The Wild Birds

by Emily Strelow

  Dear Sal,

  Both my parents have died. It’s pretty inexplicable, or if there is an explanation I’m not sure I want to know it. Looks like I’m in charge now. Lily says hi, and that she found a new egg for the collection box. She doesn’t know what bird it’s from, so you’ll have to let her know next time you are in town. We already had a service, so don’t worry about trying to come back for it. Hope you are well.

  Yours,

  Alice

  There was a crudely drawn picture of a little speckled egg next to the text, clearly added by five-year-old Lily. The emotionless tone of the postcard made Sal unsure what she should do next. There were mixed signals in the short phrases, a sort of come, don’t come tone. But that was how Alice had been the whole time Sal had known her. Their relationship seemed to her an endless parade of green-and-red flags flashing, the moon hiding behind the clouds just at the moments she saw how beautiful and bright it shone.

  Jump

  Burning Woods, Oregon, 1994

  Lily paced the floor of the kitchen practicing what she would say to her mother when she woke up. She could hear her snoring upstairs. Lily herself had hardly slept that night as she went over and over what she had overheard of her mother and Darla’s conversation, her mother’s drunken crashing of the eclipse rendezvous with Max the night before, and, finally, the questions that still remained to be answered. Her mother’s behavior the night before had brought her to a boiling point. Why, when she looked in the mirror, did she want to start a fight with herself? Why did she faint? Lily needed answers about Original Donnie and she wasn’t going to back down until she got them.

  Alice came down in her gossamer nothing of a nightgown rubbing her eyes and sniffling like she was getting a cold or suffering allergies.

  “Morning, pumpkin,” she said, as though nothing had happened the night before. As though she hadn’t just ruined her daughter’s life.

  “Mom. We need to talk,” Lily said.

  “Let me wake up first, please.” Alice ran water into the teakettle and set it on to boil. “No shop talk before I’ve had my tea.”

  “We need to talk about Donnie. Now.” Lily pulled the chair to the table, the little lions peering out from under the table in the dark as if watching from an arena cage before a gladiator fight.

  “Honey. Let me wake up. I’m all cobwebs this morning.” Alice stared blankly at the flame on the stove as though hypnotized.

  “I would say you’re more spider than cobwebs, Mom.” Lily sat down at the table with her hands flat on the surface. “Black widow. Don’t they eat their young or something?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Alice said, pouring the water over her tea, a little splashing onto her thumb. “Fuck,” she said, putting her burned finger under the faucet.

  “Fifty cents,” Lily said. “Spiderwoman.”

  “Seriously,” Alice yelled over the sound of the faucet. “You are acting insane. And it’s the offspring who eat their mother in the species stegodyphus lineatus, not the other way around. Black widows eat their mates sometimes. Can’t hardly blame them.”

  “I don’t actually care how much you know about spider cannibalism,” Lily said, unblinking. “Okay. So maybe I am insane.” She tapped her fingers on the table as if to accentuate. “What I do want to know about is my father. Then maybe I’ll know if I need to check myself into an asylum.”

  “What is this all about? Is this because Max is gay, honey? You can’t take that personally, love. That’s just who he is.”

  “It’s not about Max. It’s about you.” Lily slammed her hands on the table. “You trying to kill me in utero. You not telling me who my father is. You crashing your way into my personal life with your drunk-ass self every other day.”

  Alice made an exhalation like a leaky balloon.

  “I need you to tell me about Original Donnie. Everything.”

  “There’s really nothing to tell,” Alice said. Her face looked deflated, her eyes clouded.

  “I overheard you talking to Darla about how you tried to drink yourself to an abortion,” Lily said.

  “Honey,” Alice said feebly, shaking her head. “I’m sorry you heard that.”

  “Is that why I faint all the time? Is that why I’m so small?”

  “Honey. No.”

  “Who is Original Donnie?!” Lily screamed.

  “There’s nothing wrong with you,” Alice whispered. “You’re smart and perfect. Confirmed by everyone who’s ever met you.”

