Praise for The Hummingbird’s Cage
“A beautiful story of one woman’s reinvention, with a little touch of magic that will warm your heart.”
—Laura Lane McNeal, author of Dollbaby
“Here is a story of a woman’s courage and strength, the power of friendship, and the gift of grace, which magically appears when we need it most. Truly inspired and beautifully written; you will love this novel.”
—Lynne Branard, author of The Art of Arranging Flowers
“Brilliant and beautifully written. Unflinching. Honest. Heartbreaking.”
—Menna van Praag, author of The House at the End of Hope Street
“So much for her veneer as an ink-stained newspaper columnist. Tamara Dietrich’s The Hummingbird’s Cage draws you in with unusual characters, unexpected twists, and a charming small town that gives us all reason to ponder: If you had the opportunity to reset your life, would you take it?”
—Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Paul Giblin
“You don’t just read The Hummingbird’s Cage; you fall into it. Dietrich’s writing is descriptive in a way that fully captures each moment of a character’s journey.”
—Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Mark Mahoney
Published by the Penguin Group
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A Penguin Random House Company
First published by NAL Accent, an imprint of New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC
Copyright © Tamara Dietrich, 2015
Conversation Guide copyright © Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2015
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REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
Dietrich, Tamara.
The Hummingbird’s cage / Tamara Dietrich.
pages cm.
ISBN 978-0-698-18470-1
1. Mother and child—Fiction. 2. Abusive men—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction.
4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3604.I3733H866 2015
813'.6—dc23 2014047187
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Praise
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Part I: Asunder
January 1
January 7
February 15
February 29
March 2
March 6
March 10
March 13
May 18
May 20
May 29
June 3
June 4
Part II: Borne Away
The First Day
The Second Day
Morning
Rain
Sunshine
Vantage Point
Simon
The Café
Good Night Air
Bee in a Thunderstorm
A Still, Small Space
Little Yellow Boots
Let There Be Light
Anatomy Lesson
The Lady from Mississippi
Rain, Rain, Come
Nastas
The Periwinkle House
The Dog That Didn’t Bark
Simon’s Cabin
Tea and Empathy
Night-light
Dinner at Bree’s
Olin’s Kachinas
Red Bird
The Ravenmaster
The Parting Glass
Climbing a Mountain
Back Again
Dark Night
Forgiven
Kindred
Night Chill
Into a Fogbound Moon
Have You Ever Heard of Little Orphan Annie?
Part III: What Is Past, or Passing,or to Come
Rattlesnake
After the Storm
Epilogue
Conversation Guide
About the Author
To every woman with a story of brokenness.
You are stronger than you know.
Acknowledgments
Writing can be a solitary business, but getting a novel ready to pass into the hands of readers never is. Every manuscript needs gentle readers, hawkeyed nitpickers and wizards of the Big Picture.
First, to Mike Holtzclaw and Veronica Chufo for giving the first draft an early read and forgiving its countless rough edges. Novelist Leah Price, whose keen sense of plot helped add depth and drama, and whose ongoing moral support is invaluable. My fellow Pagan River Writers—Diana McFarland, Hugh Lessig, Sabine Hirschauer, Felicia Mason and Dave Macaulay. You help keep the creative torch burning every month with pizza and wine, page reviews and good humor when it’s sorely needed. To jazz diva, writer and sister-from-another-mother M. J. Wilde, who has always believed in magic and miracles and, most important, in friends.
To Trudy Hale at the Porches on the James River and Cathy and Rhet Tignor at Pretty Byrd Cottage on the Eastern Shore. Their retreats were sanctuaries when I needed them—peace and quiet and blissful views from my window.
My literary agent, Barbara Braun, at Barbara Braun Associates, who took on a would-be novelist and steered her toward her lifelong ambition. Editor Jenn Fisher and editorial director Claire Zion at Penguin/NAL, for seeing promise in the manuscript and shepherding it through to publication.
I can’t overlook my sixth-grade teacher at Northeast Elementary. Eons ago, Betty Hinzman was the first to believe in an awkward adolescent who said she wanted to write a book one day. She’ll never know how much that meant.
And last, but never least, to my mother, Betty Phillips. (See, Mom? This is what you can do with a creative writing degree.)
To all, my warmest thanks and gratitude.
Part I
Asunder
It’s difficult to discern the blessing in the midst of brokenness.
—Charles F. Stanley
January 1
My husband tells me I look washed up. Ill favored, he says, like old bathwater circling the drain. If my clothes weren’t there to hold me together, he says, I’d flush all away. He tells me these things and worse as often as he can, till there are times I start to believe him and I can feel my mind start to dissolve into empty air.
