The Dark and Other Love Stories

by Deborah Willis

  The crow made a sound like a rusty hinge opening. Eddie reached for one of its brittle legs but his arm was too slow and the crow hopped easily away. “You fucker,” he whispered. He liked animals, had a dog growing up until she got a tumor that hung heavily from her leg, but he hated crows. They were street birds. Dirty. Thieves.

  “Listen, man.” He sat up in bed. “You can’t be here.”

  The crow cocked its head as though confused, as though Eddie were the intruder. Maybe he was. He’d only moved in yesterday, proud to sign the lease. Right now all he had was a mattress thrown on the floor, his patchwork quilt, a few mismatched dishes, and a scratched pot. The bathroom sink was rusty and two of the stove’s burners didn’t work, but he planned to buy a fold-out couch for Abby when she came to stay.

  The crow picked at a corner of the quilt, tugging a loose thread. Then made a low whine and watched him with a wary eye that reminded him of his daughter. The crow’s eyes were blue like Abby’s, something he’d never seen in a bird before. Maybe it wasn’t a crow. Maybe it was a raven or a rook. But what was the difference? They all meant bad luck.

  He spent the morning chasing the bird through the apartment, flicking a towel at it, and arrived late for work. His job was to install cable boxes and phone lines, and that meant he wore a name tag, rang doorbells, and slipped soft covers over his shoes before walking into strangers’ homes—Yaletown high-rises, North Van mansions. He was quiet and polite and tried not to show his teeth when he smiled. He liked to tread over people’s thick carpets and stand in their bright sunrooms. “Have a good one,” he said each time he left.

  When he finished work and got back to the apartment, he kicked off his shoes, heard them land with an echo against the door, then took a beer from the fridge. It was good to have his own place. If only he had a chair to sit on and maybe a CD player instead of that shitty tape deck. And a girlfriend, someone who found his jokes funny. Mostly he wished Abby were here, at the kitchen table. He didn’t own a table yet, but when he did, she would sit there doing her homework.

  What kind of homework would she do? He knew kids used computers now and he didn’t have one. He also wasn’t good at math and worried about how he’d help her. But these were small things—what was important was that he had cleaned himself up. And that his daughter still phoned him late at night, when her mom was asleep. “Hi,” she’d say. “It’s Abby.” As though he might have forgotten.

  No matter how bad things had gotten in his life, he always kept minutes on his phone so she could call to play the Question Game. It had no rules, no winner or loser, no beginning or end.

  “What’s your favorite fruit?” he might say, to start them off.

  “Grapes. But only the green kind.” She whispered so her mom wouldn’t hear. “What vegetable do you hate most?”

  “Cauliflower.” That was an easy one. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

  “A bobsledder,” she said. “What do you want to be?”

  “A sea monster. Do you like sweaters or sweatshirts?”

  “Sweatshirts. ’Cause they’re not scratchy.”

  He collected this information, but knew nothing about the life she lived with Tara in Coquitlam. He was only a half-hour drive away but didn’t own a car and, anyway, wouldn’t have been welcome. So he didn’t know the names of Abby’s friends, or of the songs she listened to over and over, or even whether her hair was long or short now. And what could he tell her about his life? Not the part about sleeping in shelters or under cardboard. Not the part about buying drugs from a guy named Kit Kat. Not the part about emptying Tara’s bank account.

  So he and Abby played the Question Game, or they talked about the future: she was ten years old now and lived with her mom and grandparents, but she planned to move in with him when she was twelve and legally allowed to choose. “When I live with you, will we go to the aquarium?”

  “Every day,” he promised.

  Now he poured Corn Pops into the same bowl he’d used for breakfast—Corn Pops were Abby’s favorite. Or they had been a few years ago. When Tara was out, Eddie and Abby used to pour so much cereal into their bowls that the milk became thick and syrupy with sugar. This was one of their very-secret secrets.

  He poured milk in now, and that’s when he heard a grating sound from the bedroom, like a car driving over gravel. The crow. He’d forgotten about the crow. It flew into the kitchen and landed lightly on top of the fridge.

