An Ornithologist's Guide to Life

by Ann Hood

“T-O?” Rachel asks him. She is already edgy. They are in the middle of a huge thunderstorm and she hates talking on the phone during storms.

  “Transitional object,” Peter explains. Rachel is sure this is something Yvonne says. “The point right now,” he continues, “is that she’s hysterical and I can’t change her overdependence in one night, so you have to bring it over right now.”

  Lightning scars the sky.

  “Drive all the way down there? In this?” Rachel says. It’s a half hour in good weather. There are curvy roads, traffic.

  She can hear Sofia crying in the background.

  “I’m on my way,” she tells Peter.

  But before she can leave the phone rings again. Maybe he has calmed her down, Rachel thinks, and answers it.

  “Rachel? It’s Mary.” She sounds nervous. “I have to tell you something.”

  “This isn’t a good time,” Rachel says. “Sofia is with her father and she’s upset—”

  “Harry is back with Victoria. There. I’ve said it. Ever since that day at the playground I’ve been feeling just awful, because I knew they were back—they got back together the very next night after you met him—”

  “The next night?” Rachel asks, to be certain she is hearing correctly. She sits down, holding Madeline on her lap. “That’s impossible.”

  “Maybe he saw you for lunch just to be polite, to be friends, you know,” Mary is saying.

  Rachel thinks about him strutting naked around her kitchen. “I don’t think so,” she tells Mary. That’s why I called, he had said. About the job. She thinks of her poached chicken, the open bottle of wine, and feels embarrassed.

  “Look,” Mary says, her voice easier now, “the point is I wanted you to know. It’s crazy really. They’re actually getting married. Can you believe it? All in a matter of days. It’s crazy.”

  “I think Dan’s cousin is a shit,” Rachel says. “A real shit. Trust me, he did not come over here for cookies and milk and a round of ‘Kumbaya.’”

  Rachel hears Mary’s sharp intake of breath. “I’m certain I don’t know,” Mary says.

  “Well, I do. All he wanted was . . .” She struggles a moment, then says, “All he wanted was a good piece of ass. I’m sure he’s very happy, the little rooster.”

  She knows she has shocked Mary and for some reason, she’s glad.

  “I know you’ve got to go,” Mary says, sounding too composed. “I won’t keep you.”

  After they hang up, Rachel realizes it is the first time they have ever spoken without planning a play date.

  BY THE TIME she gets to Peter’s the storm is over and Sofia is asleep. Rachel stands on the doorstep of the home he shares with another woman, holding the doll out to him. When she told him about Paris, assuring him it was just one year and that Sofia could spend a chunk of that time with him, he had been happy for her. I knew you’d make your way, he’d told her.

  Now he is looking at her funny.

  “What?” Rachel says.

  Peter shakes his head. “You look so pretty,” he says. “That’s all.” When she doesn’t say anything he opens the door wider and asks her inside. He tells her Yvonne is teaching a class at the Y on grooming cats.

  Rachel tries not to study everything in the house. She sees that animal hair coats everything. She sees framed photographs of Peter and Yvonne, all smiling white teeth. She smells some kind of fruity candle burning, one of those cloyingly sweet ones that make her slightly nauseous. But she concentrates on Peter’s back, the back she has followed through train stations across Europe, and up narrow stairways in pensions, and into crowds, and now through the house he shares with Yvonne. When he turns to ask her if she’d like a glass of wine, she is startled by him, by how she has loved him for so long. She actually gasps, she thinks. But he is too busy, uncorking and pouring, to notice.

  She lets herself look around this room. Here is their television, their stereo, a rough Haitian rug that used to sit in the apartment Rachel lived in with Peter. Music is playing, something unfamiliar. A CD case lying on the floor says ENYA, but Rachel doesn’t know if that’s the group or the title.

  “To Paris,” Peter says, raising his glass.

  “Shut the door,” Rachel says. But she is thinking je t’adore.

  She lets him kiss her. But she does the rest, the undressing, the reaching, the urging yes, yes, yes. For a few minutes they are somewhere else, on some forgotten bed in a foreign country, doing this same thing, learning each other. But when this is done, she feels something she has not yet felt about Peter: it is over between them. The thought strikes her, like a slap. Then settles into its proper place. It really is over, she thinks. When they hear Yvonne’s car pull up, they both scramble to their feet and dress hurriedly, without embarrassment.

