathroom and seemed disappointed when I didn’t let them in. I thought I’d feel lighter without my clothes on, but I didn’t. I felt damaged and ugly. I found bruises on my side and legs where I hadn’t noticed them before. The hot water stung at first, especially on the back of my head, but I let it burn over me until I realized I was crying again.

They let me use their phone later that evening to call Beatrice. I tried a couple of times, but nobody answered or called back. I hadn’t e-mailed Beatrice, or spoken to her on the phone, in two weeks. I wondered if her parents had gotten Mindy’s message, and what they would say when they did. Did Beatrice know about the assault at the lake, or the arrests? Did she know I’d been in the hospital, and that now I was staying at the Tutens’? Did she know anything about what had happened to me?

After the Tutens went to bed, I poked through the kitchen until I found a grocery bag. I dumped the potpourri in it and buried the bag under a pile of blankets in the closet. A row of faded yellow bears marched in stenciled formation around the tops of the walls, with “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” lyrics stenciled underneath in flowery script.

I turned off the light but couldn’t fall asleep. Maybe it was the lingering smell of the potpourri, and the ferrets. Maybe it was missing the safety of the hospital. At three in the morning, I found a pen and notebook and tried to write a letter — my first in a week.

I went to sleep with the light on but woke up a few hours later, sweating through my clothes. I kicked off the blanket but kept sweating and turning, trying to get comfortable on the pink twin bed for what seemed like hours. The fever finally broke, but that left me trembling from the cold, shaking so hard that it hurt. I wrapped myself back in the sheets and blanket and somehow fell asleep again.

The ferrets woke me at sunrise, dooking at the door.

Mindy was waiting for me the next afternoon when I got back from my first ferret walk. It was a Thursday, but I hadn’t gone back to school.

She stood on the front steps with Mrs. Tuten. It looked as if they’d been there for a while. Mindy asked if I wanted to go for a walk, and right away I didn’t like the sound of things.

“I just did,” I said.

“Without the ferrets, then,” she said.

I took in Mindy’s outfit. She was wearing a tight calf-length skirt and high heels. Not ideal for walking. I handed the leashes to Mrs. Tuten and shoved my hands as deep as I could get them in the pockets of my black hoodie. It was cold, and I hugged myself but didn’t like feeling my ribs. One time Dad had to put down three horses that an old farmer had starved nearly to death. It wasn’t on purpose; the farmer had Alzheimer’s and had hung on to his farm too long. I wondered if I was starting to look like those poor horses. Maybe someone would put me down, too.

We walked a couple of blocks before Mindy began talking. I should have been icing my ankle; my limp got worse, but Mindy didn’t notice. She shivered without her coat and wobbled along beside me in her high heels.

“The reason we haven’t been able to reach your friend or her mother is because they’ve been staying in Portland with relatives. I believe there’s a younger brother with them as well. The father is still living in the house, but he’s not answering the phone. The school put me in touch with the mother. There’s been a separation.”

I stopped. “Are they getting a divorce?”

“I don’t know,” Mindy said. “That has to be a possibility.”

“When did they get separated?” I asked.

Mindy shook her head. “I’m afraid I don’t know that, either, Iris.”

“Then what
do
you know?” I snapped, but I didn’t wait for her to answer. “Just give me the phone number in Portland,” I said. “I’ll call Beatrice myself.”

“I can’t do that, Iris,” Mindy said. “You’ll have to be patient. I gave Beatrice’s mother the Tutens’ phone number, and I’m sure your friend will call you as soon as she can. Things are just very difficult for them right now. I know this is sad for you, and I’m so sorry, sweetie. I really am.”

She tried to put her arm around me, but I stepped away from her. She thought I was sad, but it wasn’t that at all. I was angry — at Beatrice
and
her parents. How could they not appreciate everything they had? How the hell could they throw it all away? And for
what
?

Mindy tilted her head to the side sympathetically and said those damn words again: “You just have to hang in there, Iris.”

I stared up at the sky through the mostly bare branches of a sickly elm tree. Cirrus clouds were racing south on fast-forward — so fast it made me dizzy. I counted to ten. Out loud.