He stood in front of them, the elephant ear tipping this way and that.
“But consider the following,” Pierre went on. “What if the map of the world as we know it is missing a few countries?”
He gestured with his non-elephant-ear hand in the direction of the sea.
“Surely it is possible,” he said. “How could one ever know all the countries there are in the world? The hugeness of the sea, the tininess of our eyes.”
He turned back and looked at Pablo and Birdy, his gaze solemn. “Which brings me to my theory, which is that you came from a country not yet discovered by outsiders, whose people sent you and the bird as emissaries. Emissaries from the forgotten world.”
So enthralled was Pierre with his story that he inadvertently clasped his hands together, sending the elephant ear flying to the floor.
“Mon dieu!” said Pierre.
He picked up the elephant ear, gave it a quick inspection, looked sadly at the spot on the floor where it had landed, and then took a bite.
“As I was saying,” he said through the crumbs, “it is my firm belief that you are both emissaries from a world as yet unknown. Undiscovered. A world where miracles can still happen, as evidenced by the fact that you came floating up to our shore on that hallowed day.”
Pierre’s story was a good one. An undiscovered country, one unknown to the rest of the world? Maybe the inhabitants there lived in tree houses, or underground.
“Pierre’s theory is a bit different from mine,” said Lula. “I believe that our Pablo’s appearance in Isla is the result of his precocity.”
Pierre looked at her with narrowed eyes. Pablo suspected that he was trying to cover up the fact that he, like Pablo, didn’t know what the word “precocity” meant.
“Consider the facts,” she said, ticking them off on her fingers. “We have a baby. We have a bird. We have a small swimming pool meant for backyard use, certainly not on the open ocean.”
Everyone nodded, including the sous-chef from the Parrot Café, who was hurrying by with his take-out coffee and not even part of the conversation. Even Peaches and Sugar Baby, who had hustled over to the scene of the elephant-ear mishap and were pecking at some crumbs, looked up and cocked their heads.
“Hmm,” said Mr. Chuckles, but everyone ignored him.
“Now consider the following scenario,” said Lula, holding up her hand for emphasis. “A party. Perhaps a Feliz Navidad party. Old people, young people, middle-aged people, dogs and cats, music, everyone milling about. Babies laughing. Or screaming.”
She grimaced. Lula wasn’t a fan of babies. The very idea of babies exhausted her. Some people were like that.
“And in the middle of the party, at the height of the merriment, just as the gifts were about to be distributed, one baby crawled away,” said Lula. “One precocious baby.”
Pierre frowned again, possibly because he, like Pablo, didn’t know the meaning of “precocious” any more than he knew the meaning of “precocity.”
“That one very special baby,” continued Lula, “had other things in mind. What was a Navidad party to that baby? Nada. No, no, he had a master plan for the day. A master plan”—here she looked from one to another—“that involved a little swimming pool in the backyard of the home where the party was being held.”
Everyone was nodding now, picturing the little swimming pool.
“The precocious baby looked around, saw that everyone else was focused on the festivities, and seized his chance. Out the back door he snuck, grabbed the swimming pool between his gums, and crawled his way straight to the beach, where he set sail. And the rest,” Lula added, “is history.”
Birdy was staring at Lula as if she had left out something essential. Which, of course, she had.
“What about the bird?” asked Pierre.
“The bird?” said Lula. “Oh yes, the bird. The bird, let’s see, the bird . . . decided to come along for the ride.”
She brushed her hands together in a that’s it sort of way. Birdy raised her wing, but Pablo quickly scooped her up before she could give Lula a swat. Lula’s story, even if she had nearly forgotten to include Birdy, was a good one too. The only problem was that no one knew if either story were true.
Lula turned to Emmanuel with an expectant look.
“Your turn,” she said, and she settled back in her chair. Emmanuel’s stories were usually the best, because they were the most far-fetched. Take the pirate baby story from last year, for example. The idea of a pirate baby crawling around on the deck of a pirate ship could even make Pablo smile. But Emmanuel just glanced at Pablo, a troubled look in his eyes, and shook his head.
