The Hummingbirds

by Ross McMeekin

  THIRTEEN

  Ezra checked his phone and only ten minutes had passed since she’d left the house to who knew where. It was probably foolish to stay, but he couldn’t help but hope that Sybil had changed her mind, and there was the chance that something was wrong that he didn’t know about. He continued pacing the lawn, already nostalgic about the groves of flowers—cool cream, bright buttercup, and hot vermillion—and standing guard, as always, the soft phallic bends of the palm trees, capped with their brittle flags—all here to witness to what would happen next. Their rustling and chattering unnerved him. He’d have to leave them behind, too.

  But he still had this feeling. Maybe he was a fool. Maybe he was in denial. But it didn’t make sense that what he and Sybil shared could change this quickly. And if, in the end, it could change this quickly, it might just as quickly change again.

  He went inside the pool house and paced the kitchen, alternating sips between a beer and a glass of tap water. He used the restroom. Returned and watched. Used the restroom again. Returned. Checked his phone. He’d texted Bryce, with no response. Maybe payback for the way he’d ghosted over the last week—Bryce had messaged him a few times and he hadn’t responded. He hadn’t known what to say about April, nor had he wanted to try and bridge the gap between his old world and this new one. Especially considering he hadn’t known what this was, yet. And to put words to it felt disloyal to the private existence he and Sybil were enjoying.

  On the couch sat his packed bags. Even they seemed restless, on the verge of sliding off the cushions of their own volition. Had this past week not been the most miraculous of his life? Was that not worth the price of being played for a fool? No, it only made it worse. And funny how the sex, after all these years of waiting, ended up feeling almost crass compared to the companionship, the honesty, the openness.

  There’d been a peace. Hadn’t there? But now, as he thought about it, he wondered how on earth his mind could have come to such a conclusion. Peace? His emotions had been racing all week, between exaltation and anxiety. She’d seen only one of his panic attacks. He’d had several each day, mostly as he was landscaping, brought on by the feeling that all of this was sinful on a level he’d never before experienced. He’d slept with his neighbor’s wife. In early biblical times his life would be at risk. Sybil’s more than his.

  His mother had slept with lots of men. He couldn’t ignore that. But did that justify what he’d done with Sybil? Unlike his mother, he couldn’t claim to have prophesied events and healed dozens of people. All he’d done was lie and hide.

  But now he wasn’t even sure about that. Over the last week, he’d gone over his history and motives countless times. Was he courageous for finally stepping out of his self-imposed seclusion of shame, or was his courage that of Adam biting the apple?

  Did it make a difference?

  He paced. Outside the kitchen window, the twilight wrapped everything in a sleepy haze. Glow from the bottom of the pool slithered up through the water. The beauty distracted him. But his brain soon returned to the mess: if only his mother had simply woken that one morning, called her dream with the doves peculiar, and gone on with her day, then most likely none of this would have happened. She would never have become the Prophetess. He would never have become the pathological mess that he was now.

  She might still be alive, had she dismissed that dream. God, one small decision, based on the tiniest of thoughts, could project so far into the future. It could drive you crazy. Make you want to cling to a higher power.

  But that was the thing. So long as you kept on living, you were choosing from the moment you rose each day. To act or not to act—both were choices, both were actions, both had consequences. He could see it now. All of the times he’d said no had really been their own kind of yes.

  All of this was too much to think about. He wanted to be back in Sybil’s bed, underneath her, feeling her warmth, listening to her breath, feeling the pulse of her heart. But the mansion was still empty. No light shone in any of those grandiose checkered windowpanes of what was now, once again, just a dark, distant fortress. It already felt as though he’d never set foot inside.

  Ezra tensed; he saw something in his peripheral vision, or thought he did. Light poured through the sash window on the first floor of the mansion. He saw movement in the kitchen—it had to be them. It was now dark enough outside that he could potentially be seen, so he switched off the pool house lights and pulled a chair over to the sink to watch in secret.

