I gasped as Pete slammed an elbow into my ribs, and then doubled over as he landed a solid punch to my stomach, but I didn’t let go. His shirt was no longer over his eyes, but I still had it wrapped around one of my hands, preventing him from getting up from his knees to his feet.
“Let go!” he screamed, punching me again.
I grunted and pulled down harder, then rolled my hip so that we both flopped sideways. It had to be four o’clock now, I was sure.
I looked up in order to find out exactly where the second hand was, but what I saw instead was Mom, pushing the table aside to stand next to Dad, the green-and-black hammer now in her hand.
All the fight went out of me as I saw what was coming: the hammer arcing up as Mom lifted her arm. Pete felt my body go slack and turned his head then, too, so that both of us were looking at Dad, so that both of us saw the twin points of pure white light appear in his eyes.
The sparrows arrived at that very moment, banging against the back window with their feet and their wings.
“Wait!” Pete and I both yelled, our voices sounding as one.
Mom tried to check her swing, but the momentum was too strong to counter. She couldn’t stop the motion completely, just slow it down. The hammer fell, struck glass, but gently, oh so gently.
There was the tiniest plink sound, and then nothing for the space of a second or two, long enough for a spark of hope to flash into being inside me.
The two spots of light began to grow, while outside the sparrows kept shrieking and whistling and chirping. Songbirds they might have been, but this wasn’t song; it wasn’t anything anyone anywhere had ever heard from the beaks of birds. It was a message borne by a flock unequipped to deliver it, and yet somehow I understood. Somehow I knew that what they were saying was simply this: He’s with us. He’s here.
A tiny crack appeared at the point of impact, and began to lengthen, branching down like tree roots or lightning, like so many tributaries from a river as black as night.
I didn’t know where to look, at the cracks now racing wildly across Dad’s surface, or at the intensifying light that was spreading out from his eyes as well, following those very same fissures of potential destruction, and giving the impression of a jet-black statue weeping tears of pure white radiance.
Time slowed. For a moment it might have stopped altogether. I breathed, in and out, in and out, again and again as fate flipped a coin to make up its mind, and then all at once the world returned to real time. The cracks reached the tips of Dad’s fingers and the ends of his toes, a thousand tiny fault lines with nowhere left to branch to.
The shattering was instantaneous. Dad was there and then he wasn’t. The world skewed sideways. The birds fell silent.
I watched as the last few fragments rained down from the edge of the chair to the floor below. For a moment I was too stunned to move, but then I leaped up and ran to him, collapsing to my knees and grabbing up handfuls of the glass, the fragments so small and fine that they simply poured through my fingers like sand. The light, of course, was gone now.
Mom was weeping, Pete just standing there with his mouth open, disbelieving.
I stared at him, while above me the muffled sound of the radio through the floor abruptly stopped, its sudden absence a sharp reminder of what had brought us here to this moment.
Hatred filled me as I got to my feet, hatred and blame. Pete was no longer my brother or my enemy; he was simply a target for the guided missile of my rage, a target that must be destroyed. I leaped across the room toward him. I’m not sure my feet ever touched the ground. He could have stepped back or sideways, or simply raised his arms to block me, but he didn’t. He put up no resistance at all as we fell to the floor. Nor did he try to fight back when I closed my fists and began to throttle him, my jaw clenched so hard that my molars should have cracked.
“Go on, Ben,” he told me as I pummeled him. “Go on.”
But then I couldn’t. His refusal to fight back just made it all sour, and as quickly as it had come, the hatred was gone.
Mom pulled me off him and tried to hold me, my knuckles bloody against her dress. I struggled free of her grasp, grief settling like a ten-pound rock in the pit of my stomach. I felt sick, feverish. I had to get out of there while I still could, before adrenaline left me spent and weeping upon the floor.
I ran.
Out the front door and down the street, tears building in my eyes, blurring everything. It didn’t matter. The world wasn’t worth seeing anyway. Not anymore.
FORTY-NINE
I didn’t stop running until I reached the big maple tree in the corner of Sunskill Park, at which point I started climbing, the limbs so familiar to me that I didn’t even have to think about where I was putting each hand or foot.
