Bird

by Crystal Chan

  “Come on,” John insisted, grabbing my arm.

  “B-but I haven’t done my chores yet,” I stuttered. “Mom will be mad.”

  John’s brow furrowed. “But she wouldn’t be mad that he”—John jerked his head at Grandpa—“just spat at me? Come on. It’ll only be for a little while.”

  I bit my lip. I don’t disobey my parents. Not intentionally. I know a lot of kids in my class don’t listen to their parents, or they sneak out, or they talk all disrespectfully. But it’s different for me. It’s like, my parents have already lost Bird. I’m Bird’s replacement.

  At least, that’s how it feels sometimes.

  “Come on,” John said again, exasperated. “I want to show you something.”

  Grandpa frowned.

  I shuddered and leaned away from Grandpa, and in that moment I had a crushing desire to go with John, wherever he wanted to take me. Someplace other than my silent and cold house. I took a couple hesitant steps toward John.

  Suddenly, Grandpa dashed at me and gripped my upper arm, his fingers like a vise.

  “Let me go!” I cried, and I jerked my arm back violently. Then, before I knew what was happening, John started running and I was running after him, away from my house, my chores, my grandpa, and through the rows of growing corn.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “IT’S just a little farther,” John said, his legs swishing quickly through the calf-high cornfield and up the hill. He had longer legs than me, and I had to work hard to keep up.

  I felt tingly and strange all over, like my body didn’t belong to me. Did I really just do that? Did I disobey my grandpa, right to his face? My stomach churned with shame. Would he tell my parents? That would be even worse.

  My foot caught on a dip in the earth, and I fell to my knees. John stopped and came back. “You okay?” he asked.

  “It’s nothing,” I said, even though a little rock had hit my kneecap hard.

  “Just wait until you see this place I want to show you,” John said, and his smile was so bright I wondered for the two hundredth time why Grandpa was so angry at him. John helped me to my feet. “What was up with your grandpa? He went nuts back there.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and that was the true-blue truth. “Maybe he was in a bad mood.” That wasn’t quite true, but it was better than saying that Grandpa didn’t like John for no good reason.

  “A bad mood,” John repeated. He looked like he was going to say something else, then thought better of it.

  I thought we were going to go to his uncle’s house but instead we went in the opposite direction, where I’d seen John come from yesterday. We cut through three different fields and climbed up a steep hill to a small but dense grove of trees that sat at its crest and looked over the land. Iowa isn’t all cornfields, unlike what a lot of people think; it has a lot of variety to it, with bluffs and caves and sinkholes and oxbow lakes. And it’s not flat, either; its hills swell and dip, a river of land flowing from the Rockies in the west, rolling like waves on the horizon.

  The sun was high overhead now, and my throat itched with thirst. Iowa is no place to mess around without water in the summer. With it being a landlocked state and all, the heat just swelters and bakes everything it touches. All the folks with air conditioners hide in their houses. My family has to sweat it out.

  We slowed down when we reached the thin, outlying trees, which seemed to sweat in the summer heat. The trees farther in got bigger, thicker, and under their protective canopy they became a grove of mothers holding out their arms, shielding us from the sun. Leaves bent softly beneath our feet, and John guided me through the glowing understory, until he suddenly stopped.

  “Here.”

  I looked up. In front of me stood an enormous hollow tree, a basswood, much taller and larger than all the rest. It pierced through the canopy with its bare branches and naked trunk. It was dead, for sure; it must have died long ago from lightning or fungus or old age. The heartwood was completely gone, dissolved away, almost, but the bark and shell of the trunk and all its branches stood firmly intact. A four-foot-high hole rose from its base, like a door.

  It was a house. Made of a tree.

  “What happened to it?” I said. I was almost whispering.

  “I don’t know,” John said, and he seemed a little embarrassed. “I was hoping you would.”

  I shook my head.

  “This is Event Horizon,” John announced. His chest puffed out a little.

  “What?”

