I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird

by Susan Cerulean

  Inside the auditorium, purveyors of cheap jewelry, wind chimes, and bird baths offered their products on tables lining the auditorium walls, interspersed with the exhibits of local conservation groups. I visited my friends from the Great Florida Birding Trail, the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, and the Audubon Center for Birds of Prey. Two empty perches promised a display of live birds later in the evening.

  On the registration table, amid a swirl of giveaway plastic pens and local advertising brochures, I fanned a couple dozen glossy postcards featuring my book cover. Tracking Desire: A Journey after Swallow-Tailed Kites side by side with “Glades County: We Have Room for Your Business!” Was this really going to work?

  My friend and co-keynoter, the nature photographer John Moran, blew through the double glass doors with boxes of his wares in his arms. I whispered a quick update, “Only two dozen people so far!” and he calmed me.

  “Let’s think of ourselves as festival hosts and take this really seriously,” he said, “no matter how many people show up.” John’s business cards were shrink-wrapped copies of his better-known images: a host of alligator eyes gleaming in a central Florida lake, palm islands off the Big Bend Coast, Ichetucknee Springs. He gave a dozen to the woman accepting door prize contributions. I felt stingy in comparison (how can a writer make any money at all, if not by selling her books?), so I signed a copy of Tracking Desire and added it to the pile of freebies.

  The aroma of dinner cheered me, even though, ironically, we were about to sample a feast of local wildlife: fried gator tail, venison, and softshell turtle stew. I loaded my plate with a cold black-eyed pea salad fired with raw rings of jalapeno pepper and a luscious corn pudding. Khaki-clad Audubon folks delivered a rehabilitated bald eagle and a crested caracara missing half a wing to the perches, and it began to feel like a real opening night.

  A small but lively crowd had flocked to the free bar: all the wine, beer, or mixed drinks you could imbibe. I overheard Tracie say to a coworker, “I’m so bummed by the low turnout. I’m going to call over to the county courthouse and invite anyone still at work to help us eat all this food.”

  John and I ferried our plates to a set of long folding tables in a darkened corner of the room. The tables were lit by battery-operated candles, which flickered and reflected off scatterings of colored glass stones.

  “Where are you all from?” I determined to engage the couple across the table, our customer base.

  “Ohio,” said the man, friendly and full of smiles. “I’m Bill and this is Shirley, my wife.”

  “That’s a long way to come for a bird festival.” I wondered which special Glades County birds drew these two so far from home.

  “Oh, we aren’t bird-watchers, we run the Kountry Korn booth out in the parking lot,” his wife explained. “What we do is sell caramelized popcorn varieties.”

  During the next thirty minutes, we were schooled in the ins and outs of a Florida snowbird food vendor, how every spring and summer Shirley applied to dozens of festivals across the state. And then, how all winter long, towing their booth behind a camper van, they’d zig and zag from Naples to St. Augustine. We learned that the couple began in ice cream, until their freezer lost power one night and melted thousands of dollars worth of product. “That business was a real flop,” said Bill, sliding a chunk of crispy gator tail into his mouth.

  I retreated to the buffet for seconds on the starches, winding through the party happening at the bar. No one had been issued a name tag, but Tracie pointed out that the bartenders included two Glades County commissioners and the mayor of Moore Haven. They were dressed sharp as movie cowboys, in tight-fitting jeans, starched pastel shirts, and tooled leather boots.

  The exit doors behind the makeshift bar swung open to admit more county employees lured by Tracie’s invitation of free booze. The golden rays of the equinox sun slanted for just a moment into the room, and I longed to bolt to Fisheating Creek, only ten minutes away, to watch its beautiful set. The swallow-tailed kites wouldn’t be gathered in big numbers yet, but how wide and quiet would be the air and the sky!

  But John said no, we needed to stay. He’d just met tonight’s speaker, a shorebird enthusiast and fine artist from coastal Georgia.

