Hummingbird

by Hummingbird (retail) (epub)

  Where were you?” I demanded, charging out to meet them in my bare feet.

  Meredith hoisted Christine out of her car seat, looking confused. “At the rec centre.”

  “Oh.” I’d forgotten that Christine had a music class every Sunday morning. “Well, did you get my messages?”

  “No, my phone was off.”

  “Daddy!” Christine chirped.

  Meredith swerved around me with Christine in her arms. “Come on, honey. Let’s give you a bum change.”

  I followed them into the house, where Meredith laid Christine on the change table in the nursery. I hovered behind her. “So … you were at Toddler Tunes?”

  “Of course.”

  “How’d it go?”

  “Fine.”

  I peered over Meredith’s shoulder. “Did you have fun at music class, pumpkin?”

  Meredith shot me an annoyed look. “Do you mind?”

  “What?”

  “You’re crowding me.”

  I stepped back and she positioned herself firmly between me and Christine, taking what felt like forever to put on a new diaper.

  “There we go,” she said, picking Christine up. “Come on, let’s get you a snack.” She carried Christine past me into the kitchen and started going through cupboards. “When did you say their flight was coming?” she asked me.

  “Um …”

  “Never mind, here it is.” Meredith pulled a yellow sticky note off the fridge. “Five o’clock. That gives us, what? Four hours?” She handed Christine a teething biscuit and shifted her from one hip to the other, holding her like she never intended to put her down. “They’re bound to be hungry when they get here. We should pick up some snacks. What do they like to eat?”

  “I—I’m not sure,” I stammered, unable to imagine who “they” might be, or why I’d know anything about their dietary habits. Up in Meredith’s arms, Christine had started to squirm. “She wants down,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Christine. She wants down.”

  Meredith reluctantly set her on the floor. “Go play nice in your room, okay?”

  “Kay.” Christine toddled out of the kitchen.

  “Daddy will be there in a minute!” I called after her.

  “Oh, no you won’t,” Meredith said. “I need you to set up the spare room downstairs.”

  I wasn’t sure what I found more troubling, the revelation that someone was actually going to be staying with us, or the tone Meredith was taking with me, as if I were a disobedient child. I had no choice but to pretend it was all perfectly normal. If she knew I’d been missing time again, I would find myself back at the psychiatric unit that very afternoon. I peered into Christine’s room on my way to the basement and found her sitting on the floor, whispering into the ear of a plush doll.

  “What’s the secret?” I asked, smiling at her.

  She jumped and started to cry. Meredith was in the room in an instant. “What happened?”

  “Nothing.” I held up my hands.

  “Daddy scare me!”

  “Honey, I didn’t mean to scare you. I was just saying hello.”

  Meredith gave me an exasperated look and I stormed out of the room, not bothering to defend myself, going downstairs and slamming both baby gates behind me. My phone buzzed. I took it out and looked at it. The dating app was back. “Jesus Christ!” I shouted and dragged it up to the trash with a vicious swipe of the finger. I shut my eyes and took a breath, before continuing on to the spare room. Just as I was about to open the door, it swung open of its own accord and I found myself facing a tall, well-tanned man with a bleached goatee. “Ho! Gave me a jump there! How you going, Felix?” The man chuckled, then looked concerned. “Say, are you all right, mate?”

  Judging from his accent and the open suitcase on the bed, I assumed this could only be my sister’s husband, a man I’d never met. “I’m fine,” I said. “I’m sorry. Is Eileen here?”

  “She’s upstairs with the boys, isn’t she?”

  “Right. I just came down to … check on something.”

  “Oh, all right.” He gave me an affable smile.

  I turned back to the stairs and banged my shin on the open baby gate. “Fuck!” I shouted, aware that Eileen’s husband was watching me. My phone buzzed and I looked at it. Once again, the dating app was back, with another text from Jazz.

  family still there?

  With mounting panic, I swept the app into the garbage and resumed climbing. Upstairs, the blinds were wide open, sunlight flooding the house. Meredith was in the kitchen, wearing the same dress she’d worn on our first date. “Did you find the camera?” she asked, her face shining, as if she’d had a couple of drinks.

  “I … No.”

  “Well, I’ll have a look for it later.” She held out a glass of red wine. “Can you bring this to your sister?”

  Christine’s high-pitched laughter rang out deeper in the house. I took the glass and rounded the corner to find my sister—older and thinner than I remembered her—in an armchair in the TV room. Across from her, two boys in their early teens sat on the couch, flanking Christine, who was standing unsteadily on the middle cushion.

  She rocked forwards.

  “No!” I lunged to catch her, but she made a small correction and plopped down in the taller boy’s lap. I’d spilled Eileen’s wine all over the floor. “Sorry,” I said, battered by all these new faces. “She was about to—”

  Christine took two big moon steps across the couch. “Hey!” I shouted, intercepting her. “The couch is for sitting! Not bouncing!”

  The boys exchanged a wary look. They looked like gangly, pimpled versions of the Kiwi in the basement.

