Sugar Birds

by Cheryl Grey Bostrom

“Hard to lump them all together, Aggie. Each one is different. Sometimes people get well.”

  Another hope she couldn’t let inside herself. “What are the chances?”

  “I … tend to ignore statistics. You know that.” He grinned at her. “They kept her in a coma for three solid months. Wouldn’t be the first time a brain has healed from all that rest. And everyone we know was praying.”

  He set the salt shaker in front of her and pointed at it. “Imagine this is a benzodiazepine-induced coma.” Then he lifted the pepper shaker to eye level and set it beside the salt. “And this is prayer.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Which one healed her?” He pressed his forearms into the table and leaned toward her. “Does it matter? Nothing short of a miracle, Aggie, straight from the Father.”

  If it lasts. Aggie rocked in her seat.

  That night she screamed her cougar scream again. Burnaby, his hair tousled from sleep, stumbled from his room and turned on the lamp. Dad sat her up, wiped her sweaty face with the cool washcloth Burn brought from the bathroom, and crooned to her.

  “Another one?” Her father stroked her hair and wrapped his arms around her.

  She nodded, whispering. “Worst one yet,” Third time this week.

  Dad held her. This time he didn’t ask her what she’d dreamed. She couldn’t tell him anyway. As always, the terror slipped away as soon as she roused.

  She awoke to the sound of Burnaby’s truck as he left for school the next morning. Seven forty-five. Better than a clock. The nightmare’s residue lingered, and she wished she could fall back to sleep. Mama. Here in two days. She dressed, gathered her homeschool lessons, and walked the trailer’s narrow hallway to the kitchen as her dad hung up the phone, humming.

  “We’re leaving for Seattle at the crack of dawn on Friday. Have a little airport stop before we go to the hospital.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Celia has a long weekend. Teachers’ workshops. She’ll catch a red-eye out tomorrow night and we’ll pick her up before we get your mother Friday morning. She can stay until Tuesday.”

  “Stay here?” Aggie’s chair toppled as she jumped to her feet. An elbow sent her books to the floor as she leaped to hug her dad, who held a skillet of eggs and a spatula in his extended arms.

  “I take it that’s okay with you?”

  “Oh, Dad.” Things were looking up.

  CHAPTER 46 ~ CELIA

  Dreams

  If Cabot hadn’t ruined my knee, I’d have been at a cross-country meet during those teacher curriculum days, but given the incompatibility between healing tendons and competitive running, I had the weekend free for my friend Aggie. Daddy booked my flights.

  She was having nightmares, Harris told me. Bad ones. And she wouldn’t talk about them or about pieces of the trauma that plagued her. He’d taken her to a counselor, but then poor Aggie had really clammed up. And now with Bree coming home? He was at his wits’ end. He’d called Gram, who suggested he call me.

  Aggie. My little bird. After our August days together, I suspected that the flames inside her had more to do with her guilt and her unpredictable mama than her time in the woods, where even God had been kind to her, she said. I didn’t get that whole forgiveness and God thing, but my history told me that mothers will do what mothers will do. So will daughters. And sometimes they wish with all their hearts that they could undo some of it.

  Good luck with that one. No matter what her mother did, unless Aggie learned to show herself some mercy, she’d keep right on screaming. I knew that for a fact. I’d done a fair bit of screaming myself.

  When I walked across the airport’s tarmac, Aggie’s forehead and nose pancaked against an upstairs window in the terminal. She waved with both arms, then ran down the ramp against traffic to hug me and to commandeer a handle on my duffle. Burnaby retrieved my bag from us both, but not before he made true eye contact and smiled. For half a second, but still.

  “Celia.”

  I felt like Queen of the World, even before Harris wrapped his arms around me, smiling wide as the Mississippi watershed.

  “You get my letter, Agate Esther?” I poked her midsection. Still skinny. “I picked out that barn swallow stationery just for you.”

  Aggie blushed, pulled a crinkled letter from her pocket and waved it in front of me.

  “Dang, Ags. You’re supposed to read it and write back, not haul it around. Here I spend the entire month of August with my new friend Aggie, and as soon as I go back to Texas, she drops me like a hot potato. What’ve you been doing for the last six weeks?”

