The Lovebird (17 page)

I found an attorney in the phone book. His name was Ronald Clack, and the photo accompanying his ad depicted a cocksure young upstart with arms folded across his chest. He seemed to wink at me from the page. I was mildly comforted by the familiar tone he took with me when I called. “It could go either way, Marge,” he said. “We could be talking months, we could be talking years. Or, best case, we could get you off. Everything has changed since the terrorist attacks of 2001. And forget the red scare of the 1950s—we’re in the midst of what I like to call the ‘green scare.’ ” He paused, as if waiting for the import of his words to sink in. “Enviros and activists like yourself are the targets now. I think what we’re really dealing with here is a freedom of speech issue. Why don’t you come over to my office and we’ll hash this thing out.”

During our meeting, Ronald Clack had gourmet takeout fare the likes of which I could not normally afford delivered right to his office door. “Dig in,” he said, but I was too worried about my future to eat. My trial date, set for just three months away, loomed. My hands shook and I couldn’t stop blinking. “Am I going to be locked up again?” I asked. Ronald Clack’s desk was buried under layers of paper—notes he said he’d made while brainstorming ways to get me out of my mess. He seemed sincere in his desire to help, and because he had just begun practicing he was not quite as costly as most other lawyers. Still, even if I gave him the rest of my student loan money, it would not have been enough to cover a mere week’s worth of his services.

BACK ON THE ROOF OF THE OLD VICTORIAN
, I stared out at the lights lining the airport tarmac and wondered what Dad would
do when he learned I was going to jail. The unfinished letter was still tucked beneath the pillow on my bed, and I fretted over the prospect of writing any sort of postscript now.
P.S. One more thing, Dad: it looks as though I’ll be going away for a while
.

I heard steps behind me. “I knew you’d be up here,” Bumble said. He sat down and curled an arm around my shoulders. “I always sensed there was something funny about that guy, Agent … what’s his—”

“Fox.”

“I just never imagined it was this. I’m still trying to get to the bottom of it. I even called Simon, but he never answers his phone.”

“What difference does it make?” I said. Pride, along with persistent heart-pain, had prevented me from reaching out to Simon myself. And, on the rare occasions when I chanced to pass him on campus, he always looked at the ground, and had a hunched posture, as if weighted down by a bag of burdens he couldn’t unpack, not even for me. “What’s there to get to the bottom of?” I flopped back and searched for a star, but they were all hidden from me. “I’m doomed.”

“I’ve been working on that, too,” Bumble said. “And I don’t think you’re doomed. But you have to leave. A lawyer doesn’t seem like a possibility. And a public defender will be of no use—I’m sure they’re all in cahoots with the feds anyway. I talked to my mom. She’s been making some calls. She has some relatives you can go stay with. Well, friends, really. Or, I’m not sure—it’s different with Indians—everyone acts as if they’re related.”

“What are you talking about?”

“People like us, we’re not just activists anymore, we’re enemies of the state.
Domestic terrorist
?” Bumble shook his head. “This is a witch hunt, Margie. I’m sorry that you’re the one they singled out. I’m sorry for everything. But it’s best if you just get
out of here before you’re made an example of. Start over. We’ve had our thrill.”

“But, what are you saying? Indians?” I thought of Jack Dolce with his poster of Sitting Bull.

“I found a hiding place for you,” Bumble said, “in Montana. You can stay there until we come up with something else.”

“Montana.” It was a place to which I had never in my life devoted a single thought. “What’s in Montana? Nothing’s in Montana.”

“Exactly. But there are seven Indian reservations there, which are basically, like, invisible places. And one of them is the Crow Reservation. That’s where my mom’s friend lives—”

“Bumble,” I said. “Aren’t Indian reservations supposed to be like third-world countries?” But he was too busy explaining to hear me.

“—a friend she met back in the seventies, when she was a lot cooler. Anyway, this friend of my mom’s has a son, and this guy—”

“No guys.” I covered my eyes, thinking of my fractured friendship with Jack Dolce, whom I had wanted for a forever brother, and of Simon, of course I thought of Simon, who had first milled me so long ago on the soft sofa of his school office. “Nothing personal, Bumble, but I’m weary of guys.”

