“Good choice,” said Lula. “As for me, I would bring back the voice of my sister as a baby.”
“I thought you and your sister weren’t speaking anymore,” said Pierre. “Didn’t you have a big fight years ago?”
“We did.”
“What was it about?”
She shook her head. “Something stupid. I don’t even remember.”
“Have you tried to call her?”
“Once. She hung up on me. But sometimes I think about her, the way we were when we were little. How she would laugh and laugh.”
Pablo looked over at Birdy. She was standing on a chair, pecking at a plate of chopped mango. She didn’t meet his eyes. She appeared to be completely focused on the mango. But Pablo was pretty sure she hadn’t missed a single word of the conversation.
“How about you, Emmanuel?” Lula said. “Whose voice would you bring back?”
Emmanuel looked down at his hands, then over at Pablo. His eyes were dark and sad.
“Come on,” said Pierre. “Tell us.”
But Emmanuel just shook his head. And no one asked Pablo.
TWENTY-SIX
DOWN ON THE floor, Peaches and Sugar Baby were fighting over the same shred of coconut. Rhody had lost interest and wandered back outside, while Mr. Chuckles was laughing quietly to himself—“hahahahaha”—in the corner. Maria had left to open the clinic. Two overheated tourists sat at a table in the back, fanning themselves with plastic fold-up Seafarer fans and bickering about how to spend the rest of the day. Just then there came a commotion outside the bakery. The skittering of paws on the sidewalk, the flashing of a lopsided tail, and the dog—the dog!—tore in, followed by Rhody in hot pursuit.
“Not again!” shouted Pierre, as the dog raced behind the counter, leaped up, and snatched an elephant ear. “I forbid this! Drop that pastry!”
“Cock-a-doodle-doo!”
“HAHAHAHAHA!”
“Holy crud!” said Lula. “That dog does not give up!”
The dog had made it halfway back to the door, crumbs spewing from his mouth, lopsided tail waving wildly, when a voice, a man’s voice, began shouting.
“YOU DESPICABLE CREATURE. YOU UGLY, NO-GOOD DOG.”
Instantly, the dog skidded to a near halt and lowered himself onto his belly. He began to crawl toward the door. Fear rose from every trembling inch of him. The voice thundered down again.
“WORTHLESS MUTT.”
The dog’s eyes rolled with fear. Pablo’s heart pounded in his chest. He looked around for the man, the awful man who must belong to the awful voice. But there was no one in the bakery but Pablo and Lula and Pierre and Emmanuel and the bickering tourists. And they all were staring at Birdy, who was standing on the chair with her wings raised.
“It’s okay,” Pablo said. “It’s okay.” He knelt on the floor next to the dog, who was still on his belly, still trembling. There was silence behind them. Pablo was afraid to turn his head. He put one hand on the dog’s side to soothe him. Sharp ribs felt as if they were poking right through the dog’s long, matted fur.
“Poor guy,” said Pablo.
“Pobrecito,” said a woman’s voice. “Pobrecito.”
Pablo kept his hand on the dog’s trembling side and swiveled around to see Emmanuel, Lula, Pierre, and the tourists now gaping at Birdy. She was shifting from foot to foot. She opened her beak and “Pobrecito,” she said again. There could be no denying that it was Birdy. Birdy, speaking in a woman’s soft, sad voice. She hid her head in her feathers, which were all ruffled up as if she’d been out in a strong wind. But the voice came again, muffled and full of sorrow. It was the same voice that Pablo had heard in the middle of the night.
Pobrecito.
“Birdy?” said Lula.
Birdy raised her head and looked at Lula, then ducked back into her feathers. The others had still not said a word. Their argument forgotten, the bickering tourists were now taking photo after photo, turning their cell phones this way and that and murmuring to each other. Pablo distinctly heard the words Toledo Tip Line before they abruptly turned and slipped out the door. Emmanuel broke the silence.
“Birdy?” he said, his voice full of astonishment. “Birdy, mi Birdita, eres un”—here his voice turned to a whisper—“Seafarer?”
