Her eyes were clover green and Celtic fierce. “That’s not you. You’re better than that.”
I hesitated and then said, “If you say so.”
“I say so, and you know so.” She got in the front of the Explorer with her grandfather and pulled the door shut.
Winston politely made room for me in the back seat. He licked my cheek. I didn’t return the lick. I just wasn’t in the mood.
BACK IN THE DAY
THE BOY, THE FATHER, THE BIRDS
So Corbett Ormond frequently beats his wife, murders her and ten others, and a few years later shoots and kills his own twelve-year-old son, Litton, my roommate and best friend. How can a just world be shapen to allow such outrages? Why aren’t we designed to be unable to harm one another? Why aren’t our brains wired so that we can’t kill or rape or steal or lie or deceive? Why are we formed with the capacity to hate and envy? They say that this world and life in it are a gift, but how can it be a gift when it so often subjects us to fear or even terror, and to unbearable sadness?
At eleven, rocked by grief, having lost the ability to find happiness, I dwelt obsessively on those questions, arriving at no answers, eating too little, sleeping more of the day than not.
Sister Theresa, psychologist and counselor, sought to relieve my unrelenting depression by teaching me about ants. Although it was odd to have a therapist who was a dead ringer for Aretha Franklin, I learned a lot about several varieties of the family Formicidae, but nothing I learned cured my despair, for I was a stubborn patient.
Having brought a large glass-walled ant colony into her office for our study, Sister Theresa said, “If ants didn’t enlighten you, then bees probably won’t.”
I stood at her office window, staring out at the heavy rain that fell in gray plumb-bob lines through the windless day, foaming like corrosive acid on the black street and gray concrete sidewalks.
“Anyway,” Sister Theresa continued, “I’m certainly not going to bring a hive into my office.”
“Why do bees have to sting?” I asked.
“To defend themselves and protect their colonies. But we’re not going to spend any time on bees.”
“Why do animals bite? Why does everything kill everything?”
“Not every animal kills. Rabbits don’t kill, unless you think that grass and flowers and carrots and berries can be murdered. If you do, then we should at once start putting rabbits on trial and sending them to bunny prisons.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“I will if I wish to be,” she said, leaning back in her creaky office chair. “I rather like being silly on occasion. However, in the interest of accuracy, I should report that even rabbits can be violent with one another. They use their powerful hind legs to kick when they’re contesting for mates, and they’ll even bite one another now and then if they disagree.”
As I watched the rain, I thought of the flood that was said to have scrubbed the sinful world clean of everything except Noah’s family and the animals on his ark. When the flood receded, however, they all got off the ark and started killing again.
“I don’t want to hurt anyone. I don’t want to kill anything.”
“Then don’t,” Sister Theresa said.
I didn’t care to believe it was so easy. She always had a quick answer I couldn’t dispute, which began to irritate me. “Yeah, well, I could get mad, lose control. Lots of people are always angry.”
“Quinn, dear, you’ll have moments when you’re mean and you hurt people’s feelings, just as they’ll hurt yours. You’ll do stupid things, maybe even something cruel now and then. But you’ll never murder anyone.”
“What if there’s a war and I get sent?”
“Defending your family or your country in a war, you might have to kill, but killing in defense of your own life or the lives of innocent people isn’t murder.”
I wished that the rain would fall harder, harder than it had ever fallen before, until the streets were rivers and the cars were swept away. I wanted to see the people on the sidewalks, in their raincoats and carrying umbrellas, trying to get into the safety of the buildings but finding the doors all locked, so they would know that they, too, would be swept away, so they could feel what Litton must have felt when he looked in the muzzle of his hateful father’s pistol. None of that made sense in my despair, but I was eleven, an age often short of reason. I said to Sister Theresa, “I could go to war with you right now, come over there and punch you in the nose.”