ANIMAL STORIES by Jason Brown
To reach the cabin where we would spend my sabbatical from teaching, we had to drive along the twisting two-lane road that followed the river at the bottom of the canyon north of a scruffy old ranching community with sofas and rusty trucks in the front yards. The red canyon walls rose on either side of us. Tectonic plates had slipped under the surface of the continent 80 million years ago and pushed up to form these mountains. If the land was still slowly rising, it was also slowly falling as the wind and ice eroded the peaks into the valleys. The remains of prehistoric crocodiles were lodged in the striated rock in the jagged landscape undisturbed by the scars of human presence except for the contrails tracing the sky above. I tried to imagine the planet before there were so many people living on it, before the culture in which I had been raised, the culture that had metastasized over the globe, had forged the myth that man should dominate nature. Humans would wreak more havoc on the planet, but in the end, we were just another animal. We wouldn’t have the last say.
We turned off the pavement onto a narrow dirt road and started the climb to the top of the mesa and the cabin. Little if any work had been done on my mother-in-law’s place for more than twenty years. The wood siding was brittle and perforated by the wind and sun. I could break it off between my fingers. The wind poured in around the window frames, the bent metal chimney had never been cleaned, and the well water coughed out of the faucet in orange spatter. In a high wind the tin roof flapped because the screws had never been tightened. During storms the whole place shook as from an earthquake. Probably in part because the place needed saving, I loved it. If I didn’t get to work right away, we would never make it through the winter. We had to secure the roof, cut firewood, get a sled so we could hike groceries in from the main road in the winter.
We were miles from a ski area and beyond the absurdly wealthy enclaves that surround skiing in the west. None of us – Nicola, me, or Nicola’s mother – were wealthy, but because Nicola’s mother had bought this place years ago, our family now had the opportunity to spend time apart from the human world while I was on sabbatical from my teaching job. We had a chance to spend time with our twoyear-old daughter, Bella. The absence of people was a shock and a relief. Except for the boundary lines on the county property website, life on the mesa was governed by laws that preceded human dominion.
To be in a place where human presence was tolerated provisionally and to sit in the dry grass as Bella learned to run across the field chasing our dogs filled me with a sense of vertigo. I wanted to stay here forever watching Bella wheel away from me on her springy two-year-old legs only to stop and turn around to make sure I was still there. “Papa,” she would say, her voice cutting through the constantly blowing wind. Our Australian shepherds had been bred with a similar radar. They would race through the grass until they were twenty or thirty yards away, then arc toward us to touch base before racing away again. Nicola, Bella, the dogs, and I, we never tired of this ancient ritual of pulling away and circling back, of periodic contact: Bella’s hand against my arm before she ran into the field again, a wet nose grazing my palm or rising up to brush my cheek before following a scent into the scrub oak.
I reminded myself that the relief I felt at living apart from people shouldn’t be confused with thinking of the wilderness as paradise. I had to keep an eye on Bella at all times. Several years before, my mother-in-law, getting ready to leave the cabin, placed her hand on the handle of the glass front door, but realized she had forgotten her coffee mug and walked back through the kitchen. When she returned to the door, she found a mountain lion sitting on its haunches on the other side of the glass. Two years before, while on a visit from Eugene, I was walking our two dogs and my mother-in-law’s Lab a hundred yards south of the cabin when we came around a scrub oak to face a bear cub. The Lab chased the cub into the bushes to our left. The mother bear appeared ten yards to our right and rose onto her hind legs. Franny, a little more than a year old, started barking. I grabbed her, turned in place, and ran west through the scrub – exactly what you’re not supposed to do, I was later told. Cheever led the way as the branches scraped against my face and arms. I heard crashing behind me and kept running until I tripped on a stump and flew headfirst into the grass. There was nothing behind us except the twisted oaks and the sky.
***
We had left my mother back in Eugene, Oregon. She lived in a small apartment two miles from our house, which we had rented to one of my former students. Though she was in her late seventies now, she was still physically agile and strong. She hadn’t had a drink in many years. Signs of dementia had just started to emerge, but she was still able to care for herself – as well, that is, as she ever had. Age was not the problem.
I’d been sober for over twenty years, and many years had passed since my mother had been jailed for grand theft larceny in Arizona, many years since I had rescued her from homelessness. My sister and I paid her rent in Eugene, and I tried my best to keep an eye on her and to make sure she had enough food and went to the doctor once in a while. I worried what would happen while I was away.
