The Lovebird (23 page)

UP ON MY BUNK, I OPENED THE ENVELOPE
, careful not to tear the whale.

I found the newspaper clipping to which Bumble had referred.
LOCAL ANIMAL RIGHTS ACTIVIST ARRESTED
, the headline read, above the photograph of disheveled me taken on the morning I was booked.

I wondered how the
Sun
could have possibly obtained the scoop on my arrest, considering that it had been made in the privacy of my own slovenly studio. But when I read the next paragraph, I realized who had told them my story.

I was impressed with Ronald’s rhetoric in spite of the fact that he had, I was sure, called the paper and told them about me just so he could secure a bit of free publicity for himself.

I crumpled the article into a tiny ball and crammed it under my pillow. I was confounded by my legal fix and terrified of being discovered in my hideout, full of affection for Jack Dolce, as well as for Bumble and the rest of the crew, hopelessly homesick, craving an interminable cuddle with Charlotte, embarrassed that I, my exploits, and my arrest had been the subject of a newspaper article, glad my first name had been misspelled, and, most of all, sentimental about Simon, who had asked about me.

He had not said so much as one word to me since he’d handed me the Operation, but he had thought of me and, I now knew, watched for me. He had watched for me, just as he had once watched from his bench on the busy campus quad before class, while I passed before him with my yellow bicycle and a litany of Latin vocab words running through my brain. I wanted to write to him, even if I wrote a letter that I would never mail. I wanted to tell him everything, how I was living with a family that was not my own on an Indian reservation in the middle of nowhere, could summarize the latest happenings on TV’s most popular daytime soap, was digging roots out of the ground, had prairie earth tucked under each of my fingernails, and wore a pair of old-lady sneakers, all because I had once been his armful of warm girl.

I pulled a pencil and notepad from his other girl’s suitcase, lay belly down on my bed, and wrote, with the soft tones of Cora and Granma’s conversation humming in the background. “Don’t bother her,” I heard Granma say, “she needs time to herself.” I wrote while the light turned dusky and dim, and I wrote through
the grumblings in my stomach when I heard dishes clanging in the kitchen.
I am lonely
, I wrote.
I am living with the Crows. I am hiding. I will never understand you or what happened
. I wrote and wrote, and I only stopped for a few moments when I heard Jim come home.

I paused to consider how after just one week I had unwittingly memorized the hallmarks of Jim’s presence. I recognized the sounds of his homecoming like a dog does those of his two-legged companion—the rhythm of his footfalls on the grass outside, the gentleness with which he opened and closed the screen door, the metallic scrape of his lunch pail when it met the tabletop. I heard him say my name with a question mark at the end. “She’s resting,” Granma answered. Even hidden away as I was in a distant room, I detected his rich dark odor of blue and black and purple inks, and the odor of his body’s efforts at work. And I thought of all my yearning to be among the animals and a part of their world. Maybe, when we shared one shelter and grew familiar enough with each other, like the imagined families in the hill houses whose closeness I coveted, we were already much more like the animals than most of us ever realized.

But why had that animal familiarity never suffused my time in Simon’s shadowy home? What had been missing from that place and from us, the people who had shared it? I wrote more, to try and find out. I wrote until long after dinner was done and Cora went to sleep below me and the house was silent, the prairie black. And there was something, I realized, about writing in the dark that mirrored my life as it felt to me then: I couldn’t see the letters I was shaping, but I wanted to go on writing anyway.

4
PRONGHORN
(Antilocapra americana)

THE NEXT MORNING, A
SATURDAY
, I woke to the sounds of Jim working on the old Cutlass, just as I had on the Saturday before. I heard him humming through the window beside my bunk.

I burrowed down into the bed and slid my hands under my pillow, where they found the crumpled-up newspaper article from Bumble, and the folded pages of my long letter to Simon. I struggled to reconcile them with the sound of Jim’s wordless melody. I felt in between places and in between lives, the way sometimes it is possible to feel in between sleeping and waking, poised on a threshold. After a few minutes of lying with my eyes closed tight against the strong prairie light, listening to Jim’s air (a mournful tune I remembered, though I didn’t know from where), I climbed down the ladder.

