The Confusion of Laurel Graham

by Adrienne Kisner

  “His head. I totally think your bird has a crest.”

  “And he was gray? But that would make him a breed of titmouse? A cedar waxwing?”

  “I don’t know about the gray part. It’s so bright.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Fuck.”

  “Fuck,” Risa agreed.

  “But crested helps, right?” said Sophie. “Doesn’t that narrow it down a little bit?”

  “It could. If it’s actually crested,” I said.

  “I stand by that. It’s the gray part I’m not sure about.” Risa sniffed. “Get any pictures, Laurel?”

  I looked at the viewscreen on my camera. “No. Maybe there’s a tuft there. But then maybe this is part of the tree. The stupid leaves block anything helpful. The sky pictures just make him a UFO.” Sophie put her arm around me. It would be hard having her gone for the rest of the summer.

  “He was tufted,” Risa said again. “Why don’t you believe me?”

  “It’s not that I don’t believe he might be,” I said. “I think Gran … I mean … it’s not what I’d think she’d…”

  “But like you said it’s bright,” said Sophie to Risa.

  “Sure. Right,” Risa said. She tilted her head at me curiously.

  I kept trying to breathe. I could make this okay. I could make this okay. I could figure out the tufted (?!?) bird. Sophie put a hand on my shoulder.

  “Do you need—” Risa stopped. She raised an eyebrow at Sophie. “Actually, I should get going. I have stuff to do.”

  “Don’t you want to go to city hall to see their proposal?” I said, getting ahold of myself.

  “Um. I’ll leave you to it?” she said. She didn’t sound sure. But she looked from Sophie to me and back again and then turned away.

  “Oh. Okay?” I said as Risa walked in the opposite direction toward the library.

  “What was that about?” I said to Sophie. “Was it because I questioned her bird identification powers? I wasn’t trying to be a jerk.”

  Sophie shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe she really did have something else she had to do.”

  “I guess.”

  “Let’s go to city hall ourselves.”

  “Good plan. I don’t want Bill Andrews of Channel Four Action Live to forget about us,” I said.

  Sophie and I walked up to the information desk and who should be sitting there but Birdie Bro in chief, Greg.

  “Oh, hi, Greg.”

  “Hey, Laura. How can I help you?”

  “Laurel. My name is Laurel. Same as it’s been for the last decade we’ve been speaking to one another. And we are here to see the proposal for the combined school district. Or the plans for developing the school site. Or whatever.”

  Greg raised an eyebrow. “Which is it?”

  “Which is what?” said Sophie.

  “What do you want to see? Do you want to see the merger plans? Or the site specs? Or any of the other fifteen reports related to it.”

  “Um. How about all of them?” I said.

  “Okay.” He pointed. “You will need to fill out a form for each of the files that you want to request. I’ll need the goldenrod copy. You can keep the green for your records. There is a three-dollar fee per request. Each will be available in two to four operating business days. But this window is only open twice a week in the summer.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I said.

  “What?” he said.

  “I have to fill out one form per report? And I have to pay to see them?”

  “Technically the reports are free. But it takes clerical time to pull them, refile them, et cetera.”

  “Aren’t you a volunteer? Why does it cost money? You work for free.” I knew the bros had private school service hours to work in the summer to make them More Responsible Citizens.

  “That’s beside the point,” he said. “This is the policy.”

  “Greg. Buddy. They are trying to tear down the woods and wetlands. Don’t you know that? You work here. Surely you heard that.” He looked surprised at that, but I figured appealing to the illusion that he had some sort of power and privilege might make him more friendly. “The birds. The nature. Could you do me a solid and just get a couple of the reports? I’ll look at them right here and give them back.” I had wanted to make copies, but it would make sense just to take pictures with my phone. “Dude. Think of the herons. Think of Fauna. Shunksville will lose its renown as a migratory site!”

  He hesitated. I thought I got him with that last one. “Nope. Sorry. Rules are rules. I’ll get in trouble. But I’m open for another half hour, so if you fill this out, maybe I can get you something.”

