Brain Baby

by Nicole Gulotta

We hear them at night—the round hoot of barred owls high in the trees behind our house. In February, when I can’t sleep, I listen to discussions of what I assume are matters of prey, and imagine a bird swooping into the yard to snatch one of the voles that have been digging tunnels under the grass.

Once diving, it would be impossible for the rodent to take cover. The sound owls make when they fly is too faint. If recorded by a machine, their flapping would register as a low-frequency waveform, which is mostly attributed to the shape of an owl’s feathers. It’s one of the reasons that in her book, What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds, Jennifer Ackerman calls owls “a pinnacle of evolution.”

During one of these winter mornings when I both can’t sleep and discover an insatiable interest in owls, our dog begins behaving strangely. The first sign: she forgets how to climb the steps. Once a running start up to the deck with a leap, Emma now stands outside the back door and looks at us with pleading brown eyes. It could be her hips, which are prone to dysplasia as she gets older, and we start picking her up several times a day. Up and down. Up and down. Up and down to the grass.

Soon she’s jumping again, this time on her haunches, front paws gripping the lip of the front door window, barking at the UPS driver. Then up to my son’s dining chair, sniffing for scraps after dinner. Then onto the shins of my parents when they come inside and say her name repeatedly in a high-pitched staccato.

Emma’s standing still appears more like a choice she’s making, so I occasionally refuse the request, encouraging her down the three short steps using my leg as a guide against her backside, mumbling something about being instructive and reminding her how easy it is. I do not think this is the beginning of the end.

Nights remain cold and dark, and the owls continue calling out, hunting. I learn how their wings are larger in relation to their bodies, making their flight both buoyant and slow. It is this very speed, sometimes no more than two miles per hour, which makes an owl’s approach nearly undetectable.

—

The second sign: In March she seizes when I’m in the kitchen refilling my water bottle. I yell my husband’s name and he runs downstairs as she shakes violently, then collapses to the floor like a butterflied chicken. He scoops her up, unsure where to place her. We say nothing but our eyes are wide. I call our vet, impatiently listen to the recording, and push the number two to indicate an emergency. Emma’s calmer by the time someone picks up, but they tell us to take her to the neurologist as soon as possible. They start her on Keppra, a medication with side effects that could make her unsteady, but potentially reduce the severity of her seizures. During the appointment we ask what to do the next time she has one. The doctor says to stay nearby to make sure she doesn’t hurt herself, and to count the seconds as they pass. That’s the most we can do.

Later that day I sit at the dining table and call the eight veterinary hospitals in North Carolina with MRI machines. The farthest one away can see her in two days. Roaming the house alone, Emma is feeling well enough to tear into a set of Pilates bands I’d meant to throw away. Covered in a dusty film, their rubbery smell is irresistible. I blame myself for leaving them out, tossing the old, yellowed package open on the floor and walking away intending to grab a trash bag.

The next morning—I will not describe it—she finds the material disagreeable. While she grunts and sniffs the ground outside I look around and up. No owls in view, but I notice a squirrel in the corner of the yard, sifting through leaves. He stuffs several into his mouth and darts up the fence, leaps to a tree and I track him up the trunk of a pine at least two stories high. One leaf slips and flutters down as if newly fallen, a second death, and he disappears into a large nest, abandoned since last summer, where I imagine he’s making a fine bed for himself. We keep our days busy with unimportant things, but this should also be enough—spending hours making a soft place to sleep at night.

My husband leaves at dawn to drive her to the appointment in Charlotte. At a more reasonable hour I take our son to the museum in Durham where he climbs onto the back of a dinosaur and traverses a treehouse. I get the call as we’re walking down a long path, toward the wolves. Looking out at a body of water where a crane stands motionless on a rock, he tells me what we already suspected: she has a brain tumor.

The drive home should take two hours, but it stretches closer to four because Emma pants so heavily it borders hyperventilation. They pull off on the side of the road multiple times so he can let her walk around and help her drink water from his hand. In the late afternoon, when they finally return, we give Emma a warm bath. I rub her freshly washed chest with my middle and index fingers, cupping her broad shoulders. She looks up with droopy eyes, leans to the right and I steady her, but all day we hear thumps as she falls, the clacking of her nails on the hardwood.

—

Owls are known for being quiet and elusive, making them challenging to study in the wild. Owls are also experts at something known as crypsis, a strategy of melding into the world around them. Ackerman describes them as masters of camouflage: “streaked like grasses; mottled, speckled, and striped like tree bark; pale like snow…” Like a near-silent predator as it spreads its wings and sinks its talons into the mouse or snake, a brain tumor approaches just as stealthily, growing without incident for months until revealing itself.

Emma’s neurologist confirms this when we have a second consultation with her. “These brain babies can compensate really well, until they can't,” we’re told. The tumor, a choroid plexus, is in the center of her brain, under a brown patch of fur that looks like a keyhole. People always commented about her unusual marking. Now I rub it and think about the mass of cells underneath. The size of it, looking at the x-ray, is shockingly large compared to her head.

