“Maybe she wanted to tell you, but she couldn’t,” said Maria.
“What are you saying? And if she couldn’t tell me, then you should know why, shouldn’t you? You’re the doctor.”
Listen to me, Pablo thought, so rude, and then the equally awful thought came to him that Birdy would hear him talking like this forever, inside her head. Forever! Pablo instantly sat up straight and quiet. Maria was still holding his hands.
“What I’m saying,” said Maria, “is that maybe Birdy knows your story, but for some unknown reason, she can’t tell it to you.”
At that, Birdy tilted her head and looked straight at Pablo, as if she agreed with Maria.
“Let’s look at what we both know for sure,” said Maria. Her voice was calm and matter-of-fact. That must be the scientist in her, coming out in a time of stress. “We know that in the ten years she’s been here, Birdy has not flown. She’s never even made an attempt to fly, correct?”
“Not until the other night, when I found her out on the cable. She hasn’t talked, either.” Thinking about how she hadn’t talked, not in all these years, even when she could talk, made the anger come rising back up in Pablo, but he took a deep breath and focused. “Except for now, I mean, and a little bit in her sleep.”
“Did she always talk in her sleep? Ever since you can remember?”
Pablo shook his head. “No. It’s only been the last couple of weeks.”
“Okay. Why, then, would she suddenly start to talk in her sleep? And why all this talk, a flood of it, today? There must be some reason. Something must have changed.”
Birdy was quiet and still, as if she were interested in the conversation and wanted to see where it might lead.
“I have no idea,” said Pablo. “The only thing that’s different is that I’m about to turn double digits. And why would that matter?”
But even as he was talking, the image of Darren Mandible flashed into his head, dipping and swirling in front of his weather map, so excited was he at the thought of the winds of change. And Elmira Toledo, her trench coat blowing open in the gale. The scientists. The Tip Line. He turned to Maria just as she turned to him.
“The winds—” he said.
“Of change!” she finished. “Listen, Pablo. There’s a principle in science known as Occam’s razor, which holds that the simplest explanation is usually the right one.”
“So could that mean that the winds of change are why Birdy’s talking? And trying to fly?”
“Well, according to Occam’s razor, that would make sense.”
Birdy pushed her beak into Maria’s shoulder and then hopped over and did the same to Pablo’s shoulder, as if to encourage them. Pablo stroked her feathers. His anger was gone. He was thinking, thinking hard.
“Maybe the only time Birdy can talk and fly is when the winds of change are here?” he said. “Sort of talk, anyway? And try to fly?”
“I’m wondering the same thing,” said Maria.
They sat there, the three of them, Maria and Pablo and Birdy. It was quiet on the street outside, which was unusual. No alpacas or ferrets or stray cats or teddy bears in the office today, which was also unusual. Did the winds of change make everything weird and strange and not like usual? Birdy pushed her beak into his shoulder again, but sharply this time. Then she nipped at his ear.
“Ouch,” said Pablo. “That hurts.”
But she did it again.
“Birdy, if you want something, why don’t you just tell me what it is?” he said. “Can’t you do that?”
Jab. Again with her sharp beak, this time right on his chin, which was not like her at all. She must be trying to tell him something, but why she didn’t just tell him was . . . wait a minute. Pablo’s mind whisked through the events of the last week. Birdy had inched out on the cable, but she hadn’t actually flown. She had poured forth sounds and voices, jumbled and chaotic, but she hadn’t actually said anything that came directly from her, had she? She had not said, for example, Pablo, I am going to tell you the story of what really happened to you, and to me, and why we ended up on that tiny inflatable swimming pool, had she?
No. She had not.
Just the thought of Birdy saying something like that brought tears to Pablo’s eyes. If only she would. He looked at her, at her steady dark eyes fixed on his, at the tilt of her head. At her lavender feathers with iridescent blue-green under-feathers, so beautiful and so unearthly. Surely, if there were any way for Birdy to speak to him in her own voice, to tell him the true story of his beginnings, she would do so. She had taken care of him his whole life, after all. Pablo turned to Maria.
