by Alan Cumyn
It was time to stop talking—that much Shiels understood. Her mother was going to be angry for hours, maybe days.
(That much Shiels understood.)
Her mother would develop a migraine soon, if it had not already started.
“I do understand, Mother,” Shiels said.
Something clumped upstairs. Her mother’s face freeze-dried in panic. “Is it . . . Is he moving around?”
One of the upstairs toilets flushed.
“He had to go to the bathroom. That’s all,” Shiels said. “Even in prison they let him do that.”
Enough. They all needed to eat. To get past this firestorm.
Noise now on the stairs. No! Shiels vaulted from her seat, but already Pyke was halfway down and in plain view of her parents.
“You need to rest! I’ll help you—”
“Mizzer,” he said. He leaned hard on Shiels and on the banister. His momentum kept him moving down.
“Oh, man!” Jonathan blurted. He hop-hipped in imitation of the way Pyke used to move when he was healthy. “Look at those wings!”
Pyke hadn’t even extended his wings, except around Shiels’s shoulder.
“Jonathan!” Shiels’s mother said. “Don’t get too close!”
Even Shiels’s father was standing now, fists balled up.
“He’s harmless!” Shiels cried.
“Mizzes, Mizzes,” Pyke muttered. At the bottom of the stairs he freed himself from Shiels and hop-hipped gingerly, as if in imitation of Jonathan imitating him.
Shiels’s mother stepped back when Pyke approached her, but her father touched her arm and said, “I think it’s all right.”
The pterodactyl looked a fraction of his former self. The security bracelet drooped, as if made for someone several sizes larger. He would have to eat something soon if he wasn’t going to fade away completely. “Mizzes,” he said again, and extended his hand to Shiels’s mother. His eyes were moist, tired, imploring.
Doubtfully, Shiels’s mother took the three fingers in her own hands.
“Pleez you mede me,” Pyke said, bowing. His crest came close to caressing her cheek.
Shiels could not seem to exhale.
Her mother was blushing.
(Her mother was blushing!)
“Why don’t I make us all some dinner?” Shiels said quietly.
• • •
There was the soup in the freezer—Shiels set it in the microwave immediately. The smoked salmon would all go to Pyke, as would the fish sticks (in the oven), and she found sushi, too. Who knew how old it was? But it smelled all right to her. Her mother had brought home artisanal bread—twelve-grain, organic, produced entirely within thirty miles of their house—and premixed salad. Would Pyke eat salad? Jonathan wouldn’t, but Jonathan was always happy with more leftover pizza.
It wasn’t brilliant but it was food, ready, on the table in twelve minutes.
They converged in the dining room. Now that Pyke was real, a person, not just the name of someone out of sight upstairs, Shiels’s mother was her warm, graceful, public self. She lit the candles. She deplored the lack of flowers for the centerpiece—why hadn’t she picked some up on her way home? She knocked her foot cast against the table leg as she was setting out the cutlery and laughed like a little girl who has done something silly. “I’m so clumsy with this thing!” she said.
They were not yet seated. Pyke stood to the side, a thread of pterodactyl drool suspended from the corner of his beak, as he eyed the smoked salmon.
“Sit! Sit, please!” Shiels said.
Pyke had trouble with the chair—Shiels wasn’t sure if the problem was his weakened condition, or if he still was not used to sitting, despite all his practice in school—so she helped him into place. Pyke slurped up the smoked salmon in one quicksilvery motion. When Shiels turned fully to look, the plate was clean.
He raised his beak, and the lump of fish slid down his throat.
But Shiels’s mother missed it all. “Aren’t you serving anything to our guest?” she asked.
“There’s more,” Shiels said. “Just sit.”
Pyke speared the pizza off Jonathan’s plate and gulped that down too. “Hey!” Jonathan said. His hand had been on the edge of the table, just inches from the spearing.
Pyke darted three times into the salad bowl before Shiels snatched it away from him. “Pyke!”