  “Aagh! Stop lying to me. Who IS he?”

  “I don’t know,” Alice said, looking down, away from her daughter’s bright pink face and the scary blue veins sticking out of her neck. “I really don’t even know.”

  “But you know more than you’re telling me, obviously.” Lily got up. “And if you won’t tell me what I need to know, then I can’t live here with you anymore.”

  “Wait, hon.” Alice tried to move toward her daughter and grab her arm, but Lily slipped quickly past and grabbed a backpack all ready and propped outside the door on the deck.

  “Come find me when you’re ready to tell me everything,” Lily said, pausing in the kitchen screen door. “I’ll be with Sarah or something.”

  The screen door slammed its thick, mildewed wood frame with a thud as Alice watched Lily retreat across the orchard and toward the expansive back garden that once had been a burn patch, and before that, had been a sanctuary with a beautiful wild ginger growing among the trees. That acre was their own little experimental succession story. Alice felt encased by molasses as she watched Lily grow smaller and smaller in the distance. She was far too slow to chase after her. As Alice watched from the window, Lily disappeared into the same small greenbelt running toward the sea, up the hill and toward the low mountain foothills of the coast range. She walked right into the fold of dark evergreen and Alice could imagine her taking the same old overgrown road that she had when she was her age. From the look of her bulging backpack, though, her daughter was far more prepared for the journey than she had ever been. She sat at the table with her head in her hands for a long time, letting the gravity of what just happened sink in. She picked up the receiver from the yellow wall phone to make a call to the one person she knew could help. It rang for a long time before someone finally picked up.

  “Hi, Boomer. It’s Alice.”

  “Wow. It’s been a loooong time, Alice.”

  “I know, friend. Mea culpa.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Lily ran away.”

  “Like mother like daughter,” Boomer said. “How do you suppose I can help?”

  “Can you just make sure she’s okay? Track her, maybe?” Alice sighed. “She’s heading west. I can pay you somehow.”

  “No need, Alice. I’ll check up on her. Where is she headed?”

  “She’s on the old road.”

  “Well, of course she is.”

  ◆

  Lily was out of breath by the time she reached the lagoon—a bend in the Siuslaw that held deep green, cool, rocky pools for swimming. It was always a good trek to get there from the highway, but the intrepid were rewarded by some of the best swimming holes in the area. The shortest way to get there was the half mile straight uphill from their orchard property, but it remained a closely guarded secret. The morning sun had broken through the fog and Lily was starting to peel off layers as she set her backpack on the small rocky beach. She was warm from the uphill hike, but when she stuck a toe in the water, it was cold as snowmelt. Going in would require a sort of madness, a need to wrest the self from one’s own body for a moment. She was up for it.

  Lily stripped down to nothing and scrambled up a ledge some ten feet above the water. She knew every inch of the pool from years of summer swimming and would aim for the deepest part. As a kid, she loved going in with swimming goggles on. There would be a
brook trout or two cruising the bottom, and some crawdads and caddis flies trying to hide from the trout, which would inevitably find and eat them. There was a whole brutal hierarchy down there below the surface. Her mother told her there used to be salmon that would come up this far to spawn, but no more. Something had changed their course over the years and they no longer made it this far inland. She braced herself and gripped the rock ledge with her toes. Just as she was preparing to jump, her knees bent and Achilles sprung, one of the first butterflies of the season came and landed on her bare naked chest, right on the periphery of the scar left from the spider bite she’d gotten under the porch, just above her heart. She tried to stop, but the jump was already in motion, so she sprang up in the air, the butterfly clinging to her chest as she tried to wave it off wildly before they hit the water where its thin wings would be forever ruined. Save yourself, she thought. But the insect clung to her skin and refused to budge as she flailed her way down toward the water.

