Flight Season

by Marie Marquardt

  “There they go again,” TJ says.

  “Who?” I ask.

  “The weather people—every couple of years they get all hysterical about some hurricane, and then people scramble around and buy up all the water at Publix. The plywood flies off the shelves at Home Depot, schools close, and then there’s, like, a little wind and some good surf and it’s over.”

  He’s got a point. If growing up in Florida teaches kids anything, it’s that hurricane warnings are a big excuse for adults to skip work and drink excessively.

  I try to scoop another spoonful of orange Jell-O into Ángel’s mouth, but he holds up his hand, signaling for me to stop. He must be feeling terrible. He always inhales the Jell-O.

  “Yeah, well, I hope it doesn’t hit Haiti,” I say. “They’ve been through enough already.”

  After I say it, a heavy silence fills the room. I’m thinking about Ángel, and about how much he’s already been through. I think TJ must be too, because he darts a quick look at me, and his brows scrunch together. Then he turns back to cleaning out Ángel’s water cup.

  “It will be fine,” TJ says after a long silence. “It’s never as bad as they say it’s gonna be.”

  Ángel’s eyes fall closed, so I pull the tray of food away quietly, hoping not to disturb him if he’s drifting off to sleep. He needs to rest today.

  “Tengo frío,” Ángel mumbles.

  “He’s cold,” I tell TJ. “Can you get him one of those heated blankets?”

  TJ nods and leaves the room. I’m left alone with Ángel, studying his face. I remember when I first saw that face—pockmarked and skinny, black hair sticking up all around it. I think the expression—a face that only a mother could love—came to mind. It’s strange, because Ángel’s face hasn’t changed at all, except that it might be a little skinnier now, but when I look at it, my heart fills up. I don’t want to look away.

  I’m still studying Ángel’s face when TJ comes back in the room. We work together to spread the warm blanket across his thin body, tucking it around his toes and chin.

  “Chjonte,” he whispers.

  That’s Mam for “thank you.” He’s been teaching me a little Mam, just to pass the time.

  “You’re welcome,” I whisper.

  We watch as he relaxes into sleep. Neither one of us seems able to leave his side.

  “I keep forgetting to tell you,” I whisper to TJ. “I can’t drive you home on Friday. I have to go to Orlando after work.” I hear my voice quavering, and TJ does too, because he looks right at me, studying my face.

  “What’s happening in Orlando?” he whispers.

  “Mom and I need to get some things done at the house. We, uh, we’re putting it on the market and I need to pack up boxes.”

  “You’re selling your house?”

  I nod, looking at Ángel’s feet tucked under the covers.

  “Where are you going to live?”

  I shrug. I don’t know where we’re going to live. What I do know is that we can’t afford the house anymore, and we need to find some source of income if there will be any chance at all of me going back to Yale in the fall. Even if I get a financial aid package that gives me a job on campus, I don’t think I’m going to be able to sustain both of us with part-time work in the dining hall. Mom’s not ready to go out and look for a job. For weeks, she was so out of it that she couldn’t even pull together the forms I needed for those applications. Alice has been incredibly patient with us, but she finally called me on Monday and told me that if I didn’t get the forms submitted this week, they wouldn’t be processed by the start of the school year.

  When I asked her, “What does that mean, exactly?” she replied, “Well, Vivi, it means you and your mom will be expected to pay us $30,587 by August tenth.”

  “We have to pay for the whole year by August?”

  “No, Vivi,” she said, her voice patient and calm. “That’s for the first semester. The second half will be due in December.”

  My very dignified response was, “Holy crap! You have got to be kidding me. Sixty-one thousand dollars?”

  Alice was great about it. She laughed a high, tinkling laugh and then said, “It’s $61,174, to be precise. I wouldn’t kid about this, Vivi. Submit the forms.”

  I had no idea college was that expensive, but it certainly lit a fire under me.

  Thank God, we finally managed to submit the paperwork yesterday. Now we wait. In the meantime, we need money, so Mom called an old friend who’s a Realtor in Winter Park, and he put the house on the market.

