by Melissa Hart
Love, Dad
I crumpled up the note and hurled it at Darth Vader. “I am alone,” I muttered.
Slowly, I shuffled out to the kitchen where my mother still sat with her head in her hands. I poured us bowls of the weird organic cornflakes she’d bought and splashed in some milk. Then we sat there, not eating. The cereal turned to paste.
“He’ll come back,” I told her. “He said so in his note.”
She nodded, not looking at me.
“I’m going to go clean my room,” I said. I had to get away from her. If she hadn’t nagged Dad about his writing, he might be lying on the couch right now listening to NPR instead of doing whatever he was doing, wherever he was doing it.
I picked up One Man’s Owl and forced myself to read. The author’s wife got so sick of the bird that she left them both forever. Did anyone stay married?
I closed my eyes and contemplated the glowing red inside my eyelids. My mind circled like a vulture around one deadly question.
What if Dad doesn’t come back?
•
I slept late Sunday morning and jumped out of bed to scan the driveway. But the VW wasn’t there, and my parents’ bedroom stood empty. My father hadn’t come back.
I heard water running in the bathroom.
“Mom?” I pressed my ear against the closed door. “Everything okay?”
My mother’s voice sounded faint, exhausted. “I’m fine, Solo. I’m taking a bath.”
“Wanna hike up Spencer’s Butte? We could take a picnic …”
The door opened. Mom stood in her robe, scowling below her white towel turban. “Don’t you have community service today?”
My jaw dropped. “It’s … it’s Sunday.”
“Oh. Well, can you go find something to do?”
It’s strange how pain works. You can be so scared and sad that it’s like you’ve been gashed open. But then a scab grows over the wound, and later, a scar that makes you even tougher.
Like a robot, I turned away from Mom and walked into the kitchen. I toasted a bagel, buttered it, and wrapped it in foil. Then I jumped on my bike, ignoring the empty parking space by the trailer, and pedaled away.
•
Minerva was loading a large pet carrier into the back of her car as I walked my bike up the steep hill to the center. She didn’t seem surprised to see me on a Sunday. “One of our red-tails is sick,” she said. “I’m off to the vet. Greet visitors, will you? Give them a map of the center and take their admission fee.”
“You sure you want me to handle money?”
Minerva climbed into the car. “I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t sure.”
“Okay.” I watched her station wagon disappear down the hill.
Lucas walked out to find me standing on the lawn. “You okay, kid? You look dazed.”
I stood up straight. “I’m fine. It’s hot.”
“How’s the bike working out? Hey, long as you’re here, can you help me with the injured great horned in the treatment room?”
“No way! That owl could rip my face off.”
Lucas shook his head. “He’s not an imprint like Artemis. I need you to hold off a vein after I get a blood sample. Leah can hold the owl while I bandage its wing.”
“Leah?”
“New volunteer.”
“Sounds like you two have it covered.”
Sergeant Bird Nerd’s eyebrow lowered with disgust. “Geez, Solo. Don’t you want to help rehabilitate the birds? You could really make a difference here if you’d stop thinking about yourself for two seconds.”
He turned and stalked into the office.
I stared after him. My throat stung. I stumbled toward the screen door and opened my mouth to tell him off.
Lucas, you can take this community service gig and …
But a girl stood in the clinic. She spoke quietly to Hermes in his little mew, then reached into a dish and offered the owl a wriggling mealworm in her delicate fingers.
“Solo, meet Leah. Leah, Solo.” Lucas bent over a clipboard, scribbling.
The girl—Leah—walked over to shake my hand. “Nice to meet you, Solo.”
“You, too.”
In an instant, I saw how the scene would look on film.
FADE IN
INTERIOR. CLINIC - DAY.
LEAH, about twenty, wears overall shorts and red high-top sneakers. Sapphire eyes. A silver hoop gleams in one nostril. She has a hat pulled over black hair twisted up in a bun—it’s an LA Dodgers cap.
SOLO
Are you from California?
LEAH
Santa Barbara. How’d you know?
