Byrd (21 page)

My brother liked figuring things out. On Christmas Eve he would lie in his room pretending to sleep, waiting for our parents to go to bed. As soon as they turned out the lights (all but the Christmas tree lights, which they left on for Santa) and closed their bedroom door, my brother would sneak into the living room to check for presents—not to open them; he just wanted to see them, to know they were there. He was proving his theory that in the very instant our parents went to bed, Santa Claus would have come. For him, that was the magic of Christmas. Not the presents Santa brought, but the absolute infallibility of Santa's timing
.

Now our mother has an electric fireplace, a wall-mounted thing with synthetic logs and a heater and a fan. I don't know what happened to the Christmas fireplace
.

I've spent every Christmas Eve in that house. This year will be no different. My husband is packing the car as I write. He's a good sport, my husband, and a methodical packer
.

We married late—I was forty-four, too old for a big white dress and a grand entrance. I wore a blue sweater and a wool skirt and he wore his suit and we stood in front of a justice of the peace, a tall, stooped man with a cough, and read the vows we'd written. Simple vows
. I will always love you. I will never leave.

I can guess what you're thinking: I'm not qualified to make such promises and don't deserve them. You're probably right. But there comes a time, even for someone like me, when there's nothing to do but throw yourself into whatever your life is. My life is a secondhand bookstore and a husband and a house on a hill and a pair of finches, green-wing singers who can turn their heads all the way around
.

The man I married is not your father. Your father was a musician. Not famous, but he had a gift
.

He married someone else soon after you were born, and they had a son, your half-brother. I never met your father's wife, though I once spoke with her on the phone—at least I think it was her. She died in a car accident years ago. By the time I found out, it was too late to send a sympathy card, even if I'd known where to send it
.

I haven't seen your father since you were born. I've gone to two high school reunions hoping to. At the last one, our thirtieth, he wasn't even listed in the class directory. No one had heard from him. He's probably off somewhere leading a secluded and mysterious life. He never quite belonged to us, your father. He was never mine
.

But you
.

I looked for you, years ago. I've written you letters, a box full, all unsent
.

This one I am mailing, because you're grown now. Your coming-of-age letter
.

Maybe one day you'd like to meet me. Maybe not. I have hopes but no expectations. Here's one decision, at least, that gets to be yours. This letter is my invitation to you, a standing, arms-open-wide invitation to visit if and only if you want to, when and only when you're ready. I'm easy to find; the agency that placed you has all my information. I'm sure you have questions for me. I promise to answer if I can. Maybe you have things you'd like to say. I promise to listen. I'm a good listener; your father always said so. He once said that when I listened, it was like I let everything else fall away. If he ever loved me, it was for that
.

Don't worry about calling first. Just come. That way if you change your mind at the last minute I'll be none the wiser. We have a nice guest room, freshly painted antique white (I don't know your favorite colors), with windows overlooking a creek. You can stay as long as you like
.

For now, I should stop and post this so that my husband and I can leave for my mother's, a two-hour drive. When we get there my husband will insist on parking on the street, leaving the driveway open for people may or may not show up. (“Just in case,” he'll say.) My mother's Christmas tree will be lighting up her picture window, a little tabletop tree with bubbling blue lights. We'll walk inside and the house will smell like ham and mulled cider and cigarettes. My mother will get up from her electric fire to greet us. She's probably camped there this very minute, toasting her hands, glancing at her watch, wondering if we'll be late as always. Wishing we were there already. Trying to be patient. Trying, as she does, as mothers do, simply to wait
.

A Short History of Sam

He is a curious, careful child, touching things with his fingertips to feel how they're put together, sometimes taking them apart and remaking them into new things with motors and wheels. He thinks, his whole family does, that he will become an inventor. No one thinks
claims adjuster
. No one ever does.

He grows up, marries, and at twenty-nine, moves to Bisbee, Arizona because his wife wants to be near her parents and convinces him the desert air will cure his asthma. Which it does. But it doesn't erase the old panic, the sense that he could run out of breath at any minute.

