Forty minutes later a small service truck pulled up and a young man named Mark in a field jacket came to the door with a well-used field notebook over his shoulder. He looked inside the bedroom with a practiced squint, and whatever curiosity he had turned into quiet focus the way a firefighter’s face does when something important is at stake.
Mark spoke calmly and clipped: this was a flying squirrel, a species the state keeps under protection in certain areas. He explained that people are often tempted to handle wild animals, but with protected species the rules are strict — you don’t touch, move, or disturb a nest. The wildlife folks needed to document the find, which is why the situation had to be handled officially.
Not long after, a patrol car rolled up. The officers weren’t there because I was in trouble — Mark later told me they come to witness and record the situation when a protected species is found on private property. Still, standing in my own hallway as they made notes, I felt, for a moment, like a tenant in my own house.
They told me, politely but firmly, not to go upstairs. The bedroom was effectively sealed until the animals matured and left the nest on their own. By law, they couldn’t be coaxed out or removed.
Mark came by almost every day after that, tiptoeing into the room with his notebook, checking on the mother and pups, and leaving quietly. I kept busy in the kitchen or in the yard when he was there — planting, fixing a loose board — anything to avoid standing at the door watching him write.
One night, when the house was finally still, a soft rustle woke me. I slipped out of bed, opened the bedroom just enough to see through the crack, and watched the mother nursing her babies. She moved with the kind of focused tenderness that only a mother knows. I closed the door and went back to bed feeling oddly lighter.
The next morning Mark noticed a small pile of shelled sunflower seeds and a few fresh hazelnuts on the hallway windowsill. He looked at me with a half-smile; I stammered that I’d been cleaning up and must have left them. He didn’t press it — and I didn’t admit that I had left the food on purpose.
A week later one of the pups was brave enough to venture out of the room. I was sitting at the kitchen table when I saw this tiny, daring ball of fur scuttle across the tile toward the doorway. It froze, looked at me with tiny dark eyes, and didn’t bolt. I picked it up as gently as I could and carried it back to the room.
The mother simply pulled the pup close and began grooming it, no drama involved — as if I’d been performing a perfectly ordinary errand. I left the room then, feeling like I’d done something both foolish and important.
Two weeks after that, Julie called to remind me about her wedding and to say she’d pick me up in the morning. We talked for a bit about the usual things — what to bring, where to meet — and then she laughed when I mentioned “new roommates upstairs.” I didn’t go into details; sometimes a joke is the safest way to answer a worried child.
On the day of the wedding I stood in the reception hall watching Julie dance in her white dress and thought about how she and Anne would have laughed together. The city lights outside the window felt bright and busy — a good reminder that life kept moving. I stayed in town for a couple more days to clear my head.