SOLO points to her hat. Leah laughs.
LEAH (CONT’D)
I forgot about that. Are you from LA?
SOLO
Redondo Beach.
Leah breaks into a sunny smile.
LEAH
No kidding? My parents live …
LUCAS
Are you two gonna stand around gossiping, or can I get some help with this owl?
Lucas glared at us through the screen door separating the treatment room from the clinic. “Grab some gloves, both of you.”
Leah smiled. “Oh good, Solo. You’re gonna help, too?”
“Uh … yeah.”
I followed her into the treatment room with its sheet-covered carriers full of recuperating birds. Lucas pulled on heavy yellow gloves, then reached into a carrier and gripped the injured great horned’s feathered ankles. He pulled him out with one quick, decisive movement. “Tuck in the wings and hold the owl against your chest, like this.” The big brown and black bird squirmed in his arms, its yellow eyes wide. The white patch at its throat fluttered.
Leah pulled on gloves. “You want me to … um … take him from you?”
“He won’t bite.”
The owl hissed and clacked his beak. I thought I recognized fear gleaming in Leah’s eyes. But she reached for the owl’s legs, tucked in his wings, and cradled his body against her chest.
I hovered near the door, ready to run. But the owl didn’t fight. He just sat there, pressed up against Leah.
Lucas stretched out the injured wing, unwrapped the pink bandage, and bent down to check the wound.
“What happened to him?” Leah whispered.
“Electrocuted.”
According to Minerva, electrocuted birds were usually doomed. They looked good for a few days until the flesh around the wound began to die along with the bird. But this owl had been at the center for months, trying to heal from a wound that wouldn’t kill him but wouldn’t heal enough for him to go back to the wild.
“He’s gonna be fine,” Lucas said.
That’s when I caught Leah smiling at Lucas. It was the kind of smile I used to see my mom give my dad, like she’d handed him a whole sand dollar. But Sergeant Bird Nerd only had eyes for the owl.
“Here, Solo.” He handed me a square of cotton, then stuck a needle into the owl’s wing and sucked blood into a syringe. My stomach lurched. “When I say now, press the pad down where the needle went in, against the bone. Firmly.”
He’d asked me to help my enemy. Those talons that could murder a kitten without warning jutted inches from my face. Confusion gripped me.
“Now! ” Lucas said.
Leah met my eyes over the bird’s head. “Now,” she said.
I bent and pressed down the cotton pad. My heart banged against my chest.
“What’s that noise?” Leah whispered.
Lucas nodded at the owl. “His heartbeat. He’s terrified.”
She gulped. “That makes two of us.”
Lucas turned to me. “Birds bleed a lot, so you’ve gotta apply pressure for a while to allow the artery to clot.”
I pressed down more firmly on the pad.
“You can move closer,” Leah said. “I won’t bite, either.”
The owl lay in her arms, blinking up at us. With one gloved finger, Leah stroked his chest feathers, just once. “If he recovers, will he live here
?”
Lucas studied the owl, then shook his head. “Nope. We’ll release him at the coast. Two kids found him near the coast there. That’s his territory.”
“He picked a good one.” Leah turned back to me. “Don’t you love Oregon, Solo? My parents want me to move back to California after I get my environmental science degree, but I told them no way.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just breathed in the sharp smell of alcohol Lucas had rubbed on the owl’s wing. The bird shifted and clacked his beak. Leah’s hands tightened, and the tip of her tongue stuck out between her teeth. The expression reminded me of Eric. Eric reminded me of the trailer, which reminded me of my father and how he’d vanished. What if by the time I biked back that afternoon my mother was gone, too?
•
Leah and I cleaned the down off of all the mews and debated which was better—California or Oregon.
“In California, you can surf,” I reminded her over by Artemis’s mew.
She raised one dark eyebrow. “You can surf in Oregon, too. You just need a full wet suit.”
I shrugged. “It’s not the same.”
“Yeah, here, the beach isn’t full of towels and coolers and radios and people.”
“Wouldn’t know,” I mumbled. “Never seen it.”
