by Alan Cumyn
Shiels didn’t mean to stand staring. She turned finally, allowed her feet to take her from the room.
XXX
Shiels sat in a living room loveseat lump while her mother held her. Where was her breathing? She didn’t know what she was doing. Somehow air went in and out, though her lungs felt full of sand.
“I’m sorry I brought him into the house,” Shiels said.
“You couldn’t have stopped them from doing what they did,” her mother said, strangely calm, unalarmed. She certainly didn’t feel this peaceful, this accepting, about the dodgy conduct of any of her own children!
But it did feel good to be held like this. Shiels hated being enemies, this ache as if she had to leave everything.
“I think they’re done now,” her mother said.
The crows were done, at any rate. Silence seemed to have frozen the household.
Done what? Shiels wondered.
Jonathan was sitting on the loveseat opposite, holding himself, looking pale and stricken, as if a relative had died.
“How do you know what they were doing and if they’re done yet?” Shiels whispered to her mother.
Her mother gripped her tighter. Shiels felt she couldn’t be squeezed any further. “I just have a sense. I have spent the last couple of days getting to know him. I sang to him, I tickled his back, the way I used to tickle yours. Do remember, when you were very young?”
Shiels did remember. Her mother’s warm fingers. Her soothing voice, the silly songs they made up together.
I built for you an igloo
of straw and glue and leather shoes
waiting for the snowfall . . .
“Did he tell you . . . what was going to happen?” Shiels asked.
“He’s a force of nature. We can’t really hold him much longer. Or Jocelyne. They are bound together. They always have been. You’ve known that, I think. Haven’t you known that?”
“I don’t know what I’ve known. About anything!” Shiels blurted.
Her lungs were full of sand. Her body ached for no reason, it just did, through and through. Yet she kept breathing. The house had not fallen down. Outside the front window, the yard looked as it always did this early in the winter.
The steam from the faraway kitchen bouillabaisse licked the edges of this window too.
“I wanted to have a feast, and a normal night, for when your father gets home,” Shiels’s mother said.
• • •
Shiels did not know when Jocelyne Legault left the house. It happened quietly, whenever it was—perhaps when Shiels was in the kitchen numbly chopping vegetables for the side dish for dinner, or when she sat by herself in the smallest main floor bathroom hugging her knees to her chest, trying to shake free from her thoughts.
When her father came home, no one said anything about what had gone on—not Jonathan, who retreated to his room, not Shiels’s mother, who kissed her husband deeply at the door and poured him a glass of Palacios, the absurdly expensive Spanish wine he had bought at a charity auction. Shiels felt like she was six years old again, all eyes and ears, but not saying a word, not bringing any attention upon herself.
“I hope that comes off,” her father said about the new darkness of his wife’s nose.
“It’s for a good cause,” she replied serenely.
Shiels’s father was full of the details of the shoulder reconstruction he had performed that afternoon, and while Shiels took in his words, she focused primarily on how animated he was, talking about the torn labrum, the ligaments. How attentive her mother seemed. She was giving him what he needed at the end of a long work day, but also pretending that the world was still spinning on its right axis.
Maybe it was?
At some point Shiels was simply aware that Jocelyne had left the house, by some method or other, that there was no danger anymore of her father walking upstairs and stumbling in on . . . something fierce and wild and unnatural or perhaps all-too natural. Something unusual, at any rate, and disturbing. She did not glance again into Pyke’s room, but she imagined the gashes in the wall, the ripped rug, the pillow guts everywhere.
When Pyke came down for dinner, he seemed himself: unruffled, gleamy-eyed, dignified, the same fierce smile spread all along his prominent beak. His crest was fully crimson again, almost throbbing with color. He moved with vigor. Clearly he had regained his strength after his days in prison. That beast roiling with Jocelyne around the guest room was not some invalid marshaling his meager resources. He rippled again. He lightly clutched a slice of fresh baguette and dipped it into the bouillabaisse with all the élan of a pterodactyl in his prime.
