The Language of Sparrows (10 page)

He stood and walked behind her to look at the picture. Something bothered her as she looked at the idyllic family. It was the young Luca Prodan.

“When was this taken?” She lowered her voice.

“1974.”

That was it. The man in the picture looked young, possibly in his early twenties, possibly even in his late teens. She would have guessed Mr. Prodan to be about eighty. “My math isn’t what it should be, but it doesn’t add up.”

“What?”

“His age. He looks so young here.”

“Ah. My father is fifty-nine. He’ll be sixty next month.”

She shook her head, trying to make sense of the twenty-year gap. There was no way the man she had lunch with today was fifty-nine. The white hair, the stooped shoulders, the graveled voice—they belonged to a much older man. She opened her mouth, trying to find the right question. “Fifty-nine?”

Nick’s jaw visibly tightened. “Wait here.”

Nick ran up the stairs. She could hear him open a drawer before running back down.

When Nick came into the room with another photo in his hand, she stood and stepped in close to look. This was of Mr. Prodan, too, but he was old, older than he had been when she’d left him this afternoon. His white hair was badly cropped, his cheeks sunken, some teeth missing from his attempted smile. His eyes were huge in proportion to his narrow face.

He looked like a ninety-five-year-old man, but there was more to it—the way his clothes hung slack on his frame, as if no one could find clothes small enough for someone so emaciated. He could have been a survivor from a Nazi concentration camp.

“He was twenty-nine in this picture,” Nick said.

She swung her head up to look at Nick. It took her a few minutes to find any words at all. “What … what happened to him?”

“My father spent five years in a communist prison. This was taken just days after he was freed.” Nick looked out the window. “He won’t speak of why he went to prison or what happened to him there. Not even what he did in the years after he got out, before he joined us in the States. This picture—and his inability to cope in public—are the only clues he’s offered about his missing years.”

“Oh, Nick,” April breathed. Luca had spent five years in a gulag? What had they done to him there? Starved him, clearly. Tortured him? It explained his reaction to the men in uniform today. Luca Prodan needed a friend.

But could Sierra be that friend? Men who had suffered trauma deserved mercy, but they weren’t always safe. She remembered a Vietnam vet in their previous neighborhood who almost killed his wife one night. For a few minutes, he’d believed she was the Vietcong. At the very least, Luca Prodan was prone to meltdowns. She couldn’t put Sierra in that position.

Chapter Fifteen

“Hey, Brown Eyes.”

Sierra stopped in the middle of the hall and waited for Carlos to catch up. It took him only two long strides.

“What are you doing this weekend?” he asked.

“Nothing special.”

“Yeah? Me, too.”

Sierra didn’t know what to say to that, so she started walking again. It didn’t seem to bother Carlos. He smiled and walked beside her as if she’d given him the answer he wanted.

On Saturday morning, she saw Carlos through her bedroom window. He was kneeling in the apartment courtyard with Ricky, laying stones for a new path. So that was the man who’d taken him in after his year on the streets. Ricky owned their apartment complex.

She knew she should get breakfast, but she stayed at the window. Even as he hefted stones into place, Carlos had a sly smile, like he knew a private joke.

He moved about his work with slowness, but he wasn’t lazy. He made her think of an animal in the wild, taking its time but poised to leap. That was it—he had a lion’s grace. She told herself again that she ought to go have breakfast, but she still didn’t leave.

In the early hours, it must have been cold, but later Carlos pulled off his sweater, working in only a T-shirt. Then, without warning, he looked up at her window. Sierra dodged behind the curtain quickly, but she saw him laughing. He knew she was watching him. He’d known the whole time. And somehow Sierra wasn’t sure she minded.

Thanksgiving passed by with the necessary dinner at Aunt Hillary’s. In the first week of December a cold front blew in from Canada. The skies turned thick and gray, and storefronts turned on their lights in the middle of the day. At school, the hallways seemed more packed than ever with everyone in their winter coats. There was talk of sleet on the forecast.

Sierra zipped up her jacket. How would Mr. Prodan handle the cold? Would he be used to it after living in Romania for so many years? But he looked so frail.

