Bird

by Crystal Chan

  It’s funny that it’s Dad who’s taking care of Jamaican plants, talking about duppies and the like, because he didn’t come over from Jamaica—Grandpa and Granny did. Nobody’s been back there either. Nothing to go back to, Dad said when I asked him once. Everything’s changed by now—the people and towns are all different. Anyway, he said, he and Grandpa have been in the North so long that even the Jamaican sun wouldn’t recognize them anymore. They’d probably get sunburned like a bunch of white people. Dad had laughed pretty hard when he said that. Still, once I found a really old travel flyer for a vacation package to Jamaica that was tucked into one of his car magazines. The flyer had these pictures of the ocean, and trees and sunsets, and the package included airfare and hotel and even meals, and listed what it said was a rock-bottom price. But that price didn’t look very low to me. Maybe not to Dad, either, because he never said a word about it to us.

  Dad’s never even gone back to Miami, either. That’s where Grandpa and Granny lived after they came over and where he grew up. I figured they’d want to go back and visit their friends, at least a couple times.

  Sometimes I feel bad for Dad because he can’t talk to folks around here about things like using rosemary to ward off duppies. Iowa doesn’t have the greatest Jamaican community, if you know what I mean. We have to drive fifty minutes to get to a store that sells plantains, and since those are sold for the Mexican Americans, that’s the only time that Mom speaks Spanish, because the workers don’t speak much English. Then we have to drive more than three hours to get to Chicago, where we buy our Jamaican food: saltfish, tinned ackees, Scotch bonnet peppers, dried pimento, bammies, and beef patties. After eating at our favorite Jamaican restaurant, we drive back to the cornfields, to the community that thinks that Jamaica is some country in Africa, to a place where the white people and the Latinos stay in their own little corners of town, and where mixing just doesn’t happen.

  Except for in my family.

  I wonder what it would be like, sometimes, to have two parents who have the same languages and histories and recipes. It would make things less interesting, I think, but maybe a little simpler, too. When we leave Caledonia to go shopping, it’s confusing to hear folks ask me what I am. Shouldn’t they ask who I am? Why am I a what? I’m not sure why it matters so much, but I can tell by the way they stare that it does.

  “Why didn’t you pick up around the house?” Mom asked me, more tired than stern. It must have been stressful for her at work today or she would have been more upset with me. She had turned on the oscillating fan and was taking off the earrings Dad had given her for Christmas a couple years ago. Mom then leaned in to the mirror, staring at her face. She always looks for wrinkles or something on her smoky quartz skin. She doesn’t know how much I’d love to look like her one day; she’s so beautiful.

  I was sitting on the edge of their bed, and I stopped swinging my feet back and forth. One day they’ll touch the ground, but for now, they were still a couple inches away. “I didn’t get to the living room because I got distracted a little.” Heat rose to my face.

  Mom’s dark eyebrows rose and scrunched together. “By what?”

  “I spent too much time weeding the garden.” That was true, but not completely. I just left out the part about Grandpa, and then John, and then Event Horizon.

  Mom sighed, and she turned to face me. “Jewel, come here.”

  I slipped off the bed and approached her, slowly. She gave me a hug, not too tight, then drew me back a ways so she could look at me. “I’m really worried about you, honey,” she said.

  I swallowed.

  “You listen too much to your dad. He means well, but I want you to have a good job when you grow up. Be someone.”

  I squirmed. She was afraid that I won’t? That I’m not anyone right now? I looked back at her and nodded.

  “Your father is a sweet man, and you know I love him, but you can’t take him too seriously.”

  I didn’t like this conversation. I love Dad’s lessons and his stories and the way he keeps wishing for things, even if they’ll never come true. So what if he wants a coconut tree in Iowa?

  Mom softly pinched my chin. “You’re all we got, Jewel. I want you to make us proud.”

  A small tremor ran through me, like my heart was splitting, a deep crack in the earth, and all kinds of dark fears rose up. I swallowed.

  “I want to make you proud, too.” I whispered. And nothing could have been truer than that.

