The Bird Market of Paris (19 page)

“That was nice of them,” I said.

“Guess what happened.” Poppy turned to me, ready for the punch line.

“They all came back?” I couldn't help blurting it out.

“Yes, they all came back!” Poppy laughed and slapped his thighs.

The pigeons in front of us widened their circle at his gesture, but nothing deterred the gulls. They were so close I could feel the breath from their wings on my face.

“The government should have asked me about the plan. Pigeons always come home. Everyone who loves birds knows that.”

We fed the birds in silence as Poppy led both of us in a deep breathing exercise. Breathe in. Hold. Breathe out. He said the ocean air cured many ills. The breeze smelled like a tropical cocktail, coconut-ish and limey, with a lick of salt. I closed my eyes and breathed in time to the ocean's waves, despite the cacophony of birds swirling around my head.

When I opened my eyes, Poppy was standing a few feet in front of me, his arms raised like the underwater statue of Jesus,
Christ of the Abyss
, sunk in twenty-five feet of water at John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park in the Florida Keys, where I had snorkeled a few months before. He held a dinner roll in each hand, the gulls swooping and diving to snatch them. A pigeon landed on Poppy's head, then another on his shoulder. Soon, he was covered in pigeons, all scratching their way to his hands to feed. Poppy's white clothes glowed in the afternoon light, and I sat in awe for a moment before arming myself with two handfuls of bread, intending to join him.

The punctuated
woop-woop
of a police siren startled me. A blue and white police car pulled up behind us. Poppy dropped his hands and the pigeons scattered. A chubby cop stepped out of the car and approached. I thought he was going to ask if we'd seen a criminal, or maybe ask directions, though that seemed unlikely.

“Are you feeding the birds?” he said. I squeezed my handfuls of bread, hiding it in my palms.

“Is it a problem?” Poppy said.

“You're not allowed to feed birds here,” the cop said. His cheeks were red and his hairline glistered with sweat. I couldn't see his eyes behind his dark glasses.

“I did not see a sign posted,” Poppy said. “We are innocent, just me and my granddaughter feeding a few pigeons for fun.”

“Whether you saw a sign or not, it's illegal to feed birds here.” The cop mopped his forehead with the back of his hand.

“We have come here many times and no one told us,” Poppy said. I nodded in solidarity and smiled big at the cop, but he didn't smile back.

“Please come here, sir,” the cop ordered.

The cop directed Poppy to step toward the police car. I nudged the bag of bread onto the ground, kicking it under the bench, and followed them.

“I need your ID, sir,” the cop said, reaching into his car and removing a yellow paper pad.

Poppy patted his pants and shirt pockets. “My wallet is in the car.”

“We promise not to do it again,” I said, my words quick and sharp.

“Sir, can you please step into the car.” The cop opened the back door where criminals sit on their way to jail. I grabbed Poppy's hand.

“Miss, I need you to sit on the bench,” the cop said, pointing to our pigeon feeding spot.

“I'm going with Poppy.”

“Miss, sit on the bench, now.”

“
Chérie
, do as he says.” Poppy looked scared, this man I loved who had never been in trouble a day in his life, a guiltless feeder of pigeons.

“Where are you taking him?”

“I'm issuing him a citation and it's air-conditioned in the car,” the cop said. Sweat traveled from his sideburns onto his chin. “I'm not taking him anywhere.”

I sat backward on the bench on my knees and watched Poppy slide into the car. The cop closed Poppy into the backseat, and then sat behind the steering wheel. They spoke, back and forth, and the cop seemed to be writing, though I couldn't see his hands. My knees dug into the spaces between the bench's iron bars and started to ache, but I didn't move. The pigeons had dispersed, but a few gulls still charged the air around my face, and I waved them away.

Poppy and the cop chatted back and forth like mimes behind glass, and someone must have said something funny, because they both laughed. Poppy gestured as he spoke, and then pointed at me. The cop peered at me through the window, then turned around to look at Poppy. They laughed again. The cop opened his door, stepped out, and set Poppy free.