  He banged his spoon on the counter and the bird fluttered to the other side of the room, then screeched at him—a sharp, startled squawk. Eddie threw a handful of Corn Pops at it, and they clattered over the counter and onto the floor. Then the crow picked one up and held it in his beak, as if to mock Eddie’s inadequacy.

  This couldn’t be happening. Eddie was a human being—top of the food chain. Not only that, but he was a human being with a job and a debit card. A human being with a daughter who had his same blue eyes, a daughter who whispered into the phone that she missed him.

  He strode to the entranceway and picked up one of his shoes. He would beat the thing to death.

  But when he got back to the kitchen, he saw the crow stamping its small black foot to crush a Corn Pop to powder, then pecking the pieces off the floor. It ate quickly, nervously, watching Eddie with one of its blue eyes.

  The fucking thing was hungry. And Eddie remembered being hungry.

  He took the other bowl out of the cupboard, half filled it with cereal, poured in some milk. Did crows like milk? He would find out.

  “Here.” He set the bowl on the counter. “Have some.”

  For twenty minutes, the bird took tentative steps toward him, jumpy shuffles that reminded him of the meth-heads on Hastings—except the crow looked normal, looked right. Finally it settled on the bowl’s rim, and, before eating, executed a little bow. Eddie was in an empty kitchen, eating Corn Pops from the box and drinking beer from a can, but suddenly felt like he was in another country, at a dinner with a sober and elegant guest. “Bon appétit,” he said, using French he’d learned from his buddy Marc, a Quebecois who knew how to swallow swords. And the crow seemed to answer him. It gurgled like an old man gargling mouthwash.

  Each night he came home from work with something new—apples, pepperoni—and the crow greeted him at the door, cawed, and curtsied. Eddie felt disoriented like when his daughter was born—five pounds seven ounces, with bright blue eyes and a head of dark hair. He’d been terrified to hold her, scared he’d drop her, worried that her quick, irregular breathing meant her lungs were collapsing. He was only eighteen when she was born and she was a creature he didn’t understand at all. She seemed fragile as an egg. He vowed to do his best, to at least keep her alive, and he learned to change diapers and give her a bottle. He rocked her to sleep by holding her against his chest so she could feel his heartbeat.

  After the curtsy, the crow took three prim steps to the left, its talons clicking on the floor. Then it bowed a second time, deeply and formally, and Eddie bowed back. Sometimes they greeted each other this way for five minutes, bowing back and forth. It reminded him of the first time Abby smiled. She was six weeks old, so small he could hold her with one arm. Just a week earlier, her eyes didn’t focus properly, but suddenly she looked at his face and smiled. Christ, she looked so fucking cute, wrinkling up her face and showing those pink gums. He’d smiled back and she smiled a second time. They did that, smiling at each other, for what seemed like hours.

  He learned that the crow liked banana but not avocado, cheddar but not Swiss. It devoured cans of Spam and of gray, mushy cat food. It loved raw eggs, rejected all fruit, left Doritos alone unless they were softened in water, and was fond of his culinary specialty, omelets with onion and bacon. Once Eddie brought home a grocery-store rotisserie chicken and the crow ate half the carcass, including the bones.

  Over dinner, Eddie took one bite—of toast or pizza or whatever—and tossed one to the crow, who leapt and dove to catch the food in its mouth. “Hell, y
eah!” Eddie found himself cheering like during a hockey game.

  After dinner, while he hoped for Abby to call, they had tugs-of-war with an elastic band. Or Eddie crumpled a piece of paper, rolled it along the floor, and the bird chased and pounced.

  After about a week, Eddie gave the bird a name. He had no idea whether it was male or female, but he called it Todd, after his first roommate, a guy he’d worked with laying floors. Instead of tug-of-war, they’d done a lot of coke, but living with avian Todd wasn’t so different from living with human Todd.