“We’ll have to get you over there.”
“Water.” Lucas walked up and tapped my chest with his index finger. “Don’t get dehydrated. Leah, you want to learn how to give Artemis a shower?”
She beamed. “Absolutely.”
He picked up a hose near his feet, turned it on to a low spray, and handed it to her. “Don’t get too close to her mew….”
Leah stood back and aimed the water through the wire. We heard rustling behind the blue tarp, and then the owl flew in a rush of wings to her perch. Drops gleamed on her feathers like diamonds. “She’s so beautiful,” Leah breathed.
I snorted. “She’s mean.”
A moth fluttered by. Instantly, Artemis’s pupils filled her round eyes. Her feature tufts shot up. I stepped backward, knowing she couldn’t fly through the mew’s wire sides, but I was scared just the same. Lucas calmly retied his blond ponytail. “You know, kid, it’s not really her fault. She’s a human imprint. People made her the way she is; they failed her.”
Failure. In my mind, I saw again the piece of paper wedged into my father’s typewriter. I’d crumpled it into my trash can, but the word imprinted on my brain. Had I failed my father?
And if I had, would he ever come back to me?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
NOT A RETARD
Most families look pretty normal from the outside. Anyone looking at mine would see a father who works from home writing a book, a mother who does yoga and jogs while she looks for a new teaching job, and a kid who rides his bike all over town and helps to rehabilitate raptors.
But put my family under a magnifying glass and you’d see a really sad man who left his family and vanished, a mother gone silent and mean with worry, and a kid scared of owls. A kid who—every time he thought of his father—felt scared to death of death.
What would I see if I looked closer at Leah’s family, at Lucas’s, at Eric’s?
Eric came to find me Saturday morning, a week after Dad took off. I sat in my room, staring out at the driveway, like if I just gazed at the potholed gravel long enough I could make the VW appear. I didn’t see Eric until he tapped me on the shoulder.
“Don’t surprise me like that!” I yelped.
His hair had a greenish tinge. He stood there in his bug T-shirt and denim shorts, grinning. “I dye it with Jeh-wo.”
“What?”
“I dye my hair with Jeh-wo.” His tongue danced in his mouth, trying to make me understand.
“Oh, Jell-O.” I touched the ends of my hair. It was longer than I’d ever worn it, almost ponytail-length.
“I dye yours,” Eric said. “Please, Solo?”
I turned away from the window. Dad said he’d come back. But he hadn’t called, hadn’t even written. Was he even alive?
“Okay. Let’s go.” I marched Eric past my mother’s closed door and left without writing a note. Let Mom wonder if I’d run away, too.
In Mrs. Miller’s kitchen, Eric poured hot water mixed with Jell-O powder into my hair. “Whoa! You purple, Solo.”
I ran into his bathroom. My hair wasn’t bright purple like the grapes on the Jell-O box, but just a little darker, sinister-looking.
“Why’d you dye your hair, Eric?” I scrubbed sticky streaks off my neck with one of his mom’s washcloths.
Eric’s thick fingers twisted his hair into spikes. “I be cool.”
I couldn’t help laughing. Eric would never be cool. His emotions lay right out there for everyone to see, like the bugs under his magnifying glass. Seriously uncool.
But I nodded at him just the same. “Your hair looks awesome, dude.”
“What’s going on here?” Mr. Miller loomed suddenly in the doorway, rasping his heavy, asthmatic breath. I hadn’t seen him since the day he told the judge to throw me in jail. “Community service is too good for this kid!” he’d yelled.
I shrank behind the bathroom door and stared down at my purple-splotched feet.
“Solo and me have fun,” Eric said. “See, Dad? I have green hair!”
Mr. Miller’s eyes slid over him and shot bullets at me. He turned and stalked out the front door.
“Come on!” Eric ran out of the bathroom. We knelt on the couch and peered out the open window at his parents. They stood in the garden on opposite sides of Mrs. Miller’s deer fence and glared at each other. Through the open window, we could hear every word they were saying.
