Fastest Things on Wings

by Terry Masear

  “She’s in torpor,” Jean replies ominously. “I can’t bring her out.”

  A dozen thoughts race into my mind in that instant, but one elbows its way to the head of the line. “I’m coming down,” I announce as if a higher authority has made the decision for me and issued immediate marching orders.

  I expect Jean to argue, the way she always does, with rational explanation and reality-based consolation. But instead she just says, “Okay, I’ll see you,” then abruptly hangs up.

  I don’t know how I get dressed and into the car in less than five minutes. All I remember is racing down a deserted six-lane freeway as if my life depended on it. Halfway there, I am overtaken by a brain-splitting headache as rivers of sweat stream down my temples and drip onto my powder-blue polo shirt. It’s a balmy morning, maybe 70 degrees already at six o’clock, portending a sweltering afternoon. But inside the car, it already feels like a hundred even with the air conditioner roaring on high. By the time I turn off the 110 freeway onto Pacific Coast Highway, I can hear my heart hammering in my head and I am soaked in sweat, even though, when I put my hand on my forehead for reassurance, my skin feels cold and clammy to the touch. As much as I try to calm myself with deep breathing, as I pull into the driveway, my agitation escalates. When I rush to Jean’s doorstep, I have a flashback of her expressionless greeting the first time I arrived at her front door drenched to the skin with young Gabriel in tow, four years earlier. But this time when she opens the door, Jean can’t mask her shock.

  “My God, Terry, you look like shit.”

  “Thanks.” I tilt my head in acknowledgment. “But rest assured, no matter how bad I look, I feel a lot worse.”

  “Are you okay?” Jean stares at me with such frightened concern as I hurry inside that I begin to panic even more.

  “I don’t know.” I sink into a chair at her kitchen table as I struggle to catch my breath. “I don’t feel too good. I’m so parched. Can I have some water?”

  Jean pours me a tall glass from a plastic container in her refrigerator, which I drink in a second, and I nod when she offers to pour another.

  “Do you have any aspirin?” I ask before gulping down the second glass.

  Jean opens a cupboard over the sink lined with a dozen brands of aspirin, anti-inflammatory drugs, and other unidentifiable pharmaceuticals.

  “Wow.” I admire the collection. “You come prepared.”

  “You’re looking at twenty years of hummingbird rescue,” she mutters dryly.

  As I swallow two aspirin I wonder how such a mild treatment can possibly address the skull-splitting headache that makes me feel like dropping to the kitchen floor.

  “Where’s Pepper?” I ask anxiously.

  Jean directs me to one of her ICUs sitting on a table against the wall. Four fully feathered nestlings are huddled in two nests on one side, and at the far end is Pepper, perched on the edge of a plastic-salsa-cup nest with her eyes closed, bill in the air, and feathers puffed up.

  “Oh, Pepper,” I sigh sadly. I slide the glass door open, reach in, and close my hand around her cold body, and my heart starts to pound faster. “I have to get her home.” I look at Jean urgently.

  “Terry,” Jean begins cautiously, “I’m not sure you should be driving—”

  “Jeannie.” I raise a palm toward her. “Just . . . don’t.”

  “Okay.” She quickly relents. “Take this.” Jean hands me a head-injury cage.

  “Good.” I set Pepper and her nest on the bottom of the cage and head for the door. “Oh, wait.” I turn suddenly. “What about the other one?”

  “Oh, she’s fine.” Jean gestures toward the animated female Allen’s zipping back and forth in a starter cage on the table. “While I was massaging her last night, she dropped it right into my hand,” Jean announces, proudly holding up what looks like a white Jelly Belly between her thumb and index finger. “She’s been flying around since I got up.”

  “I’ll take her too, then. Just in case she has a nest.” I move to pick up the cage but freeze in midstride from a sudden stiffness in my arms and legs.

  “Here, let me.” Jean lifts the cage by the handle and follows my slow exit out the door and to the car. “Be careful, Terry.” She looks at me sympathetically as I slide into the driver’s seat. “I don’t want to have to give up rescuing hummers because you’re not around to help me anymore.”