Shiels’s father pulled her back from the table by her shoulders. “Just give him all the food!” he said. “I’m calling the police.”
“No! No!” Shiels said. “I can feed him separately.”
Pyke slashed at the five varieties of lettuce with oil and vinegar and a touch of lemon seasoning. He looked around at his hosts, at Shiels, with guilty eyes. “Zorry,” he said.
Shiels’s father had his phone out. But Shiels pulled on his arm the way she’d done when she used to drag him to the back garden to admire her mud-pie concoctions.
“I’ve seen what that beak can do,” her father said.
“I’m sure it’s because he was starved in prison.”
“It’s okay,” Jonathan said, and pushed more pizza toward Pyke, who plucked it from his hand with a knifelike motion.
“You step back too, Jonathan!” Shiels’s mother said.
“He eats everything,” Jonathan said. “Don’t you, Pyke? Everyone feeds him in the caf.”
Shiels prayed that Jonathan would not throw food for him in the air now. “Are you starving, Pyke?” she asked. He just grinned. So Shiels headed back into the kitchen, and there, hiding in the fridge behind a jar of bacon fat, was a half-opened tin of oysters. When she brought it out, Pyke could barely stay in his seat. Before she even made it to the table, he stretched toward her and plucked the tin from her hand.
“Well, you certainly love those!” Shiels’s mother said.
“There’s more!” Jonathan hurried back into the kitchen pantry, and returned with three more tins. Pyke slurped as if he had not eaten in a week.
“Zorry, zorry,” the pterodactyl-boy said when the gorging was done. When he grinned—it was a disarming gesture—slimes of oyster juice hung from his pointy beak. “Me mebbe bed-zleep gain.”
“Are you exhausted?” Shiels asked.
Her father was still standing by his seat at the head of the table with his phone out.
Pyke eyed the empty tins as if he might have missed something. Shiels could bring him the fish sticks later. She bent over and lifted him. Cradled in her arms, he felt like a big, bony baby. “Please don’t call anyone,” she said to her father. “I can feed him in his room. He’s really not dangerous. Dad!”
She stood in front of her father with Pyke draped across her.
“Jesus Christ,” her father said.
Shiels hurried him back into bed before there could be any changing of minds.
• • •
In the night, when Pyke had been put down and the house had settled finally into an anxious stillness, Shiels lay awake just a few rooms from where Pyke was sleeping. They were under the same roof now, breathing the same air. His piquant odor, that raw physical fishiness, became more apparent as darkness descended and other senses shut down for the night. Was that his snoring she could hear, a fine-toothed saw slowly cutting through the hold this household had on her life?
She would be leaving this place soon, she thought, no matter what happened. She would be out of her mother’s grip. Jonathan would be on his own under the PD’s yoke, but he was a boy, they treated him differently. He was managing to keep their expectations low, low.
And she . . . she was causing such a stink that her parents were going to fire her out of the house in a cannon before too long.
The application for Chesford was due soon. She couldn’t keep putting it off. She’d had too long to think about how to impress Lorraine Miens, but surely this most recent development could be turned to her favor. “As student-body chair of Vista View High, I fought to integrate the first pterodactyl-student in school history i
nto regular student life, and even sheltered him in my own home against the oppressive machinery of a state system bent on prosecuting difference and stifling individuality.”
Sheldon would have phrased it better.
Sheldon—
Would she ever get into Chesford without Sheldon?
• • •
Late in the evening—or early in the morning—in a dazed sort of half sleep, Shiels thought she heard something moving down the hall. Was it Pyke? Was he up, wandering around, had he forgotten where he was and that he was safe for now, freed from his cell?
The footsteps sounded both soft and thudding.
Shiels crept to her door and listened. Nothing. A tree branch outside complained of the cold. A slow wind rested against a tired fence. Insomniac traffic moaned far away.
Another few steps soft-thudded in the hall.
