by Chris White
Pete gives the ranger the GPS coordinates, which the ranger in turn gives Adrian, who thumbs madly on his iPhone while sprinting toward the trail leading to the rental car, Deborah trotting along behind him, holding her backpack like an infant in distress.
Adrian knows where he’s going. A major migration corridor at the convergence of two major flyways, the Rio Grande is one of the most diverse birding areas in the country, and he’s been here a dozen times. They speed southwest out of the park toward the border, as the pulsing blue dot on the iPhone creeps toward the round, red pinhead. They turn down a sandy dirt road and drive until they can’t drive anymore, then jog the mile and a half along the muddy river, until they are literally standing on the cross section of the coordinates.
“Where is this guy?” Adrian says, hands above his knees, breathing hard.
Deborah doesn’t know, of course, and shakes her head as the sound of a truck motoring away ricochets off the river.
A tickling on his left calf. Adrian yanks up his pant leg to find a small brown tick with its tiny noxious head imbedded in his epidermis.
“Little fucker,” he says. He despises all parasites, but especially ticks.
Deborah kneels down beside him to take a look. “Want me to operate on that for you, Doc?”
He chuckles to seem lighthearted, then he carefully pulls it out, crushes it between his thumbnail and forefinger, and ducks under a canopy of trees.
They never find the bird. In midafternoon, Adrian hears a distant whooo . . . whooo but sees nothing.
Deborah says, “You heard it. That’s gotta be good enough. What’s the difference?”
Maybe there isn’t one.
• • •
When he’s dropping Deborah off in Boulder at the end of the long day, Adrian accepts her invitation in for a cup of “Sleepytime tea.” He sits at her mini dining table, takes out his laptop, and adds the prized species to his list. No reason to celebrate yet: the late, great Henry Lassiter’s year remains a mystery. But whatever Lassiter’s final number, Adrian is one bird closer.
#864 Ruddy Quail-Dove (Geotrygon montana), 11/15/09—Bentsen State Park, Texas, stateside bank of the Rio Grande.
Chapter Seven
* * *
Morning. When he switches off airplane mode, a dozen dings erupt from Adrian’s cell, and he leaps to standing from Deborah’s futon, penis stuck to his thigh. He rummages through the room for his shirt and jacket. Deborah pushes herself to sitting: “Adrian, hey, what’s happening?” while he zips up his pants, jams his feet into his boots, forgoing socks, and hurls himself out her door.
“I’m sorry!”
• • •
Sinowitz sets up monitoring while Adrian scrubs, shamefaced and unwashed. It’s the first pre-op evaluation he’s ever missed. Since the patient is a kid (Sunshine Bates, a friend of Michaela’s with chronic ear infections), Adrian performs a mask induction and keeps her a touch light. There is relatively little pain involved in the placing of a PE tube in an eardrum, and it’s worth the insignificant risk to allow for less grogginess during recovery. Her ENT man is Adrian’s friend. The operation is performed without incident. A little sevoflurane, a little rectal Tylenol. Ultimately, thankfully, there isn’t even any mention of his tardiness, only that Sinowitz says on his way out, “Mandrick. Get some rest.”
• • •
It’s one of those other Colorado days, the ones with spontaneous precipitation in the late afternoon when rain or snow falls steadily and furiously for half an hour. Sometimes there’s hail beating the hood of the car like sugar cubes out of a box, littering the drains along downtown streets that empty Boulder of its overflow. Everyone in town knows that in moments it will stop: even in the midst of it, the sky is clearing in patches, and steaming rays of sun filter through branches and into alleyways. Soon sun envelops the valley, and the hurried shower is a wet dream, something spilled in an odd moment of partial consciousness, not lasting quite long enough for comprehension.
Adrian waits at a stoplight on Broadway and Arapahoe. He doesn’t know if the kids will be home or whether they’re with their grandmother, but there will be dinner to get through with Stella, in any case. She didn’t call him when she received his note saying he was going to Texas, not until this morning, clearly worried when he didn’t return the night before. He hadn’t listened to it.