  A shadow moved behind the curtain in the kitchen of the mansion. He wished he could somehow get closer. An idea struck him. He grabbed his camera from the couch and rustled around in his pack until his fingers recognized the shape of his long-distance lens. He fit it to the mouth of the camera and sat back down and focused on the glowing window. With the lens, he was close enough to see a moth skittering about the far panels, trying to get at the source of light inside.

  He zoomed back out to get a larger picture of the mansion and saw that two more windows were now lit up. His sight was obscured by the stained-glass patterns tracking up the tall stairway that composed the spine of the house. Distorted images, just smudges of darkness, circled up the staircase. They were almost to the third floor. The light to the master bedroom flicked on. The massive oriel window turned the dull yellow of drapes. He zoomed in. Nothing.

  Then the drapes flung open. Hudson, jowls and cheeks peppered with a trim beard, tongue inside Sybil’s mouth, one arm around her waist, and the other rubbing her crotch with fury. Sybil’s left leg bent around him, blue slacks still fitted to her frame, but no shirt, only a black bra lilting at her sides. Then she was against the window, shifted, and the skin on her back bunched up beneath his groping paws. His gray slacks and black belt were loose.

  Then Hudson turned Sybil around and put one hand on her hip and the other on her back and pushed her down onto her knees facing the outside world. She spread her fingers out wide on the windowpane and smudged the glass. Grant pulled down her pants, and with a fierce look on his face, began.

  Ezra searched in vain for evidence on Sybil’s face of anything other than pleasure. He held up the camera and smashed it and every picture inside on the floor.

  FOURTEEN

  Ezra chucked a handful of empty mini tequila bottles into a dense thicket of hawthorn outside Bryce’s apartment building. A man with a leather jacket and slicked-back hair was on his way out, so Ezra didn’t have to buzz in at the gate. The apartment building was three levels crowded around a pool. He’d once jumped from Bryce’s second floor deck into the water on a dare. That seemed ages ago. That seemed a different jumper.

  He circled the stairs up to the second floor walkway and past a few apartments. He stopped at Bryce’s front door and gathered himself. He didn’t hear anyone inside, but there was light on. He knocked.

  No one answered.

  He knocked again, and then texted you home?

  Nothing.

  He could picture Bryce in his bedroom, headphones on, engaged in some role-playing game, or maybe watching a porno, soundtrack bleating too loud into his eardrums to hear anything else. Ezra knew that in the planter box next to the door, beneath a neglected cherry tomato vine, rested a fake rock housing a key. He found it and pushed back the little metal slide. He failed to fit the key in the slot until he closed one eye and rubbed the teeth along the brass surface of the knob.

  The living room was empty, but he heard the sound of a woman in the back, laughing, and the bassline to some 90s-era smooth funk piece. “Bryce?” he asked, loud, but there was no reply. “Bryce!” Nothing. He was about to walk back to the room when Bryce emerged. Shirt off, boxer shorts, sweating, Louisville Slugger raised.

  “Ezra? How did you get in here?” He lowered the bat.

  Ezra tossed the key and it landed on the carpet a few feet short. “I need to talk.”

  “Dude, you broke in?”

  “Let myself in. There’s some crazy shit happening.”

&n
bsp; Bryce blinked. “Uh, yeah, there is some crazy shit. Like what you did to April.”

  “I—”

  “You slept with her and didn’t call.”

  He felt his cheeks redden. But it felt odd. Since when had Bryce ever, in his entire life, said slept with, and not screwed or boinked or fucked? The voice in the other room—they weren’t alone. And that wasn’t Maria back there, either.

  The music stopped. A head peeked around the corner, then a full body. It was April, with Bryce’s faded Dodgers jersey hanging limp around her legs.

  “It’s not what you think,” Bryce said.

  “It’s exactly what you think,” April said.

  Ezra just stood there.

  “It’s just that after you ditched her, one thing led to another—” Bryce said.

  “Is that what this is?” April yelled. “One thing just led to another?”

  “No,” Bryce said. “Hold on. Let me think.” He set down the bat and sank into a beige armchair, head in his hands.

  She narrowed her eyes at Ezra. “What do you want?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Listen,” Bryce said. “I need to figure some shit out.”

