A Beauty - Part 2
Nora Frazin
Renee lay in bed, listening. The animal control guy had said that the raccoon he’d taken out of her ceiling that morning was probably a mother, and that she should expect to hear the babies chattering. Renee didn’t have an attic; the raccoon had taken up residence in the low-ceilinged crawlspace between the second floor and the roof.
“They should be too young to move out of the nest,” the man had said, “so I need you to listen carefully and figure where the noise is coming from. That way we’ll be able to get them out of your hair right away.”
Renee looked over at her bedside clock. It was 10:30. She had always considered herself a night person, but ever since Randy left a year before, she had been going to bed earlier and earlier.
The image of the mother raccoon stuck in her head, how its hands reached through the gaps in the wire cage toward her. They were hands, Renee thought, not paws.
By now the mother raccoon had surely been released in the forest preserve. She must be frantic, Renee thought. She began to wonder how long it would be before the mother made her way back to claim her children. But no, raccoons aren’t like dogs, surely. Surely she won’t be able to scent her way back. The owner of the animal control business, the nice man with the beautiful phone voice, will bring her children to her. Surely, surely animal control wasn’t in the business of breaking up families.
Renee was in the woods, now, her black hands clinging to the thin branches like whips, thin branches bending under her weight, small blood red berries just within reach—
She was shocked awake by a heckling noise. It was shrill. It sounded like a bat, like a cruel child. Tears rose to her eyes like she’d been slapped.
The sound came from above the right side of the bed, Randy’s side. Renee got up. She wouldn’t be able to sleep with the babies so close above her. She went downstairs and lay down on the couch.
Renee woke, disoriented, the sun in her eyes. She sat up abruptly. Her alarm was upstairs. She was downstairs. She looked at the clock on the stereo across the room. 8:15. Her first class started in 15 minutes.
Renee rushed into the multipurpose room where she taught music at 8:32 am. Her class of fourth-graders had already arrived. Renee hadn’t been there to set up the risers where they normally sat, so most of them were standing in circles. Some of the boys were running around, playing tag.
“Everyone sit down!” Renee ordered, trying to keep the note of pleading out of her voice.
“But there’s nowhere to sit!” cried Angela Thornbury.
“Just sit on the floor. We’ll all have to stand in a moment anyway, to practice for the recital tonight.”
As the children sat, Renee noticed something written low along the blackboard at the front of the room.
I have lock jaw I can’t sing tonight, it said.
Renee turned to face the class. “Who wrote this?” she asked.
“It was Marta,” said Angela.
Marta. Of course, Renee thought. Marta, knock-kneed, sallow, sunken-eyed, the perpetual thorn in Renee’s side.
“Marta,” Renee said to the girl staring up at her from floor. “On Wednesday it was whooping cough, today it’s lockjaw? What’s it going to be next?”
Marta didn’t respond.
“Well?”
Marta glowered at Renee for a moment, then very deliberately walked past her up to the board and wrote a second line. I can’t talk I can’t open my mouth I have LOCKJAW. She underlined the last word. The other children giggled, shocked.
“You’ve interrupted my class enough. You will be singing tonight, but first you will be going to the principal’s office.”
Renee barely recalled the rest of class; it seemed like no time at all until she found herself saying “Seven p.m., remember. We’ll meet in here for vocal warm-ups. Send your parents along to the gym and make sure to wear a white shirt and black pants. See you tonight!”
Renee usually responded to the high stress of recital days by planning every detail. Today, though, she felt reckless, even like she was losing her mind. She found herself telling her sixth-graders, “Now, I think I’ve been good to you over the years. If your fly was unzipped, I would pull you to the side and tell you. I always let you take bathroom breaks, and sometimes I bring in movies on Fridays. So, for me, please, please try to stay on beat tonight. This is your one chance this year to make our school proud.” By the end of the speech, she was nearly in tears.
The scratchy-voiced owner of the pest control service had explained, when Renee called him over her lunch hour, that the removal of a baby raccoon is a delicate operation.
“Now, a grown-up critter we can catch with a trap on the roof, as you saw,” he drawled. “A little guy, though, he’s not gonna come out on his own. And we don’t want him starving to death up there, or you’ll have a nasty mess on your hands. So what we’re gonna do is come around your house tonight and see what we can do about getting that little sucker out of there.” The owner said he would take care of the removal personally.
