The Hummingbird War

by Joan Shott

  “Lilly, what is it?” I asked. I almost wanted her to have taken a drink or five or six. I prayed she was imagining it all. And I hoped more than anything she wasn’t doing all this to control me. I tightened my hand around hers.

  “Will Matthew ever forgive himself for what happened? If I hadn’t told those boys to watch out for each other.”

  “Lilly, are you sick? Do you need to see a doctor?”

  “I’ve always known the big things in my life before they happened. That’s why I was the one who took care of you the day you walked into the meeting. I knew when I saw you my life would change and so would yours. You got better, and now it’s me who needs help. I have cancer. I know it.”

  She was talking like a crazy woman, telling me I’d changed her life when it was the other way around and then diagnosing herself with cancer. “Come on, Lilly. Let’s get out of here.” I led her out into the daylight.

  She held onto my arm and walked slowly, taking each step with deliberateness as if she was walking towards the edge of a cliff.

  She stopped and looked at me. “I hope you’ll find it in your heart to forgive me.”

  “I’ve had time to think, and I remembered something you told me the first time I met you.”

  “What was that?” She looked up at me, and I saw Matthew in her eyes, her face. I couldn’t believe I’d never seen the strong resemblance before.

  “You told me if anyone reached out for help in your meetings, you would be there. And that anyone happened to be me. You said you were responsible for me. It’s my turn to take care of you. Now I’m responsible for you. I love you, Lilly.”

  “You are the daughter I’ve always wanted.” She squeezed my arm with the weight of a sparrow.

  I had to do something to let her know I needed her as much as she needed me. I knew the difference between the things I could change and the things I could not. “How about driving up to the house on the island with me tomorrow? To help me celebrate my birthday?” I said, standing at the corner and looking up at the red light, waiting for it to turn green.

  Her eyes grew as wide as a child’s. “Oh yes, it’s your birthday. Of course I’ll go.”

  “Maybe we can get to know each other all over again, considering how much things have changed.” The light turned green, and I led her across the street, holding onto her with every ounce of courage I had. “Come on, Lilly. We’re both going to get a second chance.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  I turned onto the road to Oak Harbor and drove to my father’s garage. Lilly waited in the car while I went into the office. He was busy with Rev. Cartwright when I peeked into the repair bays; scrutinizing something under the hood of a car I was pretty sure was one of those little Hondas. I could just imagine my father telling the man something like, whydja go and buy one of these Jap cars?

  His pride was cracking under the weight of changes to his world he didn’t like and couldn’t stop. And the reverend was looking at my father as if he was nothing but a pain in the neck, even if he was the best mechanic on the island.

  Danny walked up to me, wiping his hands on a rag as he always did even if his hands weren’t dirty. “Hey, Diane. You here to see your father or me?” He laughed at his own joke, although I knew he’d melt on the spot if I told him I’d come to see him.

  “He’s busy. I’ll call him later.”

  “You might want to wait a while. Let his whole thing blow over some.”

  “What thing?”

  “You being on television in Chicago and all. He was pretty upset. Mae told him about it on accident. She’s always got that TV on in the diner, and she saw you.”

  The hurt in Danny’s eyes was obvious. He knew I’d gone to Chicago with Matthew. I hadn’t told my father I was going to Chicago because I didn’t want to hear him tell me I was wrong; wrong about the SDS and wrong about Matthew.

  “I’d do anything to help you, Diane. I’ll try to smooth things over. He’s a good guy once he has a chance to think ‘bout things.”

  Lilly and I drove the fifty minute trip from the garage to my house in near silence. She rested her head against the window and seemed to sleep as I inventoried each thing I’d done that took me one more step away from my father. I’d moved out of the shadow of his protection and was left, like a fledgling, relying on my own shaky wings. Lost in my thoughts, the road to my house came up suddenly, and I almost missed the entrance. The Volvo wobbled down the dirt driveway, scattering stones in its wake. Crows flew to the tallest pines.

