Sugar Birds

by Cheryl Grey Bostrom

  Only then did she tear off the bottle’s waxed paper lid and gulp. When she paused for breath, the quart was half empty. She set the bottle down, scooped a palmful of seeds and crammed them in her mouth. Chewing fast, she pulverized the sunflower shells, swallowed, and then—more intentionally this time—picked out her next mouthful.

  Her tears returned. Here she was focusing on her first decent meal in two days, but when she separated the sunflower seeds out of the mixture to shell them, she remembered Mama sorting seeds at the long table in the barn. How her mother’s lips moved as she counted coriander balls and thorny little chard beads. How her freckled hands grouped tiny carrot crescents and lettuce seeds shaped like so many punctuation marks. How, when Mama slid the seeds into little envelopes, Aggie licked them closed. The image comforted her. Her kind Mama was here. With her.

  She shelled a few sunflower seeds, mixed them with a handful of millet and naked peanuts, and chewed for a long time before she washed the slurry down with another gulp of milk. Her stomach was full now, and her eyelids drooped. But the sun marched higher, and she heard voices and car doors slamming near the house. A horse whinnied. What if those people went for a walk and found her sleeping under a tree with the stolen milk bottle? She felt dirty again, but when she rubbed her hands on her legs, her guilt smeared and grew bigger.

  Rousing, she poured the rest of her seed into the bottle with the milk, pushed the waxy lid back into place, and scattered duff over her makeshift kitchen to erase it. No walkers or riders or dogs would stumble over her. With the bottle clamped in her armpit, she climbed the maple, then hid the precious food at a branch cluster. She would come back for it before the milk soured.

  At a long, lateral bough, she crossed to her lookout tree. Halfway up, her hand landed on something slimy, and she recoiled. Ew. Berry barf. She wiped her palm on the trunk, chose her grips with greater care, and tuned in to noises near the house as she ascended. Even in the rising wind, sounds clattered like dishes in a sink. When she took her elevated seat, her body went stiff at the scene below.

  Colors cascaded down the hill: red, green, yellow, and neon orange windbreakers, caps, T-shirts. Search and Rescue people. One wore a cowboy hat and rode a horse. Another, in an orange shirt with SHERIFF across the chest, walked a black German Shepherd. Two of several wearing orange caps, a middle-aged woman and a big-bellied older man, carried a long bar wrapped in chains.

  Her dad led search parties like this. Wait. She recognized some of the volunteers: Uncle Loomis, gesturing wildly to the older man; the black-haired girl named after ear hairs; Aunt Nora, rubbing her nose, her shoulders bowed; Mender. Lagging was Burnaby, oh Burnaby, who seemed to be studying trees upstream. Pi trotted close to his heels.

  She nearly cried out at the sight of her brother. Burnaby, here for her. She could run right over to him, could bend over Pi, and the dog would lick her ear. Burn would drive her home in his truck to Mama and Dad. She couldn’t take her eyes off the pair.

  But something was wrong with Burnaby. He tilted with every step, as if he didn’t have knees, as if his legs were stilts. His arms didn’t swing. And Pi was on high alert, her head down in that bodyguard way of hers, her muscled legs tensed and dodgy. What were they—?

  Oh, oh, oh. How could she forget? There’d be no ride from her brother. No Mama at home. No Dad. Burnaby was upset. So upset. He and the others were helping the sheriff. Her chest felt sweaty. They’re after me. Even Burnaby. Especially Burnaby. And, as she suspected, Mender.

  An engine revved down by the river. Another searcher in an orange cap pulled a skiff to shore. The two with the bar called to the man in the boat and unwound the chains, exposing large hooks that hung from them. “They’ll snag her if she’s there.” Uncle Loomis bellowed across the field.

  Snag who? Snag me? With those hooks? She trembled. How did they know where …?

  Then she saw it: her yellow dinghy. Someone had pulled it ashore so close she could almost hit it with a fir cone, if she threw her hardest. The black dog sniffed it. The boat was hers, all right. She had written her name on it with a Magic Marker as soon as her dad pumped it up on her birthday. She couldn’t make out the letters, but there was no mistaking that green ink. Stupid of me to write my name. Stupid of me to shove the boat under the willow without tying it better. Did the wind pull it loose? Stupid of me to think I could hide a bright yellow raft, anyway.