  “The name of my tree,” he said.

  I found myself grinning again. “It’s not your tree, you know.”

  John’s dark eyes twinkled. “Trees belong to everyone. Check it out.”

  The temperature seemed to drop twenty degrees inside the tree, and the ground was soft, spongy beneath my feet. As my eyes adjusted to the shadows, I could make out the dark, rich walls of wood encircling me and squinted up at the bright disk of sky overhead. It smelled of peat moss and loam, the scent of one thing slowly becoming another. It’s funny, I realized, that people feel like they have to go into churches to pray when there is all this sacredness sitting here, outside, silent and waiting.

  “It’s really great to come here at night,” John said. I hadn’t even heard him enter, the ground was so soft. “You see the stars when you look up.”

  “Like a spaceship,” I said, and the moment I said it, I knew I was right. I turned around slowly, my neck craned up, taking it in.

  He nodded and handed me a bottle of water. I looked at him, grateful but confused.

  “Over by the doorway,” John said.

  I had missed it when I ducked inside: a little stash of water, candy bars, flashlights.

  “Awesome,” I whispered.

  No one had ever shown me their secrets. In my family we hoard our secrets, gathering them in with greedy arms, never sharing them with anyone. And now that John had shown me his secret place, it was like the universe was unrolling before me.

  I felt rich.

  Then it hit me. “This is where you were coming from yesterday.”

  He pressed his lips together. “It’s better than home.”

  Anyone could see why being at Event Horizon was way better than being at some dumb house with nothing to do.

  “So does your grandpa spit at every person he meets?” John asked.

  I winced. I’d nearly forgotten about it. “No, he’s just . . .” I searched for the word. “Different.”

  “Really.”

  “No, I mean, besides that. He doesn’t talk.”

  “Not at all?” John ducked out of Event Horizon, and I followed after him. We sat down some ten feet from the tree, drinking our water and watching the sun cast mottled patches of light on our legs.

  “He hasn’t talked since my brother died.”

  A pause. “I’m sorry.”

  I squirmed. I hate it when people say I’m sorry when I mention my brother. “It’s okay,” I said, “I never knew him.” And, I realized, I never really knew Grandpa, either.

  An awkward silence fell over us, and my hands started digging into the cool soil.

  John watched me dig for a moment, then looked back at his tree. “Event Horizon’s a great tree, but I don’t climb it.”

  Dead trees are dangerously brittle. I let the dirt sift through my fingers. “Why do you call it Event Horizon?” I asked.

  John gave a little knowing nod, as if he’d expected me to ask that. “You’ve heard of black holes, right?”

  “Right.” I hesitated. “A little bit.”

  “When a supergiant star dies, it implodes—crashes in on itself—and forms a black hole. Everything gets sucked into it. Even light. Stars too.”

  “Where does all that stuff go?”

  John shrugged. “No one knows. Anyway, if people were able to get into a black hole, there’d be no way to tell us what was on the other side, because they couldn’t get out.”

  He had a point.

  “The black hole’s pull
is strong, but you can avoid getting sucked in if you don’t get too close. The event horizon is what scientists call that point of no return. You cross it . . .” John pointed a finger and crossed his neck with it. “Ack. You’re sucked in. Good-bye. If you don’t cross the event horizon, you can still get free.”

  I thought it sounded scary to name a favorite tree as the point of no return. But it sounded daring, too. I would have never thought of a name like that.

  “If you ever get sucked into a black hole, where do you think you’ll end up?” I asked.

  “Another dimension,” John replied simply.

  How could he be so confident? My head buzzed a little. I’d never met anyone like him before. And the best thing was that someone as confident and courageous and smart as John was happy sitting in the woods with me. In my whole life, I hadn’t met someone who truly understood why I dig in the dirt so much, or why I like rocks and trees or watch how the sky moves during a storm. But John liked all those things too, and then some, and he didn’t feel he had to hide anything at all. I wanted to slip under his skin and snatch some of that confidence. Maybe that’s why I told John that the other oaks and pine trees surrounding us looked really great for climbing.