“No story?” Pierre said, disappointed. “But yours are the best.”
“Not today,” said Emmanuel. “Not today.”
EIGHTEEN
THAT NIGHT, PABLO had one of his ocean dreams. Ocean dreams came each year around his non-birthday. Each of them began with Pablo rocking on the waves, flat on his back, looking up at the sky above. Birdy’s talons blocked his view, and he reached up to push them aside, but she wouldn’t budge. Baby Pablo, unbudging Birdy. Ocean waves gentle below them both, rocking them like a giant watery rocking chair.
They didn’t end that way, though.
In one dream, the waves grew bigger and bigger and bigger, until finally they splashed over the edge of the swimming pool and it began to sink. Pablo always woke up just as he was going under.
That was a terrible dream.
In another, the sky turned darker and darker and darker. Pablo could see nothing, nothing at all—not even Birdy—until the moon rose high enough to shine soft light down on them both. In this dream, he and Birdy rocked their way through the night.
That was a good dream.
In another one, the waves were big and swift underneath the tiny swimming pool. Too big, too swift. Baby Pablo rose and fell, rose and fell, and Birdy’s talons shifted. It was hard for her to hold on. There were voices in the background, shouting and panicked. Then they faded.
Another bad dream. This one went on and on, one of those strange dreams that Pablo, even though he was asleep, knew he was having. That happened sometimes, with his ocean dreams, and he had never been able to wake himself up from them. Tonight was different, though. Tonight, a voice woke him up.
“Pablo. Pobrecito Pablo.”
It was the same voice! The woman’s voice that he had heard before. Pablo sat up in his hammock.
“Birdy? Did you hear that?”
But again, she was sound asleep, her head tucked into her feathers. Had the voice just been part of the ocean dream? Pablo lay awake, wondering and listening, for a long time. When the sky began to grow light, he pedaled down to the shore with Birdy in the basket. It was early enough that no one would be around to talk to him or possibly ask about his birthday. The members of the Committee were still roosting. There hadn’t even been a single crow from Rhody. Maybe, in his ongoing attempt to turn himself into a parrot, he was forcing himself not to crow.
“Here’s the thing, Birdy,” Pablo said when they reached the beach. “I don’t want to hear any more made-up stories about you and me and how we got here.”
Birdy fluttered down from Pablo’s arm and stood on the sand at his feet, lifting her wings so the breeze could ruffle her feathers. A piece of driftwood tumbled about in the lapping waves, and she cocked her head as if it were a fish that needed to be watched.
“Remember when Maria asked me if I had plans for my birthday and I told her I was going to do something brave? I don’t know why I said that.”
He thought about the little dog. Even if he was a pastry thief, the little dog was a brave pastry thief. Look at the way he had practically flown over Mr. Chuckles and Peaches in his desperate attempt to make off with the elephant ears.
“I mean, what could I do that’s brave?” Pablo said.
He felt for his necklace and closed his fingers around it. Birdy was listening, as always.
“Every one of the
ir stories makes me sound brave. Pirate baby, precocious baby, messenger from another world. But none of those stories are true.”
Pablo himself had a few theories about how he ended up on the ocean.
Theory #1. Maybe his original parents, whoever they had been, had taken him to the beach and put him in the little swimming pool to keep him safe. Sort of like a little playpen. But then they had fallen asleep, in the hot sun, and no one had noticed when the tide came up and carried the baby in the tiny swimming pool out to sea.
Theory #2. Maybe, when his parents had fallen asleep one day, he had woken up from his nap and crawled right out of the house and down to the ocean, where he had found an abandoned tiny swimming pool, gotten into it, and paddled out to sea.
