Plumage (23 page)

Now what was he going to do? Follow, like Kleet fluttering after her, poor parakeet, keeping a safe distance? Better make like the bird, Racquel thought; he could lose Sassy forever in this weird place if he didn't. But his pride kept him standing where he was. “Sassy, don't be such an idiot!” he yelled helpfully.

Turning her head to yell back at him, she tripped over a tree root and grabbed at a vine to keep from falling. “Go—go—” Instead of a shout, her voice came out a half whisper. She couldn't seem to get words out. “You—go—” Go what? Knowing Sassy, probably something pretty mild. Go back where he came from? Go to hell?

“Jesus jumpin' on the water!” yelled a wild soprano voice from somewhere out of sight in the treetops. “If you want to tell him to go fuck himself, just spit it out!”

Sassy felt like her heart was going to explode into jagged pieces flying all directions like her life falling apart. First there was Racquel in his macho outlaw getup, typical man, saying things just like Frederick—except Frederick had never said them, exactly, just looked at her with that pinched whiteness around his nostrils like she smelled bad before he turned away to ogle another chickie. And she had been such a good wife that she had never said anything to Frederick, exactly, just opted out of any cutie competitions, placing a silent curse forever on that shallow way of looking at things. She had hoped that he could learn to think differently, that he would see she was his wife partner helpmeet mate forever, not just some bimbo.
I am your wife
, she had said to him in every way she could, with her eyeglasses and her plain smiling face and her extra thirty pounds and her money-saving Wal-Mart clothes.
I
am your wife, I have substance, my devotion runs more than skin deep
. With the lines around her eyes, with her gray hair.
I am your wife, you are my husband. We are supposed to grow old together
. She had grown old trying to show him what marriage meant. But he had not learned after all. So there was all that. And now—

Now there was that voice from the treetops shattering her heart with a force of emotion she did not understand. She barely heard the words; the voice alone almost knocked her over, snapping her head back as she peered up, straining to see—nothing. Nothing but greenleaf and sunspokes and butterflies.

“Where are you?” Sassy cried, her voice shattering like her heart, flying like the butterflies. “Come here!”

“Come here!” mimicked the voice from up there somewhere, hidden, never touching the ground. “Come here, she says.”

“Please!”

“Why should I, pray tell?” drawled that voice Sassy felt to the marrow of her bones, knew somehow deep, deep yet could not recognize at all.

Another voice, whispering, barely registered in her mind. “Sassy,” Racquel was breathing at her like he was trying to help her cheat on some awfully final exam, “think about yourself. How you used to be. How you used to look. Don't you have old photos? Pictures of yourself before—”

“Shut up, you!” the voice screamed, ricocheting nearer. Branches rattled, butterflies scattered, Kleet cried out, wrens and ibises and little green honey birds cried out in what might have been alarm or ecstasy, Sassy heard a cry that she only afterward comprehended as her own, she saw great shimmering wings, a gown the color of moss in shadow, russet hair flying wild, a fierce fey elfin face, and—there, hawk-plummeting, there, hovering amid a startled breathless silence, there, almost within arm's reach, shimmering like a dream—there she was.

She. The one, the—

“You keep out of this!” the visitant flared at Racquel.

He did not answer. His face, Sassy saw, had gone taut, his brown skin tinged with blue.

She, the—what? Who? Sassy did not know.

With an effort she took a breath, got her mouth moving. “Thank you,” she whispered. Just the sight of the winged spirit was—frightening, as she turned her face that seemed lit by an inner angry fire—but also somehow a blessing.

“No thanks to
you
,” she snapped.

“I—you—please, who are you?” Sassy still did not understand why she so desperately needed to court this uncanny being.

“Who am I?” the bird-being mocked. “
Who am I
? I'm the one you blew off, idiot!”

Sassy heard a frightened chirp. Maybe Kleet. Maybe a choked sound from her own throat.

“It would be nice to have feet, you know,” the hovering bird-girl said with a kind of ferocious nostalgia, “and someplace to go with them, and somebody to talk with besides cockatoos—”

“You're mad at me!” Sassy found her voice, and with it a strong sense of the unfairness of life in general and people in particular. She wailed, “Why is everybody mad at me?”

