The Lovebird (18 page)
WHEN BUMBLE DROVE ME AWAY
toward my hiding place in Montana, and I had an embarrassing bout of tears lasting all the way from Salt Lake City to Pocatello, it was the green album that I was thinking about.
THE ALBUM’S SPINE WAS LOOSE, FLEXIBLE
. It opened with the ease of oft-opened things. The first two pages contained thirteen photographs of me. They were wallet-sized pictures, one for each stage of school, from kindergarten to senior year. I hadn’t known Dad had saved them, much less arranged them with such care (he had written my name and the date beneath each one in his baroque cursive). Glancing over them, I remembered a ritual I had hitherto forgotten: Dad had spent many a morning styling my hair, and the imperfect results of his earnest labors were evident in all of the earlier photos. There were uneven pigtails, weirdly woven braids, and bangs freshly snipped at accidental angles across my forehead. I thought of us standing together before the bathroom mirror, the everyday intimacy of it. I imagined us staring into a circle wiped clean of steam, he behind me with his hands in my hair, and I helpfully offering instructions in my chirping child’s voice. What had we talked about, I wondered, when I was six and Dad had spritzed my curls into submission? What morningtime murmurs had we exchanged? Had we smiled at each other in the mirror and spoken of the dreams we’d had before waking?
The next pages in the album featured little relics of sorts—items with a bit of bulk that prevented the pages from lying flat with perfect smoothness. My face flushed as I flipped through them, for I was unaccustomed to the sensation of seeing myself
memorialized. There were several baby teeth taped to one page. They resembled sunbleached pebbles and might have just as easily been scooped by Dad from the seashore as from beneath my pillow. There was a stray pink anklet, toddler-sized, with no companion. There was a thin gold baby ring with the following note written beside it: “Gift from Aunt Yalda, Sent from Beirut, Worn, Swallowed, and Spat Up On Easter Sunday, 1986.” And there was a collage comprised of dried black beans depicting an elephant that I had created in kindergarten.
I turned more pages, passing over painstakingly printed book reports and moody sketches, and found the program from the “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” Father-Daughter Dance, followed by the photo we took that night—Dad in that regal leather chair with me standing beside him wearing my corsage of roses. His eyes were closed in an involuntary blink against the glaring flash, but he wore a wide smile.
Then I came upon a series of essays with consistently ungainly titles (“The Haunted Huntress: Why Hunting Foxes Hurts Natasha in
War and Peace
”). They were the papers I’d written during my second semester of college while in the first flush of my animal rights romance, the ones I had sent home to Dad after I’d stopped visiting him.
Upon receiving them, Dad must have gathered that I had grown deeply interested in animals, that the affection I’d once held for Old Peep, our absent parakeet, had morphed into an obsessive regard for “all things both great and small,” to quote the Coleridge poem I had used as an epigraph for several of the essays. I wondered what he’d thought of it all. And I wondered if he intuited that the “trouble” I’d run into had something to do with the animals. He was silent as he watched me glance over the essays. I noticed he had drawn a star on “Needless Desperation: How a Dog Could Have Saved Werther from His Sorrows”—perhaps to indicate it was his favorite.
The last page contained a memento I couldn’t place. It was
neither a photo nor an essay, neither a trinket nor a tooth, but a fine sheet of paper bearing a handwritten column of text, with numbers and measurements, too. It might have been a poem. “Twenty years,” Dad said.
“Hmm?”
“Your mother’s perfume formula, honey—or recipe, as she called it. It’s almost twenty years old. It’s the one she finished just before you were born, the one she called her favorite. I’ve been saving it for you. It’s something of hers that you helped her create.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “I ruined her whole dream … and yours, too.” It was the first time I had ever said such a thing, and as soon as I said it, I felt it, hot, in my eyes.
“No, Margie. Please don’t say that. She told me she was never as inspired as when she was carrying you. She could smell everything!”
I took off my sunglasses. The paper was goldening with age, and the penciled words were soft and silvery. Rasha’s handwriting, which I’d had so few occasions to see, was sweetly slanted toward the right and featured lush, bulbous lower
g
’s and
y
’s, and tall, elegant
l
’s and
t
’s. It was lovely to look at, like a drawing, regardless of the words it spelled. But when I read some of the words—
magnolia, orange blossom, jasmine, lavender, grass, roots, cherries, tobacco, wild rose, peach
—I realized they
were
a poem, both poem and enchantment, recipe and prayer, a code for an invisible kind of beauty to be conjured with the things of the earth. “I’ve been waiting for the right time to give it to you,” Dad said. “I suppose this is as good a time as any since you are going so far away.” His voice faltered at the last two words. “Go ahead, honey. Take it out.”