  Although Mom didn’t say it, I could tell she was sad, just like I could tell all the other times when something inside her would wither away. Sometimes it would happen around my birthday, the anniversary of Bird’s death, and she would change. Then she’d do a lot of the same things, but there’d be a deep heaviness in her eyes, and she would be quiet a lot, and sometimes she’d cry, like at the dinner table for no reason, and when she would speak all she could do was tell me I did something wrong. She’d get mad a lot too, more than normal. That was the worst part, when she’d get mad, because there’d be nothing I could do to make things better.

  Every time she changed like this, it was about Bird. Sometimes I’d be scared about my birthday because I’d be afraid that Mom would turn sad or angry—and she wouldn’t be like this just for a day but for weeks or months sometimes, until something would happen and snap her out of it. The tricky thing was that you never knew when it would come; sometimes my birthday would pass and Mom would stay Mom, laughing more than I thought possible on my birthday.

  I’d always know when Mom had returned because she’d rub me on the back in the old way. But Mom would change every once in a while—sometimes around my birthday, sometimes when I would ask about Bird, like that time I asked what his favorite food was. When this would happen, I’d get so mad at myself for bringing Bird up at all. So, of course, I learned not to bring him up. It was just too risky. But even though I’d learned to stay far away from talking about Bird, she’d still slip into this other Mom, and then I’d wonder what I did to make her do that. Like, she turned sad a couple weeks before my twelfth birthday, and I got really mad at myself for having a birthday in the first place.

  Grandpa emerged from his room for dinner, sat down at his chair, and stared at his empty plate. He sucked on his cheeks. I bit my lip and continued to set the table, trying not to think about how I’d left with John, defying him.

  “How are you feeling?” Dad asked Grandpa. Dad was asking this a lot since they got home from the hospital yesterday.

  Grandpa shrugged dismissively. Then he angled his head just slightly in my direction and frowned good and angry and deep.

  I pretended not to notice and brought over the tortillas and rice and beans, some zucchini that Mom managed to fry up, and Mrs. Rodriguez’s salsa. It was Mom’s dinner night. It’s funny, because Dad learned to cook Mexican food from Mrs. Rodriguez and cooks it a whole lot better than Mom does. Mom doesn’t like to cook so we get a lot of canned beans, even though they’re more expensive than the dried ones. And she loves salsa, but Dad doesn’t make it well, so they send me to Mrs. Rodriguez’s house to get some. Mrs. Rodriguez doesn’t speak any English, and she always gives me these looks when I drop by, like she pities me. I’m not sure if she pities me because Mom didn’t teach me Spanish or because I’m kind of skinny and Mom’s not a good cook, but whatever. I get our salsa from her in exchange for Dad shoveling for her in the winter.

  We just started dinner when I noticed that Grandpa wasn’t eating. That was strange, since he usually digs in and doesn’t stop until he cleans his plate. Mom glanced at Dad.

  “Grandpa? What’s wrong?” Dad asked.

  My stomach flip-flopped. He was going to tell them what I did. I felt like throwing up.

  Suddenly, Grandpa grabbed his knife and fork, and with both fists started pounding his silverware on his plate. I gasped and jumped back from the table.

  The three of us stared at one another as Grandpa’s metallic pounding filled the room.

 
“Grandpa,” Dad said, getting up, but Grandpa was already stalking into the kitchen. Mom looked at me, wide-eyed. We ran over in time to see Grandpa carrying our ten-gallon rice container to the screen door. Dad and Grandpa wrestled over it until, with the shoving and pulling, they spilled it all over the kitchen floor. The hard grains skittered over the linoleum in a white, dry waterfall. Grandpa opened the door and started kicking the rice out of the house, onto the ground.

  Dad pinned Grandpa’s arms behind his back. “Grandpa! Stop this! There are no duppies here!”

  My stomach dropped, and blackness crept around my vision. I grabbed the counter to steady myself. Dad and Mom struggled with Grandpa, step by crunching step, slipping on the rice, to get him out of the house. Dad’s engine started, and then he and Grandpa were gone.

