Ghost Sickness

by Amber Foxx

  Shelli came to his rescue. “It sounds like a lot, but they’re hand reared from the day they hatch, and they live forever. It’s not like a dog you’ll only have eight or ten years. If Jamie gets you another parrot—and he still could, you know, the store has a couple of nice Amazons, they’re about the same size, green, playful, good talkers—he’s not really being extravagant. A parrot is a lifetime pet.”

  A lifetime pet. The deeper meaning of what Jamie had been doing with that gift swept over Mae. Without saying so or perhaps even understanding it himself, he’d been offering commitment.

  Mae saw no reason to tell Shelli she didn’t want any parrot at all, no matter how green, playful, or talkative, and she had a feeling Jamie would have struggled to select a replacement even if it had those qualities that had endeared Placido to him. This bird had been special to him, and he’d believed it would have been special to her. First, she’d turned it down, and now Placido’s flight had distressed him. Mae almost wished she could give him the parrot. Or at least find out that Placido was okay.

  Thinking, she turned one of David’s miniature pots without lifting it off the table. Thin-walled and decorated with incredibly fine lines, it bore a woven pattern that created the illusion of texture on its smooth surface. It was beautiful, but with day jobs David and Shelli obviously didn’t make a living from their art. Would Shelli have risked her parrot store job for four thousand dollars or less from selling two birds? It didn’t make sense. Maybe she wasn’t lying about their escape. Florencia’s hyacinth was no longer around. Could that breed be prone to flying away? If Mae could get some feathers from the two lost birds, she could do a psychic search for them, and find out if Shelli’s story was true as well as if Placido was safe.

  David said, “That pattern is called ‘weaving lightning.’ It’s a hard one. Makes my eyes cross. I could only work on it a couple of hours at a time.”

  Mae realized she must have looked like she was studying the pot. Being polite, she asked, “How many hours did it take?”

  “About twenty.”

  She tipped it enough to read the price on the bottom next to David’s signature and laid it down again a little too quickly. It was one hundred and seventy-five dollars. David gave the rejected pot a proprietary little adjustment, moving it to an invisible degree.

  Embarrassed by her show of sticker shock, Mae picked up one of the smallest pots, a white cat figurine about an inch around, curled in sleep with its tail tucked, its back and forelegs painted with intricate black and white cross-hatching. It was only fifteen dollars. Then she noticed a whole cluster of the little cats, all the same shape but with different abstract patterns on their backs. They were probably made in a mold, the only hand work being the painting. She could afford one of these, and Jamie loved cats.

  She could also use David’s pottery to look for information about him and Shelli and the lost parrots, but parrot feathers would be better. She wanted to find the birds, not prove that Jamie’s friends were thieves or liars. It would only upset him. Loyal as he was, he wouldn’t even accept that Zak was an asshole.

  Mae showed the figurine to Jamie. “You like this, sugar?”

  He looked up from the baby. “You want it?”

  “Not for me. I was gonna get it for you.”

  David reached for the little cat and cupped his hand around it, a soft hand with short, fat fingers that somehow did this delicate work. “I’ll make one for you to give him. Paint something special on it for you. Like, if you met in a rainstorm, I could do the rain symbols. Or since he plays the flute it could be Kokopelli. You think about it.”

  The offer startled Mae. It was extra work, and probably no extra money. Did David think that much of Jamie—a guy who chatted with him while he was grocery shopping?

  Jamie kissed Mae on the ear. “Tell him what to paint on it when I’m not listening. Surprise me.”

  How could she refuse? Mae asked David for a business card. He looked at Shelli. “Did you bring them?”

  “I forgot. They must be in the van. But we have a web site now. MVP pueblo pots dot com.”

  “That’s cute,” Mae said. “Like, most valuable potters.”

  “We’re far from that.” David touched a large bowl that glowed with golden flecks. “This one is only five hundred.” He winked at Mae. “Our prices are low. We’re not famous yet.”

  She wondered what a high price for pueblo pottery would be, but didn’t ask. “What’s MVP stand for, then?”

