The Fifth Sacred Thing (25 page)

“It’s me,
abuelita
. It’s Bird.”

She recognized him, without surprise but with relief, because it had been so long since he’d come to her that she had begun to fear he was irretrievably lost.

“Bird. Come in. Where have you been? Where are you now? You look remarkably substantial. I believe you actually cast a shadow. Doesn’t that drain you?”

“I’m really here this time,
abuela
. Body and all.”

She sat up, then, and opened her eyes wide.

“Bird!”

He came to her and she clung to him, weeping into his cropped hair. He was warm and solid and real in her arms. She could feel the beating of his heart against her heart and the pulse of his blood, blood of her blood. “Bird!” she crooned over and over again. “Bird. Bird. Bird. My baby!”

He was bent over the bed in an awkward position and finally she became aware that she was hurting him, so she let him go.

“Sit there where I can look at you,” she directed him.

Maya shivered with happiness. She held herself still, as if the joy might dissolve away if she moved. He is not lost, she thought. My line, Brigid’s line, is restored. For a moment, she thought she felt the presence of her daughter, brushing soft spirit lips against the nape of her neck.

Bird perched on the edge of the bed, facing her. She took his hand, rubbing and stroking and patting it. The knuckles were swollen and misshapen, clotted with old pain. She looked into his eyes, searching for traces of everything he’d thought and felt and suffered.

“When you look at me like that,” he said, “I feel like you know everything. And it’s okay.”

“It’s not okay. It’s unforgivable, going off and leaving us like that. But I forgive you anyway. You’re alive, and you’re here, and that’s what’s important. Tell me about it. You were hurt.”

“I recovered, more or less.”

“Where were you? In prison down there?”

“Yeah.”

“My poor baby. How’d you get out?”

“I escaped.”

“Well, you certainly took your own sweet time about it.”

“Maya! How can you say that? It’s a miracle I got out at all!”

“Nonsense. What do you think we raised you for? To be a jailbird?”

“That pun is what’s unforgivable.”

“I’m an old lady,” she said. “I can make all the puns I want. Now come here and hug me again. You smell like a barn, but I don’t care.”

Her arms ached to enclose him. She could see the stiff and awkward way he held his body, could feel the intimations of pain behind his eyes.

Her arms felt frail around him. Some little-boy part of him nestled down to be held. But he was the strong one now, the one who should catch her up in a tight embrace and keep her from slipping away into the whispering world of the disembodied.

Finally she let him go again. “Well, now, have you seen Madrone?”

He smiled. “She seems to want to feed me.”

“She would. How are you? Do you need anything? Want anything?”

“Oh, I want to eat and sleep and fuck and wash all at the same time, and I want to tell you everything that’s happened to me in the last ten years, and hear everything that’s gone on here. And I just want to sit here in the sun and look at you. I can’t believe I’m really home.”

“It’s a miracle.” Maya raised her eyebrows and solemnly nodded her head. “The Old Bitch has finally come through with a genuine miracle!”

The upstairs bathroom had a skylight over the shower, and the light made rainbows in the water as it splashed over Bird’s skin. He sang a cleansing chant as he washed himself, letting the colors and the light and the water carry away more than the physical stink, letting the despair he’d carried on his back like a dead thing dissolve and run down the drain too.

When he stepped out, finally, Madrone was waiting. She handed him a towel and he rubbed himself dry, turning away from her, feeling suddenly a little shy. The moment in the garden had passed. In this moment, he was afraid. So much time had gone by, so much had changed. He had, and she had. They were, in reality, strangers to each other. And yet so close. She was like a lost part of his history, sprung up to smile at him and look him over with eyes that saw too much. He wrapped the towel around himself, hiding.

But he couldn’t hide from Madrone. She was a healer, after all, and she knew bodies. In his stance, by the way he shifted his weight or the slight awkwardness of his movements as he lifted his arm, she could trace the flow of
pain, the twisted muscles and the sore ligaments, the breaks that hadn’t healed right and the old wounds. The Bird she remembered had worn his body as lightly as an animal did and moved with a predator’s grace. She reached for his hand.

“Come into my room,” she said. “Let me give you a massage.”

The sun poured down onto the bed through another skylight. He lay in a pool of warmth while she worked on the knotted muscles in his lower back and the nodes of pain in his hip. Her fingers read his history.

She was afraid too. He understood that, suddenly. She was afraid, and she was keeping him at a distance by healing and feeding. Giving out, giving out, generating a power that in the very force of its giving kept him away. He rolled over on his back, looked up at her, and grabbed her hands.

“I want to look at you,” he said. “I want to look into your eyes and talk to you.”

She let out her breath slowly. “Yes.”

“I want to say I’m sorry.
Lo siento
. Sorry I didn’t make love to you one last time before I went.”

