Silent Bird (22 page)

Still frustrated, I returned to the living room
and yanked the package of photos from behind the couch.

“
I have something to show you,” I said.

Jeannot shuffled without interest through the first few. “Why do you dislike my village, anyway? It is very beautiful. Look at all the pictures you took.”

“It is beautiful in appearance, but
ugly things seem to happen there.”

He had almost reached my snapshot of the
teenaged boy yanking on the girl’s white kerchief when he frowned and pushed away the pile. “Not now,
Chérie
. Please. Do not start on this tonight. I am not in the mood.”

“But
she
is there. I got her.” How could I get him to listen to me, to understand that something was wrong with this situation in his village, and it wasn’t some pesky little detail but something big and hidden? “I have the photos of those boys too, making her cry. What if they are the same ones who…kidnapped her?”

“Bullying is not kidnapping.”

“No. But they happened in the same week. Then she was assaulted.”

“You do not know that either.”

“She was found in her underwear. In a church graveyard! What do you think happened to her? That she lost her clothes?”

“I did not say—”

“Or that she took them off herself because she wanted to?”

“
Quoi?
Pilar, you are talking nonsense. Calm down.”

“I am calm!” I was screaming. I was not calm.

Jeannot said, “Whatever happened to her, she will speak to the
gendarmes
. For the hundredth time, this is not our business. It is sad but not a sign that my village is…bad. Are you saying that people never get hurt in cities? In Montpellier? Paris? New York?”

“No, of course not. Little girls get abducted everywhere. That’s why we have to speak up, don’t you see?”

“My God. Why do you focus on this? Why do you have the time to worry about a child you do not know, but not to take a simple test to learn if you are carrying
our
child? It makes no sense.”

“
You heard your father at the restaurant. He blamed this girl for being…foreign. Like she brought it on herself to disappear or be violated.
That’s
what I mean by ‘ugly!’”

Jeannot’s expression
flattened.

I
plunged ahead anyway. “
I’m
foreign, Jeannot. An American
and
a Jew. Why would I want to live in a place where this kind of thing happens but people turn away?” I waved the photo in the air.

“They do not ‘turn away.’ I am sure—”

“Your father, then.
He
turns away. If something isn’t French, it isn’t important. That includes me. And your mother can’t decide, can she?”

Jeannot blinked. “
You do not know anything about my family! My uncle married an American. She is long gone, back in America, but Papa
liked
her. He was disappointed when she…left.”

“
Why did she go?”

“
Who knows? Charles is very private. But if he or my father sound a certain way, it is due to the divorce. When I marry you, I remind them of it.”

“
Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

He did
n’t answer.

“
Okay, forget it,” I said, grabbing the package of photos and stalking into the other room to shove the whole enigmatic mess into my purse.

Fine
, I thought. Be in denial. But I won’t let you become your father, Jeannot. I won’t!

Then I saw t
he unopened pregnancy test peeking out of the bag. I pulled it, ripped open the box, and stalked into the living room. “I’ll take it now, all right?” I said.

But
Jeannot didn’t reply. He didn’t even open his eyes. It took me another second to realize that my fiancé was sound asleep on the couch. There he sat: an open-mouthed, head-bobbing, intoxicated and unrecognizable caricature of himself. I slammed the box on the coffee table. Then I helped Jeannot off with his shiny dress shoes, and placed a blanket over him.

I went to bed alone.
What a sad, empty ending to a disappointing day. My feet hurt from my rotten shoes, too.
Footprints all over the world…

I tossed and turned,
then curled on my side in a fetal position. Closing my eyes, I whispered an old, old prayer to the night.

“
This salt will dissolve all impurities, and go to the bottom of the sea, and this child will be free of illness,
Ben Porat Yoseph, Ben Porat Alay Ayin
.”

Grandma stops her prayer from where she’s standing, in front of the bathroom sink. She comes closer to the potty where I’m sitting and looks down at me. “One more minute,” she says softly, and tweaks my nose.

I wonder what’s coming next. She has a container of salt next to her and a worried look on her face. I think she wants to put some of the salt inside the bowl of pee, but I don’t know why.

Mama doesn’t like any of it, the salt or the prayer or the funny hand gestures warding off evil spirits. But she’s not home today. Grandma’s babysitting me and Grandma says that sometimes the old ways work better than new ones like doctors. She says magic fixes what magic causes, and that no one knows more than the healers of the old country.
What
old country, I don’t know. But that’s what she says.

Grandma taps my knee with her hand, and I scooch over so she can peer inside the pot.

“That’s my pee,” I say, giggling.

She sprinkles a tiny spoonful of salt into the palm of her hand then tosses it past my leg into the toilet. Still giggling, I watch her say funny words to the water
filled with pee.

“Will you put
in pepper too?” I ask, still giggling.

“
Don’t be silly.” She sounds stern, but she’s smiling a little.

“
It's not going to taste good, even with salt.”

“
This is not funny, young lady.”

“
Oh yes it is!" I grin up at her nice wrinkled face.

“I am saying a prayer,” Grandma tells me, “to cure you of the Evil Eye.”

“Oh. Who gave it to me?”

“It is difficult to say. A jealous person, perhaps. An angry person.”

“Grandmother Russell was angry. Did she give the eye to me?”

“No one knows, Pilar.”
Grandma clucks her tongue. “You are such a beauty. People are jealous of a child like that. Even if they do not intend to harm you.”

