A lot stronger.
After we leave, Adrian drives to Baskin-Robbins, which is where we go when he wants to have a serious talk. His reason for going to an ice cream shop: “The sweet balances the serious.”
I don’t hold anything back and order a triple-scoop banana split with Rocky Road, bubble gum, and chocolate ice cream, strawberry and hot fudge syrup, and extra whipped cream, with almonds on top. Almonds are the closest thing they have to seeds. Adrian doesn’t think I can eat it all. I’m going to prove him wrong.
I dig my spoon into the almonds and whipped cream and push all the way down till I hit bottom, then open my mouth as wide as I can and shove everything in.
“I found a placement for you,” he says. “There’s always a chance it can become permanent.” Adrian likes to believe he’s giving me hope when he uses words like permanent.
But, synonyms for permanent are eternal, lifelong, enduring. The word and all its synonyms are tricks. There is nothing that is permanent.
What he really means by permanent is being adopted, but even if that’s what happens to me, getting adopted, it won’t matter. Once my wings unfold, I’m flying away.
Adrian orders a single scoop of vanilla with no toppings. “I won’t give up until we find a good home for you. You’re not alone, December.”
It’s part of his job to convince me things aren’t as bad as I think they are, or that everything’s going to be okay. He’s good at it. No matter how many foster homes I’ve been in, he tries to make me believe that the next one will be better.
The next one being better is not always true. I’d be hard to convince anyway. But I do believe in the possibility that each house will be my last, that my wings will finally unfold, and I won’t need Adrian to find me a “good home” anymore.
Adrian hasn’t taken one bite of his ice cream. He stares at it, and with his thumb and pointy finger squeezes the end of the pink spoon. “December, what do you think your life will be like ten years from now?”
What I want to say: Well, my wings should be really strong, and I’ll spend my days flying around the world, seeing every place there is to see. The end.
Instead, I don’t answer his question at all. “Did you know emperor penguins have the highest feather density of any bird? One hundred feathers for every square inch.” I try to get Adrian’s mind on something else. “It’s to keep them warm. You going to eat your ice cream?”
But my subject change doesn’t work. “I think you’d make a good scientist.” He points the pink spoon at me. “Seven or eight years from now you could be in college, and be studying … What do you call the study of birds?”
“Ornithology.”
“Yes!” Adrian lifts the spoon in the air like he’s won something. He smiles in victory. “Wouldn’t that be great? You would travel all over the world, studying different birds. Wouldn’t that be an amazing life?”
“It would be amazing.” I eat the last spoonful of whipped cream. Part of me thinks it really would be a good life, but the other part believes that this is what’s even more amazing:
After I jumped from the tree in front of Karen’s house, one of the EMTs checked to make sure I didn’t have any sprains or broken bones. She said, “You have a little blood on the back of your shirt. Can you hold it up so I can take a look?”
There’s always a quiet, a pause when people see the scar on my back. The EMT was no different. “You got scratched a little,” she said, her voice whispering from the shock of seeing the twisted skin that covers the space between my shoulder blades. I know if I examine my scar closely, I will be able to see an outline of wings.
“It’s just under your scar,” the EMT said. I’d felt where the scratch was. A tree branch didn’t cause it, though. It was caused by wings, beginning to break through my skin.
Here’s another thing that’s amazing: when I leaped from the tree, I was flying for six seconds. I counted, from the second my feet left the tree, to the second I started falling. “One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand, five one thousand, six one thousand.”
I take the last bite of my sundae. I’m better at talking in half-truths than Adrian. “It would be amazing to study birds for the rest of my life,” I say to him. But it would be more amazing to find my wings and fly.
Sometimes not telling the whole truth is the safest place to be. Plus, the thought of me going to college and having a normal life gives Adrian hope. Giving him hope makes him stop worrying about me, and he finally takes a bite of his ice cream.