To her shock, the bird-girl made an absolutely gross gesture involving one dainty hand and her pert little nose.

Sassy faltered a step back. “What's the
matter
with you?” she gasped.

“Me? Nothing the matter with
me
!
You
're the one who's been ignoring me for, what, twenty years?”

“But I don't even know you! What's your name?”

“It's up to you to name me, twit!” Her wings kicked even harder than her words, rocketing her upward and away. One hand lifted in a single-digit salute that made Sassy blink. With a fake-friendly wave of her upraised hand she yelled, “Nice talking with you, moron!” The words dopplered away into echoes as she dived upward and vanished into the green veil of canopy.

“Come back!” Sassy cried, tears starting—but why? Why should she feel such desperate emptiness in her heart over someone who abused her? And why did she want to cry when she was pissed off? She stamped her foot, furious at the bird-girl, herself, the world. She cried, “Did you see that? She flipped the bird at me!”

Sounding a bit as if he had been punched in the stomach and was just getting his breath back, Racquel said, “How very appropriate.”

“It is not!”

“Because of all the birds, I mean. Lame attempt at a joke. Duh.”

Looking at his worried face, Sassy heard in a kind of delayed reaction his whispered words still hanging on the air:
Think about yourself. How you used to be. Before
—

Before what? Before Frederick?

Before she had turned into a wife?

Her thoughts ran crazed. Wife, waif. Waif, self. And hazily Sassy remembered a girl she hadn't thought about in a long time. An elfin-faced, pert-nosed girl who liked braids and silly hats and dreamed of wild horses and love forever and flying—

“Oh,” Sassy whispered. “Oh!” Realization struck like lightning all in one deep-searing nonverbal instant. She could not have explained, but in that thunderbolt moment she knew to her bones how very much she had lost for so very long, and she could scarcely bear it. “Oh,” she whimpered, and then the tears came.

Kleet perched disconsolate on a sprig of fern, not even interested in the seeds ripening in the gillyflower heads nearby. Nothing was going as he had hoped. His tree, his adored Deity, had not vouchsafed him a mate. Instead he was seeing her buffeted by trouble as if by stormy gales. Kleet did not understand the hu-hu-hu cry she was crying now as she leaned against the other one, the tall dark one, but he felt that it was not good. It made him feel very alone.

In the world on the other side of the hard air he had not felt so alone. Twee had been more with him there. But he had grown aware of many puzzlements, so many other trees like this tall dark one who was alive and twiggy and perchable yet not his tree, not Twee as his tree was Twee, not one whom he cared to skreek. When the other trees preened their plumage in front of the hard air, only similar trees looked back. But when Twee faced the hard air, a parakeet like Kleet yet not like Kleet, a blue parakeet, looked back. This made sense to him, for Bird is the spirit of Tree, Bird has been the spirit of Tree back to the Great Time, the beginning time of the One Tree—but, puzzlement, had those other trees no spirits?

Why was Twee so unhappy?

Did she want to preen her plumage like the other trees?

She was standing up now, away from the other one. Kleet chirped and felt his own fluttering heart make his wings beat; he whirred up from his perch and flew to her. He perched upon her warmlimb the way she seemed to like and nibbled at her foliage. For a moment she turned to him and stroked his feathers—but only for a moment. Then she seemed to forget him again. Hu-hu-hu she cried from deep in her trunk. Her crown turned away.

THIRTEEN

Racquel watched the parakeet perched on Sassy's shoulder nibbling her hair and the edge of her ear. She barely seemed to notice. He could see that she was still fighting tears and trying to clear a stuffy nose, but he figured she could talk now. Really, what better time to talk about the crap of life than when you're already crying? It's not like you're going to lose it at that point when you've already lost it, so things are not going to get any worse.

Racquel sighed, selected a comfy-looking patch of moss to plop himself on, and said, “Sassy, sit down and tell me about it.”

“Aboud whad?” Obediently she sat. Too tamely. Racquel liked her recent fury better than the despair she was showing right now.

“About how you came to forget, um, you know. Your real self.”