  “Our last names,” Shelli said. “Mirabal and Viarral Pottery.”

  “Mirabal.” Jamie glanced back and forth at the couple. “Which one is ...?”

  He doesn’t even know their last names.

  David tapped his chest.

  Jamie asked, “You related to the painter? Orville Geronimo’s first wife?”

  “You can say her name. We don’t have that taboo.”

  “I know. But I do. Is she your relative?”

  “Yes.” David’s face hardened, and his nails dug into the velvet of the display board. “My aunt.”

  Florencia didn’t have contact with her family. How did he know she was dying? Jamie’s wording could as easily have come from forgetting her first name as from avoiding it, so someone had told David about Florencia’s illness. Maybe that wasn’t such a coincidence. He was an artist, too, and the pueblos were small towns. It sort of fit that they’d be related, and Jamie couldn’t be the first person to put Mirabal and Mirabal together.

  Mae asked Shelli, “Any chance you have more of those feather earrings somewhere?” It was hard to believe she’d brought so few to a four-day event. “Some in your van, maybe? I could order them from your web site, but I’d rather get some now.”

  Shelli was slow to answer, watching as Star grabbed a fistful of Jamie’s hair and pulled. While he tried to pry her fingers loose, her other hand seized his goatee. Shelli laughed and commented on her baby’s strength, then said, “I still have some feathers. But I’ll save them for David’s corn dance regalia unless I can get more. If I volunteer at the parrot rescue place in Rio Rancho, maybe I’ll do earrings again.”

  “Parrot rescue?” Mae helped Jamie free himself from the baby attack, tucking her fingers into Star’s fists to give the child something new to grasp. “Like abandoned parrots?” The lost parrots—if they were really lost—could end up there.

  “Sometimes people don’t know how much attention parrots need, and they think it’ll be like having a cat. But a parrot is like a little feathered person. They need you to talk with them and play with them or they get into trouble and act out, or they get neurotic. So people give them up. And sometimes owners die and then there’s this poor bird no one wants.”

  “They must outlive their owners a lot.” Mae sensed Jamie looking at her as she played a finger-tussle game with the baby. Is he seeing me as wife-and-mama? The idea made her uncomfortable. For years that had been the only role in which she saw herself—and now she didn’t. She eased out of Star’s grip. “Orville told me that hyacinth macaws can live to be over a hundred.”

  “They can,” Shelli said. “But not always. Parrots can get sick if you give them the wrong food, or they can even get some respiratory stuff. So, once in a while you lose a bird young. And that’s sad, because you might have had it for twenty years, and you’d be really attached. Most of them live to be old, though. If you got a young one now, an Amazon, or an Eclectus like Jamie picked out for you, the age match would be perfect. They make it to fifty or sixty so you could have him for the rest of your life.”

  “Thanks.” The rest of my life. With Jamie and a parrot. “That’s good to know.”

  Star began to fuss suddenly, waving her fists and kicking. When Jamie rocked her and made soothing sounds, she wailed and thrashed all the more. “What’d I do wrong?”

  “Nothing.” David reached for her. “Let me put her in the shade. I think she’s hot.”

  Jamie surrendered the baby, passing her over David’s delicate pots. S
he calmed quickly in her father’s arms. Mae suspected Star had needed not only shade, but someone familiar. Jamie was new to her.

  How well did he know these people he thought of as friends? David worked with food and Shelli with pets, two of Jamie’s favorite subjects. They probably talked about these topics, or art and music. It was doubtful that he knew them well enough to know their ethics and values. The couple might be kind, good people—or they might not be.

  *****

  Jamie wanted to stay and talk with David and Shelli longer, but Mae struck him as eager to say goodbye and move on, though her only stated goal was to go to the Navajo taco booth for iced tea. After they placed their orders, she said, “Was that strange or what?”

  He sat on the bench and slurped up half his tea while she was still tearing sugar packets into hers. “What? David being a Mirabal?”

  “No—the parrots. Could they really have flown off like that?”

