Wingspan

by Karis Walsh

  They crossed the Bogachiel River using a narrow wooden bridge, and then Bailey took a barely visible trail that branched off the one they’d been following. They started to climb, and the rapidly increasing elevation made even Ken feel her breath coming in shorter gasps. She stopped feeling so smug about the time she had spent on the treadmill and the beach because walking up a rough forest trail with a heavy pack was proving to be a more effective form of exercise. She was relieved when Bailey stopped to pick yet more salmonberries so she could lean against a mossy tree trunk and catch her breath.

  “Almost there,” Bailey said cheerily. She held up a big bag of salmonberries, their yellow and coral colors shining jewel-like through the plastic. “We can eat some of these for dessert after lunch.”

  The mention of food was enough to give Ken her second wind, and she pushed forward with more enthusiasm. Forty-five minutes later, Bailey led her off the trail and through some thick bushes. Ken was paying attention to swatting at bugs and pushing the scratchy branches away from her bare legs, and she didn’t realize Bailey had stopped until she bumped into her.

  “Oh,” Ken said, looking around the small clearing and realizing at once why Bailey had wanted her to see this place. A stream meandered through one corner of the meadow and lacy purple, yellow, and white wildflowers dotted the grass. Several trees joined to make a lattice of branches overhead, and the brushy undergrowth was shelter for what sounded like hundreds of twittering birds.

  Ken dropped her backpack to the ground and scrambled to get out her notepad and pencil. After weeks of worrying about her position at Impetus and her ability to design an annex Bailey would appreciate, she felt surprisingly confident about creating flight cages based on this spot. Ken might not trust her own talent or her desire, but she had no trouble agreeing to this task. All she had to do was copy nature. Adjust the dimensions, but keep the general proportions of plants and trees and light. It would be an easy exercise, and the area was stunning enough to inspire even the laziest of muses. “You’re right,” she said, already picturing an octagon-shaped structure in her mind. “This would make a perfect flight cage.”

  Bailey lugged the two packs over to the base of the trees. She watched Ken wander through the clearing, apparently looking for the right viewpoint before she started to draw. “Isn’t it gorgeous? I wish I could have a stream in the cages. It’s a more natural way for them to drink.”

  “I’ll bet Randy could design some sort of self-filtering system. You’d need to have a way to keep the water fresh and clean.”

  Ken sat on a rock and started to draw, and Bailey left her to it. The hike had left her warm and sweaty, so she ducked behind some elderberry bushes and changed into shorts and a tank top. She heard the drone of a hummingbird and the raucous cry of a pileated woodpecker, but she couldn’t see either one. She felt relieved that she hadn’t chickened out at the last minute and refused to leave her clinic. The thought of having Ken recreate this lovely place in her own backyard—for her birds—made the effort of teaching and trusting Dani worthwhile. Bailey hummed quietly as she set up a makeshift kitchen and got a fire going in her small camp stove. By the time Ken finished sketching the area from several different angles, Bailey had their lunch almost ready.

  “Hungry?” she asked when Ken sat down by the stove and set her notepad aside.

  “Starving. It’s been hours since breakfast.”

  “How about some Thai food?”

  Ken sighed as she stretched out her feet. Bailey had switched from jeans to shorts at some point while Ken had been drawing. All her bird chasing had definitely paid off, if her slim but well-defined legs were any indication. Ken needed to concentrate on her own hungry stomach rather than the scanty parts of Bailey’s anatomy still covered by clothing. “Yum. I love Thai food,” she said, impressed by Bailey’s camping skills. A fire and a gourmet meal. All in less than an hour. She watched Bailey pour a packet of ramen noodles into a saucepan of water. She might have to revise her definition of gourmet.

  “Is that ketchup?” she asked when Bailey squeezed the contents of a small white packet into a bowl.

  “No, of course not. It’s hot sauce. And this one is peanut butter.” She added the seasoning packet and the cooked ramen noodles, stirring the whole mess together before she handed it to Ken with a plastic fork.

  “This is not Thai food,” Ken said, sniffing the contents of her bowl before she took a hesitant bite.

