Birdie and Me

by J. M. M. Nuanez

  Next thing I know, Patrick has a frown on his face as we hover over Uncle Carl. Birdie joins us and asks if he’s okay.

  I lean down to get a good look at Uncle Carl’s head. When he fell, he partially rolled down the windshield and then plopped to the gravel. His head looks to be in one piece and I think I even hear him snoring.

  Suddenly, from the shed, there comes a long creak and then a great crashing sound, like something big just fell from up high.

  The door to the shed is still open and something small and round rolls out and stops in front of Patrick’s truck.

  Everyone stares at it.

  I go over and pick it up.

  It’s a small wooden egg. Just like the one Birdie and me and Mama got from the family with backyard chickens we helped move during a Wolf Day.

  No one says anything as I walk to the shed door. As I feel around for the switch, I think of the part in the Bible, at least I think it’s the Bible, when God says Let there be light!

  And then I see.

  It’s everything from home.

  Mama’s old armchair that she usually just sat in front of. The Miss Luck Duck lamp. Our bright green bookcase that we found next to the dumpster behind an old office building. The mannequin that used to hold Mama’s and Birdie’s sewing projects. Boxes on top of boxes on top of boxes and so many trash bags. And I finally see the big rock I threw, which lies by an open cardboard box on the ground.

  My hand around the wooden egg feels numb.

  “Miss Luck Duck!” says Birdie, who’s suddenly beside me. “How long has she been in here? And the Tokyo Tower hat rack!” He points to the far wall. “And Mama’s chair . . .” His eyes start to move quickly all around the shed; back and forth they dart until his face has morphed into a frown. “I don’t understand. Why does Patrick have our stuff?”

  I grab his hand and hold up the wooden egg.

  “Follow me,” I say.

  We turn around and walk toward the gate.

  “Where are you guys going?” Patrick asks.

  “To the reserve!”

  Patrick picks Uncle Carl up and Uncle Carl groans, his arm slung across his brother’s shoulders.

  “Wait a minute, Jack.”

  “What, now you want to talk?” I say over my shoulder. “Why don’t you go inside your silo like you always do!”

  He opens his mouth to say something, but doesn’t. He hefts Uncle Carl up again and watches us go.

  I walk quickly, holding Birdie’s hand the entire way. When I don’t turn down the road to the reserve, Birdie looks up at me, tugging on my sleeve.

  “We’re not going to the reserve,” I say. “We’re taking the bus.”

  CHAPTER 19

  BRIGHT SPOTS IN THE DARK

  An hour and a half later, Birdie and me are standing outside a chain-link fence. In the middle of the grass are two big balloons lying sideways. They’re attached to baskets and people stand around and a couple of trucks are parked nearby.

  Birdie drinks his hot chocolate. It was the last thing we could buy with our money while we waited for the bus. I also offer my last Honey Bunny Bun, which I’d shoved in my jacket pocket after Uncle Carl crashed into the bush.

  The balloons get bigger and bigger as huge fans blow waves of air inside them. Two guys keep them from going anywhere as they inflate.

  “Patrick’s going to be so mad when he finds out we didn’t go to the reserve,” says Birdie.

  “So what?”

  “Don’t you want to see what else is in the shed? There’s like a mountain of bags and boxes in there. I think I even saw Mama’s mannequin.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “It was like slipping into another dimension or something.”

  “Maybe we did,” says Birdie.

  I take the wooden egg from my pocket and give it to Birdie. He squeezes it and then holds it up to his eyes. “It looks like the real thing. It looks like our wooden egg.”

  “Yeah. I don’t think we’re dimension hopping.”

  Once the balloons are inflated, flames shoot out of some kind of heater, I guess warming the air inside. Within seconds they float up and the baskets sit upright.

  “Wow,” says Birdie. “They’re huge.”

  I half expect to see Uncle Carl as one of the people waiting to board. But of course he isn’t there.

  Birdie leans into the fence, putting his eye up to the metal, and I do the same to get a clear view of takeoff. And before I know it, the baskets are up in the air, higher than the trees.

  “Why would Patrick keep that stuff in the silo shed and not tell us?”

  Because he’s selfish and cruel.

  But I don’t say that.

  We watch the balloons for a while as they slowly float higher in the sky. They kind of remind me of the figs from our old tree and I tell Birdie.

  “Yeah,” he says. “Kind of like upside-down ones.”

  “You know what? I kind of hated that fig tree.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it hardly ever grew that many figs and it seemed like every year Mama was disappointed and she’d get upset about it.”

  Birdie nods, still looking up.

  I don’t realize I’m crying until I start talking again. “I hated it when she got upset. Because then she’d disappear and it didn’t matter how many times it happened, I always wondered if she’d come out of her room again.”

  “She always came out, though,” says Birdie. “And you always made really good grilled cheese and ramen and bean burritos when she was hiding in her room.”

  “But I didn’t want to do that, Birdie. I wanted her to do that. I always wanted her to not disappear.”

  “I know,” he says. “Me too.”

  The red, green, and blue of the balloons are hardly visible now that the sun is beginning to set.