  John shot me a mischievous grin. “These trees go up a lot higher than my uncle’s.”

  My lips twisted up. “Are you saying I’m afraid?”

  “I’m saying that you can see everything.”

  We spent a long time climbing as high as we dared, and trying all kinds of different trees. He was right; there were some big trees with pretty daring jumps, from one branch to another to another, and at times I got a little nervous, but I kept up, right there with him.

  We secured ourselves in the forking branches of a maple tree, and John was on the higher branch when he looked down at me. “What was your brother’s name?”

  I paused. I wasn’t quite sure what to say, but then I realized I’d already lied to him about not believing in duppies and wasn’t ready to tell two lies in one day, so I said, “John.”

  He swiped the sweat off his forehead and fixed his eyes on me. “No way.”

  My heart was thumping a little faster, and my hands gripped the bark until my fingers hurt. I wasn’t quite sure what he was thinking. “Serious. But they called him Bird.”

  “Why?”

  “Grandpa wanted him to fly.”

  We didn’t say much after that, just kept climbing. There were still a couple big branches left before it got dicey, but we didn’t go any higher. When our forearms ached too much, we climbed down, ate John’s snacks, and stood at the edge of the grove. From the top of the hill, we could see the flowing, green-golden land, the tiny little houses below—with a clear view of my house and Mr. McLaren’s, too—carved dolomite cliff formations, and the gravel roads as thin as twigs in the distance. Millions upon millions of years of earth were holding us.

  When I snuck a peek at John, I caught him looking to the sky.

  Dad was standing by his garden when I got home, hands on his hips, studying each plant.

  “Hey, Dad,” I said, giving him a light peck on the cheek, but my stomach twisted inside. If Grandpa had somehow told him how I disobeyed him this afternoon, I would be in deep trouble. “What do you think of the weeding?” I asked as casually as possible.

  He was nodding his head. “Nice job, Jewel,” he said. Dad bent down and inspected the young cucumber leaves.

  I exhaled silently, relieved. Grandpa hadn’t said anything.

  “I’m surprised you got all the way down beneath those prickers,” Dad continued. “Their roots are tough.”

  Those were the weeds that John pulled up.

  Dad walked slowly around the perimeter. “I was starting to worry about the rosemary.”

  My cheeks felt hot. I wasn’t sure I had done something wrong. “It looks pretty healthy to me,” I said.

  He put his hand on my shoulder. “Yes, but if those weeds had strangled out the rosemary, that would be very bad for us.”

  “It would be unlucky because rosemary protects us,” I said, more confidently this time.

  Dad’s eyebrows lifted with delighted surprise. “You remembered.”

  I beamed. Dad had told me about rosemary a long time ago, and I had run to my room to write down what he’d said so I could impress him at a time exactly like this. “Rosemary can be used in different ways,” I said. I scrunched my brow, thinking. “You rub it on your skin or put it in your pocket when you need help remembering things. Like for tests.”

  “And?”

  “And . . . you put it under your pillow so you don’t get nightmares.”

  He squeezed my shoulder.

  “And drinking rosemary tea can make you healthy if you get hurt,” I added, wanting to make him even prouder.

  “And?”

  “And . . .” I faltered. I couldn’t remember anything else.

  “You burn rosemary to get rid of duppies,” Dad said. “Burning rosemary is very powerful for warding them off.”

  “Just like the Xolo dog?” I asked.

  Dad’s smile grew wider. “Do I have a smart girl or what?” he said, shaking his head, but I knew it wasn’t really a question.

  Dad had been really excited when some show on TV talked about the Xolo dog, an ancient dog that protected the Aztec kings from intruders and evil spirits. After Dad found that out, he made sure a Xolo dog figurine was in our house. When I pointed out that Xolo dogs are from Mexico, not Jamaica, he replied that protective spirits do the same job, no matter where they’re from. Then he made sure to work on the leak over in Mrs. Rodriguez’s kitchen, because she was the one who brought the figurine back from Mexico for him. Dad put the little dog right by our family pictures in the living room, and it stayed there even though Mom had some sharp words for him when she got home.