  For the first time, when Rachel sees Yvonne, she smiles.

  “I was on my way out,” she tells her.

  “We had a minor tragedy,” Peter says.

  RACHEL GIVES HER notice at the toy store and spends her days with Sofia at the playground, or at home packing. Her friends have started to give her going away parties. She feels full, happy even. Later, when she sits alone in her small bathroom, two weeks before she and Sofia are to leave, staring at the bright pink spot appearing in front of her—a pink spot is positive!—Rachel wonders if she ignored the early signs just to have those weeks of feeling so good. Her hands are shaking as she lowers the early pregnancy test with its positive pink reading. She wants to call Mary suddenly, Mary who she has not spoken to since that awful phone call. And as soon as she thinks about doing it, she understands why—this could have something to do with Harry.

  THERE IS ONLY one right thing to do. Rachel knows this. But still she calls her friend Liz—a real friend—and tells her. Liz is single, self-assured, a lawyer who wears suits in bright colors like magenta and tangerine.

  “It could be Peter’s?” Liz asks.

  It is the one question that Rachel has not let herself consider. Because there, in front of her every moment, singing “Frère Jacques” and skipping through the emptying rooms and splashing in her bath each night, is Sofia, the child she did have. Hers and Peter’s child.

  “It could be that rooster’s too,” Rachel says, too quickly.

  Liz recovers immediately. “That’s irrelevant anyway,” she says, in what Rachel guesses is her lawyer voice. “Let’s not waste time. Call your doctor. Set up an appointment.” Then, gentler, “You only have two weeks before you go.”

  “I know,” Rachel says.

  Outside, Sofia’s voice rises up to her through the open windows. It is late summer, the air has not yet turned cool. Everything around them has gone past green to gold and looks burned, parched. A wave of nausea washes over Rachel. Is it her first? She remembers thinking she had food poisoning at a picnic last week. She remembers thinking she might be coming down with something.

  “I’ll drive you,” Liz says. “Let me check my calendar.”

  “No,” Rachel tells her. She is thinking of other things. That flight to Paris in two weeks. The way a plane points straight upward when it’s first airborne.

  “Look,” Liz tells her, “you’re not alone here.”

  Rachel knows this. She has Sofia, after all.

  SHE CANNOT FIND a doctor to do it.

  “My God,” she tells Liz the night before, “it’s like the sixties or something. I mean, this is legal, right?”

  In the end, there is no place to go except a clinic, where everyone else will be twenty years younger than her, clutching the hand of a frightened boy or a disappointed mother.

  Rachel almost asks Mary to watch Sofia for the day. She has been asking, Won’t I even get to say goodbye to Sophia? and Rachel has made up ridiculous stories about why they haven’t played together. Now, after all this time of not calling, she cannot bring herself to finally do it to ask for a favor. She believes that Mary is sitting in her lovely cool home, expecting that Rachel will eventually call. But somehow that is even wors
e, the idea that she would call and Mary would gush, forgive, go back.

  So she leaves Sofia with Peter and Yvonne, who acts troubled by the surprise midweek intrusion. Sofia will have to stay with us at the office, they say like a threat. We have appointments to keep. Rachel knows those appointments, the rabies shots and neutering and hairball removals. But Sofia likes that idea. She will help with the animals. She will make them better. Oddly, in these weeks before they leave for Paris, she has neglected her Madeline doll. She leaves it now, as she runs to her father, tossed in a corner like an orphan.

  Rachel has decided to walk to the clinic; she is too nervous, pent-up is how she thinks of it, to ride in a car and circle around for a parking space. Liz will pick her up at two. She has opted for anesthesia and she will, they advised her, be groggy, too groggy to drive or walk alone.

  The heat of the day makes her stomach flip-flop. And, walking, she is aware of her breasts, the fullness there. She is definitely pregnant. Why now? she wonders, when everything was finally going so right. But then she stops herself from that line of thinking. She has managed, hasn’t she? She has packed up her and Sofia’s lives, she has—long distance!—found them a new place to live. At night she listens to language tapes, carefully repeating the phrases. Comment ça va? Je m’appelle Rachel. Ou est la gare du nord?