I did, and I couldn’t help but smell it, as if the words and figures might exude the scent of the perfume they outlined. The sheet was transparent, like tracing paper. I held it up in front of
me and looked through it, looked between the words, to see Dad standing, hands pocketed, watching me with expectant eyes.
Yes, I lifted the recipe to my face, and after a moment Dad blurred, and I could not see him at all through my tears.
“Dad,” I said. “I can’t believe it.” I didn’t just mean the recipe. It was the very existence of the album that surprised me, the photos, the relics, the essays. I had lived, and grown, and Dad, in his way, had watched. He had kept track. And everything, all of it, was safe behind sheets of that clear plastic film that adheres so gently to whatever it contains—inconspicuous but always present, always pressing, always protecting—there, all along.
*
A precipice in front, wolves behind
LION(Panthera leo)
ON THE DRIVE TO MONTANA I THOUGHT
once more about the hour I’d spent in Simon’s school office on that fluish day and retrospectively studied the seconds that had comprised it for portents—unnoticed at the time—of what had since come to pass. I recalled the books I had found crowding his shelves. And I pondered writing my own book, one that might someday be slid among them. Thematically, it would fit right in. I would call it, I thought,
Montana, My New Loneliness: The True Story of an Animal Rights Activist on the Lam
.
Montana really was a kind of loneliness, as if the feeling of loneliness had cloaked itself in earth, capped itself in sky, and become a place. How is it, I wondered, that of all possible locales I’ve ended up in the one that is the geographical embodiment of the very condition from which I have for so long been running?
But I knew Bumble had meant well when he suggested I escape to the Treasure State. And he had been extra cautious, using a fake ID to rent the tiny blue economy car that carried us all the way from the saline sweetness of San Diego to the prairie of eastern Montana, where the season was not summer or winter or spring, but unsettlingly in between.
Long before we reached our destination, homesickness began to hurt my stomach, then shape-shifted into an invisible elephant who stood upon my chest. There were no orange trees in Montana, and no occasional oceanic odors. And what about Dad? Robe-clad Dad with his Dorals dangling, Dad in our crumbling house with the furniture so crazily arranged, Dad with his photo albums, Dad with an old lovebird cake topper complete with ossified frosting? The ladybug began to stir behind my eyes, causing a tingle that I knew was preludial to tears, and I had already had a sloppy cry during which Bumble tried to comfort me with shoulder patting, hair smoothing, and, finally, with singing. His singing voice was showy and surprisingly high, but his spontaneous choice of “Oh My Darling, Clementine” proved to be ill considered, because when he melodiously declared “you are lost and gone forever” the elephant on my chest grew almost unbearably heavy.
I studied Bumble’s profile. Not only had he found me a hiding place on the Crow Reservation, but he had insisted on staying behind the wheel for most of the twenty-two-hour trip. He said he wanted me to relax. He was exhausted but he tried not to show it. Still, he looked tired—tired and serious and boyish and more human, somehow, than he ever had. Maybe I’d been mistaken, I thought, for assuming that Bumble’s love affair with gadgetry and gear betrayed a lack of inner warmth.
“Bumble,” I said. “Thanks again for this, for driving, for singing, for everything.”
“Of course, Margie. And please don’t worry. Everything’s going to work out.” I remembered the night I’d met Bumble, when Simon brought me to my first Operation H.E.A.R.T. meeting upstairs at Gelato Amore. A year and a half had passed, but remembering it was like recalling an incident from childhood—a moment so long ago it seems, when viewed from what feels like
a great distance through memory’s misty eyeglass, imbued with sentiment. Bumble’s red dreadlocks were just beginning then, and his face had still been cushioned with a pillowy layer of baby fat that, in the ensuing months, had melted away. “I’m Bumble B.,” he’d said, shaking my hand. “That’s ‘B’ with a period, not ‘B-E-E.’ ”
What has happened, what has happened?
went the secret refrain in my brain.
How can I ever go back to school? Or do anything at all? Wanted by the FBI? A fugitive?
I rested my head against the seat and stared out the open window. The prairie air blew against my face without tenderness. Black ravens, heavy with carrion, flapped lazily off the road just in time to dodge our wheels and observed us from fence posts, only worsening my sense of being watched.