The Someday Birds

by Sally J. Pla

  I am starting to actually believe I am a lowly servant from the 1770s when that nice, plump lady finally comes back to rescue me. She takes my apron and dishrag and says, “You’ve been a wonderful sport, kiddo, but I’m springing you now. Marcus means well, but he gets a little carried away. Not many boys your age would have stuck with him for so long.”

  “About McGinty,” I ask. “Does he really think it’s the 1770s? He acts like it.”

  “You know, he gets so into character, I think sometimes he does.” She laughs. “But that’s because he’s, well, kind of a strange bird—you’ll have to forgive him. But he knows everything there is to know about Revolutionary history, so this is the perfect place for him, God love him!” She rolls her eyes and shakes her head. “Still, he’s not quite right in the head, is he?”

  Old McGinty’s been driving me crazy, but now I want to defend him. I want to say: “What’s wrong with knowing everything about Revolutionary War history?” Or even, “What’s wrong with being not quite right in the head?” But I don’t say anything.

  The landlady gives me a five-dollar gift certificate for the dry goods store. I’m not sure what “dry goods” are, but after saying “Thank you, ma’am” and bowing like I think the cobbler’s boy probably would, I leave that place, Ludmila’s orders or not.

  It must have rained while I was inside the tavern, because everything looks soaking. How did I miss it? Trees are dripping, benches and sidewalks slightly steaming.

  And there, down the street, I see Davis, Joel, Jake, and Ludmila. They are walking back from that muster, soaking wet and laughing. Sunlight’s glinting on the slick, rainy cobblestones and lighting up their outlines from behind. When Davis smiles at me, her dark brown hair has a glowing copper outline. Ludmila’s pink hair is all matted down flat.

  I am so glad to see them, I feel all hot and funny inside. And all of a sudden I wonder what they think when they look at me.

  Do they look at me the same way that landlady looks at McGinty?

  37

  Change is possible. It is not to be feared. If only you could sit where I sit, in this secret, green-roofed spot on my small island hill, under the towering pines—this rare hidden jewel, deep within Sanctuary Marsh. From here, one sees how life could be restored. How we can change Nature for the better. And in doing so, change our own, human natures, for the better.

  —Tiberius Shaw, PhD

  Over dinner that night at Ye Olde Colonial Diner, we have a powwow. It’s time to figure out the next day or two of the trip.

  I have been thinking for ages about how close we are finally getting to Sanctuary Marsh, so I come prepared with suggestions. I have Shaw’s green journal, and a very careful map I’ve made.

  “Good news. The marsh is only an hour or so north. We could get there early and spend the whole day birding,” I announce.

  I have about 90 percent concluded that I know where Tiberius Shaw’s house is: about a four- or five-mile walk from the visitor center. I have gone over all the parts in Shaw’s green journal that mention the area. I have checked it out on Google Earth on the public computer at the RV park office, where we’re staying near Williamsburg. There’s only one house, according to that map, I think, that could possibly be his.

  And although Ludmila and Davis think it’s not good manners, I plan to knock on his door anyway. When he sees I am there to give him back his long-lost green journal, it will change everything. He will be so pleased, he will invite me in and tell me all the answers and advice that I need to know.

  “But birds are so boring!” Jake moans. “Blah! And there’s so much stuff in downtown DC. The spy museum! And that theatre where Lincoln got shot! Don’t you want to see that, instead of just bird-watching all day? For crying out loud, Charlie, you can see birds anywhere!”

  “This is a special place, Jake. And you should say birding, not bird-watching, just like it’s Trekkers, not Trekkies,” I inform him. “Bird people are sensitive to that stuff.”

  Everyone groans. They know not to mess with me when I start to talk fast like this. When I get nervous and my hands get itchy and my feet get rumbly.

  Ludmila pulls out her phone. “Well, your grandmother might have something to say about our schedule. Let’s give her a call.”