When I called her to check in, I thought I recognized the same old force inside of her driving her to tear everything down. I recognized a similar force inside of me. Some kind of mental illness, it was hard to deny. The phrase mental illness flashed in my head like a roadside construction sign. I had spent most of my life in fear of becoming like my mother.
I knew I had made some progress. In Eugene, Nicola and I had bought a small house on the hill above the university and worked overtime to fix it in the years before Bella was born. I tore up shag, laid down wood floors, rebuilt the carpeted staircase with cherry, skimcoated over the popcorn-finish drywall, and built a deck off our bedroom. I labored with the awareness that we were striving for what many people had striven for over time: a place to raise a family. I loved the work and loved working together with Nicola to give shape to our future together.
On our hikes and walks in Eugene, Nicola and I had started to talk about becoming parents. We didn’t have forever to think about it, and I was afraid of what it might mean. In speaking with Nicola about my apprehensions, I leaned on my own limitations by telling her that I might not be a good father. I really feared that there was something wrong with me that couldn’t be fixed. Nicola had never seen me drinking or depressed. She’d never met the man who dodged every responsibility, careened into fights, drove headlong into fire hydrants, and wanted to curl up in a ball and hide. That person was dormant but not gone. In short, when the subject of children arose, I worried about all that could go wrong.
“Things can always go wrong,” she said, and I knew she was talking about her father dying from injuries sustained in a car accident and her half-brother dying of a heroin overdose. She herself had struggled with depression, especially after her father’s death. She didn’t like her job, which didn’t pay very well. I didn’t make enough to support us all in the long run; she didn’t want to rely on me anyway. At night before bed, we sat at the kitchen table and schemed about our future. We weren’t young anymore, but we both felt a kind of youthful restlessness. We were as hungry for life as kids in their twenties, and like overgrown kids we conceived of dreams that didn’t quite make sense for two middle-aged people about to have a child: moving to Alaska to homestead, retraining me as a cabinet/furniture-making carpenter (a persistent dream of mine), or, in Nicola’s case, training as a helicopter pilot. One day we drove to a Coast Guard recruiting office and sat in the car talking about who would feed our baby while she flew into storms to rescue fishermen from sinking ships. I think we both knew that our dreams would evolve as soon as we were responsible for a new life.
***
While we were in Colorado, three things happened at more or less the same time – our tenant in Eugene moved out earlier than we thought he would, my mother’s landlord wanted her out (her lease had expired), and the world was beset by a global pandemic. We could have pushed to keep my mother in her apartment, at least for a while, but even if the landlord had agreed, he was going to raise the rent as much as he could. My sister and I couldn’t go any higher. When I called my mother to see what she thought of living in our house until we returned, at which point I would build her an apartment in our oversized garage, she was silent.
“What if I don’t want to live up there with all those fancy people?”
“There are no fancy people,” I said. “It’s Eugene.” After half an hour of persuading her that our neighborhood was not a right-wing stronghold, she grew lukewarm to the idea and finished off the conversation with, “I don’t know, we’ll see.”
When I suggested to Nicola that my mother move into our house for the rest of my sabbatical and into a garage apartment thereafter, she studied me for a while as if I had just returned from a long and perilous journey to the moon.
“Are you crazy?” she eventually said. Bella looked up at me as if she also expected me to answer this question.
I had to wait until after Bella fell asleep to pitch my idea a second time. I had formed a presentation with clear points: we would save money on paying my mother’s rent, we could use the savings for childcare, maybe my mother could provide some “supervised” childcare, the “apartment” I built in the garage would add to the value of our house . . .
“And as an added bonus, every time I leave the house with Bella, I will run into your mom sitting in a lawn chair outside our garage ready to yell at me because you haven’t met her needs,” Nicola said.
“I will build a separate entrance on the other side of the garage. She won’t be able to get in through the gate to our front door.”
“A gate? Your mother is a criminal mastermind. Within a week, she would be living in the house, and we would be living in the garage.”
“That seems extreme.”
“Does it? When are you going to build this apartment in the garage with new windows, doors, floors, a bathroom and kitchenette?”
Bella came into the room with all three of her stuffed white unicorns somehow loaded in her arms – Papa Woodrow (the size of a German shepherd), which I had bought on sale at Lowe’s, Mama Woodrow (about the size of a corgi), and Baby Woodrow (the size of a kitten). She kept repeating the phrase “Baby Woodrow booboo” because Baby Woodrow’s horn was coming off. She was looking at me with her huge blue eyes because I was the one who knew how to sew.
