Hummingbird

by Hummingbird (retail) (epub)

  “And what was your husband’s name again?”

  “Michael.” She set down her cup. “You know, I should really give him a call and let him know that—”

  “Stop it,” I said, abruptly.

  “Excuse me?”

  “This whole charade. You can stop now.”

  “I don’t know what you’re—”

  “Why are you acting so nervous?”

  “Is that a serious question?” She gave an incredulous laugh. “You show up without warning after all this time. You tell me you’re unmedicated. You start asking about Christine’s friends …”

  I didn’t believe her for a moment. At first I’d thought she was trying to protect me, but her insistence on pretending that nothing had happened to Christine had begun to feel malicious. “Let me see her room.”

  “What?”

  “Her room. I want to see it. What did you do with her things? Did you keep them? Or give them away?”

  “Felix—”

  “I’m not stupid, Meredith. I know what happened. I know that Christine is gone.”

  “Gone?” Meredith’s face softened. “Oh, Felix. What have you been thinking all this time?”

  “Stop lying!” I shouted, and at that precise moment, the front door swung open. A chubby girl in a pink bomber jacket and neon toque stepped into the house. Her eyes went between me and Meredith, a silent question in her eyes.

  Meredith went pale. “Honey. You’re back.”

  “I forgot my phone.”

  “Your phone?”

  “Yeah. Have you seen it?”

  “I don’t … I think it might be in your room.”

  “Okay.”

  The girl slouched over to her room, staring straight ahead. Her hair was short and some of her features had become more prominent, but it was unmistakably Christine. My baby, resurrected and moving casually (if suspiciously) through the room, close enough to touch. I couldn’t tell if she knew who I was. She must have seen photographs, but I’d grown out my hair and beard since leaving, and it might have been enough of a disguise.

  “Well,” Meredith said, once Christine had closed her door. “I think we were just about finished here, weren’t we?”

  I heard the warning in her voice and understood what she wanted me to do. I might have found Christine again, but I would not be allowed to keep her. She had adapted to life without me. She had friends. She had sleepovers. She had a mom and a stepdad who loved her. They’d carried her this far. They’d kept her safe. I looked at Christine’s door, briefly tempted to barge in and reveal myself, but the impulse passed and Meredith must have seen it go, because her face relaxed and she stood up, regarding me with genuine warmth.

  “It was good to see you again,” she said.

  I followed her to the door, where she pressed my hand in gratitude—the first physical contact I’d had in nearly a decade. Muscle and bone. The blood coursing through her veins. I marked that moment, savouring it, promising myself I would return to it often, then turned and made my way down the icy porch. Meredith shut the door behind me. I fished out my new phone. An autocab responded to my pickup request with an estimated arrival time of ten minutes and asked if I wanted to be tracked through the GPS on my phone. I said that I did, and started walking, trusting that they would find me wherever I happened to go.

  On the night Christine was born, I sat by Meredith’s side, wondering if I was saying the right things, holding her hand the right way, if the nurses approved or disapproved of my performance. The younger of the two was gorgeous, commanding my helpless gaze whenever she crossed in front of the bed. “Oh!” Meredith said, wincing as another contraction gripped her in its teeth. Teeth, I thought, was the accurate metaphor. She looked like she was being devoured. “Okay,” she moaned, reasonably. Then, “Stop-stop-stop-stop-stop,” in a strained voice, whether to me or to the creature fighting its way out of her body I couldn’t tell.

  Her grip on my hand loosened as the contraction passed.

  “Good!” the older nurse said in a bright voice, the way a teacher congratulates a student on solving a not-too-difficult math problem. “Wonderful!”

  Meredith shut her eyes. I looked at the clock on the wall, my stomach burning with a sudden powerful desire to shit. Her hand spasmed around mine and her eyes snapped open. “No,” she said. “Not yet. Oh god—”

  The contraction came and went, the old nurse making encouraging noises, while the young one did something with the monitoring equipment, her uniform hugging her generous curves. In a fleeting moment of calmness, Meredith squeezed my hand and smiled at me weakly, gratefully. I tried to smile back, my bowels cramping.

  “Do you have any idea how much longer this is going to be?” I asked the old nurse, who ignored me. I lowered my voice to Meredith. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  She lay with her eyes closed, in some other place.

  “Mer …”

  “Just go,” the old nurse snapped. The young one looked at me blankly, as if at an empty chair. I slunk over to the room’s private bathroom and sat down on the toilet, lowering my head to my hands. It was four in the morning. We’d been at the hospital for nearly sixteen hours. All I wanted to do was sleep. The bathroom fan hummed, drowning out any noise from the adjoining room. I let the shit come, then sat for a while, my eyes shut. The next thing I knew, someone was knocking at the door. “Just a minute!” I yelled, quickly finishing up, before coming out of the bathroom. The scene had changed dramatically in my absence. A doctor had come into the room and was teasing something bloody and awful from between Meredith’s legs. For a moment I thought it was the baby, then I noticed Meredith holding something a little more human to her breast—a red, cheesy-looking thing in a pink knit cap. From the clock on the wall, I saw that I’d been gone for more than an hour.

  Conscious of the sewer-like smell wafting out from the bathroom behind me, I shut the door and edged over to the bed, past the doctor holding what I assumed to be Meredith’s placenta. Meredith looked up at me with a smile.

