Two are left behind. In one cage, a mother and father snuggle religiously on their eggs in the dark, cave-like hollow of their nest. She searches the abandoned nests. They also hold eggs. She reaches into one nest and touches the egg, which is not like a chicken egg at all, as she had expected. Instead it is as cold and silky smooth as a pebble, and between her fingers, it feels as if it could be used in sacred rituals or magic spells, if she believed in that sort of thing. Jenny closes the cage door, deciding to pretend she didn’t know that these two devout parents stayed.
She thinks she should make it look a little more like a break-in, but there is nothing with which to make a mess. Also, it’s even quieter than it had been in her apartment before she’d heard the birds. She hears a slight rustling and the expectant father pokes his head out of the nest. He jumps to the edge of the cage, preening his feathers with his beak, seemingly aware of his own dapper charm.
On impulse, Jenny opens the cage door and he, too, glides across the sky like a feathery comet. She closes the cage door. The expectant mother finch stays sitting on her eggs.
When Jenny returns to their front door, Malik is unlocking it. There is something downhearted in his kiss, or is she imagining it? His lips taste salty with sweat, but there is also something else. “We should talk,” he says as he pulls away.
“What about?” Jenny asks, pushing past him into the living room. She pulls off her finchy-smelling gloves, throwing them in the corner so Malik won’t smell them.
“I think we should both get checked out to see if we can even—if we can have kids.” He clasps her hands, drawing her down next to him on the couch. His hands weigh on hers like sandbags heated under the sun.
Trying to conceal her anxiety, she says, “Are you joking?! We’ve only really been trying for a few months! Let’s give it some time.”
“Listen, Sam and his wife went to a doctor when they were trying to conceive and he said it was really helpful.” Malik looks so earnest that she almost believes it is a brilliant idea. She wonders, for a split second, what their future baby would look like. Perhaps it would have Malik’s eyes, his mouth, her eyebrows and cheekbones. Perhaps it would combine them so closely that nobody would be able to distinguish or assign features.
“No! I said give it time.” Jenny reaches back down for her gloves, avoiding Malik, who reaches for her. If she waits long enough, perhaps Malik will change his mind.
She buries the gloves in the laundry basket at the end of the hall, under their other clothes, and glances back. Malik is rubbing his temples. Jenny closes the bedroom door behind her and hunches in bed with her laptop. She hears the front door close quietly. Again silence. No finches, no clock ticking, and the light fades. She squints at the words of her story as if it is a kind of steganography, a series of marks that mean help wanted.
Opening the window, she listens to the blue static monotone of crickets chirping, the only sound in the sleepy residential streets. She trembles for a while and then she falls asleep.
***
Morning sunshine runs across the room. Blessed silence. Malik is lying asleep beside her. Jenny leans over to kiss him, then stops, remembering. Siena and Shane will come home from their camping trip today. And yesterday she released their finches.
Jenny decides to go to the library to plan her job search. As she walks to her car, she imagines the look of horror on Siena’s face, those thin lips pulled downward. Somehow, it bothers her. She considers buying some more finches. But it’s too late, and they would notice the difference. They probably stared at those stupid birds all day long.
***
Malik tells her that someone has broken into Siena and Shane’s apartment. Had she seen anyone? No, she’d been in bed most of the day. “But you were just coming in when I ran into you outside the door,” he interrupts.
“Oh, I just went for a quick jog. I wasn’t paying attention to anything.”
According to Malik, the mother Jenny left behind sits on her eggs alone, only leaving the nest for more food. She has started pecking out her own feathers, and balding. Siena has mentioned that she doesn’t think the babies will hatch. This bothers Jenny more than she thought it would.
A month passes before Siena knocks on her door again. “Wow, you’re almost to the finish line, huh?” Jenny looks at Siena’s belly to avoid her face, which is red and puffy from crying.
“Do you think I could stay here for a few hours?” Tears slide like small mirrors down her cheeks.
“What’s wrong?”
“Shane left.”
“He what?”
