Birds and Birthdays

by Christopher Barzak

  My father stayed home from work that day, too. All of us gathered in the backyard. We grilled steaks and skewers of vegetables. I chased the geese around the birdbath, splashing them with water. It was good-natured fun, and they loved it. Hester could see this, so she didn’t chastise. She leaned against the fence with her knees tucked up to her chest. She sighed a lot and ate a lot, and seemed anxious. So did my parents, but they did their best to hide their anxieties. They were both good at doing that, and as their child, I appreciated their tact and skill at covering up their own problems. I had my own problems, and anyway, children shouldn’t have to worry about their parents. It’s supposed to be the other way around.

  Toward evening, when the sky purpled and the wind started to buck, Hester told us she was leaving. Somehow we’d all been prepared for this and weren’t surprised by her decision. My mother resisted only once with an, “Oh, honey, don’t talk like that.” But Hester shook her head. My mother lowered her face and said no more. She just nodded.

  “I won’t be going far,” Hester told us. “Just to the old park, the new forest. I’ll be safe there. You can come visit me sometimes. Later, though, after everything has settled.”

  This cheered my parents a bit. They went to Hester and hugged her arms, her legs, tried to fit their arms around her neck. They cried a little, then retreated to the house.

  I was about to say my goodbyes, too, but Hester spoke before me.

  “Stephen,” she said, “I need you to come with me. You’ll have to keep watch for a few days. If anyone tries to find me in there, you’ll have to stop them, or else everything will be ruined.”

  “This is my job, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Hester. “You are the guardian of the guardian of the egg. Please don’t let me down.”

  I nodded gravely. I would protect her under any circumstances. In a matter of minutes, I collected my whittling knife, rope from the basement, and my BB gun. I felt like an action hero gearing up for battle. Mel Gibson, Arnold Schwarzenegger — why didn’t the director of Wild Thing approach one of them to play my role?

  We left for the park later that night. In the darkest hours, our town was silent except for the sounds of crickets whirring, night birds cooing, and the strum of frogs in their secret places. Hester’s geese flew our route before us, then circled around to report that the way was clear. An unmarked white van was parked several houses down from ours, but the driver was slumped against the window, asleep from too much waiting for Hester. We followed the geese through the vine-covered streets until we arrived at the park, where Hester slipped into a dark sliver of space between two towering elms. As soon as she passed between them, she disappeared. I couldn’t even hear her rustling in the branches. A moment later her long pale arm stretched forth from the dark place and her fingers curled inward, motioning for me to follow. I took hold of her pinky and Hester pulled me inside her realm.

  The quiet of the suburbs I’d heard as we slipped through the streets of our town would have sounded like a parade in that forest. I heard nothing there but wind in the trees and the gurgle of a nearby creek. Hester loomed large above me. Her breath came heavily, as if she were anxious. Suddenly she started walking at a fast pace, pushing through the treetops, which swayed and snapped back into place behind her. The ground beneath my feet trembled at her step. I clasped the hem of her orange dress to my chest and followed as close as possible so I wouldn’t get caught in the backlash of branches. And in this way, crashing through the forest, we found our way to the grove at its center.

  Tiny lights awaited us in the grove. They shimmered in the dark, floating through the night like miniature Japanese lanterns. As one passed by me, I heard a slight buzzing sound, a hum like a bee as it skims your ear in summer. I looked at Hester, who stood in the center of the grove already. The glowing creatures circled her, lit upon her face, her hair, her shoulders, upon the weeping willow growing out of her head. She held her arms out at both sides and turned in a slow circle, a smile of pure pleasure washing over her.

  The trees in the grove towered over Hester, unlike some of the smaller ones at the border. If I squinted here among these giant elms and maples, she looked to be the right size again. For a moment, she looked like the old Hester, the girl who was once so awkward and quiet, books clasped to her chest protectively, ready to bump into anything if it meant avoiding other people. Hester still avoided people, but now it was for different reasons: now Hester shrank from the burdens of civilization in order to accomplish a task so mysterious even I didn’t know all the reasons for her secrecy.

