The Lovebird

by Natalie Brown

  He shook his head. “We should get on the road.”

  “I won’t take long,” I assured him. I told the others, “You can all share my station wagon while I’m in Montana.” Turning to Ptarmigan, I added, “I want Charlotte to stay with you now.”

  Then, as was our habit, we all drew close together in a circle, extended our hands, and stacked them. But this time, no one spoke, and there was no triumphant declaration of our organization’s name. We stood touching each other, and for a moment we were all of a piece, in need of no one and nothing else. Somewhere, a wing flapped, an antenna quivered, a hoof turned up dust, a beak snapped shut, and our hearts with their varied wounds were momentarily mended, and the world with its menagerie of inhabitants was right again, and there was no such thing as an “us” or a “them,” only a giant “we,” otherwise known as a family, and we savored that sensation of wholeness until the dream flickered away as suddenly as it had come, and Simon’s Operation was done.

  I DROVE TO ORANGE COUNTY BY MYSELF. I hadn’t been back home in over a year. Our house was the same dun color, but seemed several shades lighter. The magnolia tree was a bit taller and bright with blooms. Dad, of course, wasn’t expecting me. Several minutes elapsed between my second, amplified series of knocks and his arrival to the front door. He was clad in a bathrobe and dress slacks. When he saw me standing on the porch, hidden behind my big black sunglasses and shaking from stress, he blinked and stepped back. “Margie?” Maybe he didn’t remember sending the note. In my arms, he was stiff with surprise.

  Inside, I quickly surmised that “cleaning out the attic” really meant removing everything from that shadowed, spidery upper realm and scattering it haphazardly around the first and second floors. There was an antique Louis XV–style chair turned upside down on top of the coffee table, leaving just enough room for Dad to place his TV Guide and remote. A stickered steamer trunk, reeking of mothballs, was stashed in the hallway, requiring me to turn sideways on my way to the bathroom. Half of the sofa was occupied by boxes of old Life magazines, along with a phonograph, dull with dust, inherited from one of the long-deceased Fitzgeralds, as well as the curvy dress form Rasha had used to sew some of her clothes. The stairs leading to the second floor were lined on both sides with additional debris—a doll-sized stroller, a set of golf clubs, a remote-controlled toy car, three skis, an old black suitcase, and a ladies’ fan fashioned from faded pink flamingo feathers—and I wondered if my bedroom was still habitable or if Dad had rendered it a repository for more of his attic discoveries.

  I stood in the living room, unable to remove my sunglasses. I poked my finger through a hole in a Depression-era quilt assembled by Grandmother Fiona, she of the Mitsouko perfume. Then I let my eyes rest on a porcelain wedding cake topper. It featured a pair of blushing lovebirds snuggled side by side. A faintly glittering crust (fossilized frosting?) was clumped around its base.

  “Are you thirsty, Sweet?” Dad asked. He patted the oversized pockets of his robe as if they might contain a small box of juice complete with its own bendy straw, or a sippy cup of milk.

  “No, I’m good.”

  He smiled. “You look beautiful. I’m happy to see you. The place is a mess. I didn’t know you were coming. How’s San Diego? You have a lot of friends?”

  Without going into too much detail, I told Dad that I had met with some trouble, withdrawn from school, and was going to move to Montana for a while. A frown furrowed the top half of his face, but the bottom half still smiled.

  “Montana?” he said. His voice was soft with awe or confusion.

  “I wanted to come and say goodbye,” I said. “Goodbye for now,” I added, swallowing. “Not forever. I promise I’ll write.”

  There was a breadbox on top of the hi-fi in the foyer. On top of the breadbox sat a fat photo album. But it wasn’t a snapshot shrine to Rasha. It was one I had never seen before, with a dark green vinyl cover on which Dad had markered his (or my) initials: M.F. I touched it in curiosity. “Oh,” Dad said. “That didn’t come out of the attic, honey. That’s usually in my den, but I brought it down here. I look at it often.”

  WHEN BUMBLE DROVE ME AWAY toward my hiding place in Montana, and I had an embarrassing bout of tears lasting all the way from Salt Lake City to Pocatello, it was the green album that I was thinking about.

