Rise (18 page)

Her friends were mothers, all of them. They named their kids Archer and Zephyr and Dax, and they talked only about mothering, as if they'd forgotten everything they'd ever cared about before. After a while Shelby stopped calling them, or maybe they stopped calling her, he wasn't really sure. She set her sticks aside and her basal thermometer, and she didn't mark the days down on her calendar. She was sleeping before he came to bed, and she was sleeping when he woke and he didn't reach for her. He'd forgotten how things were before they began trying. He'd forgotten how to touch her without thinking about her mucus first or whether she was spotting.

The walls of the nursery were still pale green, and she'd picked curtains from India that were stitched with butterflies and shells. Babies need light, she told him. They need to see the shadows moving on the walls. She knew about infants' brains and how they developed. She talked a lot about the importance of stimulation. It was a relief when she stopped reading her baby books. A relief and a sorrow both, and he didn't go inside that room. He left it the way it was.

He left her a message on her cell and told her he wasn't coming. “Something's come up,” he said. “I'll call you when I can.” But he didn't call her again or check his e-mail or go outside. He stayed in sweatpants and his hiking boots. He wore the clothes from his suitcase. It was better
than going on a trip. He was camping inside his house, and nobody knew he was there. He didn't brush his teeth until noon. He didn't bother to shave. He explored the pantry shelves like a visitor, and he found things from before she'd gone organic. Ravioli in a can and niblets and Dinty Moore beef stew, an unopened package of Fig Newtons.

He watched the World's Strongest Man competition on cable. Just him and the bird sleeping in its nest. The men were pulling boxcars behind them and lifting the Atlas stones. They threw logs and kept the Hercules pillars from falling, and the guy from Iceland was winning again. The veins were bulging in his temples. Jason kept the bowl of mush beside him on the armrest. “How about you, Magnus,” he said. “I bet it's time for more.”

The bird opened its eyes. It knew his face already and the sound of the chopstick tapping against the bowl. It looked strange as a dinosaur with its pointed little head. Its beak was bright yellow, but its mouth was pale inside and Jason could see the blood pumping through its veins.

There was this girl who worked at the Gamburyan bakery on the way to the army base. Sometimes she went behind the store so she could feed the pigeons. They pecked around her feet, and she raised her arms when the bread was gone and swung her hips around. Jason had gone there for an inspection once, and he saw her dancing from his car. Her hair flew around her shoulders. It threw colors like oil on water. He gripped the wheel, and he didn't want to open the door or step outside. Her head was back and she was smiling and he wanted to know why. What brought her outside when it was cold and the wind had started to blow. She wasn't even wearing a jacket. What music was she hearing there in the alleyway?

Her name tag said Dalita. He saw it when he checked their scales. She wasn't older than twenty. They were cheating again on the cookies, but he didn't write them any tickets. He wrote things down in his notebook and checked the messages on his phone, but all he could see was this girl and how her hair was coming undone. She was a younger version of Shelby before Shelby became unhappy. He was distracted on his way out. He set his steel coffee mug on top of his
car and left it there, and he drove that way across town. He grabbed Shelby when he got home. He tried to dance with her in the hall.
What's wrong with you
, she said.
Why are you acting so strange?
She smiled without meaning to, and he remembered the steps from the class they'd taken years before. Forward left and side right and they waltzed into the kitchen.

The days were full of sounds. Magpies on the chimney. Somebody practicing the drums every weekday at noon. Gardeners with their blowers because they were too lazy to use a rake. Delivery trucks backing up on the street and telephones ringing and hollow core doors slammed in the entryway. Contractors working a tile saw in the corner unit. He was living inside a hive and he hadn't ever noticed.

