The Language of Sparrows (7 page)

Chapter Eleven

April stopped in the middle of scrubbing the kitchen sink to watch Sierra sitting in front of the TV. She’d been flipping an international news station on and off all evening as if she were searching for something. Apparently, she found what she was looking for because she put down the remote and leaned forward to watch the woman broadcaster. What was it she found so captivating?

April thought the broadcaster was speaking Italian at first, or maybe Portuguese. Then she caught the ribbon of text trailing at the bottom of the screen—Bucuresti. Bucharest, the capital of Romania.

April almost had the sense Sierra understood what the woman was saying, the way her eyes blinked in sync with the rise and fall of the broadcaster’s voice. Her daughter already spoke French and Spanish. Who knew? With Sierra’s abilities, she might be picking out some of the words. Romanian belonged to the same family of languages.

She put down her sponge. A simple warning wouldn’t turn her daughter from this man. Like her father before her, when something captured her attention, nothing would distract her. Food and rest, not to mention companionship, would take far, far distant seconds and thirds until she mastered her subject. And clearly, the one and only subject on her mind right now was this old man from Romania.

She sat on the couch beside Sierra. Her daughter’s ever-present notebook lay by her side, but instead of writing alphabets of the ancient world, Sierra used the familiar letters April knew. Boxed-in words with loops and accent marks filled the page. It didn’t take a genius to know what she was doing.

“Picked up much Romanian yet?” April refused to let Sierra see the wave of hysteria coursing inside.

Sierra gave her a shy smile. “A little.”

When the news program switched to Bulgaria, Sierra put the notebook away and got ready for bed.

But at one in the morning, April found her sitting in the corner of the living room next to the tiles, reading with the aid of her book light.

April sat down beside her. “What are you reading?”

Sierra looked up at her, blue smudges under her eyes. Without a word, she lifted the book, a thick leather volume. April strained to see it in the dim light. It wasn’t in English. Romanian? Where could she have possibly found a book in Romanian?

April sent her to bed, but it was almost two before the sounds of Sierra tossing and turning in her bed quieted, and April could fall asleep herself. When Sierra came out of her bedroom in the morning, she moved like a zombie. Her oatmeal sat untouched on the kitchen bar.

When she trudged off to school, April sank onto the couch, looking at the tiles. Sierra never mentioned them. April saw her glancing at them from time to time, but she couldn’t fathom what was in her daughter’s head.

It was time to do something about the empty middle. She would take care of it before she went to work. Dragging the large center tile from the coat closet, April took it outside. She laid the cream ceramic on the balcony and kneeled beside it.

Dipping her paintbrush in ebony acrylic, she hovered just above the tile. She wanted loose lines to match the feel of the running letters that would surround it. Black and bold, yet abstract. With her thickest brush, she painted the outline of a woman and child and then a symbol of water on both sides. She didn’t fill them, leaving the impression of a large hieroglyph.

When it was dry, April hung it and stood back from the completed project. Sierra could make of it what she wanted. April had conveyed her message, not in empty words, but in images. Her daughter would see it every day when she came into the apartment.

They were in this together. The waters might rise high, but they would surge over them together or not at all.

On April’s afternoon off, she went for a run. Back at home, she took out her camera, but she couldn’t bring herself to take one picture. She found herself pacing around the apartment. Her daughter needed light, and April couldn’t give it to her. Somehow this man, Luca Prodan, had provided something Sierra needed though.

On a whim, April logged on to the Internet. There was no phone number for Luca Prodan, but with a little digging, she found his address.

Unable to keep herself from snooping, she looked up the house records. The title and property taxes were in Nick Foster’s name. Something wasn’t right. Why wasn’t there anything in this man’s name except his address?

She looked up directions and picked up her car keys. What would she say when she found this Luca Prodan? She wasn’t sure yet, but she had to get a sense of who he was. What sort of grown man wanted to spend time alone with a teenage girl he had no relation to?

She passed apartment complexes and stores with bars in the windows and crossed over the bayou. When she found the street and the house number, she parked at the curb, inspecting the house.

