Undercover (8 page)

O
NCE I HELD A BABY BIRD, but it was dying.

I had been climbing the old pink dogwood tree and I had seen it from above—lying on its side in the strawberry patch. “I found a bird, I found a bird, I found a bird,” I yelled real loud to anyone who’d listen, but I guess it was only a half-born bird, with a head too big for its skinny neck and wings like sacks, eyes as blind as blisters. I slid down the dogwood tree and ran to where it was and bent to take a closer look and then, so very gently, slowly, I kneeled down to the ground. It looked so soft, the
bird, like it had no weight at all. It looked like all it needed was a cradle.

“I found a bird,” I told the world. “I found a baby bird!” I proclaimed. And scooped it up and ran inside and opened my hands for the big world to see.

Jilly was on the couch with one of my mother’s magazines—long and lovely even then, already keen on the fashions. “That is so disgusting,” she said, lifting her head. “You should have been a boy, Elisa.”

“Honey. Please. You take that back outside,” said my mother. “It isn’t sanitary.” She was in the kitchen, making cookies. She raised one hand like a caution cop and pointed at the door. “You have no idea where that bird has been. You need to wash your hands.”

“It’s my bird,” I declared to them both. “My bird!” Sticking my tongue out at Jilly and running straight past my mother and flying up the stairs, keeping the bird safe and living in the cradle of my
hands. Maybe I was only six, but I was one hundred percent sure that that bird needed a bed, needed a pillow, and that my mother’s pillow was the biggest of all, and therefore the very best. I grabbed her pillow from her bed. I tucked it under my chin and flew back down the stairs, and all that time I still held that bird in my hands; all that time it was a very living thing. In the laundry room it was warm and it smelled like soap. In the laundry room there was the sound of slosh, and that was where I made that bird its getting-better bed, right on top of the rumble of the dryer. I plumped up the pillow, and I laid the bird down inside a little soft place that I pressed out with my hand. And then I stood on my toes and I waited for that bird to grow out its feathers and stretch its wings and open its eyes so that it could see, but it did not. It just lay where I had put it and got very, very cold, and then it wouldn’t move, and then it couldn’t.

That night when Dad got home, he helped me bury the bird beside Mom’s strawberry patch, inside
an empty Barbie box. He called it honoring and he filled the box with twigs and leaves, and then he told me to lay the bird in by myself, lay it in nice, he said, for eternity, which of course I did, my face all hot with tears. Then he covered the box with a bunch of dirt and put a couple of daisies from Mom’s garden on the mound. He picked me up, though I was too big for that. He carried me into the laundry room and helped me wash my hands.

That night it rained and rained and rained and rained, and the streets got full of gush, and the trees and the tops of the flowers seemed cut from their stems, and all I could think of was the bird in its box that would rise through the mud. It would slip from the cracks of its cardboard coffin and open its blister-blind eyes and not know anything about where it was, and if that was what eternal was, that was a very bad thing. I knew that it was my fault—that I had killed the bird, that I had buried it in the worst kind of drowning—and all I wanted then was to go outside and rescue the bird from the flood. I
had my new pink pajamas on. I was extremely careful. I tiptoed down the hall, past Mom and Dad, down the stairs and around the corner, into the laundry room, where the machines were so much bigger in the night. Then I went out through the door, through the bang-banging screen door, to where the rain was falling so hard, it felt like fingers pulling through my thick hair and my pajamas got soaked through and also muddy.

I looked for the daisies above the grave, but the daisies were gone. I dug for the box, but I couldn’t find it. I pulled out the strawberries one by one, and I found nothing, and so I kept digging, but the bird in the box was gone, it had disappeared like dreams disappear, and the next day Jilly kept saying I was in real trouble.

Later, when it was just the two of us, Dad explained that wherever the bird had gone, the bird was fine, and not afraid. And he said that there were two kinds of chances you take in life, and that I had chosen one. You can love not enough, he said, or
you can love too much, and when you love too much, you risk everything, but you also enter into a thing called beauty.

I didn’t know when I was six what the word
risk
meant, but I never forgot what Dad told me. And after that night with Theo at the pond, after that chase through the trees, after the baby’s feet that weren’t, I put the word
risk
right in my Book of Words, under my epigraph, Making and Roaring.
Risk
was a word that it took some growing up to use. Risk was the beginning.

The next morning I tried to write Dear Lila notes for Theo.

Dear Lila,
I wrote.

Dear Lila.

But I had nothing. Something had changed, and I couldn’t help it, and the skies were threatening snow.