“Am I harmed?”

“Not if I can help it. This is why I am trying a prayer. My grandmother knew this prayer. It was from our village.”

“Does Daddy need a prayer too?” I ask—and Grandma changes, her nice voice gone.

“May his name be blotted out!” she cries. She looks and sounds like a rooster: pulling back her arms and calling out the same things over and over. Next she makes little puffed spitting noises and waves these sounds into the air with her hand—chasing away dark wishes.

I slap my hands over my ears.

To my
surprise, Grandma bends down and gently tweaks my nose again. Her hands are cold and skeletal, but her body smells of old blankets. She reaches into the pocket of her sweater and takes out a bright blue stone. The chain holding it is the color of Hannukah gelt.

“Here,
put this on. You are so smart and talented, you have ten miracles on all ten fingers. If we cannot cure you, we should take you back to the healer.”

“Am I fixed yet?

“I don’t know. Maybe we should try the prayer one more time.”

“
Okay,” I say. “But I want a toy.”

“
All right, which one?”

I ask for my baby doll Chizera, which is what Mama calls me when she wants to say I’m like a little witch.
Holding Chizera close, I clutch the pretty necklace in my hand and feel better.

The magic spell must be working.

I opened my eyes to see the piano, cover open, keys smiling their dead black and white smile.

Jeannot’s piano,
both covers splayed wide open as if readied for surgery.

And my fingers poised over th
e keyboard, ready to sprinkle it with a pinch of—I squinted at the small container in my left hand—
fish food
?

Goldfish food, to be exa
ct, from the time before he met me, when he had been the proud owner of two fat and elderly
poisons rouge
—literally “red fish.” He had told me all about them: Arnaud and Agathe, a promiscuous pair though all of their babies died young (one eaten by the mother, alas).

And
here I was, about to sprinkle their fishie flakes into Jeannot’s Hamilton piano. Carefully I covered the container. I placed it on the piano bench and closed both the small and large lids.

All better.
No harm done. So what if I dreamed about salt being poured into pee and then walked around the house while sleeping, reached under the bathroom sink to pull out the fish food, and carted it to the piano to heal Jeannot’s poor jinxed piano keys?

I get it. Sort of.

I really hated going to sleep in one place and waking up in another.

Jeannot still lay sprawled on the sofa
, snoring louder than usual. For a moment I watched him, listened to him. What time was it, anyway? The living room shutters spread like oversized hands against morning light. I touched my neck, feeling for the chain of Grandma’s blue stone necklace. But of course it wasn’t there. I wasn’t wearing it—had never worn it since arriving in France since even looking at the thing made me feel guilty. The necklace remained in my fanny pack with my passport, ensconced inside Jeannot’s armoire.

Our
armoire.

I wandered into the kitchen, made some coffee and drank it black, almost enjoying the bitterness.
And when the phone rang, I snatched it up, expecting to hear my mother, expecting for her to tell me she had dreamed of me too, that she knew something was wrong; and was so worried that she wanted to cart me back to the lady with the parakeets so I could be cured of whatever hex had been thrown at me.

Instead I heard Monique.
“Pilar. It is me. I am sorry to bother you so early on Sunday. But I am downstairs, in front of your building. Let me in, please?” She sounded small and scared, like the child sitting on the potty waiting for magic spells.

“
What happened? Are you sick?”

“No, it is something else.
I will explain,” she said, and broke into sobs.

I had never heard Monique cry before. Maybe I didn’t believe women like her ever had a reason to cry. I was waiting at the door when she sailed in glassy-eyed, not stopping for a kiss.

And that
scared me most of all. Monique never forgot to kiss. That would be like me forgetting to bathe.

We tiptoed past the sleeping Jeannot into the kitchen where I spent an awful ten minutes watching
her wipe her eyes with an ironed handkerchief. “I'm sorry I ruin your Sunday,” she kept saying between nose-blows.

I poured her coffee and told her that she had
n’t ruined anything; that Jeannot was passed out from drink and we had our own problems with which to ruin our Sunday.

“
Yes, I ruin,” Monique insisted. Her skin was blotchy, as if her freckles had merged from all the crying. Her eyes held a sadness that resonated in my own solar plexus.

“T
ell me what’s wrong. You’re scaring me.”

“
My husband…”

Louis had lied
to her. He had told her he needed to go to work early that morning, even though he never, ever worked Sundays. How could he stoop to something so cheap, so obvious? He must have thought she would be too naive to catch on. Too trusting. But she called him at work. He wasn’t available because the office was closed. Of course.

Afterward, searching his desk at home, Monique discovered a phone bill with an unfamiliar number dialed a little too frequently for too many minutes.
So she called it herself. A female answered: a girlish-sounding female whose voice sent my friend into another frenzy of spying.

Monique
called the operator and got an address for the number. Now she had that address tucked in her purse and wanted me to go with her. She wanted to knock on a stranger's door and catch her husband red handed.

“
Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I asked. “This could be painful.”

“
I do not care about that. Pilar, you must understand. How would you feel if Jeannot has sex with another woman?”

“T
errible, of course.”

“
Then you understand.”

“
But…you know he loves you. Maybe he made a mistake.”

She stared at me.

So I jumped out of my chair to wrap my arms around her. “I’ll do whatever you want, okay? Let's go investigate. I’ll leave Jeannot a note.”