The Lovebird (20 page)

“It’s been nice for our moms to reconnect,” Jim told Bumble. “They were friends long ago.” Granma nodded from her recliner. “And I think your mom’s dad was actually married to one of my mom’s cousins, though, you know, in Crow we don’t even have a word for cousin.

“We’re glad we could help out with all this,” Jim continued. “What a mess, huh? The federal government.” He shook his head. “We tribes have had our share of conflicts with it, too. Even though we’re supposed to be a sovereign nation all our own, the feds still have jurisdiction here when it comes to cases like yours. But this is a decent hiding place. And you—” He turned his face once more in my direction. “You can stay with us as long as you need. I know I already said that, but we’re glad to have you.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I know I already said that, too. But I am so grateful,” I added, reddening, “for your help. I hope I can be as much of a help to you, and to Granma, and—”

Cora stepped out of the hallway. She wore a nightgown, and her loosened hair streaked down her back in a straight and shining waterfall. She crushed her small body up against Jim’s big one. “Have you met my daughter yet?” he asked.

“Hi, Cora,” I said. “I’m Margie.” With some prodding, she faced me, and slid one of her hands into the other with the quickness of a mouse vanishing into a hole. Standing with her hands thus arranged, she looked both dignified and demure.

“I like your glasses,” I said. She still had on the cat-eyes. They
were tortoiseshell, with constellations of rhinestones on both sides. The points of the almond-shaped frames extended beyond the perimeter of Cora’s pixie face, which she promptly turned away from me. The glasses were of the same sort that a certain set of San Diego twentysomethings had been wearing for the last several years. I’d seen them for sale at steep prices in twee vintage clothing shops that specialized in adornments from yesteryear, most of which were meant to be worn with a tongue in one’s cheek. I had a feeling Cora wasn’t wearing the glasses ironically, but I also did not have any idea what to say to her, so impenetrable did she seem, as locked away from me as the mysterious prairie. So I asked, “Are those prescription, or are you just wearing them because they’re cute?”

“They’re subscription,” she mumbled after a long pause and a slight, encouraging jostle from her dad.

“They’re beautiful on you.”

“Thanks.” She frowned and looked at her bare feet, which she curled kittenishly, as if she hoped to hide them.

I watched the way Jim ruffled his broad hand over the top of Cora’s head, the absent, innocent enjoyment he took in the softness of her hair. “Did you eat?” he asked us, and Granma brought him a sandwich stacked with sliced meat of unidentifiable origin, and Cora disappeared back down the hall, and Jim and Bumble talked some more. And Bumble was familiar to me in his grunts and foibles, in his fundamental goodness, and I could sense the vestigial traces of home on him like I could on nothing else in the room: they were folded in his speech, floating in his breath, woven invisibly among the fibers of his high-tech clothes, and I wanted to bottle them up, to keep them under my pillow for all the nights I might spend in that square and snug house among strangers. When he stood up with a stretch and said it was time to go, I fought the urge to cling to him in a way that the unwritten rules of our platonic palship had always prohibited.

“You should just stay the night here,” Jim told him. “It’s awfully soon to get back on the road after the drive you’ve had.”

“Oh, that’s okay. I already made arrangements for a hotel room in Billings. The War Bonnet Inn.” Bumble blushed after saying the name.

My throat swelled with stifled tears, and I half-whispered a little “no,” which no one acknowledged having heard. The star-shaped lamp above the table flickered.

“Well, at least Billings isn’t too far,” Jim said, and he told Bumble how to get there using a shortcut, and to beware of the black cows who sometimes ambled onto the reservation roads and were invisible on dark nights when the moon was just a sliver, and Granma rose, her knitting clutched in her gnarled hands, to bid him farewell, while Cora snoozed or, more likely spied, in her hidden chamber. Outside, Bumble clutched my shoulders and leaned close to whisper in my ear things I was too scared to hear, and handed me the Strawberry Shortcake suitcase (but not the dozen bottles of red wine I had bought special for the trip, because Granma said I could not have alcohol in the house). As he drove down the dirt road that had led us to that place so many hours earlier, I watched his taillights wane and dissolve. I tipped my head back to see the stars, and they seemed to swell and contract, swell and contract with every beat of my heart. I stood that way for a long time, listening to a melodious bird send out its short song again and again into the night, and watching the stars throb in time to it. Then my own name came clear to me, and I realized the birdsong was Granma, calling me inside.