“He doesn’t want to raise the baby with me. No explanation. Well … I mean, I can think of ways this has been coming for a few weeks. He had cold feet about being a father and then the camping sent him over the edge.”
Jenny pulls Siena down next to her on the couch. She wonders if releasing the finches caused Shane to leave. No, that makes no sense. It’s totally absurd.
“How could camping make it worse?”
“Remember how I told you I want to raise the baby in a forest? It freaked Shane out. Maybe I could live in a city if it meant Shane would stay with me, but he doesn’t want to do that. He says he doesn’t want to be responsible for my decisions. I said, ‘We’re having a baby. Of course you’re partially responsible for my decisions,’ and he said, ‘Well, I don’t want to be.’ The baby was an accident. We didn’t plan it or anything.”
“Um, maybe he’ll change his mind?”
“No. When he gets like that, there’s no changing anything. He might change his mind months or years from now, but I don’t want to wait until then.”
Jenny listens silently, patting Siena’s arm. Siena says, “And the finches are gone. Did Malik tell you? I haven’t been down here because Shane and I have been fighting so much. But somebody broke in. We think maybe, because there was nothing to steal, they just opened the cages for spite.”
“But, uh, Malik said they left the mother.”
“Yes. But she’s mentally ill now. I’m probably going to have to move, so I’ll give her to an aviary or something. Rent’s too expensive here if Shane’s not paying for it.”
“You could stay down here temporarily, if you want. Malik and I could help you.”
“Really? But you don’t even like me.”
Jenny’s stomach flips. She examines her chapped hands, tracing her life line, her head line, her heart line on the palms. Siena had shown her these when they had first met. “Of course I like you.”
“Do you?”
“Stay here at least until you figure out what you’re doing.”
Siena sleeps upstairs for the following nights, but during waking hours she crochets in the living room. She teaches Jenny to crochet, even though Jenny thinks it is one of the most boring activities ever, calling to mind log cabins cradled in snow and stern, industrious women sitting primly in rocking chairs beside kerosene lamps.
Later Siena tells them that Shane came back to pick up the last of his things. “He didn’t leave a phone number but said he would call to check on me and the baby later. When we first started dating, we had a long conversation about flying buttresses. Well, I guess it wasn’t a conversation, because Shane talked more than I did. He can talk for hours. Have you guys noticed that? He told me that he used to win awards for the sandcastles he built in elementary school. Who wants to bet that even back then he would give acceptance speeches? He won an award this year and almost left the audience snoring, the self-centered bastard. We didn’t have anything to talk about when he came to get his stuff, though.”
To Malik and Jenny, Shane always seemed more work-obsessed than anything else, but they nod sympathetically.
They look for apartments for Siena that night and the next and the next. They stop having sex or talking about kids. Siena calls the local zoos, but most of them aren’t interested in taking a single zebra finch and suggest she take the bird to an animal shelter. Finally, they transport the bald mother finch to a nonpro
fit conservation aviary an hour and a half away, across the bridge, in Los Altos Hills. The director, Lucy Yang, asks Siena questions about the mother’s health. “I’m not sure we can put her in with the other birds,” she says to Siena’s stomach. “I’ll have one of our vets examine her.”
“She’s just depressed because she’s alone.” A hint of despair creeps into Siena’s voice. Malik massages Siena’s shoulder. Lucy nods, her eyes cloaked in pity. Jenny looks away, staring out the plate glass windows at the lush gardens adorned with whimsical sculptures and fountains made of rainbow mosaic tiles, the bright and cloudless blue sky.
The apartment seems naturally quiet now, as if neither Shane nor the finches had ever taken up residence upstairs. Every night, Malik’s eyes are shadowy as he narrates stories of the schoolyard. Ivory has mercilessly bullied Evan ever since Malik explained Evan’s crush to her. Jude’s kingdom has rebelled and he’s found himself divested of his riches, a serf once more. The other kids ignore him on the playground and he rambles around the outskirts of the field alone as he chews a sandwich. Now Malik regrets keeping him back a year.