The rain screeches to a halt and the light turns green. He had sex with another woman. Twice. The birds are dying every day while he’s taking out the trash and checking his email. He has the sensation he’s pulled the plug on something that’s draining away at a rate he can’t control, like a bicycle tire you fill with air that hisses out while you fumble with the valve.
• • •
Stella sits on the couch reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead when Adrian steps into the living room pulling his suitcase. The sun slashes across the floor while the dampness on Mapleton subdivides into scattered puddles.
“Hi,” he says, relieved she’s otherwise engaged. “So sorry I had to leave like that. There was a Ruddy Quail-Dove in Texas. It’s only been in the US five times before and never in Texas.” He leans over to kiss her on the cheek.
She has just been smoking.
“Kids at your mom’s?”
She nods. He steps backward into his suitcase, which topples off its wheels to the floor.
“Did you get caught?” she asks.
“What?”
“In the rain.”
He stoops to right the bag, pressure gathering in his cheeks. “Yeah, but it was a quick one.” He picks up the current National Geographic, “Egypt’s Animal Mummies,” from the seat of the armchair and sits. Tosses the magazine onto the coffee table.
Stella covers her long feet with her pant legs. “Why didn’t you call me, Adrian?”
“I left you a note, honey. And I did call you, like, six times, when my flight was delayed, and it kept going straight to voicemail,” he says, feeling dangerous and small.
Stella looks at him with an odd expression, as though someone is nudging her under the table. “So, how was it?”
“I ticked it.”
“I mean Sunshine’s operation. Wasn’t it this morning?”
“Oh! No problems whatsoever.”
Stella blinks as Adrian breathes consciously through his nose. “Was Jesse there?” she asks.
“Who?”
“Jesse. Sunshine’s mother.”
“Yeah. Of course Jesse was there.”
“Probably got there really early, knowing her. She’s so OCD. It’s impossible to imagine her naming a child Sunshine. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah.”
“So, did she?”
“What?”
“Did she get there really early?”
“Not that early.”
“Did you talk with Sunshine ahead of time?”
“Oh, yeah. I came in early for the patient meeting, just off the plane actually, explained the machines and the mask. She seemed fine. She’s pretty grown-up for her age.”
Stella stands up and walks to the mantel. She flicks her hand across it as if knocking something off, but nothing’s there.
“Why would you lie about something like that? You missed the patient meeting. They called here ten times. Are you having a fucking affair or something?” Stella asks, almost a joke, neither of them fully believing it as it lands, so clichéd, on the Persian rug between them.
Adrian feels his face fill with blood. He watches Stella watch it fill with blood. The iPhone buzzes in his pocket.
Her eyes dare him to answer it at such a moment.
“Stella, I’m . . . on call,” he whispers, extracting the phone from his pocket without taking his eyes from her, nausea bubbling into his esophagus, almost concerned she’ll hit him. “This is Doctor Mandrick . . . Oh, Jesus, Evan, I can’t—”
Stella waits in suspended animation while Evan Mandrick tells his brother that their mother’s neighbor, Willa Hunt, found Ju
ne dead in her kitchen in Kingston an hour ago in a pool of blood. The paramedics said she had apparently died from a blow to the head. They assumed she fell, with bruises on her shoulder, arm, and rib cage, and a deep gash over her right ear. She had signed on as an organ donor, but because of the pancreatic cancer, her organs were deemed unrecoverable.
I’m sick, she’d been saying. I’m sick and dying.
Adrian’s side of the conversation tells Stella pretty much what she needs to know, and when it’s over, she says, “I’m so sorry. I know you and your mom didn’t, you know . . . I’m sorry.” She’s panting, though, like she’s been running.
Adrian glances down between his knees like he’s going to cry, but he begins breathing more rapidly every second until he is pale.
Stella hurries out.
When she returns, Adrian’s lips are gaping uncontrollably like the mask of tragedy.
“Here,” she says. “Take this.”
