Birds of Summer (2 page)

“Look out,” Sparrow yelled suddenly. “Here comes another one.” They were walking along the shoulder of the highway, and as the car came by heading north she jumped as high as she could into the air. It was a game called Jumping Shadows that Summer had started years ago, before it began to bother her to be stared at by the startled people in the passing cars. “You didn’t jump,” Sparrow said. “You got shadowed. You’re poisoned.”

“Stop it! I asked you a question. Are you going to answer it or what?”

Sparrow looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know for sure about seeing Marina. I thought it was for sure. But then all of a sudden she wasn’t there anymore, at the window, and I didn’t see her go away or anything. She looked in the window and said for me to come to her house right away, and then she wasn’t there anymore, and you said to lie down and quit pulling the covers off.”

“You were dreaming,” Summer said.

“Dreaming?” Sparrow’s rounded forehead puckered into a frown. She looked puzzled, bewildered, but then suddenly she jutted her chin and said, “But the troll wasn’t a dream. The troll was real and no-pretending.”

“Yeah,” Summer said. “You told me.” It seemed that Marina had a secret place inside a rotted-out tree stump halfway up the hill, and on Saturday Sparrow had sneaked off and gone there. Summer was away working at Crown Ridge Ranch at the time—Sparrow never tried to sneak off when Summer was around—and Oriole hadn’t even noticed that Sparrow had been gone, until she came back all excited about finding Marina’s troll doll.

“You sure it wasn’t there all along? I mean ever since she left?”

“No. No,” Sparrow shouted. “It wasn’t. I’ve been there before, and it wasn’t there. But then it was there, all of a sudden, right on a little shelf place where she always used to put it. Marina came to our secret place and put it there, not long ago. I know she did.”

“Couldn’t someone else have done it? Lots of people have those little troll dolls.”

“No! No! It was Marina’s troll. She braided its hair and drew it a moustache with a ball point. Its name was Adam.”

Summer smiled. Adam was Marina’s oldest and not favorite brother. Like Jerry, his father, Adam was dark and solemn and into telling everyone else how they should run their lives. He was also very ambitious and hardworking, which got him a lot of strokes from adult types. Nicky, who was two years younger, seemed to admire and hate Adam a lot, and Marina always said he was bossy. Undoubtedly she’d named the ugly doll after him to tease him. “Okay,” Summer said. “So the troll doll was Adam. There are still other ways it could have gotten on that shelf.”

“What other ways?”

Another car came by just then and Sparrow stopped to get ready to jump, and by the time she caught up with Summer she’d forgotten what she’d asked, which was just as well, since Summer really didn’t have an answer in mind. It didn’t seem likely that either Adam or Nicky, who were seventeen and fifteen, had been playing with dolls. And no other kids lived anywhere near the Fishers’ property.

The gravel road led up through the Fishers’ property, first passing the pathway to the McIntyres’ trailer and then fishtailing on up the mountain to the high plateau on which Jerry and Galya had built their new house and planted their organic gardens. By the time they turned off the highway onto the Fishers’ road, Summer was walking fast—tuning out Sparrow’s continuing chatter. An ominous tightness in her stomach was threatening to become something more unless, by hurrying, she managed to get home first. In the large grove of redwoods where she often stopped for a moment to breathe in the everlasting calm of the great trees, she only pushed on faster, until Sparrow had to trot to keep beside her. Beyond the redwoods the road became a narrow canyon, enclosed now by dense stands of fir and pine and an impenetrable undergrowth of madrone and wild rhododendron. Summer was jogging now, and in less than ten minutes they reached the beginning of the footpath. As she turned onto the path, Sparrow grabbed her hand and pulled her to a stop.

“Let’s go on up to the Fishers’,” she said. “I want to ask Galya if Marina is back. Come with me, Summer. Please.”

Summer jerked her hand away. “No. You know we can’t do that. You know what Jerry told us about not going up there because of the new dog. He said we shouldn’t ever go up there anymore unless they know we’re coming, so they can tie up the dog.”

“I’m not afraid of that dog.”

“Well, you ought to be. Jerry said it’s very dangerous. So you stay away from there. Do you hear me?” Summer felt angry—tense with the antsy feeling she always got when she was almost home—a feeling that lasted until she found Oriole and saw how she was and what she was doing.

“Well, then. Let’s tell them we’re coming,” Sparrow said brightly, as if it were the simplest thing in the world.