  “A half an hour? Then when are you open again?”

  “Wednesday.”

  “How are people supposed to look at these reports if you can only get them once every other month for a million dollars?” said Sophie.

  “Don’t get hysterical, ladies. It’s just the way it is. A few bucks and a few days have never seemed to bother anyone else.”

  “Goddamn it, don’t you care about the pond?” I said.

  Greg opened his mouth, but I didn’t want to hear whatever he had to say. “Forget it. I have the form. I’ll fill it out.” I grabbed one of the carbon copy sheets from a tray by Greg’s window. Sophie and I went to two spectacularly uncomfortable orange plastic chairs near the door.

  “These chairs smell like puke,” observed Sophie.

  “This whole process smells like puke,” I said. I scribbled in my name, address, phone number, and all of the other irrelevant information to my purpose for being there. “Remind me to register to vote as soon as humanly possible after I turn eighteen. And possibly run for public office. This is shit.” I ran over to Greg’s station. He was reading a comic book with his feet up on the desk.

  “It costs three dollars to pull you away from X-Men,” I said.

  “I’ll waive the fee this time. I have the authority to do that.” He smirked. He took my form. “You didn’t say what form you want,” he said.

  “Do you know what one I want?”

  He thought for a second. “Well. That depends where you want to start. Probably the most helpful might be the sites survey? But there’s one for each place. Maybe the joint school district proposal, too. But I don’t know the report numbers. You’ll need those.”

  “Well, how do I get them, Greg?” I said.

  Fuck, did this kid have a future in bureaucracy.

  “They’d be in the online database. Eventually. If they were filed within the last week or two, those won’t be online yet.”

  A wall clock over Greg’s window loudly ticked seconds of my life toward Greg closing at noon.

  “Goddamn it, Greg. I’m trying to save fucking birds.”

  “You know, I hear that now. I do. But the file room is huge and packed. I hate it. I only know how to look stuff up by the numbers.”

  “Do you know how to navigate the site where these numbers are?” Sophie calmly chimed in.

  “Kind of. It’s not a great interface.” Greg leaned toward the screen in front of him and typed something on his keyboard. “Okay. I went by date range, because you probably want recent documents. There are six. Two have to do with the new pipes that everyone will have to pay to hook up.”

  “Maybe I should tell my boy Bill Andrews of Action Live about that, too,” I said to Sophie.

  “There are two new ones. One on record from Martintown about school site availability. One from here about the proposed school district merger. Which one do you want me to pull?”

  “Can you do both?”

  “I’m off the clock in ten.”

  “Damn it, Greg…”

  “We’ll take the merger one. Thanks,” said Sophie.

  “564199b,” Greg said, pointing to the form.

  I wrote the number in the little boxes for him. He ripped off the green sheet and handed it to me.

  “Be right back,” he said. He disappeared behind a dark wooden door and reemerged a few minutes later.
“You have five minutes,” he said.

  I sighed and took the folder he held out in front of him. I got out my phone and took pictures of all twenty pages. Sophie took them, too, just for good measure.

  I handed the folder back at 11:59 a.m. “Thanks,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “And you’ll be back on Wednesday?”

  “No. I’m only Friday. My boy Brett will be here, though. Bring cash or a money order. He can’t waive the fees.”

  “Super. Thanks.” Sophie and I turned, and I rolled my eyes to her. “Do you think we’ll find anything useful in all that mumbo jumbo?” I asked her when we got outside.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I should have gone for the Martinsville one.”

  “Don’t second-guess yourself. Without you, I probably would have been arrested for trying to strangle Greg. I’m going to miss you while you’re at your fancy art camp.”

  “Back at ya,” she said. “Use the sadness in your art. Shoot weeping willows. Mourning doves. Et cetera. Or maybe take yourself a lover.”

  “Uh-huh. I’ll get right on that,” I said.

  We grabbed our bikes from the rack at the park. Sophie waved as she turned onto her driveway. I debated about going to see Gran after grabbing some lunch at home. But then I walked into the living room to find Mom on the couch with some rando guy, looking disheveled. Like, just made-out-with-rando-guy-on-the-couch disheveled.