The fifth day the pin feathers really started sprouting. He brought the scale in and set the bird on the platform. He had a Tanita scale from when he used to work in silver. He still had his jewelers saw and his set of Nicholson files and sheets of copper and sterling in different gauges. Before she'd left he made her hammered silver cuffs and ashtrays they never used. Baby cups and feeding spoons that she gave away to her friends. The bird perched on the scale. It grabbed around the edge with one long witchy foot. It weighed less than ten grams. Not even a third of an ounce. It was lighter than powder when he lifted it up. Light as eight blueberries or a spoonful of sugar and he could feel the drumming of its heart.

His voicemail box was full. His father had called and both his older brothers, and Shelby was still trying. He cleared out the messages one by one. He didn't check his mailbox in the lobby or log on to his e-mail account. He didn't have a single place to be. This was how life used to be when he was only eight. The summers were so long, and he didn't have camp yet like his two older brothers. No art classes or trombone lessons, just a string of dusty afternoons in his spot beneath the trees. His mother was working in the dress shop and his dad was still in the
army and he was alone in the house most days. He spent hours on the backyard lounger. He read Asimov and
Weird Tales
, and there was nothing better. Frozen pizzas and pudding pops and those storms rolling down from Palmer Lake. The air shimmered sometimes. It was sweet like butterscotch from the ponderosa pines. His mother would call him from work before the thunder started. She'd tell him not to be afraid. She didn't need to watch the weather to know when one was coming because she could feel them in her bunion. Ten years had passed and his father still talked about her in the present tense.

The bird was getting bigger. It was hopping on his floor. Its feathers were in, and it ate from a bowl and not just from his hand. He set it on the window sill so it could see what it was missing. “Look what's out there,” he said. “Everything's blooming, but it's not too hot. This is the best time of the year.” He rubbed his chin, and pretty soon his beard would be full like Jeremiah Johnson's. It was really coming in. Who knew there'd be so much gray.

Last summer a pregnant woman in Omaha lost her balance and fell from her bedroom loft. Her husband was a musician. She landed on a microphone stand down in the living room. The metal passed through her abdomen and came out between her shoulders. She survived and her son did, too. He was born healthy and unmarked. Another inch either way and it would have speared her baby or her liver or her heart. There was a lesson to be learned from this story. He watched the news so he could understand. Sometimes things are fragile and sometimes they're resilient and who knew why this bird had lived when all the others had died. His father smoked two packs a day and he'd been exposed to Agent Orange, but it was his mother whose lungs had failed. Women did drugs and fell down stairs and birthed their healthy babies, and at their core things were a mystery. He needed to rise above them. He needed distance to see their pattern.

The bird learned to fly when he wasn't watching. It was the last Saturday of his vacation. He came in from the bathroom, and it was sitting on top of the TV cabinet. It looked at him with those rust-colored eyes.
It flew from the cabinet to the sofa and back again. It flew as if it had been flying for a thousand years, as if gravity were a riddle and it knew the answer from birth. “Look at you,” Jason said. He stretched out his arm like a falconer, but the bird didn't come to his wrist.

They started calling from work on Monday at 9:30 in the morning. His boss Milman wanted to know where he was.
Personnel had you down for ten days
, the secretary said. She coughed a little and cleared her throat.
Maybe they have it wrong
. By noon Milman himself was calling.
It's not like you
, he was saying. Eleven and a half years at Weights and Measures and Jason had never taken a sick day. Not even when he had mono or when Shelby lost the babies. He should have stayed with her those first few days. Nobody needed to tell him this. They should have talked more or gone together on a trip, but he'd gone to work instead and wrote up his bakery tickets.

Milman called all Monday afternoon and then again on Tuesday. When the ringing became too much and the flashing of the light, Jason unplugged his cordless phone and set it in the closet. He wedged it between the beach towels, and the house went quiet then. Even the bird stopped its singing.