  THE ALBUM’S SPINE WAS LOOSE, FLEXIBLE. It opened with the ease of oft-opened things. The first two pages contained thirteen photographs of me. They were wallet-sized pictures, one for each stage of school, from kindergarten to senior year. I hadn’t known Dad had saved them, much less arranged them with such care (he had written my name and the date beneath each one in his baroque cursive). Glancing over them, I remembered a ritual I had hitherto forgotten: Dad had spent many a morning styling my hair, and the imperfect results of his earnest labors were evident in all of the earlier photos. There were uneven pigtails, weirdly woven braids, and bangs freshly snipped at accidental angles across my forehead. I thought of us standing together before the bathroom mirror, the everyday intimacy of it. I imagined us staring into a circle wiped clean of steam, he behind me with his hands in my hair, and I helpfully offering instructions in my chirping child’s voice. What had we talked about, I wondered, when I was six and Dad had spritzed my curls into submission? What morningtime murmurs had we exchanged? Had we smiled at each other in the mirror and spoken of the dreams we’d had before waking?

  The next pages in the album featured little relics of sorts—items with a bit of bulk that prevented the pages from lying flat with perfect smoothness. My face flushed as I flipped through them, for I was unaccustomed to the sensation of seeing myself memorialized. There were several baby teeth taped to one page. They resembled sunbleached pebbles and might have just as easily been scooped by Dad from the seashore as from beneath my pillow. There was a stray pink anklet, toddler-sized, with no companion. There was a thin gold baby ring with the following note written beside it: “Gift from Aunt Yalda, Sent from Beirut, Worn, Swallowed, and Spat Up On Easter Sunday, 1986.” And there was a collage comprised of dried black beans depicting an elephant that I had created in kindergarten.

  I turned more pages, passing over painstakingly printed book reports and moody sketches, and found the program from the “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” Father-Daughter Dance, followed by the photo we took that night—Dad in that regal leather chair with me standing beside him wearing my corsage of roses. His eyes were closed in an involuntary blink against the glaring flash, but he wore a wide smile.

  Then I came upon a series of essays with consistently ungainly titles (“The Haunted Huntress: Why Hunting Foxes Hurts Natasha in War and Peace”). They were the papers I’d written during my second semester of college while in the first flush of my animal rights romance, the ones I had sent home to Dad after I’d stopped visiting him.

  Upon receiving them, Dad must have gathered that I had grown deeply interested in animals, that the affection I’d once held for Old Peep, our absent parakeet, had morphed into an obsessive regard for “all things both great and small,” to quote the Coleridge poem I had used as an epigraph for several of the essays. I wondered what he’d thought of it all. And I wondered if he intuited that the “trouble” I’d run into had something to do with the animals. He was silent as he watched me glance over the essays. I noticed he had drawn a star on “Needless Desperation: How a Dog Could Have Saved Werther from His Sorrows”—perhaps to indicate it was his favorite.

  The last page contained a memento I couldn’t place. It was neither a photo nor an essay, neither a trinket nor a tooth, but a fine sheet of paper bearing a handwritten column of text, with numbers and measurements, too. It might have been a poem. “Twenty years,” Dad said.

  “Hmm?”

  “Your mother’s perfume formula, honey—or recipe, as she called it. It’s almost twenty years old. It’s the one she finished just before you were born, the one she called her favorite. I’ve been saving it for you. It’s something of hers that you hel
ped her create.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “I ruined her whole dream … and yours, too.” It was the first time I had ever said such a thing, and as soon as I said it, I felt it, hot, in my eyes.

  “No, Margie. Please don’t say that. She told me she was never as inspired as when she was carrying you. She could smell everything!”

  I took off my sunglasses. The paper was goldening with age, and the penciled words were soft and silvery. Rasha’s handwriting, which I’d had so few occasions to see, was sweetly slanted toward the right and featured lush, bulbous lower g’s and y’s, and tall, elegant l’s and t’s. It was lovely to look at, like a drawing, regardless of the words it spelled. But when I read some of the words—magnolia, orange blossom, jasmine, lavender, grass, roots, cherries, tobacco, wild rose, peach—I realized they were a poem, both poem and enchantment, recipe and prayer, a code for an invisible kind of beauty to be conjured with the things of the earth. “I’ve been waiting for the right time to give it to you,” Dad said. “I suppose this is as good a time as any since you are going so far away.” His voice faltered at the last two words. “Go ahead, honey. Take it out.”

