Sparrows For Free

by Lila Felix

But it stinks like—well, shit.

  “Gray left her rosary in the church last night.”

  “Didn’t see it.”

  Aren’t priests supposed to be perky in the mornings—like ‘Thank the Lord for this glorious sunshine’ and shit? My brother sucks at morning priest perkiness.

  “You know that girl?”

  “The one with the red hair?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No. But she’s there every Friday night.”

  I feel like I’m talking to a Fight Club member the way Knox looks down and scrubs while he speaks to me—without giving me any real information.

  The first rule about church is you don’t talk about church.

  I stop scrubbing, “Every Friday night?”

  “Yes. When I switched with Thomas, he used to have Friday nights, he told me she comes in every Friday night, no confessions, no lighting of candles, just sits in the back pew. Sometimes she stays for five minutes—sometimes she stays for hours. Why?”

  Even though he was still in seminary, he is allowed to take confessions.

  “Maybe she saw the rosary. She was helping Gray.”

  “Ask her.”

  “I will.”

  “Is there something wrong with her?”

  He stops and leans his chin atop the broom handle, “There’s something wrong with all of us, Ezra.” His voice changes with that statement. He goes from Knox to priest in a breath. He told me once that his ultimate goal was to serve God by providing comfort. And when he speaks in his priest voice, I always feel better.

  But he is still a piss ant in the morning. He needs some more coffee—with extra holy water.

  “Do you know somebody Gray can talk to?”

  “I’ve got some counselors I know. Just for Gray?”

  “Just for Gray.”

  “I’ll text you the numbers when I get back.”

  “Thanks.”

  I finish at the animal shelter sometime in the afternoon and go straight home to shower. Gray, Dauber, Leon and Neil are in the living room, making plans. None of us ever sit still for very long.

  Leon and Neil joined Gray, Dauber and me after the Mara incident. I had a whole school of people calling me a murderer. And since they were already ostracized for not being social, they joined us and have been our friends ever since. Leon is an introvert, which came from his author parents who’d fled China when he was seven. And Neil was just Neil. He was the nicest guy, but he often let people run him over. I’d stood up for him countless times in school after he started hanging with us.

  “Pool,” Leon suggests, smacking his gum.

  “Boring.” Gray drones out.

  “Movies.”

  “Ugh, gross.”

  I watch them banter back and forth before interjecting, “Bowling.”

  “Ezra for the win,” Dauber bellows.

  We gather our things and ride together in my four door truck. All the way, Dauber and Neil argue about who will get the biggest ball and place bets on who will win. I really don’t care. The bowling alley is loud with pop music and crashing pins. We go in alphabetical order which puts me first, since Dauber insists on using Roman in places where there’s any shot at all of meeting a girl. But all I really want to do is sit in my orange crackled plastic seat and people watch. But instead, my friends expect me to participate in life. Damned friends. I take my turn, throwing the marbled blue ball down the lane. I hit a strike, of course. Bowling is one of my hidden talents.

  I sit back down and watch the little teens around us. I watch the boys, lining up their targets. The girls, most of them wearing their tightest clothes, knowing exactly how to shake their assets. Then I look around for the Maras of the people. I remember what caught my eye with her. I spot one immediately.

  She’s not with the big group of what I assume is the popular kids. No, she’s with her family. Between frames, she’s slumped down in her chair, arms crossing over her chest. She enjoys the time with her family, I can tell. But there’s also a sliver of her that is desperate to be with the others. She’s got a hint of leopard in her otherwise bunny like personality. She doesn’t dress the same. Her gray shirt contrasts the hot pink tank tops of the other girls and her jeans actually fit her instead of making everyone in the room concerned about the blood flow to her legs.

  That was Mara. She loved being with her family. She didn’t flaunt short skirts or heavy, sinus infection inducing perfume. She wore V-necked tshirts and Doc Martens. She was an enigma to me. But I was seventeen when I first saw her—and a jerk faced seventeen at that. All thoughts of getting to the bottom of her tiny quirks, the ones I’d obsessed over for months, all went away when I saw her at James McCon’s house, the night of that party. Testosterone pushed emotion out of the way and before I knew it, I was offering her a beer—offering her a ride home—offering to push my selfish destruction onto her.

