by Sally J. Pla
And Ludmila had squinted her small eyes behind her heavy glasses, put her puffy hand over her chest, and said in a deep voice, “Yes. So is my heart, bleeding. For your sorrow, and for mine.” Then she bowed to us all, and left the room.
Gram’s mouth was hanging open. That’s a visual cue that means a person is surprised.
Anyway, that was the first time we met Ludmila.
3
For some birds, survival means the flock. For others, life is a solitary proving ground in the wild.
—Tiberius Shaw, PhD
Dad’s room is a private one, with a window overlooking the parking lot. He’s sitting by it right now in his wheelchair. It’s still weird to see him in it. But at least he’s out of bed and those machines are gone, with all their beeps and buzzes.
For a while, all anybody talked about was something called his “intracranial pressure.” That’s what happens when your injured brain swells up and bleeds, and the inside-the-brain bleeding puts too much pressure on your skull. Dad’s brain pressure was so serious, they had to remove a piece of his skull to relieve it. Plus, he’s had something called aphasia. That means he has trouble speaking and writing. It could all get completely better. Or not. It’s tricky. We just don’t know. It’s what they’re calling, “Wait and see.”
Dad’s eyes watch us enter, but the visual cue on his face—or what you can see of it under the protective bike helmet he wears—doesn’t seem to change too much. At least, not that I can tell.
“Hey, Dad, it’s us!” Joel and Jake yell, and they sort of swipe their fingers along the back of his wheelchair before they start bouncing around the room.
“Hey, Daddy-o, it’s Davis,” says Davis in a soft voice, kissing her fingers and then touching the top of his helmet.
Gram rests her hands on Dad’s shoulders. Then she asks, as usual, “Well, Charlie? Aren’t you going to say hello to your father?”
I look down at my shoes, my black outdoor Crocs, and inspect for dirt or scuffmarks. They are fine. “Even if I did say hello,” I say, “Dad doesn’t hear me.”
Gram stomps her foot. “For crying out loud, Charlie!”
There is a hand-sanitizer dispenser in the corner of Dad’s room. I put my palms under it, first one, then the other, and the dispenser whirs. I coat every finger, one-two-three-four-five, and repeat. Alcohol gel is horrible, but it’s better than nothing. Hospitals are hotbeds of germs. I think about microbes crawling up the walls. My skin is twitching and itching.
Davis takes a book out of her bag and settles on Dad’s bed. She pats the spot next to her and calls me over, but I stay by the dispenser. She shrugs, and starts to read in that loud and cheery voice the nurses use. It’s a book she pulled off Dad’s office shelf by someone called Dave Barry that Dad used to think was funny. Davis thinks laughing is therapeutic, but only she and the twins ever laugh at the book, never Dad, and he’s the one who needs the therapy.
Davis used to also insist on bringing Dad his cup of coffee every morning. We’d stop at Klatch, his old favorite spot, for a caramel latte to go, and Davis would spoon him little foamy sips. Dad would smile at her out of the right side of his mouth. Once he even winked, and everyone got all excited. Dad used to be a big winker, back in the day.
But one morning, when Davis came in with her cup, Ludmila was already sitting in the chair in front of Dad. And she said to Davis, “The milk in that latte is no good; it upset his stomach. Do not bring it anymore. No more milk. I’m just giving him half a cup of plain black.”
Gram said later that she thought Davis was going to throw that cup at Ludmila.
Gram rebuttons Dad’s pajama shirt. She says to Joel and Jake, “Behave yourselves.” She tells Davis, “You’re in charge, doll-baby. I’m gonna corner that dang doctor for an update.”
When Dad first came here, I made him a drawing for the wall by his bed. I drew him a red-tailed hawk sitting on a branch, and I surrounded the picture with all the facts I could find about red-tailed hawks, which I wrote in perfect lettering. My handwriting’s so weirdly good that Mr. Simpson, my sixth-grade teacher, used to call me the Human Typewriter.
I try not to think about what my seventh-grade teachers are going to call me. I have enough to worry about this summer.