  And she has managed this. This phone calls. The hushed voices. The appointment. On the phone the receptionist had warned her that Thursday was known with pro-life groups as baby killing day. Rachel supposed that was a test, a way of asking if she had the guts to actually go through with it, if she was certain she was doing the right thing.

  Now, though, as she turns the corner onto the street where the clinic sits, she realizes that the receptionist has given her a real warning. In the wavery heat, the clinic practically shimmers. Rachel thinks of Oz, and then of those religious sightings people have—the madonna in clouds, in tortillas, in tree bark. She thinks of those because when shown on television, some camera desperately attempting to catch a glimpse of the image, there is always a crowd, shouting. Praying, Rachel supposed. Here, in front of the clinic, is a crowd too. A shouting crowd, carrying signs.

  A knife of fear stabs Rachel in the gut. It is wrong, she thinks, that she should have to walk through them to go inside. She watches a teenage girl get swallowed up by them.

  “Baby killer,” they shout.

  “What about the Commandments?” someone calls. “Thou shall not kill.”

  Rachel waits, but she never sees the girl emerge. It is as if they really have swallowed her up.

  She is not sure what propels her forward, closer, until she is right upon them. A van parked nearby says CATHOLICS FOR BABIES RIGHTS on the side. Rachel too was a Catholic, was raised that way. She thinks of the cathedrals in Europe, the darkness of them, the heavy smell of incense, the way your footsteps echoed as you made your way forward.

  “Baby killer!” they are shouting. At her, she realizes.

  She is overwhelmed by the idea of her daughter, of Sofia. The softness of her skin and the brown sugary smell she carries with her. But even more than that. All the things that make her Sofia. The scramble of cells and genes. Everything.

  Rachel makes her way almost through the crowd, almost to the door, when she is stopped by something so familiar she smiles and reaches out to it. But her arm hangs like that, reaching, without going any farther. It is Mary that she sees. In that crowd, wielding a sign that does not hide her bulging belly, which is wrapped in the softest color yellow maternity dress. Mary sees her too. Their eyes meet, lock. It seems to Rachel that the world around them melts completely away, and they are just two women standing on a street. But then the clinic door opens, releasing a medicinal smell in its burst of cold air-conditioned air, and two people emerge and gently take Rachel’s arms to escort her safely inside. Behind her, the shouting starts up again, and Rachel almost imagines that she hears Mary’s voice above all the others, calling out to her. But when the door closes, and she is in the silent waiting room, she cannot imagine what it might be that Mary would have to say to her. Or what she could ever say to Mary.

  THE LANGUAGE OF SORROW

  THE BUS FROM Logan Airport pulled in with a heavy sigh. Dora’s grandson was coming from New York City, via Kennedy Airport. Gate one. She considered getting a box of doughnuts to bring home with them. A Dunkin’ Donuts was right inside the terminal, Dora had recognized the familiar smell before she even saw the shop. Her children had always loved doughnuts, especially the messy ones like powdered sugar or chocolate frosted. A long ago morning shot through Dora’s mind: Tillie and Dan at the old metal kitchen table, the one with the green rooster on top, their mouths dusted with white sugar, with smears of chocolate, their teeth small and smooth, the sunlight sending dust particles dancing in the air, and Dora pouring purple Kool-Aid from a pitcher with a goofy grinning face on the front.

  She remembered it and it was gone. As if she could somehow pull it back, Dora raised her hand, surprising herself. The hand looked like her grandmother’s used to—wrinkled, spotted, gnarly. The noisy arrival of a bus right in front of her forced Dora to put all of this nonsense aside. It was the bus from New York City. On that bus was her own grandson, Dan’s boy, who she had not seen in over five years. People spilled off the bus. Giggling girls and boys who looked like they were in gangs, young women with small children and older women dressed in clothes from Lord and Taylor or somewhere like that. Dora met each person’s gaze with her own expectant one. Her lipstick felt waxy on her lips. Fleetingly she remembered how the undertaker had put a thick coat of lipstick on her friend Madeline Dumfey’s lips, in a dreadful shade of pink. He thought it made her look healthy, as if someone who’d been killed by cancer could look healthy. What an idiot, Dora thought. The flow of people slowed, then stopped. Dora stood on tiptoes, trying to see inside the bus. Was it the wrong day? The wrong bus?