One night, as they’re washing dishes, Siena calls out to them from the living room. Malik trots off to see what’s wrong, coming back to announce that her water broke and that he’s going to bring the car around.
Jenny picks up the phone. “Call my midwife,” Siena insists. But the midwife doesn’t answer. Jenny pages her. She doesn’t answer the page. Through the window, Malik’s car is waiting, light on, engine running. He gestures at Jenny.
“We have to take you to the hospital,” Jenny says. “We don’t know what else to do.”
“I could walk you through it?” pleads Siena. But Jenny helps her up. They struggle across the lawn, through fallen leaves, to Malik’s car. The hospital isn’t too far away, but Siena cries during the ride. Jenny holds her hand.
“Remember how you told me that your heart line was long and deep? Doesn’t that mean you have a strong heart?” Jenny tries. Malik stays silent.
“That was total bullshit.” Siena cries harder, holding her belly.
Malik shakes his head at Jenny in the rearview mirror. Every once in a while, Siena stops sobbing to wince with pain during a contraction.
“Do you have a number for Shane? I’ll call him when we get there.”
“No! He’s not coming. He left. He—”
Malik parks and helps Siena through the glass doors of the hospital. Jenny follows behind, feeling uncertain and useless. She stays in the waiting room while Malik, without even being asked, helps Siena in the delivery room. Some volunteer spreads a fresh batch of magazines on the table, but Jenny stands by the window, staring at the city, all shadowed toy buildings and random spots of light, dark hills that almost blend seamlessly into the night sky.
She waits, it seems, for hours, but neither Malik nor Siena emerges. Something dark begins to swallow her up from the inside. How long can she keep up this wait, and why has she been waiting? This hospital with Siena in labor is where Malik wants to be. But she is not this sort of person; this is not her life, or at least it shouldn’t be. She takes an Uber home and stands in front of the apartment for a few minutes, uncertain. Through her apartment window is the old familiar pumpkin-colored couch and the television in the living room, the computer in the corner. They look like someone else’s belongings. Upstairs, Siena’s window is dark.
Jenny wanders uphill, meandering through the quiet, winding shadowy streets. She finds herself at Codornices Park by the rose garden. She climbs the forty-foot concrete slide, and her throat starts to burn from the exertion of going up the incline. At the top of the slide, she chooses a big cardboard square from the stack people have left behind. She sits down on it and closes her eyes. She tries to feel a kiss from Malik, a kiss from before Siena and Shane moved in, from before there was any talk of babies, when love, luminous as amber, swam and splashed around her insides. Nothing.
After a few minutes of silence, Jenny feels his breath over her lips, but she can’t quite taste or smell it—she can’t describe a smell in words, the way she can describe the color of lipstick or the sky. Instead she thinks of the smell in layers of tangible things—first, just a liqueur haze from his mouth and her own, then closer, a more blistering scent—salty, stinky, delicious oysters, maybe a trace of cinnamon because Malik gnaws on whole cinnamon sticks.
Jenny wonders how Malik became the Malik he is now, and how it could have happened without her really noticing over a period of years. Maybe he was always gentle and kind, boring and staid. Maybe he always wanted children, domestic bliss, to settle down, and the memory she has of another Malik, the more liberated, bohemian Malik who’d hang out with her in the playground at night, now represents some other, less important part of him, a minor note.
Jenny imagines Malik and Siena raising the baby together. She’s never sensed sexual attraction between them, but that doesn’t matter, maybe. They could see the same thing in those birds. They could see something she couldn’t. They could gaze at those finches for hours.
She looks up. Clouds quilt the sky in shades of grey. No constellations. She pushes off and begins the fast descent down the slide, her breath catching. As she slides down the steep slope, eyes closed, hands outstretched, fingers treading air, her heart jumps in her chest. That’s when she remembers. Nothing but the softness, the fragile featheriness of the baby finch, as if its heart is pulsing in her own hands. It lay on its back, quiet and still resting on Malik’s palm, and when he released it into the cage, it flew around like a wild thing.