“Pyke?” Shiels whispered. She opened her door. In the dark she looked for his muted form, for the hop-hipping gait headed to the bathroom perhaps.
It took the longest time to see her mother despite her bright white housecoat. In her cast still, she was slowly step-hopping down the hall . . . toward Pyke’s room.
“What are you doing?” Shiels asked.
Her mother was slow to turn around. “Just go back to sleep, baby,” she whispered finally.
Why was she heading to Pyke’s room now? “Is he all right?” Shiels asked.
Shiels, in her pajamas, pushed into Pyke’s room right behind her mother.
The pterodactyl-boy lay wrapped in the bedsheets, his gorgeous beak lolling to one side, toward the window, snoring gently.
Mother and daughter stood side by side in the doorway staring at their sleeping guest. The prisoner ring around his neck glowed slightly in the gloom, like the fluorescent hands of a wristwatch.
He’s beautiful, Shiels thought.
Her mother murmured something Shiels could not hear—a coo almost. A sound you might make around a newborn.
“Shall we let him sleep?” Shiels said, and then she turned and stepped back into the hallway, and waited until her mother joined her and returned to her own bed.
XXVIII
“I think I need to stay home today,” Shiels’s mother said at breakfast, calmly, as if she were commenting on the weather. “I need to make sure Pyke is healing properly.” She glanced across the granola box at Shiels. “And you need to get back to your classes, young lady. First semester marks are crucial for college acceptances, as you know.”
Her mother was dressed as if going to work, yet the tone of her voice suggested she had had it in mind for some time to stay with Pyke today.
“It would probably be good to stay off your feet anyway,” Shiels’s father said. As usual he was hurrying out the door. “The clinic can cover your load?”
“I hardly ever miss a day,” Shiels’s mother said. “I’m due.”
She had mentioned nothing about the episode from last night—the both of them visiting the boy in his bedroom. It was as if it had never happened.
“You must be anxious to get back to Sheldon and all your . . . organizing,” Shiels’s mother said to her.
Jonathan blurted, “Shiels split from Sheldon, like, forever ago! He’s totally in love with Rachel Wyngate now!”
“Oh,” Shiels’s mother said. Her eyes said, These high school romances. Half-life of a fruit fly.
She did clump over to her husband to kiss him good-bye for the day. “The sooner Pyke gets better, the sooner he’ll be out of here,” she said, but in a gentle, almost mocking tone, as if in fact she meant the opposite.
• • •
It felt wrong, wrong for Shiels to be walking to school when Pyke was at her house, in a weakened state, being attended to by her mother. Her mother—who had never taken time away from her own work of healing others to stay home with Shiels when she was young and stricken by flu or chicken pox or an ear infection. It was Stay in Bed. Then, Read a Book. I’ll call you at lunchtime.
It was definitely cold outside, the steel gray sky offering no relief, just promises of winter, long and slow. Shiels had only missed a day and a half of classes, yet it felt like she’d been away much longer, that somehow she had outgrown the place in the meantime. Her English assignment was still incomplete—she would have to watch the David Foster Wallace video again to refresh her mind—and no doubt other assignments had been piled on in her absence. Normally Sheldon would have kept her in the loop. And normally she would’ve met with him at Roseview and Vine. They would’ve walked together, strategized about the day.
What was there to strategize about now? The day was going to happen no matter what she did.
As she walked along, the bitter wind smarting her cheeks, the grayness of the sky sinking into her, she thought about how dreamlike her life had become. She was still Shiels, Vista View High still loomed ahead of her like a city unto itself. Her family was still her family, her mother still Mom. Yet, some dial had been turned. She felt like a different person almost.
Instead of walking across the street and entering those cold institutional doors with all the others flooding in for morning bell, she turned right and followed the contour of the hill, like water heading toward the path of least resistance. What path was that exactly? It was meandering, but settled downward. She shoved her hands into her pockets and let her feet slap against the pavement, avoiding the ice. November. Not winter yet, but the ground was frozen; snow lay in patchwork clumps as if undecided yet to stay or to go. It was cold on the feet. She should have worn her boots, not her yellow runners.