  “Do you ever wonder,” Birdie whispers, “if she’d still be alive if she never came out of her room after that Wolf Day? If she’d stayed inside and left on a different day, maybe a day there wasn’t black ice on the road?”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Or maybe if we’d never done a Wolf Day, then everything would have been fine, we’d still be home?”

  I hope he isn’t actually looking for an answer. Because I don’t have any.

  “Sometimes I hate Wolf Day,” he says.

  “Don’t say that.”

  “But it’s true. Sometimes I hate it.”

  “I know, Birdie. Me too.”

  * * *

  • • •

  We’d been all over the city on that last Wolf Day. We’d seen a movie and sneaked into a second. We’d been up in the theater projector room with a woman named Reed and then we drove to where they were setting up for a free movie-in-the-park showing that night. Then we were going to go with a caterer to shell a bunch of beans at this organic farm just outside the city and Mama got really excited since it’d always been one of her dreams to live on an organic farm.

  But then the farm owner got weird about having kids come help or maybe it was all the questions Mama was asking and her twitchy enthusiasm that she always had a hard time containing. Either way, the farm owner talked to the caterer and the caterer apologized and said that it would be best if we left.

  I could tell Mama was disappointed. More than disappointed, which made me nervous. It was already the late afternoon, so we decided to head home. But Mama said we shouldn’t drive because it might get in the way of us encountering something new, which was important for Wolf Days. Something new might help make up for the farm disappointment.

  I tried to convince her otherwise because I was pretty sure it was a long walk. Even the caterer tried to tell us not to walk. Birdie was tired because he was still getting over a cold. It might be five or ten miles before we could find a bus, the caterer said. But M
ama shook her head. We left the car at the farm and started on foot.

  But then Mama stopped and turned around. She said, you know what? All I need to do is talk to the farm owner and make it clear we only mean to help, not get in the way. Birdie sniffed and asked about waiting for the wolf. I said maybe we should just go home in the car, but that maybe we could do it by a different route and then the day could still end unexpectedly.

  But I already knew there was no changing her mind.

  So we went back, and the farm owner and the caterer were near the gate discussing Mama’s car. There was some confusion because Mama just walked right past them and into the shed where the beans were being shelled and a bunch of other vegetables were being sorted.

  The owner was starting to get mad and the caterer just stood there like she had no idea what she’d done by inviting us here.

  At some point I was begging Mama for us to just leave. To get in the car and go. But she just kept saying, “We say yes to everything! Even to stubborn beans covered in aphids! We say yes to everything on Wolf Day.”

  I could feel the caterer standing right behind us, stunned.

  “Please, Mama, let’s just go.”

  The caterer and the farm owner looked totally weirded out and had no idea what to do. And then Mama started digging around in a couple other bins, one filled with tomatoes and another filled with some kind of leafy vegetable. The farmer and caterer rushed forward.

  “Please stop,” said the caterer. She turned toward the farmer. “What are we supposed to do? Call the police?”

  “Please don’t,” I said.

  The caterer looked at me. “Honey, I don’t think I can let you go home with her.”

  I looked at Mama again. “Please, Mama. Let’s just go. If we don’t they’re going to call the police.”

  But she ignored us.

  The caterer led Birdie and me around the corner to the front porch of a house.

  “She’s just really, really enthusiastic sometimes,” I said.

  The caterer nodded with sad eyes.

  “Is there anyone you can call? Maybe your dad or a grandma?”

  “She’ll be fine if you just let her help with the beans. Can’t she just help with the beans and then we can go?” I wasn’t crying yet, but I could feel a lump in my throat. I didn’t want her to call the police.

  A loud crash came from the direction of the shed and then we saw Mama storm off to her car. “Jack! Birdie! We’re going! We’ve said yes enough!”

  She got in the car and slammed her door shut and turned on the engine. She stepped on the gas so hard her tires spun on the dirt. “Jack and Birdie, let’s go!” she shouted out the window.

  “I can’t let you drive with her,” the caterer said, holding on to my arm. I don’t know why, but that kind of freaked me out, like I realized that I had no clue who this woman was.

  And that’s when Mama again shouted, “Let’s go!” and then backed the car out. She peeled out of the gate and disappeared down the street, without us.

  The caterer said she’d drive us home, but I called Mrs. Spater, which I didn’t want to do because I knew she hated driving and leaned too far forward and cursed at her car and other drivers, and she never said those words other times. Driving would bring it out of her. But she came and got us anyway.

  By the time we were home, Mama was in her bedroom. Mrs. Spater looked in on her. When Mrs. Spater came out, she said for us to be quiet and let her sleep, as if we didn’t already know that. It’d been a while since it had happened, maybe six months, but we knew what to do when Mama got sad. She once told me that when the world and loneliness became too much she needed to burrow down and that it’s best to just leave her alone. I always imagined that she was going down into a rabbit’s burrow, like Peter Rabbit, which we’d read together.

  Later that night, Mrs. Spater tried to get us to come over to her side of the duplex, but by then, Birdie was sitting in the kitchen cupboard he’d sometimes hide in for fun, except this time he wouldn’t come out, not even for Mrs. Spater’s lemon pound cake.