I ran to Poppy and threw my arms around his middle. He wrapped an arm around my shoulder and squeezed twice, which I took as code for “be calm.”

“
Chérie
, this is Officer Hernandez. He grew up not far from where we lived in South Miami.”

I shook the cop's hand. It was sweaty.

“Your grandfather is very nice,” Officer Hernandez said. “I'm going to forget the citation today, but don't feed the birds here anymore. It's not my rules.”

We thanked him. He sat back down in his car with a groan and cranked his air conditioner, then shut the door.

“What did he say to you?” I said as we walked toward the bench to retrieve our sack of bread.

“That bloody sycamore. He asked me for your phone number.”

“Really? What did you say?”

“I told him you were fifteen.”

I laughed. I picked up the bag of bread and Poppy grasped my hand. We crossed A1A behind the cop's car and I saw him bending over inside, studying something below the dashboard, and in one swift motion I upended the sack of bread onto the trunk of his squad car.

Gulls engulfed the car in seconds, screaming and fighting, swooping at his trunk in a crusade to assuage their appetites, but it looked more like a battle of freedom versus authority, feathers deposing the established order. Poppy pulled me forward by the hand toward the safety of the sidewalk on the other side, and I looked back and waved at the cop, who waved back, then checked his rearview mirror and scowled. Gulls scrambled and tumbled on the car's roof and trunk, screeching and laughing in high-pitched cackles. Poppy looked back at the cop.

“What did you do,
Chérie
?”

“He said not to feed the birds on the beach, but he didn't say anything about his car.” I tried to remove my hand from his, but he squeezed harder.

“You have always had a sense of justice, even as a child.” He released my hand, then took it again as we crossed the street to the parking lot.

We drove home, toward our own birds, and Poppy told me yet again about the bird market of Paris, slowly, like someone picking up pieces of a memory one by one.

*   *   *

The surgeon walked in.

“I have some news,” he said. He looked at my dad and shook his head. “Do you want me to say it here?”

“Yes,” my dad said. My instinct was to have the surgeon tell us the news in the hallway.

The doctor leaned over Poppy's face. “Mr. Moustaki, can you hear me?” he asked in a too-loud voice, as if he were talking to a child or someone who didn't speak English. Poppy nodded and his eyes opened a little.

“Mr. Moustaki, you have a stage four tumor called a glioblastoma,” the surgeon said. “We can't do surgery or the laser knife on this kind of tumor. Do you understand?”

“Is it fatal?” Poppy said in a soft, creaky voice.

“One second,” the surgeon said, gesturing for us to join him outside the room.

“This is fatal, I'm sorry,” he said to us in the hall in a hushed tone. “I don't know if you want to tell him.”

My dad and I started crying. I hated the surgeon. I wanted to smash his face and watch blood spray all over his white jacket.

“How long does he have?” my dad asked.

“It's hard to say. Three to nine months is my best guess.”

“Thank you,” my dad said, and shook the man's hand. Why was my dad thanking this man? I wasn't going to shake his hand or thank him. I wouldn't even look him in the eye. He was supposed to be our savior.

“There's nothing you can do?” my dad asked him.

“If you want, I'll order a round of radiation, and that might slow the growth. Think about it and we'll discuss options.”

We both walked back into the room wiping our eyes.

“Tell me the truth,” Poppy said.

Poppy had taught me that where there's life, there's hope—and he was alive. Dr. Z had prognosticated that Bonk had three months to live, and it had been a year since then. Doctors don't know everything.

“It's fatal,” my dad said, wiping his face with the collar of his shirt.

Poppy cried, weakly, and I started crying again.

I pulled my dad by his sleeve into the hallway. “Why did you tell him?” I stamped my foot, furious.

“He has a right to know.”