At the word Seafarer, whispered though it was, Pablo held his breath. Birdy was on the chair, huddled into herself with an air of misery. Tears were running down Lula’s cheeks, while awe spread across Pierre’s face. Emmanuel’s eyes were filled with wonder.
“Mon dieu,” Pierre whispered. “All this time. All these years.”
“It’s a miracle,” Emmanuel said.
Lula tried to say something, but her voice was choked with tears. She got down on her knees and clasped her hands together and bowed her head. And Pablo? All Pablo could think of was getting to Birdy. Picking her up off that chair where she kept shifting from foot to foot, the chair where she stood alone, the chair where anyone who looked into the bakery could see her. So many thoughts rushed through his mind—Birdy asleep on the Cuba suitcase next to his hammock while the man’s voice shouted in anger about a dog, Birdy silent while the Committee gabbled and squawked around her, Birdy spreading her wings while Pablo almost-flew her down the beach—but one thought rose up bigger than all the others, which was that Birdy needed him. He had to get to her.
Pablo sat up, but as he started to stand the dog heaved himself up, toenails clicking on the tile floor. His lopsided tail tucked itself down the way that Birdy had tucked her head into her feathers, and he shoved his head into Pablo’s neck as if he was trying to hide himself. Trying to tell him to stay, to please not leave. Pablo put an arm around him and hugged him close, but the dog didn’t stop trembling.
“It’s a miracle,” Emmanuel said again.
“It is,” Lula agreed, drying her tears. “Birdy can talk—Birdy can talk.” Wonder spread across her face, but then she shook her head as if trying to focus. “It’s a miracle that could become a tragedy. Are the rest of you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Toledo?” Pierre said.
“The Tip Line?” Emmanuel said.
Lula nodded. “Elmira and her henchmen are on their way, and the only thing they care about is finding a Seafarer. We have to help Birdy.”
On the chair, Birdy shifted her weight. She looked miserable, as miserable as the dog on the floor.
“There’s no one here,” Pablo whispered into the dog’s ear. “The mean man is gone. He was never here at all.”
But as he said it, he knew that wasn’t quite true. In a way, the mean man had been there. His voice had anyway. Then another voice came back to him: Elmira’s. Until we have a Seafarer in captivity . . .
“Stay here,” Pablo whispered to the dog. “I have to go, but you’re safe here.”
Birdy wasn’t, though. Pablo got to his feet, walked to the chair, and held out his arm to his bird.
A few others were down on the beach—a tattooed father carrying a baby, a woman collecting sand dollars—but not many. Pablo went to the far end, where a disintegrating oyster boat leaned against some rocks. He sat down in the hull so that he and Birdy wouldn’t be visible to anyone. She perched there on the bottom of the boat.
Pablo felt for his necklace and closed his fingers around it. He turned it over and over, until the leather cord was tight around his neck. Had his mother given it to him? Could his mother possibly be the woman with the soft, sad voice? Pobrecito Pablo.
Maybe he hadn’t been a horrid baby, screaming all the time so that whoever his parents had been, they were happy to see him go. Maybe he’d had parents who loved him. Who wanted him. Who would never have let him go unless they had to. And when they had to, maybe they had put him in the only thing they had at hand, the only thing that might keep him alive, that might give him a chance to survive. Didn’t that make more sense than the other stories?
But no one ever talked about that possibility. Pirate baby, precocious baby, emissary from a forg
otten world. Those were just stories, made up for fun. But they weren’t fun anymore.
It was a warm morning, but Pablo shivered. Next to him, Birdy was shifting from foot to foot. She ducked her head under her feathers as if she knew what he was thinking, and she didn’t want to think about it.
“Birdy,” he said, “I know you can hear me. So I’m just going to talk.”
Once he said that, though, he went quiet. The thing he had wondered about for so long, the question he had asked Maria about, was clear. She had always said that no one knew what exactly a Seafaring Parrot looked like.
But now, Pablo did.
Seafaring Parrots were lavender, with under-feathers of iridescent blue-green. Medium height, medium build. Dark eyes. Did every Seafarer look like Birdy? If they did, then the far reaches of the ocean skies must be beautiful with birds.
