The Lotus and the Storm (19 page)

“Hot damn,” James says, shaking his head. “I love it.”

“I love it,” the bird hollers.

And before I know it I hear myself repeat after the bird. “I
love
it,” I say, startled by my own voice. The bird looks at me. It is used to repeating others' words and is startled to hear me repeat its words. “I love it,” I say again, a little more subdued this time.

James scoops me up and draws me into his arms, a gesture suggestive of our old ways. I let myself stay inside his embrace. “Step by step. One day at a time,” he says gently. “You will get your voice back. You have the loveliest of voices.”

I smile. James gives me the tape.

“This way you can listen to Mick anytime.”

My Chinese grandma rolls her eyes.

James also reserves the privilege of naming the bird for me. “When I come back, you tell me the name, okay?” I nod. I already know the name I will give the mynah bird. “Galileo” is the obvious choice. But the urge to speak has vanished and I tell myself I will wait until he returns to share the name with him. Before we say good-bye, James plucks me from my silence and presses his smiling face against mine. “See you soon, kid,” he says to me. And to Galileo, he says, “Keep an eye on her for me, won't you?”

I watch him leave. The backpack disappears when he turns the corner. Our Chinese grandmother bends down, wiping the tears off my face with her hands.

 • • • 

My most intense time with Galileo is spent during a monsoon month while James is away. The skies darken and water pours down in absolution. The bird seems to love the rain. The harder the better, as if it knows that a torrential, windswept rain is necessary to alleviate the overbearing swelter of heat and humidity. As gusts of wind loft sheets of rain against our windowpanes, Galileo scratches the newspaper-lined floor of his cage and asks to be moved closer to the window. Often he will perch triumphantly on the window ledge, observing the implacable cascade. I stand close to him, placing my eyes as much at his eye level as possible to try to take in exactly what he must be absorbing.

In our yard, against the garden wall and hemmed in by thick leafy hedges, is the giant rain-collecting cistern my sister and I once used for hide-and-seek purposes. A caterpillar, tremulous and fat, is trying to escape the rain, looking for cover under the arch of a drooping leaf. The grass-covered grounds are waterlogged. Galileo seems enthralled by it all—the wind-whipped trees stoically standing up to the rain, the clattering of water on tiled roofs, the sound of little children playing naked in the streets. Sometimes he will almost flatten himself against the window, as if to help him see through the glistening rain and his own blurred vision. I watch him rub his body against the glass, lifting his wings, sinuously preening.

What are you doing? I ask silently.

And as if she can read my mind, my Chinese grandmother volunteers an answer. “Birds like to take baths,” she says, as much to herself as to me. “We must get a bath pan for the bird,” she mutters. I am pleased. She too is enthralled by Galileo.

“Galileo, Galileo,” the bird says, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

Grandma laughs. “What a quick study you are. Are you sure you want such a name?” And then turning to me, she asks, “So, little one, you have been talking to this bird and teaching him his name?”

I shake my head. I have not. Perhaps it is Grandma herself who has been playing with Galileo. I hear her call his name. I decide
she
is the one who told him his name and she is simply playing a game with me.

“Galileo, Galileo,” Galileo says.

“What a good bird,” Grandma clucks. She fusses over the bird. She gives him a piece of bread as a midafternoon snack. Galileo snatches it from her hand, then dunks it into a bowl of water before swallowing it. When I run a finger along his feathery breast, he tilts his head and opens his beak ever so slightly, as if he were being tickled into a trance. I cup Galileo in my hands and together we watch the rain pour from the eaves and drainpipes of our house. My cricket puts out a contented chirp from the sanctuary of its matchbox.

Galileo does not merely mimic. He listens and understands and knows the meaning of words. If I sit by myself and stare, he will ask, “Sad?”

Right now, he is on a roll, showing off an enviable repertoire of sounds, words, and phrases. Soon a game between Galileo and Grandma develops.

“Is that the phone ringing?” Grandma asks.

“No! No, me, me,” the bird says as he makes a trilling sound.

“Is that the rumbling of a motor?”

“Nooooh!”