  Offering to ruin her life.

  Offering to end her life.

  A piercing, cold sensation waterfalls down my chest, jerking me from my inflection. Looking up at Neil’s guilty face, I realize he’s thrown ice down my shirt. I missed my turn.

  “Your turn!” He snaps on both hands and smiles; “Be present. You have to be present.”

  “Shut up.” I retort, pushing him aside and ignoring his Tom Cruise sounding bullshit.

  Not caring, I throw the ball out, but manage to deliver a strike anyway. Gray claps and hollers for me and I decide Neil is right. For tonight, I will attempt this present thing. I will remove myself from my thoughts for a few hours to give my friends the time they deserve.

  If I can.

  The next week passes in a whirlwind. The weekdays usually do. I work twelve hour days at the plant and then eat, run, shower, repeat. I look forward to Friday when Gray and I can go back to the church. I want to see if that girl has Gray’s rosary.

  If I can remember what she looks like.

  I was so wrapped up in something happening to Gray that I didn’t even thank the girl or pay her any attention. I just Supermanned Gray out of there without hesitation. But if anything ever happened to Gray, it would be like Mara dying again. She’s the last attachment I had to her.

  Why did I crave that attachment to her? Mara certainly made it clear she’d attach herself to just about anyone.

  Friday, after work, I take a shower and go to the living room, dressed for my regular dinner and church Friday night with Gray. I can hear her, still in the shower, and I make a lame attempt to play with her guitar game. I trip through the tuning of the chords and finally give up. Even the computer animated guitar teacher has a twinge of frustration in his voice. I don’t blame him.

  Gray comes out a good amount of time later. She never takes that long getting ready. She wears a white dress and heels. I haven’t seen her wear a dress since prom. She went with me, of course, out of pity. My jagged outlook on life generally turned high school girls off.

  “You’re awfully dressed up for Applebee’s and church.”

  She plops down next to me on the couch, juts her wrist out and hands me one of her bracelets. I wrap it around her wrist and hook the clasp, looking to her to answer my unasked question.

  “I have a date.”

  That one sentence slams into me, calling forth a jealousy I don’t realize I possess. It’s not a love kind of jealousy. It’s a jealousy over her spending time with someone other than me. It’s a feeling of betrayal over her not telling me earlier. Mostly it’s humiliation over sitting here, like an idiot, waiting for her while all the time she has other plans.

  It’s also an envy of her moving on—even though these episodes never last.

  “Oh, okay. Well, you look great,” I say, trying to muster a mild tone of joy.

  “Look, I know we have this Friday night thing but I just can’t do it anymore. I’m ready to move on. I’ve got to move on sometime. I’m not trying to abandon you, even though it feels like I am. This isn’t living, Ezra.”

  But that’s exactly what I felt
like—abandoned.

  “No, I’m glad. I really am. Just let me know if he’s a dickhead. I’ll kick his ass.”

  “Okay,” she says, getting up to return to the bathroom.

  I decide to leave before she can come back. Plus, I don’t really think it would make the best first impression for her date to pick her up with a guy sitting in the living room.

  Fisting my keys, I head to the truck and call Dauber. He’s on his way to meet Leon and Neil at Hooters, and I decide to join them. When I get there, the guys are surrounding a tiny, tall table, and Dauber has the other two in stitches. He’s lying, of course. Dauber can take a regular story; of everyday events and turn it into the funniest story you’ve ever heard. No one cares that ninety percent of it is made-up. It’s too funny.

  “So then, she starts driving the damned bus away, my foot is still trapped in the accordion door. Finally, after she drags me a couple of feet, I finally get untangled and flop into the ditch.”