Theory #3. Maybe Pablo had been a difficult baby, one of those babies who screamed all the time and never stopped, their red faces always squinched up and bellowing. The kind of baby that drove Lula insane. There were lots of babies like that. Pablo had seen them in the store, squalling in their strollers, their parents exhausted and at their wits’ end. Maybe he had been one of those babies. Maybe his parents just hadn’t been able to take it anymore, so they had pushed him out to sea in a tiny swimming pool and waved good-bye.
Pablo didn’t like this theory. Or any of them, really. But sometimes he couldn’t help wondering where he had come from and how he’d gotten here, at this time of year especially, when the ocean dreams descended. Or when he woke up in the middle of the night and everything was quiet and still except for Birdy, dreaming in her sleep, perched there on the old Cuba suitcase and sighing. Was there another theory, one he hadn’t figured out yet?
“Come on, Birdy-bird,” he said. “Let’s go see Maria.”
Maria was a scientist. She believed in facts. And she knew how to keep a confidence. The clinic wasn’t officially open yet, but when Maria saw who it was, she unlocked the door and let them into the empty waiting room. This was her open door policy, which applied only to Pablo and Birdy. He got right to the point.
“Maria, is it really true that sound doesn’t ever disappear? Every sound ever made is still out there?”
“Not really. Sounds last longer than we can hear them, but even loud sounds eventually disappear.”
“And human ears can only hear sounds when they happen?”
“Unless you count hearing them in your head, in memory,” Maria said. “Which I don’t. Human memory does not represent scientific proof, and my nature is that of a scientist.”
“Well, is there any way to sharpen our ears?” said Pablo. “So that we could hear sounds from the past?”
“Not that I know of. Why?”
“Well,” he began, “I’ve heard this voice. Twice now. In the middle of the night. But I can’t figure out if I’m hearing it for real or if it’s just a dream.”
“What does the voice say?”
“My name. Pablo. Actually, pobrecito Pablo.”
Maria looked at him thoughtfully. She reached out and brushed his hair out of his eyes, the way that Emmanuel did. The gesture loosened Pablo’s tongue.
“I don’t want any more fake stories,” he said. He was on the verge of tears, which embarrassed him, but he kept going. “I want my real story, the whole story. I only know the part that begins here, when we came floating in on the waves.”
“I don’t blame you. I would wonder too, if I were you.”
“Everyone makes those stories up,” said Pablo. “They act as though the truth doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter, though,” said Maria. “You were a someone before you were set upon the waves. You were a someone, and . . .”
“And what?”
“And someone was watching over you. Someone wanted you to live.”
Pablo thought about that. It must be true. Someone had tried to keep him safe. But in some ways, knowing that fact made not knowing his whole story that much worse.
“Maria? Do you ever wish you had the ears of a Seafaring Parrot?”
“No,” she said immediately. “Never. I think it would be a very hard life. Some stories are hard to hear, Pablo. And knowing every one of them would be a hard burden to bear.”
“It’s better to hear them anyway,” Pablo argued.
“Maybe.” Maria regarded him with her kind and thoughtful eyes. “And maybe not.”
NINETEEN
PABLO WOKE UP that night, restless. It was windy, and the Seafaring Parrot banner was flapping. He got out of his hammock and pressed his face against the window screen and watched it curling and uncurling. Like waves on the beach. It was unsettling to wake up and see the giant parrot hanging there in midair. He wished its eyes weren’t quite so bright and burning. Couldn’t the painter have made it a little less creepy-looking, especially when no one knew what the bird looked like, or if it was even real?
Here was what was real:
Pablo’s Dios me bendiga necklace, which he had never taken off.
Birdy, who had never left his side.
The tiny swimming pool, deflated and stored on the shelf in his closet.
The green blanket, washed and folded and kept next to the pool.
Those things were absolutely, verifiably real. Everything else that surrounded his arrival in Isla—Lula’s precocious-baby theory, Pierre’s emissary-from-a-forgotten-world theory, Emmanuel’s pirate-baby theory, the day that they had arbitrarily picked for his birthday—all that was made up out of thin air.