Adrian tears one of Michaela’s lunch bags from her hand, thrusts it over his mouth, and breathes in and out of it. There is no other sound in the room but this strange crackling breathing, the bag stretching taut then twisting in on itself as Adrian sucks in his own carbon dioxide. His mother is gone from the world. He hadn’t called.
In a few moments, he wads the bag into a rough ball and drops back against the chair. He looks over at Stella and cautiously offers her a clammy, bewildered hand. When she doesn’t take it or even look up, he slides it between his thighs.
His mother’s death renders them incapable of resuming their roles in the scene they were performing. Stella is unable to weep greedily, as she would have; gloat with moral superiority, as she deserved to; or do him violence, as she surely wanted. Adrian is unable to improve on his lie, make paltry excuses, or admit the error of his ways.
• • •
They walk gingerly as if their bones might break, each pouring a glass of water for themselves in the kitchen like they always do, then moving silently about their bedroom, opening and closing doors and drawers. Adrian lies down on his side of the bed with his clothes on, staring at the wall, because he doesn’t want to stand and he doesn’t want to leave. He watches Stella’s eyes as she takes out her earrings and drops them into her jewelry case, hollowed out with shock. And something else: a kind of quiet resolve. He’s taken something from her forever, he sees now, and proven something too, just as irrevocably.
He says, “I’ll stay in the guest room,” sitting up, his arm shaking under his weight. He anticipates what it will be like to walk out into the darkness of the hallway, alone in the house with a ghost.
“I was gonna suggest that.” Stella’s forehead is in a thick knot, like a much older woman’s.
Adrian hesitates, then whispers, “Stella . . .”
Her voice is low and unsteady. “Probably now is a good time.”
• • •
That night, he dreams of the woodpecker. Adrian is Alexander Wilson, the bird painter, and he has the huge ivorybill attached to his waist by its leg with a telephone cord. They’re traveling in a carriage across the small farms and jungled forests of the South looking for a hotel, and as they enter upon a rickety bridge that crosses moving water, a muffled cry rises from below. Adrian (Alexander) yanks back on the reins to stop the horse, planning to search for the sound. But as he starts to climb out of the carriage, the bird begins pecking at his chin and face trying to get free, and when Adrian attempts to unhook the bird—it wasn’t worth it, he thinks; what was he thinking, he thinks; why would he tie a living creature to his waist; how had he traveled so long without asking this simple question—the telephone wire is coiled around the bird’s neck and wings, around Adrian’s forearms, binding his wrists, choking them both, the bird piercing his eardrums with its wailing. Adrian and the bird fall, in a flailing and constricted mass, to the floor of the bridge, flailing, writhing, trapped together as one being, so that with every panicked movement, the cord gets tighter and more tangled. While from under the bridge, the sound inextricable from the shushing of the moving water, the sustained crying—the voice of his mother, hurt somewhere not so very far away, maybe trapped or wounded. He’ll never be able to get to her now.
Chapter Eight
* * *
Adrian wakes in exile. The guest room smells like a dryer sheet, and there’s a paranormal constriction in the air. A literal ticking clock counts down from the shelf. The whine that lives in his ears is thinner, sharper, unrelenting. He didn’t sleep a wink until 2 a.m. and woke again at four. Since, he’d slept fitfully, as though he were waiting through the night in a chair at a foreign airport, with broken dreams he can’t recall.
He gazes blankly into the motionless room and flashes on his mother lying dead on the floor of her kitchen. He breathes carefully through his nose, wondering where his pants are, so he can find his wallet, so he can reach into the deepest credit card slot and slide out a Xanax. He turns onto his back, still focused on breathing; then adrenaline erupts into his aorta—sadness for Stella so strong it’s like terror, like the night in grad school he fell backward through the opening of the fire escape down a flight of steel stairs. How had Stella felt when consciousness returned to her this morning? He doesn’t want to know.
• • •
Adrian walks out the guest-room door in his robe and boxers. He forgot his slippers in the master bedroom last night, so he is barefoot. Here is the hall where they tore down the ceiling tiles and put up drywall. Here is the Wallace and Gromit sticker on Michaela’s open door. Here is the stairway from which you can see through the front-door window into the sky. Here is the silence of a man walking in a house where he is an intruder.