  “Dunno.” A group of children ran past. One was chasing the others with a can of foam string, spraying it on them and laughing. Mae sat close beside Jamie. He squeezed his paper cup. Tea crept up the straw and back down. Shelli couldn’t have stolen the birds—she loved parrots, loved her job with them—but Placido’s departure stunned him. And how could the hyacinth have gotten its four-foot wingspan out that narrow door? It was hard to picture, and yet it had to be what had happened.

  Where could they have gone from the alley behind the shop? It was in a strip mall on San Mateo, with nothing behind it that he could remember but some dumpsters. The birds couldn’t go far without their full flight feathers. He pictured Placido and the hyacinth getting run over by a garbage truck. How could Shelli not have caught them? And how could no one have noticed parrots on the loose in Santa Fe, blue and green against all that brown and adobe? It would be like Mae and Jamie disappearing in Mescalero.

  He sighed. “Someone must have found them and kept them.” A weight descended in Jamie’s heart. He’d been fond of the bird. “Hope they know how to take care of parrots. Be awful if they just caged ’em, didn’t let ’em out to play. Parrots need to have a life.”

  Mae rubbed his back. “I was leaning toward thinking she stole them, though unless she kept at least one of them, it wouldn’t be worth losing her job—”

  “Kept one and hid it while the police searched her place? Come on. You can’t hide a parrot. They’re loud.”

  “I thought of that, too—that she’d get caught. But there’s something weird about the way she told that story. And she didn’t call you when she lost Placido, even though she knew you wanted him.”

  “Could have felt bad. Didn’t want to upset me. Thought they’d get him back. She wouldn’t have stolen him, though.”

  Mae drank her tea in silence for a moment. “I was thinking that if I could get some of the earrings, if they were made with his feathers, I could find him. Like when you lost Gasser. It might be hard to tell exactly where he is, but I might get some idea.”

  Hope rose, then sank. “But she sold out.”

  “I don’t think so. You heard the lady that wanted some. There were a lot, and some of them were kind of expensive. I bet there are more, and Shelli’s saving them so she can sell ’em all for that price. It’d be a smart marketing thing. ‘Oh look, I found some in the van after all. But they’re all the thirty-five dollar ones.’ ”

  “So she’s a thief and a liar?”

  “Sorry. I don’t mean to insult your friends. But they’re really more like just acquaintances.”

  Jamie frowned at her. He’d never thought of anyone he liked as an acquaintance. They were friends, even if he didn’t know everything about them.

  Mae said, “Anyway, if she doesn’t have more earrings here, I can try to get some through her web site. Is Placido a different green than those Amazon parrots?”

  “Yeah. Little...” How could he describe the bird’s color and texture? “Mossier. The feathers on his body are like hair or fur. And he has these red and blue places under his wings, like you’re supposed to see him from underneath when he’s flying.” This was somehow sad, given that he had flown low to whatever his fate was.

  “So, if I see earrings that could be Placido’s feathers, I’ll buy them and look for him.”

  “Nah. I’ll buy ’em.” It was as close as he would get to buying her the actual parrot. “Or why not just tell Shelli what you’re doing? Bet she’d give us feathers for that.”

  “Sometimes people don’t like my being psychic—if they believe it. They think I’ll find out something they want to hide.”

  “What? Like stealing parrots?”

  “Maybe.” She stood. “Come on. Let’s go in and see the powwow.”

  Chapter Eleven

  The emcee announced the Navajo Nation dancers. Mae let Jamie choose their seats, and he hurried her to the top bleacher. “Got to be up high for the eagle dance. The wings look best from here.”

  He was right. The view from above obscured the young dancers’ human forms as the feathered sleeves of their dance regalia floated in birdlike motions. Jamie sat closer to Mae and put his arm around her. The eagle dancers hovered and crouched low to the ground, almost still, their wings softly pulsing. Mae pictured the lost parrots fluttering to the ground, their wings pulsing like the dancers’ wings as they tried to lift off with their trimmed flight feathers. Could they really have gotten so far that Shelli didn’t find them?

