The Lovebird

by Natalie Brown

  “Thank you, Margie,” he said, shooting a smile at our onlookers, all of whom had raised eyebrows and open, rapt mouths. “I think that about wraps things up. And thank you all for your questions, everyone. We’ll now begin taking your application forms.” He feigned a few friendly pats on my shoulder in an effort to push me down into a chair.

  And then, just as I took my seat, I noticed it again: the cell phone. I saw the cell phone of the man in the newsboy cap clearly now, as if for the first time, positioned upright on the table in front of him, and it gave me a sudden sick feeling.

  Yes, even though I had no notion of what was about to happen, I had a sick feeling, sick and scared, a sensation no warrioress would feel, worse than the feeling of watching Jack Dolce descend the stairs in disapproval, worse than the feeling of dozens of Dorals dangling from a downcast dad’s mouth, worse than Rasha’s red poppies—it was a feeling of doom that clung to me like the strawberries of my sweat-soaked dress, so dark now that they looked overripe, unappetizing, rotten.

  BUMBLE CAUGHT UP TO ME AS I SPEEDWALKED to my car. Jack Dolce had given me a wistful wave when I’d passed the downstairs window of Gelato Amore, and I could feel something salty brewing behind my eyelashes. “I think that went well,” Bumble said. “You did start running off at the mouth there toward the end—what was that all about?—but all in all, it was good. Some promising people in the crowd. Let’s go have a beer at the Ould Sod.” The Ould Sod was a bar in Kensington that had an actual chunk of Irish earth mounted on one of its walls. Bumble liked to tell me the color of the oft-touched soil matched my hair. “Celtic chocolate,” he called it, not knowing how much more I loved Beirut brown. He lightly socked my shoulder. “I’ll buy.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I don’t feel right. I think I’m coming down with something.” I ducked into my station wagon and slammed the door after me. Bumble frowned, squinted into my eyes. “I’ll see you soon,” I said through the glass and steered myself home.

  THE NEXT MORNING SOMEONE KNOCKED on the door of my studio. I was sluggish from the bottle of red wine I’d imbibed the night before in an unsuccessful effort to drown my feeling of dread.

  I let the knocking persist for several minutes. I tried to convince myself that Bumble or one of the others had come to discuss the applications we’d collected (none of which I had so much as given a glance) or to tell me the latest news about a chicken ranch in Escondido with a modus operandi abundant in the usual atrocities (birds driven mad by their living conditions, by the heartless hacking off of their highly sensitive beaks) or an underground sushi restaurant in the Gaslamp Quarter (hidden door, big bouncer) that was secretly selling endangered sea turtle to select patrons. But in my belly, I knew.

  I rolled over with a little groan. Charlotte sat beside my head, watchful. “Oh,” I whispered to her, “oh …”

  Then I heard a voice, nasal and newly familiar, on the other side of the door. “Margie Fitzgerald,” it said. There was no question mark after “Fitzgerald.”

  For five minutes, I listened in vain for the sound of retreating footsteps. Then I heard my name once more.

  I stumbled to the door and opened it, wild haired.

  I saw two men in suits. “Good morning,” I said.

  One of the men used to be the man in the newsboy cap. “Ms. Fitzgerald,” he said. His cap was gone. “I’m Agent Fox and this is Agent Jones. We’re with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  At that moment, I had a memory. It wasn’t a remnant of a dream snaking its way through my brain, never to be seen again. It was a memory of something true. I remembered a red resin bracelet that had belonged to Rasha.

  “May we come in?” Agent Fox said.

  I was self-conscious about the condition of my apartment. A gang of fruit flies hovered over a pile of cherry pits in the overflowing trash can, and Charlotte had left a smattering of droppings beside the chair in which Agent Fox took a seat. He pretended not to notice, as I pretended not to be amazed that the man who had habitually sat upstairs at Gelato Amore staring into a book (by all appearances a meek man with neither a lover nor a job, a café loiterer, a gelato addict) was the very same proud personage who now, suited and badged, seemed to take up so much space in my shabby studio.

