The Lovebird (39 page)
THAT NIGHT THE TWO OF US SAT AT THE TABLE
listening to the grasshoppers. The star-shaped ceiling lamp shone down on us, and the flecks of glitter in the Formica shone up.
“I missed it, too,” Jim said.
“What?”
“Cora’s Shawl Dance.”
“What? Why?”
“Because I was so worried about what might have happened that I went looking for you.”
“That’s terrible,” I said.
“I know.” Jim’s vertical furrow was deep. “She didn’t even ask why—that’s the worst part. She wouldn’t speak to me at all last night or this morning.”
I laid my head down on the table, wondering what I would say to her.
Soon, Josie’s truck rolled up to the house, radio blaring, and deposited two figures outside—one aged and slow, one young and quick.
“So, she’s back,” Cora said before the screen door slammed shut behind her. Her hair had been freed from its braids and fell in wild waves all around her face.
“Cor—” Jim started.
“Did she just come back to get her things?” she asked him.
“No,” I began, “I—”
“Or is she going to sleep in my room a bit longer?”
“Cora, we’re so sorry we missed your dancing,” Jim said.
“It’s all my fault,” I added. “I left, and your dad felt like he had to look for me.”
“I
knew
you were the reason.” Glaring in her regalia, with her hair so full of static and smelling so smokily of the fires from the teepee camp, her skin shimmering with prairie dust and slightly ghostly from the powdered sugar that covers fry bread, she frightened me. But then she tucked her lips into a small tight line and her eyes went stormy behind the spectacles.
“Grandchild—” Granma said, but the sobbing sprite stole swiftly into her bedroom. Granma sat down. She reached for me, and I noticed how much like Jim’s her hands felt. The same blood warmed them. “Where did you go yesterday, honey?”
“I’m sorry and ashamed. I was so confused, Granma. I felt so uneasy and sick.” I told her all that had happened.
Granma nodded. “I know that sickness you had. It’s called
daásduupe
—two hearts. It makes a person feel uncertain, insecure, faltering. Do you still feel it?” She stared into my face, studying it for signs.
“No. I got better. In the night, while I slept, and at dark face time. I knew what I wanted, and where I wanted to be. I want to be here with you,” I said. “But I won’t if it’s not okay with Cora. That means everything.”
“I’m glad you feel that way, like you belong here,” Granma said. She smiled at Jim, and then winked.
“Mom,” he said, shaking his head.
“What?” she asked. “I’m happy she wants to be with us. I love her.”
The grasshoppers called. We looked at each other across the table. “
I
love her,” Jim said.
• • •
THE ROOM WAS DARK
. She was visible only as a slight shape in her twisted sheets. She had carelessly strewn her fine clothes all over the floor, and I stumbled over a moccasin before I made it to the bunk ladder. I ascended and lay flat on my back. The air felt compressed, as if Cora and I were inside of a watch that had been wound too tight. And sensitive Daphne was unwilling to release some of the tension with even a few squeaky turns of her wheel.
“Cora.” In the silence after I spoke her name, I thought about it, for the first time, in a Latin way, the way Simon had taught me.
Cor
, I realized, meant
heart
—“Cora, I’m so sorry I caused us to miss your dancing. I’m so sorry”—and mine hurt for her. She was quiet.
“I want to be here,” I said, “to watch you dance next year. I’m kind of like you. My mom hasn’t been a part of my life.” I felt her turn over in the bed below me. I couldn’t tell if she was listening, or if she meant to give the bunks a see-if-I-care shake. “And I’ve been looking for my place for a long time. I think it’s with you, and your dad, and Granma, but only if you think so, too.”