  “You think?” April said.

  The shock wore off, and Ezra understood what had happened. In fact, it made perfect sense. As always, Bryce was being completely honest—one thing had led to another, and now here he was. April’d come knocking at his door to talk about what had happened, and he comforted her, and he’d become so caught up in it that Maria hadn’t so much as entered his mind, and when she had, he just decided not to think about it, because that was something that he was able to do.

  And now, faced with reality, in the form of Ezra, Bryce felt terrible—he really did—and hadn’t a clue what to do to get out of it. But that was the thing with Bryce: he’d stop feeling terrible once he began concerning himself with something else.

  For a moment, Ezra wondered if he was any different; he’d barely spared a thought for April over this past week. “April,” he said. “I’m sorry. I apologize.”

  “You assholes deserve each other,” she said. But as she tugged at her jersey and fingered the worn fabric, showing a bit of her beautiful shoulder, the look in her eyes surprised Ezra. She looked like she’d won a battle, here with Bryce on the couch, nearly fetal, ready to be manipulated into obedience.

  Ezra backed toward the door and clasped his hands together. “Got it. Bryce? We’ll talk later.”

  “Do you need a ride?” Bryce asked. The hopeful sap was already trying to escape.

  April crossed her arms and rolled her eyes at Ezra, as if now—seconds after he’d apologized—they were already commiserating over the behavior of a teenage boy in need of discipline.

  “I’m good.” Ezra left. He walked down the steps without turning back. What hadn’t he fucked up? Sybil was gone, and now, as a consolation prize, his best friend was shacked up with the only other girl he’d been intimate with since the afternoon his mother died.

  Of all things, he didn’t want to think about that, so he didn’t, and somehow it worked. Maybe Bryce was rubbing off on him. He walked down the side street back on to the main drag. He passed the open windows of a hookah bar and breathed in the smell of incense. For a moment, he wondered about Maria, whether she knew about all of this. Probably not. Why else would Bryce be having a crisis in there? But soon she would know. Bryce would never tell her on his own, of course, but April would make him. Or if he resisted, she’d just tell Maria herself. She’d already revealed herself to Ezra.

  Maria was probably at the hospital that very moment, tending to her patients, too caught up in the care of the sick and dying to spare a thought for what was happening at her fiancé’s apartment with her good friend. Ezra felt a bit of anger at the injustice of it all. If anyone deserved more, it was her.

  The whistle of airbrakes interrupted his thoughts. A bus pulled up next to him and a couple of teenagers hopped out. For the hell of it he got on and found a seat near the back, in front of a guy with dreadlocks. The bus hissed and began moving. Ezra watched the shop-lined city blocks pass, bright with neon. Pleather seat cushions stuck to his shirt. He was soaked from both drunken sweat and the miles he’d walked since first seeing Sybil and Grant in the window.

  The bus slowed to a stop. On stepped a woman with hair dyed the color of snow. She was wrapped in dark stretchy workout shorts that barely reached her thigh and a pink tank top of the same poly-something-fabric as her shorts. She strutted down the middle of the bus as if it were a catwalk, spun around, and sat across the aisle from Ezra.

  She removed her sunglasses and began playing with her phone. Her features were loud, every one of them: skin pulled back from her eyes, skin pulled up from her forehead, pulled back by her jaw, giving everything a plastic sheen. Her eyebrows were absent save a few graphite swipes, nose carved from a bar of soap, lips off the dime shelf of a magic shop. In the faces of film industry beauties there was typically one dominant physical feature, maybe two, around which the rest of the more common facial traits were composed. This woman’s face seemed ready to burst from all the amplification.

  Ezra wondered whether anyone was ever really happy with their lot in life. He’d wondered this before, many times, probably been ordered to wonder it from the pulpit. But he was still drunk and the question seemed profound. Maybe his mother was right: everyone was blessed with deep caverns of need that nothing of this earth could fill, and that emptiness pushed them to do terrible things.

  “What the fuck are you looking at?” the woman asked, head cocked sideways.