***
My mother had more than a month’s warning that I was returning. On the phone she had said she was packing and getting ready to move. She complained that it was hard to find boxes, so I talked her through a plan to pick up boxes. She complained that she had no packing tape, and I explained that there were places called stores that sold packing tape. I decided to hang up and call back fifteen minutes later. Sometimes that worked the way it did with restarting my computer to get rid of a glitch. When she answered, she said, “Yesssss,” and I mentioned that the previous conversation hadn’t gone very well. She agreed. I asked her if she didn’t want to move into our house.
“What choice do I have? When Stalin commands, you do what Stalin says!”
I tried to explain in my strained calm voice that she did have a choice, of course, but when I thought about it, I wasn’t so sure how much this was true. Her landlord wanted her out so he could repair the damage she had caused to her apartment. We could fight him under the new Covid regulations, but that was a temporary solution. I would be lucky if he didn’t come after me for thousands of dollars of damages to the apartment – my name was on the lease. She didn’t have a social worker because she refused to work with one, she wasn’t on a list for public housing because that was beneath her. She was dependent on me, and she hated to be dependent. She hated to be a burden.
I drove 1,200 miles back to Eugene and arrived at my mother’s place to discover that she hadn’t packed one single thing. Not even a fork. Since I had last visited her apartment, before we left for Colorado, she’d added quite a bit of raw material. There was an earth-tone La-Z-Boy that had spent most of its life outdoors and what my mother generously called a “love seat,” which someone named Hank had helped her drag in from the curb. One corner of the room was occupied with a rusty bike, two suitcases, some tools, and what looked like several trash bags of clothing. I guessed that the bike and tools belonged to the guy named Hank and his cronies who had hauled in the filthy love seat so he could watch movies on my mother’s big screen TV, which was also new. My mother informed me that the TV was probably “hot.” We stood looking at each other.
“I thought maybe you would have packed or cleaned a bit,” I said.
“I did,” she said and gestured to the room.
Mounds of garbage stretched back to the bedroom. Everything smelled of urine. When I touched a seat cushion and the mattress, my fingers came back wet. I asked her what was going on, and she said she was having a problem. I shouldn’t worry, though, because she was wearing rubber pants now.
“Have you gone to the doctor?”
“You’re going to really like Hank,” my mother said. “He’s a fascinating man. He lives right over there.” She pointed out the window. I cleaned the pane with the sleeve of my shirt and squinted at a grey apartment building – Section 8 housing for downtown Eugene.
“What floor does he live on?” I asked. If he wasn’t too many flights up, maybe my mother could live with him. I had tried to persuade my mother to sign up for Section 8 housing.
“No, he lives in front of the building.” There was nothing in front of the building except a rusty, old Ford F-150 with a demolished front end and what looked like a self-fashioned tarp home in the truck bed. “He has a generator in there,” my mother said and nodded approvingly.
“I bet he does.”
It wasn’t long, of course, before I met Hank. Reeking of whiskey and not wearing a mask, he stopped by to say how sorry he was that he couldn’t help with the move. After he left, my mother watched him limp down the street toward his truck. He pulled back the tarp and crawled in over the tailgate.
“Poor Hank,” she said, “someone is going to steal his generator. He’s very excited about my moving to your house. He knows the neighborhood very well and loves it up there.”
I asked my mother to please take a seat in one of the many chairs and sofas I would have to move on my own. Every time I turned around, there was a new piece of furniture aimed at the TV. Several pieces of luggage, different size shoes, drug paraphernalia – a bong and a bag of needles. Two different TVs, probably stolen, other than the one she’d been using.
“You know,” I said, “with Covid, it’s not safe to have the whole park population in to watch movies.”
“They don’t have Covid, they live outside.”
“That’s not how Covid works.”
I tried to add up how long it would take me to disassemble the apartment. Most of it would go to the dump. It would be much saner to hire someone to help me, but I had sailed beyond sane the minute I had set foot in her apartment.
My mother offered me some apple juice, which I declined, though I used the mention of a cold beverage as an opportunity to open the refrigerator door and check on the state of things. As a whirling comet of gangrenous rotten food crashed onto my Muck boots, I leaned over and dry heaved. I had neglected to eat for the last six hours. Evidence, maybe, that part of me was still sane.
