Unsaid: A Novel
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For my angels—Isabelle, Madeleine, and Amy
I
am so grateful to many people who have helped make this book a reality.
I was continually amazed at the extraordinary level of skill, genuineness, care, enthusiasm, and integrity of everyone I worked with at Center Street and Hachette Book Group.
Unsaid
could not have found a better home.
At Center Street, profound gratitude to Christina Boys, my wonderful and wise editor; Angela Valente, my daily go-to person, who makes everything run so smoothly; Rolf Zettersten, publisher, and Harry Helm, associate publisher, who believed in this book.
The sales, marketing, and publicity teams have worked so hard and with such passion and creativity. Huge thanks to Andrea Glickson, Martha Otis (and Teddy and Winston), Karen Torres, Chris Barba, Mindy Im, Kelly Leonard, Chris Murphy, Shanon Stowe, Janice Wilkins, Gina Wynn, and Jean Griffin. I am humbled by your talent and moved by your compassion. For his incredible eye, thank you to Jody Waldrup, art director. For his guiding hand, thank you to Bob Castillo, the managing editor, and his terrific team, including my copy editor, Laura Jorstad.
This book could never have happened without Jeff Kleinman
at Folio Literary Management. Seriously. He never gave up on me and never lost his faith in this book. He is brilliant at what he does, but more important he is, as my grandmother used to say, “a good man.” And to Celeste Fine and the rest of the gang at Folio, thank you for everything.
My colleagues at Proskauer, and in particular in the great labor and employment department of the firm, have taught me so much more than the practice of law. They have never let me down and, when I needed, actually propped me up. I cannot imagine a better place to practice law or a better group of people to do it with. My very special thanks to Joe Baumgarten and M. David Zurndorfer for putting up with me all these years, being such good friends, and not telling me I was crazy (or at least not about the book). The late Steven Krane, a brilliant lawyer and animal lover, reminded us always that doing the right thing was not merely a process, but an end. I miss you, Steve.
My thanks as well to anthropologist Dr. Barbara King at William and Mary College, the author of
Being with Animals,
for serving as my science consultant. The errors are still mine, but because of her review, there are fewer of them.
Dr. Gay Bradshaw, the founder and director of the Kerulos Center, gave me invaluable information and insight as well as encouragement. Kerulos is doing remarkable work, and I hope their vision is not too long in coming—“A world where animals and their societies live in dignity and freedom in peaceful co-existence with humans.”
More thanks to Herb Thomas, a kind and quiet man, who wrote a book called
The Shame Response to Rejection
and changed so many lives, including my own; Roma Roth, who made a remarkable movie about bonobos called
Uncommon Chimpanzee,
gave me
the first encouraging words about my writing, and continued to be a source of encouragement throughout this process; and my dear friend Adrian Alperovich, who always gave me good advice.
Thanks and love to my folks, who taught me to love books.
To Skippy and my other animal companions who first opened my heart, I will never forget you.
And to Amy, Isabelle, and Madeleine, who have filled it more than I could have possibly hoped for. There is nothing without you guys. Nothing.
E
very living thing dies. There’s no stopping it.
In my experience—and I’ve had more than my share—endings rarely go well. There is absolutely nothing life affirming about death. You’d think that, given the prevalence and irrevocability of death, whoever or whatever put the whole thing together would’ve given a little more attention to the process of exit. Maybe next time.
When I was still alive, a critical part of my job was to facilitate the endings. As a veterinarian, I was a member of the one healing profession that not only was authorized to kill, but in fact was expected to do so. I saved life, and then I took it away.
Whether it was because I was a woman—and, therefore, a life bearer by definition—or simply because my neurons fired that way, the dissonance created by my roles as reaper and healer had been with me since my first day of vet school.
Although I tried to convince myself that I always did the best I could for all in my care, I often worried that every creature I’d
killed would be waiting for me at the end. I imagined a thousand beautiful, innocent little eyes glaring at me, judging, accusing, and detailing my failures. I didn’t do enough for them, those eyes would say; I wasn’t good enough. Or perhaps I gave up too soon. Or maybe, for some, I kept them alive too long when they were in pain—a mere shadow of their former selves—only because that is what someone else wanted for them.
Of these offenses I’m almost certainly guilty. In the end, the responsibility of filling heaven is too difficult a burden for mere mortals like me. Yes, I had cared, but caring is not enough.