She saw what brought Sierra here. It was a simple home. It wasn’t even half a mile from urban decay. And yet, under the shade of the huge oak trees and decorated by bright gardens, the street breathed. April’s heart tightened at the thought of her daughter feeling trapped in their concrete world when this green refuge was calling to her.

April knocked on the front door. There didn’t seem to be a doorbell. She was at the point of knocking again, when she heard shuffling steps and the door opened. This couldn’t be the man. He was stooped and frail. Why had no one told her?

“Mr. Prodan?”

“Yes.” He had his son’s piercing gaze. And for all his frailness, his single syllable spoke volumes. His gaze turned into a knowing smile. “You are Sierra’s mother, I think.”

“I’m April Wright.”

“Your eyes are very alike.”

April looked up in surprise. People were always saying Sierra looked like Gary. But then, this man had never seen Gary.

He didn’t invite her in, and it seemed he held to the door frame for support.

“I …” April fumbled, shook her head, and tried again. “I hope you don’t mind my coming. I don’t know what the police said, but they said some things to you, I think.”

“Untrue things.”

“Sierra has missed you.” April tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I hope you understand. It’s impossible for a mother to let her daughter go into the home of a man she knows nothing about.” She closed her eyes. She was bumbling it.

“Perhaps. But I did nothing to hurt Sierra, and it was wrong, what the authorities said to me.”

I’m sorry,
April wanted to say. But she couldn’t say that. She wanted him to know she would not back down in protecting her daughter. “I wanted to meet you for myself. I can’t send Sierra here to spend time with you without supervision,” she said. “But I don’t know how I can tell her not to speak with you either. I thought if I came here and spoke with you, we might find a solution.”

Mr. Prodan inclined his head and stepped into the house. April followed. She took in the immaculate, bare house. He led her through to the kitchen, and they sat at a table beside a large window.

The window looked out on his backyard. Rows of herbs sloped away from the house, and a cluster of giant pine trees stood in the center of the yard. Soft breezes wafted in the branches, sending pine needles spiraling to the ground.

Mr. Prodan busied himself in the kitchen. He didn’t ask her if she wanted anything. He simply served her strong coffee and a pastry with some kind of herb sprinkled on top.

“Langoş, it is called.” He said as he handed her the pastry.

April looked away from his hands, not wanting to be rude. But she was curious. The scars were so uniform and unlike anything she’d ever seen.

He sat down next to her at the scarred table. “You should know there is no miracle to make you trust me. To trust is to believe. And to believe in what has not happened yet …” He lifted one shoulder in a very European gesture.

She swallowed. “Yes, well, it’s fair enough to trust for myself. But it’s reckless to make that decision for my daughter. She’s the one who would have to live with the consequences if I were wrong.” She looked up. “You have a son.”

He sent her a quizzical glance.

“He was once Sierra’s age. I’m sure you were careful about who you let him associate with.”

“I believe our circumstances are quite different.”

She studied her pastry. How were their circumstances so different? Mr. Prodan and his son had been separated for some years according to Nick, but he’d only been a year older than Sierra when Mr. Prodan arrived in Houston.

“I do not think Sierra wishes to come here with her mother,” Mr. Prodan said. “My years of fatherhood have not been as they should be, but they have taught me this much. Children have a different type of honesty with their parents than they have with friends. Otherwise, I would invite you to come and visit me with Sierra.”

April had been so sure she would see more options when she spoke to this man, but instead she found only more questions. “So what should we do?”

He shook his head. “I would very much like to see Sierra again, but it is more important for her to have peace with her mother first.”

Faith. That is what he was telling her. Her only way forward was to have faith in him. April looked into his eyes. This was a man worth knowing, as Sierra found out for herself.

It was hard to imagine a man less likely to hurt her daughter in the perverted way she had imagined. Even less in the way Nick Foster suggested. How could this gentle man use words like jackhammers?

But then she’d only known him a few minutes. He was still a stranger. She had to know more.

April inched forward in her chair. “What did you do in Romania, Mr. Prodan? Where did you live?”

“I was a secondary math teacher. In Bucharest.”

