by Sally J. Pla
“Whoa, now, what’s all this?” he says. “I’ve been hearing the water running in here for half an hour! What’s going on? You okay?” He doesn’t sound like he is mad, though. His eyebrows are relaxed, not scrunched. His hands are on his hips. His voice is slow.
“I had a tick on me,” I say. I try to act steady, without shivering and jumping up and down too much. He looks me up and down, says, “Aw, shoot,” and leaves. A few seconds later he’s back with a towel, tweezers, a dry sweatshirt, and a black plastic comb.
“Okay. Bend down, kid,” he says. He calmly combs through my hair. I hate this, but I let him. Emergencies are emergencies, after all.
“I don’t see no bugs in there. You’re clean. Looks like you just had that one tiny little bugger, won’t hurt you one bit. Imagine, all that fuss over such a tiny bugger.” He stands back up. I shrug.
“You with anyone?” he asks. “Your parents here?”
I shrug.
His name tag says “Rodney.” He has brown eyes, blue-black skin, and the whitest straightest nicest teeth I’ve ever seen on a human. “I’ll wait outside,” says Rodney. “Why don’t you shake out your clothes, check them over good, put on this dry sweatshirt? You’re shivering. When you’re ready, come on back into the visitor center and we’ll talk about what’s what. Okay?” He winks and smiles his brilliant white smile on his way out of the bathroom. “That’s why we built the boardwalks,” he turns back to say to me. “You’re not supposed to go bushwhacking, young man! Especially not all alone.”
When I come back into the visitor center, Rodney’s just putting the Closed sign in the window. On the counter, he’s set me an orange soda.
“Well?” he says, pulling up a stool with his foot. “Now you got to tell me the scoop. Who do I call? Where’s your folks? What’s a nice kid like you doing in a place like this—alone, at closing time?”
It’s such a long story. I think about Ludmila, how hard it was for her to tell us her long story. But, before I realize it, I’m talking more than I have ever talked to anybody so far.
I tell him about when Dad first got hurt. About the hospital. About Davis’s road trip idea, then Ludmila coming, after the accident. About Wyoming, Yellowstone, Little Bighorn, Wall Drug, Wisconsin Dells, Chicago, Pennsylvania, Williamsburg. I show him my own Bird Book, which I’ve never shown anyone. And I tell him what I saw this morning in the hospital: my gram, who never cries, breaking down on the other side of the surgery window.
And when I tell him that I don’t know whether my dad might have died today, and that I couldn’t find Shaw to answer my questions about what it’s like, having no parents—well, it gets to be so that Rodney has to bring out a box of Kleenex and another orange soda.
“Well,” he finally says. “You’re a birder, right? So you’re just going to have to remember about the thing with feathers.”
I look at him.
“Like in the poem. Emily Dickinson. ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers.”
I tell him I do know about hope. That I walked all the way out to the marshlands and the pine island, and saw the Carolina parakeet, all because of hope. But he doesn’t believe me about the bird.
“Can’t be. You must’ve seen a flock of domestic parakeets, or monk parrots. Or pets that escaped over the years, and flocked together.”
“No, no. I know the difference. They were Carolina parakeets.”
“Well, I guess hope really is a thing with feathers.” He slaps his knee. He has a very loud, deep laugh.
Rodney also chuckles when I tell him we have a three-legged dog from Las Vegas named after Tiberius Shaw. “I think Dr. Shaw would consider that quite an honor,” Rodney says.
“Wait—what? Do you know him? Would he?” I feel hope—feathers or no feathers—rise in my chest. Or maybe it’s soda bubbles.
“Never seen him myself.” My shoulders sag. “But some of the older rangers have told me stories.”
He hands me another soda. I don’t even like soda, as a rule, but I’m so worn out and thirsty, I’m drinking these down.
“Well, now,” Rodney says finally. And the room grows silent except for the clicking of the big clock on the wall.
“You’ve had quite an adventure. But it looks like it’s about time for you to make a phone call now. Wouldn’t you say? You know the number?”