  Barf.

  “Oh, hello, Laurel!” she said, like it was a surprise I should be coming into my own house. “I wasn’t expecting you to be home.”

  Clearly.

  “Hi,” I said. I looked Mom’s latest up and down. Short. Salt-and-pepper hair, as Mom tended to like. Beard, as Mom also liked. Dude was one part miniature lumberjack, one part hipster. More downy than a blond-crested woodpecker.

  That reminded me that I really ought to fill Gran’s birdfeeders next time I got the chance. Bet the fucking Sciurus scourge had taken out the last suet batch I’d put out already.

  “This is Brad,” she said.

  “Howdy, ma’am,” he said to me, holding out a hand. “Your mama talks a lot about you.”

  Oh. Cowboy? That was a first. Guy named Brad? Notsomuch.

  “Hello, Brad,” I said.

  “You can take a guy out of Texas, but you can’t take Texas out of the guy,” he said.

  “Good to know,” I said.

  He smiled. He didn’t seem too bad. I gave him about a week. Though it was still spring mating season, so maybe two.

  “I was just stopping in to grab something,” Mom said. “Brad and I are going out. I’ll be right back.” She looked at me hopefully, as if asking me to behave.

  “Sure, Mom.”

  Mom disappeared up the stairs and the new dude and I looked at one another.

  “So what do you for work?” he drawled.

  “I go to school,” I said. “I’m seventeen.”

  “Good for you!” he said. “Have you considered the 401(k) options there?”

  “What’s a 401(k)?”

  “It’s for retirement. I imagine you are thinking about that?”

  “Can’t say that I am. I think I have to graduate first. And that’s like a year away.”

  “Oh. I see. Never too early to start planning, you know. Do much hunting? You look like the kinda girl who can take names when needed.”

  I didn’t want to like this guy, but the accent made everything he said sound friendly. “I only shoot things with a camera,” I said.

  “Fair.” He nodded. “I hate hunting, too. More of an opera guy, you know?”

  I stared at him, baffled.

  Mom clattered down the stairs with more noise than usual, warning me to her presence. She looked less disheveled.

  “Done!” she said. “Everything good, Laurel?”

  “We were discussing her investment portfolio,” he said. “Nice to meet you, ma’am.” He shook my hand again.

  “Thank you for the sound financial advice,” I said.

  Mom gave a grateful smile and they left.

  Mom is dating a hipster cowboy from Texas, I texted to Sophie.

  Pictures or it didn’t happen, she texted back.

  Next time, I said, knowing that I might never see that poor fucker again.

  I sank onto a chair, not wanting to put my butt on whatever had been happening between Mom and hipster cowboy moments before my arrival. I scrolled through the pictures of the report. They were too tiny, so I uploaded them to the cloud and looked on my laptop. Words swam in front of me. It seemed that Shunksville was a “tenable merger site solution.” But Martintown was central to both of the other districts. Richburg had more land and better public transportation. It had just built a new school five years ago and could build another close by. Shunksville didn’t seem to have … anything, exactly. But at the end of the report, it suggested Shunksville as the town best suited for the combined school. A footnote to the last sentence read, “For site viability see documents 964392c; 837566a; 736450b.” I wrote those numbers down on a Post-it note to look up on Wednesday.

  Got a report from city hall. Maybe interesting stuff? I texted Risa. I cut and paste all of the photos into a PDF and saved it to the cloud. I texted her a copy.

  She didn’t reply.

  I should really go see Gran. Or go out to take pictures. Or something. It was early on one of the first days of summer vacation. The temperate bird-perfect weather called from outside my window. But a piece inside me gave way from the constant pushing of forces outside me. The politicians and their stupid paperwork held hostage by Greg and goldenrod forms. Sophie going away. Risa being weird again. I tried to force my usual optimism to the front of my brain, but nothing felt good or right. I surfed the web, looking for inspiration. I stopped on the site for Jenkins Wood. Stones and rabbits and a robin eating berries greeted me. Gran and the birders were on the “Seen at…” page. After enough scrolling, I found a picture of a party at Gran’s place. The Friends of Sarig Pond used it like a kind of clubhouse, having meetings and things there. I’d loved those, despite their vegan activist eccentricities. (They served kale and things with “live cultures in it, Laurel! It’s so good for you!” and wouldn’t take no for an answer.)

