Above Us Only Sky

by Michele Young-Stone

  The Old Man used a cabinet to rise to his feet. He repeated to his sister what I had just said. “Prudence has scars. The doctors removed her wings.”

  I reached back, rubbing my thumb between my shoulder blades, beneath the cotton of my sweater. “I have the scars where my wings used to be.” Inching my sweater and thermal undershirt up my back, I asked her, “Can you see them? The scars?” I didn’t consider it at the time, but thinking back, there was no one in the room who hadn’t been scarred. In that way, I was the same as everyone else.

  I told Daina that the man who’d taken her photograph had also taken mine. “He’s still alive and he lives in Vilnius.” She pressed her fingers to my scars and said, “I remember him. He was in the room when Saint Casimir came.” Her wings opened and closed more quickly. As she took her hand from my back, I pulled my shirt down. She said, “I wanted to live.”

  The kitchen pulsed with steam. She continued, “Our mother brought us here to the sea every summer. She doted on us. Do you remember, Frederick?” In Daina’s Palanga kitchen, the Old Man was just a boy. His sister was playing angel or bird—flapping her wings, momentum building. Steam rising. Her blue shift split horizontally at her shoulder blades and vertically down her back, the sign of the cross, the fabric dropping to the floor. Wrinkled skin sagged from Daina’s triceps and forearms, the curse of age. She reached to feel the fullness of her own glorious wings, turning her head to admire them, knocking over a kitchen chair. She was giddy. In Lithuanian, she told Stasys that everything was changed. She knocked a sugar bowl and fancy cake plate to the floor. At first, it was an accident, but then she used her wings to whack commemorative Soviet Union anniversary plates, gifts from the propaganda offices, off the wall. It was heavenly to hear them shatter. Daina sent copper pots rattling to the floor and toppled a rose vase and pot of coriander from the windowsill to the sink.

  I covered my mouth, my hands fluttering, how Daina’s hands had fluttered to keep her heart from departing. How her sisters had kept silent lest they murder the world with their voices. But this time the fluttering hands were different, because this time no one had to hold anything captive. No one feared for her life. Because this time, the fluttering hands mimicked freedom and flight. They were their own. I stepped forward to feel one of Daina’s wings and as my hand made contact, the wing swelled. There were no feathers. Fully expanded, the wings were soft and malleable like cartilage, like the rays I’d witnessed flopping on the Los Vientos pier, slick like a waterbird’s, but bigger. Daina went to the window and pressed her palms there. The glass was cold. She flapped her wings deliberately, knocking pans and pots, bread and muffin tins, a metallic symphony, a cacophonic reprieve. Aunt Daina turned to face me, her wings silenced, pressed against the glass window. We met in the center of the kitchen, where she wrapped her sinewy arms around me. We were chest to chest. I felt Daina’s sagging breasts against my full ones. Her arms were at my waist. The wings pulsed and flapped and quickened, and is it any wonder after all of this that I am an ornithologist? Bird girl. Girl bird. I felt something in my chest, something bigger than my heart. I felt my own ghostly wings struggling to emerge. I felt Daina’s heart. The two of us were seamless now, each full up and spilling into the other. Then my big feet and Daina’s small feet were off the floor, and Stasys, who apparently never used bad language, did just that, cursing out of surprise before dropping to his knees. Men are always falling to their knees around strange birds like us.

  The window’s frost cast a blue hue, dreamy and musical, Daina’s wings, our wings, flapping, pulling down ancient cobwebs. The old woman and the young woman hovering beneath the ceiling. There was nothing but air beneath my boots. Nothing but air under Daina’s slippers. Frederick sat entranced, a boy before a purging and a world war, a man on the verge of everything.

  We stayed aloft for as long as Stasys could hold his breath.

  The flapping slowed. Our feet touched down. The wings folded in like a Chinese paper fan, the tips touching. I fell in a heap to the floor while Daina pulled her ripped shift from the linoleum and covered her breasts. “To be born a bird,” she spoke in Lithuanian, “doesn’t mean you get off any easier.”

  I understood. Life would be life for anyone who felt different, apart from the pack. Wings or not. Life would be no better and no worse, but perhaps more inspired, but that was up to the individual, not a pair of wings. On my hands and knees, I crossed the floor to my messenger bag, returning to Daina with the gold timepiece. “My dad gave it to me, but I think it belongs to you.”

