by Alan Cumyn
The place could get along just fine without her for a day.
And now this!
She cradled him, afraid to break something. His wings did seem to fold properly, but his beak drooped, his neck chafed in the security bracelet, there seemed little left of him. Where were those glowing pecs? His eyes were teary. He felt like he was made of kindling.
“Are you hurting somewhere?”
He rubbed his beak against her arm in reply, like a dolphin nudging her. His breathing sounded squeaky, shallow.
“I’m just going to put you to bed. Have they fed you? Are you famished?”
His eyes brightened. She couldn’t tell if it was by accident or in reply to her mention of food. What did they have? Smoked salmon in the fridge. Her father’s disgusting store of kipper snacks. Some frozen fish sticks for Jonathan.
She carried him down the hall. He was light, light in her arms, but he felt warm—feverish?—and Shiels breathed in the deep, rich, seaside smell of him. Was he used to flying all the way to the ocean to feed? He seemed happy to snuggle into her chest and to close his eyes. Maybe he was reveling in her smell too? What did she smell like?
Bed. Fitful sleep. Cellular-level exhaustion.
What did she have to feel tired about? Nothing. Pyke was here in her arms. It was like a dream, but there were her actual feet on the hardwood floor, that was her physical toe nudging open the guest room door. She carried him in and bent over as gracefully as she could to pull back the blankets and sheets before setting him down and soothing him between the covers.
His wings were fine. They were just . . . weak. He needed rest. It was a good thing she had decided to stay home today.
“Water?” she asked. A noncommittal wiggle-dip of his head. His sunken chest quivered with the shivering of his heart. His crest had faded to the barest smudge of brownish red.
If it ever got to court, she thought, no jury would convict this boy of a vicious assault. He didn’t look like he could hurt a beetle, in his current condition.
She got a glass of water from the bathroom, then trooped downstairs to the kitchen to find a straw in case that might make it easier to drink. But what would his lips do with a straw?
He didn’t really have lips.
He had that long, sleek, almost polished beak.
She imagined trying to pour the water down his throat, what a mess that would make. So—not a glass. Instead she found a cooking bowl—a big steel basin—and filled it with water so that he could dip his beak.
By the time she carried it up the stairs, he was fast asleep in the guest bed, sunlight slanting through the window straight onto his pillow. She set down the basin, drew the drapes, then just sat on the edge of the bed and watched the fascinating creature as his breathing slowed, his chest rose and fell, his presence filled the room like a warm, sweet, barely visible spectrum of light.
One of his wings had slipped out from under the covers. She lightly touched the three long fingers—so cold at first, then warmer, warmer—and sat as still as she could, just watching.
• • •
Really, she thought, as she sat on the living room floor now, on a patch of white carpet that got the most sun in the morning, she should call the PD. They were going to find out anyway, as soon as they got home. Better to lay the groundwork now. Lay it all out: the donation, her reasons, how she would pay for it, how Pyke had come to be upstairs. There would be a battle no matter what. She shouldn’t appear to be hiding anything.
She was in her floppy clothes still, she hadn’t even taken a shower. She was, however, wearing her yellow running shoes for when Pyke woke up and saw her again.
He liked her as a runner. As if she might be a Jocelyne Legault! Maybe he couldn’t tell the difference—any girl who wore yellow shoes and ran around a track was devastatingly beautiful to him.
That would be all right, she thought. To be devastatingly beautiful.
Lorraine Miens spoke up in her head. (Oh, Lorraine! Shiels thought. For once just let me enjoy this.) “A woman with great beauty is like a man who has inherited too much money—crippled by the apparent gifts of birth.”
Thank you, Lorraine, she thought. Ms. Killjoy, who had been, by the way, strikingly beautiful in her own youth. It hadn’t hurt her career. How many female academics get on the cover of national magazines in their twenties? The beautiful ones. Who do bold things.
I’m doing a bold thing, Shiels thought. I have brought a pterodactyl into our guest room, and this is the calm before the storm.
She wondered (the Sheldon part of her brain kicking in now) who the first person had been to throw shit into a spinning fan. Or had some genius imagined the phrase, like Einstein with a thought experiment, and left the world to do the actual testing?
She wanted to text Sheldon right now to tell him that Pyke was sleeping just upstairs, that she had held him in her arms, that he smelled like the seaside. But even when they were at their closest, she realized, this would not be a share-with-Sheldon sort of thing. She had feelings for Pyke.
Non-Sheldon-like stirrings.
But now, at least, Sheldon was not hers to betray.
At least she could feel good about that.
• • •
She showered and changed into a black, body-hugging running outfit, as if she were going out for a jog, but of course she stayed in, glancing into the guest room from time to time. Pyke slept soundly—clearly he felt safe here, away from the clutches of the uncaring law. Shiels fussed unusually with her hair, and then she changed outfits entirely, into a black skirt and leggings and a slashing, purple top that still went with her yellow shoes. Somehow deep red lipstick seemed to complement her purple nose—or at least it gave her face an unusual severity, which she thought perhaps a pterodactyl would like. But just as she applied the finishing touches, she remembered how, early on, Pyke had blithely walked past her when she’d been all made up in her short dress and zebra leggings. Maybe he didn’t like provocative women. Maybe the casual jogging look really was what turned his crank.