2
CHICKEN
(Gallus gallus domesticus)

GRANMA SHOWED ME TO CORA’S ROOM
. We crept in, careful not to disturb the girl who, I was surprised to see, slept on a bunk bed. “She’s always had it,” Granma whispered. “It will come in handy now.” The top bunk was for me.

I lay there, just beneath a ceiling I could not see, for that night on the prairie was as black as Jim had said. I stayed awake for hours, listening to the occasional chirps of insects through the opened window, to the mellow rustlings of the grass, to Cora’s sleep sounds, and to the squeak of a wheel in constant rotation—presumably the exercise device of a small pet rodent.

I missed Charlotte, who had habitually slept beside me, and I wondered about everything under the slumbering sun: about Agent Fox and all the books I had seen him pretending to read at Gelato Amore, about Bumble snoozing at the War Bonnet Inn, about the handwritten recipe at the bottom of my suitcase and the loveliness of its ingredients, about the houses in the hills and how far away from me they were now, about miscellaneous Latin words whose meanings I had already forgotten, and about the dark-haired stranger of whom I had so often dreamed, the one who held me in a front-of-him-against-the-back-of-me embrace.
My mind spun relentlessly, in tandem with the ceaseless circulations of Cora’s caged creature, until, at what had to have been an hour before dawn, I heard the front door open.

Certain that Agents Fox and Jones had followed the trail of the bright blue car all the way to Montana and simply breezed into the house to retrieve me, I instantly began to sweat, and a cavern opened up in my chest. Then, through the window, I heard the sound of footsteps going out of the house rather than in. I surmised by their near-inaudible softness and by the slowness of their pace that they were Granma’s. Possibly Granma sleepwalked in her orthopedic sneakers, I thought. My chest mended itself partially, and I lifted my head from my pillow—carefully, carefully, so as not to disturb Cora, who, on the bunk below me, seemed to answer my every minute movement (a wiggle of toe, a blink of eye) with an annoyed-sounding sigh—and pulled away the window’s makeshift curtain, a pillowcase printed with daisies. I peered into the night. By the light of one star, I saw Granma walk away from the house and climb a distant hillock. She stood there, wrapped in a blanket, unmoving and silent, for a long time. I decided I would watch to see what she might do, and it was only then, while straining to see her against the charcoal sky now lit by a single streak of gold, that I fell asleep.

I WOKE UP IN THE MIDDLE OF A DREAM
in which Bumble, wearing a war bonnet and biting into a doughnut, told me, just as he had when he had first spoken of the reservation, “It’s very isolated where they are.” The room was yellow with sunlight, and I squinted, unsure of where I was. Then I saw the daisy-printed pillowcase curtain, smelled the grassy prairie air, and remembered. And I thought about isolation. Was it merely a consequence of too much open space? Or did it also live in cluttered houses on suburban streets, and in the pages of photo albums
where sad eyes had too often looked? Was it the lifeless down on my arms when there was no one beside me to stroke me awake? Or the sound of a strange child breathing?

Soon I heard Cora rise and scrape her spectacles from her dresser. “Daphne,” she said in a scruffy voice. The nighttime wheel spinner, a cream-and-brown hamster, wiggled her nose with exuberance before burrowing into a bed of cedar chips. A small sign bearing Daphne’s name in precise penmanship hung from the cage. Beside it stood a row of books arranged in perfect alphabetical order (
Anne of Green Gables; Apsáalooke Nation: A History of the Crow Tribe; Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
). Cora added a handful of pellets to Daphne’s food dish and said nothing to me at all. When she opened the bedroom door and exited, the smell of something savory and sizzling curlicued into my nose. It was forbidden, fleshy food, I knew, but my stomach drummed with desire, and soon I stepped shyly out of my top bunk and into the day, one ladder rung at a time.