  She props her phone up against the big bottle of ketchup on the table, and hits speaker. Outside the window I notice about a dozen little brown finches scrambling for crumbs from an outdoor table. I stare at them while the phone rings. I both want—and don’t want—to hear Gram’s gruff, familiar voice.

  “Hey, Grammy,” Davis says.

  “Hey, Gram!” say the twins.

  “Davis. Joel. Jake. Charlie,” Gram says.

  She doesn’t usually call us by our names. It’s always cuties, or honey-bunnies, or cookie pies. Or for me, Lysol Louie.

  “Hello. We are in Virginia! We’re very close now,” says Ludmila in her deep, even voice. “But the boys want to do a few more things. Tomorrow, Charlie very much wants to do the bird-watching in the sanctuary. I mean, the birding. The twins and Davis want to visit DC.”

  There’s silence from Gram’s end.

  “Or,” she says, “we could come check in with you right away, first. We are very close.”

  More silence.

  Then, finally, Gram sighs a long, airy sigh. “Well, I’m very sorry to be the bearer of bad news at the end of your long trip.”

  I feel like someone just pricked me with an electric shock. We all sit, silent, around the phone, dreading her next words.

  “I’m afraid that you’d better come right away, right now. That nice Dr. Spielman was just here—he just left the room, actually. They’ve scheduled your father for another surgery.”

  “What?”

  “They found something and they want to go back in.” Gram’s voice is tired, flat. Like each word is hard to get out.

  Go back in. To my dad’s head. To his brain. To what makes him, him.

  The chicken nuggets I just ate turn into lead bullets. Panic shoots into my legs, then rebounds like a string of fire back up into my chest. I am not ready to think of Dad having surgery again. The first time was bad enough. No. I don’t want it. Not again!

  Davis’s face looks pale. She is nibbling on a strand of her brown hair from her ponytail—something Gram always yells at her for doing. The twins are sitting very still.

  Ludmila says, “We can come to you right now.”

  “No, don’t worry; that’s more hullabaloo than I can deal with tonight. Get a good night’s sleep and be at the hospital by seven. It’s going to be a long day tomorrow.”

  Ludmila turns off the phone and quietly puts it in her bag. We brush off our hands and scurry and scramble, wordless. The twins pop the last fries in their mouths. They scramble just like those little brown finches, frantic for the last crumbs of a summer day.

  Dad was supposed to be getting better at this hospital. Not worse. He is not supposed to go backward, into more problems, into more surgery. It’s not supposed to work like this.

  It’s not until we’re back in Old Bessie, chugging toward the motel, that another thought hits me like a punch in the gut:

  Tomorrow was going to be the day. My chance with Tiberius Shaw in the sanctuary.

  When all my questions about human behavior and bird behavior would get answered.

  Sanctuary.

  Not surgery.

  I am still holding Shaw’s green journal in my hands, along with the map I’d made of how to find his house. I’ve been holding it since Gram’s phone call, holding it so tight that the bones in my hand hurt. So tight that my hands need washing, washing, washing.

  38

  The next morning precisely at six a.m., we meet Gram in the lobby of the strange new Virginia hospital. It’s odd to see her in this totally out-of-place place.

  Gram has one of her sweat suits on. She wears sweat suits all the time, even though I’ve never seen her sweat. Still, today, she looks messy—her short silve
r hair is sticking out all over, instead of smooth and high, like her usual hair-helmet. She looks like she’s been sleeping on a couch. Or in a chair by Dad’s bed, like she used to in the early days back in San Diego.

  “Hark, the weary travelers,” Gram says, opening her arms. “Where’s my hugs? Joel, why on earth are you wearing that wig? Charlie, did you grow another inch since I’ve seen you? Hugs, please!”

  The new hospital has dirty smudges from millions of hands around door handles and corners. No potted palm trees, orange couches, or gift shop in sight. No Ellie in her blue vest. No little bird sculptures waiting for me on a shelf.

  I think: This is where they sent Dad? This is where the expert brain surgeons work? But when we get upstairs to the special neurology unit, it’s a little more reassuring. It’s cleaner and newer, with a modern-looking nurses’ station. A bunch of nurses talk on phones and write in charts.

