Byrd Page 8

  That night Claree gets a long-distance call from Sam, who’s in Arizona, visiting his wife’s family. Margaret’s parents live in the desert outside Tucson. Claree has never been to Tucson. She’s never seen a desert. She has never been outside North Carolina. She thinks of deserts not as places but as blanks between places.

  Sam is talking about some cactus-tree park Margaret’s parents took them to. He’s talking fast, like he’s afraid of running out of breath. “They’re fifty feet tall, some of them. They look almost human. Like giants.”

  “They aren’t real trees,” Claree says.

  “What?”

  “Cactuses. They aren’t real trees.” She lights a cigarette and wishes he weren’t having such a good time. She has been losing him since the day he was born. “Cacti, I mean.”

  Margaret’s parents live in a fake-adobe house, Claree has seen pictures, with a swimming pool and a patio and a built-in barbecue grill. They’re all sitting by the pool now. It’s earlier there. The sun is just going down. Claree pictures them in lounge chairs, Margaret and her parents drinking their beer out of glasses, snacking on corn chips and salsa, watching their big Western sunset, and Sam sitting off to one side, talking on the phone, saying things he wants them to hear even though they’re pretending not to listen. In the background, Margaret’s father laughs his deep, confident, businessman laugh. He impressed everyone at the wedding—so relaxed, so smooth with jokes, so tanned. Claree pictures him in expensive leather sandals. Getting up to throw steaks on the grill. She knows Sam will have to hang up soon.

  “Your father left me at the chicken place this evening,” she says.

  “He what?”

  “He stayed in the car while I went in to get our dinner. When I came out, he wasn’t there. Apparently he thought he could slip over to the VFW for another drink and get back before I missed him, but then he forgot about me. I waited and waited, but he never came. I had to walk home through Parkertown.”

  “Why didn’t you call somebody?”

  “I wasn’t scared. I was too mad to be scared. I got home with our chicken and there was his car, in the Davenports’ front yard, parked right in the middle of their big pink camellia. And him still sitting behind the wheel.”

  “You should have called somebody. You should have called Addie.”

  “She’s an hour away.”

  “Forty minutes.”

  “She doesn’t want to be bothered.” She is trying not to let him hear how let down she is, and not only by Addie. “You know, she hasn’t been home all summer? Every time we talk it’s a different excuse. Busy at work, sick with a cold, something. She won’t say what’s really wrong, but I know. It’s your father. I think she stays away because of him.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “He’s fine. When I got to him he was calm as could be. Sitting in that big bush like he was stopped in traffic, waiting for the light to change.”

  In a hospital room in Greensboro, the baby is coming.

  After eleven hours of contractions, Addie asks for an epidural. The drugs turn her blood to ice water. She starts to shiver. Then the lower half of her goes numb—solid, dentist’s-office numb. Then they stretch her legs apart, sit her up, drop the bottom out of the bed and tell her to push.

  She pushes.

  She can’t tell what’s happening with the baby because she can’t feel anything from her rib cage down, but she pushes anyway, until she thinks the top of her head will explode. For an hour and a half she pushes, until she’s running a fever of a hundred and two.

  In the end they have to do a C-section. They take her to the operating room and lay her on a narrow table and put clips on her fingers. The doctor leans over and assures her there’s nothing to fret about. The doctor’s big face looks freshly scrubbed. Her gray hair is tucked into a cap. “You’ll feel a twitch,” she says, “like when your eye jumps.”

  Addie can’t see what’s happening, but when they open her, there is a smell like meat gone bad.

  Then someone says, “We’ve got him.”

  Addie isn’t allowed to hold him because of her incision. The nurse has to hold him up above her draping. The nurse is short, her arms a cradle of fat. “Your son,” she says, smiling proudly.

  Addie draws in her breath.

