Hummingbird

by Hummingbird (retail) (epub)

  “Did you just . .?”

  A terrible clarity came over me. “I thought that you wanted …”

  She looked more confused than angry, our bodies still locked together, our faces inches apart.

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t.”

  I lay there for a moment, wanting to reel back the last thirty seconds of my life.

  Meredith put her hands on my chest. “Excuse me. I need to …”

  Then she was gone: in the bathroom, with the shower running. I pulled on a pair of sweatpants and waited for her to come back, which she eventually did, wearing a fluffy bathrobe and looking more closed off than I’d ever seen her.

  “Mer,” I began, intending to explain that there had been no premeditation on my part, that it had happened in the heat of the moment, that I didn’t even want kids, but she was looking around the room, frowning slightly, as if trying to remember where she’d put her keys. When her eyes finally settled on me, her expression didn’t change.

  “I think,” she said. “I need to be alone.”

  I nodded, letting her know that I found her request perfectly reasonable. “Okay. I’ll make a bed on the couch.”

  “No, I mean alone in the house.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “I’ll call you a cab,” she said. “You should get dressed.” She left the room with that same distracted look, like a person confronted by some unpleasant fact that they’ve always denied, but secretly feared to be true.

  It took three days for Meredith to find me at the Super 8. A knock came at the door and I looked out the spyhole to find her standing in the hallway with a pizza box. I opened the door and her anxious features smoothed out.

  “Hey,” she said. “Have you had supper yet?”

  We ate together in silence, her in a cheap office chair, me on the edge of the bed. On the muted television, a satellite image of a hurricane swirled towards a fragile archipelago. “I’m sorry I sent you away,” she said when we’d finished eating. “I thought you’d get in touch.”

  “I didn’t know if you’d want me to.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” she said, deliberately, the way a parent speaks to a child they’ve made the mistake of expecting too much from. “I should have been more careful. I should have asked you to use protection.”

  “Because I can’t be trusted,” I said, my eyes going from the hurricane to the half-empty pizza box on the bed.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But it’s true. You don’t know the kinds of crazy things I’ve—”

  “Of course I do,” she said with a laugh. “Do you think I’d have invited just any patient home without digging into their history? All those terrible things you thought you did … None of them happened.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “But they could have.”

  She laughed again and shook her head in exasperation. “Are you still on your meds?”

  “Yes,” I said, truthfully.

  “Good. That’s good, Felix.”

  After talking it over, we agreed to give the relationship another try, but a subtle shift had occurred in our three days apart, a polite distance settling between us. We still slept in the same bed, but neither one of us seemed to have any interest in sex. We treated each other with studied kindness, the way one treats a dying loved one. On my birthday, she gave me a new laptop. The extravagance of the gift took me off guard, and I thanked her in a hollow voice, thinking I had no use for it; I hadn’t written a thing since I’d gotten out of the hospital. When she was at work, I connected the machine to the internet and browsed the local classifieds for affordable one-bedroom apartments, not knowing just how or when the end would come, but sensing the moment drawing near.

  Then, three days before Easter Sunday, the miracle occurred. Meredith came out of the bathroom, holding a little pink wand with a blue cross on its face.

  “No,” I said.

  She nodded, looking dazed.

  “Could it be a mistake?”

  She held up a second wand, with a second blue cross.

  “Maybe they’re defective,” I said.

  “They’re not defective.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “Felix, I’m a nurse.”

  I sat down on the couch and lowered my face to my hands.

  “What do you want to do?” Meredith asked after a moment.

  “Me?” I looked up at her. “Isn’t it supposed to be your decision?”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about, Felix. I’m having the baby. What I’m asking is … do you want to be a part of this?”

  Pain stabbed at my right temple. “I can’t,” I moaned, shaking my head. “I just can’t.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right. I understand.”

  “I never meant for—”

  “I know.”

  I looked up at her uncomplicated face; the way she was standing with her shoulders defiantly square, taking it all on herself.

  “I think …” I said slowly, wanting to be sure of the words this time, “that I love you, Mer.”

  She smiled sadly. “I’m not sure that helps us.”

  “What would help us?”

  She thought for a moment. “In the bathroom,” she said, “looking at the results, I started to cry.” She raised her hands when I began to apologize. “I wasn’t upset. I was happy. I’m not a young woman, you know, and I’ve always wanted children. I think I must have been waiting for something like this to happen. I suppose that’s why I was so careless. You’re a good person, Felix, whether you realize it or not, and you could make a good father. But you’d have to want it.” She paused to emphasize the point. “You’d have to really want it. And if you don’t, well …”

  The pain in my head had begun to subside. “I don’t know what I want,” I admitted. “To be honest, I don’t even know if this is really happening. I mean, how can I even be sure this is real?”

  Still holding the positive test, Meredith gave me a weak smile. “I was just asking myself that same question.”

  The room was fittingly womblike—dark and quiet, the technician moving one hand over a glowing console, the other over Meredith, who lay on the examination table, her stomach glistening with jelly under the ultrasound probe. From the angle of my chair, I had a good view of everything that was happening: pale ghosts swirling on the technician’s screen, as if she were communing with souls in different realm.