  Then Agent Fox told me in polite, almost tender tones that “the Federal Bureau of Investigation” was in possession of “recent video” of me “teaching the making or use of an explosive,” which was, he added pointedly, a federal crime. I looked at Agent Fox, the very one who had baited me to “teach the making or use of an explosive” with his question, who had obtained the “recent video” with his cell phone, and he looked back at me and did not blink or shift his gaze. My cheeks grew hot with humiliation. He said I had demonstrated that I could be a serious threat to my country as a possible domestic terrorist, one who endeavored to spur others to commit violent acts. And, finally, he said what was at once inevitable and unimaginable, what I prayed to Saint Jude, patron of the lost and desperate, would not be true: I was under arrest.

  13 LOVEBIRD (Agapornis roseicollis)

  AFTER ALLOWING ME A FEW MINUTES to dress and set out some rabbit food, the agents drove me to the county jail, where they took my photograph (a joyless image with no rosemary crown, no green snake necklace) and my fingerprints (unfathomable hieroglyphs with all the secrets of my destiny in their swirls). I waited there while the crew arranged for my bail (I had placed my sole allotted phone call to Bumble, for I could not conceive of calling Dad). During my confinement, which I spent alone in a locked cell with a disinfectant smell that stung the insides of my nostrils, I had time to think. It was only then that I realized why I had suddenly remembered Rasha’s red resin bracelet upon opening my door to the agents: the cell phone with which Agent Fox had recorded me at Gelato Amore was not the first object I had both seen and not seen.

  It had happened with the bracelet, too. When I was younger, fourteen or fifteen, I found it while poking through a drawer of miscellany (tape measures, decade-old coupons, plastic forks, pencils too short to write with but too cute to throw away) in the kitchen. I put it on, wore it on a whim to Sunday Mass, and then—it seemed—lost it. Later that afternoon, I noticed it wasn’t on my wrist anymore but could not recall just when or where I had taken it off. I hunted all over for it and finally resorted to chanting the special prayer for lost objects the nuns had taught us in CCD: “Saint Anthony, Saint Anthony, won’t you take a look around? Something has been lost and must be found.” But this was to no avail. I lay awake in my bed all night, listening to the broken song of a nightbird who stood in the magnolia tree, worrying, wondering where the bracelet had gone.

  My search continued well into Monday. My bleary eyes and the dark circles beneath them convinced Dad that I was sick and should stay home from school. As he left to show a house in the Rio de Lágrimas tract, he suggested I make myself a hot toddy with his Maker’s Mark, wrap myself mummy-style in a blanket, watch TV, and try to “sweat it out.”

  Once alone, I frantically turned over and looked under absolutely everything, even in cobwebby corners where I had not trod in years, until, breathless and despondent, I threw myself belly down onto my bed and sobbed.

  I could not bear it, the feeling of having lost anything of hers.

  Then I turned my face and saw the bracelet sitting on my nightstand next to the white porcelain palm that held the rose-scented rosary, exactly where I’d already glanced a thousand times, where it had been seen but not seen, and, reverent in my relief, I sniffed it. It was the most radiant of relics, a vermilion icon, a piece of picked fruit, still fragrant from Rasha’s wrist—there, all along.

  GENEROUS PTARMIGAN PAID TO HAVE ME SPRUNG from the slammer. He used all that remained of the funds bequeathed to him by his aunt who had expired in the polo mishap. “You’re a bird, Margie,” he told me. “I always think of you that way. And no man—no honorable one, anyway—can abide a bird’s confinement in a cage any more than he can a chimp’s, or a mouse
’s.” Once free, I kissed him on both cheeks, and then pulled off his glasses to kiss his shut eyes, where I tasted salt, to my surprise.

  I found an attorney in the phone book. His name was Ronald Clack, and the photo accompanying his ad depicted a cocksure young upstart with arms folded across his chest. He seemed to wink at me from the page. I was mildly comforted by the familiar tone he took with me when I called. “It could go either way, Marge,” he said. “We could be talking months, we could be talking years. Or, best case, we could get you off. Everything has changed since the terrorist attacks of 2001. And forget the red scare of the 1950s—we’re in the midst of what I like to call the ‘green scare.’ ” He paused, as if waiting for the import of his words to sink in. “Enviros and activists like yourself are the targets now. I think what we’re really dealing with here is a freedom of speech issue. Why don’t you come over to my office and we’ll hash this thing out.”