  “Sorry. I didn’t think you’d …” She hung her head, sheepish.

  I squeezed her close to my side as we walked to the car. “Just teasing you, sweet pea. How’re you doing?”

  Before we left the airport parking lot, we talked through the surface of her days: homeschool, the trailer, her birds migrating at the equinox. Then, while Harris steered and Burnaby hunched over his homework in the shotgun seat, she and I sat in the back and, for the entire half-hour drive to Harborview, navigated her most immediate worry: her mother’s burns and physical healing.

  We waited with the car in the hospital loading zone while Harris and Burnaby went inside for Bree. Only then did we begin to rummage around somewhere deeper.

  “Think your mama’s in those nightmares?”

  Aggie shriveled and rubbed her stubby hair. “I can’t tell. Sometimes I remember trees, but not much else. Last night was horrible. I woke up feeling sad and dirty and really scared. Something inside me is so afraid, and I don’t know why.”

  I trotted my fingers on her shoulder. “Sounds like that fire’s still burning.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  I pointed at the hospital entry, where Burnaby and Harris flanked a nurse with Popeye forearms wheeling Aggie’s mother across the lobby. Coming our way. At the car, Burnaby folded the wheelchair footrests and opened Mama’s door. Bree took Harris’s arm and stood, as a grimace crossed her face. Then she placed her hands on the car’s roof, lowered her head and passed her eyes over us, her connection remote.

  “Hello, kids.”

  Quiet. Fragile. She seemed exhausted. Harris helped her sit, buckled her seatbelt, and tucked her caftan around her. A knotty scar showed at the edge of a blue scarf wrapping her head like a turban. She didn’t say more, and nobody tried to make her.

  Harris drove north. Aggie, wedged between me and Burnaby, went silent and held my hand. Burn looked out the window, his legs pleated like an accordion in the cramped back seat. Bree dozed, so I did, too, lulled by Harris’s humming, the red-eye catching up with me.

  Early afternoon, we pulled up in front of a cracker-box trailer near their blackened homesite. At the perimeter’s far edge, a bulldozer and excavator stood ready to scrape away the rubble and start over. Harris helped Bree into the recliner in the sparsely furnished living room and Aggie, her cheeks flushed, spread a quilt across her mother’s legs. I sat at the kitchen table next to a plate of cookies and reached for one.

  Bree shifted in the chair and took in the hand-me-down furniture without comment. Aggie hovered nearby, but her mother was oblivious; the girl could have been invisible. I knew what that felt like. Anyone walking into that room would have tripped on the tension.

  Then Aggie did exactly that.

  “Your favorite, Mama. Chocolate chip oatmeal.” She set a napkin and two cookies on a small table beside her mother’s chair, returned for some milk, then caught her toe on the carpet and spilled the full glass in her mama’s lap.

  Aggie gasped, but Bree’s features stayed flat as she watched the milk soak through the quilt and into her clothes. Aggie ran for a towel, but Harris got there first.

  “Here, love. Let’s get you changed.”

  “I’m tired, Harris. I’d like to lie down.”

  Aggie returned with the towel and held it out to her, but Bree stepped past her, bumped the table and knocked the napkin and trea
ts to the floor.

  For five seconds, the room was as still as the air before a northeaster starts blowing. Except for Bree, all of us—Harris, Burnaby, Aggie, and I—stared at the cookies on the rug. Then I raised my eyes to Aggie.

  Her mouth quivered. She clenched her ragged hair and pulled. A wail began low in her throat.

  “I … didn’t … MEAN … TO!” She screamed the last words. Bree’s eyes widened and locked on her daughter, as if Aggie had suddenly materialized out of nowhere.

  Aggie dropped to the floor. She clawed at the carpet, at the cookies. Ground them into bits between her fingers. Smashed them with her fists as she howled from deep in her guts. “I. DIDN’T. MEAN. TO!” Each word stood like a soldier between her and her mother. Then she humped over, her face against the rug, sobbing. “Mama, Mama, Mama. I am so sorry.”

  “It’s just milk, Aggie.” Bree seemed confused. Didn’t she know about Aggie’s campfire?