We’re transferred to a radiology oncologist, who is excited about the new technology available to treat brain tumors. It’s targeted, more precise than ever. He tells us this while Emma falls over in the patient room, yelps in pain. He draws us pictures on the white board: A circle to represent her brain. A square around the circle. Lots of arrows. A graph showing follow up treatment schedules and potential outcomes. He describes these next few days as being marked by layers and layers of uncertainty.

The prednisone prescription we pick up at the drugstore makes Emma even more disoriented than before. She struggles to use one of her back legs and refuses to eat for the first time in her life. Following another seizure, she spends the night at the emergency vet. After retrieving her, we affix a bell to her collar. It’s a tip we learned from the nurses, so we can hear if she’s stumbling. Our son donates his Christmas bell, the one he made in Kindergarten during Polar Express Day when they all wore pajamas and had hot cocoa, celebrating the coming holiday.

With a mug of tea in one hand, I use my other hand to caress her back. We sit in front of the fireplace where she sleeps on a pile of blankets. Today she shakes less and nibbles at pieces of kibble.

Another day goes by, maybe two, before she’s admitted to the hospital again. Dropping her off, the tech on call says no news is good news, so when a phone buzzes at three in the morning, I know she had another seizure. I also know that the decision to end her life is being made for us. When we arrive, her eyes are still darting back and forth but she raises her head when get close.

“Will Emma die?” our son asks in the car.

In the passenger seat, I take off my glasses to wipe my face and the lights—yellow, red, white—burst like fireworks in the black sky. At home I can’t stop crying like she’d just died, even though she remains somewhat stable.

Our neurologist is out due to a family matter, so we speak with someone new who kindly walks us through all the scenarios, given what we know. Emma’s overall mentation hasn’t improved, which is to say, her facial twitching continues. To begin shrinking the tumor, she’s scheduled for the first of several procedures tomorrow, but may not be a good candidate for anesthesia now. The plan was two procedures a week for four weeks. Now we watch and wait. Just in case, we reach out to a service that provides in-home euthanasia and place ourselves on the waitlist. Euthanasia means “good death.” Good death, good dog, like all the times we’ve told her that and still do, we are now saying it will be good, even at the end.

—

I visit her while my son is in karate class up the street. She sleeps with her head in my hands, snuggling on the blue couch as though she were at home. She’s lost weight, so the brown spot, normally centered on her back, is sloped to one side. Her ears are as soft as the cherry blossom petals I picked up on a walk yesterday. I wept when I held them. I don’t want to leave. I tell Emma we’ll be back. I ask her to fight another night if she can, and that I love her, that I think of her whenever I see sunlight streaming onto the floor. I’ve cried so much today that my eyelids have somehow receded, skin under my eyes is tinted blue, almost translucent.

The next day, a Wednesday, my husband and I spend three hours inside Comfort Room 2. Emma kisses my nose, which she rarely did during the eleven previous years. The nurses administer more medication to fend off another seizure, and she’s able to be brought home. We place her on a blanket in the shady backyard, where she sleeps with the wind caressing her face. At dusk I snuggle with her in bed for an hour, curled around her potato body, my legs jutting out on the floor. We light candles and wait for the mobile vet to arrive. I can barely eat, occasionally picking at a salad we’d ordered. I bring Emma to my chest and she snuggles into my shoulder. Her breath smells like asparagus.

I keep Emma on my lap as preparations are made. I can’t imagine anyone growing up wanting to choose this vocation, and wonder aloud how she does it. Pressing Emma’s paw gently in a clay mold, she says not wanting a pet to be in pain is the most loving choice you can make for them. At the end Emma snores like always, booming and relaxed, and the blue liquid pushes into her IV and not ten seconds later, breath leaves her body like the woosh of a flame blown out, silent departure of light. “Bye sweet girl,” I say. I say it over and over, petting her head.

Emma is placed in a basket and the three of us sob and walk outside where she’s settled into the trunk of a Honda CRV. It’s been arranged like a hearse with white flowers on either side, a processional of streetlamps leading to her final resting place.

—

After she dies we drive to the coast. At my parent’s beach house on Oak Island, I dump ice into the sink and spray it with hot water. The melting is like watching Emma decline all over again. At first the mass doesn’t move, then a piece collapses. She can’t walk down the steps. Like dominoes, a cluster dissolves and you can see the bottom of the sink. She has one seizure, then another. For a split second you think the mass won’t ever melt, that it will take longer. But the ragged pieces lose their shape, their density. Fossil-like, nothing but bone, they disappear down the drain.