“Are you okay?” my mother said.
I replied that I was not. When I recovered enough to stand upright, I decided to triage the situation and returned to the more important subject of Hank. The man named Hank, I explained to my mother, would not be visiting my house while I was not there. Nicola wouldn’t stand for it, and it was her house as much as mine. It wasn’t a big house, it wasn’t a fancy house, but it was all Nicola and I had. I told her I was setting up cameras in the house that would be connected to my iPhone – not to spy on her, but to make sure everything was okay – and that I would know right away if Hank crossed the threshold. I had not planned to set up cameras – the idea had only just occurred to me as I spoke.
As my mother’s brow furrowed and her shoulders slumped, I felt my chest tighten with shame.
“You’re a monster,” she said. “What do you think those people at the university you want to impress would think of what you’re saying?”
“I have a kid, I have to think of her,” I said.
“That’s what everyone like you says.”
My thoughts spun with arguments for why I had security and she did not. I had worked hard, I wasn’t beyond thinking, if not saying, and I made the right decisions while others – Hank, for instance, and my mother – had not. Seeing through one’s own thinking is no defense against believing in it. My mother knew, and, more importantly, I knew, that I needed to believe that I had earned a place for my family in a middle-class neighborhood while she had not. She lived in a urine-soaked apartment with a rock-bottom alcoholic. Why was this? she had asked many times.
As I moved furniture out to the lawn and bags of trash to the dumpster behind the apartment, she set up one of her kitchen chairs in front of the building. Whether she knew the person or not, every time someone walked up the street while I was carting her stuff, she pointed at me and shouted, “That’s my son, the monster!” Several of her neighbors said they hadn’t known she was moving. “Off to the gulag! The Stasi have come for me,” she said. When I was young, she had suffered from hallucinations, imagined voices, and a conviction that people in blue shirts were stalking her. We weren’t there yet at least.
I briefly wondered if I should reverse course and find another solution. As long as she was living somewhere else, in her own apartment, I could step away from her to some extent. If I moved her to our house, she would become more my responsibility than ever.
I took eight trips to the dump in the Subaru, straining my back in the process. Whatever she couldn’t part with, I loaded into our garage for storage, and finally I moved her into what would be Bella’s room.
“There,” I said, when she emerged from the room to join me in the kitchen. “Isn’t this better than where you were?”
She looked out the large windows facing the woods and at the art on our walls.
“Yes, I can die in peace now that I have moved to bourgeois heaven.”
We spent several days in the house discussing how she could get her food, where she should walk for exercise. We sat in front of the fireplace and discussed the apartment we would build in the garage. I’d set up an appointment at the doctor. It turned out she had seen another doctor about her incontinence, and he had prescribed medication, which she had refused to take. We went to the Walgreens and the grocery store. I had a modest sense that we were gaining control of the situation. Just in case, I bought plastic covers for the bed and a blanket for the sofa.
By the time I was ready to drive back to Colorado, my mother had reluctantly agreed to my conditions: cameras in the living room and kitchen connected to my iPhone, no Hank, no leaving the doors open and wandering around the neighborhood, no messing with the complicated thermostat, which I had set for her on a timer. She had a friend who drove a cab who would take her to the grocery store. She said her car was broken, and in any case, it wasn’t registered or insured, and she had no license. I had the car towed to the driveway, and she agreed not to drive it.
I presented the situation to her as I saw it. We’d build her a nice place, she would be in a nice middle-class neighborhood twenty feet from a hundred-acre park, she wouldn’t have to worry about all the pesky problems with maintaining an apartment and utilities. I would take care of that, and she would be close to her granddaughter, close to us. We could help her as she got older. She wouldn’t be so alone. I didn’t point out that I would feel less guilty. She seemed aware that I was somewhat satisfied with myself.
“It’s a good argument,” she conceded and scowled at me. “Those are very reasonable points.”
When I drove off, I thought we were on decent terms. In other words, I thought I had won. She was in the house, not in the apartment. The garbage was at the dump, not in the house.
***
As soon as I arrived back in Colorado, I started to feel more guilty for setting up the cameras in the living room and the kitchen. Nicola joked that I was like the NSA, but I hadn’t told her everything about what had happened on my trip to Eugene. If she’d known about Hank and the urine and the state of my mother’s apartment, she wouldn’t have been joking. Our friends Marjorie and Brian, two of the writers I worked with at the university, thought I was kidding when I told them over the phone. “You set up cameras to spy on your elderly mother?”