His eyes were all-knowing, and she had the feeling he knew she was investigating him, but that didn’t stop her. She inclined her head toward the library. “You’ve got a lovely collection of books.”

On that subject he opened up to her like a beloved friend. He leaned back and almost began to chat.

He liked to read theology and philosophy but was content to read a good children’s story or a classic romance. He gave a small laugh. “I learned English by reading children’s books by Enid Blyton, and eventually I moved on to Henry James. I got quite a few odd stares my first years here in America. It took me some time to realize that the language has changed since those writers put pen to paper.”

Outside, the afternoon light softened. She took a last sip of coffee, cold now and thick as molasses, and stood to go. “I haven’t found any answers. But I’m glad we met.” She let out a nervous laugh. “You’re not the man I imagined.”

He gave her a quiet nod and led her to the front door.

As she stepped onto the porch, she inhaled the sharp scent of marigolds and dead leaves. Her gaze traveled along the oaks and stopped when she realized a truck was parked in the driveway. Nick Foster, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, carried several bags of groceries. She’d understood from their conversation that he wasn’t on close terms with his father.

April stole a glance at her watch. They met on the walk, and she stopped to look up at Nick, who seared her with his icy blue eyes.

“I had to see for myself,” she said. “I needed to know what kind of man he is.”

He shifted the grocery bags to one hand and used the other hand to push his glasses up. “Was it a good day or a bad one?”

April wasn’t sure how to answer that. “He wasn’t what I expected. He seems … wise.”

“It was a good day then. You were lucky.”

Mr. Prodan, still on his porch, bent over his flowers, studying them. He made no move to meet his son on the walk, and his face remained blank, as if he didn’t realize Nick stood in his yard. Nick didn’t look his father’s way either. What was that all about?

Why did she feel the need to apologize for coming here and for liking his father? “It bothers you that I came to see him, doesn’t it?”

He shot her a sardonic smile. “I wouldn’t want him to ruin your day. He can be tough to deal with.”

“But you care enough to buy his groceries?”
And pay his property taxes?
But she wasn’t about to admit to snooping.

He shifted some bags back to his other hand, inspecting her for a moment. “Sure, he’s my father.” He stared off at the dim November sky. “It’s complicated. It’s just better if I do it.”

Complicated? Luca Prodan was elderly; maybe he needed the help. But what had caused the rift between the two men? The gentleman she’d spent the afternoon with was pleasant and courteous, and she couldn’t imagine his offending anyone. Well, their family complications weren’t her business.

“Look,” he said. “I don’t own my old man. If you want to visit him, you’re more than welcome. Just take care.”

“Okay, I will,” she said. “Have a good afternoon, Nick.”

He still stood in the yard looking after her when she turned the street corner.

Chapter Twelve

Sierra didn’t go straight home after school.
It’s only a walk,
she told herself. She needed to see the green lawns and oak trees. That was all. She wouldn’t go to his house. But somehow, she found herself on the corner, a few houses away.

Mr. Prodan stood on his porch, sweeping the dead leaves. The heaviness drained from her. It wasn’t a walk she needed after all. Not lawns and trees. She needed him.

He stopped sweeping and looked straight at her. How could people tell her she couldn’t talk to him? They didn’t know him like she did.

She started walking again, her feet as unsure as the first day she’d met him. She walked into his yard, but he didn’t move. He stayed on the porch.

“Hi, Mr. Prodan,” she said softly.

“Your mother does not know you are here?”

She shook her head.

He nodded at her, but then he looked off. “Because of your visits, the police came to my house. They asked me questions. They accused me of things I did not do.”

She sucked in a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“
You
do not need to be sorry!” His voice rose suddenly, and a boy riding his scooter slowed to look. “Do not be sorry, Sierra, for what you have no need to be sorry for. But you cannot know what it is like to be questioned by the police. For me! For a man like me!”

He leaned the broom against the house and shuffled to the door. “Go, Sierra. You must go. Do not come here again.”

He waved her away, as if he could make her disappear with a flick of his hand, and then he went inside, closing the door behind him.

Sierra began walking back to the bayou, her steps quick now. Mr. Prodan didn’t want to see her. She’d brought him only pain. Head down, she quickened her steps until she was practically running.

