Bird After Bird (9 page)

I’d parked at the Falls Interpretive Center and flipped through Dad’s layout while I ate my muffin, washing it down with whole milk. Didn’t have the heart to do the chocolate milk now. The Ohio was up, meaning the famous fossil beds in the falls were off-limits today, but that was okay with me. I’d be sticking to the woods, mostly, anyway. I left Dad’s book in the car and took just the essentials.

I took the path through the woods, excited as the memories returned. Wildflowers climbed up tree trunks. It was early spring and flowers that wouldn’t bloom for another month up in Chicago were already attracting hummingbirds here.

I met a few hikers and fishermen on the path. We exchanged smiles and waves, and then I was out of trail. A floodwall rose to my right, and the river swelled to my left. Gravel and boulders formed a sort of rough path through the forest floor, so I left the park trail and climbed over driftwood, slowly making my way among the trees to a large flat rock the size of a farm tractor.

I sat on the stone, letting the warmth of the sun stored in it heat me to the bone. I watched the river, snapped a few photos, and jotted the names of birds I saw. The music of the songbirds and the rushing water pacified me. I might have napped if I’d brought something cushy to lie on.

In the journal I added:

Bring blanket

Have Dad’s book digitized

I’d brought a garbage bag, and when I was ready to leave, I pulled it from my pocket. I knew I couldn’t clean up the whole of the banks of the Ohio River, but I’d never been birding when I didn’t regret taking some trash away with me for proper disposal.

Two beer cans and an old shoe later, I came across the origami bird. A barn swallow watched me from a branch, and I snapped his photo. As I stuck my phone back in my pocket, I reached for what I thought was another piece of trash—and realized what it was.

“Now, how do you like that?” I asked the swallow. He chirped and flew away.

Chapter Fourteen

Laurie

I painted the outside of the letter, folding it first into a bird shape, then washing it gently with brown and gold watercolor pigments. Carefully, with India ink, I drew the heavily lined eyes of a wren.

The puppy tugged at my shoelaces with his teeth. “What should I call you? Silly Ass Dog? What’re those initials? ‘SAD’? Forget that.”

The puppy flipped over onto his back and showed me his belly. Reaching down to scratch it, I couldn’t help but grin.

“Ain’t nobody got time for ‘SAD.’ I’m going to call you…Happy. Hap for short. You okay with that, Hap?”

He rolled onto his belly, panting. He looked like I’d just offered him a steak and a romp in the woods.

“Hap, it is.” I returned to the letter, now transformed into painted origami.

“Almost a shame to set this one free,” I said to Hap, but he didn’t answer. He was scratching at the door, so I took that as my cue. “Walkie time!” I said, grabbing the leash.

I’d taken him earlier in the week for a long drive, all the way to the Falls of the Ohio to let him sniff around. The park had a great set-up for training, because if he ran too far, he was blocked by a floodwall on one side and a river on the other. The river was up, too, so he had even less room to run, but lots for his nose to explore. If we were going to succeed in search & rescue, I needed to be able to trust him off-leash most of the time.

The property I was buying from my folks extended to forty+ acres surrounding the cabin, but I still didn’t trust Hap off-leash here. It’d been different at the lake, where the tennis ball had appeal, and my pocket full of jerky treats sweetened the pot. Here at home there were too many rabbits, squirrels, and other small furry critters. And if there’s one thing you need to start training a search and rescue dog on early, it’s to
not
dash off after every rabbit it encounters.

The woods smelled full of life. A sweet breeze carried the scent of wild honeysuckle, and I could hear a chorus of titmice tweeting “Peter, Peter, Peter!” from the treetops.

“Titmouse! What did you say?
Tit
mouse?” The memory came unbidden and unwelcome, but inevitable. My mother hated any language that was even borderline crude out of the mouths of her children, despite dispensing it herself on the regular. “Don’t you dare take that painting to school! I can’t have you showing off a—well,
that
bird! Our family has a reputation to uphold, Laurence Byrd, and don’t you forget it!”

I don’t know why she was so uptight about appearances. Honestly, everyone in town knew how she was. Maybe she never had a hair out of place, but that didn’t make her a nice person, did it? I don’t know who she thought she was fooling. The older I got, the less I suspected she cared about fooling anyone at all.

I won the seventh grade art show with a nice, safe watercolor Northern Cardinal pair on a holly branch—how stereotypical can you get? They were always outside my window, though. Very accessible models.

Eventually, Mom bullied Dad into buying a McMansion in Crane View Estates, and moved away from our rustic family home—the home where my father was raised, built board after board by his own father, then added onto as needed as their family grew.

Dad lost his two brothers young—one to scarlet fever, and the other to Vietnam. Grandma and Grandpa sold Dad the house for a song before they retired to Florida, and they’d never redecorated either boys’ room. I’d begged Mom to let me have my Uncle Laurence’s room when I was little, with its dated train car mural and his name scratched in the baseboard.

“I don’t like it—it seems like asking for trouble,” she’d told my dad. “Your brother by the same name died in that room!”

“Make up your mind,” he’d said. “Are you going to be a Christian or are you going to be superstitious? Because you can’t have both, and if you’ve given up being holy, holy, holy, I’d just as soon sleep in on Sunday mornings.”