  As with any roommate, Todd did things that pissed Eddie off. Almost every evening he came home to find garbage—orange peels and coffee grounds and candy wrappers—scattered on the floor. And the bird liked to steal stuff: Eddie’s watch, his nail clippers, even his nipple ring—once he woke to the bird pecking at it, trying to tear it out. He also found lettuce in his sock drawer and crackers in his shoes. And he couldn’t figure out why Todd hated his leather wallet. The bird repeatedly bashed it on the floor as if to kill it.

  And there was the bird shit. On the floors, in the shower, on the walls. Powdery white streaks on the legs of Eddie’s jeans.

  But now he knew that crows weren’t black: they were iridescent blue and purple and pine green, like oil spilled on concrete. And it was calming to watch as Todd built a nest in the bedroom, busily and tenderly arranging scraps of paper, old receipts, Post-it notes, socks borrowed from the laundry pile.

  They both liked the White Album, would shake their tails to “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.” And at night, they slept side by side—Eddie on his back, Todd with his beak tucked under a wing. The bird gave off a dry, yeasty smell and trilled softly in his sleep. Do birds dream? It was a question for Abby the next time she called.

  “Yeah,” she answered. “But only half of their brain sleeps at a time. I did a project on it. They probably only have half a dream.”

  He wanted to tell her about the crow, wanted to say, I have a very-secret secret. But if Tara found out, she’d just use it as more evidence against him.

  “Were you asleep?” Abby asked. “What were you dreaming about?”

  “Not sure,” he said. “Probably that I was flying.”

  “Maybe you were a velociraptor,” she said. “I’ve dreamt that lots of times.”

  They talked this way until one or both of them drifted off. And in the mornings, Eddie woke with small, hot feet on his skin. Demanding breakfast, Todd stood on his shoulder and plucked out his hair, one strand at a time.

  He went to the library and learned that crows mate for life, though some make brief forays with other partners. They have a language system, can count to six, and are able to see more colors than the human eye. To navigate they learn the layout of the stars, watch the sun’s movement across the sky, sense the Earth’s magnetic field. There’s even a theory that they find their way by listening to the groan and crack of tectonic plates, the gathering of ocean waves, a volcano’s underground rumble. They can hear the explosion of meteors in space.

  He wanted to tell Abby this, but she hadn’t called in weeks. Which was normal, he guessed, ’cause she must be busy. He knew she took dance classes and had schoolwork and sometimes had sleepovers at other girls’ houses.

  In those weeks, Todd grew bigger and walked with what Eddie thought of as a dealer’s strut. The bird lost his downy feathers, and stiff, glossy ones grew in to replace them—once Eddie woke to find a spray of molted feathers through the bedsheets, as though he’d spent the night wrestling a dark angel.

  Todd’s blue eyes changed too, darkened to the color of the plums Eddie used to steal from a yard on East Twelfth. And a few weeks after that, Eddie came home from work to find that Todd had laid an egg.

  It was the color of an olive, speckled with gray like it had been spray-painted. The crow sat lightly on top of it, eyes half closed, feathers puffed out.

  “Todd.” Eddie crouched down. “So you’re a chick.”

  The bird snapped her beak at him, offended by his bad joke.

  Would the egg hatch? It needed to be fertilized—Eddie knew all about that—but maybe Todd had a boyfriend who flew in the open window and visited while Eddie was at work. And if it hatched, what was Eddie supposed to do? He shouldn’t even have one crow living here—if the landlord found out, he could be evicted. If Tara found out, she’d say he was mentally ill.

  He had to get rid of the bird. Take Todd outside, with her nest and her egg. Leave her in a park, maybe.

  Todd snapped at him again, then opened her beak wide and showed her small pink tongue. She was hungry. She probably needed more calories now. Probably couldn’t feed herself while keeping the egg warm.

  He went to the kitchen, got one of the jars of applesauce he’d bought for her, and fed her with a spoon. She thanked him in her usual way: chattered and gurgled, as though cheerfully gossiping about people they both disliked.

  “Yeah, okay.” He settled in beside her. “You’re welcome.”

  Abby called three days later, in the middle of the night. “What’s your favorite song?” Her voice pulled him from sleep.

