When She Flew (3 page)

It wasn’t that Nina was heartless. She wanted her son to have a grandmother. She brought Teo from Tacoma for twice-annual visits and allowed weekly phone calls, but phone conversations were not the ideal way to maintain a relationship with a small boy. The problem was more that Nina had no desire to have a relationship with Jess, and no recollection of the good things—of the love between them—before it all had gone bad.

On a whim, Jess headed toward the jewelry department. Her daughter loved big swingy earrings that shone against her dark hair, bubble bath, sweet-scented lotion—all things she couldn’t afford to buy for herself. Jess could send them along with Mateo’s present. Maybe she would wrap Nina’s gifts, too, even though her birthday wasn’t until December.

Jess stopped, then turned back toward the toys. Her daughter would see it only as manipulation, and perhaps it was. She couldn’t imagine her daughter didn’t still love her at some level, even if she wasn’t willing to acknowledge it. At least now Nina had found a way to move into her own apartment, away from Jess’s ex-husband, who drank more than Jess had ever felt comfortable with, especially for one charged with taking care of a young daughter and grandson. Without his constant influence, Jess thought, there might be a chance for her to be the kind of mom and grandmother she longed to be. She had to believe that.

If Nina would just listen to her, Jess would tell her daughter how proud she was of her for raising her son on her own—Jess had made the mistake of staying with Rick for ten long years, mostly for economic reasons. But if she said it, her daughter would think it was a dig at her father. “You always make him out to be the bad guy,” Nina would say, so Jess had stopped talking about almost everything she would have liked to with her daughter.

Earlier in the summer, Nina and Teo’s visit had gone the way they often did—somewhere between frustrating and nuclear winter. Nina had wanted to take Mateo to Wonderland Park to ride the carousel and feed the pygmy goats, and to the U-Pick-It strawberry fields, and to South Columbia Public Pool. She had an agenda in mind that meant Jess got no real time with either of them, baking cookies as she’d planned, or taking a walk along the greenbelt that ran behind her house to look for bird nests, which Teo dearly loved, or to pick a bouquet of dandelions. All of the simple, normal things she yearned to do with Teo, and Nina wanted to cart him all over the city.

“He’s only two,” Jess had said, sipping tepid coffee at the breakfast table. “He’ll never even remember picking strawberries. Kids this young don’t remember stuff like that. Wait till he’s five. Can’t we just have a nice day together here?”

Teo banged a spoon on the table while cramming Cheerios into his mouth. Jess put her hand over his to stop the racket, then took the spoon and placed it in her lap so he’d forget about it and concentrate on breakfast.

“I remember things from when I was two,” Nina said, sliding her own spoon over to the boy.

Jess tightened her jaw, determined not to react.

“Fank oo,” Teo said, grinning, half-eaten Cheerios falling from his mouth. He resumed banging the table. Nina smiled at him, the kind of smile Jess had given Nina when she was so small and happy and charming.

Her smile faded as she turned back to Jess. “I remember when I was two and Dad took me to ride the ponies at that place with the big totem pole and the fake fishing pond.”

“You were three and a half. And I was there, too, Nina. Whose idea do you think that was? Your father would have rather been . . . I don’t know.”She’d been about to say he would have rather been having brewskies with his buddies.

“But he was the one
with
me. He walked with me the whole time I was on the pony, because I was scared it was going to bite me.”

“Yes, he did. All the way around that little circle.” Jess shook her head and stood to clear the breakfast dishes.

“Do you have to do that?” Nina’s voice wobbled, and Jess turned to look at her, surprised.

“What’s the matter? I was just saying you never remem—”

“Do you have to ruin every happy memory I have?” Nina stood and held her arms out to Teo. “Come on, baby,” she said. “Let’s get ready for the day.”

Jess felt guilty, of course, and followed her to her room. Once again, she’d done the wrong thing.

“Nina, come on,” Jess said from the open doorway. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

Nina kept her eyes averted as she pulled off the boy’s pajamas, saying, “Just forget it,” and Jess wished more than anything that they could forget everything that had ever come between them, but Nina never would.

Later in the day, Jess stood outside the fence enclosing the old carousel, watching Nina hold Teo on top of a gilded horse. They laughed like drunken chimps as they circled around. They were both petite, with soft honey gold skin, and Nina’s dark hair drifted behind her. Jess’s heart filled at their beauty.

All the activities Nina had proposed for the day were things Jess had loved doing with her when she was small, but it was as though her daughter had wiped Jess from every happy childhood memory. Jess turned her back on the rickety wooden fence, even though an excited Teo called, “Grammy! Grammy! Look at me!” each time she came into his view.

She reached into her purse for a tissue, blew her nose, wiped her eyes, and turned around to wave.

“Hi, hi, hi!” she called. “Hi, sweet boy! Hold on tight!”

2

T
he great blue heron stands three to four and a half feet tall and has a wingspan of up to eighty inches wide, wider than I am tall by eighteen inches. I would like to lie in the wings of a great blue heron, in its downy under feathers, and listen to its heartbeat.

It has been my dream to see one up close, ever since I first read about them in the
Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America
at the library. I like to draw herons and other birds, and write poems and stories about them. Birds are such happy things, and so free to flit and glide wherever they want, yet they always return to their nests. Maybe that’s what makes them happy. Great blue herons hardly seem in the category of birds, though. To me they seem more like enchanted creatures waiting for someone to break the spell so they can change back into the princes and princesses they once were.