I nod. But I don’t want to call. I don’t want to have to hear my gram’s voice. I never want to know what she is going to tell me. I want to stay here and avoid everything and become a Sanctuary Marsh ranger for life, with my new friend, Rodney.
He’s waiting, and the clock is still ticking.
“I can’t do it. Would you call,” I say, looking at the floor.
He looks at me hard, with his very brown eyes with their very white whites locking lasers and tractor beams on me so my eyeballs swivel up on their own and I have to look at him back.
Then he sighs and says, “Oh well, I suppose you’ve spoken enough for one day. Okay, kid.” And he takes out his phone.
40
Warring birds, peaceful birds, life and death, kindness and menace—birds mirror the struggling in our own nature. Both war and peace are human nature. They are the nature of many creatures. It is hard to accept that these things will always exist.
—Tiberius Shaw, PhD
Something in Old Bessie’s wheezy, clanking engine is even worse than usual. You can hear Ludmila coming a mile away.
Rodney walks me down the steps and outside to wait. He puts his hand on my shoulder, and somehow I find the strength to let him.
Ludmila squeaks to a stop right in front of us. “Charlie!” she calls out the window to me, but not in a mad way. Just in her regular voice. Her pink hair looks rumpled and her eyes look squinty and red behind her heavy glasses. “We have half the town out looking for you.”
“I’m sorry.”
I don’t know what else to say. I just stand there in my new Sanctuary Marsh sweatshirt. Rodney stands behind me, waiting.
“Rodney,” I finally think to say. “This is Ludmila.”
Ludmila clicks the camper door open. Tiberius the dog tumbles down the steps and up into my arms. His whole body is wagging happily. He just doesn’t understand this kind of sadness. It must be nice to be a dog.
Ludmila follows him out of the camper. She slowly comes over and pumps Rodney’s hand up and down five times. Then she places her other hand over his hand, sandwiching it. People do this for extra emphasis. Then, I guess the emphasis wasn’t enough, because she goes in for a hug. “Thank you so much for watching over him. Oh, thank you, Rodney,” she says. She is teary.
Rodney steps back and salutes her. Then he turns and scratches Tiberius’s ears. “Great dog, kid,” he says.
Ludmila coughs. “I thought you might want to see him, so I brought him along.”
I smile at Ludmila and hug Tiberius closer.
“Now, good luck,” Rodney tells me. “Be strong. Remember what we talked about. Keep the faith. And keep in touch.”
I stare at the dirty camper steps. I don’t want to get back in. Getting back in, is like a failure. I failed at finding Tiberius Shaw. I fail at everything. I don’t know how to do anything. I don’t want to be with Ludmila. I don’t want her to talk. I don’t want to hear anything about anything that ever exists in the world ever again. The world is dark.
“Come on then,” she says, looking me up and down. “Let’s get you back. We’ve been more worried about you, today, mister, than we’ve been worried about your dad.”
Then—everything brightens.
41
It’s night now, and black outside as we cross the hospital sky bridge. We are heading toward Dad’s room. He is doing okay!
“Be prepared,” Ludmila says as we walk. “He doesn’t look very good. But the surgery went beautifully, and he’s going to do fine. They won’t let us in to see him, but we can stand outside the glass window.”
I stop in the hallway. “If he was okay, then why did
the doctor seem so serious when he talked to Gram? Why did Gram cry? What did the doctor say to her?”
“The doctor was just telling her the surgery went well.”
“But I never saw Gram cry before. Crying should mean bad news.”
“Ohh. So you thought—”
Ludmila pushes her heavy black-framed glasses up on her nose and looks at me. “And that’s why you ran? Oh, Charlie,” she says. “Your gram cried because she was so relieved. It was happy-crying. Relieved-crying.”
I think about Gram’s slumped shoulders and caved-in face through the narrow rectangle of glass in the surgery door. Gram’s visual cue didn’t look like “happy” or “relieved” to me. Her face looked like “end of the world.”
There are so many things I just don’t think I’ll ever get.