“Maybe she can only make sounds that she’s already heard?” he said, trying to puzzle it out. “Maybe only when the winds of change are here? That would be the simplest explanation, wouldn’t it?”
“It would,” said Maria. “You’d make a good scientist, Pablo.”
Pablo remembered the awful sound of the man’s voice in his room in the middle of the night. He remembered the frightened look in Birdy’s eyes in the bakery, when she hadn’t been able to stop bringing forth voices. He remembered the night he had found her inching out on the cable, high above the street. If his theory was right, and Birdy could speak only during the winds of change, then maybe she could fly only during the winds of change as well.
As if she could read his mind, Birdy hopped onto his lap. She pushed her beak into his neck, but gently this time. “Maybe only when the winds of change are here?” she said, in his own voice, the same question he had asked just minutes before. That must be the closest she could come to telling them that they were right. That he and Maria had figured it out.
Pablo thought of all the mornings he had almost-flown her down the beach, and how much she loved it. He thought of the legend of the Seafaring Parrot, the great heights it climbed to and the vast distances it covered at sea. Then he pictured Elmira Toledo and her crew descending on Isla, determined to find a living specimen.
“I need some time to figure out what to do,” he said to Maria, and she nodded.
THIRTY-THREE
OUTSIDE, THE WIND was picking up. There was something strange about it, and when Pablo realized what the strangeness was, his heart beat harder in his chest. Darren Mandible had been right. The wind was beginning to blow directly away from the shore.
“What day is it?” came a quiet voice.
Pablo looked down. The Committee was gathered on the sidewalk outside the Critter Clinic. Mr. Chuckles advanced a step toward Pablo, as if he had been chosen to lead this meeting.
“Shoo,” said Pablo. “Leave us alone. I’m trying to figure something out here.”
The Committee didn’t move. Dumb birds, scratching and clucking around the town, free to go where they wanted to whenever they wanted to. Unlike Birdy, who had never left Pablo’s side but for that one time, out on the cable. Who did the Committee think they were? They were nothing special. Nothing like Birdy.
“You guys think you can talk,” said Pablo. He knew he sounded mean, but he didn’t stop himself. “But all you do is say the same things over and over again. That doesn’t make you special.”
“HAHAHAHAHA!” said Mr. Chuckles.
“You laugh, but why?” said Pablo. “There’s nothing funny about this situation! How would you like to be locked up in a cage for the rest of your life?”
The birds looked at one another and then back at Pablo. Mr. Chuckles cocked his head.
“Hmm,” he said. “Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.”
It was as if he was trying to tell Pablo something. But what?
“ ‘Hmm’ is not going to get you very far, now is it?” said Pablo. He just kept saying mean things.
The other birds cocked their heads, blinked, opened and closed their beaks. All except Rhody, who just kept scratching the same little place on the sidewalk, as if he were tapping out some kind of avian Morse code.
Pablo didn’t know what to do.
He thought back over all the years he and Birdy had
been together, and all the times he had told her the things he couldn’t tell Emmanuel or anyone else. Things about his non-birthday. About his Dios me bendiga necklace. About his own ideas of where he might have come from, and why he had been set upon the ocean alone. Birdy knew all his secrets.
She was quiet against his chest.
Something about her silence and her stillness unnerved him. Her eyes were fixed on something in the sky. He followed her gaze upward. The cable swayed high above them, a gray snake, and across the chasm of the air, small birds swooped back and forth. The babies, those who had survived the weeks of learning to fly, were all bigger now. Still smaller than their parents, but big enough to pop out of the nests on their own, diving and darting for food. Pablo looked at Birdy; her eyes were steady. She wasn’t following the fly lines of the little birds.
Was she looking at the grotesque?