  Whatever she’d been expecting, it wasn’t this. It wasn’t him. His face isn’t shriveled but smooth and pink. His hair is a mat of dark wet feathers. His eyes are fierce. Addie raises her head to kiss him, but misses, and kisses the nurse’s hand instead. Then the nurse carries him away. Addie can hear him down the hall, his hungry, hopeless squawking.

  She names him Byrd. With a Y, like an open beak.

  “This probably isn’t the best time to mention it,” Sam says to Claree, “but Margaret and I are thinking of moving.”

  “Where?”

  “Out here. Where it’s dry. Where I can breathe.”

  “I don’t understand, honey. Plenty of people with asthma live in North Carolina. Isn’t your medicine working?”

  “Sure, it’s all working just fine, all the steroids and inhalers. Also ruining my liver. Didn’t you read the book I sent?”

  “I was going to,” Claree says. It isn’t that she doesn’t take Sam’s asthma seriously; she just doesn’t like to think about it all the time. “What about an air purifier? I’ve heard there’s a new one on the market like they use in hospitals. I’ve heard it removes dust and moisture and everything.”

  Sam doesn’t answer. Claree knows this silence by heart.

  “I just worry you won’t be happy in the desert,” she says, “with no trees. You love trees. When you were small your favorite place was the woods. We bought that yellow teepee and set it up in the woods, and you and Addie practically moved in. That was before the Davenports bought the lot next door, remember? Remember the summer you found the bird? A robin with a broken wing, and we built a cage for it next to the teepee, and you and Addie spent all summer nursing it, digging up worms and feeding it until it could fly.”

  “It was a blue jay.”

  She lights another cigarette, sighs into the receiver. “I still think about that lot next door. We should have bought it when we had the chance, before the Davenports cut down your woods.”

  “Did you know,” Sam says, “that most kids whose parents smoke get asthma sooner or later?”

  “That can’t be true. Where did you hear that?”

  “Something like sixty-five percent. It was in the book I sent you.”

  “Does this book say anything about air purifiers? Because I’ve heard the new one is supposed to take everything out of the air.”

  Non–Identifying Information

  Dear Byrd,

  My social worker, Janet Worry (not her real name), says I should write you letters. She doesn’t know I’ve been writing you all along.

  She says a lot of her mothers (that’s how she talks, “my mothers”) have trouble getting started. Some copy out favorite poems or song lyrics. Some send greeting cards.

  “Greeting cards?” I said.

  “It’s a start,” she said.

  “What do your mothers write about?” I said.

  “Everything,” she said, “anything. Sometimes it’s easiest to start with the facts, details of the child’s birth. Whatever you think your child might like to know. Just be careful to leave out any identifying information.”

  On the day you were born, J.D. took me to the hospital and went with me to the maternity floor. The carpet in the elevator smelled like iodine. One stop before ours, an orderly got on pushing a woman on a gurney. The woman’s arms were covered with needle bruises. She had a high, weak voice, and she kept asking the orderly, “Why are you doing this, why are you doing this?”

  They took me to a room and put me in a bed and J.D. came in and planted himself in the recliner and turned on the TV, some show about dolphins. I watched him watching. I watched the dolphins in his glasses. The room smelled like him. I felt safe. Then a nurse came in a
ll crisp and efficient and said to him, “Are you the father?”

  “The driver,” he said.

  “Maybe you’d like to wait in the waiting room.”

  J.D. stood up. He looked like Paul Bunyan. He came and stood over my bed and laid his hand on the top of my head like he had something to tell me. “Let me know how the show comes out,” he said.

  He waited fourteen hours before they called him to the nursery. Could you see him there, pressing his big face to the glass? He said he knew without asking which one was you. He said you looked like me, sort of, and sort of like the man on the dolphin channel.