“Frederig.”

“Frederick is not your real self,” Racquel said, trying once again mawkishly to joke; God, he wished he'd stop that.

“I thoughd he was.”

“Huh?”

Sassy explained, nasals gradually clearing out of her speech as she talked. Apparently she felt that she should have taken a cue from the fact that she had seen Frederick's face instead of her own when she looked in the oval pool. She told Racquel about that and a great deal more. He listened and nodded and said things at appropriate intervals. All the time he felt himself tightening like a bowstring inside. Sassy was in worse shape than he had thought.

“So it wasn't just that he didn't like you to try on hats,” he tried to sum up finally. “It was also that you took a stance. He had this idea of what a wife was like, and so did you—”

“And I chucked away anything that didn't fit the role.” Sassy sounded dead calm now, but also dead tired, and she was looking at bits of leaf and stick on the ground, not at him. The parakeet stood motionless on her shoulder.

Racquel said, “God, Sassy, you are giving me the absolute chilly willies of marriage.”

She almost smiled. “Good. Hold that thought.”

“Holding.”

“What an idiot I was.”

“Hey!” Racquel reached over and grabbed her under her little pointed chin; surprised, she focused on him. “Stop that,” he told her. “Don't go putting my friend down.”

Startled, she actually grinned.

“You did what you thought you had to do,” Racquel added, releasing her. “You gave the marriage everything you had. And that's the way it's supposed to be, right?”

“I guess.”

“So screw him. He did wrong, not you. And you're not married anymore,” Racquel added. “You're free now. You can do whatever you want.”

She shrugged and looked at the ground again. There were periwinkle flowers growing amid the moss, and little mushrooms like pearls the color of peachskin, and snail shells as fancy as those Easter eggs they make in Ukraine, but Sassy did not seem to be seeing any of that. The parakeet chirped as if he were whispering in her ear, but she seemed not to hear. She was looking at dead sticks.

Racquel decided to try again. Very gently. Keeping his voice down, not to be obnoxious. Whimsy. Attempt whimsy. After extensive mental preparation, he blurted, “So, you never did tell me, what kind of bird would you be?”

Sassy did not look up. She mumbled, “Oh, who cares?”

“I care! Sassy, tell me about yourself. The real self. Not this wife person.”

“What's there to tell?”

“I don't know. Anything.” He knew what her natural hair color was now: a shimmer of tawny auburn. It had looked stunning over the winged Sassy's green gown. “Did you wear your hair in pigtails?”

“Yes.”

“With ribbons?”

“Yes.”

“Bright red ribbons?”

“No, I liked subtle colors.”

“Such as?”

“Lavender. Dusty pink. My mom tried to make me wear white, with white-ruffled socks. I hated them.” A hint of a smile now, Racquel saw.

“You didn't like ruffles?”

“I didn't like
white
. Actually, I had lace-ruffle lavender barrettes that I loved.”

“Barrettes. That's adorable. Did your mom curl your pigtails?”

“Yeah. Banana curls.”

Racquel let himself grin. “I bet you were cute. Freckles?”

“Right across the nose. I liked my freckles. I—”

Sassy stopped talking. Her mouth fell open. She looked as if she had been stepped on by something invisible but large.

“Sassy?”

“Oh,” she gasped. “Oh, for God's sake.” The strongest language he had ever heard her use.

“For God's sake, what?”

“Oh!” She leaped to her feet, startling the parakeet off her shoulder, hanging on to her head with both hands as if it might explode. “Oh, I don't believe it!”

“
What
?” Racquel struggled onto his sore feet, beginning to be alarmed, wondering whether something physical might have flown into her brain all of a sudden. With a person that sensitive to bird poop, it might happen.

But it wasn't that. “I don't believe it!” she yelled up at the forest canopy as she clutched her own squirrel-colored hair with both hands. “I'm still being a wife!”

“Waaal, smack my fanny and call me Suzie,” Racquel drawled in owl-eyed down-home wonder. Luckily, Sassy seemed not to hear him.

“Hanging on!” she yelled. “Hanging on with my stupid gray hair and my stupid sacky pants! Still playing the same old sad song—”