  “Here,” she murmured, talking to herself really. She stood upon a small hill, and I saw that she held the egg in her hands once again. A pale stream of silver moonlight spilled over her, illuminating the trees ringing the hillside. She slipped the egg into one of the pockets of her orange dress, then bent down and forced her fingers into the earth. She groaned, struggling, flexing her muscles. The wheat of her hair rustled over her shoulders, against the small of her back. The weeping willow tree growing out of her head swayed with her exertion. Finally she pulled up a tab of earth and continued pulling until she’d pulled up the grass and sod of the hillside in one long strip.

  “It’s up to you now, Stephen,” she said, wiping the sweat from her pale brow. The glowing creatures circled her as if they were planets orbiting a sun.

  “Don’t worry, Hester,” I told her. I trotted up to her and she bent down and lifted me into her arms. “You’re so big!” I said, truly realizing it for the first time. Since she’d started changing, I never actually allowed myself to touch her. I was happy to touch her now. She was still my sister. She was still Hester underneath all of that flora. I wished I’d hugged her more often when she was still five foot seven, and I could reach my arms all the way around.

  Hester placed me gently back on the ground, then laid herself down in the hole she’d created. She pulled the strip of grassy sod under her chin like a blanket. She was getting comfortable in the hillside, wiggling her toes at one end, shrugging her shoulders at the other to make more room. She retrieved the egg from her pocket a moment later. Then, holding it between her forefinger and thumb, she placed it inside her mouth. She swallowed, and the egg traveled down the column of her throat and disappeared from my sight forever.

  “Take care, Stephen,” she said, blinking soberly. Then she pulled the quilted earth over herself entirely and disappeared as well.

  I maintained a defensive position in the days that followed. Hester’s geese helped to guard the perimeter of the grove where Hester had buried herself in the hillside. The geese patrolled the outer borders, reporting to me at varying scheduled hours during the mornings, evenings, and in the night. I didn’t understand their bluster, but I sensed that their posts were well watched. Only once did I feel an impending threat to the grove, and that came on the fourth night of our vigil, just when I thought things were going to be okay.

  Brunhilda, the Viking goose, suddenly appeared in the grove at sunset, her wings fluttering anxiously, her bill filled with an alarming honk. She led me through the forest until we reached a blind of brush that she’d selected as her vantage point. I kneeled beside her in silence and waited, and then all at once I heard the sound of men moving through the forest, snapping branches beneath their feet, grunting, sometimes cursing. More than one voice. Perhaps three, maybe four. All male, deep and rough.

  I looked down at Brunhilda, gave her the signal for our agreed upon plan of action, and she nodded gruffly and waddled out into the woods, awaiting the men. Once they reached us, she flew up into their faces, landed, jogged away from them for a moment until she was sure they were following her, and then took once again to air.

  I caught only a glimpse of them. They were dressed differently from each other: one in flannel and blue jeans, another in a business suit, and also the postman. Two of them had guns, a handgun and a rifle. The postman held a baseball bat and slapped it lightly against the palm of his hand.
Two shots rang out immediately. “Blast her!” the postman shouted. When the silence of the woods resumed a moment later, he ran forth like a dog to see if he could retrieve Brunhilda. He returned to the other men shaking his head. “Missed her,” he said, “but she’s just up ahead.” On hearing this, they began to track Brunhilda once again.

  It didn’t take much longer to capture them. Brunhilda executed our plan brilliantly, leading them to a pit Hester had dug for us before burying herself. We’d covered it with weak branches and leaves and pieces of brush. The men ran over it, the branches broke beneath their weight, and they fell twelve feet into the earth.

  What other disturbances we faced were minimal. Other geese had scared off trespassers simply by surprising them, jumping out of their hiding places and chasing them out of the park. A week passed and no more incidents occurred, and I decided it was time to venture back to town.