  “This is my first formal presentation,” she confided. “I’m pretty nervous.” John helped her plug in the PowerPoint projector she’d brought, but then there was the matter of a screen. There wasn’t one.

  Two of the festival organizers offered “to rig something up.” “Not very professional,” I muttered to John as we watched how, working with one hand each, gripping the lips of their red Solo cups brimming with rum and Coke, the two men pinned a wrinkled round tablecloth to a shaky wall partition.

  Finally, John approached one of the men and asked if they might have a real screen in their office building two blocks away.

  I didn’t think the man was joking when he said, “I know we used to have a big screen to project our porn, but everyone’s pretty much converted to DVDs by now.”

  I locked eyes with John. “We are going to have to learn to speak another language,” he mouthed over the noise of the crowd. I pinched a tablecloth from one of the vendors’ tables, noting that none of the jewelry for sale featured even a generic form of wildlife, and we strung it up tight, so it wouldn’t wrinkle the legs of the artist’s projected willets and plovers. She launched into her carefully crafted presentation, explaining how she sketched wild birds, protected them, watched them. Tracie herded the more raucous members of the crowd out the door, so that the speaker’s voice could be heard. There were no questions at the end of her talk.

  All the evening’s disappointment and inconsistencies faded in my mind when John and I made our way to the small cabins in LaBelle where we’d spend the night. For a solid mile, we drove beneath a sky filled with spiraling swirls of tree swallows. I knew they were massed for their northward migration. At last, a true festival of birds.

  CHAPTER 6

  How We Are Lost

  “Mom,” said my son. “This is the last time we will cook together before you take me to college.” David stood beside me in our kitchen, his knife thwacking through carrots, broccoli, and garlic he had laid on a wooden cutting board. My son, now eighteen, was in my heart still a child, my child. But truly, he was more man than boy, eager to get out into his own life and more present than I with what was being cut for the last time that night.

  I hadn’t been thinking beyond the days we still had together: our travel north to Connecticut, a celebration with my sister and brother-in-law, shopping for David’s new room in the dorm, and freshman orientation. David anticipated the day after those days—the beginning of life on his own.

  “Let me season the stir fry.” He took the spatula from my hand and my place at the stove. It wasn’t the onions spitting in the hot oil that caused my eyes to suddenly fill. With the hem of my white shirt, I wiped the steam from my glasses and the tears from my cheeks.

  “Thief, thief,” screamed a blue jay in the backyard. I heard its cry through the open window, and I agreed. Our old calico cat threaded between my ankles and David’s on the tile floor of the kitchen. I rested my head briefly against the shoulder of my son.

  “You take the window seat, David,” I said, as we boarded the plane the next morning. “You’ll like watching the landscape change.” As we approached the Hartford airport, we could see from the window of the plane how even the light was different in Connecticut, and how in late August, the terminal leaves of the maple trees were turning yellow and red already. “This sure isn’t Florida,” David said quietly. “Florida is so far away.”

  Bittersweet farewell to son David on first day at Wesleyan University (August 2008). Photo by the author.

  The president of Wesleyan University told us he hoped our children would find challenge and passion in the four years to come. In the dark and lovely chapel, we listened to him speak, parents and freshmen children together. In the pew beside me, a man sat so still it was as if his fe
et were nailed to the pine-planked floor. Eyes cast down, he kneaded his knees with his hands, as if they were loaves of bread. I wondered if he was running films in his mind—of the years raising the daughter from whom he would soon part. Or maybe he was pondering the advice of the new parent committee: “If you don’t already have a life of your own, find one. If you do, then get busy. Quit obsessing about how your child will manage her new life here at college without you.” I felt the pain of impending separation rolling off his body in waves.

  When we were released from the chapel back into the light, David and I ambled back to his dorm, admiring the excellent features of his new world: the student center, Foss Hill, athletic playing fields, an enormous library.

  “I can’t wait to meet the cocaptains of the ultimate frisbee team!” An uncommonly large grin lit his face. At the door to his room, where we had mounted a dry erase board to receive messages from the friends he hadn’t yet met, we shared a long hug. And then he was gone. Off to a freshman barbecue with a yellow-haired girl from Los Angeles.