I was about to call my mother and tell her to unplug them when I decided I would, just once more, open the app on my phone and see what was going on in the living room. There was a blazing fire with no screen in front of the fireplace. Light from the flames flickered off a large pile of bags, an old rusty bike, and a broken keyboard stacked against the wall. Four candles burned on various wooden bookshelves around the living room, the flames dancing inches away from the books. In the kitchen on camera #2, a tall, bald man, standing center frame, prepared what looked like an appetizing vegetarian stir fry on our stove. Hank.
My mother appeared on camera #1 in the living room, settled herself in front of the fire, and put her feet up on the coffee table I had made for Nicola. Hank appeared momentarily with two plates and some silverware. I immediately called my mother. She pulled out her phone, squinted at the number, and set it down on the coffee table. When I called again, she reached over and turned the phone off.
Maybe, I thought, I’m being unreasonable here. They were just having supper. Hank was a friend of my mother’s. He was a homeless active alcoholic – I’d known plenty of those as a member of AA – who was looking for a place to crash all winter. Why couldn’t I be generous? Maybe what was wrong with me in this case was the same thing that was wrong with the world.
It didn’t help to know that Hank was not exactly a victim. My mother had told me that he had many options for places to live, all of which required him to stop drinking. He’d stopped drinking many times, according to my mother. He just didn’t want to. The question of agency was thorny business with an alcoholic. To even have a chance of staying sober, they had to at least want to stop drinking. It also didn’t help that my mother had told me, as a way of establishing the normalcy of her own condition, that Hank regularly pissed himself in his sleep when he drank too much. Based on the contents of my mother’s former apartment, it was also clear that he had a habit of helping himself to things that didn’t belong to him.
“What’s wrong?” Nicola asked. Bella was asleep upstairs, and we were sitting by the woodstove sipping tea. I must have looked tense. I told her nothing was wrong as I tucked my phone under my leg.
“There’s this guy named Hank,” I said eventually, “and he’s moved into our house.” I confessed everything I knew about what was happening in Eugene, everything I had seen in my mother’s apartment, everything I knew about Hank. My mother’s old friends, the Go Bernies, seemed to have been replaced by the riverside addict community. She had always been tight with the homeless community wherever she lived and was always trying to help them.
“When were you going to tell me this?” she said.
“I knew I had to tell you,” I said. “But I was hoping that after I left . . . she promised not to have him over. I thought it might fix itself.”
“Did you hear what you just said?”
“Sort of.”
“So now that he knows where we live, all the other people who were hanging out at your mother’s apartment know where we live. They’ll be over soon.”
I nodded. It seemed inevitable.
“Shooting drugs in our daughter’s bedroom.”
I hadn’t thought of it this way, but the answer was yes.
Nicola squinted at me. “We can’t have strangers using drugs and getting drunk in our home.”
I nodded but at the same time I wasn’t sure. When it came to my mother, I had always felt that I had to do whatever it took to rescue her.
Out on the porch an hour later, I checked the cameras again – empty except for a mountain of dirty dishes in the kitchen. No one coming or going. I called my neighbor Jamie, who picked up right away. His house, designed by his architect partner, had large glass panels looking out at our dead-end road. I asked him if he had happened to see my mother in her car.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I just saw her drive away with some bald guy in the passenger seat. I thought you told me that car no longer worked.”
“It didn’t, or at least I thought it didn’t.” My mother had lied to me about the car being broken. The car was in my name, but I had removed the insurance because it was not registered and didn’t run – so I had thought.
“Seems to work fine,” Jamie said, “except it’s night and she doesn’t have the headlights on.”
When I finally got my mother to answer the phone, I gently broached the subject of not driving and not bringing Hank – or any other active addicts – over to the house.
“I’m gonna have to talk to Moose about that one.”
“Moose?”
“My therapist. He’s training to be a death doula. Do you have a therapist?”
“What? No. What’s a death doula?”
“You should. You are very angry.”
She looked at her watch. I could see her looking at her watch on my phone.
“I have to go,” she said. “This conversation is over.” She hung up and exited stage left.
I waited five minutes and called my neighbor Jamie again.
“Yep,” he said. “She just peeled out in the Focus.”