  This was a trickier proposition than I thought, though. The town was no longer the town I remembered. As I slipped through the two towering trees that Hester had guided me through, it became apparent that the roads were no longer drivable — trees broke through the pavement, tumbled the sidewalk slabs this way and that. Vines grew over streetlamps, filtering their light so that it felt like you were underwater, like swimming at the bottom of our pool in the back yard.

  I found home eventually. My parents cried when they saw me, circled me in their arms and held me close. “We were so worried, so worried,” my mother sobbed. “Where is Hester?” my father asked. I told them she was safe, that she was in the old park, that she said to tell them she loved them, but this was a call she could no longer ignore. They nodded, but I could tell they didn’t understand. “Where did I go wrong?” my mother asked no one in particular. “Was it all those years of Brownies and Girl Scouts?” my father pondered.

  We toured the rest of the town — or what remained of it — later that week. Whatever Hester and her egg were up to, it had changed our home from its original refined layout into a riot of wild things. A wellspring sprang up in the electronics department of the Super-Mart, ruining the TVs and computers and stereo equipment on the shelves. Deer roamed the strip mall parking lots, which now greened over with thick grasses and wild flowers. Our school found itself surrounded by oaks so tall they appeared hundreds of years old. Bird song filled the air. The chatter of squirrels. Overnight our town population tripled, but no one human moved in.

  Soon after Hester’s metamorphosis reached its final stages, many of the people of our town packed their belongings into their SUVs and minivans and drove off to other towns outside of Hester’s sphere of influence. A few people stayed, though, and eventually some newcomers arrived. It was a small settlement, and we lived off what the land provided and tried not to overextend it or ourselves.

  My parents decided to stay in the hopes that, one day, Hester might come back to us, a regular girl again. Actually, it was my mother who held this hope. My father only indulged it from time to time. I myself felt that Hester wasn’t really gone. She was all around us, in the air and in the earth and water. I could smell her, feel her chest rise and fall as I walked the forest to visit her hillside, I could hear her voice on the wind and in the gurgle of the streams. I saw her face, just once, in the still surface of a small lake. I was fishing, and then I wasn’t. I was watching my reflection in the water instead, thinking, Hester, Hester, show yourself, give them a sign. They miss you so.

  Hester’s face swam up at me then, floating just under the water. She smiled, tilted her head at a quizzical angle, waved, then swam to the bottom again.

  The tree was no longer growing out of her head. Her body had returned to the young woman’s body I remembered. I wondered if perhaps she had been showing herself occasionally to my mother and father, and that these brief visitations kept them here in the hopes that she’d return one day for good.

  Sometimes at night, when my mother sews jackets and darns socks and mends buttons, when my father gathers firewood and guts fish for our dinner, when we’re all home and the forest seems satisfied and restful, I go out to Hester’s hillside, where the glowing creatures congregate in uncountable numbers — hundreds of them swarming the grove, faster fliers than most birds, brighter than most fireflies. I go out there and sit on the hillside with a book — sometimes school textbooks, sometimes an old paperback crime novel or a fairytale — and I read aloud to Hester and the glowing creatures. They hover over my shoulder, perch upon my head or on my legs, folded Indian style, and when they are still I can sometimes make out their faces, tiny and almost human, their eyes slightly slanted, their ears slightly pointed. They no longer hum like bees when their wings are at rest. Quiet and rapt, they listen to the adventures of detectives or to the mishaps of children lost in the woods, abandoned by their parents. They listen to stories of terrible witches who live in Victorian houses, not in forests at all, and wonder at the utter strangeness of automobiles, airports, high-rises, factories, subways, and cell phones, only to return from these visions of a world not their own, hearts eased, home again.

