When I Found You (6 page)

Two years before that, on the afternoon before his first day of kindergarten, Nat Bates found a baby bird in the front yard. Under the maple tree.

It was almost too much to bear.

One new thing to accept, that was difficult and exhilarating and stressful and wonderful enough. But kindergarten
and
a baby bird was almost too much. Like something in his chest might burst, and then that would be the end of him.

At first he didn’t even know what the tiny lump under the maple tree was. He knew only that it was alive. It didn’t look like a bird. It didn’t look like anything he had ever seen before. It had no feathers. It was no bigger than his palm. Pink. Bony, like the pictures he’d seen of dinosaurs, with the skin stretched over those bones looking strangely translucent and wrinkled.

It opened its beak as if demanding something from Nat. Something he was sure he didn’t have.

He scooped it up in his hands and carried it in to Gamma.

“Oh, dear,” she said.

She didn’t like animals in the house, Nat knew. But he felt he’d had no choice this time.

“What is it, Gamma?”

“It’s a baby bird. It must’ve fallen out of the nest.”

“Maybe I could put it back.”

“Now, how are you going to get all the way up there?”

“I could climb up.”

“With a baby bird in one hand?”

“I could borrow a ladder from Mr. Feldstein. If you could hold the ladder, I bet I could.”

“It’s too late, anyway,” Gamma said. “You touched it. You can’t put a bird back in the nest once you’ve touched it. The mother won’t feed it any more. Not once it smells like a human.”

Nat considered this for a time. Unwilling to accept any solution that ended badly for the bird he had touched.

“I guess
I’ll
have to feed it, then.”

“Oh, Lord,” Gamma said. But she did not say no. Seeming to know from experience that he would not accept it as an answer.

•  •  •

Nat rinsed out an eyedropper in the bathroom sink while Gamma went to fetch the heat lamp she used when her back went out.

They made the baby bird as comfortable as possible in an old hat box — which Gamma had been unhappy to give up — cushioned by a handful of Nat’s white socks.

“His name is Feathers,” Nat said.

“You may not name him,” Gamma said. “If you name him then he becomes a pet. And you’ll want to keep him. And I don’t like pets, and besides, you can’t keep a wild bird, anyway. He’ll either die or fly away. So you can’t name him.”

“But I already did,” Nat said.

Gamma sighed deeply. “Besides, that’s a silly name for him. He doesn’t even
have
feathers.”

“But that’s just it,” Nat said.

“What’s just it?”

“It’s like a wish.”

Gamma just shook her head and went unhappily off to find something that could be fed through an eyedropper to a bird.

•  •  •

She came in before bed to say, “Stop looking at the bird and go to sleep.” In fact, she said it even before looking into his room. Leaving Nat to wonder if she could see through walls.

She’d often told him she had powers he could never understand. And certainly never foil.

“I was just checking on him.”

“You have school in the morning, so go to sleep.”

“I don’t want him to die.”

“Well, they usually do die, so don’t get too attached.” Nat began to cry.

It was only partly the idea of the bird dying. More than that, it was a sense of too many new things to bear, and the feeling that something in his chest would burst because of it.

“Oh, dear, oh, dear. Don’t cry, now. I didn’t mean to make you cry. Just go to bed and we’ll see.”

3 September 1965   

Before Gamma left him at kindergarten, just as she was buttoning her big cloth coat and wrapping her neck in one of her many huge, hand-knit scarves, Nat said, “Will you feed Feathers while I’m gone?”

“You can feed him when you get home. He doesn’t need to eat every minute of every day.”

“But he didn’t eat this morning. He wouldn’t even open his mouth. Please, Gamma?”

“Oh, all right,” she said with a sigh. “Now, you be good for a change.”

•  •  •

The teacher was very kind to him. And it was nice.

At first.

She was pretty, with brown hair that looked a touch red where the sun hit it. She wore lipstick, and a white dress covered with little bunches of red roses. She sat by the window in a burst of the morning sunlight, her arm draped around Nat’s shoulder as he worked on his picture.

They had been given brushes and glue. And, after making a pattern on colored construction paper with the thick, wet, white glue, the teacher gave them glitter to sprinkle on the page.

Nat waited for the glue to dry, enjoying the soft weight of her hand on his shoulder.

He looked up at the other students. He counted them. He was a good counter. There were sixteen, besides himself.

He looked down at his paper again, imagining how it would look when the extra glitter could be shaken off.

“That’s going to be beautiful, Nathan. You’ve done a good job.”

She likes me, Nat thought. He looked up at the other students again. Searching for a feeling. He couldn’t quite put words to it. But some part of him was waiting for the teacher to go and put her arm around each of them, too.

She never did.

She likes me the best, Nat thought.

He looked up at her. She looked down into his eyes and smiled sadly. It made his stomach hurt.

It was the smile you get from a stranger at the department store when they see you’ve been crying, and they wish they could help. And it hurts them that they can’t help. And all they can do is smile sadly to show that they wish you wouldn’t be sad. But Nat hadn’t been crying. And if he was sad, he didn’t know it.

He filed the mystery away for later. Maybe much later.

Was there something inside him that was not there in the other sixteen as well?

The teacher told everyone to shake off the extra glitter and see how the pictures turned out.