  The searchers gathered around the boat and listened while the sheriff talked and pointed. When he finished, the men in the boat lowered the hooks and bar into the water and motored down the river. The rest of the team headed her way.

  She inspected her clothes. Her navy leggings could pass for a shadow. Her gray shirt was more conspicuous, but at least it wasn’t pink. And in two interminable days, her long-sleeved tee had picked up a layer of grime. If Mama saw her, she would insist that Aggie strip to her undies in the laundry room before she came inside.

  She needed to be dirtier still. She pinched earwigs out of a crevice in the bark and smeared the insects across her chest and down her arms, adding smudgy streaks to further disrupt the solid field of fabric. She smiled wanly. Much better. If she kept her knees pulled up, her legs would block even more of her shirt. Or should she take it off ? She peeked down her neckline at her pale chest. Nope. Too pasty.

  When the searchers entered the woods, she forgot her camouflage efforts. Four teams combed the forest floor. She quickly dismissed any threat from old Mender and Aunt Nora, and from impatient Uncle Loomis and the orange cap lady, who fell backwards when Uncle Loomis released a branch that whacked her. She doubted the cilia-girl and Burnaby would be much help either. Sure, her brother was a skilled tracker, and he knew she climbed, but he hated heights. Whenever she scampered above his head, he averted his eyes so he wouldn’t get dizzy. He didn’t know her climbing habits or how high she traveled.

  And Pi? She wouldn’t give Aggie away. The dog wasn’t trained to track. Besides, she had been smelling—and ignoring—Aggie forever. Unless someone or something threatened Burnaby, or unless she sat right in front of the dog, Pi cared only about her brother.

  The searchers’ other animals worried her, though. Dad called horses “prey beasts.” He said searchers liked them because they watched for threats from above as well as at ground level. If a horse could detect a cougar overhead, it could easily sense her. When that horse drew near, if Aggie so much as itched her nose, the animal would alert its rider to look up. A horse had a keen sniffer, too. She wished she had rubbed a smelly plant on her body to mask her odor.

  Her nape tightened as she watched the sheriff. He poured water over the dog’s nose—a scent-sharpening tactic, according to Dad. Then the pair plunged ahead of the others, moving fast along the river on a route she hadn’t traveled. Why? Wouldn’t the dog have snagged her trail where she crawled to the woods? Why leave it? Oh, yeah. They were heading downwind. The dog would track her from the opposite direction on a trail uncontaminated by the other searchers, closing a lariat around her.

  She picked at the dried mud on her feet, visualizing her tracks beside the spring. But so what? They’d dead end, wouldn’t they? Her footprints wouldn’t show on rough bark, and even when the dog caught her scent, it couldn’t follow her as she moved between trees in the canopy.

  Or could it?

  Her best hope to evade them all, she decided, was to climb even higher. Become an owl, sitting so daytime still she blended in with the tree trunk bark and lichens. Nobody would expect her to go as high as she did, to hide right above their heads. All summer, if she must. But then what?

  The horse approached, and Aggie saw its ears flick. It sensed her! Apprehension broke her resolve to stay still. She rose and sidestepped around the tree, positioning herself behind the trunk—and dislodging some debris; a clump of tree litter fluttered toward the forest floor. She shrank. Hadn’t she had known better than to move? Mama’s voice rang in her head: Impatient! Careless!

  The horse halted and snorted, no
t fifty feet from her tree. The rider turned in the saddle and panned his surroundings. When the animal blew and stamped, the man dismounted and draped the reins over the saddle horn. He watched the horse’s ears first point forward, then swivel. “What is it, boy?” He read the ground before he aimed his eyes higher.

  Methodically, he traced each tree around him, far into the branches. Though she was pretty sure her tree stood outside the radius he was studying, she kept the trunk between them. She willed herself to tree bark immobility and breathed in sips as the man’s eyes crawled the woods.

  At last the easy sound of a horse tearing grass replaced the silence. “Unh-uh. No eating. We’re working, remember?” Aggie peeked to see the man tug the reins and the horse’s head lift. “Must have been a false alarm, if you’re thinking about lunch.” He swung into the saddle and rode on.