“Birdy?” he said. “What’s it like, to hear everything, forever?”
He had tried to imagine it before, and now he tried again. Just think of knowing the happiest things that everyone in the world had ever said. The most loving things. The kindest. It would be beautiful, but it would also be overwhelming. Then he imagined just the opposite. What if you held, inside your own head, the saddest things said by every person in the entire world?
“Can you tell me?” he said.
She tilted her head and looked at him for a minute, as if she were thinking. Then she opened her beak and sound came pouring forth. Voices in languages familiar—English and Spanish—and entirely unfamiliar, both human and animal, singing and crying and calling and whispering. The natural world, leaves in the wind, the crack of thunder, rain, first a patter, then a deluge, the howl of what might be a tornado. Pablo’s head filled with noise, a cacophony of it. A man’s voice shouting in anger, a child’s shriek of fear, a woman’s voice calling something over and over, the crack of a tree falling, the groan of wood pulling apart.
Oh no.
This was all too much. Instinctively he closed his eyes and put his hands over his ears to block it out, but the noise was everywhere. It was more than he could bear. More than anyone could bear. Maybe Maria was right. Maybe it was better not to know. He felt a nudge on his shoulder and opened his eyes. Birdy, her eyes focused and intent. She opened her beak again, but this time there was only one voice, soft and sweet, the same voice as the pobrecito Pablo voice. She was singing a song with a slow lilt, a song that repeated itself. A lullaby, maybe.
“Who is that, Birdy?”
She didn’t answer him. She just kept singing, the same little song, over and over.
“Is that . . . my mother?”
No answer.
“Please, Birdy. You have to know who it is. Please tell me.”
She stopped singing and ducked her head into her feathers, burrowing. Was she trying to hide? But if she was a Seafarer, why didn’t she tell him? And why didn’t she fly? Confusion filled him. And not just confusion but frustration. None of this made sense.
“Birdy, if you’re a Seafarer, then why don’t you fly?”
She just kept looking at him.
“You’re supposed to, aren’t you?” he said. “I mean, everyone says that Seafarers have to fly, or they’ll”—the word was die but he couldn’t stand to say it—“be sad and . . . and . . . unhappy.”
At that, she burrowed her head deeper. “Stop hiding,” he said. “We have to figure this out. I don’t know why you won’t just talk to me. And I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to help.”
But she wasn’t trying to hide this time. When she untucked her head, there was something in her beak.
“What is that?” said Pablo, and she extended her head so that he could see. A feather. She was holding it out to him. He took the feather—long and blue-green and so light it was like holding air in his hand—and brought it to his nose. It smelled of her: warm and dusty, with the scent of mangoes. Pablo put both hands around her and lifted her to his chest. Maria’s warning, that plucked feathers were a sign of distress, hung in his mind.
“All right, Birdy-bird,” he said. “It’s going to be okay.”
He kept both hands around her, gently, all the way back from the beach, all the way to Maria’s Critter Clinic.
TWENTY-SEVEN
FEAR STILL PRICKLED down the dog’s back as he hunched up next to the outside wall of the bakery. When the boy and the bird left, he had waited until a little strength came back to him, then slunk outside, away from the people who were now talking intently. It was a good time to sneak out, before their attention returned to him. Before they trapped him and locked him up for stealing, or before the man found him. It was a world full of danger. The dog looked up the street and then down.
Hadn’t he gotten away from the man?
Far away?
The sound of his voice had brought the dog right back to the house on the edge of the woods, the house where the man yelled and yelled. The house where he took off his belt and came after the dog, slapping it against his palm and advancing step by step. Step by step by step, until the dog had huddled himself as far back in the farthest back room as he could. Until there was nowhere else to go.
YOU WORTHLESS MUTT.
Those words. The feel of them in his ears.
The feel of the belt on his back and legs and paws and head.
The ears and the paws hurt the worst.