Poppy and I believed in magic. In our world, anything was possible. But magic is fragile; it has to be nourished and handled gently, like an egg. The words that should never be said had been spoken, and had broken the magic with syllables and breath:
The tumor is fatal.

*   *   *

We took Poppy for radiation treatments, but they made him sicker. His flowing silver locks fell out in a clump at the radiation site where they zapped him, and I collected some of his hair and put it between the pages of my favorite book, T. S. Eliot's
Collected Poems
, at “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate.

When the radiation ended and there were no other choices, my mom arranged for hospice care. The hospice nurse, Terry, arrived at nine in the evening on the first night. She was well over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and frizzy black hair. She wore white nurse pants and a pink scrub top stretched over large silicon breasts. She had a strange, throaty voice with a thick Texas lilt. She had been guiding people into the eternal beyond for years, helping their families cope. Her laughter echoed through the house, and you couldn't help but laugh with her. She was a cheerleader for the dying.

On the second day, Terry arrived before dinner, earlier than expected, and brought us a barbecue feast. This endeared her to my dad, and we all felt that Poppy was in capable, generous hands. Rather than talking to my parents about Poppy, I confided in her, asking about his condition and what we could do. She told me that dying people see differently. They breathe differently. They make peace with themselves and their loved ones, silently, little by little. She was medicating him, she said, so he wasn't in pain. He still communicated with us with hand gestures and mumbling, but essentially we all sat around, watching and waiting.

“This isn't an easy job, helping the dying,” she said to me one day when we were alone together, folding laundry.

“I imagine it's not,” I said.

“People don't want to live when they get like this.”

I folded a pair of my dad's khaki shorts.

“That's what extra morphine is for,” she said. “It ends things peacefully.”

I excused myself and sat by Poppy's bedside and held his hand as the angel of death folded our towels in the other room. Poppy was sleeping sweetly, the sleep of the healthy, but I knew he wasn't. I walked upstairs and sat in the darkest corner of my closet and drank until my own sleep came hard, like someone smothering me with a blanket.

I had to leave for NYU in the morning. I called my boss, another graduate student, to explain the situation, and asked if I could return late.

“If you're not back Monday, we'll give your room to someone else—someone who wants to be here.”

“My grandfather is dying,” I repeated.

“Decide what you want,” she said. “There are a lot of people who would love to have your job and your room.”

“Can someone else take my hours and I'll take theirs when I get back?”

“If you don't want this job, call me back and let me know,” she said, and hung up.

This girl had the key to my room and the ability to write me up. She could have me tossed out of the dorm and, with nowhere else to live, tossed out of school. I took her word as gospel.

The next day, I set down my suitcase, approached the hospital bed, and took Poppy's hand. “I have to go now, Poppy,” I whispered into his ear. I wanted a moment alone with Poppy, but everyone stood around the bed, waiting for something to happen, and I didn't feel comfortable asking them to leave.

He squeezed my hand. “Please stay,” he said, wheezing asthmatically.

“I can't. I love you, Poppy.”

“Stay with me,” he said. “I need you.”

I hadn't realized how much he still understood and could articulate. My parents and the hospice nurse lingered nearby, watching, listening. I needed to catch my train, but once I stepped outside the house, I knew I'd never see Poppy again. I felt heartbroken and numb at the same time, wanting to find a zipper in my skin so I could step out of this human body.

“I love you,” I said again. “Do you have anything you want to tell me? I'll write it down.”

“Yes, please,” he said.

I ran upstairs two steps at a time to gather paper and a pen. I leaned my ear to his mouth, my pen poised over a sheet of lined yellow legal paper.

“Be a good girl,” he whispered. I wrote it down.

“Beware the hunters,” he continued. I wrote that down, too.

“Always hope,” he said.

I tried to stop crying by holding my breath. Poppy paused for a long time.

“Anything else, Poppy?” He was silent, breathing hard.

“Poppy, I'll be a good girl. You don't have to worry. I'll beware of the hunters. I won't lose hope.” My chest hitched and my throat ached.