  Ludmila is dressed crazier than usual. That green dog collar. The combat boots with the flowery dress. It seems like the more stressed-out things are, the crazier Ludmila dresses.

  We all troop and clomp down the hall after Gram. She stops at Dad’s door, then turns and looks at us with watery eyes, her hand on the knob. “The timing stinks. As it turns out, we only have a few minutes.”

  And then, there is Dad, sitting up in his new hospital bed.

  There’s a little piece of toilet paper stuck to his chin, with a tiny red dot in the center, a shaving nick. He used to let me watch him shave. He’d even spread a layer of his thick, creamy shaving foam along the side of the tub, and tell me to write the alphabet in it, when I was little. I loved the clean smell of it on my hands.

  Dad’s got a green hospital gown on, his arms at his sides. He looks like he’s in the dark and someone’s shining a flashlight in his face and he can’t figure out where the light is coming from.

  “Hi, Daddy-o!” says Davis, real extra loud.

  “Hi, Dad,” says Joel, knocking gently on his helmet.

  “Oh, for crying out loud, don’t knock on it, numbskull!” says Gram. “What, did you forget everything already?”

  Dad squints at Jake and Joel. He reaches out his hand to them and smiles.

  “Don’t. Worry about it. Champs,” he says. It’s the first time we’ve heard his voice in so long. It only comes out of the right half of his mouth, and it’s a little slurred and raspy, but it’s definitely Dad.

  That’s when everyone starts crying.

  But I don’t cry. I just stand by the door, by the hand-sanitizer pump, breathing hard. Breathe in.

  Breathe out.

  I need to tell Dad I’ve found almost all of the birds on our Someday Birds List. But I don’t think now is the time. Too much is happening too fast.

  A big dark-skinned nurse in a bright pink top comes in and claps her hands. “All right, family,” she sings. “It’s time!” Gram straggles up from her seat. Davis locks her arms around Dad’s neck like she won’t let go without a fight, and he smiles at her, pats her hand.

  Gram’s face looks like a wrinkled-up Kleenex.

  The nurse’s voice gets softer. “Come on now, folks! Don’t you worry, because you’ve got Dr. Spielman, and he is amazing. Your dad’s made so much progress already. And Dr. Spielman is going to fix it to make sure he can keep on making more progress. He’ll take very good care of Robert. But we have to stay on schedule here.”

  Two orderlies come in with a gurney, which is what you call one of those table-beds on wheels. The big nurse keeps clapping her hands, trying to scatter us like pigeons.

  They send us to a separate neurology waiting room. It’s across a sky bridge in a newer section of the hospital, on the other side of the street. The twins pound across, testing its strength. I tiptoe after them and stop in the middle to look out the window at the traffic below. I am up high like a bird, floating above the street.

  “Charlie!” Gram calls. “Move your keester!”

  Something gray flutters toward me: a mourning dove lands on the outside ledge. There’s only an inch of glass separating her from my hand. She has no idea I am right here, so close to her. She coos, and I can almost feel the vibration on my palm.

  I used to think it was morning dove, as in time of day, not mourning dove, as in grieving.

  “CHARLIE!”

  The dove spooks, and flies away.

  This new waiting room has low green couches, a coffee table, and an annoying news show blaring on a flat-screen TV. It also has a Nintendo 64.

  “Mario!” Joel and Jake shout, flopping down together on a floor cushion. Joel flings Ludmila’s wig off into a corner and hands his brother a controller. They sit shoulder to shoulder. My two brothers are sticking to each other like glue today.

  Davis looks pale. Her mouth is set in a straight line. Visual cue: Fear? Worry? Love?

  Gram has dark wedges of purple tiredness underneath her watery blue eyes. She rubs them as the video game theme song starts. It clashes with the sound from the television, where twin blond ladies in red, white, and blue outfits shout at us, while photos of soldiers flash in the background. Gram clicks it off with the remote and says, “Crazy nonsense; you can’t hear yourself think.”