  How would she know, unless Harris told her? But he hadn’t. Obviously, he hadn’t.

  “Not the milk, Mama. The fire!” She howled, choking, and threw herself on the sofa, burying her head in the cushions. Burnaby stood near the door, fidgeting with the zipper on his sweatshirt, while I wished I were a mouse. Bree sat on a kitchen chair, her eyebrows tilted with worry. Harris went to Aggie, but she pushed him away and sat up, her eyes squeezed closed.

  “I lit it, Mama. I was mad. Mad. I was trying to be better, I really was, but I lit the fire that burned you and Dad. Ohhh, Mama, Mama. I am so SORRY.”

  The word sorry erupted from her like a train, its horn blaring. Or like a blowtorch.

  And like a broken-winged bird.

  Bree braced herself on the table and stood, pausing for breath before she crossed the room to Aggie, whose eyes roved wild over ceiling and walls, her sides heaving with the pent-up stuff of nightmares. So gingerly, Bree sat on a cushion beside her daughter and laid her hand on Aggie’s knee.

  “My Agate.”

  It was the kindness, I think. At that moment, Aggie found a tear in that enormous curtain between her and forgiveness— and slipped right through it. She buried her face in the folds of her mother’s caftan and sobbed, while Bree traced her ear as if petting a web.

  I didn’t belong there. Edging past Burnaby, I crept outside, where I walked along the river until evening fog settled in, hours later. A melody wound through the trees as I returned uphill to the trailer.

  Someone was playing a fiddle.

  Personally, I know little about God, whoever he is.

  If he is.

  I realize, however, that to some, he’s downright awesome. From Gram’s description, I picture him like a raptor with a sky’s wingspan, exhaling love’s oxygen on his hatchlings, feeding them comfort and truth and power straight from his beak.

  On the other hand, my mother would say that bird sits on people’s backs, the god of heavy loads.

  I’m still perched on the wire about all that.

  But Aggie? I do believe I saw her finally leave one for the other.

  CHAPTER 47 ~ CELIA

  Millie

  A November snowstorm delayed us in Denver, but Daddy and I made it to Gram’s by Thanksgiving noon. When I stepped in the door, Aggie jumped on me, her arms and legs like vines. She was taller, I think, and had gained weight. Her dad limped to us and kissed my cheek. Bree, still gaunt, made her way across the room and hugged me. When I let go, she held on, until Gram approached to take our coats.

  Burnaby gestured behind them, so I rezipped my jacket and followed him to the barn, where Millie, our eagle, was eating frozen mice and raw beef like a celebrity.

  “Four months already, Burn. She using that wing at all?”

  He eased into a ten by twelve-foot pen of vertical wooden slats. Millie flapped awkwardly to a chest-high perch, the jog in her injured wing obvious. “She’s attempting, but the misalignment will prevent her release.”

  “How’d that surgery get so screwed up?”

  “Post-op X-rays looked correct. I suspect she reinjured the wing in transport, but the shift wasn’t evident until she began extending it. By then fibrous tissue interfered with calcification.

  “So she’ll spend her life on a glove, visiting schools.”

  “Not if I correct it.”

  “You’re making me nervous.”

  He exited the pen. “I talked to Jack Seamus about her when he was dehorning calves.”

  “He’s a dairy vet. What’s he know about eagles?”

  “He knows avian anesthesia.”

  “Burnaby, you can’t.”

  Or maybe he could. Millie lifted her nape feathers and glared at us, then hopped back to her meal. The thought of her never flying again made my stomach hurt. “What if she—”

  He looked me square in the face and spoke softly. “I’ll keep you informed, Celia.”

  In December we were back in Washington. Burn joined Daddy and me outside the courtroom as we waited for Cabot’s trial to begin. “So how’s Millie?” I asked. I hadn’t heard a peep from him since Thanksgiving.

  “Still researching procedures.”

  No time to ask him more. As he checked a clipboard on a nearby table, the bailiff opened the doors, and everyone’s attention shifted to the judge’s bench. Over the next two days, witnesses spilled out facts, attorneys jockeyed, and Cabot stared at his hands.

  Until I took the stand.