Sierra pulled her headphones from her drawer at home. She sat on her bed with her laptop and, within minutes, found the site she needed on the library page. It was exactly what she wanted. The tutorial said it was best to take it one lesson at a time, but Sierra couldn’t help herself. She gulped a week’s worth of lessons in one evening.

Her heart sped up when Mom peeked in and gave a worried glance toward the computer, but then she left. It was midnight when Sierra finally put the headphones away. In her sleep, Romanian phrases murmured through her dreams, along with the spiraling script she was only just learning. When she woke, a Romanian greeting hovered on her tongue.

At school, she doodled in Biology as the teacher went over the human genome, and she’d soon filled a page with bits of the Romanian alphabet. It wasn’t so different from English. Only a few letters came with added loops and tails. But she wrote some sideways, some right side up, some in boxes, all in her heaviest, neatest handwriting, and she liked the look of the page.

As they crowded out the door after class, Carlos lifted the notebook from her hands. “Is that some kind of code?”

Sierra shrugged. “Just an alphabet.”

He put his finger on a block of letters. “
An
alphabet?”

“The Romanian alphabet,” she conceded.

“Cool.” He cast her a curious glance.

Sierra retrieved and closed her notebook, feeling protective of her new words. “I’ve got to get to my next class.”

“Sure. See you at lunch.” He lowered his head, giving her a smile, his head close enough that only she could see.

Sierra couldn’t breathe.
No,
she wanted to say.
Don’t look at me like that.
But he was already outpacing her as he hurried to class. He glanced back at her one last time before he turned into the stairwell.

The next day, Miss Lee frowned when she picked up Sierra’s geometry homework, a worksheet only half filled in. Mrs. Velasco didn’t say anything when she didn’t turn in her English homework, but she noticed. Sierra could see by the brief look she gave her.

In the hallway, Jazzy breezed by. “Hey, girl, there’s a party tomorrow at Shawna’s.”

Sierra looked up. “What?”

“Don’t look so shocked. Carlos thinks you’re cool. You can come.”

“Yeah, whatever.” But Jazzy was already passing her by.

Jazzy left a message on the answering machine and Mom’s face lit up when she heard it. How could her mom not see that a man like Mr. Prodan was twice as safe as a party like this? What would Sierra do? Stand on the edges of the room like a wallflower twice over? She didn’t have the heart to tell Mom it would just be a bunch of drunk kids. Maybe she could drop in and get right back out.

At the party, Sierra sidled through the solid wall of kids unnoticed. The music blasted, and her whole body vibrated with the sound. Someone handed her a drink. It was an amber drink, and she was sure it wasn’t anything she wanted. But she held on to it. It gave her hands something to do.

Jazzy waved wildly from the second floor but went on flirting with a football player, and Sierra pulled close to the wall. Too late, she noticed Emilio laughing with a bunch of guys, and he’d already seen her.

Even with his slow saunter across the room, he cornered her before she could find a path out of the crowded room. Sierra slunk back, looking for a way out. But there were walls and clusters of people on all sides. Everyone talked and laughed. No one looked her way.

Emilio took her arm and led her to an empty sofa under the stairs. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. See? We’re just talking.”

He winked at his friends.

He was only holding her hand, and loosely at that, so why did she feel cornered?

“You are sweet, aren’t you,
mamá
?”

Sierra searched the room, but everyone clustered in their own little packs, laughing and screeching. Emilio’s arm was warm and foreign against hers. He smelled like smoke and something else, some kind of musky incense. Of course. Emilio was a pothead.

She closed her eyes, trying to shush the scream building inside of her.

“You’re shy, hey? That’s all right. I can do the talking.”

He didn’t look like he had talking on his mind. He put his arm around her and began to knead her neck. The whole room seemed to rock with the music, and she wished she could disappear. She was staring at the glass in her hand when it was suddenly lifted away from her.

“What are you doing here, Sierra?” Carlos took her glass in his hand.

She leaned her head back. “What are
you
doing here?”

“Weirdest thing. I kept asking myself why I would come to a party like this, but I felt like I should. I guess I know why I’m here now.”