  The night was dark, and Middletown, so charming when I explored its narrow, one-way streets with my son, was harsh and unforgiving of my grief. I believed I knew the return route to my sister’s house in Madison, but instead I was heading west on Highway 6 to Meriden. How could this road be wrong when we had driven it together, my son and I, just hours before, when the morning was light and soft? There was the store where we bought a lamp for his desk, and a sixty-watt bulb, and a tall, vining philodendron with heart-shaped leaves for his windowsill. Without my son beside me in the night, that store was just a brightly lit barn of consumer excess. Were I to pull into the parking lot, even if I steered my rental car between the very same pair of painted lines where we had filled the car with his supplies, there would be nothing of him. For eighteen years, he had been at the very core of my life.

  At a stoplight, I pressed the back of my head against the seat. Vertigo swept my body. My neck felt as if it had been whipped in circles, and the reeling would not stop. I knew I was not the only parent feeling so lost, but nevertheless, I was completely alone.

  My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled off the road into the parking lot of a darkened pizzeria. The screen read “Dave,” a message. I pressed the OK button. “I love you, Mom! Thanks for supporting me in this fabulous experience!” For just a moment, I absorbed the exclamation points in his message, and from my heart I wished him every good thing. Then I pulled out the small map the rental car company had provided and began to navigate my own way home.

  “Honest to God, Sue, I’m so glad you called,” said my dad. His words came all in a rush. “Talking to you helps ground me in reality. There’s a hobo in my room. He could easily slip a knife in my gut, and I don’t want to face that.”

  I was a thousand miles away, stacking breakfast dishes in my north Florida kitchen, when my father called. It was hard to get hold of him, unless Mary Jane was there and could help him manage the phone. The telephone stood on the bed stand and was out of his reach and beyond his abilities to use. I couldn’t guess how he’d dialed me up just now.

  “Why do you think Fred wants to kill you?”

  “Well, he’s pretty bitter about me because I can’t solve his problems. He says he doesn’t have a dime in his pockets. He wanted to use my phone to call his sister but then he lost his nerve. He’s so damn convoluted. It must be a defect in his mind.” I couldn’t see Dad’s face, but I understood the urgency in his voice.

  I’d met this Fred, a slight old man with crow-sharp eyes, always on the move in his wheelchair, executing frequent, erratic spins and turns. I thought maybe his left arm was the weaker, because his circles generally led off to the right.

  “I’ll be there next week to help,” I said. “But do you feel unsafe right now?”

  My father didn’t answer. There was a blur of talk in the background. “What’s going on there, Dad?” I wiped my hands on a dishtowel, thinking I’d need to call Mary Jane or someone in charge at the facility.

  “That’s the nurse’s aide, talking to my ‘not’ friend,” said Dad. “It’s a crazy thing around here.” I knew it was. I’d seen Fred run his hands over the uninteresting contents of Dad’s nightstand, looking off into the distance like a raccoon washing a crayfish. His obsession seemed less with acquisition and more about glitter or distraction. Or maybe he was looking for something he had lost: his car keys, I wondered? Like my dad, the only thing on that old man’s mind was getting out of that place.

  Fred was causing trouble on the floor, and he wouldn’t be staying at Seacrest much longer. The ideal patients, the ones who lasted from month to month to year, were compliant. The angry or exceedingly restless vanished. Last time I visited my father, Fred wheeled up to me, close and urgent. “Now,” he said. “Help me get this straight. Once I get out of the parking lot, I turn left to get to the highway. Or do I turn right?”

  “Left,” I said, thinking of the two sets of locked doors that stood between Fred and his unlikely freedom. “You just turn left.”

  “The best I can hope for is that you all keep in touch with me. But I can’t depend on my children for my sustenance,” said my father before we disconnected.