She began to run. Slowly, slowly she found a bit of a rhythm: feet slapping, arms pumping, lungs working. Cold breath, blowing out, eyes on the sidewalk directly ahead. Away from the school, from Sheldon, and Manniberg, from Melanie Mull and Jocelyne Legault and the eight million questions about Pyke.
“I have left Pyke with my mother,” she said aloud, to no one, as she ran along.
• • •
The running-shoe shop looked closed, almost mournfully so: cloudy windows, dullness inside, no lights, no people. Shiels gazed along the street—cars were inching their way downtown. It was definitely a weekday morning in the life of the city.
What now? She could go to a coffee shop and sit in the window nursing a hot drink like some homeless person with nothing to do, no other way to fit in. She could wander around, running some more until she couldn’t, and watch the faces of the office workers and the retail clerks as they began their day. One man was going store to store with a bucket in his hand, cleaning the windows of the shops opening for business. Did he have a contract, or did he just do it on spec, one step above a beggar, hoping to get paid?
A woman opened the door of the florist’s shop across the street and spoke to the man, who nodded his head, grimaced while smiling, and kept cleaning the big picture window.
Why wasn’t the running-shoe shop open yet? The front window was filthy. They needed her to call across the street to the window washer guy to get him to spruce up their business just as soon as he was done with the florist’s window.
Shiels checked in her pocket. Would the window guy be insulted if she offered him five dollars to clean the shoe shop window?
Someone approached her from behind. “It’s you again,” said the old guy, the running-shoe man. He had his keys in his hand.
“You really should get your window cleaned,” Shiels said. “And you’re kind of late. I bet the mall stores are already open by now. If somebody wanted to pick up a pair of shoes before work so they could go out running at lunchtime . . .”
Her words dribbled to a stop. The man stared at her with windy blue eyes. He unlocked the door and said, “I used to open at eight, but nobody ever came. Why are you here?”
He held the door for her, in a gentle way, and she stepped into the gloom of the store. Really, there was so much he could do to make this place more attractive. “I think maybe you need to hire me,” she said. “Nobody’s here because, frankly, the p
lace is a dump.”
He flicked on the lights, but it didn’t seem to make much difference.
“It’s like you’re caught in a time warp. You need new lighting, wall posters from this century, fresh carpets. My God, how old are these benches?”
He neither smiled nor moved. “The last time I saw you,” he said, “you told me you’d started running.” It was an obvious statement. She’d run most of the way here, was sweating still from the effort. She pulled out a tissue and wiped her nose.
“I can start without a salary,” she said. “Sort of an internship. After a while you could see whether it’s been worthwhile having me around or not. I’m sort of a natural organizer. I’m currently the student-body chair at Vista View High School.” As the words came out, she hated how needy they seemed.
Needing to have him acknowledge her worth.
“Why aren’t you at school now?” he asked.
“I have a flexible arrangement.” The lie came so easily, it was a shock, and she amended herself at once. “I’m thinking of taking a break, actually. Things have been fraught with me. At school. And in general.” Was she saying too much now? Those eyes on her did not waver.
“I think you wanted to learn how to run better,” he said.
“Well, actually,” she blurted, “you wouldn’t believe how much I’ve improved since I bought these shoes from you! The first time I tried, I ran back to the school. I was late for this event I was organizing—and I almost died. I swear to God. I had this, like, out-of-body experience. I practically collapsed at the end of it. But this morning, you know, I just ran here, and it was like I was running . . .”
She was going to say “downhill,” but in fact it had been downhill. That probably accounted for more of the difference than she cared to say.
“If I’m going to teach you how to run,” the old guy said, “you’re going to have to start by learning how to breathe.”
Shiels chortled, it was such an odd idea. “I already know how to breathe.”