  I’ve heard this one. It’s about how he fell down the stairs of the school bus, and the bus driver dragged him. Sometimes it’s for miles, sometimes it’s a couple of yards. Either way, I was there. The story is that he fell down the stairs and busted his knees on the street. I had to bring him to my house and clean him up, so he didn’t catch hell from his drunk father. Of course, that wasn’t half as funny as his version.

  I grab a stool from another table and pull it up. I see the questions on their faces, but no one speaks.

  “She has a date.”

  They nod in understanding. Truth is, Gray has done this before. She starts dating and going to counseling. It lasts a couple of months, sometimes weeks, and then they break up, and she breaks up with her therapist. And every time I wish her the best. I seriously do. Every time I hope it sticks, whatever she’s doing to give herself a life. Even if it means leaving me.

  I forgo the Scotch and instead just have wings and burgers with my boys. A small part of me knows that Gray and I are poison together. We feed off each other’s guilt and Mara-obsession. It feels good to get a break from it. I think her demons feed mine and mine nurture hers.

  I get to the church at my regular time and sit in the pew near the back. An older couple is kneeling on the kneeler in front and as the woman prays in earnest, the man seems unimpressed. He doesn’t bow his head or close his eyes. Instead, he rubs her back and looks at his wife as if she’s the object of his prayer and praise. Her faith must be enough for them both—or has to be.

  I wonder ifthat works—that off balance of faith in a relationship.

  Does one person ever have enough faith to carry themselves and another person?

  Is one person’s love enough to satiate two people?

  After hours, and on the verge of giving up, I finally see a girl with light red hair silently slip through the side doors of the church. I’m thankful, since I looked for her in lieu of my regular confessions. Her head is down, and she moves, lithe and long, though she was very short, maybe five foot three at the most. She sits on the very edge of the last pew behind a massive pillar as if the rest of the pews have offended her.

  She pops her head toward the front and looks onto the praying couple with awe. A pointer finger runs over the top of a stray hymnal next to her. She reaches up and flicks a tear from the apple of her cheeks. I remember what Knox said about everyone having trouble.

  What troubles her?

  I gather some gumption and stroll over to her pew. I sit close enough to her to speak but not close enough to spook her.

  “Hi. I’m Ezra.”

  She spooks anyway, looking around to see if I’m talking to someone else instead of her—because this place is such a social haven.

  “Are you talking to me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hi?” Her voice intonates at the end of the sentence, and it comes out like a question.

  “You were the one that helped Gray.”

  “Yes. I have her rosary,” she says, digging her finger and thumb down into that little useless fifth pocket on her jeans. She pulls the chain out carefully and hands it to me. It seems like she positions her grasp in such a way as to purposely not touch me.

  “Thank you. This was her grandmother’s.”

  She squirms on the pew. It surprises me that she hasn’t fallen off yet.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “What’s your name?”

  She points to herself and finally turns, so I can see her whole face. She’s striking. Not like Gray with her blonde hair and model stature. This girl is petite, like she’s only three fourths of a regular human. Copper hair flows over her shoulder, and when she handed me that rosary, I see that her nails are bitten down almost to the quick. Her eyes are mint green, but the right one, the one which was caught in shadow has a semi-circle of amber at the bottom, like God pressed His thumb into bronze and then pressed it on the bottom of her iris. She has rounded hips, completing the hourglass of her figure. She is someone I wouldn’t give a second glance to on a regular day, but now I can hardly look away.

  Finally realizing that I was, in fact, talking to her again, her eyes widened as she secreted her name to me, “Aysa.”

  I let her name curl around my conscience for a minute while we sit in silence. Her hands grip the edges of the pew. I can feel the anxiety coming off her in radiating waves. Something about her urges me to hover over her, umbrella her in my protection, save her from whatever troubles her. It’s a feeling I never got with Mara. I never felt protective of her even after she told me about the baby—that was the day I was supposed to break up with her. Kissing her had become a robotic act. Plus, I knew Joshua from the football team was trying to get her back. They’d gone out for two years before I started seeing her.

  See Mara in the hallway—kiss her.

  Pick Mara up for a date—kiss her.

