by Chris White
He walks home. Through the snow. Across a wide valley to a ski lift with skeletal chairs that rise up the mountain, one following the other, and trees covered in frost. He doesn’t want to stop here; he has to get to the heart of it. So he keeps walking, until he can’t see any more lights and there is a darkness many people never see. Only an owl speaks to him here, unburdened with humanity, as Adrian lies back in the powdery snow as if it’s his own bed. That’s what he loves. That the earth is a bed he can lie down on when he needs to, his entire body held. He will go somewhere warm next, he thinks, and then he’s on his front lawn where the crows are a tattered cap on the head of the big oak.
He finds his mom inside, cooking spaghetti with canned mushrooms on the stove, which he likes, and garlic bread, which he loves, and when he goes to his room, he sits Indian style on his actual human bed made in a factory. He has Ellen Rason’s number. There is nothing on his bedside table but his globe, which shows him all the places he can go and will go, so he drags the phone into the hall closet and crawls over the boots and under the clothes to call Ellen, dialing the numbers already etched in his brain, cradling the phone, which rings like a tiny bell.
“Hello?”
Adrian startles awake, his head reeling.
Blinking back to the room, he drags his hand across the bedside table for his cell, furiously scratching his itching calf, wondering what the hell could have bit him this time of year?
On the phone is a voicemail from Zander. “Hi, Dad. Just wondering where you are over here. Did you forget about us, or what? Isn’t the snow great?”
No, not forgotten, Adrian thinks, never for a moment forgotten.
And a new email. Amazing, his phone is so bright and so colorfully lit, when he can hardly raise his head. It’s got a little atomic stamp on the back. The inventiveness of man, it says. Atoms for Peach. No, peace. Atoms for Peace. The screen blinks, “low battery, 5% remaining.” Adrian barely touches it, the email loads—a missive from someone he knows but doesn’t know, someone who watches birds and can’t sleep. As he attempts to focus his eyes to read, dizziness descends, but he reads anyway, this message in a bottle.
4601 (11/21/09): Hey I’m just writing this to you doc so there won’t be a tidal wave. Only you. You won’t believe me but this is what happened. This morning about 11:30 a.m. I saw a Ivorybilled Woodpecker!! You heard me right. I was taking down old nesting boxes for the Red cockededs and after I was done I drove east past the swamp to find a place by the river to eat. There it was. A male. Perched in a narly old cypress and me watching it. I see pileated woodpeckers every day. Thats not what this was. I scared it (didn’t mean to! ) and it took off so I saw it in flight to. It headed into the swamp where I couldn’t go unless I wanted to get real wet. Couldn’t anyway cause I had to work. But its here And its real.
Adrian’s torso sways ever so subtly from the waist like a sapling in a light wind. Stunned, confused, he rereads the message, something about his mother and the bird—but not. He struggles to comprehend the implications of its contents, twinkling at some distant point where he can’t quite reach them, until tiny stars begin to explode around his peripheral vision like Elmer Fudd’s at the bottom of a dry ravine.
Smelling the sickening sizzle of his gray matter, like burning sage, he flings off his blankets and stands, then eases his way directly to the floor.
After a long moment, he pushes himself onto all fours, without quite remembering why, and crawls over cherry planking, the Tibetan rug, the bathroom threshold, and the cold hand-painted ceramic tile, to find . . . what? Vitamins. In the small dark room where the toilet is.
No, he thinks, vitamin . . . water, knees splaying beneath him, mouth hanging open, but there is no vitaminwater in the bathroom.
Just coherent enough to remember he’ll soon be nothing more than a piece of toast, he struggles to stand again, heart pounding anew, finds the thermometer, pushes the speculum into his ear canal, and waits like a defendant for the determination of the jury. In spite of his agitation, he starts to fall asleep again, nodding though he’s standing, dreaming though awake: a griffin—lion’s body, eagle’s head and wings—is the crossing guard, showing him the way, holding fluorescent orange sticks which go beep, beep, beep—
105.4 degrees.
105.4 degrees.