  “Noodles in spicy peanut sauce? Sounds Thai to me,” Bailey said. She picked up a forkful of noodles and blew on it before putting it in her mouth.

  “Sounds like dorm room food to me,” Ken said. “But it’s not bad.”

  They ate in silence, except for Bailey’s random interjection of a bird species when one caught her attention. After they finished, Bailey got up to prepare dessert, and Ken noticed the jagged scar on her right shin. She reached out and grazed the whitish skin with her index finger when Bailey came close. Bailey didn’t move away from her touch, so Ken rested her hand over the old wound. The scar was puckered and rough, but the surrounding skin was smooth under Ken’s palm.

  Bailey handed her a bowl filled with chunks of freeze-dried ice cream and salmonberries before she went back to her seat on the far side of the stove.

  “What happened?” Ken asked.

  “When I was five, I found a nestling hawk on the ground in the woods behind our house. I climbed the tree and put it back in its nest, but I fell and fractured my tibia.”

  The story wasn’t unusual. What kid hadn’t fallen out of a tree at some point during childhood? But despite the commonplace event and Bailey’s dispassionate voice while recounting it, Ken felt something more powerful stirring behind the memory. Bailey and her birds. The relationship between Bailey and her obsession was a complex one.

  “Must have been a serious break,” Ken said. She decided to circle around the topic until she got Bailey to talk. Or maybe she should accept Bailey’s abbreviated version and change the subject. Why dig into stories people didn’t want to tell? She and Bailey didn’t need more depth in their temporary relationship.

  “Yeah,” Bailey said. She picked up a cube of ice cream and ate it, licking her fingers. “I remember seeing the bone sticking out of my leg. I was horrified.”

  “Your parents must have been out of their minds with worry,” Ken said. She was staring at Bailey’s tongue as it slid over her fingers, and she almost missed seeing Bailey wince as if Ken’s words were physically painful to hear.

  “Yes. They were upset.”

  “Were you close to them?” Ken pushed harder. Bailey wasn’t good at hiding her emotions on a normal day, and the intensity of her feelings was displayed clearly in the creases on her forehead and along the edges of her frowning mouth.

  Bailey shook her head. “We…none of us were what I’d call close. Have you heard about those experiments where scientists stick a bunch of rats in a small cage, and the rats start to consume each other? My family was like that. They didn’t need the crowds, though. Just put them in the same room, and the fights would start.”

  Bailey put down her dessert bowl and Ken saw it was still half-full of the salmonberries Bailey had been so excited about collecting on their way through the forest.

  “When my parents finally split, the divorce was about as messy as one can get. They fought for custody, each accusing the other of abuse. I was in foster care on and off for a few months, and my parents had supervised visits with me that were little more than ranting sessions about whatever parent wasn’t there.”

  Ken felt her back stiffen with anger. If she’d been a dog, the hair along her spine would be standing on end. How dare any parent treat a child that way, let alone a sensitive and unshielded one like Bailey. “Had they ever…were the allegations true?”

  Bailey held her hand out in a calming gesture. “No. They never paid much attention to me unless they were using me as a weapon against the other. They never hurt me.”

  Physicall
y. Ken knew precisely how much damage emotional abuse and bullying could do. She wanted to get revenge, to lash out, but instead she got up and walked over to Bailey. She sat close, not touching, and waited for the rest of the story.

  “They were divorced with joint custody when I fell out of the tree. I remember lying on the couch, crying because no one would let me go back to the woods so I could check on the baby bird. My parents were in the next room arguing over which one had to take care of me. Mom had a new boyfriend and Dad was busy with work. I didn’t help by being nearly hysterical because of the nestling.”

  Ken laced the fingers of her shaking hand with Bailey’s. “Don’t even consider blaming yourself for any part of what happened. You acted out of compassion. You were just a child.”

  Bailey curled against Ken, resting her head on Ken’s shoulder. Her right hand settled below Ken’s collarbone and she felt the strong, angry beat of Ken’s heart. A grounding friend, the expanse of sky above her. She fought her way back to the present and out of the hurtful and confusing past.