“Is somebody snoring in the middle of the afternoon?”

“Noooo!”

Grandma looks at me and asks once again with evident hope and optimism in her voice, “Have you been teaching him? You talk to him?”

I shake my head.

“How is he picking up all these new words?
Someone
is playing with him and teaching him. By God, he's
talking
. Not just repeating a word here and a word there.”

You
are, I want to say. Stop pretending. But I shrug. Maybe he is a smart bird who figures out his own name because he hears Grandma refer to him as Galileo. There is a rush of air as Galileo spreads his wings and strikes a dramatic pose. He turns toward me. “Talk, talk. Play, play. Come. Cecile, Cecile,” he sings.

Cecile? Who is Cecile, I wonder. What a marvel. Galileo has invented a new game for us.

“Come, Cecile. Ceceeeeel,” he continues. His eyes fix themselves on me. He hops toward me with his outstretched wings.

I hesitate. I can almost see Cecile's shadow by my side.

“Cecile, Cecile,” he persists. He is wooing me out of my fortress of silence.

I look around. A great humming stillness envelops me while a rush of movement jolts me from the inside out. I am acutely aware of a presence beside me, like a frolicking spirit that wishes to play by a swollen riverbank. Time streams by. There
is
another person present, I am sure of it, the same person who emerges at night and hovers nearby when I am in bed. A ghost. My sister, I think. The air conditioner squeaks. I am somewhere between being and not being, subsumed deep inside a long, drawn-out transition that sticks and sticks until finally I manage to break free with a big gasp, only to hear a full-flood scream from Galileo himself.

“Cecile,” Galileo shrieks.

“He has given you a pet name?” my Chinese grandmother asks. “How curious. How cute,” she says, laughing. “Playful bird.”

Where did he get such a name, I ask myself. I have read that animals have an innate ability to detect subtle shifts in their environment, such as the earth's vibrations, or electrical charges in the air. I wonder if Galileo senses the presence I sense now and at night too. I look around.

“Cecile plays. Cecile plays.”

As I stand in dumb muteness, Galileo stomps his feet on the table's surface and asks, over and over, “Do you like me? Do you like me? Mynah bird, mynah bird.”

Grandma keeps silent and turns to me.

A moment passes. Galileo tilts his head mournfully. I detect a faint movement of his cheeks, as if he were attempting a smile. I smile back.

“You like me? Mynah bird. Nice bird.”

I say nothing. My silence stubbornly persists.

“You're hurting his feelings, maybe,” Grandma says.

He makes wiping motions. He cranes his neck sideways, rubbing his eyes against his feathered wings, as if to wipe off a tear.

I have no choice but to reassure him. “I like you,” I confess. “I really do.”

It is a whispery rasp of a voice. It is mine.

The cricket emits a sound, as if surprised. I hear a high-pitched, pulsing chirp vibrating through his body. Galileo stares at me as if through the sides of his eyes and hops on my shoulder.

“Cecile,” he coos.

“Hello,” he says. “Hello, Cecile.”

My Chinese grandmother shakes her head in disbelief.

 • • • 

Father continues to sit quietly at night by himself. Mother has stopped paying attention to our garden. A gardener has been hired to watch over the errant vines, gather the carcasses of mangoes that drop from the tree, fertilize our frangipani blooms. Mother spends her evenings inside her grief.

But the fact that I have reclaimed my voice delights them both. This is new. This is hopeful. At least it is not bad news. It is not another failure. It no longer takes much to please them.

I am partly relieved and partly disappointed. To my surprise, I miss the challenge. Once, I was capable of meeting their wishes. Now, as if deciding that their combined objectives for me might need a degree of clear-eyed adjustment, they are ready to adapt and expect less. They are now willing to live with imperfections and compromise. I am their only remaining child, one evidently not destined to prosper. The simple truth is that all their efforts are directed by their fear that I will stop talking once again.

“I'm happy,” Father says. “I'm happy you are talking. If you don't talk, how can you do well in school? If you don't do well in school, how will you fare when you grow up . . .”

Growing up is too far in the future for me to worry about now. Still, I nod to reassure him.

