Skyward

by Mary Alice Monroe

They ran together to the resident pens. He was very much aware of her support as she trotted at his side. As he rounded the curve of shrubs, Harris’s throat constricted with relief when he spotted a small child’s form standing beside Lijah inside the crow pen.

  “Thank God,” Ella said, breathless as she came to a stop beside him.

  Looking at Marion, Harris thought she seemed calm and attentive, bending at the waist to get a closer view of the smaller of the two crows. Gone was her fury and any signals that she might be having a blood sugar attack. It was obvious that she was engrossed in whatever Lijah was telling her. Harris saw the gentle smile on Lijah’s face, too, and it didn’t escape him that the old man was enjoying this brief interlude with Marion.

  “She doesn’t look any worse for wear,” Ella said. “In fact, she seems to be having a wonderful time with Lijah.”

  He pushed his hair from his face and waited for his breathing to catch up to his heart rate. “As long as she’s not with me, she manages pretty well.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself. Everyone loves Lijah. He just has this way about him.”

  “But I’m her father. Put me in there with her and she’ll throw a tantrum.”

  Her mouth settled in a crooked smile. “What happened this morning?”

  “Damned if I know. One minute we were playing Chutes and Ladders, and the next she was kicking the board and telling me she didn’t want to play anymore. I thought she was having an insulin reaction.”

  “Was she?”

  “I don’t think so now. But how could I know with diabetes? It’s like riding a damned roller coaster. I was getting the kit when she snuck out.”

  “So she knew you were going to test her?”

  He pursed his lips and nodded curtly.

  “Let’s take a walk.”

  Spring had not officially arrived in the Lowcountry, but the soft promises of redbuds and cherry blossoms, greening marshes, creamy saucer magnolias and a palette of pastel colors floated in the balmy breezes.

  They took off down the gravel road, traveling nowhere in particular. As she walked shoulder to shoulder with Harris, Ella was keenly aware that their relationship wasn’t employer-employee any longer as much as colleagues, perhaps some day friends. They’d shared too much to maintain such formality between them. Their dinnertime was no longer the torturous effort at communication. The talk was lively, full of questions and reports about their days and banter about people and birds they both knew.

  Neither one spoke right now, however. She sensed that they were walking toward a new plateau in their relationship. The gravel crunched beneath their shoes and the songbirds called in the trees. Usually Harris kept his eyes to the sky, unconsciously scanning for birds. Today, however, she saw that his eyes were on his feet as he placed one foot before the other.

  “I can’t tend to Marion. It just isn’t working,” he said at length.

  “It’s only been a few weeks. Give it more time.”

  “Marion doesn’t want to spend time with me.”

  “I don’t know how you got that idea. She adores you. She loves spending time with you.”

  “This morning we were playing a game and the next thing I knew she was kicking the board away and quitting. Does that sound like she was having a good time?”

  “Were you having a good time?”

  “Me? That’s not important. The idea is to make Marion happy.”

  “Then you didn’t have a good time.”

  “No.”

  “I think we’ve just found the heart of the problem.”

  “What do you expect me to do?” he said, his voice rising with frustration. “Dolls and board games are not fun for me.”

  “Then why play those games with her?”

  He seemed perplexed. “You told me she needed playtime, so we played.”

  “Who chose the board games?”

  “She did. We pulled them out of the cabinet and she picked out the ones she wanted to play.”

  “But think, Harris. Who decided to play board games in the first place?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “I’ll wager you did.”

  “What’s wrong with board games? I grew up playing them.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with board games, except when that’s all you play. How many days have you depended on that as the basis for interaction with your daughter?”

  He didn’t have to reply. She could read the answer in his troubled expression.

  “In the end, Harris, you chose things to do that you didn’t enjoy—for her sake. And she tried to play those games with you—for your sake. So with all the best intentions, you both ended up miserable.”