The waiting room smells like stale coffee. The Nintendo’s off. On the TV in the corner, the blond anchor ladies look like they’re still having the same argument.
“Davis took the boys across the street to the hotel,” says Ludmila. “It’s been a loooong day.”
Gram is the only person there. She is fast asleep on one of the couches, her feet in their clean, white sneakers, dangling off the edge. She has her arms crossed over her sweatshirt and a wrinkled People magazine over her head.
Once she told me, “Charlie, maybe you should read People. Might pick up some tips.”
Ludmila shakes her gently.
“I’ve got him. He’s here,” she says.
Gram sits up and the magazine slides to the floor. She looks around, sees me. I am standing straight as an iron pole, my eyes on the floor. On my filthy, filthy Crocs.
She gets up and tries to hug me. I step back and pat her gently on her shoulder.
“I’m sorry I was so much trouble to you, Gram,” I say.
Then Gram burst into tears. I always thought that was a weird expression: bursting. But that’s just what she does—water just explodes out of her eyes and she’s boo-hoo-hooing and everything. I am so surprised, I reach in my pocket and offer her Rodney’s comb, which is all I have in there. I don’t have any Kleenex.
“You’re not trouble, Charlie boy,” she says, taking Rodney’s comb and looking at it without even seeing it. “Don’t you ever say that. Don’t you think that. I just worry about you so dang much, and get so dang mad at you, because I care about you so dang much. Because I love you so dang much.”
Ludmila brings the Kleenex; Gram blows her nose. “The whole dang lot of you.”
“I love you, too, Gram,” I say, still patting her shoulder, over and over, as gently as I can. And it’s pretty much true.
42
I think about all the people along the way on this trip. All in all, there have been way more good people than bad. Dr. Joan at the observatory, showing me the owls and the stars, and lending us Old Bessie, the stinky camper. There was that kind Little Bighorn couple. The parrot lady at Wall Drug. The nurse who patched up my leg at the waterpark. Ludmila’s friends Mariana and Karim, and their little kids, and Helen, the ornithologist at the Field Museum. And especially my new friend Rodney.
Dad wouldn’t believe it if I told him I’d crossed the entire country and spoken with all these new people. Had whole conversations with some of them. I’ll show him my People list later.
And I will show him the Someday Birds List. I can’t wait to talk to him about what I’ve seen. Birds like he’s never imagined.
Dad’s out of intensive care, again. But this time around, here in this new hospital, today, he’s sitting up and talking, and listening to us.
“Davis, honey.” Dad smiles, and reaches out his hand. Then he falls asleep for ten minutes. Then his eyes open again. “Heyyyy . . . how’re my buds,” he croaks to Joel and Jake, then he dozes away again. A few minutes later: “Charlie . . .” Boom, he’s out of it again. He still talks a little bit out of only the right side of his mouth, but hey, he is talking. He is there. He is back.
When we were little, we used to pile into Dad’s big bed with him at night and ask him to tell us stories. Dad was working two jobs back then, plus trying to finish his teaching degree, plus trying to raise us alone, and I guess he got pretty tired by the end of the day, but he’d never turn us down for a story.
“Once there was, a, a little boy, and he lived at the edge of a beautiful forest . . .”
And then he’d fall asleep! So we’d shake him a little. “Then what? Then what?”
He’d come to with a start, and tell another sentence or two of the story, usually about how the kid had been warned by some good fairy or something not to go into that enchanted forest. But of course the kid always went into the forest. The kid never learned! Anyhow, Dad would say a sentence, then drowse off again.
More shaking.
Huh? What? He’d invent another bit of the story.
More shaking.
Huh? Okay, another sentence.
We shook stories out of him all the way to the end. We are not shaking him now, of course, but he’s talking-dozing-waking-talking-dozing at about that same old pace. And those enchanted forests of my dad’s stories—the forbidden places where the once-upon-a-time kids weren’t supposed to go, but always somehow did? I’ve always imagined them as thick, dark stands of pines, full of twittering, colorful birds.