  “Don’t worry. You’re not going to get out of this nightmare that easily,” I assure her, then I pull out of the driveway and speed home.

  Once on the freeway, I think back again about dropping Gabriel off, four years ago. Rather than seeming like four years, though, my journey feels more like twenty after all I have been through with hummingbirds. I recall the early mornings and late nights, the endless barrage of phone calls and anxious finders arriving at my door, the long commutes on the freeways, and the hundreds of otherwise-doomed hummingbirds flying around the city now. I can’t believe how far I have come from that emotionally paralyzed rookie weeping on the garage floor to this summer spent rescuing hundreds of hummingbirds and their people all over town. And now Pepper, with yet another lesson on how little I understand.

  Pepper’s lapse into torpor after being left with Jean also makes me ponder the difference between wild and domestic animals. I can’t help but regard domestic pets, like our cats, as extensions of ourselves. Their charming and endearing qualities are a result of our influence, just as their failures somehow reflect our shortcomings. This is what people mean when they describe themselves as pet parents. Like human parents, we have maternal and paternal relationships with our cats and dogs and are to some extent accountable for their deeds. But I have none of this sense of responsibility with wild animals. A wild animal is mean or sweet, aggressive or friendly, because that’s the way he was born. With hummingbirds in rehab, as with all creatures in nature, I have nothing to do with their violent behavior or bad temperament. I have not failed them. That’s just how they are. And I can dismiss them as natural and wild.

  The problem with Pepper is that by being so affectionate and interactive, she has pulled me in, made me responsible, and, therefore, accountable. Pepper never acted wild in the detached sense of the word. She was always right there with me, watching and relating. Her connection to me wasn’t something entirely in her, nor was it outside of her and only in my mind. It was a bond that arose between us, through our interactions. And as much as I have tried to conceal my affection for her, I always loved her, and she sensed that. So when I left her at Jean’s house, Pepper did not understand that I was trying to do the best thing for her or that I would ever come back. She just felt abandoned, and as hard as it is for me to believe, because she is a hummingbird, she was suffering from a broken heart. And now I’m feeling the same pain. After three months of my working with her every day, giving her flight lessons and encouraging her determined progress, Pepper has taken on exaggerated importance for me, and I can’t bear the thought of losing her. In my overwrought condition, I even convince myself that if Pepper dies, the entire summer will be a monumental failure.

  Partly because it is early Sunday morning and mostly because of my subconscious decision to avoid consulting my speedometer, I make it home from Jean’s house in half the time I usually do. Before the car’s engine stops completely, I’m out the door and rushing through the gate with the two cages. Halfway across the patio, I set the Allen’s cage on a cast-iron table and open the top, and in a second she disappears over the house. When I get into the garage, I turn on the ICU, put Pepper inside, sit down on a chair, and begin stroking her head and repeating her name softly. I don’t know what else to do. After several minutes, she opens her bill slightly in response to my supplication. I fill an angio, touch her head, and inject some formula into her mouth. And to my immeasurable relief, she swallows, slow and hard. We sit together quietly as I continue rubbing her head and prompting her with food. Pepper remains in a state of suspended animation with her eyes closed, although she eats a l
ittle more each time I touch her bill with the angio. Finally, after an hour consoling Pepper, when the spinning in my head begins to make me feel dangerously dizzy, I stagger toward the house. As I am crossing the patio, my phone rings and I answer it automatically without realizing that I have neither the focus nor the energy to explain anything about hummingbirds to anybody right now.

  Ariel from Pacific Palisades apologizes for bothering me about what she refers to as a silly question and then describes how a hummingbird nest in her yard with a chick inside has been carried off by crows. “The mother keeps circling around, looking for the nest, and now she’s been sitting in that same spot for three hours. I know there’s nothing I can do but it makes me so sad, Terry, and I was just wondering, do you think hummingbirds can get broken hearts?”

  “Well, if you had asked me that yesterday,” I answer Ariel in a weary tone, “I would have said no. But today, yes, I am certain that they can.”