  “Tėvas,” Daina said, admiring the timepiece, “Father.” She cupped both hands around the watch. In Lithuanian, she said to Frederick, “How?”

  “Father hid it between his bound wrists. He kept it from the Russians.”

  Unlike her, the watch had not aged. Unlike her, all its parts still worked the same. I imagined the Old Man’s father. He used to slide the watch from his waistcoat and flick it open with his thumb. I wondered if this timepiece had foretold how much time was left. I imagined a candle burning, the wax dripping, the wick shorter. Had Petras known how much time they had left? Had anyone known what was coming for them?

  Daina pressed the timepiece to her lips before passing it back to me. “This is not mine. It is rightfully Frederick’s.” On the stovetop, the potatoes had boiled to soup. The dough rose halfway to the ceiling. The steam spread like so many layers of cake throughout the house.

  Daina later told me that she’d glimpsed her mother dancing atop ceramic shards and popping red currants from the countertop into her mouth. Daina had been longing an entire lifetime to see her mother, so it was no wonder Aleksandra had chosen this time to make herself known. Probably the kitchen was crowded with the Vilkas clan, but it was just like Aleksandra to steal the spotlight.

  Palanga, Lithuania, November 1989. Kitchen. This is where I was born.

  PART FIVE

  And when the sun goes down and the mood comes upon me, I’ll watch the play of the colors on the water, yield to the fleetly dissolving images, and turn into pure feeling, all soft and nice . . .

  —Günter Grass, My Century

  27

  Prudence

  My wings are with the birds now. I gave the ghost of them up. I freed them, released them to the sky to traverse the warm Gulf Stream waters with my ancestors; Aleksandra and Aušrinė I know by name, but there are others. All year, waterfowl stop here on the eastern coast of North Carolina on their way south and north. Ducks flock to the white-capped waters, hundreds basking in the light. We tag different breeds and watch the next year to record their return. We want to know if they’re going to grow old. I mourn quietly for those that don’t return. As much as my colleagues love the birds, they do not regard them as kin—as I do, because I was born to it, because I gave the birds my wings to carry. Because when I see the birds, I think of the Old Man’s mother. I picture her spilling from a boxcar and sprouting wings to escape the frozen Siberian landscape.

  It was 1992 when I gave them up for good. I had spent too many years thinking only of myself, focused on my scars, pining for my wings to return. This craving for something I did not possess was a reminder that I had been wronged. It was futile. I would never carry more than the ghost of my wings, my body’s memory that they’d been a part of me. My brain was wired to know them, to mind and protect them, but what for?

  In 1992, I was a sophomore at the University of Florida, auditing advanced biology and ornithology classes. This same year, I went back to Lithuania with the Old Man. It was no longer the Western Province of the Soviet Union. Freedom had evolved from a struggle to an inevitability.

  Dubbed the Singing Revolution, Soviet musical festivals were transformed by one voice and then another. The performers, who’d rehearsed the state anthem of the Soviet Union, sang instead their national hymn. At first, only the performers sang, but then the crowd joined in. Television cameras rolled. The crowd expected the ma
estro would be shot by Soviet officials. Next the performers, and then the crowd. But they were not. The cameras were not behind a curtain, iron or otherwise.

  Our Latvian and Estonian brethren did the same. As a group of nations, we opened our mouths to sing, never again the state anthem of the Soviet Union. Despite the threat of bloodshed, we sang the songs of our ancestors. More cameras rolled. The Soviets in attendance were in disbelief while the world watched us sing. Freedom was palpable. You could reach out and hold it in your hand.

  During our 1992 visit, the Old Man and I recalled that glorious day in 1989 when we were part of the revolution—when everyday men and women stopped in their tracks, raising their eyes and voices to the Lithuanian flag. I think we knew it then: independence was on our heels.

  During our 1992 visit, we made sure to call on Lukas Blasczkiewicz. The Old Man thanked him profusely for helping to find his sister. He relayed that Daina was beautiful and happy. The Old Man gave Lukas American trinkets: plastic replications of the Statue of Liberty, chopsticks, and an I Love New York T-shirt. It made me laugh to imagine Lukas in that T-shirt. The Old Man told Lukas to go see his sister. “Daina will be glad to know you.”

  “In due time,” Lukas Blasczkiewicz said. He told us that he had recently acquired an apprentice, and they were busy with new endeavors, selling flying machines at festivals and parks. He said that we had better take our leave. There was much for him to do. He was never rude, just forthright.