Cora offered not one peep. “And if you don’t think so,” I said, “I’ll go. But I want you to know that I have loved the time I’ve had with you. And I love you. I know you don’t like me at all right now. But I think you’re amazing. You’re brilliant, strong, gorgeous, funny, completely unique. I’m in awe of you. I know you’re going to end up doing incredible and unexpected things with your life. You’re going to make a difference, I just know it.” A breeze blew through the window, and I turned my face toward it, thinking of what Jack Dolce had called my “desperate” drive to make a difference. I realized that it had mellowed, mercifully, that make-a-difference mania, and it wasn’t any longer so misguided. “That was something I tried to do myself,” I said to Cora. “Make some sort of difference. And I hope to be around to see you do it better.”
Daphne took a few tentative steps on her wheel. Then complete silence cloaked the room, and we all—me, Cora, the hamster, and the ballerina upside down in her jewelry box—slept.
AT SEVEN, I WOKE TO THE SOUNDS
of Cora’s precise morning routine. She rose, scraped her spectacles off her dresser, brushed her hair, poured pellets into Daphne’s bowl. I heard her pick the various pieces of her regalia up off the floor, shake them out, and arrange them on her bed. Then all was still. Granma had breakfast sizzling in the kitchen—I smelled it. But Cora didn’t open the door and bound out for a bite. Minutes passed, during which all I could hear was the regular rise and fall of her girlish breaths.
I opened my eyes and saw her standing in the center of the floor, staring at me. “Hi,” I croaked. But she just looked a little longer and left the room.
IT WASN’T LONG BEFORE THEY CAME
. Still bedbound, I lay and listened to the muffled sounds of Granma and Cora in conversation.
“… so many more of them today.”
“… know where they all come from?”
“… only the males who make that sound.”
A car pulled up to the house. I pushed back the daisy-printed pillowcase curtain, peeked out the window, and saw a sedan, black and shiny as a wet stone despite the dusty terrain it had traversed. For a short, sleepy moment, I was intrigued. But when I saw the brown and green splots all over its windshield and hood—dozens upon dozens of dead grasshoppers—I knew.
“Who’s this?” I heard Cora ask. “And where did Dad go?”
Granma said, “Let me go to the door, Cora.”
I sat up and stared at my hands. Panic seeped from my palms. Simon’s letter was right. They had started watching him before
they’d begun watching me. Maybe they had lost track of me for a while, but they had always kept their eyes fixed on him, and when he’d come all the way to Crow Country to retrieve me, they had followed.
I watched them get out of the car: two men in suits. How strange it must be, I thought, for Granma to see once more what she had first seen some sixty years before, two men in suits stepping over the prairie grass, coming to knock on her front door. Now I was the one hiding beneath a buffalo blanket.
I heard a man’s voice, the same one that had sounded outside my Middletown studio so many months earlier and called me out of bed by my first and last names.
“Ma’am. I’m Agent Fox with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and this is Agent Jones …” The introductions, the reason for their visit, rolled into my ears and out of my pores, slicking me with sweat. “We have reason to believe that this woman is living with you.” I knew the photograph (they were showing it now, pressing it up against the screen), the one they had snapped at the San Diego County jail when they booked me, the one that was published in the
Sun
—me after a long night of wine, with worried eyes, uncombed curls, and a mournful mouth. “Her name is Margie Fitzgerald, but she may use an alias. Do you know her?”
Granma let spill a long string of sentences—all of them in Crow.
“Do you speak English?” asked Agent Jones.
“Baaleetáa!”
*
I discerned a little bell through the bulk of the buffalo hide. It was Cora’s ringing voice. “Can I help?”
I buried myself deeper still. I imagined her studying the photo with her mathematician’s intensity, squinting through her cat-eyes. There was a long, long pause during which I knew she was
constructing the succinct and sword-sharp statement that would seal my doom:
You are utterly correct, gentlemen. That woman is living here. In fact, she is sleeping on my bunk bed right now
.
“This is what she looks like?” Cora asked.
“Yes, miss.”
An eternity passed. A thousand times, the sun set and the moon came up and ripened the wild plums, and all the Crow children jumped and grew up strong.