  I blinked away the blackness. Mom staggered back into the house, letting the door slam behind her. In that instant, the look she gave me was one of pure bewilderment and fear. The next moment, though, her face returned to its usual controlled state, like a curtain going down over her, until she was gone too.

  Silently we got down on all fours and began to gather the rice that Grandpa had spilled, the rice that somehow was supposed to keep the duppy away, the rice that we were going to eat the next day, and the next day, and the next.

  “Wasn’t Mrs. Rodriguez’s salsa good?” Mom said calmly.

  I nodded. Yes, it was.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “HOW old is the earth?” John asked a few nights later, when I had slipped away to Event Horizon to meet up with him.

  “About four and half billion years,” I said. We were inside the tree and had just finished saving the Andromeda Galaxy from aliens and quasar explosions and giant black holes. Mom and Dad go to bed pretty early, so they didn’t notice I had slipped out. I leaned my back against the inside of the trunk and chewed on one of John’s granola bars.

  “Four and a half billion? Is that all?”

  I shined my flashlight on his face.

  “Hey!” he said, turning his face away from the light beam.

  I hid a smile. “What do you mean, ‘Is that all’? That’s a long time.”

  “Not compared to the age of the universe.”

  “Four and a half billion years is still a long time.”

  John snorted.

  “If four and a half billion years amounted to the span of one calendar year, then humans have been on earth for the equivalent of twenty-three minutes.” That was my favorite factoid in all the world, taken right from my favorite geology book.

  John paused. “Twenty-three minutes?”

  “Yup.” I stuffed the rest of the granola bar into my mouth. “Dinosaurs roamed the earth about two weeks ago.” That was my second favorite fact.

  “But what happened in the time before that?”

  I shrugged. “Precambrian. Most of January through November.”

  John made figure eights on the tree wall with his flashlight. “Well, light travels at the speed of 186,000 miles per second, and in a year it covers almost 5.9 trillion miles,” he said. “That’s a light-year. The closest star to us besides the sun is Proxima Centauri, which is about four light-years away.”

  That was about 24 trillion miles. My head hurt thinking about a trillion anything.

  “And since the light from that star has taken four years to reach us,” John said, “it could have exploded by now and we wouldn’t know about it for years!” He hit the dirt with his fist.

  “Why do you want to be an astronaut?” I said.

  John tilted his head back to look at the stars through the hole in the roof of the tree. “I want to find what’s out there,” he said. He was quiet for a moment. The cicadas were almost deafening. “This planet is just a tiny speck compared to the universe.”

  I crumpled my granola wrapper into my pocket. “Won’t you be lonely?”

  “I could go anywhere. Like Ganymede. Io. Beyond.”

  “But won’t—”

  “I don’t need anyone.”

  I didn’t know what to say. John sounded a little silly right then, since he has to need someone, like his parents or his uncle, for food and stuff. But his words were angry, just how Grandpa’s silence was angry, or how anger hid beneath the surface of Mom and Dad’s words or the way they brushed their teeth or the way they hugged each other, even. And when anger peeks above the surface, it’s like rice, spilling over everywhere, and no matter how hard you try to clean it up, it sticks in the corners, impossible to get out.

  After Dad came back with Grandpa—they had gone out for a ride, to cool off—Grandpa stayed in his room for two days straight, leaving only to go to the bathroom. But his presence was colder than ever, a cold that went much deeper than our howling winters, a cold that came from someplace awful within. And even worse, Dad didn’t go out to check on his garden that entire time. He’s always out there after work, poking around, inspecting the growing leaves. But ever since Grandpa spilled the rice, not once did Dad tend to his garden. I watered his saplings for him.

  I was thinking of Grandpa and Dad and the rice and the silences and I didn’t think my mouth was planning on doing anything about it, but I was wrong because the words came out: “Grandpa thinks there’s a duppy in the house.”

  John started making shadow puppets. “Really?”

  “Yeah. He poured our rice all over our kitchen and outside.”

  John’s eyebrows popped up. “What for?”

  I’d asked Dad that very question the next day. “To keep the duppies away,” I said.

  “Rice?”