  “There’s the heart,” she said, tilting her screen so we could both see the tiny fluttering organ. Meredith gave me a broad smile and I tried to smile back as the technician applied more jelly to her abdomen and shifted the probe around. “There’s an arm. A hand. The spine.” A camera was integrated with the machine and I could hear her printing occasional pictures of what we were seeing. She came to the head and worked to get a decent angle. In profile, the skull looked malformed and much too large, but the technician didn’t seem concerned. She fidgeted with the probe and a distinct face appeared.

  “Hi there,” Meredith said softly.

  Horror crawled up my neck. It was obvious to me that there was something wrong with the baby, the seeds of my sickness germinating inside its tiny skull.

  “So,” the technician said, “would you like to know the gender?”

  Meredith laughed. “Well, I would. But my …” She hesitated at the designation. “Felix,” she said, “would rather not.”

  “Well, that’s fine,” the technician said. “He can step outside for a minute if he’d like.”

  “Would you mind?” Meredith asked me.

  “Um … sure.”

  I slunk from the room, sensing that both Meredith and the technician were glad to have me go. Out in the hall, I sat on a folding chair, fidgeting, as people in lab coats walked briskly past. Eventually, Meredith came back out, carrying a strip of captured stills from the ultrasound, not unlike the ones you get from a photo booth at the mall.

  I s
tood up. “What happened? I thought she was going to come back and get me.”

  “There wasn’t much left to do. Do you want to see the photos?”

  “Later. I need to get out of here.”

  “Okay.” She took my hand and led me down the hall and back out to the waiting room, past a half-dozen pregnant women accompanied by capable, confident-looking partners. The receptionist gave me an approving look, as if I were the one supporting Meredith. I followed her through the windy parking lot to the car. She got behind the wheel and I sat on the passenger side, my head against the window.

  She squeezed my leg. “Thanks. I know that was hard for you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, dismayed by her low expectations, my venturing into public for more than a few minutes being something remarkable.

  “Don’t be silly. You did fine. Here.” She handed me the photos and I held them up to the light, noting the fetus’s likeness to an alien being, with its massively out of proportion head and tiny limbs.

  “Mer? Do you think it looks …”

  “What?” she asked, pulling out of the parking lot.

  “Well … normal?”

  “For a four-month-old fetus? Yes. It looks pretty normal.”

  I tilted the photos one way then the other. “Are you sure?”

  “Try not to worry, okay? Everything’s fine.”

  “She told you the gender?”

  “She did indeed.” Meredith gave me a secretive smile. “I still don’t understand why you don’t want to know.”

  I put the pictures in the glove box and looked out the window at a cyclist weaving through traffic. We’d come downtown to get to the clinic and I realized that we were just now passing the coffee shop where I’d first seen Jasmine.

  “Turn right up here,” I said, sitting up straighter.

  “Why?”

  “I want to see something.”

  Meredith turned onto Willow Avenue, and I scanned the street for Jasmine as we closed in on my old apartment (my only apartment; I still thought of the high-rise unit as belonging to Zoe). I directed Meredith to the parking lot behind the building and she pulled into one of the visitors’ spots. “You lived here?” she guessed. I nodded. “Which unit?”

  “There.” I pointed to my old balcony. The sliding door was shut, the curtains drawn. It seemed inconceivable that anyone else could be living there. I felt myself hovering just out of sight, looking down at me in the idling car. I had an impulse to go up and hammer on the door, to force my way inside and make sure that I was really gone. I glanced over at the pale man’s building, but his windows were empty.

  “Okay?” Meredith asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, somewhat reluctantly, but as she began to pull out of the parking lot, I shouted, “Stop!” so sharply that she slammed on the brakes and sent us lurching into our seatbelts.

  “What is it?” she said, looking for pedestrians.

  I stared at the neighbour’s front yard. The oak tree that I’d climbed over in my vision of the storm (the one that had fallen across the road) was gone; not torn up by the roots, but cut, low to the ground, leaving a stump behind as wide as a kitchen table.

  “Felix?”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Keep driving.”

  Back at the house, I immediately went to the bedroom to lie down. When I came out, Meredith was putting dinner on. The ultrasound pictures had found their way onto the fridge.

  “Better?” she asked, and I nodded, averting my eyes from the pictures, certain the fetus—a shrunken and disfigured version of myself—had been aware of me the whole time Meredith was being scanned: glowering at the inner walls of its prison as I crouched in my chair across the room, trying to stifle my dread.

  “Give me your hand,” Meredith said. I gave my hand over and she placed it on her swollen abdomen. The skin felt taut and warm. At seven months, Meredith was already having trouble walking. It didn’t seem possible that her body could accommodate two more months of growth. We were sitting on the sofa, a new season of Survivor playing. My eyes stayed on the television.

  “There,” she said after a minute, “did you feel that?”

  “No.”

  “Just wait a minute.”

  I stifled a yawn.

  “How about that?” she asked.