  I did, and I couldn’t help but smell it, as if the words and figures might exude the scent of the perfume they outlined. The sheet was transparent, like tracing paper. I held it up in front of me and looked through it, looked between the words, to see Dad standing, hands pocketed, watching me with expectant eyes.

  Yes, I lifted the recipe to my face, and after a moment Dad blurred, and I could not see him at all through my tears.

  “Dad,” I said. “I can’t believe it.” I didn’t just mean the recipe. It was the very existence of the album that surprised me, the photos, the relics, the essays. I had lived, and grown, and Dad, in his way, had watched. He had kept track. And everything, all of it, was safe behind sheets of that clear plastic film that adheres so gently to whatever it contains—inconspicuous but always present, always pressing, always protecting—there, all along.

  * A precipice in front, wolves behind

  Book Two

  Terra homines fructibus bonis alit.*

  * The earth nourishes human beings with good fruits.

  1 LION (Panthera leo)

  ON THE DRIVE TO MONTANA I THOUGHT once more about the hour I’d spent in Simon’s school office on that fluish day and retrospectively studied the seconds that had comprised it for portents—unnoticed at the time—of what had since come to pass. I recalled the books I had found crowding his shelves. And I pondered writing my own book, one that might someday be slid among them. Thematically, it would fit right in. I would call it, I thought, Montana, My New Loneliness: The True Story of an Animal Rights Activist on the Lam.

  Montana really was a kind of loneliness, as if the feeling of loneliness had cloaked itself in earth, capped itself in sky, and become a place. How is it, I wondered, that of all possible locales I’ve ended up in the one that is the geographical embodiment of the very condition from which I have for so long been running?

  But I knew Bumble had meant well when he suggested I escape to the Treasure State. And he had been extra cautious, using a fake ID to rent the tiny blue economy car that carried us all the way from the saline sweetness of San Diego to the prairie of eastern Montana, where the season was not summer or winter or spring, but unsettlingly in between.

  Long before we reached our destination, homesickness began to hurt my stomach, then shape-shifted into an invisible elephant who stood upon my chest. There were no orange trees in Montana, and no occasional oceanic odors. And what about Dad? Robe-clad Dad with his Dorals dangling, Dad in our crumbling house with the furniture so crazily arranged, Dad with his photo albums, Dad with an old lovebird cake topper complete with ossified frosting? The ladybug began to stir behind my eyes, causing a tingle that I knew was preludial to tears, and I had already had a sloppy cry during which Bumble tried to comfort me with shoulder patting, hair smoothing, and, finally, with singing. His singing voice was showy and surprisingly high, but his spontaneous choice of “Oh My Darling, Clementine” proved to be ill considered, because when he melodiously declared “you are lost and gone forever” the elephant on my chest grew almost unbearably heavy.

  I studied Bumble’s profile. Not only had he found me a hiding place on the Crow Reservation, but he had insisted on staying behind the wheel for most of the twenty-two-hour trip. He said he wanted me to relax. He was exhausted but he tried not to show it. Still, he looked tired—tired and serious and boyish and more human, somehow, than he ever had. Maybe I’d been mistaken, I thought, for assuming that Bumble’s love affair with gadgetry and gear betrayed a lack of inner warmth.

  “Bumble,” I said. “Thanks again for this, for driving, for singing, for everything.”