Pete and I had climbed this tree more times than I could remember, and unlike the one in our backyard, it required almost no effort at all. The first branches were low, and the middle ones spaced close together. The only real challenge it offered was in height. Pete sometimes dared to go almost three-quarters of the way to the top, whereas I always stopped just below that point, not trusting the limbs beyond to reliably hold my weight.
Today I would test them; today I would venture all the way up to where a checkered kite had been lodged for years, the fabric attached to its frame now tattered and torn by so many seasons of wind and rain and snow. Today I would free the kite—as Pete had tried to on many occasions—and not even think about the dangers in doing so… at least not until afterward, when the flex of the branches beneath me finally began to register in my grief- and anger-addled brain.
One of the branches actually broke off below me, but I managed to land on another as I fell, my hands sliding along the trunk, which was hardly even trunk-like this high up.
The close call sent a shiver of panic through me, and forced me to lower myself farther and find a thick branch to sit on while I waited for my hands to stop shaking and my nerves to settle. The sound of the sparrows outside our window wouldn’t leave my mind, and neither would the sight of those bright white veins, branching out from Dad’s unseeing eyes. It all kept repeating inside my brain, but not like a proper memory. It was hazy around the edges, like something I had dreamed or simply made up. Like an illusion some hypnotist planted there. In my heart, though, I knew it was true.
I’m not really sure when the sky started clearing. Somehow I didn’t notice the change until it was complete, with unbroken blue stretching out as far as I could see in every direction. I had gotten so used to there not being color above me that it seemed strangely oversaturated now, almost to the point of not looking real. I could hardly believe that anything in the world could even be so blue. I sat there blinking in awe of it.
Pete appeared at the base of the tree shortly thereafter. He picked up the tattered kite and looked it over as if it were a relic from some bygone age, which in a way I guess it was. He set it back down and said to me, “I’m coming up.”
He did, but he took his time, plotting his way with the same timid care that I always took. For a moment we had switched roles, with me being the kite-chasing daredevil and him the cautious follower. He settled into his usual spot, which today was just below me instead of just above.
I waited for him to say something, for him to tell me that the shattering had worked, but it would be hours and days yet before either of us really knew that for sure. Pete didn’t say anything. He just sat there with me in silence, his lip all busted up and swollen, his left eye looking like mine had after the tea shop.
“It could have been different,” I finally said to him.
He nodded without looking up at me. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess.”
The leaves on the maple were just beginning to turn, summer green giving way to autumn reds and yellows. Pete had a habit of picking leaves and tearing them along their veins, an absentminded dissection that resulted in a slow rain of forage for the many ants that lived in a colony at the base of the tree trunk. Pete never too
k notice of the ants (except when they crawled on him), but it didn’t matter; the industrious insects benefitted from his destruction all the same.
He reached out now as I’d seen him reach out before, only this time he paused just short of a leaf, and then gently drew his hand back.
FIFTY
A whole month went by without incident, and then two. We finally began to allow ourselves to believe that it was over, that we could let go of our lingering dread and try to move on, however difficult that might be.
A new pastor arrived from out west to take over at church, his youthful energy and lively sermons a sharp contrast to Pastor Nolan’s more solemn demeanor. The new organ player was young as well, and almost seemed to bounce as she fingered the keys. I tried not to think about all the empty spots on the pews, or the empty spots in the hearts of those who remained. Mrs. Crandall still came every Sunday, but just on her own, as Mr. Crandall was no better off now than when he first returned. The shattering might well have worked, but those who had come back before had clearly lost something that couldn’t be returned, no matter how large the sacrifice.
School started up again just after Christmas. Lester Messam had a permanent limp now and seemed diminished in his brother’s absence, and although there were times when both Pete and I caught him looking at us out on the playground or in the hallways, he hadn’t yet tried to exact any sort of revenge. Maybe he was just biding his time, but after everything that had happened during the glass plague, it’s possible he just lost his nerve. I wasn’t really worried either way. I heard that Lester was living with his uncle now, and that he’d lost his father during the dark days, too, but not from the shattering. James Messam had apparently drank himself into the grave shortly after Lars disappeared and didn’t come home again (on the day of the fire). I hoped that, for Lester’s sake, his uncle was a better man than his dad had been.
