Hummingbird Heart

by Robin Stevenson

  “You have the same tattoo as Mom.”

  “Crazy thing to do,” he said, shaking his head. “It wasn’t as if hummingbirds had any great meaning to us either. We just flipped through the book and picked a picture we liked. Could have been worse, I guess. At least we didn’t get skulls. Or each other’s names.”

  I took the card. “I have to go,” I said again. Then I turned and ran back up the grassy slope toward the hotel, eyes stinging, tears cold on my cheeks.

  “Hey, Dylan.” Karma grabbed my shoulder. Her eyes were wide and scared. “You just ran right past me. What’s wrong? What happened?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing.”

  “If he hurt you…” She looked ready to find Mark and kill him if necessary.

  “No. No, nothing like that.”

  Karma’s voice wobbled slightly, as if she might start to cry. “After you went off with him, I started freaking out and thinking, like, what if he’s a pervert or something?”

  “He’s not.”

  “But you don’t want to talk about it?”

  “I just want to go home,” I said.

  This was the worst part, the most shameful thing: the first thought I’d had when Mark had said Casey was sick was that maybe if Casey wasn’t around, he’d see me as a daughter instead. It was a horrible, sick, twisted thought to have. I hated myself for having that thought. And anyone else who knew it would hate me too. Even Karma.

  Karma rode the bus halfway home with me and hopped off at the Boys and Girls Club.

  “I’ll just apologize for being late. That way I miss most of the group and they won’t call Amanda,” she said. “Are you going to be okay?”

  “Yeah.” Karma looked worried, so I tried to grin at her. “Go on. I’ll be fine.”

  She gave my arm a funny little pat and got off the bus, and I rode it the rest of the way home. I couldn’t believe Mom hadn’t told me why he was here. By the time I was kicking off my shoes in our front hall and walking up the stairs, I still hadn’t decided whether to talk to her about it or pretend that I didn’t know. She’d be furious that I’d gone to see Mark on my own but…

  Crap. At the entrance to the living room, I stopped dead. I stood and stared for a moment. Mom and Scott were making out on the couch. There was an open bottle of wine on the table and the living room smelled like pot.

  Scott jumped up when he saw me. His shirt was off and his jeans were unbuttoned. I looked away quickly.

  “Sorry, sorry,” he muttered, presumably doing up his pants. “How are you, Dylan?”

  “Fine.” God. My face was burning.

  Mom didn’t even bother getting up. She sat up, her shirt halfway unbuttoned, black lace bra showing, and laughed. “You’re home early.”

  “I’m going upstairs,” I said flatly.

  “Wait, wait. Come here, baby. Come see Scott’s new tattoo.” Mom grabbed Scott, who was bending to pick up his T-shirt, and held up his arm. “Check it out.”

  On his left bicep was a freshly inked skeleton drummer, the skin around it reddened and shiny with oil.

  “I drew it. What do you think? Nice, huh?”

  So that tattoo hadn’t been for her at all. I really didn’t care anymore. “Are you stoned?”

  She giggled again. “Just a bit tipsy. It’s Scott’s birthday. We were celebrating.”

  “Whatever.” I turned to leave, but Scott beckoned to me.

  “Hang on a sec. I brought something for you.” He pulled his T-shirt over his head, sat back down on the couch and rummaged in a canvas bag by his feet. “Here. Karma told me you were a committed environmentalist, so I thought, maybe…”

  He held out a DVD and I glanced at it. A two-year-old documentary on global warming. “I’ve already seen it,” I told him. Behind him, I could see my mother’s face. She knows about Casey, I thought. She knows and she’s just partying like always, and she hasn’t even bothered to tell me.

  “And? What’d you think?” Scott prompted.

  “It was okay.”

  “I just showed it to one of my teen groups.” He looked at the cover picture for a moment before dropping it back in his bag. “Good movie, but it’d be more powerful if it went beyond the problem and actually explored solutions.”

  “Maybe there aren’t any,” I said. “Maybe we’ve screwed up the planet so badly that it’s too late. Even if we stopped burning fossil fuels completely, right now, the temperature would go on rising for another fifty to a hundred years.”

