Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend (29 page)

She wondered (the Sheldon part of her brain kicking in now) who the first person had been to throw shit into a spinning fan. Or had some genius imagined the phrase, like Einstein with a thought experiment, and left the world to do the actual testing?

She wanted to text Sheldon right now to tell him that Pyke was sleeping just upstairs, that she had held him in her arms, that he smelled like the seaside. But even when they were at their closest, she realized, this would not be a share-with-Sheldon sort of thing. She had feelings for Pyke.

Non-Sheldon-like stirrings.

But now, at least, Sheldon was not hers to betray.

At least she could feel good about that.

•  •  •

She showered and changed into a black, body-hugging running outfit, as if she were going out for a jog, but of course she stayed in, glancing into the guest room from time to time. Pyke slept soundly—clearly he felt safe here, away from the clutches of the uncaring law. Shiels fussed unusually with her hair, and then she changed outfits entirely, into a black skirt and leggings and a slashing, purple top that still went with her yellow shoes. Somehow deep red lipstick seemed to complement her purple nose—or at least it gave her face an unusual severity, which she thought perhaps a pterodactyl would like. But just as she applied the finishing touches, she remembered how, early on, Pyke had blithely walked past her when she'd been all made up in her short dress and zebra leggings. Maybe he didn't like provocative women. Maybe the casual jogging look really was what turned his crank.

So she scrubbed her face and changed again, into her running shorts and black sports bra, which could be a top, too. It was cold in the house, so she turned up the heat—better for Pyke's recovery, surely—and she looked in on him again.

Still sleeping.

But he wasn't as peaceful as he had been. His leg trembled under the covers, he tossed from side to side, his beak opened and closed, sometimes slowly, sometimes in a snappish way that would illustrate to juries in an eyeblink how easily this pterodactyl could harm someone else. That security bracelet could not be comfortable. What dream was he having? Was he replaying his deplorable treatment in prison? Slashing out again at the Wallin players trying to kill him? Hunting in his home grounds, wherever they might be?

She thought again about calling her parents. Her father first—she would leave a message. If he got back to her, it would be later in the afternoon, his head somewhere else, still mentally performing surgery. Her mother would call back sooner. Shiels would have to pull the phone from her ear, and wait for the waves to stop crashing quite so shriekingly. But better to start the battle by phone than to wait for the full in-person opera.

She knew it, she thought it through, but she couldn't pull her phone into her hand. She couldn't compose the number. The hours began to leak.

•  •  •

What a strange thing, time. When you are used to juggling a thousand things, traveling at warp speed, now to suddenly have a whole day at home to listen to the tap drip. Shiels sat in the guest room in the comfy chair by the window, wrapped in a blanket, listening to the faint
tap-tap
from all the way down in the kitchen. That faucet didn't even drip, usually—she had simply failed to shut it completely when she'd filled the basin with water. A quick trip downstairs could bring silence, but she didn't move.

She watched the light change slowly as the sun moved across the windowsill.

She was overdue on an English assignment. She needed to write a critique of David Foster Wallace's famous speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College in which he went into excruciating detail about the suffocating disappointments of adult life, and then showed how to embrace them, love them even. He even gave a glimpse of living in sunlight, unburied by the blankets of the faulty and deceiving perceptions under which we usually hide. She had watched the video, she thought she knew what she might say about it, she had hours and hours to write it up, but her computer was in her bedroom, she was here, and what did it matter?

What did any of it matter? The expanding or shrinking universe, the qualities of a cell, social strategies in the digital age, the rise over the run, the infinite approach to zero? It all took effort, and she was already where she wanted to be. She could hear her pterodactyl breathing on the bed.

Her pterodactyl.

Jocelyne Legault will want to visit him,
she thought.

Shiels would have to be gracious.

Her parents would be home in a matter of hours, and the house would shake and the heavens tremble.

Of all of that, what was real?

This moment, sitting by the window, her body in running gear but for now at rest, wrapped in the brown blanket she used to drag into this room when she was very young and would park her nose in an open book and let the rest of the world slide on by.

•  •  •

“Clozzer,” he said when he woke up, and he moved his beak slightly, beckoning. His eyes were lit, how? In a kindly, intense way. Shiels felt her whole body smiling, and the few steps across the floor to his bed were like those steps onto the stage had been at Autumn Whirl.

She remembered those steps now, that stage. The whole movie of it seemed to be playing in her body.

But she was here, now, too. Here.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Clozzer,” he murmured again, and he tickled her with his eyes, his expression. He seemed to be laughing inside, unusually joyful.

She sat very close to him and let him put his hand—his wing fingers—on the bare skin of her leg. She was in shorts still. It wasn't cold in the room, not at all.

“Can I get you anything now?” she asked. “Smoked salmon? Water? Do you have to”—the thought just occurred to her—“go to the bathroom?”

He had been in this bed now for hours. The afternoon was draining, the light slanting away.

“Clozzer,” he murmured again.

He rubbed his beak against her cheek, she stopped breathing. Really, she thought, she shouldn't let him do that.

Why not?
she wondered.

His beak was smooth and hard, and all of him, it seemed, pulsed with heat, even in his diminished condition. He was half in and half out of the blanket. What was that along the edge of his wing? It looked like . . . a fourth finger! How had she not seen it before? It didn't look like a finger. It stretched on and on like a flexible tent pole supporting the membrane of his wing. And under the blanket, parts of him were poking up in ways she couldn't quite sort out. Was one of those other prodding tent poles . . . something else? Not a wing part or tail tip or elbow . . .

He rubbed her, so gently, his beak against her cheek. He seemed to be breathing her in, and so she breathed him in as well. It felt like one of her dreams, like soaring over the treetops and leaning into the bareness of light. Like out-winging the clouds. Like the hot, damp embrace of earth as well, rooted, like pulling life from the black soil.