4
Sometimes I practice holding my breath. Thirty-five seconds is my personal record. Birds have an advantage over humans. They have air sacs they use to keep air flowing through their lungs. Flying takes a lot of energy, so they need a lot of oxygen. I’ll need a lot of oxygen, too. If I practice holding my breath, it will help build my lung capacity, and more lung capacity equals more oxygen I can breathe in, which equals more energy.
It feels good to be away from Karen’s orange voice. I like this time between houses, riding in the car with Adrian, pretending we’re going to my flight tree, where he’ll drop me off and wish me “Safe travels.”
My new foster home is out in the country. To get there we drive down a road that goes along a river and, every once in a while, through cottonwood trees, I see the muddy water.
Adrian turns into a driveway. There’s a fence and pasture, but no cows or horses.
I can’t see the color of the house. There’s ivy growing over it. As we pull up and stop beside a green truck, I see river rock through the vines and leaves. The house is gray and brown with forest green trim.
There have been four houses I’ve lived in that have been painted a shade of brown, three a shade of green, three white, and one “canary” yellow. So far, I liked living in the canary yellow house best. It was easy to find, and I didn’t have to memorize the address. I just had to look for the bright yellow color.
I slide my daisy suitcase out of the back seat.
Adrian carries the other one, plain blue, that holds my clothes. I like that everything I own fits into two suitcases and a backpack. It makes leaving for someplace fast and efficient.
I don’t get butterflies in my stomach anymore. By now I’m used to standing outside a stranger’s house, waiting for them to let us in and show me to my bedroom.
Adrian knocks, and I listen for footsteps. A part of me wonders, What if those footsteps belonged to my real mom? She’d be the one opening the door, and she’d be holding a cake with a lit candle for every year she had missed one of my birthdays.
“I’m here. I’m here!” the woman’s voice almost sings.
Adrian told me her name. He also told me she lives by herself. I pictured an old lady with white hair, but Eleanor Thomas, my new foster mom, comes around the corner of the house wearing jeans covered in dirt and holding a shovel high in the air like she’s trying to chase us away. She’s wearing a brown cowboy hat, a brown vest, and brown rubber boots.
The saying “Never judge a book by its cover” is true, but the colors people wear have the same purpose as the color of birds’ feathers—either for camouflage or to get other birds to notice them. I’d say, right off the bat, Eleanor is trying to blend in with her surroundings.
“Hope you haven’t been standing here for too long. I was out back, trying to clean up the yard. I have a little garden. Planted asparagus, and it’s looking really good.”
If Eleanor’s voice was a color, it would be between midnight blue and turquoise. I know my shades of blue.
Having a voice that’s a shade of blue is a point in Eleanor’s favor, I guess.
“It takes a few years for asparagus to grow,” she says, “but mine will be ready this spring.”
That’s six months from now. I won’t be here. But I don’t like asparagus anyway.
“Asparagus is the favorite vegetable of the gods, you know.” Eleanor takes off her hat. Her hair falls over her shoulders. All the
layers and strands remind me of tree roots.
I don’t know what gods she’s talking about. Every house where I’ve stayed had different ways of believing in God, and that was fine with me. I’m not sure about believing in God, but if someone were to ask me what, or who, God is, I’d tell them God has something to do with winter branches and feathers, and would look just like Amelia Earhart.
“Would you like to see the house?” Eleanor reaches for my daisy suitcase, grabbing it before I do. “I can take this for you.”
Her voice is pretty, but I tell her, “I can get it myself.”
“Okay.” Instead of saying, “It’s no trouble,” and taking it anyway, she lets go of the handle. She leaves the suitcase for me to carry and makes a path of dirt footprints that lead to the front porch.
Part of being in a new foster home is getting a feel for the surroundings. Everything inside Eleanor’s house is a shade of brown, too, the walls, the furniture, and all the posters and photographs she has of cowboys, both men and women. Weird, she doesn’t have any pictures of family. Most people do, hanging in the living room or hallway. I would know. I always search them out and look for details. It’s usually in their eyes. Whether they seem happy, sad, or if they’re going to be mean like Wes and Linda. In every one of their wedding pictures, Wes had one of his fists clenched.