  “Of course, Margie. And please don’t worry. Everything’s going to work out.” I remembered the night I’d met Bumble, when Simon brought me to my first Operation H.E.A.R.T. meeting upstairs at Gelato Amore. A year and a half had passed, but remembering it was like recalling an incident from childhood—a moment so long ago it seems, when viewed from what feels like a great distance through memory’s misty eyeglass, imbued with sentiment. Bumble’s red dreadlocks were just beginning then, and his face had still been cushioned with a pillowy layer of baby fat that, in the ensuing months, had melted away. “I’m Bumble B.,” he’d said, shaking my hand. “That’s ‘B’ with a period, not ‘B-E-E.’ ”

  What has happened, what has happened? went the secret refrain in my brain. How can I ever go back to school? Or do anything at all? Wanted by the FBI? A fugitive? I rested my head against the seat and stared out the open window. The prairie air blew against my face without tenderness. Black ravens, heavy with carrion, flapped lazily off the road just in time to dodge our wheels and observed us from fence posts, only worsening my sense of being watched.

  After a few minutes, Bumble spoke again. “Remember, it’s only temporary, Margie. And what comes after this is up to you.” I stared, listlessly.

  We entered the reservation and drove through a small town called Crow Agency, where countless fluffy white tufts—cottonwood seeds, Bumble said—drifted from the trees and floated through the air, looking delicate and celestial amid the weathered buildings and the cars, which were older, louder, more beat up, and more creatively patched together than any I had ever seen. One stretch of asphalt we traversed was blotched with gleaming shards of broken Beirut-brown bottles, and Bumble drove around the glass with care.

  “Nobody will find you here,” he continued. “Just hang out until things die down. It’s not as though you hurt anyone, after all. I mean, what on earth?” he exclaimed. “I know we’ve talked about it a million times, but I seriously doubt the feds are going to stay worried about some freckle-faced college girl who wanted to help out a few animals.”

  “But you’re the one who told me I should go away because of what Ronald Clack called the ‘green scare’—the witch hunt, you said. Remember?”

  “Just wait it out. Wait a while.”

  “What’s ‘a while’?” I asked. “How long is ‘a while’?”

  Poor Bumble didn’t know, so he pretended he hadn’t heard me. Crow Agency was behind us in minutes, and we were once again surrounded exclusively by earth and sky. Driving north through Idaho, we had seen a few patches of persistent snow lingering in the shady places beneath roadside pines, though the first day of summer was just weeks away. Now the landscape was vacant and vast. There were too few trees to make shade for stubborn snow, and nothing new had grown in winter’s wake. The land was neither white nor green—it was an uninspiring shade of khaki and it had the quality of something incomplete, something waiting.

  “Look at this place,” Bumble said. The prairie was so foreign, so full of secrets, and I had no key to unlock it. The softly sloping hillocks rolling away in every direction looked to me like a lot of lions sleeping. There were mountains in the distance that—with their absence of angles and their curvy shapes—seemed
gentle, but I did not know their names. “No distractions,” Bumble went on. “Perfect for getting your thoughts in order and starting fresh. It’s so quiet. No more airplanes! And,” he added, “if it gives you any comfort, you don’t have to think of yourself as being in the U.S. or even in Montana anymore, but in Crow Country, because the way my mom explained it, the tribe is a sovereign nation all its own.”

  “Hmm.” I watched the prairie pass in a blur of beige. The land was dotted here and there with abandoned cars and pieces of farm equipment dissolving into rusty crumbles. We passed through a town called St. Xavier where no one appeared to live. I saw a log cabin that had been converted into a church, a rusty trailer tipping precariously into a ditch and painted with the words EAR CLINIC, and a place called Pretty Eagle Catholic School. Pretty Eagle’s exterior was embellished with a chipped mural featuring an Indian boy and girl, their heads bowed in prayer and a basketball hovering between them. It was early afternoon and all the students were out of sight, hunched over desks. St. Xavier was quiet, and as we left it I continued to search in vain for signs of life, studying the hillocks to see if the slumbering lions might awaken.

  After a while, I did see life. I spotted a bent figure fifty yards from the road, carrying a short stick and making measured progress over a bluff. The person was long skirted, and the softness of her shape was reminiscent of the distant mountains. She paused, then crouched and pierced the ground and pulled something from the soil. She deposited her unearthed treasure into a sack slung over one shoulder. Wondering at what I had seen, I stared at the woman as we passed, poking my head out the window to watch her shrink to a speck behind us. She stared back, lifting up a hand to shade her eyes.