  “If duppies find rice around the house, they have to count every grain before they can go inside.”

  “You think they really have to count each grain?” Now John made a dog with his fingers, and the dog grew and shrank against the trunk.

  “Well, that’s what Dad says,” I said, trying to ignore a twisting feeling inside me. “And it’s best to put a lot of rice outside since duppies aren’t too smart and can’t count that high.”

  John snorted.

  “They can only count up to nine before they get confused and have to start all over again at one,” I said. “They’ll never get in the house because they’ll be stuck outside counting.”

  “Only up to nine?” John asked, with a strange smile on his face.

  I didn’t say anything.

  A glint jumped into John’s eyes. “So if I come over in a white sheet and start making wailing noises, he’ll freak out, right?”

  I sucked in my breath. “You wouldn’t do that.”

  John laughed.

  I tugged at a lock of my hair. “Grandpa’s not that bad.”

  “Oh? He spits at guests to make them feel at home?”

  “He usually stays in his room. I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” I insisted, but I knew I was sounding like my parents just then, making excuses for Grandpa. While I didn’t really want to defend Grandpa, I definitely didn’t want John to say disrespectful things about him, even if they were true. But I was getting jumbled up inside. Was it wrong for all this anger to be stalking around the house, crouching in the corners? Was I wrong to make excuses for it?

  “You’re really uptight, you know that, Jewel?” John was saying.

  My face scrunched up, I could feel it. “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve got so many thoughts in your head you could live up there.” John jabbed one of his fingers at my forehead. “Sometimes you just need to chill out. Relax, you know?”

  I stared at him. I liked living in my head.

  “And I have a feeling it runs in your family,” John said. “I can’t imagine your grandpa letting loose.” He snorted. “Anyway, sheet or no sheet, I’ll stop by your place tomorrow. Maybe he’ll be there.”

  I froze. “And then what?”

  John grinned. “And then I’ll talk with him. Look, Jewel, if I’m going to be hanging at your house, I don’t want to be chased away every time,” he said, his voice as confident as a slab
of granite. “I want us to be okay, you know? It’s not right that he goes around trying to scare people.”

  A thrill of terror and excitement shot through me when he said that. I tried to imagine what Grandpa would do a second time around, and nothing I could think of made me feel very good. We ducked out of Event Horizon and made our way back to the road. Usually, when I’m walking along the road at night, I talk to the stars as they unfurl above me. Right then, though, I barely noticed them.

  John decided to stop by without a sheet. I breathed a sigh of relief when I opened the door and saw him in shorts and a T-shirt.

  “Is he here?” John asked as I let him in.

  “I think so,” I said. I had picked up the house a little, just for him, and everything was quiet and clean. Sunlight made the kitchen and dining room glow golden. The cool morning air had long gone.

  “Where is he?” John whispered.

  I shrugged. “Probably in his bedroom,” I said in a low voice, nodding to his shut door. “He’s always there.”

  “What does he do in there?”

  “No idea,” I said, fidgeting. I took an apple off our table and polished it.

  John looked at me. “Seriously? You have no idea what he does?”

  I used to think a lot about what he did in his room, since we share a wall. But I never heard anything coming from his room. Not one sound. Not ever. “I think he reads a lot,” I said. “Sleeps. Maybe he writes letters back to his family in Jamaica.”

  John shot me a look. “Sleeps and writes letters? If I did that every day, I’d spit at people too.” He took a step toward the hallway where our three bedrooms were.

  I grabbed his arm. “Wait. You want a glass of water? Something to drink?” I asked.

  John’s eyes twinkled. “Nope.”

  He yanked his arm back and quietly walked down the hallway toward Grandpa’s room. John raised his arm to knock on the door.

  I sucked in my breath. A part of me wanted to run at John and pull him out of the house, away from Grandpa and the never-ending silence, but my feet stayed planted like a cottonwood tree. I couldn’t stop him even if I wanted to, but then I realized that I didn’t want to stop him. Not really. Not if John was going to do this so things would be okay when he’d come over. And I had to admit I was curious to see how John would talk to Grandpa without being afraid.