  “But isn’t that kind of attitude part of the problem?” Scott said.

  I rolled my eyes. I wasn’t going to listen to this crap. “Oh, please,” I said. “Multinational corporations are the problem. Our meat-based North American diet is the problem. Our whole consumption-based disposable society is the problem.”

  “I’m serious,” he said.

  “Uh, yeah. So am I.”

  Mom glared at me and I scowled back. Why should I let her pothead boyfriend give me a lecture?

  Scott grinned at me. “Come on. You know how it is. Everyone’s like, ‘Well what can I do? Look at all the factories and planes belching out carbon gases. I might as well just keep driving my SUV and crank up the air con.’ So nothing changes.”

  “This isn’t an individual problem,” I said. “So individual solutions won’t fix it. Anyway, I’m trying to be realistic. Maybe it really is too late.”

  “So what if it is? We should all just give up? Screw it, everyone just do what you want, too bad about the planet?”

  I blinked. “No. Of course not. I just think that maybe even if we do everything we can do, it might not be enough.” I thought of Casey. If we couldn’t even figure out how to stop one little kid from dying, how the hell could we hope to save a planet?

  “I guess that’s possible,” Scott said.

  I shrugged. “Probable.” And the other thing that was probable was Scott thinking I was a real downer. It was probable that he was wondering how someone like Mom ended up with a kid as negative as me.

  “Still, even if you are right, we still have to make choices, right? And hope is important.”

  I wondered if this was how he talked to the kids he worked with, and whether he thought he was being inspiring. I didn’t feel inspired, but I had to give him points for effort. “Whatever,” I said. “Anyway, I’ve got homework, so…I’ll just…” I gestured down the hall.

  “Should be working on a paper for school myself.” Scott put his hand on my mother’s wrist and rubbed his thumb across the hummingbird tattoo. “Catch you later, Dylan.”

  Not if I can help it. I dragged my eyes away from the hummingbird and as quickly as I could without actually running, I scooted away and shut myself in my room. God. Spare me the bonding session with my mother’s half-naked boyfriend.

  TWeLVe

  Mom’s hummingbird tattoo was green with a flash of red at its throat, wings spread mid-beat as it hovered forever at her wrist. Because of the sound of my heartbeat in utero, she’d said. I’d looked it up once and found out that a hummingbird heart actually beats at about ten times the rate of a fetal heart. But the idea had been nice anyway.

  Until I found out that the whole story was just one more lie.

  I wondered if she was planning to tell me about Casey or if she was just going to let her die without even giving me a chance to try to help. She was pretty irresponsible sometimes, but I wouldn’t have thought she could be that selfish.

  I switched on my laptop. Acute something leukemia, he’d said. Acute lymphoblastic leukemia. My fingers flew over the keys and within a few seconds, I had a definition: Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a form of leukemia, characterized by the overproduction and continuous multiplication of malignant and immature white blood cells (also known as lymphoblasts) in the bone marrow. It could be fatal if left untreated as ALL spreads into the bloodstream and other vital organs quickly. ALL is most common in childhood with a peak incidence at four to five years of age.

  Casey wasn’t q
uite four yet.

  Mark’s daughter. His real daughter.

  My half sister.

  I wanted to call Toni and talk to her about it—but there was no way that I could tell anyone. Not unless I knew for sure that I was going to do it. Not unless I was actually going to be a bone marrow donor.

  Anyway, I’d told Toni to fuck off. I felt panicky at the memory—what if she hated me?—and pushed the thought away.

  I typed in bone marrow donation, clicked onto a Canadian Blood Services site and started reading. The donor is usually admitted to the hospital early on the morning of the harvest date…general anesthetic…marrow is withdrawn from the donor’s hip bones using a special syringe and needle in the operating room…I pressed my hands against my hip bones and tried to imagine a doctor sticking needles into their sharp ridges. My mouth was desert-dry and I felt sick. It was all just so…humiliating. I’d been so quick to assume Mark wanted to get to know me. But he didn’t care about me at all. He just wanted my bone marrow.