  She walked a bit farther beside him, letting the words sink in. They came to the fork in the road. If they turned to the right, they’d travel along a well-worn truck path to where the woods thinned and you came to a breathtakingly wide vista of marsh framed like a picture by the woods. Instead, they bore left, traveling farther down the dirt road that led to Highway 17. The highway, with its zooming trucks and cars, seemed a thousand miles away as they walked in a rural hush. Everywhere she looked, palmetto trees stood side by side with pine and she thought it was an amusing parallel between herself and Harris.

  They came to the gate, but the white rooster was nowhere in sight. Harris went over to the culvert to stand with his hands on hips, head down, inspecting Brady’s work. The wind did its job of tousling his longish strands of brown hair. He needed a haircut, she thought. It was the kind of thing she would notice and he wouldn’t. Harris was oblivious to how attractive he was. It was one of the things she liked most about him.

  She walked to his side and looked up into his face, fighting the urge to reach up and smooth back the hair. A simple enough act, but one that implied a level of intimacy they hadn’t reached. He turned his head when she approached and she felt lost for a moment in the closeness of his blue eyes.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” she said.

  “I don’t even know who my own daughter is,” he confessed.

  Her face softened with sympathy. “Marion’s a bright child who desperately wanted you to be having a good time playing with her. She probably figured out that you weren’t, or that you’d lost interest, and she grew desperate. So when you mentioned testing her blood, she slipped right back into the behavior she knew always got your undivided attention.”

  “A temper tantrum.”

  “Like I said, she plays you like a fiddle.”

  He gave off a short, self-deprecating laugh as his mind recalled how he’d sat on the floor giving mechanical answers to Marion’s questions, not really engaging. “The poor kid. She was probably exhausted from all that chatting.”

  She laughed, well acquainted with Marion’s nervous chatter. They started walking back up the road toward the compound. Her short-legged stride worked double time to keep up with his long-legged one.

  “How’d you get so smart about children?” he asked suddenly.

  Ella flinched. He was offering a backhanded compliment, she knew, but it still pricked that beneath the surface was the question: How could a woman without children of her own know so much about them?

  “You forget I’ve worked with children for years and studied child psychology,” she replied, giving her pat answer. “And,” she added, “I know Marion.”

  “What’s the secret, then?” All pretense and humor fled from his face. “I love my child, but I can’t seem to connect with her. How can I start to enjoy spending time with my own daughter instead of dreading it?”

  “By sharing with her the things you love.”

  He stopped walking to turn toward her. “How?”

  “Harris, you have so much to share. So much you can teach her. Why get stuck in a room indoors when what you love is outdoors? Go out with her! Take her on nature walks and share your world with her. Give her glimpses of who you are. And then, let her loose! Cut the line and just let her fly. Then follow to where she takes you. Mari
on’s very good at structured games where there are rules to follow and she knows what to expect and what’s expected of her. I was stunned when I first arrived to see that she really doesn’t know how to free play. To let her imagination soar. And, no offense, but the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

  “Ouch.”

  “I’m not criticizing you! But when was the last time you actually had fun with your child?”

  He walked awhile, pondering the question with a troubled expression.

  “If you have to think that long about it,” she said with a chuckle, “the answer is it’s been way too long. Oh, Harris, you’ve been a wonderful provider for Marion. No one could dispute that. You’ve taken good care of her. But all that caretaking is a lot of responsibility. A lot of plain, old-fashioned hard work. Right?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, it shouldn’t be. It should also be a pleasure. And it’s not just you. Do you know I used to tell other nurses not to form attachments with their patients? I was so smug. I’d figured everything out, you see. By keeping myself emotionally at a safe distance, I could make all my relationships safe. I could get a lot done, not having to waste time talking to patients or thinking about what they might need to ease their mind, not just their body. Or, God forbid, that I should actually care about them.” She paused while her mind traveled back to a time months earlier, to one child in particular.