So she scrubbed her face and changed again, into her running shorts and black sports bra, which could be a top, too. It was cold in the house, so she turned up the heat—better for Pyke’s recovery, surely—and she looked in on him again.
Still sleeping.
But he wasn’t as peaceful as he had been. His leg trembled under the covers, he tossed from side to side, his beak opened and closed, sometimes slowly, sometimes in a snappish way that would illustrate to juries in an eyeblink how easily this pterodactyl could harm someone else. That security bracelet could not be comfortable. What dream was he having? Was he replaying his deplorable treatment in prison? Slashing out again at the Wallin players trying to kill him? Hunting in his home grounds, wherever they might be?
She thought again about calling her parents. Her father first—she would leave a message. If he got back to her, it would be later in the afternoon, his head somewhere else, still mentally performing surgery. Her mother would call back sooner. Shiels would have to pull the phone from her ear, and wait for the waves to stop crashing quite so shriekingly. But better to start the battle by phone than to wait for the full in-person opera.
She knew it, she thought it through, but she couldn’t pull her phone into her hand. She couldn’t compose the number. The hours began to leak.
• • •
What a strange thing, time. When you are used to juggling a thousand things, traveling at warp speed, now to suddenly have a whole day at home to listen to the tap drip. Shiels sat in the guest room in the comfy chair by the window, wrapped in a blanket, listening to the faint tap-tap from all the way down in the kitchen. That faucet didn’t even drip, usually—she had simply failed to shut it completely when she’d filled the basin with water. A quick trip downstairs could bring silence, but she didn’t move.
She watched the light change slowly as the sun moved across the windowsill.
She was overdue on an English assignment. She needed to wri
te a critique of David Foster Wallace’s famous speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College in which he went into excruciating detail about the suffocating disappointments of adult life, and then showed how to embrace them, love them even. He even gave a glimpse of living in sunlight, unburied by the blankets of the faulty and deceiving perceptions under which we usually hide. She had watched the video, she thought she knew what she might say about it, she had hours and hours to write it up, but her computer was in her bedroom, she was here, and what did it matter?
What did any of it matter? The expanding or shrinking universe, the qualities of a cell, social strategies in the digital age, the rise over the run, the infinite approach to zero? It all took effort, and she was already where she wanted to be. She could hear her pterodactyl breathing on the bed.
Her pterodactyl.
Jocelyne Legault will want to visit him, she thought.
Shiels would have to be gracious.
Her parents would be home in a matter of hours, and the house would shake and the heavens tremble.
Of all of that, what was real?
This moment, sitting by the window, her body in running gear but for now at rest, wrapped in the brown blanket she used to drag into this room when she was very young and would park her nose in an open book and let the rest of the world slide on by.
• • •
“Clozzer,” he said when he woke up, and he moved his beak slightly, beckoning. His eyes were lit, how? In a kindly, intense way. Shiels felt her whole body smiling, and the few steps across the floor to his bed were like those steps onto the stage had been at Autumn Whirl.
She remembered those steps now, that stage. The whole movie of it seemed to be playing in her body.
But she was here, now, too. Here.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“Clozzer,” he murmured again, and he tickled her with his eyes, his expression. He seemed to be laughing inside, unusually joyful.
She sat very close to him and let him put his hand—his wing fingers—on the bare skin of her leg. She was in shorts still. It wasn’t cold in the room, not at all.
“Can I get you anything now?” she asked. “Smoked salmon? Water? Do you have to”—the thought just occurred to her—“go to the bathroom?”
He had been in this bed now for hours. The afternoon was draining, the light slanting away.
“Clozzer,” he murmured again.
He rubbed his beak against her cheek, she stopped breathing. Really, she thought, she shouldn’t let him do that.
Why not? she wondered.
His beak was smooth and hard, and all of him, it seemed, pulsed with heat, even in his diminished condition. He was half in and half out of the blanket. What was that along the edge of his wing? It looked like . . . a fourth finger! How had she not seen it before? It didn’t look like a finger. It stretched on and on like a flexible tent pole supporting the membrane of his wing. And under the blanket, parts of him were poking up in ways she couldn’t quite sort out. Was one of those other prodding tent poles . . . something else? Not a wing part or tail tip or elbow . . .
He rubbed her, so gently, his beak against her cheek. He seemed to be breathing her in, and so she breathed him in as well. It felt like one of her dreams, like soaring over the treetops and leaning into the bareness of light. Like out-winging the clouds. Like the hot, damp embrace of earth as well, rooted, like pulling life from the black soil.
Her hand fell naturally to his chest. He was more animated, she could see it clearly. He wasn’t quite the same beaten animal he’d been when she’d carried him up the stairs some hours before. Already the bed rest had done him good. She loved the silky feel of his fur.
She snuggled closer, his beak now between her breasts.
She kissed, so gently, the sleek edge of his crest, which looked, even now, slightly more crimson than before.
She fingered the cool smoothness of his locator ring.