“You want to see your room?” Eleanor asks.
We walk down a short hallway. The room is bare except for a bed with white sheets and some blankets.
“I didn’t know what you liked so I just left it plain. Feel free to decorate the way you want.”
If I was staying for a long time, it would be nice to be surrounded by sky blue walls with white clouds and a tree painted on the ceiling. But I won’t be staying.
We follow Eleanor back out to the kitchen. It smells like maple syrup and coffee. The only thing that’s not brown in the kitchen is the green refrigerator. There’s a newspaper article hanging on the front of it. All I can see is a photograph of a red-tailed hawk and the title “Rehabilitation Center, a Haven for Injured Animals.”
Eleanor opens a door and takes us to the backyard. I’ve never seen anything like it. Five bird feeders hang from the porch, and two more hang from tree branches. Along paths leading around the yard are birdbaths. One shaped like a hand, one like a mushroom, another like a leaf, and two shaped like wings. Most of them don’t have any water.
“Would you like to help me, December?” Eleanor’s holding a green bucket. “I have to fill them every week during the summer. Water evaporates fast.”
As I fill two of the birdbaths, Eleanor and Adrian take care of the others. At the back of the yard, where one of the wing-shaped baths is, there’s a red shed. As I’m pouring water, I stand on my tiptoes and try to look through a window. It’s too dark inside to see anything. A blue jay lands on the roof of the shed, jerking its head side to side. It’s probably waiting for me to leave so it can take a bath. “All right, I’m going,” I whisper.
I take the bucket back to the porch and follow the path that leads to the other side of the yard. Eleanor and Adrian stand next to a garden. There are six rows of green-leafed vegetables. The last row are tomatoes, cherry, the only plant I know.
Eleanor picks a couple. “Would you like to taste one?” She holds the tomatoes out toward me.
“No, I don’t like vegetables that much.”
“I don’t know if I did either when I was your age.” Eleanor offers a tomato to Adrian. “But you can give gardening a try if you want. The maintenance part is not that much fun but the planting and harvesting is. So, whenever you want to come out here, you can. Sometimes I just sit here and watch things grow.”
That does sound like an okay thing to do because I’ve never sat and watched anything grow, except one time at school when we planted a sunflower in a plastic cup. We put them up on the windowsill in our classroom and checked on them every day. Through the plastic we saw white roots twisting and spreading at the bottom of the cup, and I thought that’s what my wings were doing, too, twisting and spreading around my bones and muscles, the roots growing strong.
Adrian bends down close to me. “How do you like it so far?”
“I just got here.”
“Eleanor knows a lot about animals. I didn’t tell you this before, but I met her a few months ago. I’d found a baby opossum that was injured. I took it to a place where they help hurt animals, and there was Eleanor.”
“Well, all I can say for sure right now is that I like her birdbaths.”
“That’s something, right?”
The blue jay I saw before is bathing in one of the wing-shaped baths. Scientists think birds take baths to keep their feathers healthy and functional. My mom left before she taught me how to take care of mine.
“I’m going to go now. I’ll check in with you two in a couple days, to see how things are going.” Adrian kneels down, but I’m still watching the blue jay. It fluffs its feathers and moves its wings in and out of the water. I know what Adrian will say next: “If you’re not okay, I’ll come get you.” He says it every time.
“This is going to be good.” He says this every time, too. And he’ll say it again because he believes if he keeps saying it, one of these days he’s going to be right.
We walk out a gate. Adrian shakes Eleanor’s hand. “If you need anything, please call.” He slides behind the steering wheel, and through the front window gives me a thumbs-up sign.
I hold up my thumb, and like I usually do, I think about how it might be the last time I see Adrian, because what if my wings decide to sprout from my scar. I won’t have a chance to tell him I’m leaving, won’t have time to even say goodbye. I’ll just fly away.