It took a long time to do the drawing. I chose a red-tailed hawk to remind Dad of the ones we’ve spotted together near our house, swooping around the canyon, looking for mice. Now and then Dad would make me go walking on the trails with him. He’d force me, even though I hate to be outside. It’s dusty and dirty out there, and there could be ticks. I have this thing about ticks. I can handle most bugs—I even think they are interesting. But ticks are evil parasites that steal your precious blood. I live in mortal fear of ticks.
Still. I wish I’d gone walking with Dad a little more often. He liked to try to point out all kinds of nature things to me.
“Some birds are flockers, Charlie, and some birds are loners,” Dad said to me once. “Now, that hawk up there, wheeling around, he’s a magnificent loner. Look how powerfully he flies. He just makes the whole blue sky his own.” We watched the bird coast on a thermal up, up, up till he looked like a pinprick. Then down he swooped, like he was doing it just for fun.
Dad had looked at me then, and asked, “Are you a flocker or a loner, Charlie?”
I told him, “I’m a boy, not a bird,” and Dad just smiled and almost ruffled my hair, before he remembered how much I hate that. Then we started walking back home so I could decontaminate myself. And inspect for ticks.
But while we were walking, Dad stopped me to say one more thing. “You like to make lists, right, Charlie? Well, here’s a thought: Why don’t we make a list together? Let’s write down the names of all the birds we want to see out in the wild someday. Would you like that?”
I am not a fan of “out in the wild.” So I just shrugged.
“All right!” Dad said. “I’ll take that shrug as a yes! So, if you could choose any birds to put on our list, what would they be?”
I’d just read The Trumpet of the Swan, so I said a trumpeter swan. And Dad said that it would be the coolest thing to see a bald eagle, and I should put that down. He added sandhill cranes, because he’d heard that they had an interesting, babbling call. We both thought great horned owls should be on the list.
“You know what’s also a cool bird?” Dad asked. “A big old turkey vulture. People just don’t understand the importance of vultures to society.”
He didn’t have to tell me. I totally agreed.
“And maybe we should get a little ambitious with our list, Charlie,” Dad had said. “Let’s get a little crazy. Let’s throw some really exotic bird on there, something totally unique, strange, and different.”
“Like what, Dad?”
“A wild card. Like an emu. Or even more crazy: a passenger pigeon.”
“Well, for one thing,” I said, “emus live in Australia. And passenger pigeons are extinct.”
“Oh, I know, I know.” Dad smiled. “We’ll just put them on there for the challenge. Don’t you like thinking that maybe anything could happen?
“When I was a kid in South Carolina,” Dad went on, “I remember hearing how, once upon a time, there were tens of thousands of these little green parakeets living in the fields around my house. Carolina parakeets. They got hunted into extinction, because the farmers didn’t like them getting into the crops.” Dad shook his head. “Still, when I was young, I’d always look for them in the woods. Just kind of hoping against hope, you know. It made life exciting.”
“I already told you. You can’t see extinct birds, Dad.”
“I know, kiddo.” Dad laughed softly. “I’m just talking through my hat.”
That’s an expression that means “impossible dreams.”
When we got home, I wrote down all the birds we’d listed, even the impossible ones, in my Bird Book. Here is our Someday Birds List:
Bald Eagle
Great Horned Owl
; Trumpeter Swan
Sandhill Crane
Turkey Vulture
Emu
Passenger Pigeon
Carolina Parakeet
One Australian bird, and two extinct birds on our list! Good grief. And we didn’t put the red-tailed hawk on it, I think, as I look at my old drawing on Dad’s hospital room wall. He’s all too common around here, that loner, always circling the sky somewhere nearby.
My old hawk drawing on the wall is faded from all the San Diego sunlight that’s been streaming in the hospital window since Dad got here in March. But the weather’s gray and cloudy today. It’s mid-June, and school just let out. In Southern California they call this weather “May Gray, June Gloom.” It’s super-sunny around here for most of the school year, and then, just when school’s about to end, boom. June Gloom.
When Dad first got to the hospital, the doctors thought he’d be home by June. But nobody’s talked about Dad coming home for a while. That’s the real gloom hanging over this June.