Maybe. It was impossible to tell. Together they stood, looking up. The steel cable began to shimmer, undulating back and forth. Pablo heard the building around him groan and sigh. Then, and Pablo would swear this for the rest of his life, the grotesque shifted on the stone ledge. It turned, was what happened, it turned its head high in the air above them, and as Pablo watched in disbelief, muscles rippled under its scaly stone chest. Its wings lifted ever so slightly from its sides, and—Pablo swore this—it hunched forward, until it looked to Pablo as if the grotesque was about to fling itself off the ledge it had been cemented onto for as long as he could remember. The same way Birdy had hunched forward on the table at Maria’s not long ago.
Birdy struggled up to Pablo’s shoulder and dug her talons in. Her own wings lifted ever so slightly from her sides. Emmanuel’s words came back to Pablo, that the grotesque was there to watch over the animals and birds of Isla. About how it was neither living nor dead, stuck forever there on its stone ledge.
THIRTY-FOUR
THE STREETS OF Isla were curiously quiet, almost as quiet as they got when a wild storm was headed their way. No one was boarding up their windows or sandbagging their storefront doors, but still, the uneasy feeling inside Pablo seemed to be in the very air of the town itself. Pablo tucked Birdy underneath his T-shirt to hide her, something she ordinarily would never have put up with, but she rested against his chest and didn’t move. He left the Committee behind, scratching and clucking, then crossed the street and went down the block to Pierre’s Goodies, where the blinds were still drawn. Pablo had to knock three times before Lula peeked out and unlocked the door for him.
“Quick,” she said, and she drew the bolt again once he was inside. Birdy poked her head out of the top of Pablo’s T-shirt in greeting, but made no move otherwise.
Elmira Toledo was holding forth on the television screen. Her hair was brushed today, and her trench coat was buttoned all the way to her neck, but if you looked closely, there was still a manic gleam in her eye. She appeared to be standing on a promontory of some sort, huge waves crashing ominously behind her.
“Rest assured, viewers, that the Tip Line Hounds have been following up on each and every credible report of a Seafarer sighting,” she said.
“Tip Line Hounds?” Lula said. “That’s a new one.”
“A new and nasty one,” Pierre said. “An insult to the good name of dogs worldwide.”
Pierre had never been one to either notice or compliment any of the Isla dogs, and he protected his pastries against strays with an iron fist. Just look at how he’d gone running after the little elephant-ear thief, and how grudgingly he’d put out food for him only when Lula pressured him into it. It seemed that the winds of change were changing everything.
“An extremely credible tip came in just last night,” Elmira was saying, “and that is why my camera crew and I find ourselves here on the Outer Banks.”
“Mon dieu!” said Pierre. “That was my tip! I called that one in!”
His face turned red with pride. Just then a particularly enormous wave crested the promontory and drenched Elmira, who managed to hang grimly on to her microphone nonetheless.
“Sadly, our search here has proved fruitless,” she said. “But we are hot on the trail of another highly credible tip, one which will take us to the top of a lighthouse on St. Sabrina’s Island off the Florida Panhandle.”
“That’s my tip!” said Lula. “I called it in anonymously from the pay phone outside the Parrot Café. I said I was the lighthouse keeper on St. Sabrina’s, and there was a Seafarer swooping around and around the lighthouse in such a wild manner that I was afraid it was deranged and in need of hospitalization. Good one, right?”
It certainly was. Everyone looked at Lula admiringly. For better, and once in a while for worse, she never held back. Meanwhile, on the screen, Elmira was clutching the microphone with both hands. Her teeth were chattering. The Outer Banks, or at least her particular promontory thereof, did not look hospitable in the least.
“We leave momentarily and will be back with a live report early this afternoon,” she said, shivering. “Stay tuned, viewers, for further developments.”
Emmanuel clicked off the television. “Well, we’ve bought ourselves some time,” he said. “But how much?”
“Not enough,” said Lula darkly.
No one disagreed.