  She felt Ken’s fingers twisting in her ponytail. “Is that the reason you’ve devoted your life to rescuing birds?”

  Bailey shrugged. She had often wondered the same thing. “It’s part of the reason, at least. I think I was born to do what I do. It’s hard sometimes because I rarely know what happens after a release, just like I never found out about the baby bird. You just let go and hope.”

  Bailey pulled out of Ken’s arms and sat up, refastening her mussed ponytail. She cast about for a new subject when all she wanted to do was drape herself against Ken’s side again. Her hand still pulsed with the memory of Ken’s heartbeat, and she wished she hadn’t had the barrier of Ken’s shirt between her hand and Ken’s skin.

  “Will you show me your tattoos?” she asked, bending her knees and hugging them to her chest.

  “How did you know I had any?” Ken asked. She looked vulnerable, as if she had been experiencing the rejection and pain Bailey described.

  “When we were working on the osprey, I could see down your shirt,” she said.

  “You were staring down my shirt,” Ken repeated.

  “Not staring. Only the briefest of glances. Will you show me?”

  Ken hesitated. No wonder Bailey approached strangers with wariness. Her parents, the people she should have trusted without question, had rejected her. Ken couldn’t do the same now, but she wished Bailey had asked for something, anything else. A hug. Sex. Something far less personal than the tattoos.

  She grasped the hem of her T-shirt and pulled it off so she was wearing only a sports bra. No one got this close to her, not even girlfriends. She either kept the room in total darkness or wore a tank top during sex, and Ginny and her predecessors had accepted her insistence on those rules. But the image of Bailey with her leg in a cast, crying over the fate of some bird while her parents fought, broke Ken’s resolve to never share her body in this way.

  Bailey rose onto her knees and traced the outline of the dragon arching from Ken’s rib cage and over her left breast. Bailey’s fingers shifted her bra out of the way, and Ken was shocked to feel desire stirring at Bailey’s touch. She had been aroused by Bailey before, every time there had been physical contact between them and during their kiss—hell, every time she had looked at Bailey, or thought of her—but she hadn’t expected her body to react when her emotions felt so completely bare. She dragged her fingers through the dirt at her side, making deep gouges in the earth and erasing them with her palm, as Bailey’s attention turned to the half eagle, half lion on her belly.

  “What kind of creature is this?” Bailey asked as she circled Ken’s navel with her fingernail, following the curve of the beast’s talons.

  “A griffin.” She shifted on the ground so she had her back to Bailey. “And this one’s a chimera.”

  Even though she couldn’t see it, Ken had every line of the tattoo etched in her mind, and she was able to track Bailey’s tactile but feather-light examination of the mythological creature. When Bailey had reached the end of the serpent’s tail, Ken pulled her T-shirt over her head and turned around again.

  “You have a beautiful body,” Bailey said with a slight catch in her voice. She cleared her throat and looked away. “The artwork is stunning. Is it yours?”

  Ken stared at her hand. It was caked with dirt from digging in the earth, and she rubbed at the marks. “No. Steve, a friend from school, drew them. We both loved mythology, and we created cities together. I’d design the buildings, and he’d draw the gods and creatures that lived in them.”

  “Oh,” Bailey said, her voice barely audible. “He’s very talented.”

  The memory of Steve’s drawings as they wafted through the air to lie scattered on the pavement remained frozen in her mind, like a still photo of a shaken snow globe. “He was.”

  Ken got up and started to shove her drawing materials into the large backpack. Bailey watched her in silence for a moment before she stood.

  “I guess we should start back,” Bailey said as she dismantled the camp stove. “We’ll have plenty of daylight for the hike back to the car.”

  Ken hoisted the heavy pack and buckled the straps around her waist and chest. Bailey had been respectful, not asking more questions about Steve when Ken made it clear she had difficulty talking about him. But as they walked along the path, away from the private sanctuary Bailey had shared with her, Ken felt the burden of her memories more acutely than the weight of her pack. Bailey had seen Steve’s creations. She should know his story, as well.