  At Daina’s walk-up, we feasted. My Oma laughed, her chipped tooth like a diamond in the afternoon sun. Stasys was learning English. The Old Man and Daina reminisced. They spoke of their sisters and parents. They spoke without fear. The windows were open. Happiness spilled onto the street below. I remember the Old Man’s joy. Like Lithuanian freedom, I could hold it in my hands. I could feel it in my bones.

  When I returned from Lithuania, I was sitting on the sand, watching pelicans dive-bomb the waves. The sun was low in the sky and I felt a presence, an energy, a breath on my neck. It had the speed and motion of a whisk broom, running swish swish up and down my back. My wings, this birthright that I simultaneously possessed and mourned, as the Old Man had with his homeland, suddenly scattered to the wind. It took half a second. They were gone. Only my scars remained. A flock of grackles, obsidian and iridescent emerald beneath the sun, alighted from the dune. It was October. It had been a full year since Wheaton’s disappearance. Dozens of grackles multiplied into hundreds and then thousands. Too many to count. I got to my feet. Already, I was lighter. The birds blotted out the Indian-summer sun. The sky shimmered black as they sang, a symphony of calls, their own song, a splash of light slipped between two A-shaped tails. John Lennon. Take these broken wings and learn to fly. All my life, I was waiting to be rid of the birth defect that never was. I ran parallel to the surf. Under the balls of my feet, the sand made an inky sound, felt, not heard, and the birds accompanied me. I screamed, my voice swallowed by the grackles. I gave it up: the angst and bitterness. I gave them up. I gave up everything that had weighed me down. I reached for the sky. I was without my wings and only once before, holding on to my aunt in her kitchen filled with steam, had I felt this light.

  Now I have to give up the Old Man. I seem to have no other choice. I keep thinking, You’ll always have the stories. You can share the stories. You can write them down. You can sing them. But I don’t want the Old Man’s stories or songs. I want him. I want to be able to pick up the phone and know that he’ll be there puffing away on his cigar, asking, “What do you want?,” which is his way of saying, “How can I help you?”

  As soon as we exited the elevator on the tenth floor of Saint Gertrude’s Hospital, Veronica felt sick. I went to the Old Man’s room in the intensive care unit, while Veronica went to the bathroom. “I’ll be there in a minute,” she said. I was relieved to be on my own. I had to get myself together. Don’t cry. Don’t fall apart in there.

  The Old Man always said, “It is a blessing to grow old.” Too many people don’t get to grow old. He used to tell me that young people are stupid because they pity the old. They don’t see themselves humpbacked or weak. They can’t imagine themselves bald or with hair coarse like bulgur wheat.

  His door is open. I am here now with my back against the wall. His eyes are open, but I think he’s flown. He stares at nothing, his lips a faint blue—the color of an uncertain sky. It could rain or the sun might peek out. Ingeburg sits on one side of the Old Man’s bed, her collarbone visible beneath a flower-print shirt. She is too thin. Her pie face seems to dangle from her cheekbones like uncooked dough. Freddie sits on the other side of the Old Man. There’s a fly buzzing in a caulked window that wasn’t built to open. If the windows here could be opened, patients might leap to their deaths to avoid the needle pricks and beeping contraptions that accompany sickness.

  The Old Man is attached to some type of machine. A white crustiness is caked in the corner of his mouth—which is hinged open like he’s suffering from lockjaw. I expected to see Ingeburg crying, but it’s Freddie whose tears dot the Old Man’s bedcover. Ingeburg laces a silver cross between the Old Man’s fingers. I press my palms to the wall. The room looks gray. The curtains are pulled back to reveal an equally gray day. From this vantage point, I can imagine the window gone, not open, but gone, this room connected to the dismal sky. We’re in a rolling fog. It reminds me of the wardrobe in C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. This is new territory. If I step forward, I might plummet. I wonder if this is how Ingeburg and Freddie feel too. Sometimes, life is very difficult, like now. The Old Man would tell me that part of living is dying. I’m not as wise as he is. I’m not ready for him to go. The fly is incredibly loud, buzzing over the humming machine that monitors the Old Man’s blood-oxygen level. Veronica arrives, her hand over her mouth. Freddie and Ingeburg see us, and suddenly being seen makes this more real. I can’t hide. There is a knot in my stomach. I press down to the left of my belly button and feel it. Something is seriously wrong with me. I don’t want to cry. Freddie gets up, pulling me to his chest, his lips pressed to my neck, and inhales deeply. “This is hard,” he whispers. I know that it’s hard. My father is soft. He’s too much of an artist. Too sensitive. It’s impossible not to love him. His face is moist on my skin. I’m sweating as he takes my hand and leads me to the Old Man’s side. I can’t stand seeing the Old Man’s mouth hinged open, hearing him struggling to breathe. He blinks, but I can’t see the light in his eyes. His baby blues have lost their luster. “He’s DNR,” Ingeburg informs me. There is an iciness to her German accent. Freddie explains: “Do not resuscitate.”