  The house. It waited. Like Gran. Gran would always wait for me. In the form of an elusive-as-shit tufted motherfucking bird possibly, but still. Waiting. And there was something fishy going on with the mayor and deputy and guys in suits wanting to take out my woods and my pond. I couldn’t wait. I had to act. I grabbed my camera and headed out to go back to the woods.

  If I couldn’t find the answer in my own head, there was always a chance it lay in nature, where the best things tended to be.

  FIELD JOURNAL ENTRY

  JUNE 4

  It is nearly impossible to move some hospital beds. The kind that held Gran was designed to be moved; it had wheels. But it was also plugged into the wall. A lot of things now connected to Gran also required electricity, so there were a lot of wires to deal with. She had these massage things on her legs that undulated up and down, simulating the movement an active life ought to have been providing her. There were monitors for her heart, blood pressure, and oxygen. There was a vent to push the monitored oxygen in and out of her lungs. There were bags to collect various fluids. I don’t know if they had electrical cords, maybe the body just shot pee directly into the bag, but there were several tubes that you had to watch out for. All of this meant that my grand plan to move her closer to the window wasn’t going to be a one-woman job. And her nurse wasn’t convinced that this would aid in her recovery.

  “She’s a birder. A nature enthusiast. Fresh air would do her good,” I said.

  “Honey, even if we wanted to, we can’t take her outside.”

  “No, I know that. But maybe we could just push her over a little. So real sunshine could hit her face. Maybe the summer breeze?”

  “We shouldn’t open that.” The nurse looked skeptically over at the window. “It’s
climate controlled in here, and there is an air filtration system. It’s better for her this way.”

  I frowned. I wasn’t going to win. “Okay,” I said. The nurse checked Gran’s roommate and walked out.

  Nurse Joykill was wrong. There were no more potentially harmful pathogens floating around in the air outside than there were in the hospital, surely. People went in and out of patients’ rooms all the time. Bringing food and changing sheets and giving medicine. All the gloves and hand sanitizer in the world couldn’t stop all things from getting passed around. Outside might have weird crap from the mills or something, but Gran had managed to survive that for a buttload of decades; it wasn’t going to end her now. Pollen was as good for the soul as it was bad for my sinuses. I decided to take matters into my own hands and get these ladies some ventfuls of summertime to help them out.

  But then I realized the window was painted shut.

  Utterly defeated, I went to work at the Nature Center. Risa had been away and incommunicado since the park incident. Jerry had said that she would be away on vacation with her family, but when I got there, she was weeding the Nature Center herb garden.

  “There you are,” I said. “Your hair…”

  She looked up at me.

  “Raven?” I said.

  “Just felt like black,” she said.

  “No vacation?” I asked.

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  “Jerry said you were going vacation,” I said.

  “Oh. Right. Jerry. Yeah. I did say that.”

  “You aren’t?” I asked.

  “It’s a long story,” she said.

  I plopped down on the ground beside her. A weird vibe hung in the air between us, and I wondered how it could be my fault. I automatically blamed the Birdie Bros. “Well, I have time.”

  “I don’t really want to talk about it.” She turned her back to me, and started ripping out weeds with gusto.

  “Uh. Are you okay?” I said.

  “I’m fine. Don’t you have to go see your girlfriend?” she said. “Or mess with somebody’s pictures or something? I gotta do this.”

  “Girlfriend? I don’t have a girlfriend. You mean Sophie?” I laughed. “She’s my best friend. We’d never be a thing. She likes dicks. Figuratively and literally, in my experience.” It was true. Sophie liked penises attached to some of the biggest idiots I’d ever met. I’d introduce her to some of the cuter Birdie Bros, if it wouldn’t surely cause a part of my soul to die.