Where is his Vicodin now? Adrian flings open the medicine cabinet: Stella’s homeopathic treatments—chamomilla, arnica, belladonna, pulsatilla, aconite, gelsemium, hypericum; Stella’s herbs—echinacea, goldenseal, mullein oil, skullcap, St. John’s wort, Rescue Remedy—there’s lavender massage oil, vitamin E oil, Pepto-Bismol, Children’s Tylenol, Q-tips, lip balm, moisturizer, tampons . . . How is this possible? Purposelessly sweeping his hand through the bottles, blood pushing into his carotid arteries—911, he thinks, 911, then mistily takes in the orange-and-white label on the bottle of Children’s Liquid Tylenol rocking under the toilet.
He lunges for it, chucks the eyedropper top at the shower door, and drinks, before lurching back through the bedroom—doorway to dresser, dresser to chair, chair to bedpost. The room whirls unpredictably as he reaches the bed, and he retches onto his sheets, while the screen of his iPhone twirls its white flag of surrender on the bedside table, its charger forgotten in Adrian’s bag in the back seat of the Saab.
He can only throw the comforter over the shivering bile, remount, and fall back. His wrists, his palms, under his tee shirt . . . all spotted red. That beautiful auburn-headed midwife has infected him with something, and he searches inside his pockmarked golf ball of a brain for her name, her name, how can he not remember her name? The one with the small apartment by the mall. The one who ran out of gas. The one on the banks of the Rio Gr—
The tick.
An oil slick of understanding glides toward him. It’s something to do with the tick. A little courier from the trenches, leaving a tiny message in his skin. And it’s Deborah. The hospice nurse.
He looks out the window. He wouldn’t make it ten feet in that snow. He squints at the 500,000-watt Colorado sun ascending into the sky, just as the House Finch lights on the feeder Michaela put up last spring.
“Oh, lord . . . ,” Adrian whispers, reverently.
The bird pokes, full of blind hope, into the crevices in the wood in search of a seed, snow dripping through glinting cracks onto her dreary brown back. The common little House Finch. So drab but for her bruise of a head.
Adrian lays his own head in his hand, breath puffing from his nose warming his palm, watching this shivering paper bag–colored bird on stick legs with an armored mouth and wings ribbed like the most fragile fan. She looks right at him through the frosted glass. He’d like to hold out a millet spray for her, but he doesn’t even have a glass of water for himself, let alone food for birds. There’s nothing in the feeder, of course, this little convenience store that had been constructed in a moment of expansion, then abandoned, just when she needed it most.
Chapter Eleven
* * *
Rocky Mountain spotted fever is rare, even rarer in November, even in Texas. Though men contract the disease more frequently than women, the vast majority of cases are children, most of them under nine years of age. Also, not every type of tick carries the Rickettsia rickettsii bacteria, not all the Rocky Mountain wood ticks and American dog ticks that can carry it do, and only a small percentage of the ticks that actually are carrying it at any given time are pathogenic. Nevertheless, Adrian had contracted it.
“I could have died,” he kept saying, which is true. In fact, if Gertrude and the kids hadn’t found him lying, unconscious, in his bed, had he not been given massive doses of doxycycline, rehydrated, and hospitalized within five days of the onset of symptoms, his chance of dying would have tripled. As would the likelihood of coma or neurological damage or blindness or deafness. Adrian was lucky. Lucky to be alive.
He lay in bed at the hospital for days as the initial battle was waged in his body—sleeping, losing weight, sipping Gatorade, and thin
king of all that had happened to him. In the midst of recovering from the fever itself, he suffered from withdrawal—sweating, sound and light sensitivity, diarrhea, anxiety.
• • •
They actually gave him Vicodin for the body aches and headache caused by the fever, but it was only 5 mg / 300 mg three times a day, just enough to tease him but nowhere near enough to get him where he needed to go.
During the first forty-eight hours, he succumbed to superstitious panic: he was being punished (for adultery, for drug abuse, for lying)—that’s why he was in this pain and everything had spiraled out of control. Soon after, he decided against the idea, once he got some of his wits about him again. Life isn’t that simple, he knows, or that elegant. (Science is elegant, yes. Nature is elegant.) But he doesn’t believe in God or the devil, and the concept of karma is complicated and incomprehensible, so he finally let all that go.