  She started talking in a quiet voice, unsure if Bailey could even hear her since she didn’t turn around or say a word. Ken kept her gaze on the path directly in front of her feet.

  “I met Dougie and Steve in grade school. I was new, and they were nice to me from the start. I had more in common with them than with most of the girls. We liked science, math, robots, rockets. Dougie was into sci-fi and astronomy, and Steve and I were almost as obsessed with mythology as you are with birds. We were inseparable all through grade school and into junior high. That’s when everything changed.”

  Ken followed her around a large boulder blocking most of the path. Bailey shifted her pack and Ken could see her profile and her downcast eyes. Ken reached out to straighten Bailey’s heavy backpack while Bailey tightened her straps. Once they were on the move again, Ken resumed her story.

  “Hanging out with boys wasn’t a big deal until kids started separating by sex. All of a sudden, I was something strange because of my interests. One year it was fine for me to be interested in dragons and rockets, the next I was treated like an alien because I wasn’t into girly things. Dougie and Steve were targets, too. They were teased because they were friends with the weird girl.”

  Teased. Such a harmless-sounding word. Inadequate. She paused, and Bailey spoke for the first time since they had left the meadow.

  “I get that the other kids changed their minds about what was socially acceptable,” Bailey said. “But what made you change?”

  Ken cringed inside. Bailey had captured her childhood hell in one question. She had scoffed at the other kids at first. Laughed with her friends about the girls who’d troll the malls for clothes and shoes and guys. And the boys who strutted around in their half-man states. Both so weak compared to the strength Ken felt in her mind and in her heart when she was in her own make-believe world.

  “Steve was an amazing artist. I could make outlines of the creatures I saw in my imagination, but he gave them expressions. He made them real.” Ken rubbed a hand over her chest, feeling the prick of the tattoo gun instead of her fingers. “One day, a group of popular kids caught Steve with a notebook full of his pictures. I remember standing there, frozen while they ripped them out, one by one, and threw them around the schoolyard. Steve tried to stop them…”

  Bailey wanted to stop when she heard the tremor in Ken’s voice, to turn around and hold Ken while she talked, but she kept walking, step after step, as the story unfold
ed. Bailey felt as frozen as Ken had been as she listened to the pain in Ken’s voice and was helpless to ease it.

  “They beat him up pretty bad,” Ken continued. She seemed to have control of her voice again. “He was lying on the ground, bleeding and trying to fight back but just too weak to stop them. And I stood there the whole damned time. I couldn’t move. That’s when I realized how stupid our games were. We thought we were so brave and strong, but we were nothing. When it really mattered, I did nothing.”

  She was silent for a long time. Bailey waited for a few minutes before she interrupted the stillness with another question.

  “What happened to him?”

  “They made his life a living hell after that. Waited for him after school, jumped him every chance they got. He made it through a few months, but everything was different. He had always been quiet, but he withdrew completely. He was silent. With me and Dougie, in class, everywhere. He stopped talking, and then…”

  “What?” Bailey asked, her voice barely above a whisper. She couldn’t resist the flicker of hope. Maybe she was wrong about the end of the story…

  “He shot himself. With his uncle’s gun. He must have been planning it for weeks because he left notes for all of us, apologizing for what he’d done. He apologized.”

  Bailey heard the rage and disbelief in Ken’s last statement, and she knew Ken’s anger was directed at herself.

  “What happened to you after he was gone?” Bailey asked the question, but she knew the answer. She might not have all the details, but she knew what Ken had done after the incident. She had closed down, protected herself. Tried to live up to her ideal and protect everyone around her. Bailey wondered if Ken had really been concerned about her car in Poulsbo, like she had originally thought, or if Ken had been trying to protect her from danger.

  “Those kids started doing daily inspections of my book bag and locker. The first time they did, they found drawings of castles Steve and I had designed. After that, I got rid of everything they might use against me. I stopped hanging out with Dougie and the others and started working out instead.” Her voice was dispassionate, as if giving up all her interests and friends meant nothing. “I got strong enough to take care of myself. To stop even the biggest of the bullies the next time he tried to hurt someone who was weak and different.”