Pyke has entered his prime, Shiels thought.
The three small wing fingers gripped the soup spoon with surprising dexterity. He slumped, but not badly. He ate everything. He eyed Shiels’s mother as if they had a bond going back half a million years.
Shiels supposed Pyke must have a real mother somewhere, out there in the wild. But maybe she was half a world away.
“What’s new on the court case?” Shiels’s father asked, when all the compliments had been paid to the chef, and everything seemed so normal and sincere that Shiels was almost ready to rip herself from the table and run screaming from the room.
“I’m sure there will be a breakthrough soon,” Shiels’s mother said, “but you know how long these legalities take. Have some more wine, dear?”
He would, he did. Shiels noticed, in particular, how Jonathan watched the entire scene—their parents’ almost scripted interactions, Shiels’s growing discomfort, the pterodactyl’s blossoming table manners—with hungry eyes.
Future psychologist?
Shiels left the table as soon as she could.
She noticed through the living room window, in the darkness, lights on the street, vans, people milling around. No, not just people, reporters!—with cameras. Keeping their distance but looking in on them. Shiels pulled the drapes quickly. “We’ve been found out!” she said. Her mother, father, and Jonathan rushed to the living room to look.
Pyke seemed happy to continue eating, oblivious.
“They can’t come onto our property!” Shiels’s mother said. “We don’t have to talk to them!”
A cameraman seemed to be filming them as they looked out the window, and Shiels’s father pulled them all back and let the drape fall. “How much longer are we supposed to shelter him?” he asked.
“As long as he needs our protection,” her mother said.
• • •
The situation could not last much longer, and it didn’t—much later, in bed, in the middle of a scorching dream of running barefoot in desert sand with Pyke circling above her, Shiels tried to cry out. She sat upright, and there was Pyke, hunched halfway on her bed, his huge eyes so close, his beak lodged impudently between her breasts against the outside of her pajama top.
Even in the shadows she could see that his crest was flaming red.
She tried to scream, but her throat cracked, she was so thirsty from the dream.
“Weez . . . weez go!” Pyke whispered in the darkness.
“Where? Go where? To the bathroom?”
“You zee. You zee.”
She was still half-asleep. He nudged her out of bed. She threw on some clothes, including her yellow shoes—she still could feel a disappointment from her dream that she hadn’t been wearing them.
“Do you need help?” It was dark but not the dead of night. The red digits of her alarm caught her eye. 5:17. “You can’t go outside,” she said. “The press are there now. The police will track you.”
His security bracelet was glowing around his neck in the semi-gloom.
A cold wind worried the windowpane. And the crows were back, raising a racket from some nearby rooftop.
“You can’t leave. You’re under house arrest. If you disappear, we lose your bail money, which does not belong to you. It belongs to the Wallin boy whose arm you tore. Besides, they’ll find you, they’ll—”
He edged
his beak under the window, levered it open.
“Pyke! You can’t—”
But he could. In a heartbeat he slid out the opening. Somehow she felt like an accessory, but she could do nothing to stop him. She ran down the stairs, flung on her coat, threw open the door. Crows everywhere, God, and the wind was stupidly cold. Ghostly clouds lined the dark sky. She scanned the swirls of flying crows. Where was he? Gone already?
“You zeet! Zeet!” There he was by the garage, gesturing to her. “Zeet!”
The press vans were still parked on the street, as quiet as death. But they would wake up, photographers would soon be on them. The police would—
She had to stop him!
“Zeet!”
She ran at him, he raised his beak. He wouldn’t slash her, would he?
“Zeet!”
She grabbed what she could—his neck, the security bracelet. He hopped, she flung herself along his body, straddling him to hold him down.
He would not stay down.
She thought she might crush him to the ground with her weight but he was strong—of course he was—and she was nothing to him, she realized. His back held her like she was made of balsa wood.
