“There is a world inside this essay, wherein I laughed aloud, silently sobbed, and marveled. What a gift to spend time with this unlikely pair, and in doing so, recapture the beauty and pain of caring about anything (anyone!) with a full heart. Earnest, clever, and quietly devastating. I was transported.”
—Jiordan Castle, contest judge and author of Disappearing Act

Invasive Species

by Stephanie Gresham

Winner of the 2024 Essay Contest

The woman who also sees the baby squirrel meets me in the middle of the street. 

“I’m Kim.” She’s not smoking, but I can smell that she does. “Why is it just standing there like that?” We come together, concerned citizens.

“I don’t know anything about squirrels.” I’m now wickedly aware of the fact that I’m braless and my hair hasn’t been brushed in days. There’s a cruddy Band-Aid around one of my pinkies. My husband forced me on this outing when he noticed my body on the sofa for the fourth day in a row, binging CSI. He ordered me to take a walk in the sunshine to clear my head. 

“I’m supposed to be clearing my head,” I tell Kim.

“I’m on my lunch break.” She points in the direction of a low-slung brick building with some sort of medical-sounding name on its sign. A badge is clipped to her purple cardigan with her name on it and a photo of her wearing the same purple cardigan. 

A car turns the corner a block away, heading for me and Kim and the juvenile squirrel in the street.

“Should we shoo it or something?” She flaps her hands near her knees behind it, but the little squirrel doesn’t flinch. 

I kneel down to get on his level. His tiny nostrils flare gently with each quick breath. The car slows and carefully drives around us. And then the squirrel is on me. Kim approaches, wide-eyed, pulling a soft-wrinkled ziplock baggie out of the pocket of her sweater. “I wonder if he likes muesli?” she says, shaking the bag at me.

We stand there in the street for a minute as I offer a palmful of Kim’s oats and seeds to the squirrel clinging to the front of my sweatshirt. Then I usher us all toward the sidewalk where we discover another less fortunate squirrel lying motionless with a tendril of ants snaking in and out of its mouth. A dime-sized blood stain drying under its head. 

Kim shakes her head in a way that tells me she probably doesn’t watch CSI. This small, fresh trauma is too much for Kim. “Keep the muesli. I have to go back to work.” 

“I have to go, too,” I say, but I have nowhere to be.

A month before the squirrel found me in the street, my mother called to tell me about her cancer. I was searching for a certain 1984 edition of The Lord of the Rings at a dusty bookshop. Thinking about the kismet it would take to find such a treasure on my birthday.

“I’m basically knocking on death’s door,” she said. I froze in front of the bookstore while people passed on their way to lunch or the gym or wherever people whose mothers aren’t dying go. It was like most of our conversations, rushed for no reason. Minimal room for emotion or questions. There was a blurry description about what was happening and then a sterile, sudden goodbye. We hung up without either of us mentioning it was my birthday.

The little squirrel scampers to my shoulder, like a scrawny gray parrot. When a box truck tumbles by he shelters at the back of my neck, under my hair. 

“Okay. I have a squirrel on me,” I say to Kim’s back as it disappears into the Medi-building. We walk home like that. The squirrel and me. Both of us terrified, neither of us brave enough to let the other go. 

At home I search for a squirrel container in the garage. Somewhere between the point of origin and my home, I began to think of the squirrel as “Gil,” the main character on CSI. Don’t name it, I hear my mother’s words in my head, unless you plan on keeping it. She named every stray dog and wounded bird that wandered into the yard when I was growing up. My childhood was full of Gils. 

Gil looks out at me from the cat’s travel crate. Maybe, I think, he didn’t see his brother die. I look into his baby eyes and try to ascertain what level of trauma he’s witnessed. His pinkish hands grasp the grate of the door, not unlike a tiny prisoner. I watch him eat more of Kim’s muesli. 

The first step in any crisis is to consult Google. 

HELP, BABY SQUIRREL 

There are three rules, according to the Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife web page, to abide when encountering wildlife in your neighborhood. I add context to reflect my own, personal squirrel story.

1. Do not pick up an injured or juvenile squirrel . . . unless he scrambles up your sweatshirt, in which case you are innocent. It is the squirrel who has violated the rule. 

2. Do not attempt to care for wildlife . . . except in the case that he has recently witnessed his sibling’s death and is probably experiencing symptoms of PTSD. 

3. Call local wildlife authorities for advice . . . only if you haven’t already violated rules one and two.

I decide to take Gil to a wildlife sanctuary a few miles away, on the other side of the river. 

After my mom told me she had cancer I went back into the bookstore because, at the end of the phone call, when I thought she was going to wish me a happy birthday, she told me this: She has everything she needs. I don’t have to worry about her or get on a plane and rent a car and a hotel room to visit. I don’t need to come to the hospital where she is already scheduled to have her first radiation treatments. 

I went home, sans book, and told my husband everything. He comes from a family where saying not to do something means do it anyway, so he purchased a plane ticket and booked a rental car and hotel anyway, not realizing all the things I told him my mother said on the phone while I stood outside the bookstore really meant she didn’t want me there. They meant she wanted to do this without me. She wanted to keep the cushion of privacy and emotional stasis we built over the years intact. Our relationship was a cracked door, open just enough for us to show the things we could bear the other to witness. 

He knows his family. I know mine.

The squirrel changes the trajectory of my day. It’s an interruption of the crime drama binge watching depression coma I’ve cozied into after visiting my mother in the hospital against her wishes. She is sick. So much so that the sight of her in an adjustable bed with the hospital gown sinking into places on her body, small and hollow now, made me forget about the things that had been keeping me away. 