As I became more ill, after the cancer traveled from my breasts to my lymph nodes, my worry turned into fear and, at the last, terror. My hands had been the instrument of too many deaths born out of the burden I had asked for but was ill prepared to shoulder. One of these deaths in particular began to gnaw at me until it filled me with such shame that my defenses of denial and rationalization abandoned me altogether.
I came to believe that I could not face these failures without an offering of true and demonstrable repentance. For me this meant not just empty words of apology, but finding meaning in and justification for the decisions I’d made or, alternatively, finally admitting to myself that I wasn’t who I believed and that I probably had not mattered at all—not to my husband, my colleagues, my own animals, or those I tended to in life.
In the midst of that search, just as I was beginning to weave some of the discrete threads into a broader tapestry of consequence, I ran out of time. The pain became unimaginable and the morphine drip remained my last best friend until everything just stopped.
And so here I am, unable to retreat and afraid to move onward empty-handed. Instead, I watch and hope that what I see will bring
me understanding or at least the courage to move on without it, before everything fades and my pages turn blank. I don’t know how much time I have before this happens or the consequence for me if it does, but I don’t think it’s good.
If you believe my present predicament is merely the product of overreaction or perhaps cowardice, you may be right. But then I only have one question for you.
How many lives have you taken?
T
he irony is that I didn’t understand the profound impact that death had on my life until I succumbed to its power. The signs were all there, but I guess I ignored them or had been too occupied with the act of living.
I’d married an orphan—a child of death. In fact, death itself had introduced us.
David had been driving too fast to get to an evening class at the law school. I was driving in the opposite direction half asleep from twenty-four hours at the Cornell vet clinic and completely lost in the memory of a chimpanzee named Charlie.
A large deer suddenly jumped from the woods into the road and froze in the glare of our headlights. I cut my wheel and rolled down a small embankment, stopping near a dense stand of trees.
David and the deer were not as lucky. He stomped on his brakes, but he was too late by seconds. I heard the sickening
thud
of metal against soft tissue and then the sound of his wheels scream as he spun off the opposite side of the road.
I quickly climbed the embankment. The force of the car’s impact
had thrown the deer into the middle of the road. It was alive and struggling to stand on two clearly broken rear legs. I immediately thought through my options, none of them good.
“Are you okay?” David called to me from across the way as soon as he got out of his car.
I ignored him and ran toward the deer and into the road. The deer’s front legs gave out and it collapsed just as a pair of headlights rounded a bend on the hill no more than two miles down the otherwise pitch-dark oncoming lane.
“No!” David screamed. “The cars can’t see you!”
I reached the terrified deer in five seconds and tried to move it out of the road by tugging its forelegs. It was no use. The animal was too frightened and far too heavy.
The approaching car was now only a mile away. David reached me and tried to pull me out of the road and back toward his car. “Come on, we need to get out of the road,” he shouted.
I pushed him off. “I can handle this.”
When I next looked up, the oncoming car was maybe half a mile away. I realized that David was right—because of the steep grade of the road, the car wouldn’t be able to see us in time to stop.
David refused to leave me. He yanked off his coat and, after two tries, looped it around the deer’s forelegs up by its shoulders. He tied the arms of the jacket into a knot and heaved on the jacket while I pushed, but the deer moved only a few inches.
The oncoming car closed in.
A panicked hoof shot out and caught David on the cheek, carving a deep gash that immediately drew blood. David’s eyes glazed over and he stumbled on his heels. For one horrible moment I thought he was going to pass out in the road. I would never be able to move him before the car came through.
“Get out of the road!” I screamed. He shook the cobwebs away, and I saw his eyes finally clear.
He tried to get a better grip on the makeshift sling and said, “On the count of three, okay?”
I glanced at the headlights of the oncoming car. It was too close. I nodded at David, but started to sweat despite the cold.
“One, two, three!” If David said anything else, his words were drowned out by my own scream of exertion and the blare of the car horn.
We pulled the deer clear of the lane and onto the shoulder just as the car passed. Then we collapsed. The car didn’t even hesitate as its horn faded into the distance.
The deer struggled to lift her head and blood sprayed from her nose, splattering me and David and mixing with the blood already streaming from the cut on his face.
David slowly got to his feet while I ran back to my car. “Where are you going?” he called after me.
“Stay here.” Another car passed, narrowly missing me, as I ran across the road.