I watched a moth flap crazily past us in the gray evening, searching for the kind of warm bright lights that had not yet been lit. Bumble lifted his digital wristwatch, pressed a button. “There you go, friend,” he said, and the moth alighted there, magnetized by its glow. He went on, undissuaded.

“It’s not just a guy, Margie, it’s a family. I’m trying to tell you.”

“Do you know them?”

“Well, no. I’ve never been out there. Frankly, I’m embarrassed by how little I know about my mother’s people.”

I sighed, bit down on my quivering lip. Loneliness was all I
felt—the loneliness of my future. I imagined the loneliness of living with strangers, which had to be worse than the loneliness of living alone or the loneliness of living with a despairing dad and a Beirut-brown ghost.

“No,” I said. “I don’t like this idea.”

“Now listen, Margie,” Bumble said. “Do you want to go to jail or do you want to go to Montana?”

I didn’t say anything. It was a case of, as Simon had been fond of saying,
a fronte praecipitium a tergo lupi.
^*

“It sounds kind of nice, actually. They live way out in the middle of nowhere on the western side of the reservation, on a chunk of land that’s been in their family for, like, over a hundred years. It’s probably pretty peaceful. There’s the guy, and he lives there with his mother—that’s my mom’s friend—and his daughter, a little girl who’s got no mother—”

“Oh, come
on
,” I protested. “Are you
kidding
me?” Another motherless one, I thought. There were so many of us. “Is this a joke?”

“No, for real. Her mom’s in jail. Her dad drives to Billings every day for his job at a printing press or someplace. And so the grandmother and the kid are left alone. Like, out on the prairie. The grandma insists that they stay out there. That parcel of land means something to her, I guess. Now, my mom told me that they would be willing to shelter you, to hide you, and they don’t even
know
you.” Bumble shook his head in amazement.

“It seems so clichéd,” I said. “I’ll be the lost white person who is saved by magical Native Americans.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Bumble replied. “What would be so bad about that? A little human kindness? People like to help each other, Margie. It makes them feel good. My mom said they would enjoy having a young woman around, someone who can
be a friend to the girl. They say they have no real fear of the feds. And apparently the grandmother is very intrigued by your story. So, if you need to disappear—and you do, Margie—there’s no better place. It’s very isolated where they are.”

THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON
, the crew came to my studio and watched while I stuffed a handful of sundresses, the lucky red Chinese shoes, the porcelain palm, the rose-scented rosary,
Wheelock’s Latin
, and the unfinished letter to Dad into Annette Mellinkoff’s Strawberry Shortcake suitcase. Bear and Orca stood arm in arm with solemnity. Ptarmigan forlornly petted Charlotte, who snuggled in his lap and ground her teeth with pleasure. Raven lamented, “I don’t know why it had to be you who got into all this trouble and not all of us.”

“It’s my own fault. I’m the one who got greedy and overexcited and wanted to hold that stupid info session.” I stood facing them all with my hands dangling at my sides. “I’m going to miss you. You were my first real friends.”

“I did a tarot spread for you,” Bear said, wiping her wet, white face. “It looked—”

“Please don’t tell me.” I cut her off and clicked the suitcase closed. “I honestly don’t want to know.”

I stepped outside to check my mailbox and found a letter from Dad, forwarded from the apartment I’d once shared with Amy and Winnie. It surprised me, slipped among the usual abundance of junk mail. A few flaky Doral ashes, cancerous confetti, fell out when I tore open the envelope. The paper came from one of Dad’s Sunshine Realty notepads, the ones he ordered in bulk and left on people’s front porches as a form of advertising. A black-and-white portrait of him, looking buttoned down and dapper, was in the upper left corner, and his name was printed across the top (“Mark Fitzgerald: Finding Families Homes for 20 Years”).
Other realtors had abandoned the now-nostalgic notepads and moved on to glossy refrigerator magnets embellished with full-color head shots that highlighted the dazzle of their sharky grins, or to ballpoint pens with their names printed on the side—useful items that people might actually hold on to. But Dad preferred paper, pieces of ephemeral paper on which strangers would scrawl their grocery lists, their Things to Do, and then discard, crinkling up his face and name.