  “She’s here,” she said hoarsely.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “About what?”

  “I missed everything.”

  Meredith reached for my hand and gave it a pat. “It’s all right.”

  “I don’t know what happened.”

  “It’s fine.”

  The baby gazed steadily at Meredith as she fed. If I’d have left the room at that moment, she would have never known who I was, what I looked like, what it felt like to be held by me. What it meant to lose me. The doctor had carted the placenta off somewhere and the nurses were tidying up the mess between Meredith’s legs.

  “You should hold her,” Meredith said.

  My eyes filled with tears. I didn’t want her. I didn’t deserve her. I worried that by touching her, I would ruin her, infect her with my sickness. But looking at her ancient little face, and her big dark eyes, I felt the first hooks of tenderness lodge into my heart. I was lost. Meredith handed me the swaddled heap as the old nurse watched on with a stern eye, and the young nurse turned down the lights. The baby regarded me solemnly. I slipped a protective hand behind her head as I’d been shown, and she fussed for a moment, then settled as I began to rock her with a motion that came from some primal place. Meredith watched us with a fond smile. Even the old nurse seemed pleased.

  Standing at the hotel window twelve years later, I’d fallen into that same comforting rhythm. Another wave of heavy snow had begun to fall, obscuring my view of the street. I pictured my replacement arriving home from his business trip, Meredith looking over with relief as his key slid into the lock, Christine coming out of her room to ask, Is Dad home?

  Light exploded in my eyes. I fell back and felt the solid support of a forearm rise to meet me. My mother’s smiling face swung into view. She lowered me to her breast, humming softly, her face suffused with tenderness. I fed without reservation, without shame, struggling to hold her there in front of me, but my eyes were growing
heavy with the gentle rocking of her body, and before I knew what was happening, I’d fallen asleep.

  My flight home was delayed on account of the snow. With a few minutes to spare, I wandered the length of the terminal, ending up in the gift shop, where I came to their small collection of children’s books, surprised to see the latest installment in the Penelope series prominently featured. I picked it up with a mixture of pride and embarrassment. The cover depicted Penelope riding the back of her friend and protector, Swell, a large, hummingbird-like creature, through a wormhole into the future, her eyes bright with exaggerated joy. She looked nothing like Christine. I put the book down and quickly left the store.

  It was getting late. By the time I found my gate, the other passengers had boarded. An unsmiling host directed me down a short hallway to the waiting aircraft, and I followed my ticket to a window seat near the back of the plane. There was hardly anyone on board, my entire row empty. A flight attendant in a pantsuit glided down the aisle, her long red hair in a bun, her face in shadow. She passed into business class and a heavy curtain fell shut behind her. The cabin lights dimmed. Dread spiked through me as I heard them lock the door up front, but the feeling quickly passed, as if a light sedative had been introduced into the ventilation system. Outside, a marshaller in a toque and reflective vest made what looked like the sign of the cross, directing us over to a row of yellow trucks that stood waiting, like pallbearers on the edge of a snowy field. One detached from the group, lifting an operator in an enclosed basket to the level of my window. Nozzles stroked the wing, swabbing it, as one swabs a vein prior to an injection. The operator met my eye and looked away.

  Once the wings had been de-iced, the yellow truck retreated to a respectful distance, and the plane began to taxi again, guided by a single track of lights that stretched out as far as I could see. Finally, we came to a stop, and there was a drawn-out moment of stillness. I felt like I should lower my head and pray. The engine noise swelled to a deafening pitch. Then we were moving again, with purpose, rapidly picking up speed, the clouds rushing towards us in a dark flood. I gripped my armrests, waiting for the moment when the wheels left the ground, but it happened in one seamless breath. The plane rose quickly, as if untethered from the world, the city briefly rendered in miniature beneath us until we passed, shuddering through the clouds. The upper element was jarringly serene. From above, the clouds appeared solid, as if we might land on them. A band of pink flared at the western horizon, signalling the arrival of dusk. I took out my smartphone and stared at its blank face for a moment, the battery dead. The red-haired flight attendant failed to reappear. I put my phone away and looked up and down the aisle, unable to see any of my fellow passengers.

  A soft chime sounded as the captain activated the intercom, allowing a prolonged hissing silence to gather. I had the sense of being judged, the whole of my life held up on a little strip of tape. Out the window, a single bird skimmed the roof of the clouds. The stars began to reveal themselves. Still the captain did not speak. The silence went on and on—a maddening, baffling blankness onto which I could have projected any number of feelings: boredom, amusement, pity, disgust.

  Even love.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank the Saskatchewan Arts board for their support with this project. Thank you to everyone at Freehand Books, and especially Deborah Willis for thinking of me. Thanks to Sarah Feldman for her early work on the manuscript, and to Rosemary Nixon for her incisive line editing. Thank you to Grandma K. for her babysitting services and to Pearl Z. for her generosity. Finally, thank you to my children and my wife Rebecca, without whom I would be lost.

  Devin Krukoff’s previous novels, Compensation and Flyways, were shortlisted for multiple Saskatchewan Book Awards. He is a past winner of the M&S Journey Prize for short fiction. He lives in Regina, Saskatchewan, with his family.