He exploded them both into the air, jumping upright with all four limbs then pumping, pumping his wings with everything he had. She was almost bucked off. A cloud of crows had to scatter to make way. She held on, held on.
Far below she caught a glimpse of someone stumbling out of one of the press vans, dropping his camera, slipping on the ice.
• • •
She thanked the skies she had thought to wear her winter coat. From the first rush of cold wind, upon liftoff, the freezing air screeched past her, hollowing her out, it seemed. How was Pyke even equipped to deal with such icy cold sucking the heat from his lithe body? He seemed to be a warm-climate sort of beast—hadn’t his kind died out because of planetary cooling? Yet his wings brought them higher, above the trees, into the even cooler reaches, past the water tower. Shiels clamped her bare hands around the ring, lay still, tried not to pull too hard, which might choke him.
“Put me down! Pyke! I’m freezing!”
He didn’t seem to hear.
Her mitts were in her coat pockets. She forced herself to release the fingers of her left hand . . . Ow, like chopping through ice. But her hand was the ice. Hanging on with just the right now, she found herself slapping the side of her coat absurdly. How could she even grab her mitten if she couldn’t feel her fingers?
She could feel them a little bit. She clasped something, pulled it to her mouth—woolly. Jabbed her hand at it. Pyke screeched at her, wobbled midair. She shifted wildly, then righted herself and tried again to insert her left hand. Mitted!
She held on. She held on. She nearly dropped the other mitten on the way to her mouth but fought the thing onto her hand anyway. Then after a time her feet seemed the coldest. Those yellow shoes really were flimsy. She tried to curl and release her toes. . . .
“Put me down!” she yelled. “Where are we going? How much longer?”
Pyke’s wings beat relentlessly. His back . . . began to warm up. He was like an electric blanket beneath her. He climbed, climbed. It took forever. Yet at some point he was not pumping his wings so often but just soaring on the air current. She had a sense of thousand-mile migrations, of circumnavigating the globe.
His body heated up in the effort, and she was warm wherever she could touch him, cold everywhere else. She pressed her hands alternately against his neck. It helped for a while, but her balance felt so precarious that she couldn’t allow herself to ride one-handed for long. She wouldn’t last, she couldn’t—did he understand that?
“I’m freezing! You’re going to have to put me down. I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
Why—why was she sorry? For being weak. For not being able to stop him. For not having wings of her own. For being heavy, and cold, and clumsy, and slow to understand. Ever since his arrival she had failed to grasp fundamental things about who he was, what he was doing here. Yet now, with his wings spread so wide beneath her, his power to shrug off the weight of the world, she had a sense of something important . . . that would not fit into words.
She allowed herself to look down. The Earth was white and brown and both hugely solid—stretching everywhere but the sky—and insubstantial somehow. A rumor of firmness far, far away.
Something that could be leapt from, left behind.
Even in the mittens, her fingers were killing her!
“Pyke, please, I can’t hang on!”
But she could. She did. She hung on so hard that she didn’t know if it would be possible to let go. Her hands, her arms, her shoulders and back and legs were all clamped into place. Her heart might chill into a hard unbeating block, but she would still hang on.
• • •
She would hang on because, well, it was all becoming clear the longer they flew. Whatever had happened the day before with Jocelyne, whatever that was, he had chosen her. The knowledge of it spread through her against the cold.
Pyke had chosen her! So where were they going? His lair, then? Some giant nest of his on a mountaintop far from the midget hills of Shiels’s hometown? Would others be there—brother and sister pterodactyls, squawking and squabbling like their cousins the crows? Mom and pop pterodactyls, babies? A valley full of lumbering, ancient beasts, like in some impossible movie?
What was that? She thought she saw one flash by in the distance, another pterodactyl. Lighter, smaller perhaps, it was hard to tell. As she strained to see, her left leg interfered with Pyke’s wing—they stalled for a moment midair, before she was able to kick her legs painfully into place again and Pyke fought back into flight. His wing muscles were so strong, she could imagine herself crushed in the recovery effort.