When he showed up at the house, around four, Renee was a little disappointed in his appearance. From how he’d sounded on the phone, she’d expected a thin, wiry man, with a full black beard, maybe, and ice blue eyes. Instead, he was a little pudgy, with thinning brown hair and a square jaw. When he introduced himself as Rod Tucker, though, his syrup-thick voice gave Renee chills. The man is magnificent, she thought. His voice is a thing of beauty. When he told Renee that he would be cutting a hole in her bedroom ceiling and pulling the baby raccoon out through it, she didn’t think to protest.
“This means I’m going to have to carry the little guy out through the inside of your house. Are you comfortable with that, ma’am?”
“You can do whatever you like,” Renee said.
She stayed downstairs while he was working. Quiet on the living room couch, she could hear him dragging the bed out of the way, then the screech of the saw cutting through the plaster ceiling into the crawlspace. She pictured the baby raccoon, watching the blade coming up through the floor. It would look like a shark’s fin, she thought.
After about half an hour, Rod came down the stairs holding the small wire cage under one arm. The animal inside it lacked its mother’s mask. It looked more like a rat than a raccoon. It didn’t move much, but stared up at Renee blackly.
Suddenly Renee stood up, blocking Rod’s path to the door. She took two quick steps toward him and made as if to grab his free hand. He backed up, confused. “Ma’am?”
“Mr. Tucker, I need to ask you a question.”
He smiled, uncertain. “Well, fire away, I guess.”
“You know a lot about mothers and children. About creatures. Small things.”
“Well, yes, I suppose that’s true.”
“I’m an educator, Mr. Tucker, and I have a problem. There’s a child in my class. A terrible child. She’s disruptive. Every day she claims to have a new disease. She’s just trying to get under my skin. And now she says she won’t sing in the spring recital!”
Rod held the cage in front of him like a shield. “I’m not sure what you’re asking me, ma’am.”
“What should I do?”
He paused. He cleared his throat. “Well, it seems to me--”
A knock on the screen door. “Renee?”
She turned. A man was standing on the porch.
“Randy?”
“Renee, baby,” he said. “We need to talk.”
Renee looked over her shoulder at Rod, who was still holding the raccoon cage in both hands.
“It’s kind of a bad time,” she said.
The screen door shaded Randy’s face dark. “I made a mistake. Please let me come inside.”
Rod cleared his throat. “Ma’am,” he said. “I can just take this critter out to the truck now. I’ll send you the bill in the mail.”
This would not do. Renee needed an answer. Please stay, she tried to tell Rod with her eyes. She turned back to the door.
“Randy. Get off of my porch before I call the police.” She closed the heavy wood door in his face.
“Mr. Tucker,” she said. “The girl. What do I do about the girl?”
He shifted the cage in his arms. “Well, ma’am,” he said. “I think I would just let the kid sit this one out. What does it matter, in the end?”
Renee stared at him. He was right: what did it matter? What did anything matter?
Rod stepped toward her. He motioned with his head toward the door. “Can I take this little guy out to the truck now?”
Renee nodded, but she didn’t move out of the way. “Will—will you release him in the same spot as his mother?”
“What exactly do you mean, ma’am?”
“In the woods. When you let him go, will he be able to find his mother?”
Rod winced. “We can’t release these animals into the wild. That would be in violation of state law.”
“What do you—where do you put them?”
“Well, ma’am, we have to put them down. It’s the law, ma’am.”
He started to walk past her, and she moved numbly to the side. She watched out the window as Rod nodded to Randy, who was still standing on the sidewalk outside, and put the cage with the baby in it into the back of his truck. He drove away.
Renee walked upstairs to her bedroom. The hole in the ceiling was square-shaped. Rod had covered it with a piece of plywood. The bed was still pushed up against the opposite wall, and there was plaster dust all over the floor.
She looked out the window. Randy was still outside. For a moment, she considered going down to let him in, but in the end she decided she couldn’t be bothered. She was supposed to be back at the school at six to get ready for the spring recital, but she didn’t end up doing that, either. She spent the evening looking at real estate ads on the Internet.
When the parents and children showed up at the school for the recital, they were met with a sign posted on the front door: RECITAL CANCELLED. MS. ANDERSON HAS LOCKJAW.