  During our meeting, Ronald Clack had gourmet takeout fare the likes of which I could not normally afford delivered right to his office door. “Dig in,” he said, but I was too worried about my future to eat. My trial date, set for just three months away, loomed. My hands shook and I couldn’t stop blinking. “Am I going to be locked up again?” I asked. Ronald Clack’s desk was buried under layers of paper—notes he said he’d made while brainstorming ways to get me out of my mess. He seemed sincere in his desire to help, and because he had just begun practicing he was not quite as costly as most other lawyers. Still, even if I gave him the rest of my student loan money, it would not have been enough to cover a mere week’s worth of his services.

  BACK ON THE ROOF OF THE OLD VICTORIAN, I stared out at the lights lining the airport tarmac and wondered what Dad would do when he learned I was going to jail. The unfinished letter was still tucked beneath the pillow on my bed, and I fretted over the prospect of writing any sort of postscript now. P.S. One more thing, Dad: it looks as though I’ll be going away for a while.

  I heard steps behind me. “I knew you’d be up here,” Bumble said. He sat down and curled an arm around my shoulders. “I always sensed there was something funny about that guy, Agent … what’s his—”

  “Fox.”

  “I just never imagined it was this. I’m still trying to get to the bottom of it. I even called Simon, but he never answers his phone.”

  “What difference does it make?” I said. Pride, along with persistent heart-pain, had prevented me from reaching out to Simon myself. And, on the rare occasions when I chanced to pass him on campus, he always looked at the ground, and had a hunched posture, as if weighted down by a bag of burdens he couldn’t unpack, not even for me. “What’s there to get to the bottom of?” I flopped back and searched for a star, but they were all hidden from me. “I’m doomed.”

  “I’ve been working on that, too,” Bumble said. “And I don’t think you’re doomed. But you have to leave. A lawyer doesn’t seem like a possibility. And a public defender will be of no use—I’m sure they’re all in cahoots with the feds anyway. I talked to my mom. She’s been making some calls. She has some relatives you can go stay with. Well, friends, really. Or, I’m not sure—it’s different with Indians—everyone acts as if they’re related.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “People like us, we’re not just activists anymore, we’re enemies of the state. Domestic terrorist?” Bumble shook his head. “This is a witch hunt, Margie. I’m sorry that you’re the one they singled out. I’m sorry for everything. But it’s best if you just get out of here before you’re made an example of. Start over. We’ve had our thrill.”

  “But, what are you saying? Indians?” I thought of Jack Dolce with his poster of Sitting Bull.

  “I found a hiding place for you,” Bumble said, “in Montana. You can stay there until we come up with something else.”

  “Montana.” It was a place to which I had never in my life devoted a single thought. “What’s in Montana? Nothing’s in Montana.”

  “Exactly. But there are seven Indian reservations there, which are basically, like, invisible places. And one of them is the Crow Reservation. That’s where my mom’s friend lives—”

  “Bumble,” I said. “Aren’t Indian reservations supposed to be like third-world countries?” But he was too busy explaining to hear me.

  “—a friend she met back in the seventies, when she was a lot cooler. Anyway, this friend of my mom’s has a son, and this guy—”

  “No guys.” I covered my eyes, thinking of my fractured friendship with Jack Dolce, whom I had wanted for a forever brother, and of Simon, of course I thought of Simon, who had first milled me so long ago on the soft sofa of his school office. “Nothing personal, Bumble, but I’m weary of guys.”

  I watched a moth flap crazily past us in the gray evening, searching for the kind of warm bright lights that had not yet been lit. Bumble lifted his digital wristwatch, pressed a button. “There you go, friend,” he said, and the moth alighted there, magnetized by its glow. He went on, undissuaded.

  “It’s not just a guy, Margie, it’s a family. I’m trying to tell you.”

  “Do you know them?”

  “Well, no. I’ve never been out there. Frankly, I’m embarrassed by how little I know about my mother’s people.”