  “Why don’t you do something quiet,” I said, carrying Christine over to a spot on the floor, aware that I was making a spectacle of myself. “Like colouring.”

  Christine arched her back. “Lemme go!”

  “Honey …” I said, desperately.

  “She’s fine,” Eileen assured me. “The boys won’t let her fall.”

  I ignored her, looking for crayons as Christine shrieked and pounded her heels on the hardwood.

  “Everything all right?” Meredith asked, coming out of the kitchen.

  “What does it look like?” I snapped.

  I didn’t care if they were family, I wanted these people out of my house. Eileen cleared her throat. “Do you have any paper towels, Meredith?”

  “I’ll get them,” I muttered, unable to stop Christine from racing back over to the couch.

  I ran into Eileen’s husband again in the kitchen, my once-peaceful sanctuary transformed into a sinister unpredictable funhouse—unpleasant surprises lurking around every corner. He greeted me with a broad smile.

  “I’m getting paper towels,” I said, unnecessarily.

  “Someone have an accident?”

  I opened and closed cupboards, ignoring the roll of paper towels on the counter. Eileen’s husband made a clicking noise in the side of his mouth and went off to join the others in the TV room. When he’d gone, I frowned at one of Christine’s finger paintings on the fridge, trying to remember his name. Peter. His name was Peter. I congratulated myself on remembering that much, although I still had no idea what they were doing there. As I reached for the roll of paper towels, my smartphone vibrated in my pocket, repeatedly this time, as from an incoming call. I took it out and the display showed an unknown number. I stuffed the phone back in my pocket. The moment it stopped vibrating, the landline began to ring.

  I stared at the cordless on the counter.

  “Are you getting that?” Meredith called from the TV room.

  I picked it up and cautiously touched the talk button.

  “Hello?” I said in soft voice.

  No one answered.

  “Hello?” I repeated, a little louder.

  I could hear a television playing on the other end. Someone inhaled, about to speak. I quickly pressed the end button. Out in the living room, Meredith laughed at something
Peter was saying. The landline rang again. I picked up just long enough to hang up on the caller, then left the phone off the hook and tucked the cordless into a drawer. “Who keeps calling?” Meredith asked, as I came out of the kitchen.

  “No one.”

  I stopped in front of the spilled drink. I’d forgotten paper towels. As I went back to collect them, my smartphone vibrated in my pocket. I ignored it and cleaned up the mess, before sitting down in a chair apart from the main group. Meredith and Eileen pulled their chairs together, talking in low voices, as Christine bounced from one boy to the other on the couch. Peter glanced my way, trying to catch my eye.

  “So,” he finally said. “Working on a new book?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “Writer’s block, eh?” he said knowingly. I let the comment pass. My cellphone rumbled against my thigh. Peter leaned back to watch Christine. “She’s adorable,” he said, determined to draw me into conversation. I responded with a noncommittal grunt, almost hoping she’d fall and hurt herself so that everyone in the room would see how right I’d been, but as close as she came to the edge, she never went over.

  By the end of the night, I’d stopped wondering why Eileen and her family had come, focused instead on the problem of making them leave. The phones had finally quit ringing. My anxiety gave way to exhaustion. Meredith brought in pizza and the boys ate an incredible amount, while Peter got steadily drunker—and louder—regaling me with rambling stories from his youth. When he finally swayed off to bed, Meredith took Christine into the nursery, leaving Eileen and me alone in the living room. Like Peter, my sister had been drinking throughout the night, but unlike him, she seemed relatively sober.

  “So,” she said. “How is everything?”

  “Oh … fine.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Why wouldn’t it be?”

  She shrugged and looked down at her glass. “It looks like you’ve got a good thing going here. Meredith seems like a nice person.”

  “She’s a saint,” I said.

  “You’re lucky to have found her.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  She looked at me closely, then sat back and sighed. “So how do you want to do this?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The house. How do you want to do it?”

  “Which house?”

  “Dad’s house.”

  “What about it?”

  Meredith laughed. “Jesus, Felix. We talked about this just a few days ago. Why do you think I’m here?”

  “I …”

  “You agreed that it was time to sell.”

  “Right.” I had no recollection of saying that or anything else to Eileen in the recent past. She set her drink down and leaned towards me.

  “Don’t tell me you’re having second thoughts.”

  “Well …” Now that she mentioned it, giving up the house felt like a terrible idea.

  “The market’s hot right now. We’ll never get a better price.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I get that. It’s just … Doesn’t it still feel like home to you?”

  “No,” she said, without hesitation. “It’s just an old building filled with bad memories. My home’s in Perth, with Peter and the boys. I was never happy in that house, Felix. With Dad moping around and the constant drinking …” She raised her wine glass to acknowledge the irony of the statement. “I’m a pleasant drunk. Dad was a miserable drunk. I don’t think he ever forgave himself for what happened to Mom.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, he felt responsible, didn’t he? Like he should have done something to protect her.”