  Birthday

  For my tenth birthday, my parents threw a party so large and immaculate — with people ranging from the newborn to the elderly — that I grew nervous and uncomfortable and ever after cowered in fear of turning another year older. Nearly all of the guests were from the apartment building my parents owned and in which we lived. They came carrying foil-wrapped packages, jars of candy, hatboxes filled with toys. At first I’d been delighted by all of those presents, but the immediacy of that happiness vanished when I realized I would need to thank people and hold conversations, at which I have never been good. If I didn’t, my parents would have been embarrassed; I’d be considered impolite. So I assumed a way of speaking to everyone, from the babies to the mothers and fathers, to the shy, shuffling teenagers who had been dragged to the affair, to the elderly folks stumbling along with their walkers, who disguised my own trembling at being so social, when what I really wanted was to be alone, saying nothing at all.

  I loved my parents. I loved them more than anyone that came after also. They were always giving me gifts, but never anything I wanted. As a child I often grew frustrated with them, but eventually I realized their ignorance of my desires was not intentional. This was when I turned sixteen and they flew me to Alaska to see the Aurora Borealis, when what I really wanted was to eat dinner with them at the little Italian restaurant where they had their first date. The Aurora Borealis frightened me to the point of muteness. I could only stare at those green and golden lights, my mouth hanging open, realizing how small and ridiculous my life was and, in the end, would be. My mother put her arm around me. “I know, Emma,” she said. “So beautiful.” I cried, and she thought they were tears of joy.

  After that incident I became accustomed to receiving love that never matched my expectations. I was disappointed but not bitter. I painted, wrote stories, played the harp, and listened to culturally aware radio programs, culling comfort from these activities. Besides, I thought, they do love me. And I’m glad I’d been so sensible about their inability to give me the things I most wanted, because by my twentieth birthday they were both dead. Their plane went down in the Alps. My father had been flying it. I hadn’t gone with them because I didn’t like the Alps, and I knew that because they had taken me there for my eighteenth birthday present.

  They left me their apartment building, which was a lot to handle, only being a young woman just out of her teens. My relatives told me to sell it, to go to college and live off the profits, but my gut said, No. So I kept the building, and life went on as normal, or as close to normal as possible for the next year. The renters didn’t hassle me. They paid their bills and sometimes invited me in for a cup of coffee. Always on these occasions they’d bring up my parents. “Are you doing well, Emma?” they’d ask. “Yes, of course,” I’d say. Then I’d go back to my apartment, slide down the door as soon as I closed it, crumpling to the floor with tears already spilling.

  T
his was a regular event until I turned twenty-one and married Joe.

  He was good-looking, intelligent, and kind. I met him in the library when I was checking out a book on locksmithing. Joe was the head librarian. He checked out my book, then asked me out on a date. I said, “I thought you left the library with books, not librarians,” and he said that was how it usually went, but could he buy me coffee or a glass of wine? “Wine,” I said. “Definitely wine.”

  We were married three months later. I thought this was a good decision. Joe and I got along, we both liked to read, and he gave me his entire attention when I played the harp. I’d strum those strings, plucking out my love for him, while he stared on with a passion that I wanted more than anything — and was repulsed by at the same time. From that look alone, I grew afraid that he loved me more than I loved him. I grew afraid that he loved me more than he loved himself.

  We had a baby a year later, a girl with Joe’s brown eyes and my black hair. We named her Jenna. She was supposed to save us. I thought a child would take up some of Joe’s excess love, but he proved to have enough for both of us. In fact, his love grew even stronger. Within weeks of Jenna’s birth, he began spending less time with his friends and had cut back on hours at the library so he could be at home with us. In the evenings I’d find myself on the couch with Jenna feeding at my breast while Joe stared at us from his armchair, newspaper cast aside, sighing dreamily.

  “I wish I could do what you’re doing,” he said on one of those evenings.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, even though I already had my suspicions.

  “I wish I could feed Jenna from my body like you do,” he said. “It’s a bond fathers will never know.”

  “Shut up,” I said immediately. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about. It hurts sometimes, and sometimes I’m tired and she won’t leave me alone. One could describe the whole affair as parasitic.”