“How are we going to do that?” Oriole, quoting Esau, her old hippie guru, was always saying that going without a telephone was freeing yourself from the strangling umbilical cord of the establishment. But at the moment, a bit of establishment umbilical cord would certainly solve Sparrow’s problem.

“Look,” she told Sparrow. “Why don’t you sit here by the road and watch for Jerry’s truck. If you see him, you can tell him we want to visit and ask him to shut up the dog. Okay? But don’t you go up there by yourself. Promise?”

After Sparrow had promised and double-promised and seated herself on a stump, Summer started down the path that led to the trailer—“The McIntyre Trailer” as it was called, because Oriole McIntyre and her daughters had lived there for more than seven years, but it actually belonged to the Fishers, as did the land it sat on. Nicky had been born there in the tiny room that Summer shared with Sparrow, and he had always enjoyed telling Summer that she was sleeping in his bedroom. None of the teasing techniques in Nicky’s long and obnoxious repertoire made her angrier, and someday she was going to tell him exactly what he could do with his room and his trailer and every inch of the land it sat on.

In days of luxurious double-wides set in landscaped parks, the Fisher/McIntyre mobile home was definitely an anachronism. Galya and Jerry had hauled it to its present resting place, in a small clearing surrounded by dense forest, more than fifteen years before when the land still belonged to Galya’s old Russian grandfather. It hadn’t been until several years later, when Galya’s Dyedushka had died leaving her all his property, that she and Jerry had gotten married, built a huge new log house near Dyedushka’s old one, and started their organic farming business. The trailer had been deserted for a while and then loaned or rented to various lame duck projects of Galya’s, before Oriole and company arrived on the scene. Oriole and Summer and Danny it had been then, and the beginnings of Sparrow, although that hadn’t become evident until sometime later.

Summer had been only seven years old at the time, but she could remember the day they moved in clearly, and how pleased she’d been with the trailer. It must have been pretty decrepit even then, but she’d liked the flickering propane lights and tiny bathroom, and it must have seemed luxurious compared to some of the places they’d been living. She had clear memories of that first day and then nothing much until an afternoon several months later when Sparrow was born. Summer had sat on the steps listening and crying while Galya, who’d had some training as a midwife, helped Oriole give birth. Danny had still been there that day, because Summer remembered his coming out to talk to her on the steps, but he’d disappeared soon afterwards, as all of Oriole’s men seemed to do sooner or later. But by then Galya and Oriole had become very tight, and even more important, Galya’s baby Marina and Sparrow had become even tighter. So the Fishers went on letting Oriole live in the trailer, even when she didn’t pay the rent for months at a time. Oriole was always saying they were going to move, but they never did and probably never would, unless the Fishers threw them out. Or, unless Summer did something about it, which she definitely planned to do just as soon as she possibly could.

It was on the last turn of the trail, when the trailer suddenly came into view, that the uneasy tension in her stomach knotted into an ache, and something she’d been squeezing back into the far edges of her mind escaped in an overpowering flood. Careless of the rough surface of the path, she began to run at top speed, stumbling and nearly falling, her heart thudding against her ribs. She had reached the steps when Cerbe shot out of the bushes and raced her up the stairs, almost knocking her off her feet. Pushing him violently aside, she threw the door open—and stopped.

Oriole was standing by the sink peeling carrots. Her wild red hair was combed and tied back with a ribbon, and she was wearing the pleated blue skirt that Summer had bought for her at a church rummage sale—which she hardly ever wore.

“Hi, baby.” Oriole’s voice, always breathy and tremulous, was no more so than usual.

Summer closed the door carefully and slowly while she stilled her face and blanked her eyes. Then, as if bringing herself back with difficulty from an absorbing daydream, she turned back to face her mother. “Oh hi,” she said.

I
N THE BEDROOM SUMMER
put her books away, sat down on the edge of the bed and waited for the pain in her stomach to fade and for the ridiculous tremors to stop running up and down the backs of her legs. Clenching her fists until her nails pinched her palms and biting her lower lip, she punished her body for its crazy reactions. She had always blamed her body because her mind, at least the conscious and reasonable part of it, knew how stupid it was to get into such a state over nothing. Even years ago, when the sudden senseless attacks of anxiety had been almost a daily thing, she had never been certain just what it was she was afraid might have happened. In those days she had never even tried to figure it out—as if knowing what it might be could somehow make it come true. So she could only run home, shaking and panting like some kind of psycho, until she found Oriole and saw that everything was all right.