  “That’s how he wants it,” she adds. It’s obvious that she doesn’t want it to be this way. According to Freddie, when the Old Man was still conscious, they wanted to sedate him and put him on a ventilator, but the Old Man wouldn’t hear of it. Of course not. That’s not how he rolls.

  His hand is gray like the fog around us. My hands look oddly pink, the color of bubble gum, fat against his. I had hoped to see him sitting up, telling me that he is all right, telling me that he doesn’t mind getting off the Ferris wheel, but I don’t think he’s here with us. I hope he isn’t, because of how he’s breathing. Between jerky motions and gasps of breathlessness, there are seconds of peace. Freddie says that the Old Man’s organs are failing. It’s only a matter of time. And then Freddie gives up trying not to cry in front of me. His tears fall in quick succession. I can’t witness my father crying and not succumb to the same. We’re all trying not to cry in front of each other. Freddie’s blue eyes glisten. The pit in my stomach has grown roots, and my abdomen seizes. His blue eyes glisten is five perfect syllables, thumb to pinky.

  If only everything made sense. I have to go to the bathroom. This is worse than I’d anticipated. I’m not good at watching the Old Man die. I’m not good at accepting things I don’t want. I want to tell Freddie, “It’s all right,” but it’s not all right. Veronica has taken Freddie’s h
and in hers. In the bathroom, I pull the heavy door closed and flip the stainless steel lock. I stare at the mirror, blowing my nose, trying to recall the clarity and truths I’ve learned these past sixteen years. First and foremost, the Old Man will always be a part of me. I have my aunt Daina’s eyes, my father’s hair, and by proxy, the Old Man’s thick locks. Stories can last forever if you share them. I can be strong, and I know it. I can do this. I smile at my reflection because none of this seems like enough. I’m angry, and I have to be strong. I can’t fuck this up, but what’s to fuck up? On the other side of this door, a hero is dying. My stomach knots up again. What am I going to do when I can’t call the Old Man for advice? What am I going to do when I am sad or angry, and he’s not a phone call away to tell me that everything is going to be okay? No one can put things in perspective like the Old Man. No one can make everything better like him. Where is Daina? Is Daina coming? I wash my hands, soaping them three times like death is contagious.

  Things feel small now, like there’s nothing left to look forward to. We’re at an impasse in this hospital room. One of us is going away. The most important person in my life is leaving.

  I splash water on my face and breathe deep before returning to the Old Man’s side. His oxygen levels are dropping. It’s a matter of hours or minutes. There’s a nurse with us now. For all I know, she could be Miss America. Everything is whitewashed. The fog is changing into a blizzard. The Old Man’s body convulses. My Oma covers her mouth, her scarred lip and chipped tooth. Veronica starts to cry. I remember the Old Man telling me about his sisters’ hands covering their mouths, how they resembled wings. I remember Daina’s wings expanding in the white steam of the kitchen. I remember Lukas Blasczkiewicz telling us that he saw a white light when he took photographs of Daina’s wings. The hospital walls are plaster. The Old Man’s bedcovers and beard are white. Like milk. Like Wheaton’s crazy gone eyes. Like a saintly light filling a cell. The nurse says, “I think it’s time.” The Old Man’s shoulder and head jerk. We’re crowded around him. With our hands, we try to hold him still. I slip three fingers inside his beard and think for a half second of Wheaton’s curls. Please don’t go. With all of this machinery, the nurse has two fingers on his wrist, feeling for a pulse. My eyes flit from his eyes to the beeping machine to the fly still trapped between plaster and glass. If I’d known that he was actually dying, I would’ve been here sooner. I would’ve said, “Good-bye” when he could still speak. I would’ve said, “Don’t go!”