A long look passed between Carlos and Emilio before Emilio got up with a heavy sigh and walked into the crowd. Sierra let out a long breath.

Carlos put her glass on a coffee table and pulled her up by the hand. “Come on.”

Like a mindless drone, she followed him out of the house, just glad to breathe clean air. When he opened the door to an ancient Mustang, she halted, long enough to shoot him a doubtful glare, but not long enough to walk away. She didn’t care anymore. She just didn’t care.

Once in the driver’s seat, he rolled down the window. “No air-conditioning. Sorry.”

She rolled down her window without a word.

He took off, and within minutes they were on the freeway, speeding past lit billboards and glass buildings, her hair ruffling around her. The air was cool and dry and smelled like diesel. But then he turned onto a dark road and the air turned humid, heavy with the smell of trees and grass.

Within minutes he’d left the crowded streets of Houston, and they were in the countryside, a secluded place right in the middle of the city. How did he do that? In the dark night, all she could see were the shapes of trees and the narrow road before them. She looked at Carlos, but he had his eyes on the unlit road.

“How far were you going to let him go, Brown Eyes?”

Emilio had held her hand. That’s all.

“’Cause if you don’t tell him no, he’s going to think you want to be with him. At a party like that, who knows?”

Her pulse did a little beat in her throat.

“You didn’t want to be with Emilio, did you?”

She gave a slight shake of her head.

He pulled off on a side road, and the gravel kicked beneath the tires. When he stopped, she stared out at a glistening pond of dark water. There was no moon in the sky, but the stars out here filled the sky, pinpoints of light against endless black.

Carlos walked to the pond, but she sat in the car, frozen. Why did he bring her here? He didn’t seem to be making a move on her. Tonight he was acting like the big brother she didn’t have, and one with a bad attitude. But what if she were wrong? She shivered in the soft breeze as she looked at his back.

He stood at the edge of the pond, his hands crossed behind his back, while she mindlessly rotated the radio dial back and forth to give her hands something to do. He stood there for long minutes, until she finally got out and joined him. Still, he didn’t turn around. He didn’t look at her, and she was forced at last to say something.

“What are you looking at?”

He turned to her and gave her a victory smile. He’d made her speak first, but she didn’t care.

“It’s nice, isn’t it? You can even smell the leaves and wood.”

“I’d like to go home now.”

His smile fled. “Sure. It was stupid. I thought maybe I’d bring you out here. You’d see the stars and the water.” He swallowed and lifted a shoulder to the pond. “I thought maybe away from the school and those apartments … I thought maybe you’d see me. And you’d talk to me.”

She gave him a sideways glance.

He gave a disgruntled sigh. “Emilio and me, we’re not the same, Sierra. Don’t go thinking we are.”

She nodded miserably.

“I’ll take you home, but hear me out.” He sat on the grass at the edge of the pond. Sierra sat down beside him, leaving a large gap between them.

He gazed at the stretch of grass between them. “I’m not going to hurt you, Sierra. I saw you that first day in Biology. The second I saw you, I knew the floor was cracking underneath you. But you didn’t try to act all cool or brave. You’re playing it honest.”

He turned to her and waited. “You know how I knew?”

Sierra shook her head.

“Because I know what it’s like when the floor’s not where it’s supposed to be … right under your feet.”

Sierra looked at him, trying to see some sign he’d been through something hard, but she didn’t see it. His face was clear.

“My parents died in a car accident my freshman year. I went to live with my brother, but it was too much. Even when he lived at home, we never got along. And he had this wife who was always telling me what to eat and when to go to bed, like I was the same as her little boy. At my new school … I don’t know. It was like they were speaking Klingon or one of those weird languages from
Star Trek
. I tried to be one of them, but it was just an act.”

Something lightened in Sierra’s chest at those words. They were real. Only someone who had been there knew how to describe it. “I know,” she said softly.

“I know you do.”

“So what happened?”

“I finished tenth grade. I was sixteen. I told my brother it wasn’t working for me. He and his wife, they tried to persuade me to stay. Oh man, there was some yelling when I told him I was leaving. But in the end they let me go.”