But his body was warm. In her core now she bathed in the heat of him. (He had chosen her!) Some part of her remembered lying with Sheldon—this must have been something like that. Some part of her relaxed into a sort of loving embrace of this flying man-bird taking her . . . somewhere.
He felt strong, capable, as if he knew what he was doing. (Although as she gripped the security bracelet, it did occur to her the police would know he had escaped, there would be pursuit of some sort, cars with flashing lights, maybe even helicopters. Yet how remote that seemed! She pictured Inspector Brady looking up wearily from his stack of paperwork, exhausted at the prospect of chasing after a fly-away pterodactyl and his fangirl.)
She didn’t see mountains. Below them was a tiny road, civilization still. Where was the other pterodactyl?
Shiels didn’t dare look behind. Just hang on, hang on, she thought.
High up in the nest, that’s where he’s bringing me.
To his family and friends, who would look at her puny yellow shoes, her pathetic little darkened nose. What would they think? Probably they would shriek in their own secret language and peck out her liver.
“Pyke! Put me down!” she said, more whisper than a cry, since her jaw did not seem to be working anymore, her words were hard inside her.
• • •
How long was the flight? She did not have a good sense of it. Daylight leached into something else, not quite night. Tears froze on her face. It was hard to keep her eyes open to see. Pyke was warming parts of her just as other parts felt chilled beyond her command. She had to remember to hold on. She glimpsed a river below her, frozen white in the gray gloom. Trees, rocks, shoulder-like hills. The white of the ice and snow now seemed to be reaching to grab them . . . but Pyke pulled up, the frozen river was curving. A carpet of black appeared now on a new stretch of white. The carpet shimmered, then exploded into flight. It looked like black fireworks on a white backdrop blooming below.
The crows. A mass migration of them, a cacophony of crow song, or whatever it was. Whatever they were saying to one another.
Was real. It seemed to Shiels that everything in the last few impossible months had been leading up to this moment, with the ice screaming
closer and closer, not a smooth surface either, not glassy, but frozen in chunks, some heaved up by the force of the water below, jagged and hard and . . .
Ow!
They hit something and bounced. Shiels felt the blow in her shoulder, then they were rolling, rolling . . .
(God! Why had Pyke never learned to land properly?)
A bounce and something sharp again on her knees and then . . .
Still.
(The crows flapping all around them.)
Still.
On the ground.
Alive.
Her hands, her arms, would not move. Pyke seemed folded up beneath her, like that fossilized version of him she’d glimpsed in prison. He roused himself, struggled to his feet, but her fingers were still clamped to his neck choker (she couldn’t let go, it would take a crowbar!).
It would take crows. A storm of them all around her, not pecking at her digits but prying them open. She thought her fingers might snap off like Popsicles twisted apart . . .
Ah! Ah!
She fought free and staggered to her feet.
“If you ever . . . do that . . .” Her voice cracked. She wasn’t sure she could speak.
She was surrounded by a universe of crows.
“Where the hell are we?” she croaked.
On a frozen river somewhere in the backcountry, hemmed in by whitened hills pixelated with dark trees in the gloom. On the shore a few collapsed buildings, graying with age, were also cloaked in crows. The roar of them hit her full force—as if her hearing had been knocked out but now was online again.
Pyke stood unsteadily, his chest quivering with the effort.
Was this it? The honeymoon spot? How was she supposed to live here? Or were they just resting, were they actually heading somewhere even more remote, more private, more their own?
He did look, somehow, bravely heroic just at this moment. Obviously exhausted from the flight, his muscles spent, but he still sported that mischievous grin, and he was looking at her in naked love, starving with passion. It was true, what a romantic gesture to stage the breakout and fly her all the way here just for this moment when they—
