A Catalog of Birds

by Laura Harrington

  “I’m gonna miss you,” she whispers.

  He hands her a china cup. “Thought you’d like to have this.”

  She takes it, puzzled. “Thank you.”

  “You and your friend came here one summer. She loved those yellow cups. Your aunt gave her one. I thought you might like to have the other one.”

  Nell pictures the cup on the drain board at the Alsops’ farm, the breadbox gaping open and empty, crumbs scattered in front of it.

  “You don’t remember?”

  “No, I do. I do remember.” She hugs him again. “I wish you didn’t have to go.”

  Jack climbs into his truck. “You write and let me know where you land. An address. A phone number. Holler if you need me.”

  “I will.”

  “Don’t just disappear on us.”

  “Wouldn’t that be doing everyone a favor?”

  “I’m not a good worrier,” Jack says.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “I know you will. Better times ahead.”

  “Sunshine, at least.”

  “We filled the truck up in Geneva. You’ll have a good start.”

  Trevor stands in the yard watching them. Jack looks back at his brother, waves out the window before pulling onto the road.

  They ride in silence, Nell turning the yellow cup in her hands.

  “It’s hard to accept help from your younger brother. Makes a man feel small.”

  “Where’s Aunt Ida?” Nell asks.

  “Wichita. Her mother’s.”

  “For good?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “That could never happen to you and Mom?”

  “Never.”

  “Even though you fight.”

  “Differ.”

  She looks at him.

  “Wrangle,” he says.

  “You fight.”

  “No one on earth is agreeable one hundred percent of the time.”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Alsop split up.”

  “They’re not us.”

  “Will Uncle Trevor come back?”

  “Time-tested advice: don’t marry a drinker.”

  “He’s always been a drinker.”

  “A woman gets fed up. All the money goes. Jobs get scarce.”

  “He never changed?”

  “After the war . . . ” He can’t continue.

  “Dad?”

  “He tried. God, how he tried.”

  He glances at her, turns his attention back to the road.

  “You want to save them,” he says. “And you can’t.”

  Late Monday afternoon Rob Chandler skids to a stop beside Nell as she’s walking home, rolls down his window, the funk of dope spilling into the cold air, and shouts:

  “You want a ride?”

  “No thanks,” Nell says, and keeps walking, head down. The wind coming off the snow-covered fields is sharp as a razor.

  Ever since Megan’s disappearance she has hurried through here, the woods to one side, the abandoned orchard on the other. Wrens call alarms deep in the ice-crusted weeds and brambles.

  It starts to snow; heavy flakes coming down fast, melting on her hat and red mittens, making the road slick.

  He inches along beside her. “C’mon. I’ll give you a ride.”

  “What are you doing on this side of the lake?”

  She hears a hoot of laughter and then a beer bottle is thrown from the car; it smashes against a tree. Rob’s ridiculous friends: drinking, dropping acid, making themselves stupid. A fluke of birth allows them this indulgence while other eighteen-year-olds are coming home in body bags.

  He pulls the car onto the shoulder, cutting her off, sliding on ice and snowpack. John Gibbs jumps out of the passenger side as Rob gets out of the car.

  “Get in.”

  Chandler grabs her arm; she slips in the snow. She looks over her shoulder to see the road empty in both directions. He pushes her toward the car.

  She tries to twist free as Asa Alsop’s truck crests the rise. He flips on his bright lights as he gets closer. Chandler releases his hold on Nell, shields his eyes.

  Asa rolls down his window. “What’s going on here?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What’s Nell Flynn got to do with you?” Asa asks.

  “Friends is all.”

  Nell stands, brushes snow off.

  “Looks like you’re stuck,” Asa says, then, to Nell: “You okay to get home?” She crosses the road, stopping on the other side of the railroad tracks to watch.

  “Can you give us a hand?” Chandler asks.

  “Sure thing,” Asa backs his truck up and then swings around, carefully inching closer to the back of Chandler’s car.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Tell your friends to get out of the car.”

  Two more boys scramble out of the car, stand beside Gibbs. Asa pushes the Mustang further into the ditch.

  “Son of a bitch!” Chandler says.

  “You got a beef with me, kid?” Asa asks, inching closer again. “I’d suggest you start walking. You’re gonna need a tow.”

  “And you’re gonna pay for it.”

  “You slid off the road while you were threatening Nell Flynn. I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Hey, don’t you live near here?” Gibbs asks. “Can we use your phone?”

  “Any of you set foot on my property, I’m calling the police.”

  Asa never raises his voice. Waits until the boys disappear over the rise, heading for town. Sits for another twenty minutes to be sure none of them double back to trouble Nell. He puts the truck in gear and heads for home only when he sees Marion turn up the drive.

  Nell shucks off her wet things in the laundry room, stuffs her boots with newspaper, sets them by the radiator. Upstairs, she pulls the Messiaen from its sleeve, sets it on the turntable; lowers the needle. The Oriole fills the room. Billy’s gift: leaving his records and record player when he deployed.