  But then a boy stepped off. He was not like the tattooed and pierced teenagers who Dora saw on Thayer Street. This disappointed her for reasons she did not quite understand. He was more like the private school boys, the ones who dragged lacrosse sticks past her house every afternoon. Except for the dark shadows beneath his eyes and the defeated way in which he slouched off the bus, he could be one of them. Sad and ordinary, those were the words that sprang to Dora’s mind. His hands clutched a piece of bright red American Tourister luggage, the one meant for women to carry their curlers and things. With his fair hair and pale skin, his light blue eyes and perfect pouty lips, he looked exactly like his mother. This disappointed Dora too.

  “Peter,” she said, stepping through the crowd waiting for their luggage.

  He barely looked at her. “I’ve got another bag,” he said, and joined the others waiting.

  “Let’s get it, shall we?” she said, though he had already gone to do just that.

  The last time she had seen him was five years ago at her son’s funeral, a hot bright sunlit day, even though it was February. That was Houston, she supposed. Relentlessly sunny, even in winter, even at funerals. She had not paid much attention to Peter that day. She’d had enough to deal with. The news of Dan’s death and the way in which he’d died. The flight to Texas in the middle of the night, stopping and changing planes in Newark and then Chicago and then Dallas. Arriving just in time to get to the church, unable to even change her clothes. Peter seemed hardly there that day.

  “I’ve got it,” he said.

  Dora blinked as if he woke her up.

  “Welcome to Providence,” she said, hoping he didn’t notice her voice trembling.

  His eyes looked like some kind of monster’s eyes they were such a light blue. Dora found herself remembering a little albino girl who’d gone to school with Tillie.

  “I don’t want to be here,” Peter said. He swung his other bag, also bright red, the kind men hung their suits in, over his shoulder. The weight of it made him stagger slightly.

  Before Dora could think what to say, he was
walking ahead of her, his shadow stretching between them like a bridge.

  SHE PUT HIM in Tillie’s old room. It still had the pink and white striped wallpaper from her childhood, and a bureau decorated with ballerinas. Even though he frowned when he saw it Dora couldn’t let him stay in Dan’s room. He didn’t seem to deserve it, the smell of boy things, the stamps and coins carefully collected or the models of ships and race cars assembled over many lost Saturday afternoons. This boy seemed removed from any of that, a sullen stranger plunked into Dora’s life.

  Peter tossed his bags on the bed. “Thanks,” he said. Dora heard sarcasm in that one simple word.

  “I could get us some doughnuts,” she said without much conviction. “We could have some doughnuts and chat a little.”

  He wasn’t even looking at her. His eyes flitted around the room, searching. “Is there a phone I could use?”

  Dora hesitated. His mother had told her he wasn’t supposed to call the girl.

  “There’s one in the kitchen,” Dora said carefully. “And one in my room. But I’m afraid you can’t call . . .” What was the girl’s name?

  “Rebecca,” Peter said. “But I have to.” He walked right past Dora and pointed foolishly like the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. “Which way to the kitchen?”

  Dora put her hand on his arm. Startled, she dropped it just as quickly. She didn’t expect muscles under the shirt. And standing close like this she saw that he was taller than he’d seemed at the bus station.

  “Your mother gave me so few restrictions. Calling Rebecca is one of them. I’m sorry.”

  He looked at her and she knew that really, she couldn’t stop him.

  “You love her, I suppose,” she said.

  He laughed, a barking sound that Dora didn’t like one bit. “No. But I don’t think I should have deserted her. I don’t think I should have been sent away for the entire summer to live in this podunk town with an old lady.”

  Dora took a step back, away from him, rubbing her arms up and down.

  “I mean,” Peter said, “who are you, you know? My father kills himself and you vanish. Do you know what I’ve been going through for five whole years? You have no idea.”