One night after the nurse had made her final rounds, though, when there was nothing but a series of lights blinking out his own heartbeat in the darkness, he thought, what about curses? Was he cursed? Well, he doesn’t believe in curses, either, of course he doesn’t. Believing in curses, personal curses, is like believing in Santa Claus—an external, intelligent force singles you out and delivers something to your home, tailor-made for you. Life doesn’t discriminate like that. But neither does life behave the way it had lately—following him like a rabid dog into every shadowy corner—as far as he knows. Maybe it would be just as foolhardy to believe there is nothing to be gleaned from all this. You can’t lose your mother, the well-being of your marriage, and fall deathly ill all in a month’s time, without taking stock, without acknowledging that something is going on. Not paying attention to a streak like that is what lands you at the bottom of a well, clawing at the walls, screaming the famous last words, “I didn’t know!”
He hadn’t been attentive, that’s what it was. He had been arrogant. He hadn’t listened hard enough, watched closely enough, heeded enough of the signs. There are temptations in this world, and there are signposts. This, he does believe. The trick is to distinguish between the two. He hadn’t been careful about that. He had been lost and forgotten to study the map. As the crisp sunny days yawned before him (he couldn’t get outside, so was judiciously forced to turn inward), he asked himself, as honestly as he could, in spite of the withdrawal symptoms and the weakness: What should he do now? The answer had to be both intuitive and proactive.
He would stay off the pills. He would be a better father. And he would be like a yogi, listening for the perfect hum of the universe, attentive to the signs.
• • •
On the fourth day of his hospital stay, when he’s moments from being released, Stella comes and sits at his bedside. She’s home from Greeley. Adrian had already called Jeff to pick him up, but perhaps, unbeknownst to him, a happier arrangement had been made on his behalf.
Stella’s hair seems different—sparklier and fuller—but she doesn’t take off her coat, and her eyes are rimmed in red. This is what Adrian notices, but he can’t know at first glance whether it’s the result of grief or anger or regret or sentiment or gratitude—the swelling of her lids, the matting of her lashes, her chafed nostrils, the blotchy discoloration on the smooth grade above her upper lip. It’s possible she’s been crying from concern about his well-being, from coming so close to losing him, from the humbling force of some kind of epiphany, the kind that he thinks maybe he’s had himself. But it could be something else.
“Are you better?” she asks.
“Stell,” he smiles. “A lot better than I was, yeah. I guess I could have died. It’s . . . unbelievable.”
She nods.
“For now, I just want to thank you for coming. And for your text,” he says softly. “It means a lot to me. I know we still have a lot to talk about. We just have to wait for Ricci to sign something, then we can get out of here.”
Stella stands up and closes the door, then comes back to sit down. Maybe she doesn’t want to wait.
“I asked the kids about the breakage,” she says.
“What breakage?”
“The breakage you didn’t clean up. From your episode.”
“Oh.” Not a good sign. “No, that was . . . I don’t know what they told you . . .” She just keeps looking at him, so he keeps going, faster now. “Look, I’m sorry. I should never have lost my temper like that. You know how much I—”
“You’ve been through a lot, between your mom and this . . . sickness. But I don’t want you to come home, Adrian. Obviously, you’re too stressed to be with the kids right now. You won’t have any trouble finding an apartment, and I get that you still need bed rest, but you can afford to hire someone to help out.”
“Stella. Stella, hold on. Can I just say something? You’re right. I was incredibly stressed. And beside myself. I know what I did was . . . unforgivable. I know what that means to you, to both of us—”
She looks down at her thighs. “I think I might want a divorce.”
He shakes his head. “You don’t mean that.”
She raises her eyebrows as if he’s thrown a cloth napkin into a plate full of gravy.
“I’m sorry,” he says, quickly, knowing he’s said the wrong thing, that already, he’s not really listening.
She chuckles ruefully. “I don’t care what you think. I just want you out before the kids get home from school. I don’t want them going through the drama of you tramping through the house with suitcases. I spoke to Jeff. He says you can stay with him until you figure out something else.”