  Still cold, she climbs under the covers, wondering if she will ever get warm. The music washes over her. Sunrise, mist, dappled light on birch and fir, the oriole’s fluted song.

  She doesn’t want to think about what could have happened if Asa hadn’t driven up, or if Megan had been forced into a car some other dark afternoon.

  But Megan, trusting Chandler, would have gone willingly.

  She begins to tremble. Stupid. She shouldn’t have let them frighten her. What did they want with her? Hears her mother’s car pull up. Home from the hospital.

  Nell finds Marion at the kitchen sink, her purse and a bag of groceries discarded on the table, still in her blue coat, looking out the window to the lake and the darkening sky. Nell stands beside her, reaches an arm around her waist.

  “Is Billy okay?”

  “He’s fine. Well, that’s not true. Sometimes it just hits me so hard. What a long road his recovery will be.” She takes a breath. “It’s such a shock to see the burns. His face . . . ”

  “It’ll get better.”

  “Oh, honey. Burns like that . . . ”

  “It’s just one side, Mom.”

  “My beautiful boy . . . ”

  She has the rare, unsettling sensation of holding her mother up. She knows now that she can’t tell her mother about what happened on the road. It was just a prank, Nell tells herself. Nothing to be afraid of.

  “Can I help with dinner?”

  “Not much to do, but I’d love the company.” Marion turns the kettle on. “First some tea. Warm us both up.”

  Nell unpacks the groceries. Pork chops, frozen green beans, potatoes, and a pack of cigarettes.

  “Mashed or Potatoes Anna?” Nell asks.

  “Potatoes Anna. Make your dad happy.”

  In the hospital, there’
s too much time to ask questions that can never be answered. When you’re inside the mountains with their clouds and fire and treacherous winds there’s no time to think.

  They’d circled back a third time to try to get all the men out. You never do that. They’ve got your coordinates. They’re going to hit you. Plenty of time to prepare.

  But the wounded are waiting.

  Every crewmember saying: Yeah, yeah, go back in. We can do it.

  One more time.

  The smells of blood and smoke and waste fill the air, the staccato bursts of covering fire, the whup whup whup of the blades overhead.

  The boys who can still walk help each other aboard; infantrymen carry stretchers, medics run beside them. They are taking fire to the ship, to the wounded. You can hear the thunk every time a round connects. One kid has lost his shirt, his bare torso burned, vivid as a flame. A corporal, his shoulder flayed open, lips so swollen with mosquito bites he can’t cry out. Red dust rises with each rotation of the blades, coating their teeth, their tongues with grit.

  We’ve gotta go.

  Lifting off. Struggling to lift off.

  Slow climb, overloaded, rotors howling. Billy angles the ship to tip right over the edge of the mountain, drop below the mortars, gain some speed, and hope like hell he can stabilize and get some control.

  Tracers cross overhead; the first RPG takes out the tail, the second ploughs through the midsection. The ship splinters under his hands. Metal and men screaming.

  The crash is heavy and hard and fast.

  On fire.

  MARCH

  Nell sits beside Billy’s bed, waiting for him to wake after the latest surgery. She pictures the intricate structure of a hand, a wrist, Billy’s artful renderings of bird skeletons and wings. Thinks, then, about the birds’ eggs she’s studying: too thin to contain the growing embryo, the birds that do hatch, too fragile to survive. Invisible poisons in the air, in the water, in the bodies and blood of the insects and fish that sustain them, so potent they alter the chain of DNA itself. What has always seemed immutable—the body and its boundaries—is changing more quickly than anyone could have predicted.

  She looks at her brother, realizes she has yet to see him on his feet. Recalls his pride when he surpassed first Jack and then his older brother Brendan in height.

  Remembers standing on the sleeping porch looking down the hill to her two brothers on the dock, smoking and talking. They were leaving the next day for Basic. The occasional word floated up to her.

  She’d come up the hill to change out of her bathing suit. Water dripped down her shirt. Billy, earlier, had run his hands through her hair, forced her to face him, breaking the Megan tension, the Megan secrets, sex.

  Megan had always been jealous of the way Billy was affectionate with her. He’s my brother. It’s just his way. But Megan pushed and pushed until Nell wanted to smack her.

  Billy called up to her, then, insisting on the yearly challenge, seeing who could hold their breath longest, weightless in the sun-filtered water, rocking in the current. He gripped her hand when Brendan gave up, kicking for the surface, watched her: You can’t beat me. A gray sturgeon floated up from below, too big to be believed. A trick of the light, maybe, or her own shadow falling deep.

  She closed her eyes, concentrating, the ache in her chest, at the base of her skull, wished she had a bird’s hollow bones to fill with air. As kids they’d imagined that their ears would split open, that the pain was their bodies transforming into gills or wings or fins.

  His kiss, so unexpected, still watching when she opened her eyes, that look she knew so well—I’ll deny it later—this never happened—was missing now, something sober and haunting in its place.

  He swam for the surface, she resisted, broke his grip. He burst through the water, laughing. She had beaten him for the first time in their lives.

  More likely he’d let her win.