  “This is a lovely property, Diane,” Lilly said, as she scanned the landscape out her window.

  I pulled the car close to the front door. Tips of snow still frosted the highest peaks across Puget Sound, and the sun seeped through the clouds and tinted them a seductive shade of pink. I carried Lilly’s bag into the house and put it in the bedroom. “You can sleep in here, and I’ll take the couch.”

  “I don’t want to drive you out of your own bed.”

  “The couch is comfortable. It’s where I usually sleep.” It held fewer memories than the bed I’d shared with Bobby.

  Lilly looked around the room and picked up a photograph from a table. It was the wedding picture Matthew had seen the last time he’d been here. “My, but Bobby was a handsome man. Those men in their uniforms, hmmm?” She pressed the photograph to her chest as if she were remembering something and then held the photograph at arm’s length again. “They surely can turn your head. You look like a girl in this picture. You’ve changed so much.”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “Speaking of men in uniforms, I have a birthday gift for you,” she said. She put the wedding photo back on the table, reached into her bag, and handed me a package.

  I untied the ribbon and tore the paper. It was a photograph of a familiar-looking young boy. “Is this Matthew?”

  “He was around twelve when that was taken. He played little league and wanted more than anything to be the next Mickey Mantle,” she said.

  I looked at the picture of the young Matthew in his pin-striped jersey, a bat slung over his shoulder. He seemed more serious than a little boy should have been; his expression of determination stronger than needed for a homerun. It was as if he was trying to escape something tugging at him just out of sight.

  “Thank you, Lilly. This is the best present you could have given me.” I put the picture, my small connection to Matthew’s past, on the fireplace mantle. “Usually my father is the only one who remembers my birthday,” I said, walking through the house, opening the windows. “He always gives me the same thing, though.”

  Outside the kitchen I noticed the hummingbird feeder was empty. “My birds must be upset with me. Dad usually fills their feeders once a week, but I guess he forgot.” I don’t know who I thought I was fooling. My father hadn’t spoken to me since the 4th of July when he’d stumbled in on my dinner with Matthew. I was pretty certain after finding out I’d gone to Chicago without telling him, he wouldn’t give a thought to whether my birds had food or if it was my birthday. But it wasn’t the end of the world for the birds, since my garden was still full of salvia and fuchsia, penstemon and honeysuckle. I was the one who was disappointed.

  I set the kettle on the stove and made a new jar of food, mixing sugar in hot water until it dissolved and cooling it down with cold water before I filled the feeder. When I walked outside one of the green female Anna’s hummingbirds clicked at me from the safety of the overgrown rhododendrons. She zipped a straight line to the feeder as soon as I hung it on the hook and began to sip. Lick, would be the better word, her long tongue flicking into the syrup in a blur of motion. “I won’t leave you like that again,” I said.

  The little bird eyed me contemptuously as if she knew I would never be able to keep that vow.

  Was I being foolish to make a promise to a hummingbird? “No, I promise. I’ll always care for you.”

  Lilly walked out of the back door, and the Anna’s clicked a warning at her, too. She folded her arms acro
ss her chest and waited while it continued to drink. The breeze blew strands of her silver hair across her careworn face. “Patience. You have to have a great deal of patience to study birds. I never have had much of that precious commodity myself until recently. My meetings have taught me some. We call it serenity.”

  “You have to care about them to develop patience,” I said. Care about them the way I cared for her, forgiving her nature, her meddlesome behavior. It was just the way they were, Lilly and the hummingbirds, and I couldn’t change them, but I could learn what to expect.

  Dinner came from tomatoes salvaged from my garden and pasta from the pantry. We drank bottles of Crush orange soda on the back porch and watched the sun set behind the serrated blue peaks of the Olympics. The meadow at the edge of the cliff disappeared into the darkness. We moved indoors to listen to my mother’s old record albums and talked over the comforting voice of Johnny Mathis.

