Daily Rescue #8

July 30

I make cake-pops for the first time. I upturn a delicious loaf of chocolate banana bread into a bowl, mash it with my hands until it resembles play-dough, then roll the moosh between my palms, pressing and rolling evenly, until little dark planets form in my hands.

The young girl I'm doing this with is eleven. She wants to crack the eggs into the batter, enjoys watching the slime crawl down the metal bowl's sides so much that I tell her put in three, even though the recipe calls for only two.

When I was eleven I ate only bananas and nonfat yogurt for weeks, then months.

But this girl loves cake, and has been drinking the smoothies I make each morning, rich with whole milk, banana, peanut butter and berries—honey if the fruit isn't ripe enough.

While the cake pops firm in the freezer, she sits on a high stool at the kitchen island, taking notes on water dinosaurs. She tells me how big they were, how their flippers were like giant oars, and what their roars really sounded like. "Softer. More like a grunt or a purr." Not at all like the shrieks of Jurassic Park.

When it's time for her to dip the spheres into the melted chocolate, she tells me, "Wait!"

She gets the tiny box of yellow food dye we bought at Walmart, pries open its cardboard seal. I've forgotten.

We've melted the white chocolate in a heat-safe measuring cup—deep and narrow, as directed. When I stir to keep it molten, to keep the chocolate from hardening, my spoon leaves little spiraling ridges in its wake. The memory of each motion, held there in the off-white.

Cate drops the yellow in; one drop, then a fast second and third. The dye looks more orange than yellow, so concentrated.

I should let her stir, let her watch the white morph into what she envisioned. But I am already whisking, hoping the yellow is the right kind—of the banana variety, not highlighter yellow, or rubber-duck.

"Sorry. Here, get the cake pops. You can dip them."

She's waited a long time for this: for when the cake goes from something crumbly and wet, to lollipops of hardened dough, something she can hold and show.

I tell Cate to hold the glass full of yellow chocolate with one hand, and to twirl the cake pop with the other. She nods, her glasses falling farther down her nose.

But a few twirls in, the stabilizing hand leaves, like a child who is jealous of its twin for being assigned the more exciting of tasks.

I keep having to move her hand back to the glass, which is twirling now without the steadying, its warm glass bottom doing circles on the marble with each rotation, like the cream-filmed yogurt top twirls against the hard wooden floor when I let my dog lick it.

Eventually, I hold the glass myself, and watch her two hands twirling, her eyes smiling. Each cold little planet of banana bread disappears beneath the chocolate, turns into a little yellow sun.

"Woah, look!" she says. Cate is tapping the light cake pop with her nail.

The chocolate has already stuck and hardened, its sheen almost entirely matted now.

"How?" She asks me.

I tell her about contrast, about shock. About how the cake is so cold. The chocolate, so warm.

On the plane tomorrow I will take a cake-pop with me in my purse. I will unwrap it from its foil when the pilot reaches a thousand feet, and wonder if the passenger next to me notices.

I will text Cate's mom: They're amazing! Tell Cate, good job!

But I know that, of all the moments Cate and I shared, she will not remember this. She will remember, instead, the crack, the slime, the twirl: the things I let her do with her own hands.

She won't see how quickly the cake-pop disappears. How, when its gone, I take the metal to my mouth, and suck.

Right now, she is researching dinosaurs you don't know the names of. Proving someone wrong about what color scales they really had.

She sighs, looks up from her notebook, shrugs.

"No one can really know."

. . .

August 3

When we’re making our way back up the creek bank, my dog laughs at me.

I've secured his Help-em-Up harness onto his hips, the kind that buckles around his whole front and back, one handle over the shoulder and one over his hips, to assist in car embarking and disembarking; the tool I'll eventually need to use to get him anywhere –to go potty on the grass, to drink from his bowl, to sniff a flower.

When he started ascending the root-bumpy dust, I gripped the back handle, and gave it the slightest pull upward, trying to match what a healthy paw would do, when it pushes off the ground.

This feels natural to my body, similar to the months I spent helping a toddler learn to walk.

I am offering the same grip, the same slight pull upward, the same creek even. His little hands were the handles I pulled. My hands were part of his gravity, his sky. That boy did not mind recruiting a whole body into the work of moving his own.

But Fredo is not a toddler. He does not want to be helped.

He has turned around now, stopped, and is looking at me. He is laughing: his eyes are on mine like elbows on a counter, his ears are thrown back like a neck, mouth wide open, tail wagging. What are you doing?

I stop, shrug. I'm trying to help you, lil boy.

He is 87 pounds, maybe 85 now. Each week, a little less of him.

Now, I'm laughing too. I laugh like I used to laugh with my twin sister, when I did something I thought was cool but which just embarrassed me, and only she saw. The kind of laughing that demands head shaking, and closing of the eyes. The kind that, from afar, looks like crying.

I am kneeling on the dirt next to him now. Now, I am leaning on his harness for support.

Through the redwoods ahead, I see a camp counselor and a pack of kids. They are eating their lunches in the shade of the wooden stage, built inside the grove a few years ago for Shakespeare in The Park.

They hear me and turn—too see. They must expect a mother with her child, laughing about something said, or done, or dropped, between them.

But it’s just Fredo and me. The two of us sitting there on the slanted ground, moving neither forward nor back.

Only now has it become funny to us: We have so much farther to go. We have no idea how we're gonna get there.