  Three days later he took me home. He had a present waiting for me, a grab-box from his latest estate sale. Grab-boxes are how the sale companies clear out a person’s small, junky items that can’t be sold by themselves. Twenty-five, fifty cents, you take your chances. J.D. had gotten me a fifty-cent box. It had a pot of dead chrysanthemums, a glass frog for flower-arranging, a crocheted Kleenex-box cover, three shrimp forks, and a pair of ladies’ worn-out terry cloth slippers still attached by a plastic thread. J.D. shoved his big feet in the slippers and tried inching along in them. “Here she is trying to get to the telephone,” he said. He wanted to make me laugh, and I wanted to. But I could only picture the old woman from the hospital elevator, the one who kept asking, Why are you doing this?

  Dear Byrd,

  Dolphins help women have babies, and not just by swimming around on TV screens in hospital rooms.

  There’s a man in Russia, a famous midwife who delivers babies underwater, in the Black Sea. He says dolphins are attracted to mothers. It’s like they know. When a woman gives birth, the dolphins gather around her, smiling the way dolphins do, and lift the baby on their long noses and carry it up to the surface where it can breathe.

  Dear Byrd,

  When I was growing up there was a strange old man who lived next door to my grandparents. Mr. Junius Beck. When my family went for our Sunday afternoon visits, my brother and I would slip over to Mr. Beck’s. He lived in a small white house with artificial flowers stuck in the ground outside the front door, his plastic garden. He would invite us inside and offer us candy hard as fossils. Then he’d take out his family album, a green notebook worn at the edges, and turn to a picture of his wife and infant daughter, who had died years earlier from a gas leak while he was away from home. He had photographed them at their funeral—in the picture, they were lying together in a coffin in their frilly clothes. “Here’s Annie Mae and the baby in the corpse,” he would say. My brother and I knew better than to laugh at his wrong word. Even as children we knew enough to say, “We’re sorry, we’re so sorry.” The words seemed to work like a drug. Mr. Beck would let out a little sigh, a soft, rumbling sound from deep in his throat. Then he would close the picture album, set it back on the shelf, pass us the candy jar and let us fill our pockets.

  We kept up this creepy Sunday ritual for a long time—months—until our parents learned about it and ordered us not to go back.

  I didn’t think about Mr. Beck again for years. Not until after you were born.

  I was in pain from the surgery. Every part of me felt raw. I had nothing left of you, not even a picture in an album. I had a constant lump in my throat. No one sent get-well cards or brought casseroles because no one knew. I didn’t expect or deserve sympathy.

  I didn’t lure unsuspecting children with candy. But I came to understand why Mr. Beck did. How sad and guilty and lost he must have felt. How he must have craved our pure, sweet, unjudging “I’m sorry”s.

  Dear Byrd,

  Janet Worry expects me to turn my letters over to her, not keep them in a shoebox on a shelf in my closet. It’s an Easy Spirit box, the one my black suede boots came in.

  Janet isn’t old but she always looks tired, like she isn’t quite ready for whatever is happening. On the day you were born, she wore a sleeveless dress to the hospital. I could see powderpuffs of dark hair under her arms. Her dress was wrinkled. The papers she took out of her satchel were wrinkled. She sat on the edge of my bed and petted my arm and said “There, there,” like she understood how I felt. Social workers think they know you. They don’t want you to tell them things. None of the forms Janet gave me to fill out asked why I was giving you up.

  She didn’t come to the hospital until after the nurse had taken you away; that was the rule. I asked her if I could see you again to say a proper good-bye. She said that’s what the letters were for.

  Dear Byrd,

  If I were going to send you song lyrics I would choose the song your father played for me the last time I saw him. We were in his apartment, I was packing to leave, and he said there was something he wanted me to hear before I went. I thought he meant something he’d written (he’s a musician), but he put on a record by Gladys Knight and the Pips. He set the needle to the last song on side one, “Till I See You Again.”

  Gladys’s voice on the song is sometimes smooth and velvety, sometimes raw and brokenhearted. She is saying good-bye, but not forever. Her friend is leaving but he’s coming back. Until he does, she’s going to wait for him, dream about him, save up all her love and put her life on hold for him.