“I’m sorry,” Cora said, “but we’ve never seen anybody like this. Right, Granma?”
“
Éeh
.”
†
“Are you sure?” Agent Fox’s high whine was dubious and exasperated.
“Utterly,” Cora said.
I WAS ALREADY TRIPPING DOWN
the bunk ladder, saying “thank you” over and over, when they burst into the bedroom. Granma hugged me. Cora stood apart with one hand slipped into the other. Still, a smile repeatedly threatened to break open on her staid face.
“They’re going to come back,” I said.
“That’s right.” Granma nodded. “They always do.”
“They’ll have a search warrant,” I said. Cora wouldn’t let me catch her eye. Her decision to preserve me had made her shy.
Then a pervasive purr rippled through the air and hummed through the house, as if the lions sleeping beneath the prairie had finally awakened. It was the Pronghorn coming down the dirt road, and Jim was behind the wheel. “She drives!” Cora exclaimed. We awaited him on the porch.
“Who were those guys I passed in the black car?” he asked.
“Where were you?” I said.
“Test drive. Want to go for a ride?”
“I’m afraid I might need to,” I said. “A long one.”
OVER A BREAKFAST THAT NONE OF US ATE
, we made the plan. I would go to San Diego and show up in court. Rather than being taken, I would take myself. I would take hold of myself.
“Let’s resolve it,” Jim said. “Go through with the trial.”
“How can you live any kind of good life,” Granma asked, “always hiding?”
“I know,” I said. “But how will things be any different now than they were when I left?”
“Now you’ll have us,” Jim said.
Cora echoed, “You’ll have us.”
And it was hard to be terrified then.
“They’ll be back, Margie,” Granma said. “You’d better hurry. Don’t let them take you.”
I carried the Strawberry Shortcake suitcase into the living room and clicked it open. I pulled out the rose-scented rosary—“Ah,” Granma said, “you have a
baaluukáate
. I love those!”—and the porcelain palm. “I’d like to leave these here,” I said, and Cora stilled her fluttering hands and held them safe. I found my remaining lucky red Chinese shoe, opened the screen door, and tossed it out onto the grass, where it flowered for a brief moment before Belly, barking and bouncing, took it up. I lifted out the long-unfinished letter to Dad, the one begun so long before in Middletown. I considered, as I had been doing for months, the P.S., and realized that, like all my postscripts, it would be long. But I couldn’t write it yet, because I was still living it. “Save this for me, too,” I asked Cora. “I’ll be ready to finish it later.” And then, from the very bottom of the suitcase, where it had slumbered all summer, I pulled Rasha’s recipe.
“Now, that looks interesting,” Granma said, her intrigued eyes falling on the fine paper. “What is it?” she asked.
“Remember,” I said, “how you told me about animal helpers, about your aunt and the magpie? And your grandmother and the prairie dogs?”
“Of course, honey.”
“Well, a long time ago, for nine perfect months, I was loved and cared for by a gazelle, and this is what she left me.”
THE SUN WAS HIGH
when Jim bade Cora and Granma goodbye and started up the Pronghorn. “I know this is the best way,” I told Granma.
“We’ll be here,” she said. “When you need us to come, we’ll come.” I kissed her.
Cora stood at Granma’s side, arms dangling. “Thank you, again,” I said.
“It was nothing.”
“Everything I said was true.”
She nodded.
“I’ll see you soon, I hope,” I said.
“Okay.” I waited for a moment, my own arms tingling for her, but she stepped closer to her grandmother and clutched her hand. I slid into the car.
Just as Jim shifted out of park and into drive, Cora cried, “Wait!” She dashed into the house. When she reappeared, she opened the passenger door and stood close to where I sat, so close that one edge of her starry spectacles brushed my cheek. She sucked in a big gulp of air, glanced down, and took up my hand. “Now,” she said, finding my finger and adorning it with a ring sculpted from the pit of a peach, “you’re mine.”