Her hand fell naturally to his chest. He was more animated, she could see it clearly. He wasn't quite the same beaten animal he'd been when she'd carried him up the stairs some hours before. Already the bed rest had done him good. She loved the silky feel of his fur.

She snuggled closer, his beak now between her breasts.

She kissed, so gently, the sleek edge of his crest, which looked, even now, slightly more crimson than before.

She fingered the cool smoothness of his locator ring.

Jonathan clumped through the front door downstairs, his longboard rattling on the tile floor of the main entrance to the house.

Shiels pulled herself back.

Pyke implored her with his impossibly large eyes. She caught her breath. “Oh,” she moaned, “later?”

Was that her voice, wrung-out and limp?

It was not time for surrendering to whatever it was she wanted.

Oh . . . but she wanted to!

Through sheer force
of will Shiels returned to her bedroom and pulled on her warm clothes. She hurried downstairs and caught Jonathan with his body half in the refrigerator.

“I need you to be more advanced than you're probably capable of right now,” she said.

“What?” When he turned to her, his mouth was full of chilly pizza.

“I need you to not be your adolescent self for the next while. I want you to pretend to be a reasonable and mature and even sophisticated human being.”

“Hello to you, too,” he said, chewing. “You weren't at school today.”

“I need you to listen and to understand, because Mom and Dad are going to be home soon and the roof is going to blow off this place for a time.”

“Pyke got out on bail today. Melanie's crowdsourcing campaign worked. Nobody knows where he's been holed up.” Jonathan stood by the still-open door, chewing but not otherwise moving. Shiels pushed the door shut, and only at the last moment did Jonathan turn to get out of the way. “What's your problem?” he said. “Just because Melanie did what you couldn't manage to do.”

“Are you finished?”

Congealed tomato sauce clung to his chin.

“She's going to be student-body chair next year,” he said. “She's going to be way better than you. People actually like her.”

“Pyke is upstairs in the guest bedroom,” she said quietly.

He smiled as if she had just said something deranged.

She spoke slowly and deliberately. “Don't go in there. Don't bother him. If you want to say something in support of his convalescing here when the PD get home, fine, but let me do most of the talking. Do you understand?”

A chunk of pepperoni fell onto the floor at the boy's feet. “Pyke is here?”

“In the guest bedroom. Tell no one. It's much better if—”

“But how?”

“He asked for me. He wanted to stay here. Your mouth is hanging open, Jonathan.”

“And Mom and Dad agreed? How did you ever—”

“They don't know. Are you even listening to me?”

“Why didn't you tell them? They're going to—”

“Shut up. Just pretend you are a support post holding up the wall. Do you want Pyke to stay here or not?”

It took a while, but finally his body seemed capable of motion again. He threw the remaining pizza crust into the sink. “Do you mind if I video what happens?” he said.

•  •  •

At about eight thirty in the evening there was a pause in the action, as if all parties recognized at the same time that stomachs were rumbling, that nothing had been done about dinner, that despite the dramatic circumstances unfolding under their own large and comfortable roof, it had been a long day for all of them and they could not keep repeating the same accusations and countercharges, and at such a volume, indefinitely.

They were in the living room, where battles tended to happen. Shiels's mother clumped around the perimeter of the oriental rug, her black plastic walking cast occasionally pounding on certain words for emphasis, heightening the pain on her face. “I don't know what else there is to say,” she said, in that moment when the air seemed ready to run out of the storm. “We are deeply, deeply disappointed with you, Shiels. I can't express how, how . . .
monumentally
upset I feel right now. You do understand that much?”

Shiels's father sat in his reading chair, but perched forward, and he nodded in his way, in agreement with everything his wife was saying. As if all these thoughts sprang fully agreed-upon from the same two-headed brain.

Shiels's mother stopped pacing and held her temples. “Tell me, please, that you understand how utterly
betrayed
we feel that you essentially
stole
a large sum of money—don't tell me again how you're going to pay this back, that isn't the point—and brought this . . .
predator
into our house, have offered him our
protection
, without the slightest consultation or clue as to what you are up to. Just tell me . . . tell me that you do not
hate us
, and that you have not gone
completely insane
.”

Shiels was seated, unmoving, on the sofa by the window, her back straight, her eyes never leaving her mother. Jonathan stayed standing by the doorframe, in apparent imitation of a support post after all. His hands seemed to be itching to pull out his phone.

“I understand, Mother,” Shiels said. “And I apologize. Again. I felt a life was at stake. I wanted to talk to you in person. Not on the phone. You do understand
me
when I say that?”

Her mother's mouth was set. “He is not staying. I hope I am being entirely clear on that. He will not stay here, he cannot stay here. I'm sorry if he misrepresented the situation to the court. We can take no responsibility for his care or security. I will not have him in the house. You do understand that as well?”

Her father nodded, nodded. Jonathan had said nothing all along.

“At least have the decency to meet him,” Shiels said. “Go upstairs, see what he is like. Your money helped save him! You can't just throw him out on the street.”

“Oh, for God's sake, we're not throwing him out on the street!” her mother erupted. But it was only a shadow of her anger before. They were all getting hungry.

Pyke must be starving,
Shiels thought.

He must have heard every word hurled and screamed.

“He is not some pet you can buy and drag in here and imagine we're all going to fall in love,” her mother said. “That's not how this works. You will tell him yourself and you will get him out of here before bedtime. I don't care if he goes back to jail or if he stays with Sheldon or with anyone else in your school. Do you understand me?”

It was time to stop talking—that much Shiels understood. Her mother was going to be angry for hours, maybe days.