A half an hour later she and Hank were back on-screen bobbing around the kitchen making dinner again. Hank did a little jig in front of the camera with a bottle in his hand, gave me the finger, and swatted his fist right at me. His fist was replaced by the message: Video Disabled.
While Nicola helped Bella assemble an octopus puzzle, I reluctantly brought her up to speed on the latest developments. She nodded patiently and responded in a remarkably calm tone.
“So, she’s driving around without a license in an uninsured car titled in our name and living in our house with an active alcoholic who has no place to live? And soon there will be a party of others there carting off all our things to sell at the Saturday market. And this is just Act I of this drama, am I right?”
I hadn’t mentioned all the burning candles my mother had set up on the bookshelf.
“I understand why you had to try this idea out,” she said. “But you can’t just lift your mother out of her life into our own. Whitebird (an organization that helps the vulnerable in Eugene) can’t save your mother, DHS can’t save your mother and this guy – what’s his name?”
“Hank.”
“You can’t save them. You can’t. We’ve tried to bring her inside the wire, and it’s not going to work. Even if you build this apartment on or in the garage with the spare time you don’t have – instead of spending time with your daughter – all of this will continue right next to us with Bella there. What does that lead to? You talk about not wanting to repeat the past. In this case – in this instance – you have to make a choice.”
Nicola had understood all along that this wouldn’t work, but she had been generous enough to let me run the experiment for myself one last time. I had felt as if I had left my mother behind, alone in a dirty apartment on the other side of town. I didn’t want her to live that way, but she was determined to live the way she wanted to live, even if it caused her pain and misery and isolation. I understood that people wanted to make their own decisions and live on their own terms. I’d seen it in AA. Several of the guys I had worked with over the years had died young rather than change. This didn’t mean I couldn’t help my mother or others. It just meant I was no one’s savior.
“Now we know,” Nicola said. “And we are not going to try this again. Do you understand? If you want to return to Eugene and live with your mother, you can do it without us. Bella and I will come later after you’ve solved this problem. Not today, obviously, but soon. Before Act II.”
Nicola wasn’t threatening me. She was careful to point that out. She was simply stating that she had limits. The thought of losing Nicola and Bella had never crossed my mind, and I had to sit down on the floor. Nicola was calm and direct, as always, but her eyes were watering. I could see she was serious and upset.
Bella stopped playing with her puzzle and looked at me. In saying no for the first time to my mother – for the sake of my family, if not myself – I was learning what I had never learned as a child.
I told Nicola she was right.
“I know I’m right,” she said without looking away from Bella. “I think it’s time to call the police.”
I must have looked anguished. Nicola eased up on her outrage and touched my arm. I said I didn’t know and found my face awash before I knew what I was feeling. I couldn’t cut my mother out of my life any more than I wanted her to cut Hank or others out of her life. None of us could afford to cut people off by deciding they were hopeless and didn’t matter. Not without inviting the kind of sickness we think we can escape by running away. I had come to see that the question of what role I should play in my mother’s life – the question, from one point of view, of what I owed her – was really a question of what we all owed each other. All our troubles begin when we seek to separate ourselves from others, and yet (always a yet) here I was on the verge of trying to separate my small family from my mother and the chaos we feared.
I tried to explain how I was feeling to Nicola.
“You’re not trying to cut her out of our lives,” she said. “We’re taking steps to make sure they don’t destroy our home.”
When it came to my mother, I would have to listen to Nicola and Bella and trust them to show me the way forward. In marrying Nicola and having Bella, I had chosen life. Protecting that life, protecting our lives together, had to be the most important thing, but it was no simple thing
After my mother and Hank finished their supper, I called the Eugene police to explain the situation about Hank trespassing at the house. I didn’t want a big scene and I didn’t want them to arrest Hank. I just wanted them to send a message, if possible, that he shouldn’t be there. The police showed up a short time later and knocked on the door. My mother shut off the light. She and Hank crouched by the window and tried to peer around the blinds. When the police kept knocking, my mother finally answered the door. The police were kind, they didn’t pull Hank out or make threats, but they let him know that he wasn’t supposed to be there. My mother later told me that after the police left, things unraveled. Hank got drunk and became abusive. In the midst of the ruckus, he destroyed my second camera. He took a piss on our mattress. He threatened to really hurt my mother. She thought he might kill her. He called her names she wouldn’t repeat. Names that no one had ever called her before. She phoned her cabby friend – a guy who also knew Hank – and the cabby dragged Hank and all his belongings back downtown to his nonfunctional truck.