A shortage of teachers meant that some of our classes had to be taught by volunteers. Mom decided she should be one of them. There were times when she still got anxious, and times when she still felt the need to take a step back, but for the most part she was getting through it. The guilt and sadness that I feared might cripple her was instead being channeled into a gift of pure generosity, which would have filled Dad’s heart with gladness. I imagined him smiling at the sight of her standing there at the chalkboard, an eraser in one hand and a pointer in the other. The glass plague might have passed her over, but she was nevertheless transformed.
Holga returned in February, with a U-Haul trailer packed full of her belongings and multiple crates of tea, as well as a healthy supply of salty black licorice.
In early March, a huge flock of Bohemian waxwings visited our yard. For three days in a row, thousands of them came to feed in our mountain ash tree. They tossed the frozen berries into the air and swallowed them whole; they hung upside down and picked them like hungry acrobats; sometimes they fed them to each other, the berries passed gently from one bill to the next.
Mom and I watched from below, while Pete ran in circles around us and tried his best to get a few good pictures. A photography project for art class had opened his mind to a whole new world.
Nobody talked about the shattering. Nobody celebrated the fact that it had worked. Life simply went on.
There was no mention anywhere of anyone changing like Dad did, with veins of pure white light branching out from the blackness. He would have been the first, I believed—a soul claimed by darkness and carried away by crows, and then rescued by a host of fearless sparrows.
I believed this, but I could never know for sure, could never prove it, so I had to let it go. I had to accept that the plan had worked, and that Pete had been right all along. I had to forgive him, just as I had to forgive Mom for taking his side, for not trusting in me. I had to forgive them because we were a family, and there’s nothing more important than family.
Our sparrows resumed being sparrows and never left us again, all except for one female with decidedly angelic wings. I hadn’t seen the leucistic bird since the day that we lost Dad for good, and while it’s perfectly reasonable to think that a predator might have gotten her—either our merlin or a visiting sharp-shinned hawk—somehow I just didn’t buy that. I’d always thought of the white-winged anomaly as being Mom’s special bird, but maybe it was Dad that she was here for all along. I like to imagine she’s with him still, and that maybe she helped him to get where he needed to go.
And as for the voice on the radio, he never did reveal who he was or where he was broadcasting from. The station simply went silent after the shattering, or rather it returned to static, which, as Dad had once explained to us, was actually the sound of the universe, the white-noise echo of all the energy released at the moment of the big bang, at the very instant of our creation. A voice from the beginning of time, I guess you could say.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I think sometimes in life we need to take a step back in order to move forward. Such was the case with this book. After an inspired start, I soon lost my momentum, and then my faith in myself and in my future as a writer. So I took a step back, and threw myself into learning about and photographing birds. I could never have known it at the time, but this new passion would ultimately fuel my old one and provide me with just the synergy I needed to bring a stagnating work-in-progress back to life. I think birds are amazing creatures and that we should all be inspired by them.
Thank you to my awesome agent, Ali Herring, for your wisdom, your kindness, and all your hard work. I’m forever grateful. Thank you to Michael Strother, Deirdre Jones, and the entire team at LBYR for turning this dream into a reality. Your enthusiasm and your vision in developing this project have meant the world to me.
Thank you to all the short-fiction editors who have published me over the years. Like a lot of writers, I cut my teeth on the short stuff before ever tackling a novel, and I feel that this has been integral to my growth as a storyteller. This particular novel was actually built upon the bones of one of my short stories.
Thank you to all my friends for your continued positivity and support, especially Ross Kimble, for the early encouragement and help. Thank you to my family for cheering me on and for believing that I had this in me. Thanks especially to my mom, whose tearful reaction to my very first short story told me I was on the right path, and also to my siblings, without whom I would not have had the experience to draw from in capturing the essence of Ben and Pete’s relationship.
Most of all, thank you to Anna, for being my rock and the love of my life since we were just a couple of kids way back in high school. By turns you have been my best friend, my beta reader, my sounding board, and the person who has picked me up whenever I’ve fallen. You’ve seen me at my best and at my worst, and yet somehow your faith in me has never wavered. I could never have gotten here without you.
The Absence of Sparrows Page 20