  It’s going to be a long surgery. They are going to drill back inside my dad’s head and fix another small spot they found that’s swollen and bleeding. It’s a problem that they think they might have missed the first time around—it was a small thing, but it’s gotten worse. So they have to do it. They say they have to fix it.

  Dr. Spielman is old and gray-haired like Gram. He looks like he could play a doctor on TV. He spends a lot of time talking to Gram, holding and patting her hand and talking in a soft voice. He says he will come out to give us regular updates.

  I keep my backpack right by me, with Shaw’s little green journal by my side, as well as my Bird Book. I think about the mourning dove. I close my eyes and remember the feel of her vibration against the glass. The small neat head, the streamlined body. I take my pencil and begin to sketch.

  The door back into the surgery area has a long rectangular window. I see a doctor in a blue surgical cap come up to that window, look out at us, and then turn around and go back down the hall.

  “What does that mean?” Davis nudges Gram, looking at the door.

  “Lord knows,” says Gram. She is knitting a small round blue wool disk on needles that are connected by some kind of tubing.

  “What is that, Gram?” I ask.

  “Cap for your father,” she says, adjusting the bag of wool at her feet. I look in. There are at least a dozen caps in there already.

  An hour passes. Two. My butt aches, my knees ache, my head aches.

  I notice Dr. Spielman, the surgeon, in the window of the surgical area. He has blue scrubs, a blue hat. He peers out at us and motions with his hand for Gram to come forward.

  She freezes for a minute, then puts down her knitting needles. The doctor opens the door for her; she slips in, and they stand where we can just barely see them, through the long narrow window that’s set in the door. Davis and I watch, frozen. I grip the green plastic armrests of the chair so hard, I have wrist cramps.

  We can see part of Gram—her profile—and we can see the doctor’s chest and arms. He is gesturing with his hands. He is making a cutting motion. Now his hands are palms up, like he is offering something to Gram, but his hands are empty. He shrugs.

  What does it mean?

  Now, through the narrow rectangle, we see that Gram is putting her face in her own hands. Her shoulders slump forward, and she starts to shake. The doctor’s hands go down to his sides, hanging useless.

  What are these visual cues?

  In the pit of my stomach a terrible realization starts to form. Then it travels to my feet, and becomes a rumble.

  A rumble in my feet is not good.

  When I was little and something bad or scary would happen, or just something that confused me so much I got afraid from my own not-knowing-ness, I would start to feel this ru
mble in my feet. And when the rumble shot up through my body and burst through the top of my head, I would run.

  One day in fifth grade, I got called to the principal’s office. I didn’t know what for. It turned out to be some dumb reason like I was missing a field trip slip, but earlier that day, I had gotten pushed by David Gomez at recess and had pushed him back, so I was scared. The principal was a mean man. I was so scared that my feet wouldn’t let me go in his office. I came down the main hall intending to turn right, but at the last minute, my rumble feet changed their mind and ran me out the front door, across the parking lot, and down the street. It was like I had no control at all. My head went blank. I ran blind—I just followed my frantic feet.

  I ended up running into the public library next door. I hid in a corner of the children’s section. After a while a librarian noticed me huddled there rocking, and got me to confess.

  When she took me back to school, Dad was there! All wild-eyed, worried, and upset. They’d even called the police. Dad hugged me tight and made me promise not to ever, ever get rumble feet again. I’d had to stand there and let him hug me for what felt like forever, and I had to promise.

  But today, I can’t keep that promise. My feet are rumbling now like they rumbled then. I need to go. I watch Gram’s shoulders shaking behind the door, and I can’t stand it—the rumble is shooting up through my body out of the top of my head—I need to go—

  I’m gone.

  Across the glass sky bridge, down the stairs, and out on the street, frantic, following my feet, and at the entrance, I see the wide-open yellow door of a taxi, and a person getting out of it with a walker, and I almost knock him over I’m in such a rush to get myself and my backpack and my pounding heart and my rumble feet into that cab.