43
“It’s going to be a very long journey back,” Dr. Spielman says to us, outside the door of Dad’s room. “But I’m confident he’ll make a good recovery. Slow and steady wins the race. Just remember, it won’t be overnight.”
Dr. Spielman is good. He is always here, checking on Dad, checking on his speech and motor and physical therapy. Davis says Gram has a crush on him because Gram is always saying Dr. Spielman this, Dr. Spielman that, all the time Dr. Spielman. Plus, we always catch her putting on lipstick when she thinks it’s time for his rounds.
Right now, Gram pumps Dr. Spielman’s hand gently up and down, up and down, then does the hand-sandwich thing and goes in for the hug.
Ludmila hasn’t been spending much time with us. It’s odd. She’s either been somewhere else, or hanging out in the far corner of the waiting room, reading magazines. I don’t think she’s even been in Dad’s room since we were allowed in. So when I see her walking down the hall toward us with a paper bag full of sandwiches, I grab her arm and say, “You have to come in and officially meet Dad.”
His hospital bed’s in sit-up position, and his tray’s over his lap. His hands rest on it. Davis and the twins are on the window seat, watching Dad rest.
“Hey, Dad!” I say.
His eyes yank open. At first they’re dusty buttons but then they clear.
“This is Ludmila. She drove us all the way here to see you.”
He focuses on my face first, and then her face, and he smiles his lopsided smile.
“She used to bring you coffee in the early days, back in your old hospital, but you probably don’t remember.”
He reaches out a weak hand.
“Davis used to hate her, but not anymore. Ludmila is like family or something now.”
She takes his hand.
“So you have to meet her.”
Dad smiles. “Not—not Amar’s Ludmila?”
Then, it’s Ludmila who does the exploding-crying trick.
44
What can we learn about being human, from watching bird behavior? Perhaps that tiny, community-spirited bird, Australia’s superb fairy-wren, gives us the best example: their whole wren-world only truly flourishes when each bird within it acts in a manner that’s kind.
—Tiberius Shaw, PhD
We are on the plane, heading home. Davis is next to me, the twins behind us, Ludmila across. Tiberius is in a comfy new pet carrier, under the seat by Ludmila. He’s probably dreaming about chasing mice through cornfields.
Gram is staying on with Dad. I think she was glad for a little more time not only with Dad, but with that Dr. Spielman.
Old Bessie, our rattletrap camper, is kaput. It finally
gave out just as we were getting on the beltway a couple days ago. Dr. Joan told Ludmila she should just donate it to a charity for foster children. Rest in peace, Bessie.
Ludmila is talking about going back to school. Finishing her physical therapy degree. Watching the therapists work with Dad, it started her thinking.
She and Davis are also talking about joining this charity that helps women and children survivors in war-torn countries. It’s nice to hear Davis talking about something besides how crazy in love she is with boy after boy after boy.
We did some stuff in Washington, DC. The twins finally got to go to the spy museum. I went through the whole thing with them, including fake back alleys and secret passageways. We did it, the three of us, and it wasn’t too bad at all.
Best of all, we went to the hospital just to hang out with Dad. I told him about how I tried to complete the Someday Birds List. That I’d seen almost all the birds he named, and then some—but that I missed the sandhill crane, and I wasn’t sure whether I’d seen a trumpeter or mute swan at Yellowstone.
Dad says that’s perfectly okay, because maybe we can go back and settle the question. Maybe a trip to Wyoming, and also to Nebraska, next spring, to see the sandhill cranes, he said. He wants to hear the weird noise they make.
Dad says we will go out birding together a lot, once he is better.
But I don’t think Dad believes what I told him about the Carolina parakeets alive and hidden in the sanctuary. Just like Rodney, Dad frowned and asked, “Are you sure?” But I don’t care. No matter what anyone thinks, I know I what I saw.
Funny—I thought that finishing the Someday Birds List was the only way I could give us, Dad and me, that good feeling of calm relief. I worried all across the country that I had to find every bird on that list. But in the end, it didn’t really matter. The feeling of calm came anyway.
In the hospital, I worked on my bird sketches.
I thought.
Wrote in this Bird Book.