  Ezra hadn’t realized he’d been staring. He opened his mouth to apologize but was distracted by bright a facade outside. He saw a name in lights: Sybil Harper. He yanked on the wire hanging across the window. The driver pulled over and the bus jolted to a stop. Ezra stuffed a few dollars into the slot and the doors hissed open.

  He rushed to the booth, paid, and found a seat in the back-left row of the theater. There weren’t many people inside, and they were all spread out.

  The lights went down. With each additional preview that passed, Ezra’s insides began to fold and fold and fold until he felt like one tight, tiny, origami swan—these were all NC-17 flicks or straight-up pornos. It now made sense that everyone was spread out. The room was filled with people covered in hats and hoods.

  Finally, the music cued and there she was, his love, that small, beautiful little knob in the center of her nose illuminated by a million tiny pixels. The shot panned out, showing her sunbathing on a lawn chair next to a large, Romanesque pool.

  The next shot was the face of a guy wearing a T-shirt so tight it looked painted. He was watching her, hammer in hand, from the roof of the pool house.

  Ezra laughed. A few people looked over, but who cared? It was as though this was all some kind of elaborate set-up. What if, without realizing it, this entire week Ezra had been part of a reality show starring Sybil Harper and Grant Hudson? There might be cameras recording him this very moment.

  And this scene? He could see it now: a pool boy sleeping with Sybil Harper gets dumped by Sybil Harper and goes to see a movie about a pool boy who sleeps with Sybil Harper and then gets dumped by Sybil Harper.

  God, this was rich. A part of him hoped he was being filmed. At least then the whole world would see how fucked up things really were. Would anyone bother to watch it? Of course! The real question was whether anyone would actually care.

  The camera flipped to a shot inside the pool house. Sybil surprised the guy while he was changing his clothes, showing his impossibly carved abs.

  “I’ve seen you watching,” Sybil said to the silverback on screen. Her smooth chin dimpled and they began disrobing. The piano tinkling gave way to the string section, and then the horn section, until finally a pulsing bass and drumbeat flanked the orchestra as the couple fell to the ground in a perfectly managed pile of lust.

  Ezra unzipped his pants, gritted his teeth, and went to work. He
was furious. She’d made him into a piece of meat. She’d played him like the shitty part she was playing now on-screen. And all the things she’d told him! Wanting to be seen for who she really was? Understood? Not admired, but loved? No. He’d loved her, but not anymore. She would no longer be human to him. He’d make certain of it, right here and now.

  He heard a rustling behind him and turned to find a flashlight glaring in his face.

  “What the fuck, man?” A theater usher. The flashlight beam fell on Ezra’s crotch.

  Ezra jumped from his seat and pushed the usher to the ground. He ran up the aisle and out of the theater.

  FIFTEEN

  A replay of the NBA Finals from seasons before played in the dark on Ezra’s television in the pool house and Grant Hudson didn’t mind. He’d seen every minute of this game already from courtside seats, but change was afoot in real life, and when change was afoot he liked his television how he liked his employees: with no surprises.

  Until tonight, he would have said he preferred his wife this way too, and Sybil had always complied. But now he found it refreshing that she’d finally stepped out. Here he was, alone in the pool house, watching his gardener’s television, 9mm pistol loaded and resting on his midseam, waiting for the fun to start.

  The filming over the last week or so in Vancouver had been a metaphor for his life of late. Half of the crew was new and insecure, so Grant had been forced to make more decisions than usual, ones far below his pay grade. Explaining things that people already knew but were too scared to take responsibility for? Tedium. It didn’t used to be like this. Early in his career—before the successes—he had to fight his staff in order to get them to do what he said.

  If only he’d have known at the time how much more fun that was. But could he really blame it on the staff? Were they not just nerve endings of a greater system? Sure, he’d become too powerful for his position. But the real problem was this: there was so little juice. Sure, there were tens, sometimes hundreds of millions on the line, but even that had become commonplace. And after so many years of trying to pry wallets open, the public finally trusted him and his taste, so the people who had money to spend on such things trusted him as well. The wallets were his and success was predictable.