The Gravity of Birds: A Novel

by Tracy Guzeman

  * * *

  Sleep was also impossible. He tossed and turned for most of the night, finally giving in and getting up before sunrise. He needed to talk to Thomas alone before things went any further. He may have given his word, but he hadn’t signed up to be part of a traveling sideshow. At some point in the wee hours of the morning, he decided he wasn’t going anywhere with Stephen until he found out exactly what Thomas knew, and what he really wanted.

  I married a wise man. Claire’s voice was all the sun he needed.

  “Sarcasm is wasted on those who haven’t had a decent night’s sleep, my darling. Be honest. You’re wondering why I didn’t show this much backbone years ago.”

  I’m wondering what he’s up to, Denny. Same as you.

  He waited until after breakfast before calling Mrs. Blankenship to let her know he’d be stopping by to see Thomas. The phone rang as he reached to dial her number.

  “You need to come quickly.” Mrs. Blankenship sounded as if she’d been running.

  “I was just about to call you. I’m coming over to see Thomas this morning.”

  “We’re at the hospital, Professor. Mr. Bayber’s had a stroke.”

  * * *

  He hadn’t been in a hospital for almost a year. It was more grim than he remembered. All the artificial brightness, meant to be reassuring—here is order and cleanliness; surgical cure and pharmaceutical consolation; schedules kept and procedures perfected—was revealed to be otherwise by the moans issued from passing beds, by the brisk, flat-footed walk of orderlies in sneakers pushing those beds, by the janitors’ high gray laundry carts and the smells of sickness and blood embedded in the linens.

  Mrs. Blankenship, so capable and exacting in Thomas’s apartment, had been transformed into a weepy mass of wrinkled clothing stuffed into a plastic chair in the waiting room.

  “He was on the floor when I came in this morning,” she said, dabbing at her pink face with the handkerchief Finch provided. “I called for an ambulance right away, but it took them so long to get there. I kept telling him they were on their way. I don’t know whether he heard me.”

  “I’m sure he did.” Finch looked for a doctor, but seeing no one, patted Mrs. Blankenship on the shoulder, then ventured over to the nurses’ desk, where he found himself ignored by three different women. When repeated throat clearing proved ineffective, he picked up one of the pens with a large artificial flower attached to the end of it and in a fit of pique, stuck it behind his ear. “Bayber,” he said. “Thomas Bayber. I need to know what room he’s in.”

  The nurse nearest him gave him a withering glance and held out her hand. He returned the pen. “Fourth floor. Turn left,” she said. “Down to the first station on your right. They’ll be taking him there from emergency. You can talk to his doctor once they get him settled.”

  “And how long will that be?” he asked, but she’d already turned away. Finch collected Mrs. Blankenship, and the two of them followed the signs for the elevator, crowding on with the other sleep-deprived, wan-faced visitors, then expelled along with the masses onto a sterile floor that looked the same to him as the last.

  It was two hours before Finch could talk with the doctor. A serious stroke; it was too soon to tell how much speech or movement Bayber might eventually recover. He was resting comfortably. They’d monitor him continuously; there was nothing more anyone could do for the time being. Finch called Cranston with an update and told Mrs. Blankenship to go home and rest.

  “Don’t come back until tomorrow,” he ordered. “When they let you see him, I need you to tell him that Jameson and I are driving to the cabin, and to the Kesslers’ old house after that. Tell him even if he’s sleeping, Mrs. Blankenship. And tell him more than once. It’s important.”

  * * *

  The shocks on the Sentra that Finch had rented were shot. The car bounced along the freeway, and Stephen bounced along with it, his head coming perilously close to the ceiling with each bump. Finch drove too fast and gestured as he talked, causing Stephen to press himself against the seat back and stare pointedly at the speedometer. An intermittent rain drummed on the roof, drowning out the classical music station that appeared and disappeared as they passed between a series of hills. Humid air from the vents targeted Stephen’s neck. It was like being trapped in a mobile version of his office at Murchison & Dunne.