  She filled her lungs as the pair moved away, and climbed higher than ever, glimpsing only flashes of color while the teams hunted below. Their search pattern was erratic; they missed wide swaths of ground. Maybe they would even miss her footprints by the pool. The tension in her body eased. Momentarily.

  She heard the helicopter before she saw it advancing like a giant blue dragonfly. The craft crawled low along the riverside fields toward her, then lifted to skim the canopy. Aggie cowered as the deafening pulse of the rotors thumped against her. The pilot, his head cocked toward her tree, talked into a microphone on his helmet, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses.

  She was too high! Too visible from overhead. The searchers were squeezing her from above and below. Spinning blades swept the treetops, and the wind slammed her body with a concussive force that nearly hurled her from her perch. Aggie clung to the trunk and cried out from pain in her eardrums.

  The chopper made three passes. With each one, she weakened with terror and hurt and the force of the wind. If it returned a fourth time, she doubted she could hold on. The downwash would blow her right out of the tree.

  And then, as quickly as it arrived, the machine flew downriver and left Aggie and her thundering heart alone. He didn’t see me. Her head lolled, and she squeezed her eyes closed, gathering her wits, blocking out the searchers below.

  She had scarcely stopped panting when louder voices injected her with additional dismay. The girl and Burnaby had changed course and were angling her way. Could they spot her through that sea of branches? The conversation’s cadence reached her, but not the words. Burnaby blew his whistle and showed the girl something on the ground. Aggie blanched. The berries!

  She had vomited her address at the foot of her tree.

  CHAPTER 9 ~ CELIA

  Burnaby

  After the official search team moved downriver, I stood at Gram’s front door and watched the Eppings’ Buick turn toward the dairy. We all needed to regroup. And eat. Gram set a salmon sandwich on the kitchen table and pointed me to a chair, calming me with a promise that we would keep hunting for Aggie.

  “That Burnaby’s a piece of work,” I said.

  She shot me a cautionary glance. “I’m very fond of that boy.”

  “Obviously.” I thought of her handing him the licorice. “You’ve known him awhile.”

  She ran her eyes across the ceiling and spoke slowly, assembling the chronology. “Yes … since Aggie was a few months old. He was … uh … second grade. I stopped by for fall seeds and found Bree pulling her hair out.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me.”

  “Aggie was screaming. Burnaby was hiding in a kitchen cupboard because Bree stepped on some of his macaroni shells while she was walking the baby. He had lined up hundreds of them, alternating them with LEGO pieces arranged in some kind of binary code, near as Bree could tell.”

  I snorted. “I can picture it.”

  “I imagine you can, after today.” She dunked her tea bag and watched it spin on the string. “When I offered to hold Aggie, Bree practically tossed the baby to me. Your dad had colic. I ever tell you that?”

  “Nope.” As if I cared.

  “Anyway, Bree and I ended up at her table like old friends. I held Aggie. Burnaby stayed in the cupboard.”

  “So you didn’t actually meet him.”

  She smiled. “I guess not. But I learned what Bree was dealing with.”

  “Why was it his fault? If my mother ruined a major project, I’d hide too.”

  “I didn’t mean that, Celia.” Gram sighed. “Nobody blamed him. Bree had bigger issues with the boy. Burnaby was already seven and still not talking. He never made eye contact with her. Backed away from her from the time he walked.”

  “He didn’t look at me, either,” I said.

  Gram pushed her plate aside and folded her hands on the table. “I’ve seen him every few weeks for years now, either here or at their place and I—”

  “Wha—?” I coughed water onto the table. Burnaby spent more time with my grandmother than I did. “Go on. What did macaroni boy do next?” I dabbed the spill.

  She eyed me gently. “Well, a month after my first visit, I stopped by again. When Burnaby came in off the school bus, Bree asked him about his day. Neither of us expected him to answer. But this day? My word. His voice sounded like BB gun pellets hitting cardboard.”

  “So he talked.”

  “Oh, yes. He answered her question. In detail. He recalled everything, Celia. I mean everything. Like how he squeezed one point five centimeters of toothpaste onto his toothbrush at 7:12 a.m. Opened his spelling book to the middle of page forty-six at 9:14. How at that moment his teacher blew her nose.