But for the same thing to happen now, when she was almost sixteen years old and able to reason—now when she was able to imagine the worst and know that it wouldn’t be the end of the world—for the same kind of mindless panic to return now was just too frustrating. In the last few weeks she’d almost begun to hope that she’d outgrown it. But it had always been worse when something had gone particularly wrong—like last night.

At first when Cerbe tried to nuzzle her hands away from her face, she shoved him back angrily; but then, when he whined mournfully, she peeked out from between her fingers.

Cerbe was a big mutt, probably half german shepherd and half husky. He had been named Cerbe, Cerberus really, after another dog—one Grant had adopted during the summer he’d lived with Oriole. That Cerberus had died when Summer was still a baby, but she’d heard a lot about him from Oriole’s “good-old-days” stories. So, when Cerbe had appeared on the scene, a half-grown pup that someone had dumped beside the road, he’d become Cerberus the second and had grown into a wooly bear of a dog, shaggy, smelly, and at the moment, dramatically woebegone. Cerbe had always been a ham.

Because his drooping tail and head and sad doggy eyebrows were just too much, she grabbed him roughly and pulled him against her chest, her fingers deep in the thick fur on each side of his broad body. With the top of his shaggy bear-shaped head pushing against her stomach, he nuzzled happily, crooning his love growl, and she growled back. Her face buried in his rough coat, she whispered insults about his looks and intelligence and the doggy funkiness of his smell—loving him fiercely for knowing how she felt about him no matter what she said or did. A few minutes later she went out, steady-handed, to talk to Oriole.

“Here. Have a carrot?” Oriole said. Not only had she combed her hair and dressed in her straightest clothes, but she was actually wearing shoes. Obviously she was sorry about what happened last night and was trying to make amends. That was Oriole for you—thinking a hair ribbon could solve the McIntyres’ problems. Talk about straightening the deck chairs on the
Titanic!

Summer accepted the vegetable peace offering and sat down at the table. Leaning on her elbows she crunched on the carrot and watched Oriole speculatively, waiting for the next gesture. The kitchen area was cleaner than usual. Most of the dishes were done except for the ones on the window ledge that had been there for so long they’d become semi-permanent, like a part of the decor. The cracked and chipped surface of the Formica sinkboard had been wiped, and it looked as if dinner was already underway. Putting a dish of raw vegetables on the table, Oriole sat down facing Summer.

“The pay was terrible, anyway,” she said. “When I realized what it would do to our food stamp allowance—”

“Mother!” She never called Oriole that except when she was really furious at her. “That’s not true, and you know it. We figured it all out, remember? Even with the reduction in the AFDC, we’d have been getting almost two hundred more …” She stopped suddenly and shrugged. The job was over—gone—lost forever, so it didn’t make any difference.

“Galya stopped by this morning and took me in to see about the food stamps. We’re not going to have to wait to be reinstated. That’s good news, isn’t it?”

“Great!” She could almost taste the bitterness in her voice. Oriole looked at her sharply.

“I don’t see why you’re so uptight about food stamps. Esau used to say that we should never be ashamed of having food stamps. Esau said food should be free to everyone, like air and sunshine, and it’s a crime that some people should have more than others just because they have more money. Esau always said, ‘Just smile sweetly right into the faces of people who glare at you in the checkout line because—’”

“Yeah, I know,” Summer interrupted. “I remember what Esau always said.”

“Do you really remember him? You were only about four when the Tribe broke up.”

“No. I don’t remember him. It’s hearing you tell about him that I remember.” Esau had been the leader and guru of a group of people that Oriole had lived with for a while in San Francisco. The Angel Tribe, as they’d called themselves, had inhabited a big old house only a few blocks from the center of Haight-Ashbury, right in the midst of everything that was going on in those days. And Oriole had been right in the center of the Angel Tribe; she still loved to remember and talk about it. Summer had heard over and over again about how the big old house had been painted purple with orange shutters and the windows draped with tie-dyed sheets, and how the people going by used to stop and stare. And how she, Oriole, had been Esau’s special old lady for a while and a real celebrity in the Haight, and even in the whole city, because some reporter on the
Berkeley Barb
had chosen her to do a picture story on—as the ultimate flower child. “A beautiful barefoot nymph in a cloud of red-gold hair, with a lovely, dark-eyed hippie baby astride her hip.” Summer had heard that particular phrase so many times she could quote it by heart, and she could recognize her own dark eyes and level brows in the baby’s round face. But she really couldn’t remember the Angel Tribe, or even Esau. What she did remember, and probably could never forget as long as she lived, was hearing Oriole tell about all of it over and over again, while she carefully unfolded the yellowing clipping from the
Berkeley Barb.