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He could be cruel. I once saw him blow pepper in the cat’s face. He loathed that cat, a surly, untrainable tom found in the street. But he was fond of another creature we took in, an orphaned nestling sparrow. Against expectations, the bird survived and learned to fly. But, afraid that it would not know how to fend for itself outdoors, we decided to keep it. My father sometimes sat by its cage, watching the bird and cooing to it in Chinese. My mother was amused. “You see: He has more to say to that bird than to us!” The emperor and his nightingale, she called them. “The Chinese have always loved their birds.” (What none of us knew: At that very moment in China keeping pet birds had been prohibited as a bourgeois affectation, and sparrows were being exterminated as pests.)

Still behind him was that damn coyote. A determined critter, he was. He hadn’t caught sight of him for at least an hour, but he felt his presence out there. At first he had feared him. Now he didn’t. If circumstances were different he might have welcomed the company of a coyote on a lonely walk on a snowy night. At best, the coyote’s presence was disconcerting. He was puzzled. Why would a coyote be so determined? Poor animal. It had been such a hard winter for man and beast.

The ensuing inquiries found the girl to be a teenager, though she weighed only fifty-nine pounds and was only fifty-four inches tall. She was in much worse physical shape than at first suspected: she was incontinent, could not chew solid food and could hardly swallow, could not focus her eyes beyond twelve feet, and, according to some accounts, could not cry. She salivated constantly, spat indiscriminately. She had a ring of hard callus around her buttocks, and she had two nearly complete sets of teeth. Her hair was thin. She could not hop, skip, climb, or do anything requiring the full extension of her limbs. She showed no perception of hot or cold.

MAE: I used to have a fantasy where my high school boyfriend Dave Gellatly  – who totally cheated on me and like destroyed all of my self-confidence – would come to my window and knock on my window and then I would let him in and then he would be high on cocaine (even though I’m pretty sure he never did cocaine) and he would like rape me? And the whole time I’m thinking: Maybe I should scream! If I scream, my parents will wake up and come down here and save me and this whole thing will stop. But then if my parents come down here, they’ll see me naked with Dave on top of me. And I’m like a virgin. And super Christian. So I don’t scream. Because I’m too embarrassed. And he rapes me. And then later I decide to report it. And the whole town vilifies me and I’m like this outcast woman? And then Dave dies in a drunk driving accident and everyone is like: If you had just not reported it he would have died anyway and you would’ve gotten justice without having to besmirch his name

MAC: That was a fantasy?

MAE: I guess I just used to think about it when I needed to cry