  “From the cancer?” I asked, confused.

  Eileen sat back and frowned. “You mean he never told you?”

  A low droning noise started up somewhere nearby, as if one of the hummingbirds had found its way into the house.

  Eileen shook her head. “I thought that considering all the problems you’d had, he’d have at least …” She trailed off. “Mom never had cancer, Felix. That was just a story Dad told us as kids.”

  I rubbed at my right ear. “I don’t understand.”

  “She was mentally ill.”

  I waved at the air beside my head, feeling the hummingbird whirring closer.

  “I’m not sure that she ever got a diagnosis,” Eileen continued. “But she had major problems. One day Dad came home from work and found us outside, alone in the snow. Mom was inside, having a bath. It wasn’t the first time something like that happened. She went places in her head. She forgot about us.”

  “Dad told you this.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But if she didn’t have cancer, how did she …”

  “She killed herself.”

  I stared at her and she gave me a tight smile.

  “Sorry. I know it’s a lot to take in.”

  I continued to stare at her, no longer sure who I was talking to.

  She shifted in her chair. “Felix, I have a confession to make. I’m not just here about the house. You know how I told you on the phone that I tracked you down online? Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Meredith contacted me. She’s been concerned about you. I mean, the house had been on my mind, but when Meredith told me what was happening … Anyway, Peter has a friend at Qantas. He was able to get us reasonable fare under the circumstances.”

  I nodded. “Interesting.”

  The hummingbird buzzed in my head, tunneling towards my brain. My vision darkened at the edges. I wondered how long they’d been talking behind my back, what they were planning to do. Eileen was still talking, but I was having trouble hearing her.

  “They’re going to take her away.”

  The words cut through all the noise. A man’s clear voice coming from directly behind me. I jerked around in my seat, finding no one there.

  “What is it?” Eileen asked.

  “Nothing,” I said quickly. “I’m sorry, what were you saying?”

  “That medication can lose its effectiveness over time. It’s possible that you just need to increase the dose a little. I find that with my thyroid meds …”

  My phone, which had fallen silent for the evening, woke up and buzzed in my pocket, not with the usual drawn out rings, but with short, regular pulses, like a drumbeat. My vision continued to narrow. I felt as if I’d been holding my breath for a very long time. I exhaled, letting the air leak from my lungs. Then the room went dark.

  At first, I thought the power had gone out, but the bathroom light was still on, and the chair Eileen had been sitting in a moment before was empty. I looked at my phone. Three in the morning. I got up and headed for the nursery. Christine appeared to be in her crib, but even up close, with the help of her nightlight, I couldn’t be sure that it was actually her. I turned on the overhead light. She didn’t move. Her skin looked waxy, like an eerily realistic doll. I reached down to give her a gentle shake.

  “Pumpkin,” I said. “Wake up.”

  Her eyes opened halfway. A live girl then, but was it really her? Something didn’t feel right. She closed her eyes again and I shook her harder, raising my voice. “Wake up, honey. Can you hear me? Can you wake up for Daddy now?” A thump came from behind me and I whirled to find Meredith in the room in her nightgown. She spoke to me slowly, in what sounded like a foreign language. I shook my head, standing between her and Christine.

  “No,” I said. “You can’t have her.”

  She moved towards the crib and I caught her by the arms and powered her back out of the room. I shoved her to the floor, then slammed the door and locked it. A high-pitched yowl came through the closed door. The knob rattled. I went back to the crib, where Christine had fully woken and was watching me with fear in her eyes.

  “We have to go now,” I said, gently picking her up. “We don’t have much time.”

  Meredith pounded at the door, her voice joined by others—a chorus of screeches and growls. I tried to open the window, but found that it had been painted shut. I swore a
nd looked around for something to break the glass.

  “Felix!”

  The door banged open. Meredith, Eileen, and Peter all burst into the room—Peter in the lead, a switchblade glinting in his hand, my sister clutching a pistol. My phone buzzed against my thigh. “Leave me alone!” I shouted at my leg. Then, to the people in the doorway: “Get back!”

  Eileen lifted the gun to her ear, talking to it in a frantic voice. Peter advanced, showing me his empty palms. I circled the crib, realizing that if I was going to get out of there, I was going to have to go through them. “Okay,” I muttered, hugging Christine to my chest and lowering my centre of gravity. “Daddy’s got you,” I whispered in her ear. “Everything’s going to be all right. Just close your eyes … Here we go.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “How do I know,” I asked Dr. Patel, “that none of it’s real?”

  He shrugged philosophically. The blinds behind his desk were open, presenting a view of a sky so pale it was almost white. “There’s an element of trust here,” he said. “One might even call it faith. What I can tell you is that if we were to put you in an MRI machine, we could see the overactive and underactive parts of your brain. On medication, we could observe a physical change corresponding to the psychological one. But I have a feeling that’s not the answer you’re looking for.”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “What would you rather I’d said?”

  “That it’s possible I’ve seen the future.”