  “Anyway, we are going down to clear out some of the personal stuff and bring it back here—”

  Ángel mumbles something, but his eyes are still closed. Maybe he’s dreaming?

  “Yeah, okay. I’ll get Sabrina to pick me up,” TJ says. “We’re both off Friday night, so it’s no big deal.”

  Ángel mumbles again.

  “What? ¿Qué?” I ask Ángel.

  “TJ can help,” he says quietly. “He’s strong. He can pick things up.”

  I guess Ángel wasn’t sleeping. And, once again, he’s proving just how much he understands what’s going on around him.

  “Sure. Yes. I mean, yeah, if you and your mom need me—” TJ stammers.

  Did he really just say yes?

  “That’s okay,” I say. “You don’t need to do that. It’s your day off. You never get a day off.”

  “My vato has no life,” Ángel mumbles. “He’s got nothin’ else to do.”

  TJ shrugs. “My homie has a point.”

  I look back and forth between Ángel and TJ, barely able to express the profound sense of gratitude I feel. “Thanks,” I manage to whisper.

  * * *

  On the drive back to St. Augustine, we pull up to a four-way stop, just as a horde of crows takes to the air from a field across the intersection.

  “Check it out!” TJ says, leaning forward to watch them alight. “What are they?”

  I shake my head. “Did you really just ask me what kind of birds those are?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Do you know absolutely nothing about birds?”

  TJ shrugs. “I know all about Rita. I hang out with her for, like, eight hours a day.”

  “Besides Rita?”

  He shrugs again.

  “They’re crows, common American crows. They’re quite literally everywhere. Birders call them ‘junk birds.’”

  “So you’re not gonna pull out your binoculars?”

  “For a murder of crows? I don’t think so.”

  “A murder?”

  “It’s what you call a big group of crows.”

  “Okay, so what do you call a little group of crows? Cuz that one’s posing for you.” We both watch as dozens of crows lift off the field simultaneously, taking to the sky. Three remain together, perfectly still, in the middle of the abandoned field.

  “You don’t mind?” I ask.

  “Be my guest.”

  I pull up onto the shoulder and roll down my window. TJ takes my binoculars and journal from the glove compartment and hands them to me.

  We watch in silence. One crow stands erect, while the other two nuzzle into his neck. He turns toward one of the two, and they begin to twine their beaks, slowly spinning, their beaks pressed together.

  “What are they doing?” he asks.

  I shrug. “Not sure,” I say. “But scientists think that these birds—crows, rooks, ravens—actually console each other after a fight. Maybe that guy in the middle was attacked, and the other two are his friends. They’re just trying to make him feel better, repair his bruised ego.”

  “Really?” TJ asks. “Birds do that?”

  “Not all of them,” I say as I turn to a blank page in my journal and start to sketch. “But some of the smart ones do.”

  TJ watches as my pencil forms the shape of three crows. He sits in patient silence while I color each crow a deep, solid black.

  For this, I am so deeply grateful.

  Back
in January I finally returned to Yale after almost two months away. I went home for Thanksgiving and never came back for exams, so my friends had started to wonder. Gillian didn’t hesitate to share the tragic news, and I guess she took it upon herself to describe to everyone what a spectacular mess I had been over Thanksgiving.

  Everyone knew about that night at Sabor do Brasil, too.

  It was as if I had some sort of communicable disease. I walked into my first class of the semester—a first-year writing seminar, and every single person averted their gaze, even the teacher. I wanted to yell at them, tell them they were all a bunch of idiots and cowards, to remind them that a deceased father is not contagious. I didn’t, though. I slumped into my seat and rested my head on the desk, where it stayed for the entire hour-and-fifteen-minute class session (and most of the subsequent class sessions too).

  But those very same people, if I saw them out on a Saturday night, their cheeks flushed from too many beers, suddenly got all emotional and sympathetic. I can’t tell you how many times Gillian cried on my shoulder. I sat squeezed onto a dingy couch in some crowded dorm room, comforting her, trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with this picture—shouldn’t Gillian be trying to make me feel better? Shouldn’t I be crying on her shoulder?