Bisbee was once a mining town, then an almost-ghost town, then a town of squatters—artists, craftsmen, outlaws, misfits, refugees. Now ordinary people like Sam and Margaret live here. Bisbee is higher and hillier and usually at least ten degrees cooler than Tucson—where Margaret's parents live—and redder. Everything is red: red rocks, red hills, red as far as you can see. In a certain light it seems the whole world is on fire.

The days can be scorching, but the nights cool off fast, and the sky fills up with stars. Sam buys a telescope. He keeps a calendar of eclipses and meteor showers.

“Why?” Margaret asks.

He loves her but she is as incomprehensible to him as he is to her.

He takes a job managing claims for his father-in-law's insurance company. He does all his own fieldwork, driving around the state, interviewing people, taking pictures of damaged houses and cars. His photographs are his art: fascinated close-ups of blistered paint, scarred wood, crumpled metal, smashed glass. He builds a darkroom in the garage and makes black-and-white prints. He loves the closeness of the darkroom, its chemical smell.

Margaret complains that his photographs are taking over the house. She's tired of coming home and finding wet prints draped all over everything. No matter how meticulous he is, now matter how careful to protect the furniture, she complains. “I can't stand it. The mess, the smell.”

Margaret wants to start a family. They have a lot of sex, more than Sam ever counted on. He knows he should enjoy this, and pretends to, but after a while it starts to feel like punishment.

The fertility doctor is Margaret's idea. Sam thinks the treatments are a waste of resources. All that money to make more babies when there are so many already. “Why not adopt?” he says. Margaret says, “Because you never know what you're getting.” He wants to say, “When do you ever?” But he goes along. They cash in their savings and he learns to give the shots. He tries to do this as well as it can be done (he's like this about everything), with the least pain to Margaret. He tries to give the best shots ever given.

When the treatments don't work, Margaret blames him. She accuses him of not wanting a child enough. In fact, he has come around to thinking that having a child—his own—would be a good thing. Someone who might share his natural curiosity, his interests. Someone who might want to learn what he can teach. Someone to make him feel useful.

He misses North Carolina, even though he couldn't breathe there. He misses all the things that triggered his asthma—grass, shade trees, flowering bushes.

He misses his family. His mother can't travel but his sister visits from time to time. Her visits remind him what it's like to be with someone who still loves him. He shows her around Bisbee, all the coffee shops and art galleries. He drives her to the desert and points out plants she doesn't know: saguaro, cat-claw, ocotillo, jumping cholla. There are snakes and lizards and roadrunners on the highway. Everything is exotic and bright, suffused with light. “Like the bottom of the ocean,” Addie says.

In the end, the surprise is not that Margaret leaves—he assumes when she moves to Tucson to take care of her mother that she isn't coming back. The surprise is that he stays. He has become a creature of the desert, his lungs accustomed to dry air, his eyes to long views.

He has been living alone for years when Addie shows up in the late spring of 2008. He is thrilled for company, if only to have someone to cook for. He takes out his vegetarian recipes—he has a folder assembled especially for Addie's visits. Breakfast pancakes with bourbon and vanilla and nutmeg. Lentil loaf. Carrot soup. Spanakopita. He wishes she could stay long enough to try them all.

On her last night, he makes portobello burgers and a pitcher of his famous blue margaritas. It's a cool night, so quiet you can almost hear the moon lighting the sky. A waxing gibbous moon. They're wearing sweatshirts, sitting by the grill.

“I need to tell you something,” Addie says. Her voice is hushed, serious.

“What's wrong?” he says. “Is it Claree?”

“Nothing's wrong. This is something I should have told you a long time ago. I'm telling you now because—well, just in case. I wanted you to hear it from me first.” She sips her margarita, sets the glass down. “I have a child, Sam.
Had
him, and gave him up. He's grown now. He turned eighteen in September.”

“A child?”

“Yeah.”