I hear voices in the hall, then Gram steps back into the room. Davis stops reading. I leave the hand sanitizer alone, and we all look up and wait.
“Well, they finally told me the scoop,” Gram says, rubbing her hands together like she’s cold. “Your dad’s stable now, which is wonderful. But he’s a special case, and they’re a little stumped. They’re recommending we send him to a new place for a few weeks, where they can do much more specialized tests. Apparently, there’s a bunch of big shot neurology experts in Virginia who are willing to take a gander at your father’s noggin for free,” Gram says, her voice cracking. She tries to smile, but it comes out kind of twisted. I can’t read the visual cue on her face at all.
“It’s a world-class research hospital. In Virginia.” Gram takes a deep breath. “We sure as heck can’t pass up an opportunity like this, now, can we? Isn’t it great?”
Gram is teary. It doesn’t make sense to say happy words like “Isn’t it great” while your eyes are teary.
“Virginia?” Davis scrunches her nose.
“Just outside Washington, DC. He’ll get top treatment there, honey. I’m going to start making the arrangements right now.” Gram rustles in her purse for her phone. “Thing is, I think I’ll probably have to leave you all, to go with him. He’ll need me with him more than ever, being so far away.”
“Virginia?” Davis repeats. She shakes her head back and forth in quick little jerks, like she’s trying to shake Gram’s words out of—or into—her brain.
“I know, honey-bunnies. It’s another big change,” Gram says, looking around at us all. “But it’s the best decision for your father. And it’s just for a few weeks. We’ll find a way to make this work.”
“Okay, Grammy,” the twins say. They are standing perfectly still for once, shoulder to shoulder, eyes riveted on Gram.
I stick close by the hand-sanitizer dispenser. And Dad just sits in his chair, looking bewildered by everything. Which is pretty much how I feel most of the time these days, too.
4
For young birds and hatchlings, a nest that is relatively safe from marauding intruders—both of the four- and two-legged variety—is a matter of life and death. Nothing is more important than that nest.
—Tiberius Shaw, PhD
They flew Dad to the special Virginia expert neurology place yesterday morning. Gram left with him, nagging Davis up until the last second to “Please be responsible” until Mrs. Bertolo could get here to watch us.
Davis said of course she would. But what do you think? The minute the cab left, she called Jonathan Dylan Daniels. And he has been sprawled on our couch eating Doritos ever since.
Oh, and Mrs. Bertolo never showed up.
Our house currently resembles an “Environmental Protection Agency Superfund Clean-Up Site.” That’s what Dad used to say when things got extremely messy around here. So I am staying in my bedroom with the door shut most of the time. At least it’s clean in here, and I don’t have to bump into Jonathan Dylan Daniels.
Jonathan Dylan Daniels is Davis’s fourth boyfriend, but this time she says she’s really in love. He is tall and hairy. He only ever talks to me when he has to. And then, he will only ever ask me, “How’s it going, Charlie.” And when I say “fine,” he looks super-relieved and walks away. Plus, he bosses Davis around. “Hey, babe, could you get me this; hey, babe, could you get me that?” If I talked to her like that, she’d clobber me.
I wonder what it’s like in Virginia.
I’ve never been outside California, except once to Colorado Springs for this stupid “Special Snowflake” camp Gram signed me up for as a Christmas present. Some present. It was basically a lot of clapping and useless awards. There was this song we had to sing: “Every snowflake’s special, and so . . . are . . . you!” And they made us point to each other when we said the word “you!” If you ask me, snowflakes are nothing special. They melt. They’re just water.
Out there far away across the whole country, in a place I’ve never seen, my dad’s supposed to be having more and better tests of his brain. And he is starting something called intensive rehabilitation. Gram told us she’s staying in a hotel right across the street from the new hospital.
“Good griefus,” Gram said last night on the phone, “I don’t know if I’m more frantic about your father, you kids, or poor Mrs. Bertolo!”
This is because on her way over here to take care of us, Mrs. Bertolo tripped over her grandson’s skateboard in her driveway and broke her hip.