  But then what she’d told me that day cemented us into a future together, whether I wanted it or not.

  “Where is she?”

  A panic splices my veins open until I realize she isn’t talking about Mara in that soft, fairy voice. She is talking about Gray.

  I never was a huge fan of Christmas and all the lights, but something about the way the scattered lights in the church catches the shine of her hair made me want to reach out and wrap it around my fingers.

  “Gray? She’s got a date.”

  Her arched eyebrows met in a V above the bridge of her nose; “Oh.”

  “What?”

  “I thought you two—I thought you were together.”

  The couple in the front finish with their prayers and hold my attention. The husband helps the woman from her kneeling position.

  “No, she’s my best friend.”

  “Huh,” she says, shifting back into the shadows of the column.

  “I’m gonna light a candle for you.”

  She shrivels back, concaving her shoulders into a poor posture, “Why?”

  “Because everyone needs prayers, right?”

  Not waiting for her answer, I shuffle to the front, kneel and light a candle. I pray that whatever riddles her mind or her heart would cease. I pray for peace in her life. If someone was praying for me, that’s what I’d want them to pray for—peace.

  I intend to make an attempt to talk to her again. I stalk back up the line of pews only to find that she’s already gone.

  Aysa

  I go to church thinking maybe Gray would show back up for her rosary. Or maybe I can give it to the hipster priest man. But Harvey, my boss, throws some extra paperwork my way at four o’clock and I end up staying until after eight at night. He assumes I have no life outside of the firm. He assumes correctly.

  I’m actually excited as I approach the church. Even a little before Thanksgiving, it’s already decorated for Christmas. Christmas is my favorite time of year. Not because of the presents or the shopping. I guess maybe I’d get excited if I actually got presents. And I only shop for my parents and my sister—and my boss. God only knows why I
continue to buy a gift for him. Sometimes I tell myself that I won’t. But then last minute the green moss of guilt finagles around my brain and I run out to fetch whatever last minute thing I can find.

  The girls at work do a secret Santa. They exchange names and put gifts on each other’s desks. There’s even a Christmas party for the office and all gifts are left on employee’s desks. The company always gives us a ham. But I can’t really eat a ham by myself, so I always just drop it off at the local soup kitchen.

  And when I turned eighteen, my mother informed me that I was too old for Christmas presents anymore. She claimed that adults didn’t exchange Christmas presents in their house. They thought I was stupid. I knew that as soon as I left on Christmas day, she and Ariel would exchange the gifts they’d bought for each other. It was funny to see them scramble when, during the year, they’d accidentally let something slip. Like once, I’d complimented Ariel on her diamond pendant. She muttered something about Mom getting it for her for Christmas but then immediately retracted it. But I knew the truth. They always exchanged gifts.

  What exactly was it about me that warranted such frigidity?

  I wish someone would pinpoint it for me.

  I’d change.

  I swear I would.

  They’ve just began stringing the lights along the top of the church, but it warms me to see them in progress. I creep into my regular pew and perch on the edge, looking around for Gray and Boyfriend. I turn and see him, in that parallel pew and decide to approach him—sooner or later. As I shift, the rosary pokes my hip, reminding me of my mission. And just as I make the decision to go over to him, he begins walking my way. I silently gasp at the air of attention he demands. His presence is looming, overstated and underrated at the same time. His gray eyes alarm me, so serious—so determined. On instinct, I scoot as close to the edge of the pew as I can get, ready to bolt if the need arises.

  His voice comes out like a bass hum as he greets me and says his name, Ezra. It reminds me of a band I used to listen to in high school, Better Than Ezra. After a stilted conversation about the rosary, I’m still on edge. I still think he’s being way too nice to me. No one is this nice to me.

  And then I know the reason behind the niceties. It was simply pity in disguise. He offers to light a candle for me which means I look like someone who needs a prayer. My chest hollows out of any light of hope I had once he told me that Gray wasn’t his girlfriend. My fool of a heart just leaps at the faintest slivers of hope. She always has. She gets me in trouble every time.