  Niall had known Florencia’s macaw. He could probably tell her if they were prone to escaping and how far they could go. Mae called him during a break between dances. She needed to check on how he was coping with the unexpected absence of his nicotine habit, anyway.

  He answered the phone with a deep, hacking cough. Mae waited for it to stop. Jamie, sitting as close to her as a conjoined twin, gave her phone the sort of look he would give a bug. “Is that Niall? Sounds like he’s turning wrong side out.”

  “I heard that,” Niall said. “And I’m not surprised Jamie heard me. Been worse since I got healed.”

  Mae hadn’t expected this. “I’m sorry you feel bad.” She searched her memory for anything she knew about quitting smoking. “It could be normal, though. I’m trying to remember something from my health class. I think your cilia start waving again after you quit. They’ve been paralyzed. Now they’re waking up.”

  “My cilia.”

  “Little hair cells in your bronchioles. They start sweeping stuff out.”

  “It hurts. They must still be half-paralyzed. I can’t cough right.”

  What did that mean? Emphysema? “Have you been to your doctor?”

  “Have I stood on my head? Done handsprings? No, I haven’t been to a doctor. He wouldn’t even be glad to see me anymore if he can’t nag me about smoking.”

  Jamie began to rub Mae’s thigh, watching her face. The gesture, though affectionate, was busy with anxiety. Mae rested her hand on his to make him hold still. “If the coughing doesn’t clear up after a couple of weeks you should get a checkup. Actually, you should get one anyway.”

  “That’s not why you called,” Niall said. “To nag me to see a doctor. Your father does it enough. What did you call about?”

  “Just checking on how you’re feeling. Orville said you were still amazed. Is it bothering you, what I did?”

  “It’s frickin’ weird. But it’s not like I’m mad at you, if that’s what you mean.”

  “There was another thing I wanted to ask, too. About your friend’s hyacinth macaw. Do they fly off? Run away?”

  “I have no idea. Violet had full flight but Florencia took her out on a harness.”

  “What happened to her, then?”

  “She died,” another prolonged coughing spell, “of some lung problem.” Niall stopped, and Mae heard him spit. Yuck. He came back. “Sorry. Feel like I’m going to join her. Violet is buried at Florencia’s house. I’ll have to show you the memorial sometime.”

  “Like, a gravestone?”

  Jamie interjected his amazem
ent that such things as pet gravestones existed, followed by rumination on whether it was morbid or kind of nice. Mae turned her head, trying to focus on Niall.

  “It’s better than that,” Niall said. “You’ll have to see it. Reno did it for her. It’s really something. You seen Reno? Did the Rabbit make it?”

  “Yeah. He’s here.”

  “Florencia’s going downhill fast. I don’t think she’s got much longer. She says she does, but ... well, that’s her. You might let him know. In case—I don’t know—they can make things up.”

  “Does she want to see him?”

  “Daow. He’s on the shit list, along with her family. She won’t say why. Says she doesn’t want to waste her last breaths talking about him.” Niall coughed. “But you might let him know she’s about done. Hospice is for when you’ve got three months or less but I’d be surprised if she lasts three weeks.”

  Mae wasn’t sure she could share this news with Reno. He seemed to be avoiding her. Maybe she could tell Misty or Orville.

  Niall said that her father wanted to talk to her, and Marty took over the call.

  “Hey, baby girl. How’s camping?” She heard him speak aside to Niall, something about starting up the grill outside. A door closed.

  “It’s ... not my favorite thing I’ve ever done.”

  Jamie pulled his straw fedora over his eyes and slouched in a melodramatic caricature of humiliation. It was funny, but Mae was starting to feel like she was on an old-fashioned party line with a third person on the phone.

  “Huh,” Marty said. “I thought you liked it. Guess I misremembered.”

  “No. I never told you. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.

  A long pause. “We still had a good time, didn’t we? Just you and your daddy, fishing, hiking?”

  “Of course we did. I loved all of it except that we stayed in that tent.”

  “Wish I’d known. I would’ve told Jamie. Listen—I sent Niall off because I need to tell you something, so you won’t be too disappointed when you get back. I think he’s started smoking again.”