“You need a project,” my husband says. 

I feel my mood lifting slightly again. I’ll save the squirrel. I put a bra on under my sweatshirt, slather on another coat of deodorant, and load Gil’s travel carrier onto the passenger seat of my minivan. I situate it so we can look at each other through the door and buckle him in. 

The road that winds to the Audubon Society of Portland bisects Macleay Park and passes through a tunnel very near the bottom of the hill, edging the neighborhood of Hillside Park. On the day of the squirrel, the tunnel is closed to traffic. My options are to hoof it—take the bridge trail used by hikers and cyclists to avoid the tunnel, rejoin the road by foot on the other side, and hike the remaining half mile to the sanctuary—or go home and introduce my kids to their new sibling named after a brilliant, fictional entomologist. 

Half a mile doesn’t seem like much until I realize the sanctuary is at the top of the hill. I hold Gil’s temporary home carefully in my arms, secure across my chest as I huff and puff on the gravel shoulder. I feel Gil’s nervous scurrying back and forth and the desire to reassure him.  

“You’re going to love the forest,” I pant. I stop to rest and hold his crate up so he can see his new home. “All this will be yours soon.”

The birds streak from branch to branch above us as we trek under the canopy of Douglas firs and cedars. We hear hikers on the nearby trail and the whisper of Balch Creek parallel to us. When I run out of encouraging suppositions, I tell Gil about my mother’s tumor. 

“Did you know nine centimeters is roughly the size of a grapefruit?” 

Several weeks after the phone call where she forgot my birthday, I was combing my mother’s hair with a plastic, hospital-issued comb. Hospitals issue disposable toiletries in cellophane bags. Like in the military. Toothbrushes, combs, tiny bottles of mouthwash. Small yet significant items you’re likely to forget while packing for a different life. Her hair was the color of oyster shells, except in places where the white had turned yellow from nicotine. Raindrops from an abrupt, but familiar Florida storm pebbled the window. The door gaped open to the fluorescent hall. I read a David Sedaris story to her about a mouse and a snake and she laughed until a jagged strand of coughs cartwheeled out. 

“Thank you for coming,” she said when there was breath enough to talk again. 

Google, what do I do?

I am the only one here on the covered porch at the Wildlife Care Center. It’s a wood-shingled building with a green metal roof. There is a water bird painted in a circle on the front. 

The man who hands me a clipboard and pen is young. Perhaps mid-twenties. He wears a brown on brown uniform with an impressive array of badges on the shirt and a spray of pimples across his neck. A thought occurs to me that I am already a mother and could effortlessly adapt my parenting skills to accommodate the rearing of a squirrel. I don’t know the man’s credentials, but how could a biology degree stand up next to my natural instincts?   

We make the exchange. Travel crate for clipboard. Baby Gil for intake papers. It feels a bit like giving a baby to a Boy Scout. I feel my hand shake as I fill in the blanks.

Name, date, reason for visit. 

My mother is dying and my husband thinks saving this abandoned baby squirrel who is, coincidentally, also experiencing grief will help me feel like living my life again?

The man returns a few minutes later with my empty cat carrier. His face is full of an expression I recognize but can’t put my finger on. 

“Unfortunately,” he starts, “that little guy is an eastern gray squirrel. It’s an invasive species here in Oregon.”

I ask what that means. I’m familiar with the meaning of the words, of course. My mother used the same word—invasive—when she first told me her diagnosis, how cancer cells infiltrate healthy surrounding tissue. I need to know what it means for me and Gil.

They killed Gil. Humane euthanasia. Right there in the building while I sat on the gray bench that hunches sideways next to Cornell Road. I dragged myself the half-mile back to the minivan in tears—cat crate banging against my thigh—cursing the kid with the pimply neck for politely closing the screen door in my face when I offered to take Gil home and raise him to be a good, noninvasive adult squirrel. I also might’ve promised to drive him to Florida. 

I cried so hard a cyclist in spandex and expensive-looking sunglasses stopped to see if I needed help. What could I say? Thank you, kind sir, but no. I’ve just marched a baby squirrel to his death and I am beside myself with grief. I deserve to suffer here on the side of the road. 

There’s a bridge high over the Wildwood hiking trail. I leaned over its concrete railing and let my tears fall down into the cedars. I wondered how many different invasive species there were just in that one patch of forest. Ten? A hundred? 

I arrived at the van what felt like hours after I first started my mission. There were no tissues or napkins in the center console, so I wiped my face with the cuffs of my sleeves. On the ride home I felt the crinkle of Gil’s bag of muesli in my sweatshirt pocket. 

As I write this, my mother continues to break the rules of cancer. After several rounds of radiation and multiple infusions and countless medications, the tumors have shrunk to a size comparable to a smaller citrus fruit. A lime maybe. The treatments offer us an opportunity at renewed connection. 

I’ve opened the crack in the door a bit wider. We talk on the phone about her appointments and either her progress or regress depending on the day. She tells me when it’s time for me to reorder her vanilla-flavored Ensure online. Sometimes we talk about the past, but only the good things. The things that feel safest. And only as long as her football team doesn’t have a game starting soon. The tradition of forgetting my birthday continues.

I do talk about my kids more, but I’m careful to share just enough to prevent her from locating and targeting their weaknesses. I’m not ready to open that door yet. I sometimes wonder who they are to her, besides a scatter of school photos in a desk drawer. I’ve tossed around the idea of letting her know them better, but that of course would mean they know her more too. 

The squirrel story made her laugh. Probably because, at the time, laughing was what we needed to do. I’ve learned to tell it in a way that makes it seem like it was funny to me, too.

Published May 11th, 2024