  “Bree and I stared at each other over the boy’s head, dumbfounded. Next, he told her about story time and recited at least a full page of the chapter book his teacher was reading, verbatim. He kept talking until Bree offered him some peanut butter toast.”

  “So his brain filmed the entire day.”

  “In living color.” She scraped a fleck of dried oatmeal from the table with her thumbnail.

  “He talked about probability today,” I said. Beautiful math. I picked up our plates and carried them to the sink. Gram didn’t seem to hear me. She turned a spoon in her hands.

  “One night at bedtime—he was about nine—Bree was sitting on Burnaby’s bed praying with him.” Gram laid her palms down on the table and splayed her fingers. “Burnaby fixated on her hands. Then …” Gram held a finger to the back of her wrist, her eyes wide. “Then he touched this little knob with his forefinger. First time in his life the boy touched his mother without her asking. He traced the bones in her hands, tapping the knuckles. He touched the other knob.” She demonstrated, pointing to the bony protrusion near her opposite wrist. “Styloid process of the ulna.

  “The next day, on a hunch, she brought him a book of skeletal diagrams. Humans. Birds. Various animals. Burnaby devoured it. After that, Bree studied bones herself, so she’d know enough to engage him. When she found an old toaster oven at a yard sale, she taught him how to sterilize the owl pellets they found in the woods. Then she called me.

  “Burnaby arrived here with a pair of tweezers and a shoebox full of owl castings. I showed him how to extract the bones from those pellets. Over the next couple of years, we cataloged them, clear down to the caudal vertebrae of mice and the pygostyles of passerines. The birds fascinated him most, especially the osteology of perching birds.”

  She pointed at the chair beside her. “He sat right here and glued vole skeletons together. Bored holes in bird bones and wired them so they appeared to be flying.”

  “Point taken, Gram. The boy’s a genius. I get it.”

  She ignored me.

  “Next he modified the incubator. He took an egg from our coop, cracked it into a Saran Wrap hammock hanging in a Mason jar, and put it inside. He sat in front of that incubator window as if it were a TV, while that chick’s bones grew without the shell. Eyes, beak, feathers. The complete bird. Can you imagine?” Mender inclined her head. Her eyes were dusty.

  I finished wiping the counter and sat back down. She had my complete at
tention.

  “I called his mother to come see the wonder. She brought Aggie along. That child—she was about four by then—lifted a peeping Rhode Island Red chick out of the incubator. It imprinted on her.”

  “Was it normal?”

  “Normal as any chick hatched naturally. Nothing short of amazing.”

  “What did Burnaby do?”

  “He lost interest. He’d watched the bones form, and that was sufficient. The boy’s brain runs on a narrow-gauge track: one rail scientist, the other rail, artist. He rolls right past whatever would connect him socially or emotionally.”

  “That explains how he was acting in the woods.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He could have been searching for Easter eggs.”

  “I would expect that.” She set our water glasses on the counter, walked to her study, and returned pinching something. “Math, physics, art, beauty. He sees it all in his bones.” She handed me a small one.

  “A toy tractor seat.”

  “It’s an owl’s ilium. Actually, the complete hipbone. I’ve been meaning to give it to him, but you can, if you’d like.”

  “If I think of it.” If I’m still here. I’d be riding a Greyhound before I did any bone-swapping. I slid the hip into my pocket and carried mustard to the fridge.

  So the boy kept to himself. Brutal. No wonder he freaked when I touched him. Well. I’d at least talk to him. Not long-term or anything. Nothing that would interrupt my escape plans. I felt sorry for the guy. Besides, I needed a distraction until I earned the money for my ticket. Burnaby was interesting enough, unless—

  “Gram. That guy on the skiff. Know him?”

  She pulled her head from a cupboard. Assessed me warily. “He’s too old for you, Celia.”

  “I didn’t say—”

  The shrill of an incoming call cut me off. Gram answered quietly, stretching the curly phone cord to the pantry as she shelved leftover pretzels. “Oh, hello Wyatt. Good to hear from you. Yes. Yes, she’s right here.”