***
On the phone several weeks later, I told her I was sorry for setting Hank off by bringing the police into it.
“He scared me,” my mother said of Hank. “I didn’t know he had that other side to him.”
I didn’t want to mention her father. “Alcoholics often have that other side,” I said.
“I don’t understand what it is with me and these alcoholic men. It’s like an addiction.”
“It’s not like an addiction,” I said. “It is one.”
“You’re so right. I wish you weren’t right. But you are.”
“You can’t save them,” I said. “And they’re dangerous.”
“I’m sorry I drove the car. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Bella and I were sitting in a window seat I had built on the second floor of the cabin that looked west over the rolling fields of the mesa toward the San Juan Mountains. My mother was in our house in Eugene and was trying, she reported, to make a fire in the fireplace without the help of Hank, who was sticking to his truck these days.
“Listen,” I said, “I know things weren’t easy when you were young. With your mother and stepfather or with your father – on the farm.”
“And it wasn’t always easy for you either,” she said.
“But it was worse for you, I know that.”
“It was worse for my brothers, I think,” she said quickly. “But I don’t know.”
“The point is that I understand. I’m going to do whatever I can. You know that. You’re not alone, so you can relax a bit.”
She was silent for a few seconds. “Thank you,” she said. “I just don’t – I don’t know. . . . Sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“You don’t have to explain.”
Bella stood on the bench and leaned her nose against the doublepane glass as Cheever jumped up with us and looked through the window. A purple monsoon cloud sweeping toward us from the west fired bolts of lightning into the mesa.
My mother asked how I was doing, and I said, “I don’t know.”
My inability to protect my mother from herself brought my daughter to mind. I had no idea how to hold her close without holding her too close. I didn’t always know when I should intercede and try to protect. Sometimes Bella caught me looking at her, and she would tilt her head and smile. Sometimes leap in the air and spin in a circle. I was often astonished by her joy – the joy of a child who was loved and safe – and I felt an immediate bond with all those parents for whom nothing could be more important than watching their children thrive. The idea of not being able to protect her from harm was too painful to imagine, yet I understood that far too many parents all over the world and all throughout history had had to watch their children suffer. A single person is nothing in the history of the world, but when that person is your child, then they are the whole universe.
I knew the day would come when Bella would look over her shoulder at me before running into the world. I would call to warn her of the dangers she couldn’t see, and she would take off through the grass. I could already feel the thrill and terror of watching her go.
What if, I wondered, everything we would lose and all that would cause us pain was not a threat but rather the very shape of who we were? Our days not empty because they would end and be forgotten but extraordinary because we were here for such a short time. A fairweather thought, at best, which quickly slipped away.
I pictured the mesa at night. When I let Cheever out to pee before bed, his ears twitched, and he was often reluctant to leave the deck. If I shut off the lights, the sky ignited with distant stars, other worlds, and I imagined the animals around us – mountain lions, bears, elk, and coyotes – wandering among the spindly shadows of aspen groves. For thousands of years, humans had shared parallel lives with all that walked and grew, yet we still didn’t understand their language. Bella tapped on the window with her finger and said, “Grrr.”
“Was that Bella?” my mother asked. “What is she saying?”
Bella tapped on the window again and looked at me. Out on the mesa, half a mile west of us, a large brown bear loped across an open field. The muscles along its back and flank churned under its thick coat. When my mother asked me what was happening, I did my best to describe what we were seeing: the thunderheads approaching, the fourteen-thousand-foot peaks in the distance, the enormous bear traversing the field, probably headed toward the creek.
“You’re so lucky you get to see that,” my mother said. “Do you know how lucky you are to be there with Bella and to see what you’re seeing?” I didn’t know how to answer.
Cheever growled at the window and Bella told the bear to “come here right now.” She’d never met an animal she didn’t want to pat.
The bear stopped before reaching the tree line and looked over its shoulder. Bella’s eyes widened. She rested her hand on my back without looking away from the window, and together we waited to see what the bear would do.
Jason Brown is the author of the novel Outermark (Paul Dry Books, 2024), and three collections of short stories: Driving the Heart (W.W. Norton, 1999); Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work (Open City Books, 2007); and A Faithful but Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed (Missouri Review Books, 2019). “Animal Stories” is part of his memoir in essays, Character Witness (University of Nebraska Press, 2025). Other sections of the book have appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Essays, Harvard Review, and The Florida Review.