  I sighed, bit down on my quivering lip. Loneliness was all I felt—the loneliness of my future. I imagined the loneliness of living with strangers, which had to be worse than the loneliness of living alone or the loneliness of living with a despairing dad and a Beirut-brown ghost.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t like this idea.”

  “Now listen, Margie,” Bumble said. “Do you want to go to jail or do you want to go to Montana?”

  I didn’t say anything. It was a case of, as Simon had been fond of saying, a fronte praecipitium a tergo lupi.*

  “It sounds kind of nice, actually. They live way out in the middle of nowhere on the western side of the reservation, on a chunk of land that’s been in their family for, like, over a hundred years. It’s probably pretty peaceful. There’s the guy, and he lives there with his mother—that’s my mom’s friend—and his daughter, a little girl who’s got no mother—”

  “Oh, come on,” I protested. “Are you kidding me?” Another motherless one, I thought. There were so many of us. “Is this a joke?”

  “No, for real. Her mom’s in jail. Her dad drives to Billings every day for his job at a printing press or someplace. And so the grandmother and the kid are left alone. Like, out on the prairie. The grandma insists that they stay out there. That parcel of land means something to her, I guess. Now, my mom told me that they would be willing to shelter you, to hide you, and they don’t even know you.” Bumble shook his head in amazement.

  “It seems so clichéd,” I said. “I’ll be the lost white person who is saved by magical Native Americans.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Bumble replied. “What would be so bad about that? A little human kindness? People like to help each other, Margie. It makes them feel good. My mom said they would enjoy having a young woman around, someone who can be a friend to the girl. They say they have no real fear of the feds. And apparently the grandmother is very intrigued by your story. So, if you need to disappear—and you do, Margie—there’s no better place. It’s very isolated where they are.”

  THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, the crew came to my studio and watched while I stuffed a handful of sundresses, the lucky red Chinese shoes, the porcelain palm, the rose-scented rosary, Wheelock’s Latin, and the unfinished letter to Dad into Annette Mellinkoff’s Strawberry Shortcake suitcase. Bear and Orca stood arm in arm with solemnity. Ptarmigan forlornly petted Charlotte, who snuggled in his lap and ground her teeth with pleasure. Raven lamented, “I don’t know why it had to be you who got into all this trouble and not all of us.”

  “It’s my own fault. I’m the one who got greedy and overexcited and wanted to hold that stupid info session.” I stood facing them all with my hands dangling at my sides. �
�I’m going to miss you. You were my first real friends.”

  “I did a tarot spread for you,” Bear said, wiping her wet, white face. “It looked—”

  “Please don’t tell me.” I cut her off and clicked the suitcase closed. “I honestly don’t want to know.”

  I stepped outside to check my mailbox and found a letter from Dad, forwarded from the apartment I’d once shared with Amy and Winnie. It surprised me, slipped among the usual abundance of junk mail. A few flaky Doral ashes, cancerous confetti, fell out when I tore open the envelope. The paper came from one of Dad’s Sunshine Realty notepads, the ones he ordered in bulk and left on people’s front porches as a form of advertising. A black-and-white portrait of him, looking buttoned down and dapper, was in the upper left corner, and his name was printed across the top (“Mark Fitzgerald: Finding Families Homes for 20 Years”). Other realtors had abandoned the now-nostalgic notepads and moved on to glossy refrigerator magnets embellished with full-color head shots that highlighted the dazzle of their sharky grins, or to ballpoint pens with their names printed on the side—useful items that people might actually hold on to. But Dad preferred paper, pieces of ephemeral paper on which strangers would scrawl their grocery lists, their Things to Do, and then discard, crinkling up his face and name.

  This was not, I could see, going to be one of his rare and wonderfully long missives. The sheet of paper had been pulled from the pad in evident haste, for the top was carelessly torn. Hi Honey, Dad wrote, and then proceeded with a series of fragmentary sentences, all of them lacking the first-person pronoun (“I” in English or ego, as Simon had taught me, in Latin):

  Hope this finds you happy and healthy.

  Cleaning out the attic.

  Been thinking about you.

  Miss you,

  Dad

  I stepped back inside and turned to Bumble, who was going to drive me to the Crows. “I just have one quick trip I need to make before we leave.”