  “Something by the Beatles. Maybe ‘Here Comes the Sun.’”

  Streetlight shone through the window and he could see Todd in her nest. She hadn’t moved in days and there was a bare spot on her belly now, which she pressed to the egg. One of the bird’s eyes was closed, the other open. Half of her brain was sleeping and he wished he could tell Abby. But he said, “What’s your favorite color?”

  “That’s your question? You already know the answer.”

  He did. Yellow.

  But he was tired of trying to keep the game going. “Guess what?” He would just say it. “I live with a crow.”

  “What?”

  “A crow. You know, a bird.”

  “It’s, like, alive?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Alive.” Then he told her about waking up with the bird on the mattress. He told her about the nest, the egg. “Her name is Todd,” he said. “You’d like her. She’s funny and she plays soccer.”

  Abby was so quiet that he thought she’d hung up. That she’d gone to tell her mom that he’d lost his mind. That she’d never call again.

  But then she said, “They’re descended from dinosaurs.”

  “What?”

  “Birds,” she said, “are dinosaurs that can fly.”

  “Do you know how they navigate?” he asked. “By looking up at the moon and the sun. By measuring the curve of the Earth.”

  “For real?”

  And he felt like a parent. Like a person who knew things and could care for her.

  “For real,” he said. “And did you know they can hear earthquakes before they start?”

  “No.”

  “They can hear tectonic plates moving. They can hear rain before it falls.”

  Todd spent each day warming the egg, her bare brood-patch pressed to its smooth surface, and Eddie had that easy feeling you get when you crack open a beer. Even when he was on his hands and knees in the alley behind his apartment, looking for worms and slugs because he’d read they were necessary to a crow’s diet, he felt good.

  This lasted until he got back from work one evening and saw that Todd had abandoned her nest. He found her wandering distractedly through the kitchen, her nails clicking on the counter.

  “Hey,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  He went into the bedroom: the egg was still there, nestled in the torn-up paper, but it had gone cold. He tucked it under his shirt, held it against his heart. It started to warm up but what was he supposed to do now? He couldn’t take an egg with him to work.

  He went into the kitchen and turned the oven on low—maybe he could use it as an incubator. But this was the first time he’d used the oven, and it gave off a smell like burning oil, sent gray smoke into the room. “Shit.” He waved away the smoke, hoping the alarm wouldn’t go off.

  Todd was in the kitchen with a Triscuit in her mouth, hiding it under the dish-drainer mat.
She stepped back, cocked her head while inspecting her work, then pulled the cracker out and started again.

  “Todd?” He held the egg in front of her. “What the hell?”

  She ignored him. Tucked the Triscuit under the mat again, and seemed satisfied that the cracker was well hidden now.

  “Hey.” He held the egg right under her face, but she looked away. She scratched her head with one of her talons.

  She must have figured out that there was no point, that the thing wouldn’t hatch. Eddie went back to the bedroom, swept up the nest, and put it and the egg in the garbage. But when Abby phoned that night, he didn’t tell her any of this.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked. “When the baby’s born?”

  “I’ll look after it,” he said. “And so will you, when you live here.”

  He knew that she liked information, so told her that when the bird was born it would be called a “nestling,” and when it learned to fly, a “fledgling.” He said it would be smaller than her hand, bald and openmouthed. “Just like when you were born,” he said. “You used to fit right in my pocket.”

  “No, I didn’t!”

  “Sure you did. And you had blue eyes that took up half your face.”

  He promised that she could name the new bird, and when she lived there, it would sleep in her bed.

  “What about my friends?” she said. “Will I have to switch schools?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If I move? Will I see Shyla anymore?”

  He didn’t know who Shyla was. Her best friend? A neighbor’s dog? “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “You’ll like it here.”

  “What will I tell Mom?”

  “You’ll tell her that you want to move in with me. That you’re old enough to decide for yourself.”

  “But I mean, what will I tell her? She might be mad. Or kind of cry.”

  “That’s why I got this apartment,” he said. “So you could be here too.”

  “I know.”

  “Isn’t that what you want?”