  The donor can generally go home the same day but may experience some temporary soreness in the area…I pushed my chair back from the computer, heart pounding, and sat staring out the window. The sun was low in the late afternoon sky, shining weakly through a crack in the clouds. There was a weird greenish glow in the east. I wondered if it was because of all the pollution.

  When we were kids, Toni and I used to design cities that people could live in after the air got too polluted to breathe—whole communities inside great glass domes, or under the sea, crowded together like a colony of ants. Back then, I’d had a lot of faith in people’s ability to pull together to cope with change. I hadn’t realized that people were basically selfish. Me. Mom. Mark.

  Everyone was just looking out for themselves.

  I managed to avoid Mom until dinnertime, when I had to go and sit at the table with her. The knots in my stomach twisted a little tighter every time I thought about all the lies and secrets. Mom had actually cooked dinner for once, but it was hard to eat.

  I chewed a mouthful of rice and listened to the sound of Vital Shrines, Scott’s former band. The singer was screaming out some song about everything being broken, which pretty much summed up my life right now. Mom stared at her wineglass and ran one fingertip around and around the rim. Karma just ate, slow and methodical. No one said anything.

  The food was as dry and tasteless as paper. I couldn’t swallow, couldn’t choke anything past the big lump sitting in my throat. Eventually, I spat the rice into a paper napkin when no one was looking. I watched my mother’s face and hoped she wouldn’t ever tell me about what Mark had said. As long as Mom said nothing, I could pretend I didn’t know. And as long as I didn’t know, I wouldn’t have to make any decisions. “Someone called for you, Dylan,” Karma said suddenly.

  “When? I’ve been home all evening.”

  Karma shrugged. “I was in the den and I didn’t feel like coming upstairs to get you.”

  I glared at her. “I can’t believe you sometimes. Did you at least take a message?” Toni, I thought hopefully. Maybe it was Toni.

  “Um, a guy.” Karma screwed up her face like I was demanding some huge feat of memory. “Maybe Jack?”

  “Jax.”

  “Yeah. Jax.” Karma looked sideways at me. “Is he your boyfriend? I bet he is.”

  “God, Karma. What is it with you? You’re obsessed with boyfriends. You’re as bad as Toni.” Though to be fair, Toni wasn’t obsessed with having a boyfriend. She just always had one.

  Mom frowned. “Dylan. Be nice.”

  I pushed my chair away from the table. “I’m not hungry. Can I be excused?”

  “You haven’t eaten anything.”

  “I said I’m not hungry.” I gritted my teeth together, fighting back tears.

  “Is this about me and Scott? Because I’m sorry if you were embarrassed, but I do live here too.”

  Karma looked interested. “Embarrassed about what? What happened?”

  Mom tossed her long hair back over her shoulders. The green lizard peeked out from under her T-shirt, its tail curling across her collarbone. “Dylan came home when Scott and I were having a little cuddle on the couch.”

  “Ewwww…gross.”

  I shook my head. “Whatever. I don’t care.” I stared at my plate of rice. Little white grains, piled up like a heap of maggots. I imagined them all moving and crawling around. Someday, that’d be all that was left on the planet. Rats and maggots, death and decay. The stench would be unbearable. I took a shallow breath and clenched my fists under the table.

  Had I always been this selfish? What was wrong with me? Any decent person—any normal person—would have just said yes. No hesitation. Yes, of course I’ll help your kid. Of course I’ll help Casey. For a moment, I pictured the big-eyed kid in the photograph and life itself seemed as fragile as an eggshell and as precarious as Humpty Dumpty wobbling on his wall.

  I shook my head, trying to dislodge the image. “I have to go make a phone call,” I said. Without waiting for a response, I stood up, walked as fast as I could up to my room, and dialed Jax’s number.

  He answered right away. “Yeah?”

  “It’s Dylan. Did you call?”

  “Yeah. Where were you?”

  “Nowhere.” I lay down on my bed and stuck my feet up on the wall. I could see the dirty heel-smudges I’d left behind from doing this a thousand times before. “I was home, but my sister was too lazy to come upstairs to find me.”