  So we didn’t have lemon pound cake and we didn’t wait for the wolf and for whatever reason, Mama didn’t come out of her burrow for five days, the longest she’d ever stayed away.

  Afterward, for a few days, she tried to make us breakfast and pack our lunches and do normal things, but she wasn’t the same and I knew something was wrong when she left a wintry Saturday morning to visit an old boyfriend. It was like her mind was still in her room, in the rabbit burrow under her covers.

  The police said there was slippery black ice on the road.

  And that’s why she never came back.

  So in my mind the beginning of the end was that Wolf Day. I could draw a straight line between the two, a long sloping line running down to the end.

  * * *

  • • •

  The sun is almost set, the sky orange and pink, streaked with clouds. We watch as the balloons hover, the people in the baskets probably enjoying the view, maybe even complimentary champagne.

  I take the wooden egg from Birdie, thinking that maybe I’ll throw it over the fence and get rid of it for good.

  But it’s proof that I didn’t imagine all of Mama’s things in the silo shed.

  I shove my hands, along with the egg, deep into my pockets.

  I feel the glow sticks right away. I kept meaning to take them out, but then I got used to them being there.

  I give one to Birdie. He watches as I open the other one, then crack it and shake. It glows neon green. Birdie does the same and his glows orange.

  We sit in the grass and share the Honey Bunny Bun, even though I’m sick of them. We wave the glow sticks as the baskets begin to return to the ground. Birdie throws his into the air and for a moment it looks like a crystal ball as it spins. I toss mine toward him and he catches it and throws his over to me and then we’re flipping them back and forth, waving at the people as they slowly land, the wind beginning to pick up. A couple of the people wave back at us and we twirl our glow sticks at them, two bright spots in the dark.

  * * *

  • • •

  We head back toward the bus stop along the highway and I notice Patrick’s Chevy Silverado on the side of the road right away.

  He leans against the truck and doesn’t move.

  Birdie says to me, “Are we in huge trouble?”

  “Probably.”

  “Should we make a run for it?”

  “Probably. No stopping until we reach Canada, okay?”

  “Except there’s no way I can run in these dumb baggy jeans. Stupid Norman clothes haven’t solved any of our problems.”

  “Yeah, maybe you should tell Patrick about that.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  When we’re about a hundred feet from Patrick’s truck, Birdie shouts, “I’m not wearing these Norman clothes anymore! They’ve made everything worse! Besides, Norman’s all better now, so he can shop for his own clothes! I quit!”

  Patrick shouts back, “Do you want a ride home?”

  “Do we have a choice?” I yell.

  When we reach the truck, Patrick shrugs, but his face and voice are serious. “If you want to ride back on the bus in the cold, be my guest.”

  I don’t answer him and Birdie follows me to the passenger side of the truck. We get in.

  Duke sits in the back part of the cab and pokes his head forward by Birdie’s face. Birdie leans his head against the old dog.

  We drive for a few minutes and Patrick blasts the heater and no one says anything at first.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you guys about the shed,” Patrick says. “I always meant to. But I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to start that conversation.”

  “‘I saved your mama’s stuff’ would have worked,” I tell him. “‘I have secretly h
oarded all of your things’ also would have done the job.” I fold my arms.

  “I know,” says Patrick.

  “I don’t think anyone heard me earlier,” Birdie interrupts, shouting toward the windshield. “I said I’m not wearing these clothes anymore. So I hope my dresser and everything else is in the shed.”

  Patrick re-grips the steering wheel. “I heard you, Birdie.”

  But is he listening? I wonder.

  After a while, Patrick tries again, “Look, this is all new for me too. It’s my job to keep you guys safe. I’m doing the best I can. But . . .” He stops and lets out a sigh. “But maybe I’m no better at this than my idiot brother.”

  “It’s only because Uncle Carl actually likes us and you don’t,” I say. “We’re pretty sure you even like Duke more than you like us.”

  He glances over at me and for once he looks totally shocked. “What are you talking about?”

  “We know you don’t like being around us. And you bring Duke everywhere. You’re around him all the time. You’re only with us for like two hours in the backyard. That’s it.”

  “That’s not true,” Patrick says.

  “Yes, it is.” He doesn’t understand. So there’s no point in saying anything else.

  When we get back to Patrick’s house, he parks the truck but leaves the engine and heater running. All three of us look over at the silo shed. I want to know what is in there. I want to open every box, bag, and drawer.

  But it’s like there are ghosts in the shed. They are friendly ghosts, for the most part, and I do want to meet them. But they are still ghosts and how are we supposed to fit ghosts into this new life?

  “Look, it’s probably hard for you to understand. But I’ve been dealing with my own feelings regarding your mama. We had an argument a very long time ago. She needed my help and instead of supporting her, I pushed her away. She left, never returned, and it was my fault.”

  I want to know what the argument was about, but something tells me that’s not the important question right now.

  “So what are your feelings toward us?” Birdie suddenly asks.