  “A little boy named Bobby D’Angelo taught me how wrong I was. How one person could make a difference in a child’s life.” She exhaled heavily, regaining the control she could feel slipping at the mention of his name.

  “Who’s Bobby?”

  She stopped walking. He took another step before realizing she wasn’t beside him. Turning, he looked at her with question in his eyes.

  “You don’t have to tell me, if you’d rather not.”

  In point of fact, she would rather not, especially since he had been so closemouthed when she’d asked him about Fannie. But this was a step toward honesty between them, and rather than take a step backward, she decided to move forward.

  So she told him about Bobby, about his diabetes and death, and how it had driven her away from nursing. How it had driven her from the cold of Vermont all the way to the small town of Awendaw, South Carolina, and an outpost of healing called the Coastal Carolina Center for Birds of Prey. As she talked they resumed walking up the road toward the center. He listened quietly, but at some point in the telling he wrapped an arm around her shoulder, drawing her closer, safe, as she exposed her inner thoughts. This time, she wasn’t nervous or flustered. His nearness felt natural.

  When she finished they walked in a silence so deep they could hear the crunch of their footfall on the gravel and, overhead, the piercing keyer-keyer of a distant hawk.

  At length he said, “When you’re hurt like that, it’s hard to let anyone close again.”

  “Yeah,” she replied softly, wondering if he was referring to himself and Fannie. “I came here determined not to allow myself to be close to a child again. But what happened?” She cast him a sidelong glance and they shared a knowing smile. “Yep. Marion knocked down those walls and forced her way into my heart. And thank God. Because that’s what a heart is meant for. For love, Harris. And caring. And sympathy and kindness and forgiveness and compassion. Those are the qualities that make us human. The mind is where the ego rules. The soul resides in the heart.”

  They stopped again and he let his arm fall from her shoulder as he faced her, his eyes searching. Ella followed her impulse and reached up to smooth back the long lock of hair from his forehead.

  “Just do with Marion what a wise old man told me to do with the birds,” she said. “Simply open up your heart and let all the warmth come spilling out. You don’t always have to be productive, or fix things, or feel like you’re taking care of her. Just be with her. All you have to do is set aside time and take your cues from her. Play her games. Then you’ll truly be connecting with your daughter.”

  “You make it sound so easy.”

  “That’s the secret. It is easy.”

  She smiled then, and he marveled at how it transformed her face into something of quite extraordinary beauty.

  Vultures: The Cleanup Committee. Vultures are large black birds with unfeathered heads. Though they have much in common with raptors in their flight and hunting behavior, they have recently been classified as more closely related to storks. These carrion eaters are gregarious in feeding and roosting habits. Vultures have expansive wings that can catch greater lift than other raptors, allowing them to soar the wind with seeming effortlessness.

  12

  “WE HAVE TWO MORE ORPHANS COMING IN today.”

  Ella looked up from the chart and grimaced at Maggie’s announcement. This was, she’d learned, the expected response at the Coastal Carolina Center for Birds of Prey.

  As cute as raptor orphans were, the danger of imprinting nestlings to humans was very real. The nestlings identified with whatever moving, vocalizing object cared for them. Once imprinted, the effect was irreversible and the bird could not be released to the wild. Not to mention, feeding a fast-growing raptor was labor intensive. The volunteers had to wear Burkas when they went into the pens to leave food or pick up leftovers—which was several times a day for those hungry babies.

  Secretly, however, Ella’s heart pinged whenever an orphan was brought in. She’d been working at the clinic for several weeks already, and whenever she saw one of those big-headed, big-footed, down-covered fuzz balls looking at her with their innocent eyes, her maternal instincts started kicking in, mulishly knocking down all the rational arguments. And when they started chirping for her when she came near their pen, she was putty. Not that she’d ever let Harris know. He was firm that it was best for the orphans to be returned to the nest whenever possible and groaned when an orphan was brought in. Intellectually, she agreed. But it was a classic case of her brain warring with her heart.