I wave until Adrian’s halfway down the driveway. Eleanor starts back toward the house before I do. As I turn to follow her, my eyes land on the back bumper of her truck. There’s a sticker, “California Association of Taxidermists,” and a picture of another red-tailed hawk next to the words.
I’m not sure what taxidermists and birds have in common, but I won’t be sticking around here long enough to find out. I look up to wave to Adrian one more time, but he’s gone.
I glance at the bumper sticker again. Both the words and the picture of the hawk are the same color, brown, just like everything in Eleanor’s house.
“I’ve been a member for a long time.” Eleanor nods toward the sticker. “It’s a hobby.”
“Oh.” I pretend like I’m not interested.
“Look!” Eleanor steps off the porch and points to the sky above the open field.
“It’s a hawk.”
“No.” Eleanor shields her eyes from the sun. “Turkey vulture.”
“They look majestic from here, but up close they’re ugly.”
“Guess ugly is how you look at the bird,” Eleanor says. “They’re amazing fliers. They can soar for hours without flapping their wings. And they’re scavengers. I like to call them ‘Nature’s Garbage Company.’ Even vultures have a purpose.”
So, Eleanor knows about birds. It’s at least one thing we have in common.
“Everything has a purpose,” Eleanor says, still watching the turkey vulture.
“Maybe.” I think she’s looking at “purpose” through rose-colored glasses, though. It’s not that everything has a purpose. It’s more like purpose is about survival. When eagles soar way up in the sky, as beautiful and majestic as they look, they’re searching for prey. And it’s cool vultures can kill bacteria and toxins in their stomach, but they eat dead things off the ground, and over evolutionary time their stomach had to become stronger in order to survive. So, survival is the real purpose of every living thing.
And that’s what I have to do now. Survive this foster home, like I’ve survived every other foster home, until I can fly away.
“It’s almost dinnertime. I’m going to get you something to eat.” Eleanor leans against the door, but doesn’t open it. She’s waiting for me to follow. She doesn’t want to leave me
by myself, out here, with all this open space and a sky wide enough to see mountains.
“I’m not hungry. I am tired, though. I’m just going to go to my room.”
I wait for Eleanor to say something like, You should really eat something. I went to the store and bought a lot of food, all for you, but instead she says, “I’m sure it’s been a long day. If you need anything, let me know.”
In my room, I open my two suitcases and take out my six blue T-shirts, six pairs of jeans, and one blue pullover sweatshirt. I tuck them in spaces between my bed and the wall. The second suitcase is filled with my orphaned dolls. I lay them around my pillow.
Birds use all kinds of things to build their nests: twigs, sticks, mud. Some use leaf strands, grass, and spider silk. The ruby-throated hummingbird decorates its nest with lichen to camouflage it from predators. What each bird uses depends on its environment.
Nests are meant to be temporary. Since I’m not a regular person, having a permanent home isn’t important, but birds don’t leave the nest until they can fly.
I take out Bird Girl and whisper-read, “At December’s house, the door was always left open. This is because December’s mom wanted her to be able to fly out if she needed to. December did fly, but she only flew from walnut tree to walnut tree in the orchard behind where they lived. Her mom warned December not to go far. She taught December that if the world found out what she was, it wouldn’t understand.”
Some birds can sleep with one half of their brains awake. It’s called unihemispheric slow-wave sleep. It allows birds to sleep with one eye open so they can watch for predators.
At every foster home I’ve been to, I’ve practiced falling into unihemispheric slow-wave sleep. I sit up in my bed, close one of my eyes, and wait for sleep to come.
5
“You ready to go?” I don’t recognize Eleanor when I walk into the kitchen the next morning. She’s dressed in a skirt and nice shirt that shines a little, and she’s wearing makeup—pink lipstick, mascara, and blue eye shadow.
Extraordinary Birds Page 2