  There are a lot of things that Dad does that Mom’s not too thrilled about. Especially taking care of our Buick. Even though it’s super old, Dad makes sure to wash and wax it every Saturday afternoon, and he even has this special cloth mitt to put the wax cream on and a different mitt to take it off. Mom says all that is a waste of money, especially the car magazines that he leaves around the house. In her opinion, what would really help is if he could figure out how to fix the car when it breaks down, but I doubt Dad would notice even if the engine was missing, because never in my life have I seen him open up the hood. He sure shines the top of it, though, and when he’s done waxing the Buick, he puts his hands on his hips, gives a little whistle, and nods his head. But we still have to take it in for everything, even an oil change.

  I guess I don’t blame him for being as proud as a peacock about that Buick, even though it has rust on the sides. When he talks about the day he got that car, his whole face becomes as bright as a star, and his eyes twinkle too; he purchased it with cash, a big, rolled wad of it, and drove away in his spanking-new car, with a hot wife to boot. That’s how he put it. I can just see the two of them smiling from ear to ear, their happiness gleaming like sunlight off the chrome. And even though he doesn’t tell that story much anymore, I wonder sometimes if he still remembers it, especially because he’s always waxing that car alone.

  Dad and I stood at the edge of the garden in silence for a while, looking at how everything was growing. “The tree saplings don’t look too good,” I admitted.

  Dad’s eyes squinted up, like he was trying to make the trees grow by sheer willpower. “Don’t worry, honey. These are lucky saplings.” His voice was a soft, gentle baritone. “I want them because they’re good for protection too.”

  I scratched my arm. “Dad?” I asked.

  “Yes?”

  “If the rosemary is good for protecting us from duppies, why are you trying to grow the trees?”

  Dad smiled. “You sure are one smart girl,” he said, and put his arm around me. I leaned into him a little more. “The more protection around you, the better,” he said. “It’s like layers.”

  “Layers?” I cocked
my head up at him.

  “Layers of protection, Jewel. And you always want them nice and thick.” He was nodding at the garden. “One day these will grow to be huge trees, you’ll see.”

  I gave him a sideways look. “Coconut trees in a snowstorm?”

  He chuckled. “Why not?”

  I elbowed him.

  “Hopefully they’ll get to the point where we can transplant them into pots and bring them in the house for the winter. Then we’ll wheel them in and out when they get bigger.”

  Like I said, Dad can be somewhat of an optimist. What happens when the coconut tree is taller than our house? But he doesn’t bother with details like that. One reason why I think Dad loves these plants so much is that this used to be Granny’s garden, and Granny used to love plants too. Dad says she had a big garden in Jamaica in the countryside, and she knew the healing properties for all kinds of plants—plenty more than Dad knows about, from what he tells me. Maybe Dad feels closer to Granny by working the garden, like her spirit is still around, somehow. A lot of plants died when she did—Dad didn’t know how to take care of them, but he told me they died because they were heartbroken—and the ones that lived he’s super careful with. Granny knew a whole lot about duppies, too—like how to know when one’s around—and Dad tries to teach me about them when Mom’s not listening. Sometimes I think he wants to be more like Granny, because he’d talk about her and plants and duppies all day long if Mom would let him, but he doesn’t. Instead, he looks at Granny’s picture in our living room when he thinks I’m not watching; he just stands there and stares at Granny, like she’s going to jump out of the picture frame and talk to him. She died when I was young, and it’s strange that Dad misses so much someone I never really knew.

  Dad and I inspected the garden for a long time, poking the plants here and there, rubbing their leaves, and smelling their fragrances. What made me the happiest, though, was that he didn’t have to say not to mention any of our talk about rosemary to Mom. He knew I already knew that.