  But later that morning, when she opened up the covered transport box and found two of the gawkiest, homeliest-looking birds she’d ever seen, Ella had second thoughts.

  “Vultures?” she asked dubiously. “But they’re not birds of prey.”

  “No, but we take them in, anyway.” Maggie came closer, donning light gloves en route. She bent low to look inside the box. “Oh, my, bless their little hearts. They’re so young! They can’t be more than two or three weeks old.”

  “Poor babies,” Ella said, crooning. She bent closer. “Where did your mama go, hmm?”

  “It’s a sad story,” Maggie replied. “The parents were attacked by dogs.”

  “I don’t understand. How did the dogs get them both? Did the wind blow the nest down?”

  “Vultures nest on the ground, or sometimes in old buildings. But the wind does knock a lot of nests down. You know that osprey orphan we have in Med 8? Someone saw the nest floating down the Intracoastal with the nestling just sitting in it. Really. He was moseying down the waterway.” She chuckled. “We call him Huck Finn—but don’t tell Harris. He has a thing about not naming the birds.”

  “The nest just fell into the water?”

  “Yep. Thank goodness someone spotted it before it went under. What’s sad is we don’t know what happened to the other nestling. But we can guess. It’s tough coming up as a raptor.”

  Maggie hunched over the box to carefully grasp a vulture and lift it out. Like Harris, Maggie’s movements were slow and deliberate. Nonetheless, the vulture nestlings immediately began huddling low and hissing.

  Ella stepped aside, giving Maggie space to move the nestling to the treatment table. The nestling’s soft bones and blood feathers could bend and break easily if the bird flapped or was mishandled, and Maggie was the more experienced handler. She put the nestling into a towel-lined bowl for a weight check, but before covering it with the towel, she called Ella over.

  “Look here,” she said, lifting up the nestling’s wing. “The flight feathers are already in
blood, which is good. When they’re this young, they pretty much just eat, sleep and burrow under mama. This gives them a better chance at survival. Okay, little one, let’s check you out.”

  Together they weighed each of the orphans, checked their eyes, feathers and blood, and to their relief, found them in good health for ones so young. Then while Maggie held each one, Ella slipped into a Burka and fed it small chunks of cut-up and skinned mice. Using forceps, she gently tapped the beak with the meat, one side then the other, just like the mama vulture would do. The nestling opened its mouth again and again, greedily eating its fill. At last, both nestlings were fed and settled together in one large kennel with a heating pad.

  “Look at them,” Ella said, shaking her head as she took a final view of the baby vultures in the kennel. The two stared back at them, curious and pensive. “What a pair. With those long legs, big beaks and all that tan fuzzy down, they look like two homely chorus girls in feathered boas.”

  “Or drag queens.”

  They both chuckled again as Ella lowered the flap. She knew that these two would get names.

  While Ella was tending to the orphans, Harris was tending to his own little girl. Today was the first day of spring, his favorite season in the Lowcountry. All around them, the earth was ripening. The days were growing longer and warmer, and Carolina jasmine was bursting with its heavenly scented yellow flowers. He knew in a few more weeks the sunlight would lure out the dogwoods, azaleas, wisteria and scores more wildflowers, making their father-daughter walks seem like visits to the fairy world.

  Taking Ella’s advice, he wanted to share something he loved with his daughter. Hand in hand they walked through the thick pinewoods that surrounded their home. Harris hadn’t known that Marion loved to climb trees. She was like a little monkey, scuttling up the gnarled, perfect-for-climbing limbs of live oaks.

  It amazed him to realize that Marion was her own little person, with her own ideas and talents, not some miniature of himself or Fannie, nor even a combination of them. She was curious about things that he didn’t find remotely interesting. And then, when he least expected it, she’d ask a question about something he could share, like when she asked him about the lichen on a tree bark. It was like watching a flower unfold.