Gwendolyn was dead, and all her babies with her. I found them when I got home from school, the babies scattered around the wood bedding like so much bloody debris, all of their throats with brown-red gashes, and Gwendolyn huddled in a still, stiff ball in a back corner of the cage. The sight of them, all of this death, brought me first to tears, then quickly to aching sobs.
Mama heard my bawling from her bedroom, where she was napping, and came out to see what the matter was. She stood behind me, looking in the cage to where I pointed. “Oh, no,” she said, almost whispering. She patted my back, gently, consolingly. “Oh, no.”
A half-hour later, Gwendolyn and her babies were in a box resting peacefully in the trash can out in the alley behind the apartment where we lived. Mama did this for me; I was crying too hard to do it myself. She said it looked like Gwendolyn had known she was going to die, and didn’t want the babies to starve to death, so she killed them first so they wouldn’t suffer. “Look at the bright side,” she said after I’d calmed down. “Now you can put George in the cage, and take him out of that shoebox.”
I spent the next hour scrubbing out the cage with soap and water over the kitchen sink, then drying it and putting in fresh cedar bedding. I cleaned the food dish and the water bottle, and filled them. Then I put George in the cage. He sniffed the air. Then he went to each of the corners of the cage and sniffed. Finally he built a little nest of bedding in the back and settled in and cleaned himself. Once in awhile, he stopped and sniffed the air and looked around the cage, as if he knew something wasn’t right, it wasn’t the way he remembered it. Finally he got up from his nest and trundled through the bedding to the water bottle and shoved his little pink tongue up the tube for a drink. When he was done, he went back to his nest. He cleaned himself some more. Then he rolled himself into a ball and went to sleep.