She was an adventurer, and from early on went marauding in the forest behind Cassie’s house. There came the time, not long after Anders Shute moved into the Burneses’ lives, that Electra simply never came home. If she’d been hit by a car out on Route 29, we would’ve found her corpse. We wondered if she’d been kidnapped by a person or stolen by a hawk, or whether her tiny skeleton lay somewhere among the rotting leaves in the Encroaching Forest. Cassie liked to imagine that Electra had slipped off to join another family, maybe even a mile or two down the road, and that she was happily devouring tuna from a silver bowl: a better new life. “If you have to imagine, why imagine something bad?” she’d say. I was the one who was sure she must be dead.
That summer, we both wanted to be veterinarians, among other things. I was going to be a vet, a pop star, and a writer—although, I’d sometimes reflect, being a writer of pop songs might be good enough; then I’d be just a vet and a pop star—and Cassie wanted to be a vet, an actress, and a fashion stylist. We flipped repeatedly through Tiger Beat—my mom had got me a subscription because of my interest in music, and because she’d had one when she was young. I was interested in what the bands sounded like; Cassie rated them on how they looked. Her mother had explained that there were people out in Hollywood or in New York who made a living choosing the outfits for celebrities to wear. Bev didn’t say this like it was a good thing; more like, We live in such a crazy world that some people think this is an acceptable way to spend your life! But that’s not how Cassie took it. She loved fashion. We’d dawdle in the makeup aisle at Rite Aid while she tested every different eye shadow on the back of her hand. I pretended to be into it because she loved it so much. She thought Lady Gaga was cool not for her songs but for her fashion sense: those crazy shoes; that dress made out of meat. And partly, maybe, because you couldn’t get further from Bev Burnes than Lady Gaga.
Bev approved of our desire to become vets. She encouraged it. She was the one who approached my mother and suggested that if they split the driving, it wouldn’t be a hassle for us to work at the shelter. My mother agreed it would introduce us to “adult responsibility.” “When I was young, in Philadelphia, I was a candy striper at the hospital,” she told us. The volunteers had the name because they wore red-and-white striped pinafores. “I pushed people around the hospital in wheelchairs,” she recalled, “from their rooms to X-ray, or from the ER to their rooms. To Physical Therapy. To the hairdresser even, sometimes. One old lady would clap her hands when she saw me, and cry, ‘My girl! My girl!’ ” She told us about turning a corner too hard and ramming a woman’s outstretched broken leg, encased in plaster, into a wall. Even many years later she couldn’t stifle an embarrassed laugh: “From how loudly she yelped, it must have hurt a lot.” I guess it seemed to her safer for us to hang out with animals, but still in the spirit of “service.” Bev and my mother were both big on the idea of “service,” of “giving back,” expressions that were meant to remind us of how fortunate we were.
Royston isn’t a wealthy town, in spite of the Henkel plant not far away; and in spite of the fact that the nearby towns, like Newburyport and Ipswich, are on the water and attract wealthy people, especially in the summer. If, in the terms of, say, Boston, the Robinsons are negligible, in Royston we’re pretty privileged. Even Bev and Cassie were privileged, in their modest way.
The animal shelter, a one-story breeze-block building, felt like a cross between the vet’s and a kennel. The air-conditioned front room had navy plastic chairs set up on the linoleum tile, like a waiting room, and a high counter behind which sat one or two real employees with computers and files. It smelled like Band-Aids and was always cold, like a walk-in freezer. On the dun-colored walls hung posters about caring for animals and vaccinations (“Heartworm: the heartbreaking killer”; “Lyme Disease and Your Pet”), and along one side of the room stretched a big bulletin board plastered with photographs of dogs and cats alongside their new owners.
Marj, the woman in charge—small, wiry, and brown—had short graying hair that looked as though she cut it herself, and a scratchy voice. Her loose tank tops bared her muscly arms. Underneath, her old-lady boobs dangled flat and wide somewhere just above her navel. Cassie and I had pictured our veterinary selves in professional white coats and smart, clicky low-heeled pumps, and while Marj wasn’t a vet (when a vet was needed, Dr. Murphy came in from Haverhill, bluff and bearded, his belly tight beneath his white coat), she gave us a different sense of how you could be in the world: someone who did what you did for the love of it, and didn’t care what anybody thought.
Marj really loved those animals. Her leather hands were all pop-up veins, but when she touched the tottering, one-eyed pug Stinky on his rippled tummy, she was tender, and when she held a skittish cat like Loulou to her loose bosom, the cat’s wild eyes would quickly grow heavy, her body slack, and she’d emit the low, motorized hum of feline pleasure. Marj was especially good with the pit bulls and pit crosses that the shelter got in such numbers. Most people were afraid of them, even just a little, and Cassie and I were considered too young to take on their care; but Marj approached each one as if he were a long-lost friend, murmuring in a low voice, careful but sure. They called her the Pit Whisperer, but it didn’t always work out well. She had the scars to prove it.
You entered the animal shelter through a heavy metal door next to the admin counter. The cattery came first, still air-conditioned but less chilly, a big room with floor-to-ceiling cages about four feet by four feet, in which cats of all shapes, sizes, and colors dozed or groomed or paced in the palpable ammonia fug of kitty litter and sweet antiseptic. Sometimes a rabbit hovered, twitching, down at the far end, and once, a ferret named Fred, skittering around his cage as if late for an appointment.