  “I hope I can handle the work in the office,” I said, as the last chords of Chances Are faded away. “I wasn’t sure there would be a SDS office after what happened…with Amelia’s threat to fire Matthew.”

  “Ah, that girl always struck me as trouble, but I never thought she would do what she did. I tried to warn him about her. Thank God, he’s going to be all right.”

  I wanted to tell her I believed Amelia had been trying to hurt me, but I held my tongue. It was a subject I wanted to avoid. Lilly’s pronouncement that she believed she had cancer was what I wanted to talk about.

  “Can you tell me why you think you have cancer? If you haven’t seen a doctor, how would you know?” I asked.

  “I spent months at my son’s bedside and felt his cancer in the air, in his touch. I watched him suffer day and night. It’s something you can sense, smell. Like a fire miles and miles away.” A single tear rode down her face.

  “You’re going to see a doctor. I’ll take care of you.”

  “I’d hoped you’d say that. I know you’re upset with me for keeping my relationship with Matthew a secret.”

  “Why did you do it?” I thought again about what I’d heard when I’d stepped in at the tail end of the AA meeting the day before. About the things you can’t change. But there were those things you could change, and Lilly knew once I’d been malleable. I didn’t feel that way anymore.

  She ran her slender fingers through her hair. “I wanted you to take the job with him. I was sure he’d fall in love with you. You’re everything he’s ever wanted. You’re an honest person, Diane. You have the kind of principles rooted in your heart I admire. I knew it the first time we talked about…about Bobby. I thought I could just give you a little push in Matthew’s direction, but my plan took on a life of its own. Please forgive me. My son needs someone who will bring peace to his life. He needs you.”

  I blushed at the accolades I wasn’t sure I deserved. “I’ve never known of a mother who thought any girl was good enough for her son.”

  “I only hope he’s good enough for you. God knows, I tried with all of them.”

  I thought it an odd comment coming from someone who had married a powerful, famous man, probably had more money than she knew what to do with, had traveled the world, and had a son who was worldly and educated. Here I was just struggling to pay my bills and get through another year at the state university. “I’d like to think we’d have found each other without your help, but I guess I’ll never know.”

  “Can we start over?”

  Maybe I was the one who was being unfair. What I saw as advantages may have been the very weaknesses that led to her problems. Maybe those were the forces Matthew was fighting, too. How many times had my father told me that money can’t buy happiness? I took her hands and looked into her weary, gray eyes. “I forgive you, but Matthew and I can take it from here.”

  We said good night, and I turned off the lights, all but the one small lamp by the couch. I flipped through the albums to find the one I’d been thinking about all day. I found the Sinatra recording of My Funny Valentine and turned the volume to low, lifted the needle, and dropped it on the record where the song began. I wanted to recapture the memory of the night in Chicago when Matthew and I had danced to its smooth and easy sentiments. As if love would be easy and life a smooth ride. But, we were together. He said he loved me. I’d proven how much I cared for him, body and soul. I should be happy. I should be at peace.

  I tugged my sweater around me and climbed onto the couch, crawling under an old, wool blanket to ward off the chill. I’d grown used to the cool of the sea air on summer nights, but tonight I was frozen to the bone. I’d given up the warm and humid summer of Chicago when I stepped off the plane into the northwest dampness yesterday, but the uneasiness sending its chilly fingers down my spine came from something else. Maybe Lilly wasn’t the only one who could feel change before it happened, like the dropping pressure of a weather shift.

  I pulled the covers over my head and fell asleep the way I had for years before everything began to change in my life; I drifted off to the soulful voice of Old Blue Eyes and slept wrapped in dreams I couldn’t hold on to and, most likely, didn’t want to.

  *****

  I woke with the sun. A glance out the kitchen window and I was reminded it was time to tend the perennial beds. I gathered stalks of spent, white phlox at the back of the border, tidied up the black-headed rudbeckia, their yellow petals now scattered on the ground. I cut a few blue hydrangea branches and was arranging them in a vase when Lilly stepped into the kitchen.