IN THE KITCHEN, JIM FILLED HIS THERMOS
with coffee and his lunch pail with assorted pickings from the refrigerator and cupboards: an apple, a hunk of cheese, several strips of some sort of jerky, a few pieces of bread, and, from a tin canister painted with ducks, a handful of sunflower seeds. Still, he avoided my eyes. “How did you sleep, Margie?” he asked.

“Oh, fine,” I said. Cora darted a dark glance my way, having caught me in an untruth. I realized she had been as sensitive as I’d suspected to my every move on the bunk above her. She took a peach from Granma’s extended hand and pushed it into her mouth, holding it there while she tied her shoes, careless of the juice slipping down her chin. Granma worked the tangles out of Cora’s long locks with her fingers before weaving them into a
single braid that snaked like a stroke of paint down the girl’s narrow back.

“Ow!
Basahkáalee!
”
^*
Cora yelped.

“All done,” Granma replied, soft and husky.

I stood near the table and sipped from the cup of coffee Granma handed me. I was uneasy in my robe and felt suspended somehow, as if I were waiting for instructions. What do I do here, I wondered, in my new but temporary life?

Jim donned shoes and kissed his mother on the head—“Love you, Mom”—and spoke to me—“Margie, I hope you have a good day and find everything you need”—while Cora stuffed her backpack with a sack lunch and zipped it closed, and soon they left the house together, the screen door squeaking shut behind them, a pair of dancers who had completed a well-rehearsed and prosaic morningtime routine à deux. I watched Jim’s yellow truck disappear down the dirt road, like a sun that chased the horizon instead of rising above it. It was only seven—the earliest I’d risen in years.

“Jim takes Cora to school?”

“Yes, he drops her off on his way to the press,” Granma said as she tinkered in the kitchen. “And Josie, Jim’s sister, picks her up.”

“Oh, Josie’s the lady with the big brown truck? She’s your daughter?”

“She’s my own sister’s daughter. The way we understand things, she is Jim’s sister. We have no cousins here.” Granma said that as a member of her clan, the Whistling Waters, Josie was considered her daughter, Jim’s sister, and one of Cora’s mothers. “Have you ever seen what happens to a single piece of driftwood in a river?” she asked me. Confused, I nodded yes, even though I had not seen many rivers up close. “It gets tossed around in those currents, pushed into rocks, beat up. Have you ever seen a big
cluster of many driftwood pieces gathered together against a bank in a river?” I nodded again, sheepishly sipping from my mug. “It’s a strong bunch. Those pieces don’t move. They’re all woven together like a nest, and nothing bad happens to them. That’s why we say
ashammaleaxia
when we talk about Crow families. It means ‘driftwood lodges.’ ” I thought of Bumble, Raven, Orca, Ptarmigan, and Bear. Without the Operation to bind them now, would they float apart from each other in different directions like stray pieces of driftwood? And Dad and I, what kind of a lodge had we ever made? I frowned. “Sit down,” Granma said.

I sat, and she put a plate in front of me. It was heaped with fried eggs, scraps of the same jerky Jim had taken in his lunch pail, toast, and a puddle of deep garnet jam speckled with tiny berries. I looked at it all, marveling at how good it smelled while wondering how to explain again to Granma about being a vegan. “Oh. Thank you, I—”

“Just eat what you’re comfortable with,” she said. “You won’t hurt my feelings. The eggs are from our own chickens—they live in our backyard. We treat them well. The jerky is called pemmican—that’s meat from a buffalo we got at last year’s hunt, mixed with dried chokecherries. And there’s toast and chokecherry jam. I picked the chokecherries myself last summer. We’re going out to dig roots today.”

“You and Cora?”

“No, honey, me and you.” She smiled, and I noticed she had a few teeth missing. Their absence lent her an endearingly youthful look—as if she were a girl who had lost some baby teeth—rather than an aged one.