After a flamenco show, they picnic on the villa rooftop, eating knobs of hard cheese and tart apples, and drinking straight from a tall bottle of sticky port. They toast to enduring love, their two beautiful children, and how happy they are their children have grown up. The Andalusian sky is the same as the one at home, she thinks, as they stumble drunk to their rooms, yet somehow going abroad has made the sparkling covey of stars appear closer and brighter.
It also makes the cell phone’s midnight bleats more alarming.
Maisie’s hand closes around the tiny cell phone on the nightstand. Perhaps a friend has simply forgotten they’re on a trip for their anniversary. It’s midafternoon in the Bay Area.
“Hello?”
“Mrs. Turcotte?” The voice is tense, slightly fearful.
This is the call. This is the call she’s been waiting for and imagining and dreaming and dreading for her son’s whole life. After a few moments, she understands the call is real.
“We’re sorry, ma’am. Your son’s been in a terrible accident.”
***
They wait for a taxicab in the darkened alley next to the spice market, the cold night air sweet with vanilla, peppercorn, saffron. Maisie is suffused with dread. Her earlobes are icy cold and she keeps folding them, tucking them inside her ear for comfort as she had as a small child. Bran sets the rolling suitcase upright and sits on its short side. He’s stout, barely balancing. His eyelids flutter down, his sleek silver hair gleams by moonlight.
She doesn’t understand how he can be so calm, so callous, but after a while, she thinks it must be all the years of struggling with Drew—they forced him to resign himself to the possibility of disaster at all times. But if that’s the case, why can’t she be as stoic as he is?
Maisie lets go of her ear and fishes through her purse. She will scroll through her cell phone contact list and determine which of her friends still owes her a favor, which of them might be willing to check on Drew at the hospital. Beneath the litter of receipts, her hand closes around an oddly shaped metal talisman.
A toy Maserati Gran Turismo, cherry red in the dim light from the street lamp. Drew’s favorite toy as a child. When she’d packed up her office earlier that year, after selling the daycare franchise she’d built from nothing, it had been secreted away in one of the particleboard desk drawers, and she dropped it in her purse before throwing away a champagne bottle and bidding farewell to her staff for
the last time. She rotates the car in her palm, trying to remember how it ended up in her desk, whether she’d taken it away from Drew as a punishment—likely.
***
Drew was difficult from the start. During pregnancy, hyperemesis gravidarum rendered Maisie wildly nauseous, vomiting several times a day. As if this weren’t enough, her joints relaxed excessively. She could barely walk for the last two months of the pregnancy and needed to keep a crusty blue vomit bucket on her side of the bed. During labor, Drew flipped into a breech position and started to have trouble breathing, and she needed the doctors to C-section him out of her. When they pulled him out, faintly bluish and screaming bloody murder, he wouldn’t latch on to nurse.
Trouble flooded his childhood. He was adorable, by far the funniest child she would ever meet, but he didn’t listen, and he found rules irrelevant. Maisie appreciated his unique sense of humor, his unprecedented generosity, but she fretted that he flung himself headlong into danger. He’d repeatedly pry the light-socket covers off the wall and dismantle the second-story window screens and climb out onto the roof, and stand there, victorious and cheering after he’d been told not to. He ran screaming around and around the room of the preschool during circle time, completely incapable of calming down. When he was four, he struck a preschool teacher hard in the face and would later claim she was making fun of him, but he couldn’t remember specifics. Maisie didn’t quite believe it at first, but then he clobbered a little boy who made fun of him for making a buzzing noise and was kicked out of preschool. “You can’t hit people because they say something you don’t like.”
“Why?”
She struggled to come up with an explanation that would satisfy Drew. He poked holes in her half-hearted sermon about respecting authority, sensing that she secretly found his behavior amusing. “But what if they tell you to hurt someone? Then should you do it?” His resistance to authority was what Bran later reminded her of when Drew’s kindergarten teacher suggested they take him to a psychiatrist.
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