Jonathan clumped through the front door downstairs, his longboard rattling on the tile floor of the main entrance to the house.
Shiels pulled herself back.
Pyke implored her with his impossibly large eyes. She caught her breath. “Oh,” she moaned, “later?”
Was that her voice, wrung-out and limp?
It was not time for surrendering to whatever it was she wanted.
Oh . . . but she wanted to!
XXVII
Through sheer force of will Shiels returned to her bedroom and pulled on her warm clothes. She hurried downstairs and caught Jonathan with his body half in the refrigerator.
“I need you to be more advanced than you’re probably capable of right now,” she said.
“What?” When he turned to her, his mouth was full of chilly pizza.
“I need you to not be your adolescent self for the next while. I want you to pretend to be a reasonable and mature and even sophisticated human being.”
“Hello to you, too,” he said, chewing. “You weren’t at school today.”
“I need you to listen and to understand, because Mom and Dad are going to be home soon and the roof is going to blow off this place for a time.”
“Pyke got out on bail today. Melanie’s crowdsourcing campaign worked. Nobody knows where he’s been holed up.” Jonathan stood by the still-open door, chewing but not otherwise moving. Shiels pushed the door shut, and only at the last moment did Jonathan turn to get out of the way. “What’s your problem?” he said. “Just because Melanie did what you couldn’t manage to do.”
“Are you finished?”
Congealed tomato sauce clung to his chin.
“She’s going to be student-body chair next year,” he said. “She’s going to be way better than you. People actually like her.”
“Pyke is upstairs in the guest bedroom,” she said quietly.
He smiled as if she had just said something deranged.
She spoke slowly and deliberately. “Don’t go in there. Don’t bother him. If you want to say something in support of his convalescing here when the PD get home, fine, but let me do most of the talking. Do you understand?”
A chunk of pepperoni fell onto the floor at the boy’s feet. “Pyke is here?”
“In the guest bedroom. Tell no one. It’s much better if—”
“But how?”
“He asked for me. He wanted to stay here. Your mouth is hanging open, Jonathan.”
“And Mom and Dad agreed? How did you ever—”
“They don’t know. Are you even listening to me?”
“Why didn’t you tell them? They’re going to—”
“Shut up. Just pretend you are a support post holding up the wall. Do you want Pyke to stay here or not?”
It took a while, but finally his body seemed capable of motion again. He threw the remaining pizza crust into the sink. “Do you mind if I video what happens?” he said.
• • •
At about eight thirty in the evening there was a pause in the action, as if all parties recognized at the same time that stomachs were rumbling, that nothing had been done about dinner, that despite the dramatic circumstances unfolding under their own large and comfortable roof, it had been a long day for all of them and they could not keep repeating the same accusations and countercharges, and at such a volume, indefinitely.
They were in the living room, where battles tended to happen. Shiels’s mother clumped around the perimeter of the oriental rug, her black plastic walking cast occasionally pounding on certain words for emphasis, heightening the pain on her face. “I don’t know what else there is to say,” she said, in that moment when the air seemed ready to run out of the storm. “We are deeply, deeply disappointed with you, Shiels. I can’t express how, how . . . monumentally upset I feel right now. You do understand that much?”
Shiels’s father sat in his reading chair, but perched forward, and he nodded in his way, in agreement with everything his wife was saying. As if all these thoughts sprang fully agreed-upon from the same
two-headed brain.
Shiels’s mother stopped pacing and held her temples. “Tell me, please, that you understand how utterly betrayed we feel that you essentially stole a large sum of money—don’t tell me again how you’re going to pay this back, that isn’t the point—and brought this . . . predator into our house, have offered him our protection, without the slightest consultation or clue as to what you are up to. Just tell me . . . tell me that you do not hate us, and that you have not gone completely insane.”
Shiels was seated, unmoving, on the sofa by the window, her back straight, her eyes never leaving her mother. Jonathan stayed standing by the doorframe, in apparent imitation of a support post after all. His hands seemed to be itching to pull out his phone.
“I understand, Mother,” Shiels said. “And I apologize. Again. I felt a life was at stake. I wanted to talk to you in person. Not on the phone. You do understand me when I say that?”
Her mother’s mouth was set. “He is not staying. I hope I am being entirely clear on that. He will not stay here, he cannot stay here. I’m sorry if he misrepresented the situation to the court. We can take no responsibility for his care or security. I will not have him in the house. You do understand that as well?”
Her father nodded, nodded. Jonathan had said nothing all along.
“At least have the decency to meet him,” Shiels said. “Go upstairs, see what he is like. Your money helped save him! You can’t just throw him out on the street.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, we’re not throwing him out on the street!” her mother erupted. But it was only a shadow of her anger before. They were all getting hungry.
Pyke must be starving, Shiels thought.
He must have heard every word hurled and screamed.
“He is not some pet you can buy and drag in here and imagine we’re all going to fall in love,” her mother said. “That’s not how this works. You will tell him yourself and you will get him out of here before bedtime. I don’t care if he goes back to jail or if he stays with Sheldon or with anyone else in your school. Do you understand me?”