• • •
Okay, these were the signs so far. By the time Adrian arrives at Jeff’s condo with his things, Jeff has set up a little nest for him in his guest room that doubles as an office. The bedside lamp has been left on (though it isn’t dark yet), a tan wool blanket lies folded on the foot of a tidy daybed, an eight-pack of vitaminwater, called Revive, nestles on ice in an open cooler so Adrian won’t have to get up.
It’s a kind gesture, and it isn’t a terrible place to recover, just odd. In front of the room’s one window, a kitchen table has been set up as a desk, and there is an old leather armchair with only one arm onto which Jeff tends to throw things he doesn’t know what else to do with, including a bowl of poker chips, a tiny watering can, unopened boxes of ant traps, the third season of The Sopranos, and homemade CDs with titles like “R&B from Mom!” and “Happy Car Songs.” The rest of the room is nearly overwhelmed with stacks of books, and though the initial appearance of these books is impressive, upon closer inspection it becomes evident that each of them is written for “Dummies” or “Idiots.”
Adrian climbs wearily, dizzily, into the little bed to find Bird Watching for Dummies tucked under his pillow, which he slides soberly under the bed, thinking about what Zander and Michaela might have told Stella. He had been deathly ill and had obviously been unprepared for her to come home. It was like being caught with his pants around his ankles, or zigzagging naked and ignorant across the mall with a pumpkin on his head. If he’d had his wits about him, if he hadn’t been dying of infection, the bathroom wouldn’t have looked like a cyclone hit it, and he would have cleaned the mess from the broken frames in the living room. But the fact is he had lost his temper and thrown something in the presence of his children. He had behaved like a bully. He’d frightened them both. And whatever Stella might think, he would be the last one to forgive himself for that.
Now he’s stuck in this room for idiots. Okay.
He plugs in his phone, which had died and lay unnoticed when he was taken to the hospital. He waits for the fat battery icon to go from red to green. Once it does, he finds among his missed calls six from Zander, one from Stella (yesterday), two calls from Jeff, five from the hospital, a call from Deborah, texts from Zander, Deborah, and Jeff, and three from the Rare Bird Alert site (all birds he’s already seen).
He plugs in his laptop—that revelatory music swelling, always unanticipated, from the hidden speakers�
��and checks his email: a half dozen from Boulder Community Health Administrative Desk, something from the American Society of Anesthesiologists, a couple from the American Birding Association, one from some site selling pirated Levitra with the subject line “The big DICK she always wanted,” another selling Ambien—and a private message from a Backyard Birder chat-room member.
The man beside the water. Adrian is pleased and intrigued, but it looks like it’s already been opened.
4601 (11/23/09): Hey, I’m just writing this to you doc so there won’t be a tidal wave. Only you. You won’t believe me but this is what happened. This morning about 11:30 a.m. I saw a Ivorybilled Woodpecker!! You heard me right . . .
Adrian had thought it was a dream—the woodpecker that invaded his painkiller-induced euphoria in the hospital bed when he was laced up with IVs and monitors. He thought it was some festering from the wound of his mother’s death, a memory sketched into shaky relief by grief and narcotics, echoing from the cypress swamp in South Carolina where he had paddled a little closer to the bird. Yet here it is, now, the words on the screen bold as a Rorschach.
For one moment—unsteady as he is—Adrian allows himself a furtive glance down that path, the path away from regret, self-recrimination, and loss and toward some red, black, and white pinnacle looming large in the branches of a pine. But this bird that requires acre upon acre of vast virgin forest in order to survive, this Ghost Bird, is the most implausible, the most hotly disputed, the most elusive creature of all. The man beside the water might as well have reported spotting a yeti.
The facts (and facts are essential) are these. Campephilus principalis used to range all across the southeastern US and up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. By the 1930s, with most of the hardwoods in the US already destroyed, there were only about twenty ivorybills left, mostly in a rare old-growth forest called the Singer Tract in Louisiana, which the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company decided to shear off at the ankles. Preservationists offered them serious cash to leave the birds alone, but they clear-cut it anyway. A couple of years later, one last female was sighted, alone in the forest, surrounded by wreckage. By 1944 she was gone too.