  That first breath, dizzy, hair wrapped around her throat. Flanagan barking on the dock, Billy shouting, the bells pealing out from Saint Joe’s in town. She wanted time to stop, wanted to float there forever, her brother laughing beside her, the dog, the smell of her father’s fire, the bells ringing.

  Billy struggles to wake, senses Nell nearby, the drugs pulling him under. He counts helicopters, why, he doesn’t know, imagines birds in flight: they fill his mind, beating wings, turning rotors. Begins to surface, that familiar fight to come back, over and over, whether he feels like it or not. Thinks of the birds in Japan, so many strange visitors outside his hospital window.

  He knows birds too numerous to count, he knows the lake like it’s an extension of his own body, its impossible depths, currents, inlets and outlets, fish and fowl. He knows everything there is to know about wolves except how to be one.

  He feels Nell’s hand on his shoulder, hears her singing, so softly it’s almost a dream. If I were a blackbird, I’d whistle and sing . . . Her voice pulls him up through the layers of pain and narcotics, all that weighs on him, gauze, sheets, memory. He nearly surfaces, is sucked under, another wave.

  Friday morning half a dozen police cruisers pull up in front of the high school. The principal comes on the loudspeaker to announce that every locker will be searched. Class by class. Seniors first. Beginning now.

  Students are instructed to stand in front of their lockers with the doors closed. Teachers patrol the hallways, shutting up the chitchat and the gossip. A policeman stands at each end of the corridor. Detective Johnson leans against a wall, watching.

  Nell has a clear view of Rob Chandler’s locker. He tries to pocket something when he opens the door for Dale Pope.

  “What have you got, kid?”

  Chandler shows Pope a pack of Trojans.

  “Everything on the floor,” Pope says.

  Books, notebooks, a hockey stick, filthy gym socks, a windbreaker, girlie magazines, and buried beneath all the crap, Megan’s favorite camisole and a pair of panties.

  “Does this belong to you?” Pope asks.

  “My girlfriend.”

  “Megan Alsop?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What’s it doing in your locker?”

  “She left stuff in here all the time.”

  “Why didn’t you report this?”

  Chandler shrugs his shoulders.

  Dale Pope seals the camisole and underpants in a clear plastic bag. As Chandler starts to shove everything back inside, Pope stops him, calls to a cop nearby.

  “Pack it all up, would you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Chandler protests. Pope writes him out a receipt.

  “Leave the schoolbooks. Nothing else.”

  Nell looks up to see Detective Johnson watching her. He shifts his gaze back to Chandler.

  What will they find today? Anything? And if it’s not Chandler, then who is it?

  Billy is waiting for the miracle when the surgeries are done and the casts come off, for the burns to be healed, for his arm and hand to be restored to him, scarred and ugly, but functioning.

  The days slip by, a parade of frustration. All the things he still can’t do: button a shirt, pull on pants, zip his fly, for chrissake. Shoes and shoelaces, the list goes on and on. The occupational therapist won’t leave him alone. Every day. Every fucking day. Galling to find he needs someone to teach him how to put his socks on.

  He thought he was prepared for the cast to come off. He’d already been through the disappointment following the first surgery to repair his shattered elbow. The Army surgeon in Japan, happy to be dealing with a living soldier, sawed through the cast, looked at the X-rays, pronounced it: Great job. Healing well. Billy was confronted with an emaciated arm, a painful, if functioning elbow, and an almost useless hand.

  Second surgery, stateside, to repair ligaments, also went well, or so he was told. Through the haze of painkiller
s, he heard the words healing well as your hand will be healed.

  The shock when the second cast comes off is hard to measure. His wrist, forearm, palm, are crisscrossed with scars. The muscles in his arm have atrophied, his fingers unable to open fully, his hand crablike.

  The surgeon’s explanation of nerve damage, the function of ligaments holding bone together, what fine motor control he will and will not have, scarcely registers as static through the storm of Billy’s reaction: panic fueled by pain and confusion and a sense of terrible betrayal.

  “You son of a bitch, what have you done to my hand?”

  “What we were able to do? Cutting edge. This kind of damage . . . ”

  “What about my hand?”

  “You’ll get a lot of your mobility back.”

  “You told me I’d be healed.”

  “You will heal. You are healing.”

  “Fully healed?”

  “It takes time.”

  “How much time?”

  “Depends on the patient, the extent of the damage. You have a lot of physical therapy ahead of you. There’s significant nerve damage.”

  “Can you fix it?”

  “Nerves? No.”

  “Can nerves heal?”

  “Sometimes they regenerate. To a degree. But not when they’ve been shredded by shrapnel.”

  “And the pain?”

  “Should improve over time.”

  Billy looks at him, panic rising.

  “We’ve seen amazing results with young soldiers.”

  “You’re not giving me much.”

  “You’re in one piece, soldier.”

  “More or less,” Billy says, thinking: You fucking coward.

  “You’ll start physical therapy next week. Rebuilding muscle and increasing your range of motion. By the time you’re discharged you should see real improvement.”