“Born—”

“Right before you moved out here.”

“But—” Sam has a strange urge to consult a calendar. He glances at his iridescent wristwatch—nine forty-four. Time means nothing.

A child.

There has to be a right thing to say. He wishes he could think of it.

He has no memory, not even a hint of a memory, of Addie expecting a child. How could she have gone through an entire pregnancy, had a baby and given him up without her family ever suspecting?

How could anyone be so alone for so long?

But he knows the answer to that question.

“Have you told Claree?”

“No. Not yet. Maybe not ever.”

“A boy. A nephew.”

“Yeah.” She smiles, her face reflecting moonlight. “Congratulations. You're an uncle, Sam.”

Making him sound important. Big and important as a country.

Rich, Part Two

What makes Addie feel rich is, of all things, the doorbell. Not one of those lit-up plastic buttons that chimes or buzzes when you press it; she and William have a real bell forged from steel, its clapper a small steel ball. A simple, beautiful thing, weighty and substantial, like the door itself, which is solid oak. First-time visitors don't always understand the pull for the bell. They hesitate, tug timidly at first, and the bell responds with a gentle tinkle that could just as easily be one of the wind chimes catching a ruffle of breeze, or a glass of iced tea clinking on a neighbor's porch. Addie is attuned to all these sounds. If there's a person at the door, the bell will ring a second time; the visitor will pull harder, too hard usually, making a bright metallic clang, loud as a window breaking.

This will set off the birds—two green-wing singing finches who live in a cage that occupies an entire wall of the dining room. They answer every sound with one of their own. Certain loud sounds—the bell when it's pulled too hard, sirens, the vacuum cleaner, the coffee grinder—can send them into a frenzied chorus. When Addie plays records (she still has a turntable; she and William can't part with their record collections), the birds sing along, trilling and turning their heads.

The doorbell was made by an elderly blacksmith in the Village of Yesteryear at the State Fair. Addie and William go every fall. They marvel at the bloated pumpkins and miraculously decorated cakes. They sit on bleachers in barns that smell of shit and sawdust and watch the measuring and judging of farm animals. They amble through the midway, whacking moles, pitching coins, every now and then winning some misshapen stuffed animal that they give away to a grateful stranger. They watch children on rides—wide-eyed, open-mouthed little ones spinning around and around in teacups, teenagers screaming as the Scrambler slings them and the Zipper flips them upside down.

On a clear day, Addie can sometimes coax William onto the Ferris wheel. She holds his hand. She loves his knobby, stained knuckles. She loves him for riding with her even though he's afraid of heights (a mural painter who spends his days on scaffolding!). She loves knowing that she will love him all her life.

It's a rich life. Richer than she thought possible.

Still, there's something, someone, missing. There's a hole in her that, on dark days, she worries she could cave into.

“Everybody has holes,” William says.

“I'm the holeyest,” she says. “I am the holey of holeys.”

“Yes, you are,” he says, and bows. His hair is thinning at the crown; she can see a tiny circle of bare scalp, pink and smooth. It makes her love him even more. If only that love were enough.

September 2010, a Saturday evening at the cusp of fall. The dogwood leaves are burning; the light is changing, the sun slanting at a sharper angle. The air is dry. Soggy summer is over. Soon the nights will be crisp, the stars brilliant. Whatever is ripe will be harvested or lost.

Addie loves and dreads this time of year—the dying beauty of the trees, the way the world begins its slow surrender to winter. September is the anniversary of her own surrender.

Tonight she is home early, cooking dinner—a curry, William's favorite, with cauliflower and chickpeas. A giant stew, enough to feed them until they are sick of curry. The rice is in the cooker. She pours herself a glass of Riesling. The finches are quiet.

Outside, there is a faint tinkling. Wind chimes or doorbell? She isn't expecting company. She waits. The sound comes again—not tentative this time. A clean, clear slice of sound, announcing someone. The exact sound the old blacksmith must have heard in his mind's ear as he was working.