Dad didn’t often stand up to Mom, but that argument sure sealed the deal. As I got older, eventually I agreed with Mom about repainting the room, but it was years before I convinced her to let me paint a mural on the walls, myself.

Outside my window a copse of ash trees thrived, as well as a few poplars and pines. A winding trail led back through the acreage where maples and oaks older than time held sway. You could just see the small pond through the trees, and on a crisp fall day it reflected all the colors of the woods. It took all summer to paint the trunks, but by the time school began before seventh grade, I’d managed it. As the leaves changed from green to gold, red, orange, and brown, I painted the colors into the forest mural, so that when I stood across the room and looked out, it was like the woods had come alive inside my bedroom. As I spotted birds and small animals, I added them to the mural, too. By the end of the school year, my bedroom wall teemed with forest life.

“Absolutely beautiful,” Mom had said, and for a moment I felt the glow of her admiration. “We should let your sister sleep in this room!”

I tried to hide my disappointment. I’d learned long ago never to let my mom see negative emotions, because she had a way of smacking “those looks” right off my face.

Fortunately my dad went to bat for me that night, too.

“Jo’s still scribbling on walls, for Pete’s sake!” Dad had said over dinner. “And it’s not like she’s three years old, Helen. She’s in the third grade! Enough’s enough. Let the boy enjoy the fruits of his labor for once.”

Mom didn’t like it, and Jo still snuck into my room and tried to “decorate” the mural when she got the chance, but it was a small victory.

When my folks and younger sister upgraded to the McMansion, I was deployed. My older sister had already moved out and found a place of her own, otherwise she might have taken the cabin.

The Byrd family cabin was long since paid off, and Dad refused to sell it. “Laurie, you and Sylvia will be needing a place of your own soon, I’m sure,” he’d said on my first official leave. “I’ll just rent the place to vacationers until you get back.” With one of the biggest fishing lakes in the state less than three miles away, Dad made plenty for a few summers.

So, maybe my mom and dad played favorites—Mom got Jo, Dad got me and Louisa. It wasn’t the happiest family to grow up in, no question, but it got me this house, and I loved it. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.

Didn’t get cable TV, and the trees were so tall, the antenna could barely pick up stations from Evansville, a little more than an hour away. I spent my downtime watching birds and making art, anyway, so it all worked out. Never hurts to listen to the radio, you know?

At least until our song came on, which was what was happened this morning. I switched off the country music station and logged on to the internet. “At least we get DSL out here,” I said to Hap. He raised his head from his puppy nap and blinked, then groaned and went back to sleep. “Wore you out, huh?”

We’d spotted what I thought was a juvenile Snowy Owl on our hike, but I wanted to be sure. I had it in mind that snowies don’t fly this far south, so I searched until I found a bird geek board.

Sure, enough, there was an “incursion” of Snowy Owls from the Arctic, and they were being spotted as far south as Tennessee.

As I was searching through the threads, a username caught my eye.

RedWren

Wren was a redhead. Could it be her? What were the odds?

No. No way. Too random. What would a pretty girl like her be doing out tromping around in the mud watching birds through binoculars? Surely she had better things to do.

“Life’s too short for egrets,” she had said. “This lake will be full of them in a couple of months,” she had said.

I clicked the username link and it opened onto a page touting something called Crane Days, about an hour away from here. A pretty girl stood arm-in-arm with some other folks.
Sponsored by Parker & Bash, Chicago something something
.

It was her. I knew it.

“Time for another training trip, Hap.”

Chapter Fifteen

Wren

I shut the door of my office and flipped open Dad’s bird book. The cranes I’d found were wedged inside the page from Goose Pond.

4 Bald Eagles

14 American White Pelicans

2 very rare Whooping Cranes

Countless Sandhill Cranes, coots, mallards, and loons

4 Redtail Hawks

1 very cute Wren (Rileyius Birdzilliumptious)

He’d pasted a snapshot of me, binoculars to my face, standing in front of the marsh. I remember how chilled we were that day, how happy I’d been to leave the marsh and get pizza. I was spoiled on Chicago deep dish now, of course, but that old pizza kitchen in Linton was the only restaurant there that had sit-down service. After a long day in the field, it tasted like heaven, and all the waitresses were angels of mercy.

Dad had stuck a paper menu in the book. I guess he thought the food was worth remembering, too.

Looking over Dad’s notes, I unconsciously unwrapped a crane. I nearly had it all the way unfolded before I realized what I’d done.

“Ah, crap. I’ll never get this folded back.”

I thought the origami was cool, but I didn’t expect to find anything inside. When a bit of color caught my eye, I unfolded it and found myself poring over the page as though I’d just stumbled onto a treasure map. I’m not sure which struck me first: the colored-pencil drawing of a wren, or the signature:
Birdy
. The same name my father called me.

I was still reeling from the discovery when Troy pushed through my office door, knocking even as he came in. “Hey,” he said, pulling out a chair and flopping in it as though he owned the place.

Troy was one of a handful of legacy staffers who chose the family business for obvious reasons. He wasn’t as horrible with financial analysis and valuation as he was at romance, but I thanked my lucky stars a hundred times that I’d already established myself at the firm before he came on board. When we worked together, everyone who counted knew it was because I was the brains and he was the name.