But in a way, thin air was real, wasn’t it? The baby birds across the street tumbled out of their nests into it, and they spread their wings and it held them up. The lucky ones, that is. Birds knew that the air was real, and they trusted it enough to fling themselves onto it and spread their wings.
Something could be invisible and still exist. Even Maria, with her scientific nature, couldn’t argue with that.
Birdy was sleeping on the old suitcase, her head tucked under her feathers and one foot drawn up. Across the street, the grotesque’s eyes were dark caves against his stone body. The steel cable shone in the moonlight. The painted parrot’s eyes glowed up at Pablo.
“I’m sick of artists’ renderings,” whispered Pablo. “They’re all fakes.”
He raised the screen an inch at a time so as not to wake Birdy. When it was high enough, he stuck his head out and looked down, down, down at the street below. It was empty this late at night. All the stores were closed and locked, all the lights turned off. Even the Parrot Café, which was always the last place to close, was shuttered and dark.
Sugar Baby and Rhody and Mr. Chuckles and Peaches were asleep in their roosts and nests. The pigeons and doves and random chickens and wild parrots who fluttered about busily during the day were all silent too. There was nothing moving on the entire street. Even the baby birds were asleep in the mud nests that clung to the underside of the grotesque’s stone ledge across the street.
Pablo was sure that he was the only living being awake in the entire town of Isla, and he—
Wait, what was that?
Something was moving down below.
A shape, almost indistinguishable in the shadows, was making its way along the sidewalk. Whatever it was—too big to be a mouse or a cat or even a sleepless chicken—it was trying to stay inconspicuous, huddled up against the sides of the buildings. Slipping along without a sound.
Behind Pablo, Birdy stirred on the old suitcase. Pablo held his breath so that she would keep sleeping. He kept his eyes focused on the slipping-along shape. It slipped past the flower shop. Past Lula Tattoo. Past Pierre’s Goodies—no, it stopped in front of Pierre’s picture window. Pablo watched as the shape appeared to grow taller, right there by the window.
Then the shape resolved itself, as if Pablo had been looking at a blurry photo that suddenly regained focus. The shape was a dog. It was the dog, the pastry thief, balanced on its hind legs, staring inside the bakery, closed for another few hours until Pierre showed up to start the morning baking.
“Aww,” said Pablo.
“Poor little guy.”
He barely breathed the words—just a whisper of a sound—but Birdy stirred again.
“Poor puppy,” whispered Pablo. “Pobrecito perrito.”
As if the dog could hear them from all that way up, where Pablo was pressing his nose against the window screen, he dropped down to the sidewalk and slunk on his way. Halfway down the block he disappeared into the dark alleyway entrance.
Where did the little perrito sleep? There weren’t any homes down the alleyway, only a few doors that opened into the backs of shops. Garbage cans. A Dumpster or two. A bunch of trash and broken bricks and other things that Pablo never thought about during the day, because he never went into the alleyway.
Where had the dog come from? The first anyone had seen of him was when he came whipping into the bakery and out again, trailing crumbs of elephant ears and with an enraged Pierre on his heels. But once Lula and Emmanuel realized that the elephant-ear thief was actually a starving little dog, they—and even Pierre, under pressure from Lula—had put out bowls of food for him. He hadn’t shown up again, though.
“I guess he’s scared of people,” Pablo said out loud, as behind him, on the suitcase, Birdy stirred once more.
Then Pablo leaped up, banging his head against the tin edge of the window screen, because an enormous voice suddenly began to shout right there, right in his bedroom.
“GET YOUR MANGY PAWS OFF THERE OR I’LL WHIP YOU WITHIN AN INCH OF YOUR LIFE.”
The voice was so loud and mean that Pablo froze, too afraid to turn around. Who was in their apartment? What was he doing in Pablo’s bedroom? Who was he talking to? Pablo didn’t have paws. Neither did Birdy. These were all the thoughts that ran through his mind in a split second.
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