C
HRISTMAS WAS ALWAYS my mother’s holiday. She started buying gifts in March, wrapping them at night when she couldn’t sleep, mentioning them briefly in passing:
Oh, I found the best thing. I can’t wait until it’s yours.
There was an entire room at the end of the upstairs hallway in which Mom stowed the boxes of earrings, the blouses and tights, the ties she always bought for Dad, and for as long as I could remember, Jilly and I could be trusted with that. There would have been no pleasure in ruining the surprise.

On Christmas morning we’d come downstairs,
and there would not be a place to stand. It would be as if the floor had cracked wide apart and a world of color pushed up, and through—a jagged landscape of red and white foiled boxes, snowflake cutouts, silver angel wings. On the mantel my mother would have placed birch twigs, frosted with sugar. On the windowsills she’d have arranged her Santas. And she’d be sitting there in her favorite green plush chair—her blond hair magnificently smooth, her eyes wide beneath a sky of sparkle, my dad squeezing in beside her. Christmas was my mother’s holiday. It was the day of the year in which her talent for beauty was an active verb—a cascade across the room.

Dad took the red-eye home that Christmas Eve morning. A cab dropped him off. I heard it brake at the curb because I was waiting for it, because I’d been awake since so much earlier, watching the window for signs of a diminishing dark. I had a million things to tell my dad. I had as many things I knew I’d never say. But all I wanted, when I heard the cab, was to feel his arms around me, to hear him
say My Littlest Girl, which is what he always called me, even after I got big.

I slid out of bed and opened the door to my room. I went halfway down the stairs and stopped. There was a pot of coffee on. There was a murmur. I understood at once that I would have to wait my turn. That some things do take precedence over a daughter’s love.

They talked for the longest time, my mom and dad, but I could not make out a single word. I heard only the rise and fall of sadness and silence, the long pause and the resumption, the rush and the rebuttal. I was back in my bed with the door closed tight, watching the window, the low sun in the window, the day that was coming on strong. I heard a scuffle outside my door, the rattle of the loose doorknob turning.

“Hey.” It was not my dad. It was not my mother. It was Jilly, who hadn’t bothered to knock, and maybe for some sisters that would have seemed the most natural thing, but not for the two of us—
blond and auburn, pretty and not, on the opposite ends of most spectrums. She was wearing a lacy peach nightgown with cream-colored sleeves, the sort of thing I’d have thought would be worn to a party. I was wearing a T-shirt and cotton sweatpants. My hair was electrical.

“They’re talking,” I said, for she was studying me, saying nothing.

“I know,” Jilly answered. She sighed.

“He’ll probably come to see us soon.”

“Maybe,” she said. Then: “Do you mind?”

I didn’t answer. She turned and sat on the edge of my bed. Sat there in silence, facing the window.

“Doesn’t look like snow,” I said.

“No,” she said. “It doesn’t.”

And that was all between the two of us, because anything that might have been said should not have been said. Not then. It was too scary.

I woke to the sound of a slight tapping at the door. “Honey?” Dad said. “Can I come in?” I must
have fallen back asleep, and Jilly, too, curled up in one corner of my bed like a cat, her long hair over her fine shoulders. “Daddy!” Jilly said, which is what she called him still, and I said, “Hey. Dad. Welcome home,” putting my hands to my hair to power it down, swallowing the stale taste from my mouth. He looked faded and creased around the eyes, with a line of worry down his forehead. His hair seemed flat and lifeless. He wore an untied tie around his neck like a scarf. His pockets jingled with spare coins.

“You don’t know how I’ve missed you,” he said, coming toward us, sitting between us on my bed—his light, lithe daughter on one side, me on the other, all of us wrecked by some variant of sleep: too much, too little, our eyes a little tilted in our heads.

“Did you get my letters?” I said, though I knew he had.

“Of course.”

“Did you go to Gump’s?” Jilly asked.

“Without a doubt.”

“How long are you home for?” I wanted to know.

“Not long enough,” he said. “Never long enough.”

He told us stories, then, about Stuart Small. He took us on a tour of San Francisco. He told us about the Christmas tree down on the wharf, which was taller, he said, than most anything. Then he wanted to know all about us, and Jilly told him about driver’s ed and the total barf head who was its teacher, and I said only that I’d been writing poems, and maybe I could show him later, except that they were works in progress, and he said he’d like that very much, and that works in progress always had more flavor than anything perfect enough to be called finished.

“I bet you’re tired, Dad,” I said, and he said he was, and I took my arm from around his neck and Jilly took her arm back, too, so that he could stand and lean in and kiss us both on the forehead, then go off down the hall, to the master bedroom. Jilly was gone just as soon as he was. I lay down on my pillow and listened long as the house slowly went silent.

I
KNEW THINGS were different Christmas morning when I did not hear Bing Cosby’s voice floating up the stairs. When I woke and it was strangely still. Sometimes a bed is an island in a house where there’s been trouble, and I did not know, lying there alone, whether the others were awake with their own wondering thoughts, or still asleep and dreaming. I did not even know what time it was, but that didn’t seem to matter. An odd bleached sun pressed up against my bedroom windows, and all about the windows, like delicate frames, white webs of frost had settled in.