She could see just a suspicion of dampness around his eyes, and she bent forward and kissed them lightly. “It would have been unbearable, knowing it was the last time. Anyway, if you recall, I was being rather a bitch, yelling at you. I’m sorry for that.”

“I was so scared. I didn’t want to die. I couldn’t bear hearing you tell me why I shouldn’t go.”

“I kept trying and trying to reach you after. Did you ever feel me?”

“Si
, I felt you. I feel you now.”

“But you were right,” Madrone said. “I guess I believe now that you were right to go.”

“I don’t know. Right and wrong somehow don’t seem to apply. I only know I had to do it.”

“Do you regret it now?”

“It was so different from what I imagined. I was afraid of dying. But dying would have been over quick, and this just went on and on and on. The other three all died, you know. Sometimes I regretted surviving. But not now.”

“No, not now.”

He took her face in his hands and kissed her, and then the spark was back between them, the aching and the wanting. He pulled back.

“Madrone, I’ve been with all sorts of people, done things I can’t even remember. I don’t know if this is safe for you.”

Her eyes seemed to lose focus as she observed the spirit colors that played around his body. “You’re safe,” she said.

“How can you be sure? Shouldn’t I have a blood test or something?”

“A blood test only works if you know what you’re looking for. I trust my psychic vision more. My wards would warn me if you were carrying a disease. I’d smell it.”

She slid out of her shirt and her pants and held him. She wanted him with an intensity she had forgotten existed. He was the elusive stranger from an unfamiliar world and at the same time the most familiar, the most loved and safe and innocent part of her own past. When he touched her it was like the tracings of fire on her skin, and she wrapped her arms around him and twined her legs around his, wanting to encompass him, to take him into the dark core where everything melted and he could be made new again.

He was hard. He had been dying of thirst and she was a sweet well of water. He held himself back, taking time to touch her and stroke her, but she pushed his hand away. She wanted to be filled with him; later there would be time for all the intricacies of orgasm.

“Come into me,” she whispered. “I want you there.”

She guided him into her. He felt her open to him, body and mind, and he could hold nothing back.

After a while, they pulled apart.
“Lo siento,”
he whispered. “I came too fast. It wasn’t very good for you.”

“Don’t be an asshole,” she said gently. “It was wonderful. Being with you again is wonderful. And we have plenty of time.” She began kissing him, starting from his forehead and his soft hair, working gently and thoroughly down, to his eyes, the bridge of his nose, lingering a long time on his lips. By the time she reached his throat, he was hard again.

This time she could feel him holding back, taking his time, remembering his practiced skill at the art of touch. She remembered his fingers as feather-light, almost fluid. Now, through the faint tremor in their tips she could feel the underlying stiffness and the pain, the pain he carried in his body and the rage at the core, so like her own. And she could feel his power, pressing against the edges of her mind, a deeper and broader stream than she had known in him before, with hard stones in the center she could sense but not feel, and deep currents that ran into chambers underground. As her own power was deeper now, forged out of sadness and pain and anger. They were not elf children anymore, and that had to be, but something delicate and sweet was gone. Pleasure and pain swirled through her, bittersweet, pooled in her hollow places, swelled, and burst forth in a flight of birds released from some tight cage into the open air. She slid down onto him, and his hard thrust inside her kept the great wings beating until, after a long time, he began to throb and moan and spill. And then she just wanted to hold him, as if he were a great bird, slowly shivering to stillness in her arms.

Bird brought the rain with him. Or so it seemed. The sky began to cloud over while Maya cooked dinner. She had lit every candle in the house so that the common room blazed with fire, and set the table with her best lace cloth and the old china that had belonged to her grandmother. She prepared ratatouille and salad, soup and bread—a real feast. Sudden unexpected happiness had made her feel light. It had been a long time since they’d had a reason for celebration, and she wanted to make the most of it.

They ate slowly, savoring the food, the candlelight, their mutual presence. As they finished dinner, they heard the first drops, an unmistakable drumbeat on the roof. Madrone opened a window, and the blessed smell of damp earth rose up. It was the odor of returning life, the earth’s yearly promise of renewal.

“It’s an omen,” Madrone said. “The rains have come.”

They rushed out the front door, Madrone clearing the steps of candles and offerings so Bird wouldn’t stumble. Up and down the pathways, doors were opening and people were running out to dance deliriously. Children dashed about with bowls and pots to catch the first rainwater. Next door, the Sisters knelt in the mud to give the prayer of thanksgiving. Even Maya danced, skipping, albeit somewhat stiffly, down the path to join the crowd of people streaming into the park around the corner. They caught hands and were whirled into the snake dance, the spiral, the long chain turning on itself and winding back out, like the renewal of generations, Maya always thought, passing face after face of neighbors and friends in the mad dance. It seemed to her that she could feel Rio’s hand clasping hers on the left, Johanna’s on the right.