Gram freaked when she found out. She yelled, “Jesus H. Christ, will it never end?” Then she yelled at the twins over the phone, warning them that they better start keeping their skateboards off the dang driveway, as if Mrs. Bertolo’s accident was somehow doomed to be repeated by Joel and Jake.
Now Gram’s trying to find someone else who’d be willing to stay with us for a few weeks. And it isn’t easy, because Mrs. Perry’s in Florida at her sister’s, and her friends Linda and Denise are on “one of those special cruises,” whatever those are.
“It’s too bad your mother didn’t have any people,” Gram says. She sighs about this every time she gets frustrated because she can’t find a sitter for us.
By “any people,” Gram means relatives. My mother had only one relative—her Tía Marta, who raised her and put her through college and medical school in Mexico City, which was where my mom was from, and where she met my dad, way back when. Davis says she can remember both Mom and Tía Marta. But the twins and I can’t.
When Davis was five, I was two, and the twins were newborn, Mom was driving Tía Marta to an eye doctor appointment, and a drunk driver hit and killed them. I can talk about it totally fine, and it doesn’t make me sad, because I was so little that I don’t remember a thing. It’s just a sad fact, to me. Gram says it happened in the middle of the day, which brings up another sad fact: drunk drivers strike at all hours.
Since then, it’s been just my dad and Gram coming over from her old people community to take care of us when Dad goes on his magazine-writing assignments. Gram grumbles about it. She thinks single fathers should stay home with their kids, and protect the nest.
Also, we make Gram “bone-tired with all our shenanigans.” Still, if we need her, she comes. Even though she likes to tell us it’s like trading Peaceful Palms (which is the name of her retired community) for Casa Chaos (which is her name for our house).
Anyhow, while Gram tries to find someone to take poor broken-hipped Mrs. Bertolo’s place, here at Casa Chaos, the dishes are piling up, the floor is sticky, and the living room smells like Doritos and old socks.
Actually, Doritos sort of smell like old socks.
Joel and Jake are on a gaming marathon and they haven’t changed out of their pajamas since Friday. Their thumbs, orange from Dorito powder, fly on the controllers. Click-click-click, kapow, bang, bang, click-click-click.
I try to concentrate on drawing birds and writing in my Bird Book, but it doesn’t calm me down at all. I go in th
e kitchen for a snack and see Gram’s number, written in smudgy pen on a yellow Post-it note, stuck on the fridge.
I call it.
“Who’s this? Charlie? Baby, when you call someone, you’re supposed to start by saying ‘hello.’”
I know that.
“Hi, Gram. This is Charlie.”
“Well, hello, Charlie. How are you?”
“I am not so good.”
“Oh no? Why?”
Hearing Gram’s voice, I get a hot lump in my throat and my eyes burn. I am not sure where to begin. I want to ask about Dad, want to know how he is, if he’s comfortable, if they are taking care of him, what his new room looks like, if they hung up my picture of the red-tailed hawk for him. Do people talk different in Virginia? Do the doctors look the same? Is there a gift shop?
But I can’t get any words past the lump in my throat.
Finally, I croak out the only thing I can: “Davis doesn’t get how to microwave.”
“Yeah? Tell me about it, sport.”
“She made the chicken taste like a dried-out sponge. And Jonathan Dylan Daniels spilled Mountain Dew.”
“Lordy, is that boy hanging around?” (Gram always calls Jonathan Dylan Daniels that boy.)
“Yes. He tells her ‘Hey, babe, bring me another soda’ and she does it. He puts his hand on her knee when they sit on the couch. You know what else?”
“Great heavens, what.”
“The twins put Doritos in my bed. And they hid the soap, so now I have to use dishwashing liquid to wash, and the skin on my hands is starting to crack again.”
I don’t mean to complain so much. It all just comes out.
“Oh dear. Okay, Charlie boy. Sit tight. I’m gonna call someone right now to take control of that madhouse. I’ve got a last resort phone number here, and apparently I’m going to have to use it. Put your sister on the phone.”