This was not, I could see, going to be one of his rare and wonderfully long missives. The sheet of paper had been pulled from the pad in evident haste, for the top was carelessly torn.
Hi Honey
, Dad wrote, and then proceeded with a series of fragmentary sentences, all of them lacking the first-person pronoun (“I” in English or ego, as Simon had taught me, in Latin):

I stepped back inside and turned to Bumble, who was going to drive me to the Crows. “I just have one quick trip I need to make before we leave.”

He shook his head. “We should get on the road.”

“I won’t take long,” I assured him. I told the others, “You can all share my station wagon while I’m in Montana.” Turning to Ptarmigan, I added, “I want Charlotte to stay with you now.”

Then, as was our habit, we all drew close together in a circle, extended our hands, and stacked them. But this time, no one spoke, and there was no triumphant declaration of our
organization’s name. We stood touching each other, and for a moment we were all of a piece, in need of no one and nothing else. Somewhere, a wing flapped, an antenna quivered, a hoof turned up dust, a beak snapped shut, and our hearts with their varied wounds were momentarily mended, and the world with its menagerie of inhabitants was right again, and there was no such thing as an “us” or a “them,” only a giant “we,” otherwise known as a family, and we savored that sensation of wholeness until the dream flickered away as suddenly as it had come, and Simon’s Operation was done.

I DROVE TO ORANGE COUNTY BY MYSELF
. I hadn’t been back home in over a year. Our house was the same dun color, but seemed several shades lighter. The magnolia tree was a bit taller and bright with blooms. Dad, of course, wasn’t expecting me. Several minutes elapsed between my second, amplified series of knocks and his arrival to the front door. He was clad in a bathrobe and dress slacks. When he saw me standing on the porch, hidden behind my big black sunglasses and shaking from stress, he blinked and stepped back. “Margie?” Maybe he didn’t remember sending the note. In my arms, he was stiff with surprise.

Inside, I quickly surmised that “cleaning out the attic” really meant removing everything from that shadowed, spidery upper realm and scattering it haphazardly around the first and second floors. There was an antique Louis XV–style chair turned upside down on top of the coffee table, leaving just enough room for Dad to place his
TV Guide
and remote. A stickered steamer trunk, reeking of mothballs, was stashed in the hallway, requiring me to turn sideways on my way to the bathroom. Half of the sofa was occupied by boxes of old
Life
magazines, along with a phonograph, dull with dust, inherited from one of the long-deceased
Fitzgeralds, as well as the curvy dress form Rasha had used to sew some of her clothes. The stairs leading to the second floor were lined on both sides with additional debris—a doll-sized stroller, a set of golf clubs, a remote-controlled toy car, three skis, an old black suitcase, and a ladies’ fan fashioned from faded pink flamingo feathers—and I wondered if my bedroom was still habitable or if Dad had rendered it a repository for more of his attic discoveries.

I stood in the living room, unable to remove my sunglasses. I poked my finger through a hole in a Depression-era quilt assembled by Grandmother Fiona, she of the Mitsouko perfume. Then I let my eyes rest on a porcelain wedding cake topper. It featured a pair of blushing lovebirds snuggled side by side. A faintly glittering crust (fossilized frosting?) was clumped around its base.

“Are you thirsty, Sweet?” Dad asked. He patted the oversized pockets of his robe as if they might contain a small box of juice complete with its own bendy straw, or a sippy cup of milk.

“No, I’m good.”

He smiled. “You look beautiful. I’m happy to see you. The place is a mess. I didn’t know you were coming. How’s San Diego? You have a lot of friends?”

Without going into too much detail, I told Dad that I had met with some trouble, withdrawn from school, and was going to move to Montana for a while. A frown furrowed the top half of his face, but the bottom half still smiled.

“Montana?” he said. His voice was soft with awe or confusion.

“I wanted to come and say goodbye,” I said. “Goodbye for now,” I added, swallowing. “Not forever. I promise I’ll write.”

There was a breadbox on top of the hi-fi in the foyer. On top of the breadbox sat a fat photo album. But it wasn’t a snapshot shrine to Rasha. It was one I had never seen before, with a dark green vinyl cover on which Dad had markered his (or my) initials:
M.F
. I touched it in curiosity. “Oh,” Dad said. “That didn’t come
out of the attic, honey. That’s usually in my den, but I brought it down here. I look at it often.”