  Your father danced with me in his kitchen. He leaned me against the counter. We knocked over a glass. It rolled onto the floor and broke, but we didn’t stop, we kept dancing, through the key change, through Gladys’s call-and-response with the Pips, all the way to the end of the song, when the record began to skip—“again-gain-gain.”

  Your father gave me the album as a going-away present. On the cover is a picture of a barefoot child looking up at gnarly trees. Your father signed it the same way he’d signed my high school yearbook, with his first and last names, as if I might forget.

  Dear Byrd,

  You were born in one place but conceived in another, a faraway place near an ocean. There was a man there who swallowed fire. He would light a long stick and put it in his mouth and people would clap and cheer and drop money in his box.

  Everybody in that place went around on wheels—skates, skateboards, scooters, bicycles, unicycles. I saw a two-legged dog with wheels where his back legs should have been, his own little built-in chariot.

  It almost never rained there. When it did, your father told me, children stayed home from school.

  Dear Byrd,

  This is what my astrologer says about you: You are a Virgo, with a probing mind and a head for logic. You are older than your years. “Like Tom Sawyer,” my astrologer said. “Or was it Huck Finn?”

  Your moon is in Aquarius, which means you will feel different from other people, like you don’t fit in, which can be a problem because your sun is in Virgo, so you’ll want to fit in. (I have a lot of Virgo in me, so this is something I understand.)

  Most of your planets are in the western hemisphere, the hemisphere of fate, as opposed to the hemisphere of self-determination. Your life feels like something that happens to you regardless of what you do. This is also true for me. People come into our lives mysteriously and become important in ways we don’t understand.

  I can guess what you’re thinking: why would I confide in an astrologer? I don’t even know if he’s a good astrologer. He’s a thin, ghosty man with gray skin, damp hands, and a voice that cracks. He wears a huge wristwatch and clothes that don’t match, plaids with plaids. He is so dour that if he ever smiles his face looks like it’s breaking.

  But he is trustworthy. I can tell him things and he won’t betray me, because he has no one to betray me to. He is the most alone person I know.

  Your moon is in the tenth house, which means you have a strong emotional bond with your mother.

  “Which mother?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Anything You Love

  A thunderstorm follows Bryce to Greensboro. He’s driving to his meeting, listening to the radio, some tired country song turned up loud so he can hear it over the thumping windshield wipers. It’s a long drive, especially in the rain. He
doesn’t mind.

  Claree once asked him why he didn’t go to the meeting in Carswell. He said, are you kidding?

  He exits onto Holden Road. The church comes up fast on the left, a brick building in the shape of a triangle. Lutheran.

  He is the first to arrive. He turns on the lights in the fellowship hall, a big room in the basement with humming fluorescent lights, waxy floors, painted brick walls, a cross, a plastic tree, and a lectern they don’t use because this meeting is open discussion, not speakers. He makes the coffee and sets out Sty-rofoam cups. He unpacks the literature and spreads it on a table along the wall, props posters on easels, unfolds metal chairs. He likes the sound they make, a gentle creak creak. It gives him a sense of purpose. He’s been sober nineteen days, his longest stretch yet, and he’s craving a sense of purpose. He has never felt so empty. His insides burn.

  Gradually the others come in, shake off their umbrellas, pour themselves coffee. They pull their chairs into a circle and wait, talk to each other quietly, their voices steady as the rain outside. Finally Irv looks at the clock and says it’s time. A big man, Irv, with a big voice. Retired military. The meeting is supposed to be leaderless but Irv always leads. “Let’s open with the Serenity Prayer,” he says.

  Bryce looks down without closing his eyes. He looks at the circle of shoes. Running shoes, muddy brogans, loafers, Top-siders with curled toes, his own zip-up ankle boots. Sandals, giant leather sandals with black socks—Irv. Bryce has always believed you can judge a man by his shoes. But they aren’t supposed to judge in the program. They’re supposed to accept and be grateful for each other. In the program, all their thoughts are supposed to be like prayers. Thy socks and thy sandals, they comfort me.