  The shock of the icy water knocked her breath away as she plunged into the pool. She shot down into the cold and her toes just touched the pebbled bottom. She frog-kicked her way to the surface and hooted a few times in corporeal response to the cold. She briefly looked around for the butterfly but it was nowhere to be found, not on the surface of the water nor in the air. Did I imagine it? she wondered as she looked under the surface, then swam in brisk strokes toward shore. Back on land, she lay flat on the rocks to maximize sunshine-to-skin ratio. The spring sun felt warm, but not quite warm enough, as her thin skin goose-bumped all over. The scar on her chest, always more sensitive than the rest of her skin, throbbed with pain from the cold. She shimmied in the light and felt herself return to her body slowly, a falling leaf settling through the wind and finally landing on the water. The plunge had not succeeded; the darkness had not fully dislodged from her heart. She hoped her mother was suffering terribly with anxiety. She hoped Alice thought she was dead. She hoped Alice would learn her lesson this time.

  Lily was almost dry as she put her clothes back on, but her underwear clung and rolled up as she tried to pull it up. She hopped on one leg and tried to unroll the now wet tangle to smooth it up over her backside. As she dressed, she suddenly felt as though she were being watched. The feeling was unshakable and she pulled on her shirt quickly without a bra, then her sweatshirt and jeans, in a matter of seconds. She looked around but saw no one. Strange, she thought. I could have sworn there were eyes on me. I should get out of here in case Alice decides to show up.

  She made her way up the creek and onto a trail she had found once as a kid where she thought there might be some early wild fruit. She found a patch of thimbleberries, but they were all still green. There were salmonberries, huckleberries, and blackberries too, green, green, and green. If only she had timed running away to correct gathering season. But, alas, foresight and planning are not the fortes of most teenage runaways. In all the commotion at home, she had failed to eat any breakfast, so she sat on the trail and rifled through her backpack to find a snack. She gnawed on some beef jerky and threw a handful of trail mix in as she walked the trail farther than she had ever dared to go as a kid. She wondered how the trail had gotten there in the first place. It felt as though it must have once been a thoroughfare, like an old mine trail or logging road, long uninhabited and forgotten. The greenery was taller than she was and brushed her shoulders as she edged through the narrowing path. The vine maple grew more dense and arched over the trail, causing her to duck and weave as she stepped her way through. As she scrambled deeper into the dense understory, becoming more and more entangled with each step, she realized that she had no idea where she was headed, but also that she did not intend to go back. There was no map she knew of for this kind of journey, so she would have to draw in the wending lines and layers as she went along.

  The trail continued to narrow until Lily lost a shoe, was grabbed by some vine maple, and tossed down under a dense patch of Oregon Grape. She groped around for her worn sneaker, the prickly leaves scratching at her skin, and found it. It was as she pulled her hand back and examined the thin scratch marks, some just barely filling in with small amounts of blood, that she realized that she would need to recalibrate her compass. The anger she had felt back at the orchard had evaporated off into the cool darkness of the forest understory. She sat down on a fern-lined log, pulled out her maps, and started to trace the river up from her house in order to figure out where she was. Wherever she was, she could feel the buffer of soft green between her anger and her future.

  Within a mile or so margin of error, she made a circle on the map in pencil. There were two creeks and a ridge between them that wound its way fairly well west. She wondered why it was that she was inclined to move that direction, west, toward the ocean. Go west, young woman. Maybe it was because her mother had so often refused to take her to see it, as though there were something out there that haunted her. Lily would beg her mom to go to the beach and Alice always found an excuse or diversionary tactic. Let’s go to Chuck E. Cheese’s instead, her mom would say. Or let’s get some ice cream and watch a movie. Lily’s attraction to seeing the ocean felt suddenly inversely proportionate to her mother’s aversion.

  The map showed patchwork state forest and private land all the way to the Pacific. Something seemed to pull her toward the shoreline, as though that thin line drawn between the ocean and land might deliver the answers she was looking for. The internal compass of the downtrodden does seem to draw them toward water. She put her shoe back on, folded her map carefully, and pointed herself uphill so that she could find the ridge and follow it toward some sort of answer.