That evening, as the sky outside their window turned purple and then black with nightfall, the winds of change descended fully on Isla. A ghostly moon appeared and disappeared behind swift clouds, so that the ocean sparkled and then went black, sparkled and went black. The steel cable stretching between their building and the grotesque’s stone ledge glimmered. Pablo’s hammock rocked back and forth, and he picked up Birdy and crawled into it and pulled his blanket tight around them both.
Not so he could try to sleep, though. No, he needed to think. But his thoughts were still all jumbled up. The only thing that was steady was the wind. He could feel the whole building leaning, leaning toward the ocean.
Birdy’s talons gripped his hands lightly. Together they swayed back and forth in the hammock. He put his arms around her, there in the rocking hammock, there in the dark night, there in the building that groaned and swayed from the winds of change, and he breathed in a long, deep breath. Warmth and dust and the faint smell of mangoes. The smell of Birdy.
The feather she had pulled from herself that morning was still in the back pocket of Pablo’s shorts. He thought of the years she had stayed beside him, never leaving his side. He thought of Elmira Toledo, and the scientists with their clipboards, and the tourists desperate for the sight of a Seafaring Parrot. Then he thought of the night he had found her halfway across the street, balanced on the cable. He thought and thought, and as he thought, his mind became clear.
It was time.
He held her to his chest and swung his legs out of the hammock. The clouds were gone now, and stars glittered high in the heavens, impervious to the wind that was bending the palm trees toward the ocean as far as Pablo could see. It was the sort of stormless wind that the townspeople had talked about as long as Pablo could remember. The winds that blew not onto shore but away from it were the winds that would carry his bird away.
Somewhere out there, airplanes were winging their way through the night. Maybe Elmira Toledo had realized that Lula’s lighthouse tip was a hoax and was on one of those airplanes, bound for Isla and a real live specimen. He squinted and peered into the darkness, trying to see if he could make out any light on the ocean that wasn’t from the stars or moon. No. It was just him and . . . wait.
Wait.
What was that in the sky, far out to sea, making its way south toward them? It couldn’t be a plane, because it was flying too low. Whatever it was, it was growing closer every second. Then Pablo’s ears picked up a sound that wasn’t the wind. It sounded a little like Emmanuel’s snores when he really got going, but it wasn’t quite that, either. He concentrated on the approaching object and the growing sound—
Helicopter. That’s what it was.
Emmanuel had been right in that they
had bought themselves time, but Lula had been righter. There was only one person who would be crazy enough—or greedy enough was a better term—to board a helicopter bound for Isla in the crosswinds of the winds of change. Elmira Toledo was here. Pablo’s heart began to hammer in his chest. This was too soon. He needed more time with Birdy. He needed at least a few hours. He needed . . . he needed . . . he tried not to think about the future, but he couldn’t help it.
Who would stand on the counter pecking at diced mango while he made quesadillas? Who would look on when he played rummy with Emmanuel, hopping back and forth to study their cards and pointing with her beak at the one she wanted Pablo to discard? Who would listen to his secrets down at the beach, at the very edge of the ocean?
Birdy pushed her beak into the crook of his neck as if she knew what he was thinking. He stroked her feathers from the top of her head to the tip of her tail and kept his eyes on the approaching helicopter. It was hovering on the outskirts of town now, battling against the offshore gale. In the bright light of the moon he could make out large neon script that spelled TOLEDO TIP LINE. Any minute now, the helicopter would be on the ground, and Elmira would begin a relentless search for the fabled Seafarer. Birdy was in imminent danger.
Pablo took a deep breath, and through his panicked sadness, he forced his voice to be calm and strong.
“Listen,” he said. “If you get lonely out there”—he waved his hand at the sky, the enormous sky beyond the window—“listen to our voices, okay?”
Her talons tightened on his skin. She was listening.
“Listen to Emmanuel telling the pirate baby story, and Lula talking about how no one should get a tattoo that lasts forever, and Maria with the alpacas, and Pierre yelling at the pastry thief—” Here he stopped, because she suddenly dug her claws in so tight that they hurt.
“Hey,” he said. “That hurts.”
Pablo and Birdy Page 11