Any time now they'd contact his next of kin. They'd reach Shelby or his father and ask whether he was okay. They might ask the police to send a cruiser by. He could explain things away, but he lacked the will. He could blame it on a fever or a case of stomach flu, and he'd be back on his rounds. Maybe he'd see Dalita bringing the birds down from their wires. The Mesa Mercado would still be charging a dime too much for golden raisins. They had a problem with their scanner. And the bakery at the downtown Farmers Market mislabeled the sourdough loaves. A nickel here and a quarter there and there weren't enough inspectors to keep the stores honest. He could spend all his days going from one place to the next, and it wasn't any use because people were the problem and not just the machines.

He opened the door and stepped out onto the balcony. It was Wednesday morning just before seven and the air was already warm.
Another perfect summer day. One of thousands in his life. He was forty-one years old, and he'd have another thirty summers maybe, another forty if he was lucky. The bird jumped from the counter to the floor. It followed him outside and hopped onto the glass table. If two had lived and not just one, they'd fly away together, but a single bird wouldn't leave. It knew no face but his. He wanted to tell Shelby that he missed her. Not the way she was now but the way she used to be. He wanted to tell her to be grateful.

In another hour all the noises would start again.The contractors would come in their white trucks and the gardeners with their blowers. But right now there was nobody in the courtyard or walking on the street. Just a kid at the skate park who had the place to himself. A skinny kid with plaid shorts so loose they'd fall down if he wasn't careful. He moved like a pendulum when he turned on the concrete. He moved like an ocean wave. Physics could explain his movements. It could map out the forces and the curves, but it didn't reach things at their core. What could science say about something like grace.

F
ilipina ladies made the best funeral dishes. Sausages and beef with bananas and garlicky noodles, and once he went to a funeral where they cooked a pig up whole and people stood around and fought for the cracklings. The German widows did a nice job, too, with all their butter cakes. His choice today was limited, though. Mexican and Korean, and he wasn't going to eat that spicy Korean food again. He'd gone once to a funeral at their Baptist church up on Academy, and all they had was fishy balls and little silver fish that still had their heads. He was sick afterward for days, and he'd go to his own funeral before another Korean one, that much was certain.

He stood by the buffet and plucked tamales from the pot with a dented pair of tongs. It was a teenager named Marco who had died. The driver was drunk probably when he hit the boy. It happened at three in the afternoon right by the Citadel Mall, and the driver kept on going and didn't stop and the police were searching for his truck.

The young ones were the hardest. They were students, some of them, or newlyweds. They left babies behind and pretty wives who swayed beside the coffin. It was easier with the vets from his Korean War group. They were dropping every other week now, and people were sorry but they weren't surprised. He looked around the room, at the high schoolers in their dress shirts and the parents who couldn't be forty yet judging from their faces. All those funerals he'd gone to, for kids and old soldiers and mothers who died too young, and those
grieving relatives who filled their plates but didn't eat. He took it all in. He swallowed their sorrows whole, and sometimes he tried to cry but the tears didn't come.

He found a chair in the back of the hall. They'd set up card tables near the front, and that's where the family sat and the mother was weeping again and the other ladies gathered around her to rub her shoulders and stroke her wavy hair. They weren't at the funeral hall this time and there'd be no graveside ceremony either, not with the snow still coming down and the ground harder than marble. They'd need jackhammers to break through. He balanced a paper plate across his knee, and another lady sat down beside him and fumbled in her purse. She pulled out a wrinkled Kleenex. She looked at him while she blew her nose. Loud as a trumpet the way she sounded. She eyed him like a bill collector, and for a moment he wanted to stand and leave.

“It's a shame,” he said. He shifted in his chair. “Not even eighteen and he's gone.”

“I was his teacher,” she said. “Three years I taught him piano.” She set her purse down.

He watched her fingers. They were long as a surgeon's, but the knuckles were already beginning to show and they'd be knobby before she was old. They'd be crooked like his mother's had been. That's why she'd worn gloves every day, even in summertime. Thin white cotton ones with lace around the top, and he hadn't gone to her funeral, but his sister told him that's how she was buried, too. In her prettiest summer pair. “It's a shame,” he said again.