  I quit going out on weekends. I also gave up on social media. I needed less connection, not more.

  I don’t blame her. Here’s what I’ve figured out about people like Gillian: they have no idea how to deal with the searing, terrible pain of death, because their lives are good and they’re just beginning to live. So they started avoiding me, and I started avoiding them, because I couldn’t bear how much they were living. And they couldn’t bear seeing how I was dying inside.

  Over the past eight months, I’ve grown accustomed to this strange isolation. Now, sitting on a roadside in North Central Florida, I’m feeling a little overwhelmed, because a surly nurse’s aid who doubles as a churrasqueiro and a scrawny sick kid who doubles as a pain in the ass are, against all the odds, friends to me.

  I think maybe they’re my only real friends.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  TJ

  “HOW’S MEDICAL SCHOOL GOING?”

  Alisha, one of the belly dancers turned samba dancers is taking off her wings a few feet away from where I clean the grill.

  “You mean nursing school?” I ask. “I’m in nursing school.”

  My voice probably sounds more annoyed than it should. Alisha’s nice, and I know she’s just trying to make small talk, but it’s been an incredibly long night at the restaurant and—to be honest—she flirts with me a lot.

  The Saturday Samba has been so popular that Uncle Jay decided to expand it to Thursdays. As a result, it’s two A.M. on Friday and I still haven’t finished cleaning the grill.

  Dad and Uncle Jay are in the kitchen, screaming obscenities at each other, and we are all doing our best to pretend it’s not happening. It started around ten P.M., when we ran out of lamb. Or, at least that’s what my dad told all the meat runners. As it turns out, we have plenty of lamb—shitty freezer-burned lamb that Uncle Jay bought off of a shady distributor and that Dad refuses to use.

  I wasn’t really paying much attention to whether or not we had lamb, since I spent the entire night managing stupid-drunk frat boys who seem to think that randomly groping samba dancers is perfectly acceptable behavior.

  So, yeah, I guess I’m a little past using my manners tonight.

  “Oh, sorry,” Alisha says. “Nursing school, that’s really great.” She nods and I shrug. “Thanks for looking out for me tonight,” she adds.

  “Those guys were idiots,” I respond, feeling my chest tighten with anger. “I’m sorry they treated you like that.”

  My mind flashes to the night that Vivi fell off the bar, and to the two assholes we let her leave with. Since that night, I’ve had what you might call a zero-tolerance policy for groping drunks. So it felt pretty good, actually, when I got to throw the frat boys out tonight, after they used their fancy new iPhones to take pictures of their offensive behavior.

  I made sure that one of them dropped his phone on the cobblestones when I shoved him out onto the street.

  I hope the screen shattered into a hundred pieces.

  “No biggie,” she says, cheerful. “I’ve gotten used to it.”

  I glance up from the metal brush I’m using to scour the grill. Her arms are folded across her chest and she’s a little slumped. She’s frowning, like she’s feeling nauseous.

  My eyes narrow. “You shouldn’t have to get used to it,” I say.

  We both listen in silence as Demetrio breaks into the fight unfolding in the kitchen and tries to play peacemaker.

  “What’s going on back there?” Alisha asks.

  “Let’s just say you should be feeling very grateful that you don’t understand Portuguese.” I finish with the grill and wash my hands. Then I grab a big pile of clean tablecloths and start to fold them.

  “Filho da puta!” Uncle Jay yells, while apparently throwing a metal object across the kitchen.

  “I guess if you wanna learn how to tell somebody off in Brazilian Portuguese, now’s your chance.”

  She laughs. “Good to know.”

  Alisha does the whole sequined-bikini thing incredibly well, I gotta admit. Hers is gold, and it looks amazing against her dark skin. I like her hair, too. She’s got one of those natural, loose Afros that are trendy these days.

  “So, how much longer till you’re a nurse?” she asks.

  “I’ve just got a couple of credit hours left—this is my last semester of clinical.” If I take the classes online, I should be able to pull together the cash next semester—depending on how much it costs to replace my transmission.

  “Are you at Santa Fe?” she asks.