Pulling into our driveway after a few days away, I open the back gate and walk straight into the yard, stretching my torso from side to side as I gaze into the trees. Directly in my line of sight, two owlets sit on a branch, bobbing their heads, which I’ve read they do because of their insatiable curiosity. The mother is beside them, staring down, but doesn’t move. My jaw opens and I gasp.

In mythology, owls are imbued with meanings of all kinds. The Ainu people in northern Japan revere the owl as a god who brings fish to the river. In Greek mythology an owl was said to be kept on the shoulder of Athena, goddess of wisdom and war, whispering truths into her ear. In Native American culture, the Akimel O’odham, also called the Pima in central and southern Arizona, thought that someone’s soul entered the body of a great horned owl at death, while the Muscogee, in what is now Georgia, believed the great horned owl to be a symbol of wisdom. For Ackerman, researching owls is an unfolding, writing that “to get at their truths, we need to understand them over time. It’s not enough to see quick glimpses. We think we know something about them, and then—poof!—they dispel our theories, offering up bent or broken rules and unexpected qualities.”

All spring this owl family covers our hearts like a balm, showing themselves to us every few days and making it all hurt a little bit less. During the times I would normally take Emma outside, I visit the trees instead. Sometimes an owl and I stare at each other for a good long minute, and I manage a smile. Then I glance away, expecting to see her stretching out on the concrete.

Months pass and their sightings become less frequent. By the time we leave for our summer vacation in California, I haven’t seen an owl in several weeks. Before our flight I go up to the attic and flick on the light. Instead of seeing two TravelPro suitcases upright in the corner, my eyes land on the large gray oval of a bed with a thick removable cushion, saliva stained on one side. It was larger than she needed, but Emma filled it, spreading her top-heavy body across its length and resting her head on the generous raised rim with half-opened eyes, calculating as I walked by whether or not it was worth getting up to follow me. It’s muggy up there and oppressively hot. I hold the railing as I walk down, wondering if an attic is a place to remember or a place to forget. “I didn’t know you put the bed up there,” I say to my husband on the way down. “Yeah, I wasn’t sure what to do with it yet.”

Jetlagged on our first day in Los Angeles, I’m up early and take a walk around the hotel where we’re staying in West Hollywood, humming music from “La La Land” while crossing a wide intersection and reading off names of apartment buildings: Villa Avalon, Fontainebleau, The Imperial. Just off Santa Monica Boulevard is a set of dark brown stairs, ordinary enough except that my body detects their familiarity before my mind catches up. My chest flutters. I slowly turn my head, register the green paw print on the side of the building and sign for the dog store, Healthy Spot. This is where we bought her bed when she was a puppy and we lived in this city and we ran into my chiropractor who let me bring Emma to the office with me during appointments. And if I hadn’t walked outside and looked around, I would have missed her, right here with me.

—

Like humans, owls build mental maps with the hippocampus, a brain structure that helps us make sense of direction and place. The neurons involved are called “place cells,” and fire selectively at particular spots along a route, like how I used to drive from our home to the vet’s office a few miles away. This was before, when she was healthy. This was also before I knew the road by heart, and still needed to type the address into my car’s navigation system. But after enough visits for peeling skin patches and digestive issues and allergy shots and unexplained shaking, my brain encoded a map so when we turned left at the signal and drove past the golf course, then turned left into the parking lot across from the gas station, my brain fired cells in the same order each time.

A 2021 study from the Israel Institute of Technology speculates that an owl’s ability to hunt in darkness is made possible, in part, by this type of spatial memory. Out in the wild, a familiarity with their territory is essential to survival. But what happens when the territory irrevocably changes? We need new maps.

Approaching the one-year anniversary, we begin to hear a familiar sound—hooting in the yard at night and occasionally in the morning. I resume my pilgrimages to the yard, often crouching at the engraved stone while I’m there, tracing my fingers over her name. We dug a small hole at the base of a tree and filled it with a spoonful of her ashes, then layered her favorite foods on top— cucumber, spinach, and carrot—which I’m sure have decomposed by now. The owls are elusive this season, though I keep looking.

Last night my husband forgot to turn on the dishwasher. After he leaves to take our son to school, I walk outside and crane my head up. I’ve taken to standing under the skeletal canopy multiple times a day, wishing an owl will appear. Show yourself. Sometimes I press my back into the trunk of her tree and sob, letting the tears fall into my neck. Show yourself. My eyes play tricks, and what I think is the back of an owl is really bark, gnarled like a knuckle. I continue the perpetual search for what I sense, what I know, but cannot see.

Back inside I scramble an egg, squirt it with tomatillo hot sauce, and bring it to the couch. The house is quiet except for the faint rumble. I know it’s the dishwasher, but when I close my eyes, I hear her grunts, nose pressed against the rug, searching out crumbs. Come find me. I know she’s not there, but I let myself imagine she is. That any minute she’ll finish her task and saunter toward me, pressing her wet, flat muzzle to my ankle, asking to be picked up.