“Now, you take these pictures home today and give them to your mothers,” she said. Her hand was still on Nat’s shoulder. But now it felt heavier. Less comforting. She looked down at him. “Nathan, you can take your picture home and give it to your grandmother,” she said.

Another arrow pointing, but at what, he was not sure.

Something was different in his case.

He folded the picture three times and slid it, as carefully as possible, into the pocket of his jeans.

•  •  •

When he arrived home, he ran straight to the hat box.

It was empty.

The heat lamp was turned off, and the white socks had been shuffled away, probably to the laundry hamper. Gamma liked things to go straight into the laundry hamper, and fast.

He found Gamma in the kitchen, heating up canned soup.

“Where’s Feathers?”

“He flew away.”

“He was all better already?”

“Yes.”

“How could he get out of my room?”

“I opened the window for him. It’s cruel to keep a wild bird when he wants to fly away.”

“You should have waited till I got home. So I could say goodbye.”

“Well, I’m sorry, honey.”

“He was mine. I’m mad because you didn’t wait.”

“He wasn’t yours. He was wild. You can’t own a wild thing.”

“It still makes me mad.”

“I did what I thought best. Here, sit down, I have your lunch ready.”

Nat sat at the table. Fidgeted slightly as she tucked a paper napkin into the collar of his shirt like a bib. He almost never spilled on himself, but she got mad if he took it off. She said when he was old enough to do his own wash they could discuss it again.

She set a plate of soup in front of him, with Saltine crackers. It was tomato. Nat didn’t like tomato. He liked chicken noodle, but almost never got it.

“How could he fly away without any feathers?”

“I don’t know, but he did. Now eat your soup.”

Nat stirred it a few times as a stall tactic. Took a miniature sip. He had more questions, but had reached the end of Gamma’s patience. She would yell at him if he brought it up again.

He took the glittery picture out of his jeans pocket. Unfolded it. Nearly half the glitter fell off on to the floor. He set it on the table, straightening it as best he could, while Gamma clucked at him with her tongue and went to fetch a broom from the pantry.

“My teacher said I should give this to you.”

Then he stuffed three crackers in his mouth all at once, causing Gamma to frown. He pulled out as many pieces as he could, so she wouldn’t frown like that.

She leaned the broom against the stove and picked up his picture. “It’s a very nice picture,” she said. “I’ll put it up on the fridge.”

“What does it mean to be grand?’ he asked, his mouth still full of half-chewed crackers.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full like that. It’s disgusting. Grand? Oh. Well, really it just means big. Like a grand ballroom. It just means it’s very large. But most times it also means it’s fancy and rich and very showy and such.”

She finished taping his picture to the fridge while she spoke, then began to sweep up the spilled glitter.

“What’s grand about you?”

“About me?” she asked. And then brayed with laughter. “Why, I would say nothing. Not a darned thing that I can see. Why would you ask an odd question like that, anyway? Who ever said I was grand?”

“Everybody,” Nat said.

“Everybody says I’m grand? Oh, nonsense. Eat your soup.” Then, a moment later, “Oh, wait. Do you mean everyone says I’m your grandmother?”

“Yes,” Nat said. “That.”

“Oh, well, that’s entirely different. That doesn’t mean big or fancy or anything. It just means I’m your mother’s mother.”

“You’re not my mother?”

“Of course not. I’m your grandmother. You know that.”

Had he known that? He had probably heard the words.

“So my mother is …” But he had no ideas on how to finish.

“My daughter.”

“Oh.”

There was another huge question, waiting. It was right there. Yet he could not pin it down. In some ways it was so simple. As simple as, why don’t we see her around here anywhere, ever? But even in its simplicity it was so heavy, so all-encompassing, that he could not bring himself to box it into those tiny words.

And, to make matters worse, Gamma’s eyes had filled up with tears. They hadn’t quite run down her face yet. But it was terrifyingly clear that they might, at any minute. And Nat sensed he was somehow to blame.

Gamma emptied the dust pan and settled back down at the table with him, swiping at her eyes with her huge fingers.

“Are you sure Feathers flew away?”

Gamma slapped the table hard with her palm, and Nat jumped a mile. “Now I told you what happened, and I’ll hear no more about it. Eat your soup.”

“I don’t like tomato.”

“You don’t have to like it,” she said, causing his hopes to momentarily rise. “You just have to eat it.”

24 December 1967   

On the eve of Nat’s seventh Christmas, Gamma tucked him into bed early. As she always did on Christmas Eve.

The following morning was the only day of the year he could wake her no matter how “ungodly” the hour. So she insisted they get an early start.

“Look,” Gamma said, pointing to the window. “Looks like we’ll have a white Christmas tomorrow.”

“I can’t see,” Nat said.

He didn’t want to get up and go to the window, because it was cold in his room. Gamma wasn’t made of money, and saved on heating oil by keeping the house as cold as she could possibly stand. Which was colder than Nat could stand. He had just barely managed to gather enough of his own body heat under the covers to stop shivering, and he was not about to budge.

Gamma went to the window for him, and pulled the curtain wide for him to see. Just small flakes, dry and sparse, swirling in the air outside.

“Will it stick?” he asked her.