  “Good morning, Diane. What a good night’s sleep. The sea air and the sound of the waves were like a lullaby.” She kissed me on the cheek.

  “Some days I never want to leave,” I said, as I pulled plates and cups off the shelves and put them on the table. “Would you like some coffee?”

  “Yes, please. I know you don’t like it, but if you have some…”

  “I have it here for my father when he comes, but I’ve never been a coffee drinker. Matthew teases me about my shortcoming.”

  She smiled at me, tucking her chin into her collar like a young girl would. “If you use some cream and sugar you might grow to like it,” she said. “Work up to the change slowly. I know these things.”

  “You know these things?” I gathered plates of sliced fruit and a cup of coffee with milk and sugar as she suggested, and pushed the screen door to the side yard open with my hip. She followed me outside.

  “Ever since I gave up alcohol, something has changed in me. I can see things in a way I never could before. I sense things before they happen.”

  We sat in the Adirondack chairs, using their wide arms as tables. “Like a psychic?” I asked. I wondered if what she was experiencing was clarity of thought since ridding her body of its alcoholic delusions rather than any special powers.

  “Not a psychic. It’s a powerful feeling and usually it means something good is going to happen or something bad. I’ve been sensing both pulls, good and bad, lately.” She reached over to pick a dandelion gone to seed. She brought it to her face, studied it, and blew the feathery, white seed heads into the air. The wind picked them up and they pirouetted across the yard to become another generation among the blue wild rye.

  The Olympics to the southwest hovered above a collar of tender cumulus as if they were suspended in the air, as illusory as a backdrop to a stage show. Maybe the rare view of our beautiful mountain range, unpredictable like the clouds that framed it, would take her mind off the bad feelings, the good feelings; whatever it was she was imagining that led her to make such outlandish statements I almost believed.

  I pulled my sweater closed and folded my legs underneath me on the chair. Lilly draped a small, wool blanket across her lap and held the coffee mug tight in her hands. The day promised to be fair, the wind coming from the south and turning the sea the color of jade and speckling the surface with small whitecaps like a Swiss-dot skirt.

  “What would you like to do today?” I asked. I sipped from the mug in my hand. The taste of the coffee was
better with the cream and sugar. She was right.

  Lilly tried to brush her hair away from her eyes as the relentless wind blew it back. “Do you have any gardening work I could do?”

  “Work? You should rest.”

  “Gardening is the most restful thing I can imagine.”

  I thought about the list of chores which grew longer each weekend I spent away from the island. “You could do a little weeding, and I have more plants that need to be cut back before the fall.” I pointed to different spots in the garden where the flowers from late spring were dying back. “I’ll cut back those perennials that are totally dried. The rest can wait until November.”

  I found an extra pair of gloves for Lilly, and we set to work attending to the neglected garden. As we weeded and trimmed, the birds soared back and forth to the feeders. I set out handfuls of peanuts on the back steps, and the stellar jays picked them up and flew to the roof of the shed to crack open the shells, the iridescent indigo crests of the birds’ heads raised in concentration. One of the jays swooped into the edge of the garden and buried a peanut, his cache for less hospitable days down the road if he could remember the hiding spot.

  The Anna’s hummingbirds clicked from the pines if we moved too close to their feeder. A male buzzed so near I felt the breeze from his wings, and his face flashed hot-pink plumage to warn me. I stood corrected and backed away. I heard another hummingbird buzz close to my ear, coming from the opposite direction. The tiny rufous hummingbird, one of the visitors who’d arrived in spring for summer breeding, was defending her territory from the larger male Anna’s. Their vocal clicks filled the air as they soared into the sky like fighter jets, up until they were mere pinpricks of dark against the steely blue and white of the sky. They swept down in a fearless move. I raised my arms to shield my head, their maneuvers threatening even to me.

  “Don’t fight,” I said. “There are plenty of flowers for both of you.”