It took a long time before I heard anybody stir, before I felt I could go downstairs and join the day. All the twinkle lights were on, but they seemed to twinkle sadly. There were boxes wrapped in foils, but it was my dad who had come downstairs first, not my mother. He had made his way to the kitchen, pulled a big pot out of the lazy Susan cabinet, and now he was filling it with two-percent, sprinkling powdered chocolate in, heating a burner on the stove.

“Hot chocolate,” he said.

I said, “Sounds good.”

“We’re out of marshmallows, aren’t we?” He was preoccupied. The line down his forehead was a gulley, dividing left from right, before from now.

“Dad?” I said.

“Honey?” He had turned and had his back to me, was hunting through a drawer for a wooden spoon, which wasn’t where he remembered it being because weeks ago Mom had moved the wooden spoons, put them in the old yellow pitcher that sat on the opposite side of the counter. I went to the
pitcher. I selected a spoon. I tapped him on the shoulder.

“Merry Christmas,” I said.

At last he stopped and turned to me. “Of course,” he said. “Merry Christmas.” And then he took me into his arms and hugged me so hard that the big white button of his light-blue pajamas pressed a circle into my cheek. “How are you doing, Elisa?” he said. “Really doing?”

But where, I wondered, do I begin? And how long was he staying this time? And did I want to weigh him down with Theo and Lila and Cyrano when he already had so much worry on his mind?

“I’m good, Dad,” I said. “Just glad you’re home.”

We didn’t open our presents until after lunch that day, and when Mom sat in her green plush chair, she sat there alone, quietly reading the tags on the boxes, summoning us to her, gift by gift. Jilly and I tried to cheer her up by trying on the gifts she’d given, until Jilly was all decked out in two
sheer blouses and a red wool jacket over a new striped, slinky dress (a beret on her head, a head-band beneath the beret, glass-drop earrings on her ears), and I was wrapped up like a snowman zombie in sweaters and a scarf, a pair of mittens over gloves, a fine pen my mother called “the writing pen” in my new white parka’s pocket.

“You look nice, girls,” is what my mother said, but looking ridiculous had been the point, and we grew louder and louder, sillier and more strange, because we wanted to make her smile, wanted to break through to the other side of this faraway place that she was in. Dad gave me a box of Ghirardelli’s chocolate and a book on Alcatraz. He’d bought a pair of beaded bracelets for Jilly. There were big bowed boxes from Gump’s with Mom’s name on them, but she refused to open them. She wouldn’t look at Dad, and once she said, as if to no one, “You have no idea how hard this has been.”

“Tina,” Dad said. “It’s Christmas, honey.
Christmas
.”

“Well, I guess you should have thought of that,” she said, “before you made your plans.”

“It’s not my choice,” Dad said, “leaving tomorrow.”

“Of course it’s your choice,” Mom said. “How in the world does Stuart Small rank higher than your family?”

“Tina,” Dad said.

“Please,” she said. “Don’t.” She stood and went to the kitchen. She pulled out all the makings of dinner. The turkey she’d roast and dribble with gravy. The sweet potatoes for the pie. The asparagus she’d peel and top with crushed almonds. The bags of peas and carrots. The raisin bread with the white icing that she’d made the week before. It takes a long time to make a Christmas dinner. It takes knives and bowls and pots and pans and basting brushes and metal whisks and things neither you nor I would ever think of. Mom wanted no help—not that Christmas, not that dinner—though sometimes over the course of those too many hours, I would offer, or Jilly would, or we would approach Mom together.

Mom hardly talked to Dad the rest of the day—not over dinner, not after dinner, not when Dad lit the logs in the fireplace and we all sat around the orange flames. But that night I heard them talking, talking—my mother’s voice unnerving and low, my father’s voice growing hard, perfunctory, explaining. Very late, he came into my room. I was wide-awake, watching the moon.

“You really leaving again?” I asked.

“I have to,” he said.

“And then you’re coming back?”

“That’s the plan.”

“Stuart Small doesn’t deserve you,” I said.

He ran his hand through my hair, like he used to when he would read to me at night, or just before he would set off for one of his trips across the ocean, or just after he’d found a treasure for my Stash O’ Nature box. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out something gold and bright—the shimmer of a star looped through with a midnight-colored ribbon. “I found this for you,” he
said, “in San Francisco.” Standing, he hung the star from the lock of my nearest window. It swayed for a little while, then stopped and held its own place in the sky. “I love you lots,” he said, “and don’t forget it.” He leaned in and kissed me right between my two wet eyes.

In the morning he was gone.