Both parents wish to spoil Galileo and remind my Chinese grandmother that he is to get whatever he wants. But Galileo does not want much besides regular changes of newspaper for his cage or morsels of mangoes and papayas. My parents insist: Perhaps Galileo can be cajoled into a taste of Japanese royal persimmon, or a Korean pear, each lovingly coddled in a rice-paper-thin wrapper. Sensing encouragement and adulation, Galileo goes about performing and preening.

Fear that I might regress into silence has humbled my parents. They willingly rely on the bird for help. They also want to find out more about James. “What a miracle he is,” they proclaim. “We are indebted to him,” Mother says. She believes if a debt is incurred it must be repaid.

“Who is he? How did you meet him?”

My Chinese grandmother explains that he is an American soldier—a sergeant. “Oh, him, yes,” our father exclaims. Our father remembers that James was there when my sister died. James is a mere youngster, as he puts it, who is attached to the military police compound down the street.

“The girls used to spend almost every evening with him listening to music.” Our Chinese grandmother fills our mother in on the way we were, tapping her foot and moving her shoulders ever so lightly as memories course through her.

I am amused. I have never seen our grandmother's moves. Our parents look at each other obliquely. Whatever thought each has separately is ultimately shared by the other. After a few moments, they nod, as if in agreement about something. An understanding is sealed in a glance here, a nod there, as if anything more explicit were extraneous, even unbecoming.

It is the first time I have seen such a visible display of complicity on their part. A few weeks later I discover what all the nodding and sidelong glances were about.

 • • • 

The next time I see James he is in our dining room. By then I am talking again and by all outward appearances my normal self. He stands uncertainly by the table. It is the first time he has been inside our house. He clears his throat, then says hello. My parents have decided that James will be my tutor. They have both come to realize that the foreign language I should be learning is English, not French. And so for the sake of my future, for the sake of my newly minted life, they approached him. They do not know James, but he might have a faculty that ministers to the past and ushers in a different, more positive future for me.

And so that is how my second life with James begins. The language that my sister would have wished to learn, as she once announced after doing a gorgeous imitation of Mick's “Tell me.” English, the language of rock and roll. With it, my life with my sister can be resurrected. This, then, is our weekly tutorial. Galileo too participates by sitting on his usual perch on the windowsill, occasionally pecking at a pear washed and pared by my Chinese grandmother. James pronounces a word. I repeat it. Then Galileo. Later I might forget a word only to be reminded of it by Galileo. The bird eggs me on, still insisting on calling me Cecile.

“Why do you give her a French nickname, Galileo?” James asks Galileo, laughing. “Why ‘Cecile'?”

Eyes wide open, Galileo says nothing in response.

Life outside our dining room where the lessons are taking place fades in and out. From the other side of the room, James paces back and forth, pointing to an object, a table and a pen, a book and a cup, in quick succession—somehow they are always configured in twos. I listen to his big-booted thump against the tiled floor. Even off duty, he wears his military uniform. My eyes fall onto the crisp, starched folds of his shirt, the insignia that signifies rank or accomplishment. We are still in the vocabulary phase of our lesson but soon we will embark on grammatical phrases and more. I already know some English from watching American television. James is an eager teacher. This is an elbow. This is a stomach. This is a jaw. We go from nouns to verbs to adjectives. I nod avidly. I rarely fail him. The buildup of what is asked of me is gradual but certain.

On our occasional walks in the garden he points out flowers and insects to me. This is a butterfly. This is a rose. This is a funny mynah bird. This is a cricket. I show him a cluster of touch-me-nots that we call bashful plants. I flick a finger hard against a bunch of leaves and watch as they close in the blink of an eye. James sits close to the ground and blows soft breaths onto their wing tips. Slowly, slowly, they purr and hesitate, then fold up into themselves. I am delighted. James is willing to sit with me as we both wait patiently for them to open up again.

“How's everyone? Everyone okay?” he asks in a schoolteacher voice.

“It's hard to say,” I answer. That the conversation seems to be part of an English lesson makes it easier for me to talk. “We are fine,” I finally say, covering my face with my hand.