There’s no challenging him when he gets like this. No logic will do. No defense. I tried in the past, but no more. Back when I was myself—when I was Joanna, and not the creature I’ve become at Jim’s hands—I would have challenged him. Stood up to him. If there were any speck of that Joanna left now, she would at least tell him he had his similes all wrong. Tha
t I am not like the water, but the stone it crashes against, worried over and over by the waves till there’s nothing left but to yield, worn down to surrendered surfaces. That every time I cry, more of me washes away.
This is all to Jim’s purpose—the unmaking of me. He’s like a potter at his wheel, pounding the wet clay to a malleable lump, then building it back up to a form he thinks he might like. Except there is no form of me that could please his eye. He’s tried so many, you would think that surely one would have won him by now. Soothed the beast.
In the early years, I was pliant enough. I was young and a pure fool. I thought that was love, and one of the compromises of marriage. I didn’t understand then that for Jim the objective is not creation. It’s not building a thing up from nothing into something pleasing. What pleases him most is the moment when he can pound it back again into something unrecognizable.
I understand what’s happening—I do—but it’s all abstraction at this point. I am not stupid. Or, I wasn’t always. In high school I was smart, and pretty enough. I completed nearly two years of college in Albuquerque before I left to run away with Jim, a deputy sheriff from McGill County who swept me off my feet with his uniform and bad-boy grin.
In the beginning, it was a few insults or busted dinner plates if his temper kicked up after a hard day. He would always make it up to me with a box of candy or flowers from the grocery store. The first time he raised a welt, he drove to the store for a bag of ice chips, packed some in a towel and held it gently against my face. And when he looked at me, I believed I could see tenderness in his eyes. Regret. And things would be wonderful for a while, as if he were setting out to win me all over again. I told myself this was what they meant when they said marriage is hard work. I had no evidence otherwise.
A part of me knew better. Knew about the cycle of batterer and battered. And she was right there, sitting on my shoulder, screaming in my ear. Because she knew this wasn’t a cycle at all but a spiral, gyring down to a point of no return.
But I wasn’t listening. Wouldn’t listen. All mounting evidence to the contrary, I believed Jim truly loved me. That I loved him. Sometimes people are that foolish.
I bought books on passive aggression and wondered what I could do to make our life together better because I loved him so. The first time he backhanded me, he wept real tears and swore it would never happen again. I believed that, too, and bought books on anger management.
When I was two months’ pregnant, one of his friends winked at me when we told him the news. After he left, Jim accused me of flirting. He called me a whore and punched me hard in the stomach. It doubled me over and choked the breath out of me till I threw up. Two days later, I started to bleed. By the time Jim finally took me to the clinic—the next county over, where no one knew us—I was hemorrhaging blood and tissue. The doctor glanced at the purple bruise on my abdomen and diagnosed a spontaneous abortion. He scraped what was left of the fetus from my womb and offered to run tests to see whether it had been a boy or a girl, and whether there was some medical reason for the miscarriage.
I told him no. In my heart I knew the baby had been a boy. I’d already picked a name for him. And the reason he had to be purged out of me was standing at my shoulder as I lay on the exam table, silent and watchful and coiled.
That was years ago, before the spiral constricted to a noose. I have a daughter now. Laurel—six years old and beautiful. Eyes like cool green quartz and honey blond hair. Clever and sweet and quick to love. Jim has never laid a hand on her—I’ve prevented that, at least. When his temper starts to kick in, I scoop her up quickly and bundle her off to her room, pop in her earbuds and turn on babbling, happy music. I tell myself as I shut her bedroom door that the panic in her pale face isn’t hers, but my own projection. That it will soon be over. That bruises heal and the scars barely show. That it will be all right. It will be all right. It will be all right.
January 7
Jim has started probation—ninety days for disorderly conduct, unsupervised. Before that, ten days in lockup that were supposed to make an impression. That was the idea, at least. But old habits—they do die hard.
He’s working second shift now, which is not to his liking. Or mine. It throws us together during the day, when Laurel is at school and there’s nothing to distract him. He tells me if the eggs are too runny, the bacon too dry, the coffee too bitter. He watches while I wash the breakfast dishes to make sure they’re properly cleaned and towel dried. Sometimes he criticizes the pace, but if I’m slow it’s because I’m deliberate. Two years ago a wet plate slipped from my hands and broke on the floor. He called me butterfingers and twisted my pinkie till it snapped. It was a clean break, he said, and would heal on its own. It did, but the knuckle is misshapen and won’t bend anymore.