  Inside the house, I find Frank in his office working on the computer. When he glances up at me before doing a double take, he can’t hide his dismay.

  “What’s going on?” Frank asks with grave concern. “You look horrible.”

  “I’m getting that a lot today,” I respond faintly, wiping sweat off my face and arms with a hand towel I grabbed from the adjacent bathroom. I head to the swivel chair in the corner, collapse onto the seat with a shaky weakness, and find I can’t get back up.

  Frank rushes over and escorts me to the bedroom at the end of the hall, covers me with a heavy cotton blanket, and delivers tall glasses of orange and cranberry juice. While he’s in the kitchen retrieving more liquids, three cats appear and begin walking all over my inert body, purring and looking me closely in the face with wide, frightened eyes. As they sink down, one after another, on the blanket beside me, I glance around the bedroom in the bright morning sunlight.

  It’s a small, cozy room I have always preferred to the larger suite upstairs when I come down with a cold or the flu. The half-size bedroom has wood venetian blinds covering a tall window behind the bed’s headboard that invites abundant natural light, a seven-foot-high glass-covered Italian bookcase in the corner jammed with poetry anthologies and literary classics, louvered wood doors on a large walk-in closet off to one side, and a beamed pine ceiling that gives the room a snug, cabinlike feel. It’s the secluded hideaway where Frank and I do the Los Angeles Times crossword puzzle together while drinking coffee and hot chocolate on brisk Sunday mornings in the winter as the cats burrow into the plush blankets wrapped around us. A private sanctuary we can crawl into with books on a hazy autumn afternoon, getting up only to shuffle into the kitchen ten steps away. Of all the places in the world I could be right now, this warmly familiar room is by far my first choice. After a few minutes, Frank arrives with a thermometer, which quickly alerts us that I am running a temperature of 103.2.

  “That’s pretty high, isn’t it?” I knit my brow.

  “It ain’t good,” Frank concedes, squinting at the thermometer. “Do you wanna go to Cedars?” he presses, referring to the sprawling Cedars-Sinai Medical Center a block away.

  “No, not yet.” I shake my head before offering him blurry instructions on how to fill the hummingbird feeders in the aviary and care for Pepper in the ICU. I always keep a container of mixed formula in the refrigerator for emergencies, and Frank has assumed these duties in the past when my back was against the wall, so there are no surprises. I look at my phone and realize that despite the heated and whirling events of the day, it’s only nine o’clock. “I just need to rest for an hour or so,” I say to reassure Frank as he stares at me apprehensively.

  To combat my brain-scrambling headache, Frank brings me a potent painkiller and disappears on his assignment as I spiral into a deep sleep. As I am drifting off, I experience that universal sensation of falling and then I have restless, disjointed dreams about people crying and hummingbirds dying. My dreams are not about the ones I have saved but about those I have failed. Every now and then, I surface into a breathless, semiconscious state before being pulled under again. When I finally awake and check my phone, it’s one in the afternoon and every joint in my body is throbbing. The headache has been replaced by a dull mental lethargy, and the sweating attacks supplanted by a heavy immobility. Frank hears me rustling around on the bed and hurries in.

  “Are you okay?” he asks with an expression of anxious concern that I have seen in his eyes only once or twice in twenty years, at times when life was really unraveling.

  “I think so.” I struggle to pull myself upright as he sits down beside me on the bed with palpable relief.

  “Are the birds okay?”

  “Yeah, they’re all fine.” He nods. “Except for that one in the ICU.”

  “Why?” My heart tightens in my chest. “What’s wrong?” I glance up at him in alarm.

  “Well, I’ve been trying to feed her every thirty minutes,” he says, frowning, “but she just keeps flying around the ICU and I can’t keep her on the nest.”

  I fall back onto the pillows, close my eyes, and breathe again.