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  Something solid shoved me with surprising force and I jerked my hand back.

  “Whoa!” Meredith laughed. “That was a big one.”

  I pictured the fetus glaring at me. “I don’t think it likes me.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “Who’s being silly? That was a very clear message. Go away.”

  “Give me your hand again.”

  “That’s okay. I don’t want to bother it.”

  “You’re not bothering anyone. She likes you.”

  I stared at Meredith.

  “What?” she said. Then, realizing her mistake: “Oh. Crap.”

  “It’s a girl?”

  “That’s what they tell me. Is that a problem?”

  “No, not at all. I’m just … surprised.” For months I’d been picturing a decidedly male creature with oversized genitals and a smashed-in boxer’s face.

  Meredith chuckled. “I’m sorry. It’s a miracle I didn’t let it slip sooner. You don’t know how hard it’s been. Trying to remember to call her “it” all the time.”

  “They were positive?”

  “Well, it’s never a hundred percent, but they seemed pretty sure. Especially after the last ultrasound … Here, she’s moving again. Are you sure you don’t want to feel?”

  I tentatively returned my hand to her stomach. This time when the push came it felt gentler, more curious than angry. I kept my hand still, registering small flutters and nudges. Meredith watched me with a smile.

  “Talk to her,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Say something.”

  “You think she can hear me?”

  “Of course she can hear you. She has ears. Go ahead. Say something.”

  I lowered my mouth to Meredith’s stomach and hesitated.

  “I don’t know. It feels weird.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m talking to your stomach.”

  “No, you’re talking through my stomach. Think of it as a wall. You felt her for yourself just now. She’s there, on the other side of the wall, listening.”

  I kept my hand on Meredith’s stomach, feeling a series of little taps and jerks. I cleared my throat and put my mouth close to Meredith’s navel. “Hello?”

  The flutters seemed to stop.

  “I think she heard you,” Meredith said. I inhaled shakily. “So … You should probably know that your father is mentally ill.”

  Meredith swatted me. “Stop it. Say something nice.”

  “Like what?”

  “That’s up to you.”

  I thought for a minute, then lowered my mouth again.

  “I promise never to hurt you,” I said. “I promise to protect you. To keep you safe.” I said it seriously, like I was taking a binding oath. The baby remained still. I looked up at Meredith. “Was that okay?”

  She put her hand on my head, smiling softly. “Yeah, that was good.”

  That night when I shut my eyes, the terrible goblin fetus that had been haunting my dreams for months had been replaced by a miniature version of Jasmine, suspended in a pinkly glowing ball. Her thick red hair undulated in amniotic fluid, a faint ironic smile lifting the corners of her mouth. She reached for me and I took her hand, surprised by the strength of her grip. Once she’d taken hold of me, I couldn’t break free, no matter how hard I tugged, and the glowing ball was expanding, absorbing me, my vision going pink as my lungs filled with water.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I didn’t know what time it was. Nor could I bring myself to care. Voices swirled in my head, none of them remotely coherent. Snatches of old popular songs. Lines from movies. A commercial jingle. I shuffled fr
om bedroom to hallway to kitchen, breakfast so habitual that it seemed to make itself: peanut butter on toast, the coffee pot rattling. A flock of geese passed high over the house. The trees might have grown, but none of the houses out the window had changed since I was a boy. Distracted by the birds, I burned my mouth on the steaming coffee. I slammed my mug down and burned my hand. An inward tremor, a backwards tug of the mind, and the sky filled with herons, a small girl in my arms, looking up, her face brimming with wonder. I battered the memory away with my fists and the tremor subsided. The geese had passed out of sight. The house was quiet, the telephone long since disconnected, an empty space in the living room where Dad’s old television had once sat. Books lay everywhere, on counters, tables and shelves, many of them propped open at a spot where I’d stopped reading. I left my spilled coffee on the counter, and moved from book to book, reading a page here, a sentence there. Then I found myself on the battered concrete porch in my coat and shoes. The word “mailbox” went through my head. I felt in my pocket for the mail key. It was a windy day and I pulled my collar up before climbing down the stoop. Pain flared in my right knee with every step. A very specific combination of sensory details sent me tumbling back through all the autumns I’d lived in that house: the reds and yellows of the maples, woodsmoke from a chimney, the mild ache of cold air in my lungs. I walked down the rocky path to the front gate with the sticky latch, not at all surprised to see Dad—long dead—on his knees in the front yard, banging pickets onto the fence’s frame. The top of his head was pink. He reached into a bucket of nails and a single nail fell to the grass—a nail that would lie there for years, accumulating rust, until it pierced my bare foot, leading to a round of painful tetanus shots. I kicked at the gate and stepped out onto the sidewalk. A hard gust shook the trees and leaves swirled around me. The wind intensified—an atomic wind stripping the land clean, leaving nothing but devastated prairie. Then, as abruptly as it had vanished, the world rebuilt itself: smoke and tepees, wagons and ramshackle cabins; cobblestones, telegraph lines, automobiles, pavement, telephone poles, streetlights. One change led to another, bringing me back to the street as I knew it.