I clean the house exactly the same way every day. I time myself when I vacuum each rug. I clean the dishes in the same order, with glasses and utensils first and heavy pans last. I count every sweep of the sponge mop. I spray polish on the same corners of the kitchen table, in the same order, before I fold a cloth four times and buff the wood to a streakless, lemony shine. It doesn’t mean he won’t find some fault—the rules are fickle—but it lessens the likelihood.
Around two p.m., after he showers and pulls on his freshly laundered uniform, slings his Sam Browne belt around his shoulder and holsters his Glock 22, I brace as he kisses me good-bye on the cheek. When the door shuts behind him and his Expedition backs out of the drive, my muscles finally begin to unknot. Sometimes they twitch as they do. Sometimes I cry.
It wasn’t always like this. In the beginning I was content to be a homemaker, even if I felt like a throwback. And Jim seemed pleased with my efforts, if not always my results. I learned quickly he was a traditionalist—each gender in its place. At the time I thought it was quaint, not fusty. I called him a Neanderthal once, and he laughed. I would never call him that now. Not to his face.
He had his moods, and with experience I could sense them cooking up. First came the distracted look; then he’d pull into himself. His muscles would grow rigid, like rubber bands stretched too tight, his fists clenching and unclenching like claws. I’d rub his shoulders, his neck, his back, and he’d be grateful. He’d pull through to the other side.
But over time the black moods stretched longer and longer, the respites shorter and shorter. Something was rotting him from the inside out, like an infection. The man I’d married seemed to be corroding right in front of me.
I learned not to touch him unless he initiated it. If I so much as brushed against him, even by accident, he’d hiss and pull away as if my flesh burned.
* * *
I met Jim West ten years ago on a grassy field one October morning just as the sun crested the Sandia Mountains east of Albuquerque and shot a bolt of light onto his dark mahogany hair, rimming it with silver. He was tall and powerfully built, with sweeping dark brows, a Roman nose, cheeks ruddy from the cold and the barest stubble. I thought he was beautiful. It was the first day of the annual Balloon Fiesta, and Jim was tugging hard on a half acre of multicolored nylon, laying it out flat on the frosty ground. He was volunteering on a hot-air balloon crew preparing for the Mass Ascension. All around were a hundred other crews, a hundred other bright balloons in various stages of lift, sucking in air, staggering up and up like some great amorphous herd struggling to its feet.
Jim planted himself in the throat of the balloon envelope, spread eagle, arms wide like Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man, holding it open so a massive fan could blow air inside. The balloon streaming behind him was bucking as it inhaled, and Jim trembled and frowned with the cold and the effort. His dark eyes swept the crowd—many of us students from the university—and when they lit on me, they stopped. His frown lifted. He shot me the lopsided grin I hadn’t yet learned to hate, and shouted something I couldn’t make out over the noise of the fans and the gas burners springing to life, belching jets of fire all around us.
I shook my head. “What?”
Jim shouted something else unintelligible. I shook my head once more and pointed to my ears. I shrugged in an exaggerated Oh, well, and Jim nodded. Then he mouthed slowly and distinctly, Don’t . . . go . . . away.
I turned to my friend Terri, who leaned into me with a giggle. “Oh, my God,” she murmured. “He’s gorgeous.”
“Oh, my God,” I groaned back.
A thrill shot from my curling toes to my blushing face, and suddenly I knew how the balloons felt—galvanized by oxygen and fire, bucking skyward despite themselves. It was a mystery to me why such a man would single me out—pretty enough, I guess, but hardly the type to stop a guy in his tracks. Of the two of us, it was Terri, the saucy, leggy blonde with the air of confidence, the guys would go for.
For a half hour or so, Jim toiled away, helping tie down the parachute vent, spotting the man at the propane burner as it spat flames inside the envelope, heating the air till ever so slowly the balloon swelled and ascended, pulling hard at the wicker basket still roped to the earth.
When the basket was unloosed and it lifted off at last, all eyes followed it as it climbed the atmosphere. Or so I thought. I glanced over at Jim and his eyes were fastened on me, strangely solemn. He strode over. “Let’s go,” he said, and held out his hand.
Gorgeous or not, he was a stranger. In an instant, the voice of my mother—jaded by divorce and decades of bad choices—flooded my head. Warnings about the wickedness of men . . . how they love you and leave you bitter and broken. But daughters seldom use their own mothers as object lessons, do they? This man who took my breath away was holding out his hand to me. Without a word, I took it.
I believed in love at first sight then.
I believed in fate.
February 15
Yesterday, Laurel asked about Tinkerbell again. Jim was there, and looked over at me curiously. I turned toward the stove to hide my face. I clenched my teeth to keep them from chattering. I pulled in a ragged breath and said as lightly as I could:
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