  While I answered the public defender’s questions, Cabot’s muddy eyes bored into mine until I thought his retinae would combust. His aggression heightened my resolve to stay strong. I said my piece and stared right back at him. He didn’t scare me anymore, and my body agreed; I could breathe just fine.

  His attorney’s defense leaked like a colander. Cabot didn’t testify. The man was toast, and three days later everyone knew it. The judge found him guilty of felony assault with a deadly weapon, unlawful imprisonment, grand larceny, and a meaty misdemeanor or two. As the deputy led him from the courtroom, his gaze locked on me, his eyes loaded with emotions I didn’t try to read.

  And then he was gone. I let relief wash over me, hoping he could start over one day.

  The trial ended as Christmas break began, so Daddy and I stayed in Washington through the holidays. Every time I visited Millie huddled in her pen, I fought a wish to break Cabot’s arm and see how he liked it. I told Burnaby as much. My call to her original surgeon about further repairs went nowhere. “Too fragile … high risk.” Blah, blah. And impossibly expensive.

  I half-wished Burnaby and Jack would try. I told Burn that, too, but he just shrugged and threw her another rat. I couldn’t stand it.

  I spent my last three days of vacation talking and prowling the woods with Aggie. Sleeping in that trundle bed she stored under hers. She didn’t scream once.

  The day before I left, she woke up brave.

  “Owls are nesting, Mama. Great Horned.”

  “Aggie, it’s snowing.”

  “She’s started laying. I have to see.”

  Bree walked to a window facing the woods. “How high?”

  “Thirty feet.”

  “Use the harness?”

  “I will.” Aggie took safety gear from the hook by the door and tossed me my parka. “C’mon, Celia. Show ya.”

  I hadn’t been home a week before a letter arrived from Burnaby, his script tiny, precise.

  Celia,

  Two-hour surgery on Millie complete. Pulled errant rod. Resectioned. Retained bone length. Placed external metal fixator with seven pins.

  Sincerely,

  Burnaby

  I ran to the phone and dialed. His dad answered.

  “Harris! Burnaby there?”

  “Hey, Celia. He’s at work. You okay?”

  “He operated? Seriously?”

  “That he did.” Harris laughed. “The day you left. They didn’t tell anyone beforehand. Glad I didn’t know.”

  “How is she?”

  “Came home from the clinic yesterday afternoon. Hop
ping around her pen and wants to bite everyone. Only been a week, but by all appearances, she won’t be any worse off than before. Jack said your grandmother nearly took both his and Burnaby’s heads off for not asking her to assist.”

  Seriously. I wanted to clobber that Burnaby. And kiss him.

  Six weeks later, his next letter showed up.

  Dear Celia,

  Cabot is dead.

  Burnaby

  Gram filled me in by phone. After two months at McNeil Island Corrections Center, Cabot escaped from a work detail outside prison walls. Searchers figured he hid in a marsh until nightfall, then tried to swim to the mainland. He drowned alone in cold, murky water that hid his body for thirty-six hours.

  The Hayes’ line rang eight times before I hung up. I waited fifteen minutes and dialed again. Where was Burnaby? Oh, I wanted to hear his voice. To hear what he felt when he learned of Cabot’s death. What colors did he see? Were the trees indigo? The sky bronze? His hands gray? If I were to see feelings like he did, would all color drain from my world?

  I held his letter in my lap and relived summer’s iridescent green days, and laughing yellow ones. Would the day Cabot died be yellow? No, not for Burn. He hated death. He wanted to see things resurrected, restored.

  I loved that about him.

  I smoothed the paper and cried. Such a waste. Cabot fought his pain with the wrong weapons, and they took him down. I shuddered at how I nearly did the same, and thought of Meredith, and that baby she carried for a while. Thought of how we had nothing to say to each other anymore.

  Then it dawned on me that we’re all sugar birds, every single one of us. All scratching far and wide for the sweet seed that will satisfy our deepest hunger. I called Gram back with that epiphany. Asked her if she thought I’d ever find mine. If she’d ever found hers.

  “Hmm.” I could hear the smile in her intonation before she switched metaphors on me. “Pearl of great price,” she said. “Remind me to tell you that story when I can look in your eyes.”