After school, Sierra knocked on Mr. Foster’s classroom door.

He met her halfway.

“I wanted to make sure your dad’s okay.”

He didn’t answer right away. “My father’s in the hospital. I checked him in yesterday.”

She had known somehow he couldn’t withstand the weather. “What’s wrong with him?”

“It’s just pneumonia.”

“
Just
pneumonia?”

He leaned back against his desk. “No, not just pneumonia. He’s asthmatic and has low immunity to … well, just about everything. It complicates things. He’s getting special treatment at the medical center though. He’ll pull through.”

She stood hovering in the doorway, putting her hand against the frame to steady herself. She looked at Mr. Foster, willing him to offer something. “I need to see him.”

He opened his hands. “I’m sure he’d love to see you. Why don’t you ask your mother to bring you by?”

Sierra swiveled away and began walking home. It was drizzling and cold, and her coat and jeans were wet by the time she got there. She didn’t stop to change. She pulled off her coat and looked up METRO to get the bus schedule to the medical center. She grimaced when she saw it. It would take almost two hours and three buses to get there.

As she paced, she saw Carlos working in the courtyard. He wore a sweater and a ski cap but kept at his work, chucking blocks of broken concrete into a wheelbarrow. Sierra curled and uncurled her fingers. Two hours by bus or half an hour by car.

She waited by the Dumpster where Carlos brought the full wheelbarrow. Her breath came out in puffs of steam.

Carlos hefted a load into the bin. “You’ll get a cold standing out here. You ought to be inside.”

“I need your help.”

He stopped. “Okay.”

“Give me a ride to the medical center?”

He wiped his forehead with his shirtsleeve. “You know, people usually smile and say please when they ask a favor.”

“Please, Carlos. I have a friend in the hospital.”

He looked up at her empty apartment. “Sure. I’ll take you. Your mom knows, right?”

“Does it matter?”

“Go call her, Sierra.”

She rubbed her arms to warm them. “Never mind. I’ll take the bus.”

He grabbed her wrist. “I’ll take you to see the old guy. Just tell her.”

She narrowed her eyes. “I never said who I was going to see.”

He looked down. “Yeah, you’re right. I guess I don’t know all your friends. Who is it you’re going to see?”

“Never mind,” she bit out again. He had it all figured out, didn’t he? And when he laughed, it just made her angrier than ever.

“It’s no big deal, Sierra. Ricky knows the neighborhood, and he told me he was in the hospital. Give her a call. She’ll understand he’s too sick to hurt you.”

She went back to her apartment, wandering by the phone, picking it up and putting it back in the cradle. Mom never saw reason when it came to Mr. Prodan.

She looked at the schedule she’d written down and stuffed it into her pocket. She only had three minutes.

She grabbed her spare change and rushed through the front door to the bus stop. She was lucky. Right as she got to the stop, the bus pulled in with a squeal of brakes and a gust of carbon monoxide. She found a seat halfway down the aisle and shivered. She’d forgotten her coat.

An hour and fifty minutes and two buses later, she arrived at the medical center. It was late, almost dark. She tried not to gawk from the bus window. The hospitals were stacked one after another. It was as big as downtown.

She’d gone to the medical center in their old town for some of Dad’s appointments. It had been one big hospital with some doctors’ offices, a children’s clinic, and a psychiatric center. What could one city need with so many hospitals together in one place? Mr. Foster hadn’t even told her which one his father was in. She’d assumed there would be only a few. She stepped off the bus at its second stop.

The lawns in front looked frozen, each blade of grass standing stiff and separate. Nurses and med students, catching the bus at the end of their shifts, thronged the wet sidewalks. Fast-moving cars made her hair fly into her face as a full commuter train zinged by, setting off an electronic bell on the tracks.

She wrapped her arms around herself. Where would she even begin? She looked up at the heart institute. That was one hospital she could cross off her list at least.

She went into the next hospital. Crowds of people scurried through the huge lobby. A twenty-foot Christmas tree and matching nutcrackers towered over her.