From her bunk Cora regarded me with the blank, inscrutable gaze of a still-sleepy child. Daphne watched from behind the woven wires of her cage and I thought about feeding her but decided not to risk arousing Cora’s annoyance. When I reached the bottom rung, Cora let her stuffed fawn roll away and sat up. She yawned hugely, and her bangs poked up at crazy angles.

“How was your sleep?” I asked.

“Mmmumph,” she replied, reaching her arms toward the ceiling and shaking rather violently with the stretch.

Outside, I found Granma on the porch with her knitting. “Good morning, honey,” she said.

“Good morning, Granma.” I peered at the mass of yarn in her lap. “What are you working on today?”

“Oh, it’s a little cap. For one of my young relatives over in Lodge Grass. He’s not born yet, but he’ll be here any day now.” She held it up, and it resembled a fuzzy blue bell without a clapper.

“Have you always been a knitter?”

“Oh, not always. They made us learn knitting at the boarding school I was sent to as a girl.” Her face darkened for a moment in a way I’d never seen, but she was quick to offer me a grin and add, “I made dozens of caps like these for Jim before
and
after he was born, more than he could ever wear. Can you believe his head was once this tiny?” She giggled.

I looked at Jim as he bent over the Cutlass. It was true that his head wasn’t small, but then no part of him seemed to be. His face was broad and benevolent. His plum-colored lips were full. His smile was wide and generous when he bestowed it in his vague way. And I almost could not look at his hands. I had been studying them surreptitiously for days as they accomplished the most ordinary of acts—wrapping around a doorknob, pulling out a chair, turning on the faucet in the kitchen sink. They, too, were big, and beautifully formed, with expansive palms and long fingers. And they seemed even more attractive because they were always stained with ink, the same ink that, on paper, told thousands of true stories to readers of the newspapers and magazines that wound their way through the press every day. I thought it fitting that his job ensured his hands would be marked, always marked, and, that way, always set apart. Even while he tinkered with inanimate engine parts, they looked like such caring hands,
as if they might make right whatever—or whomever—they touched.

Cora, I noticed, always had the pleased, eyes-at-half-mast look of a drowsy cat after he rumpled her hair. And Granma always fell asleep as soon as he began to rub the joints of her fingers after she’d spent a long time at her knitting. The chickens always went silent out of sheer contentment when he held them, which he did on occasion, and for no reason other than it seemed to give him satisfaction. And Belly, fittingly, always flopped down to display her stomach in absolute deference and delight when he scratched her ears. I could see Jim’s heart in his hands, and, just once, I had caught myself wondering what it would be like if he ever put them on me.

That had been a daydream, I told myself, born of my abject homesickness and basic yearning for comfort. I was certain Jim did not have even the most fleeting thoughts of touching me. He didn’t even look at me. He was the opposite of Simon, who had watched me so intently. When Jim spoke to me, his eyes were always drawn to the side, as if he were addressing some ethereal companion hovering a few feet in front of his left or right shoulder, an invisible angel.

Then, possibly because he felt me studying him, Jim looked up from the Cutlass and waved. “Morning, Margie,” he called. “How’s everything?” He frowned in the glare of the morning sun, and the line between his eyes was perfectly perpendicular to the horizontal line of his smile. I thought of Cora’s
World of Math
and what little I recalled of geometry, and wondered about the intersection of those two lines—what was buried beneath the point where they met?

“Everything is great!” I replied, with far too much eager-to-please enthusiasm straining my voice. Why, I wondered, couldn’t I sound soft and breathy like Marilyn, or sweet and vaguely continental like Audrey, or deep and thrilling like Granma? Why
must I be so wispy, so nervous, so girlish? I remembered the night of the Little Italy party when I had sprawled, sans clothes, on Jack Dolce’s couch to pose for his camera, my throat husky from shouting over the music, my eyes snoozy from wine, my neck adorned with the green snake, how relaxed I’d felt at that moment (the rosemary moment I swore I would never forget), like something juicy, something ripe for the picking. Jack Dolce had given me a green-snake glimpse of the red thread of joy that wove through me and all of life, that had even stitched us together as siblings for a spell. And just how right about everything had he been? I supposed he had been right about the foolhardiness of my fire fixation. All I knew for sure was that, looking at Jim, standing on a porch of packed dirt in my bathrobe, I felt about as far from that night as I ever could, too tightly wound with my tentative smile.