There were other houses next to the house where the man yelled at the dog and beat the dog. When he managed to sneak up on the bed and lean his front paws on the window, the dog could see them. Lights glowed in their kitchens and living rooms, upstairs in their bedrooms. There were people in those houses. But no one ever came to knock at the house where the man yelled at the dog, where he beat the dog and fed him only when he felt like it and not when the dog was hungry. Which was all the time.
Maybe the neighbors were afraid of the man too. Or maybe they didn’t know there was a dog in the house.
The dog had lived in fear for weeks, months, close to a year. He had lived without enough food or clean water. He had lived without love. But he had not ever, even though he came very close, lived without hope. Just a shred of hope. And then came the night when the man didn’t return to the house.
The dog waited many hours before he snuck onto the bed again, in the darkness, and put his front paws up on the window. Other houses were lit. He could see people moving in them behind the windows. In one, a family sat around a table eating. The dog took a deep breath. Yes, they were eating: bread and butter and carrots and stew. He could smell it all. Saliva spiraled down from his mouth. He jumped off the bed and trotted into the kitchen. He nosed at the closet where the man kept the bag of food he sometimes doled out to the dog. With one paw, he nudged the door open. But the bag was empty.
No food.
The dog’s stomach growled. He bent to the water bowl. That was empty too, so he went to the bathroom and gulped water out of the toilet.
Then he went to the back door, and then the front door, sniffing deeply at the seams in each door, hoping to scent the man’s car coming down the road. He could usually smell it from far off.
But not tonight.
Back and forth from door to door he trotted, following the well-worn path in the carpet. This was a trek he had made many times. The man had sworn at him and kicked him for wearing out the carpet, but the dog didn’t know why he was being yelled at or kicked. He didn’t know he was wearing a path in the carpet. All he knew was that he was waiting for the man to come home, because even if that meant yelling and beating, it also meant that there might be food.
And if the dog had never had affection, he had also never, ever had enough food.
It was on the tenth, or the hundredth, or maybe the thousandth, trip from the front door to the back door that the dog heard a creak. Was the man home? Had he somehow missed the smell and the sound of the car? He hunched back against the wall, waiting for the stomp and tromp and flicking on of light. But there was nothing, just a slight creak
of the back door.
That was when the dog noticed that the door was not entirely closed. He nudged it with his paw, the same way he nudged the closet door.
It opened.
The dog made his decision instantly. He did not think. He did not hesitate. What he did was take off, straight into the woods. And he kept moving, for days, maybe weeks, until he came to Isla, the town of elephant ears and roaming birds, and the alley where he had taken refuge.
TWENTY-EIGHT
PABLO CRADLED BIRDY to his chest and pushed open the door to the clinic with his foot. Maria was just coming out of the back room with her clipboard. In her white coat she looked for a moment like one of the unsmiling scientists in the white laboratory on the television screen, waiting for a live specimen of the mythical Seafaring Parrot.
Then she smiled, and Pablo’s heart jumped in relief.
“Pablo?” she said. “Are you and Birdy okay?”
Pablo shook his head and glanced around the waiting room. No one was there but one of the alpacas on a leash. The leash was wound around the ficus tree in the corner and the alpaca, who was munching on a flake of hay, seemed perfectly happy. He eyed Pablo and Birdy, blinked once, and then went back to the hay.
“Sit down,” said Maria. She sat down on the orange couch and Pablo, still clutching Birdy, sat down next to her. “What’s going on? Tell me.”
At first Pablo couldn’t speak. Birdy was quiet against his chest. She had tucked her head down into her feathers again. She didn’t push her beak into the crook of his neck, the way she usually did.
“She’s talking,” Pablo blurted.
“Who’s talking?”
“Birdy.”
Then it all came out: the words about his birthday, spoken in his own voice last night, this morning’s horrible words shouted in the bakery, and how everyone sitting there had been shocked into silence. How the pastry-thief dog had been instantly terrified, almost unable to move, huddled on his belly on the floor. How Pablo had tried to soothe him and felt the sharpness of his ribs underneath all that dirty, tangled fur. How Birdy had tried to hide herself under her own feathers. And all the sounds that had come pouring out of her when he’d asked her about her life, about what it was like to hear everything forever.
Pablo and Birdy Page 9