  At the top of the ridge, Lily looked out over the slight valleys to either side and saw a small section of highway peeking through the layers of trees to the left. She squinted her eyes in uncertainty, but parked on the side of the road she could swear she saw Max’s old red pickup with the rust stain on the door. She took out her binoculars and confirmed the truck’s identity by the Dead Kennedys sticker on the bumper. What on earth would he be doing parked down here halfway between his house and school? Maybe he was doing an extra-credit project on the microbial stream biome, or raptor migration, or something. She scanned the small strip of road and the adjacent forest for signs of Max but saw nothing. She continued making her way up the ridge toward a spot that looked like it might be some sort of peak from which she could survey the surrounding land. Maybe she could even get a glimpse of the ocean from up there.

  At the top of the ridge, the land flattened out and a trail appeared out of nowhere under her feet. It ran perfectly west and through the thinning trees on the balded crest of the ridge. One large fir had something large and squared off hidden in its branches. She approached the base of the tree to find a rope ladder hanging down.

  “Hello?” she said, looking up the length of the ladder toward the darkness in the branches.

  What appeared to be a platform of some kind lay flat among the branches some twenty feet up. A long black braid was the first thing to show itself, falling earthward through a hole in the board. Then a round face followed and a man with a familiar straight nose with an upside-down triangle on the end said, “Well hello there, Lily. So nice to finally make your acquaintance. Why don’t you come on up? Or would you prefer that I came down?”

  The man looked a lot like Max, she realized, but older.

  “Um. Who are you?” Lily asked.

  “You can call me Boomer. I’m your friend Max’s uncle.”

  He shimmied down the rope and jumped the last couple feet into the dust and pine needles, wiping the dirt off his hands with loud claps.

  “Hope I didn’t scare you,” he said.

  “Likewise,” said Lily.

  “Not much scares me out here. Unless it’s human, I’m pretty much okay with it.”

  “So you’re the infamous Boomer,” she said. “What’s up there, anyway?”

  “It’s a sort of m
akeshift watchtower I built. Real clandestine.”

  “What are you watching out for?”

  “You know. Fires, bears, birds, lost teenage girls.”

  “Ha,” Lily said. “You find many of those?”

  “You’d be surprised, my dear.” His voice singsonged in the same beautiful cadence she always admired in Max. “You would be surprised.”

  Lily set her pack against the tree and climbed the ladder with some difficulty up to the platform, squeezing her body through the hole like a dog through a cat door. Up top, she stood up and could see 360 degrees. It was a clear day and only little puffs of cloud floated in the blue. On all sides, the swaths of evergreens leaned up on one another like a patchwork quilt of green and brown over a sleeping giant. In the far distance, she could just see the ocean glittering. Boomer had followed up behind her and examined the way she lost herself westward, her spirit straining outward for something like a satellite unearthing a coded message from a distant star.

  “You want to talk about it?” he asked.

  “Not really.” Lily snapped herself back inside. “What I’d really like to do is see the ocean. Maybe it’s too much to ask, but would you want to drive me that way?”

  “Not too much to ask at all.” Boomer looked satisfied, like some sort of spiritual bounty hunter with his trophy in hand. He always regretted that all those years ago he hadn’t delivered the peace of an afternoon at the ocean before he’d taken Alice back to her parents’ vicelike ownership. Now he had his chance to make things right.

  The two scrambled back down the ridge using a trail that Lily wished she had known about on the way up. They made it down to the truck in twenty-five minutes flat, whereas it had taken her an hour and a half to climb up through the underbrush. She sat in the familiar passenger’s seat of the truck and tried not to ask about Max. They rode west on the highway and she suddenly felt as though she’d given up on some sort of goal she had never actually defined in the first place. A sense of sadness and self-doubt returned. She wished she had some sort of internal compass that could guide her onto the right path. Instead she was allowing herself to be washed back down the mountain into the flood of humanity.