He pads into the kitchen full of light, surprised to find his family sitting at the farm table eating scrambled eggs, all in one piece.
Michaela pushes out her chair and shuffles over to him, tenderly hugging his arm. “Poor Daddy.”
He doesn’t know what’s happening.
He looks up at Zander, who meets his gaze, closes his eyes briefly, and shakes his head.
He risks a look at Stella.
“I know you wanted to tell them yourself,” she says. Her hair is matted, eyes swollen. “But they couldn’t understand why everybody was so sad.”
“I never got to see Grandma again,” Michaela says, as if she may tear up too.
“None of us did, Micki,” says Stella. She kisses Zander’s cheek as she stands, then goes to take a plate of eggs and potatoes out of the oven with a dish towel. Sets it down at Adrian’s place. “You should eat something.” She sits back down to finish her eggs, spreads butter on her toast.
Adrian hesitates. Both children are staring at him, so he moves with Michaela to the table, sits, and pulls the robe around his thighs. “Thanks. Thank you.”
• • •
While the kids wash their faces and brush their teeth, put on shoes and coats, assemble their lunches and backpacks, Adrian showers in the guest-room bath. It feels suddenly questionable to pee in the master bedroom shower while the water runs or to leave his pubic hair on the walls. He does go into the master bedroom to dress. The closet light has been left on and the door left ajar; Stella’s clothes from the night before are in a pile on his side of the bed. Her bedside table is in disarray, with a half-empty mug of tea, a dozen balled-up tissues, an empty wineglass fallen on its side. He rights the glass and walks out, back to the living room, to tell the kids goodbye. When he gets there, the dishes are done, and it’s quiet.
He looks out the window to find Michaela and Zander already meandering down the sidewalk across the street two blocks away, their bus pulling up beside them, and Stella is opening the door of the Range Rover, her bag slung over one shoulder, winter cap pulled down nearly over her eyes.
Adrian flings open the front door. “Stella!” She doesn’t turn around, so he prances out along the damp driveway in his socks. “Stella, hold on a second, okay?”
She’s already in the car, sliding her sunglass
es on. With Adrian’s hand only inches from her door, she drives away.
He watches her taillights snake around the corner, then walks back inside, peels off his socks, and stands weak-kneed in the foyer. He’s supposed to be at the hospital in forty-five minutes. If there have ever been grounds for a mental health day, this is it. He imagines taking a couple of Lunesta and going back to bed. But after his fuckup yesterday morning, it’s unthinkable to call in sick, especially since he will have to leave tomorrow or the next day for the funeral. He’ll drive to the hospital and do his job. He’ll call Evan before lunch to make sure he’s all right. He’ll talk to him about funeral arrangements and purchase both their tickets to Kingston.
He walks to his safe, opens it, and takes out the useful remainder of his stash. He takes a Vicodin and checks his phone. Three texts from Deborah. One, from yesterday morning:
Where did u go in such a HURRY :(
Then yesterday afternoon:
What are you up to tonight . . .
And last night:
Hey! Sup???
Adrian texts back:
Hey. Sorry I’ve been out of touch. I have to go out of town. :/
• • •
That night, Stella orchestrates her silences with the utmost accuracy. When she and Adrian are with the children, she speaks, she touches them, eats, opens and closes the microwave, checks homework, asks questions, even smiles. She seems to watch Adrian but speaks to him only peripherally. When they pass in the hallway or kitchen, she says nothing. He attempts to be present but humble, but he is losing ground every moment. When she’s saying good night to the kids, she slips off to bed without him realizing it.
He packs haphazardly for the funeral, which Evan tells him will be facilitated by someone from a Kingston Protestant church, though he’s pretty sure his mother never went to church, Protestant or otherwise, a day in her life. After the funeral, they will meet at his mother’s house, the same house she’s been living in all the years since leaving their father. They will deal with her possessions. They will set up a cleaning service, put the house on the market, and go back to their lives, such as they are.