“I need Luca Prodan’s room number,” she told a girl not much older than her who sat behind a desk.

“I can only give patient information to authorized family members.”

Sierra took two seconds too long. “I’m his granddaughter.”

The woman gave her a wary look but began typing. “Spell the last name.”

Sierra spelled it for her.

“I’m sorry. I don’t find him listed here.”

She visited a second and a third hospital, but the clerks there refused to give her any information. She made a loop. Crowds of pedestrians waited at a light as policemen waved cars into parking garages. Sounds of Arabic and German crossed between two women in burkas and a couple pushing a baby stroller.

So many people, and they all looked like they knew exactly where they were going. She was the only one wandering around the medical center aimlessly. She felt suddenly as lost as she had the time she’d been separated from her mom in the mall when she was six. But she was not six. She held her head a little higher and kept pace with the rushing people around her.

She passed a sprawling cancer center and a gold-towered children’s hospital. The buildings were enormous. The next building she went into looked like a hospital, but once inside she could see it was just a private office building closing for the night.

She walked down another street, and another, shivering inside her sweater. The streetlights flickered on and soon the sky was black. Finally, she slumped down on a bench. The sidewalks were empty now. Traffic thinned to a trickle. A policeman watched her from a doorway.

She looked back at him, trying to appear like she had a good reason for being out late at night by herself.

She craned her neck to watch a Life Flight helicopter lowering onto a roof several blocks away. If she boarded that, maybe she could tell from the air where all the hospitals were in this layout.

Freezing in the wind, she glanced at the skyline behind her. Where was Mr. Prodan? Was he in pain? Visiting hours were probably over, but she couldn’t go home. She just couldn’t. But eventually, she couldn’t stand the cold anymore.

The bus back home was almost empty. It was nearly midnight by the time the bus roared into her neighborhood. She exited before she got to her apartments. The rain had evaporated into a dry cold now.

She didn’t know where she was going, only that she wasn’t going home. She wasn’t about to face Mom with that hopeful look on her face—as if she could make Sierra be an ordinary teenager and force everything to fit into a picture-perfect life if she just smiled enough.

Sierra’s face stung in the frigid air. Her lips were numb. She didn’t look up because she knew it would only frighten her. This wasn’t a street to be on after dark. It was cold enough, though, that she hoped everyone would be inside.

She thought of Carlos, who had lived on the streets, but she shoved the thought away. He’d have a thing or two to say about her being out here.

“Hey, honey.” Across the street, a woman in pumps and a slinky dress with a fur shawl called out to her. “Come on over. I’ll keep you warm.” A man’s laughter echoed farther down the street.

Sierra walked faster. She walked and walked until she came to the bridge. Then she knew where she’d go. It wasn’t exactly an inspired hiding place, but the tension melted away as soon as she crossed the bayou and saw Mr. Prodan’s street outlined in the dark.

She glanced around furtively. There wasn’t even a kitchen light on along the street. A dog barked far away, but otherwise it was quiet. It was easy enough to pull the metal bar up on the gate and let herself into the backyard.

She stood on the back patio, the icy air cutting into her skin. She felt stiff and frozen. But she didn’t mind somehow. Thoughts of strawberry crepes and Turkish coffee and summer afternoons with Mr. Prodan warmed her.

She imagined a nurse waking him in a few hours and giving him a breakfast of rubbery eggs and weak coffee.

This was the place she wanted to be. Though it froze her backside, she lowered herself next to the doorway, trying to stay invisible.

When the sky began to soften and lights began to turn on in neighbor’s houses, she heard the gate squeal open.

Soon warm hands touched her face. “Hey,
Ojos Cafés
. I looked all over the medical center for you.”

Carlos. Still calling her Brown Eyes, in Spanish now.

She was too numb to move her lips. Too numb to do anything but shiver uncontrollably. She refused to look at him, but he crouched before her at eye level.

Sierra shook her head, as if he’d asked a question. Maybe he had. Wasn’t that why he was here? To say,
Come home, Sierra
? But there was no talk of home. He just stared at her with a clenched jaw and black eyes.