  “Yeah,” I tell her, “but I’m gonna take the rest of my classes online. It’s cheaper.”

  She carefully pulls at a loose string on her wings, tightening a gold sequin.

  “I went to Santa Fe. I’m starting at University of Florida in the fall—mechanical engineering or maybe aerospace. I haven’t decided.”

  “That’s awesome!” I tell her. I mean it too. I guess I didn’t expect a belly/samba dancer to be an engineer, too. My bad. I love it when people surprise me.

  Uncle Jay comes storming out of the kitchen, red-faced and sweaty. He’s got his suit jacket off, and his sleeves are pushed up to his elbows, like he’s ready for a fight. When he sees Alisha watching, he pauses and produces a big fake smile. “Nice work tonight!” he says too enthusiastically. “Beautiful! Beautiful!” Then he glares at me and spits out, “Seu pai é um cuzão.”

  He takes three more steps and then turns back. “E um imbecil!”

  “What did he say?” Alisha whispers.

  “My dad’s an asshole and an idiot,” I tell her, shaking my head.

  “For what it’s worth,” she says, putting a hand on her hip, “I think your dad’s a sweetheart.”

  I grab another pile of clean tablecloths. “I’m not getting in the middle of it, that’s for sure.”

  “Need some help?” she asks, reaching for one of a dozen white tablecloths.

  “Sure.”

  We stand together in silence, trying to ignore the loud voices in the kitchen—Demetrio is trying to console my dad, make him calm down.

  That’s not gonna happen.

  “Hey,” she says, shifting from one foot to the other. “Are you working tomorrow night? There’s this party at the beach, and I thought maybe…”

  “I gotta go to Orlando tomorrow.” I glance up quickly to catch her gaze. “I’m helping a friend move.”

  “Another time?” she asks.

  “Yeah, sure.” I focus on the tablecloth, bringing the edges together in an even line. “I mean, I don’t really party, but we could hang out.”

  She thrusts her hand out. “Give me your phone,” she says.

  I’m not sure I like where this is going, but I’d feel kinda
bad saying no, so I put the folded cloth on a stack and pull my phone from my back pocket.

  Alisha grabs it and turns sideways. She puts a hand on her hip and puckers her red-tinted lips. She holds the phone up high and takes a selfie. Then she starts typing her contact info into my phone.

  “Okay, done. I sent myself a text,” she says, handing back my phone. “Hope that’s okay.”

  “Yeah,” I say, picking up another tablecloth. “That’s cool.”

  And it is cool. It’s fine. But I guess I’m also realizing that I’d much rather be moving boxes with Vivi and her mom than hanging out at a beach party with Alisha. And that’s a little weird.

  It’s getting near the end of my Friday shift, and I’m trying to get through a long list of boring chores I have to do before I can leave for Orlando with Vivi and her mom, who has been hanging around the hospital all day, since she doesn’t have a car to drive herself to Orlando. So I’m a little annoyed when Vivi’s weird texts come in.

  Hey. Are you a lot taller than me?

  Yeah I think. Why?

  Come to Ángel’s room-ASAP!

  ??

  Need help. Now.

  I’m also a little embarrassed that I know exactly how much taller I am than Vivi.

  If she were to stand face-to-face with me, her forehead would be at my lips.

  It seems kinda urgent, though, so I quit restocking and I quit stressing about why I know where my lips would find her skin, and I jog over to Ángel’s room.

  The door is closed, and a bunch of people are inside, laughing. I throw the door open to find Vivi jumping at the end of Ángel’s bed, apparently trying to push the ceiling tiles loose. Her mom is encouraging her from the edge of Ángel’s chair, where she is perched, holding a bunch of thin strings with paper attached to them.

  “Salta!” Ángel yells.

  “I’m trying,” Vivi says, laughing.

  When I walk in, all three of them turn to look at me.

  “What the hell?”

  “Ángel wanted to see sky today,” Vivi’s mom says, pointing toward the whiteboard. I know what’s there, since I wrote it eight hours ago. Ángel’s goal for today: to lie on his back and look up at the sky.