Great blue herons inhabit much of North America, but they live in wetlands, not forests, staying near lakes and streams so they can fish. They have been known to eat voles, which is really just a fancy word for mice, but probably only when they can’t eat fish. There are no wetlands in the Joseph Woods, but back when we had our car and we still thought Pater would have a job, we took a drive out to the river one Sunday and roasted hot dogs for lunch. We saw three great blue herons fly over us that day, like magic, like a sign that we were meant to be in Oregon.

Last year a baby orca and its mother wandered too far upriver from the ocean; we saw the story in
The Oregonian
. They didn’t know how to get back home. Pater said all the fuss from people and boaters and news helicopters was probably confusing them more. He didn’t say he thought they’d never find their way back, but I know that was what he was thinking. In my mind, I like to think they submerged so no one could see them under all that deep blue, popping up again when they were safely out to sea.

Last year, for my twelfth birthday, Pater found a book at the Joseph Woods Wildlife Sanctuary about our forest and its flora and fauna. He doesn’t usually buy books, because we can borrow them for free from the library, and we sometimes find good ones in the free box at Goodwill. But he said I was getting older and needed some books of my own, so he bought me
The Wilds of Joseph Woods State Park
, by Carol Frischmann. I can’t believe someone would write about where we live, and I would like to find Miss Frischmann one day and thank her, because in her book she says that the great blue heron has been sighted here, in my forest, on very rare occasions. That gave me hope.

I often walked along our creek looking for morels, stopping every once in a while to sketch a kestrel posing on a limb, or a clump of Johnny-jump-ups. The day everything changed, I was thinking about herons, so I almost wasn’t surprised when I saw the tall swoop of gray-blue farther down the creek. I knew it could be a trick of my eyes, but my heart began to beat as rapidly as a hummingbird’s. Could it really be a heron? Or was it just me wanting it that made it look like one? It could have been a piece of newspaper caught in a tree, a scrap of a hiker’s coat or a camper’s tarp. They leave behind the oddest things, like one shoe, or a camera bag. Things you’d think they would need and be more careful about. If I lost one shoe, or my coat, I’d hate even to tell Pater. He says the VA’s four hundred dollars a month doesn’t go very far, even without rent and paying for the energy that Nature makes for free. You still have to eat some store-bought food (even though we grow most of our own vegetables, and forage berries, herbs, and mushrooms). You still need basic necessities (his polite way of saying menstrual supplies and toilet paper, as I just can’t make myself use leaves like he does). You still have to have presentable clothes for church, he says, and to save for the future.

The tall gray shape moved, and I crept slowly toward it, dropping the paper and pencil on top of the mushrooms in my pocket. I worried I would startle whatever it was because I wore my sparkly silver foraging dress over my jeans and T-shirt. The dress was Crystal’s. I took it from her closet the night we left to remember her by. I wear it to collect mushrooms because it has a big pocket on the right side so I don’t need to carry a bag. I took soft, quiet steps in the underbrush, slipping behind a hemlock when I was as close as I dared go. I leaned my head to the left of the tree, ignoring the tiny ants marching up a woody ridge, and slowly, slowly, I could see the creek, then in the middle of it, a bird: a big, beautiful blue heron. My breath came as fast as if I’d been running, and it was almost like I could cry. I was so overwhelmed by what I’d been allowed by Nature to see.

The heron didn’t seem to notice me as I watched it dip its head down into the water, neck snaking in a long, graceful S curve. I was almost sure it was a male, even though there are no discernible differences between male and female great blue herons. I just felt that I knew this, and Pater says when you think you know something, you ought to listen to your instincts. The heron made a quick stabbing motion and lifted his head back up, pointing his beak toward the treetops, and gulped down the fish he had caught. One thing I can tell you: the great blue heron is the most elegant fisher of any waterfowl I’ve seen.

He kept wading downstream, looking for more fish, stopping here and there to poke his beak between rocks, then moving on. I crept behind him from hemlock to fir. I don’t know how long I followed my heron. I’ve never been in a trance, but it felt as if I were in one that day, the rest of the forest and chattering birds fading away into the green afternoon light, and I could only focus on the heron’s shaggy back feathers and the black of the flight feathers on his wings kept tucked at his side like closed fans.

When he turned his head toward me, I saw the black stripe behind his eyes. He looked right at me and didn’t flinch, so I came out from behind the trees, still keeping my distance as I followed him into a clearing.

And then I woke from my trance and realized I was too near the trail. I could hear people talking, and so could my heron. His head swiveled toward the sound, and then a wide woman with short gray hair appeared from behind a stand of alders across the clearing, binoculars pinned to her eyes, and she said in a loud whisper, “Hey, everybody, look! What’s that creature doing in the woods?”

A crowd of other people gathered around her, slinging binoculars to their faces, and I heard a flapping, whooshing sound. I looked back at the heron and he’d already lifted from the ground, his long twig legs and feet trailing behind him as he flew up to roost in the treetops.

“Oh, no, we scared it,” the woman said. As I turned to run, I heard her say, “Oh, my land, look over there! What is that girl doing here all alone? Where are her parents? Hey, you, little girl, are you all right?”

Then I heard a man give out a yell and someone began to crash through the brush after me.

I ran and ran toward home, as fast as I could until I could no longer hear anyone behind me. I found a deer trail in case they tried to follow me up the creek. I was stunned at how far I’d walked downhill; it had felt like only a few moments, but it took me forever to get back home, running up and up the hill, out of breath, my legs cramping. All I could think was, Pater told me so. He told me not to wander around daydreaming or I’d get too close.

For one small moment, I thought maybe seeing the great blue heron was worth it. But then I saw Pater’s face as he saw me, panicked and running into camp, and I wished I could take that thought back.