  CHAPTER 26

  There’s No Me Without You

  FRANK’S NEWS OF PEPPER’S surprise comeback elicits a sudden burst of energy that gives me the strength to hurry out to the garage, return her to a flight cage, and set her outside with the rest of the late-summer stragglers. Although I am too punchy to grasp the full impact of Pepper’s revival, her return brings a profound inner peace to my troubled mind. After filling the feeders in a daze, I stagger back to bed. Huddling under the blanket with a resurging headache and chills, I contemplate the advantages of torpor available to Pepper at times like this. Instead of retreating into the peace of that deep slumber, as she did during her meltdown, I lie in bed tormented by fever, disturbing mental images, and a jaw-grinding restlessness. After digging around in the covers on the bed, I locate my phone. Except for a worried voicemail from Jean, I have not gotten a call all day. I drink a quart of orange juice and take another painkiller, and finally I am released from my misery and drift away.

  When I awaken, the last rays of the setting sun are streaming through the half-opened blinds, and three cats are sleeping soundly around me. As I regain consciousness I hear Frank talking on the phone in the living room. I slide out of bed and shuffle into the front room as he hangs up and approaches me with concern.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Not yet, but we’re betting on a total recovery.”

  Too weak to move anything except myself, I ask Frank to carry the large flight cages inside for the night. We step out the side door of the house and onto the patio, and I automatically glance at Pepper’s and Gabriel’s cages, as I have done hundreds of times every day for the past three months. Pepper is balanced on her top perch but I don’t see Gabriel anywhere. Frightened something has gone wrong during my extended absence, I rush over to his cage and then do a double take. Gabriel is resting on the top perch looking at Pepper in the adjacent cage. I intercept Frank as he is carrying a flight cage into the garage.

  “How long has Gabriel been on that perch?” I ask in shocked confusion.

  “Who?”

  “This bird.” I tap the top of the cage as Gabriel looks up at me curiously with his white spot glistening in the amber sunlight. “How long has he been up on this perch?”

  “I don’t know.” Frank shrugs, unaware of the miracle staring us in the face. “He was there when I came out to fill the feeders a few hours ago.”

  I look at Frank and then at Gabriel, convinced I’m having a fever-induced delusion. “How can this be?” I stare at Gabriel in disbelief. “Can you fly?” I tap the top of his cage again as he sits calmly on his high perch gazing up at me. I carry the small starter cage he has been living in for the past four months into the garage, open the side door, reach in, and touch Gabriel lightly on the chest. He flies lightly to the far perch and then turns to look at me over his shoulder as if he too is astonished. Overcome by exhaustion and the dr
ama of the day, I sink into my chair in the garage, drop my head into my hands, and weep.

  “What’s wrong?” Frank asks in alarm as he muscles the large flight cage with the female black-chinned and One-Eyed Jack through the door.

  “Nothing.” I shake my head slowly. “Nothing at all.”

  After we get the birds put away, Frank and I head into the house. When I get back to bed, I have a voicemail from Nicole, a friend who is interning at Cedars-Sinai. A year earlier, the aspiring physician from France took several of my English classes at UCLA. Dreaming of landing an internship at one of the top hospitals in the country, she recruited me to help her write application essays and practice for interviews. Within six months she had the job. Since then, she has been calling me regularly and walking over during her lunch breaks to visit me and the cats, though I suspect mostly the cats. Seizing the opportunity to take advantage of her medical expertise, I call her back and describe my current condition, but before I can finish she offers a diagnosis.

  “It sounds like it could be West Nile.”

  “West Nile?” I repeat with surprise. I had heard people talking about this virus on the news but assumed it was one of those dreaded tropical diseases like Ebola that immediately killed its victims.

  “We’re seeing a lot of it right now. Have you gotten any mosquito bites lately?”

  I raise my pink polo shirt and check the large welt Frank drenched with hydrocortisone the night before. I describe the monstrous bite, and Nicole recommends plenty of liquids and bed rest.

  “You’re so healthy, it probably won’t last more than a few days. But you need to take it easy for a while,” she cautions.

  Two weeks ago, her advice would have been laughable. But now, with only fourteen hummingbirds in rehab (five more than a wildlife specialist who called from Missouri a few days ago informed me her facility has admitted all year), the worst of the summer stress is behind me and I am on vacation. Or so I think.