“Why is that boy in my house?” Mr. Miller clenched his fists. His black three-piece suit and trench coat looked out of place surrounded by Mrs. Miller’s corn and daisies and cheerful red tomatoes.
“He’s Eric’s friend!” Mrs. Miller whipped off her cowboy hat and shook it in his face. “Anyhow, what d’you care? You’re never home.”
“Someone’s got to put food on the table.”
“And someone’s gotta make sure our son gets a chance at a normal life!”
“Normal? ” Mr. Miller spat the word. “Our son will never be normal. He’s a freak!”
I gripped Eric’s arm. But he just sat there, staring through his magnifying glass. Did he not hear what his father had just said?
I looked back toward the window in time to see Mrs. Miller turn her back and Mr. Miller raise his fist. Slowly, she swiveled her head and looked at him over one shoulder.
She reminded me of this barn owl we had recently in the center’s treatment room. The bird had been hit by a car, then mauled by a dog. It was so injured that Lucas could tube feed it without gloves and it didn’t even try to shred his hand.
Mrs. Miller looked just like the owl—ready and waiting for more pain.
But Mr. Miller lowered his fist and stalked to his long black car.
“Goin’ on another overnight business trip?” Mrs. Miller pulled her hat low over her eyes. Even from the living room, I saw tears shining on her cheeks as the car sped off. My throat stung.
“Solo? You hurt my arm.” Eric pulled out of my grasp and rubbed the white marks I’d left on his sunburn. Then, matter-of-factly, he said, “My father hate me.”
“He doesn’t hate you,” I said.
But I knew how he felt. Mine had left me, too.
“Hey, got any new bugs?” I jumped off the couch and headed for the stairs.
“I … I have a new spider….”
“So show it to me!”
He followed me slowly up the stairs. We sat studying the spider’s hairy legs through his magnifying glass when Mrs. Miller walked in. Her hands were muddy, and she had a big streak of dirt across one cheek, but her voice came out light, carefree.
“Wanna go downtown, partners? You can hang out in the arcade while I shop.”
The arcade. I hadn’t played video games since I’d
sold mine at the yard sale.
“Cool!” Eric slapped me five.
I slapped him ten just to make him laugh. “I better call my mom, first,” I said, picking up the phone’s receiver.
I dialed the phone and listened to it ring. What if Dad picked up? I pictured how I’d drop the phone and sprint home on the dirt path through the forest—saw myself give him a huge hug and ask him go hiking up Spencer Butte. Then he’d see that there was no reason to drive away again.
“Hello?” Mom said into the phone, too quickly, so that I knew she’d been hoping for my father’s voice instead of mine.
Words trembled on my tongue. “I’m … I’m going to the arcade with Eric.”
“That’s fine,” she sighed. “Have fun.”
“Call Mrs. Miller’s cell phone if Dad comes home,” I said super casual, like he’d just gone out for a gallon of milk. “Okay?”
“Okay….” Mom echoed.
I hung up the phone.
On the way to the arcade, Mrs. Miller kept acting normal, like she wasn’t married to the Lord of the Dark Side. But if you looked real close, you could see mascara smudged under her eye like a bruise. “How’s your daddy?” she asked me.
My shoulders twitched. “Fine. He’s … uh … he’s off on a business trip for a couple days.”
“Really? Where to?”
“Um … I’m not sure.”
I looked out the window at the homeless people sitting near the fountain decorated with a school of metal salmon. Had he gone to join them? Or was he holed up in that expensive hotel right on the river, ordering room service and watching osprey go fishing in the river?
Wherever he went, why didn’t he take me with him?
Mrs. Miller pulled the truck into the parking lot for the Down to Earth store and climbed out. “I’ve gotta find something to stop the deer, the slugs, and the cats from picnicking in my garden. Otherwise, we won’t have corn on the cob for Eric’s birthday next month. To which”—she kissed my head—“you are invited.”
Eric clapped his hands. “I be fifteen!”
I resisted the urge to rub saliva out of my hair and took the stack of quarters Mrs. Miller handed me. “Thanks.”