  “Yeah? Well, listen, I was wondering what you were doing later.”

  “Tonight?”

  “No, next Wednesday.” He laughed. “Duh. Yeah, tonight.”

  He probably thought I was an idiot. “Sorry. Um. I don’t know. I mean, nothing. I’m not doing anything.”

  “Want to hang out? I can come by and pick you up.”

  I hesitated. It was Monday evening, and Mom wasn’t wild about me being out late on school nights. On the other hand, if she was going to spend the afternoons smoking weed and making out with her boyfriend, she could hardly object. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll see you soon.”

  Mom looked out the window and drew in a sharp breath. “Is that your date?”

  “He’s not a date.” I watched Jax approach the house.

  “Well, he’s good-looking all right.” Mom’s tone made it sound like a bad thing.

  “What’s your problem?” I asked.

  “No problem.” She leaned forward, peering into the darkness outside. “Dylan! A motorbike? You didn’t tell me he was picking you up on a motorbike.”

  “Less fuel consumption than a car,” I said, lifting my chin and flipping my hair off my face. The thought of seeing Jax buoyed me up, made me feel tougher and harder, made me not care so much about everything. “You should get rid of that station wagon, you know. It’s an environmental hazard. Time to join the twenty-first century, Mom.”

  “Don’t change the subject.” Mom glanced through the kitchen door into the living room, where Karma was curled on the couch with a book, and lowered her voice. “You know that’s how Sheri was killed.”

  “Sheri was drunk. She drove into a hydro pole. That doesn’t mean motorbikes are inherently dangerous.”

  “Drop the sarcasm, Dylan. And the attitude. Christ. The world does not revolve around you, you know. I know you’re upset…”

  “Try seriously pissed off, Mom. That’d be closer.”

  “Is this still about the photographs?” She narrowed her eyes at me. “I don’t expect you to see it this way, but I was doing you a favor.”

  My heart started to race. “I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about Mark. I don’t want to talk about you lying to me. Okay?” I stepped away from her. “I have to go.”

  She opened her mouth like she was going to say something; then she stopped and sighed. “Okay. Go.” She caught my arm as I pushed past her, and gave me a hard look. “Jesus, baby. What’s with all the face paint?”

  “It’s just eyeline
r.” My cheeks felt hot. I didn’t wear makeup often because it made me look like a kid playing dress-up. I wanted to look older, not younger. I wished I had time to go and check in a mirror, but I could hear Jax coming up the porch stairs, and I didn’t want to leave him alone with my mom. “It’s no big deal. Everyone wears eyeliner.”

  She shook her head. “Just be careful. Please?”

  “I always am.” I snapped my chewing gum, spat it into the garbage and walked down the stairs to the front door.

  THIrTeen

  “Where are we going?” The wind tore my words away. I leaned closer to Jax, so that my helmet was almost touching his. “Where are we going?” I yelled.

  Jax shouted something back, but I couldn’t make it out. It didn’t matter anyway, I decided. I closed my eyes and felt the wind on my face as we flew down the road. Speed. There was nothing like this feeling. It erased my anxiety, drove all thoughts out of my mind. We could crash, I told myself, but I didn’t care. Everyone had to die eventually, and there were worse ways to go. Like leukemia.

  Jax took a corner fast, and I tried to keep my body aligned with his as he leaned the bike to one side. I hoped I was doing it right. He’d made a comment before about his ex-girlfriend being a bad passenger, and while I didn’t quite know what that meant, I certainly didn’t want to be one. He’d turned onto the curving road that circled the university campus, and I wondered again where we were going. Finally, he pulled to a stop and turned to look at me.

  “Okay?”

  I grinned, trying to look casual and carefree, and lifted my helmet off, shaking my hair loose. “Good.”

  “My brother’s in residence here. First year. Here, I’ll take that. You can hop off.” He took my helmet. “He’s having a few friends around for drinks. I said I’d stop by. Okay?”

  “Yeah, great.” I’d never been in a university residence before. I could hardly wait to tell Toni. Assuming Toni was still speaking to me.