  Always, as I prepared to fly north, my dad would ask, “What problems will we solve while you are here?” I’d jot a list of my own priorities. Make a dentist appointment. Try to get him to his church. Push for a single room. Take him on an outing that involved fresh air and sunshine. Our Uncle Don, Dad’s brother, had ideas too. Get him to a VFW meeting. Encourage old friends to visit. What about books on tape? How much we wanted to fix everything wrong with Dad’s life, and how little we could actually do. He hated the rehab exercises and had lost more physical strength, even after his broken bones had knit.

  My sister hired an elder care consultant to advise us further. But Mary Jane, on the front line in Manahawkin, was preoccupied with an avalanche of insurance claims from the hospital stay, the doctors, and the rehab facility, and all the legal aspects of the accident.

  “Next week I have to go to a hearing with the woman who hit your dad with her car,” she told me over the phone. Her voice was tight and shaky. “That woman changed her story, if you can believe it. Now she says she ran into your dad because he came into the road suddenly, from the woods, straight into her path.”

  But Mary Jane had arrived within minutes of the accident, and she had heard that old lady wail over and over, “I hit him, I am so sorry. I am so very sorry.”

  “I want it to be known. She took away the only thing he loved and still could do: his ability to walk.” Mary Jane’s voice was firm.

  I knew she’d have no time to talk about dentists and going to church. Or even Fred.

  We were perplexed by the pairing of physical frailty with Dad’s relatively good mental status. When I wheeled him around the parking lot of the rehab facility, Dad said: “Look, Sue, there’s a marked declivity over there,” and I knew he referred to a low spot in the marsh. It wasn’t a word I used and Mary Jane had never heard it before. “The air has a salutary effect on me,” he said, one bright, sharp February day. Another rehab patient and his wife stopped me as I passed their table in the dining room.

  “What did your Dad do ‘before’?” the woman asked, referring to the constellation of ailments and accidents that had landed him in the same facility as her husband.

  “He was a metallurgical engineer,” I said, and she nodded.

  “I thought it was something like that,” she said, meaning that even though he was disabled, there was enough left to indicate the mind and body that once had been.

  But when I tried to help Dad transfer to the toilet, he couldn’t understand that to stand up from the wheelchair, he needed to push down with his arms and hands. Or even where to place them for leverage. Years later, we’d learn from our friend Dr. Ken Brummel-Smith, a renowned and unusually humane geriatrician, that Dad had a Parkinson’s-like variant of dementia, which made sense of his symptoms,
even though it couldn’t be cured. I knew it affected how he was treated by the staff, especially at night.

  “Most of them are kind except for a couple of real bitches,” he said. I always tried to make friends, allies really, of those caregivers, and Mary Jane did too. All were very young, most extremely overweight. I’d watched them take cigarette breaks in the freezing cold, outside the glass doors of the nursing home. I learned about their children and boyfriends too. I knew their lives weren’t easy.

  When a raven-haired aide entered Dad’s room to help him onto the toilet, he perked fully alert.

  “She’s one of the bad ones,” he whispered to me.

  As she helped him to his feet, the aide smiled and called him sweetheart.

  Was this woman capable of shoving my father flat against the bed, pushing her palm against his face? I lived one thousand miles away and could be with him only a few days each month. Maybe it was too easy for me to get worked up, to pass judgment, to go indignant.

  What should I do?

  I reported back to Mary Jane; she surprised me by saying, “You cannot believe everything he says.” When I protested, she said, “Remember that paper they showed us when we signed him up for the facility? They have zero tolerance for patient abuse.” But I wondered, who’s to know in the middle of the night when a frail, freaked-out patient thinks he’s about to have a bowel movement and can’t get in or out of bed by himself? What might any one of us do if we were an exhausted, little-paid aide, frustrated and weary, in the black of the night? It was easy for me to say, to pass judgment, to go indignant.

  Bobbie and I wanted Dad to be cared for at home, with hired help for Mary Jane. But she didn’t think she could tolerate all that chaos, so it appeared Dad was in assisted care facilities for good.