  Finch raised his chin and sniffed the air. “Bananas really aren’t appropriate for a road trip. The fast food I can understand, but unless it’s an apple, or a prune, fruit isn’t the best choice.” He was secretly glad to be out of his daughter’s clutches, free to enjoy a meal of fat, sodium, and limp vegetable bits with suspect nutritional value without someone chiding him about the dangers of cholesterol and high blood pressure. “I should have gotten a bigger trash bag. How can someone as meticulous as you appear to be about certain things travel like this?”

  “I’m an anomaly.”

  “We’ll have to get off at the next exit and find someplace to dump it.” Finch gestured toward the backseat, which had become the final resting place for Stephen’s fast-food containers, banana peels, empty water bottles, used tissues, and lozenge wrappers.

  “Fine.” Stephen sulked. The entire situation was ridiculous. Forced to put his life in Finch’s hands for the six hours it would take to drive to the cabin, all because Finch harbored some unreasonable fear of flying. And now he was being scolded about his behavior?

  “Why didn’t we take your car?”

  Finch pursed his lips. “Leaky manifold gasket.”

  “We could have been there by now, you know.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “Was it turbulence? Smoke in the cabin? That would be understandable, I suppose.”

  Finch glared at him before turning his eyes back to the road. “Getting one’s driver’s license is a simple enough thing. You might enjoy the freedom of the road.”

  “And you might enjoy the freedom of the skies. I mean, how do you ever go anywhere?”

  “We’re going somewhere now.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “You don’t drive because in the city you feel no need for a car. That’s the gist of it?”

  “Yes. And the car sickness.”

  Finch looked at him uneasily and adjusted the vents, sending more air rushing in Stephen’s direction. “Well, I live in the city and I do feel the need to have a car. A means to get out when the walls start closing in. The older I get, the less I enjoy the presence of other people. Besides, car sickness is usually alleviated when you are the one doing the driving.”

  “That doesn’t explain not wanting to fly. I know for a fact you’ve been abroad, and I doubt you swam. Bayber has a piece in the permanent collection at Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, in the Guggenheim collection. You wrote about it at length in the catalogue. And you served on the jury at the Biennale at the Chianciano Museum of Art.” Stephen left his stomach as well as his momentary feeling of satisfaction behind when the professor accelerated into a turn.

  Finch was quiet for a moment before answering. “This is a recent development. My wife died. I haven’t been in an airport since.”

  Stephen stared at the matted floor carpets, then out the rain-streaked window, then back at the floor carpets again. Now he’d done it. Really put his foot in it.

  “I didn’t know.” He watched as Finch focused on the odometer before methodically performing his check of the mirrors.

  “I wouldn’t have expected you to.”

  “How long . . .”

  “Nearly a year. I’ve only had one Thanksgiving, one Christmas, one Valentine’s Day without her. I could almost pretend she was on vacation.” He gave Stephen a wry smile. “Before too much longer I’ll forget her minute imperfections. That’s what you end up missing the most, those little faults. They burrow under your skin. Become endearing in retrospect.”

  “Was there a crash? That would explain your hesitation, though flying is the safest form of transportation. Yo
ur chance of being in an airplane crash is one in eleven million and . . .”

  “Jameson.”

  “Some people find knowing the odds of a certain thing happening to be comforting.”

  “She wasn’t on a plane. Didn’t even have a ticket in her hand. She was at the airport waiting to meet her sister’s flight and had a heart attack.”

  The rain was coming down harder, and Finch turned the wipers on, smearing the windshield. He could have picked up his sister-in-law that day. What had been so pressing he couldn’t leave it for the two hours the round trip required? No doubt it had fallen into the generic category of work, an excuse Claire knew was futile to rail against. If only he’d gone instead, she might have sat down on the bed and rested for a few minutes. Just a quick nap, then she’d have felt better.

  “Should we pull over? You probably shouldn’t drive when you’re upset.”

  Finch shook his head. “I make a concerted effort to avoid the details—what moment, gone a different way, might have resulted in a different outcome. Why they hadn’t been able to revive her at the airport.” He turned the wipers up a notch. “As luck would have it, there isn’t always a doctor around when you need one.”

  “What’s that got to do with flying?”

  “It’s the airport, not the flight. The endless drone of announcements, the warning beeps of carts backing up. People who look like they’re traveling in their pajamas. The guards and security agents and policemen. All those trained professionals with their technical expertise, and they could only look at her on the floor and ask people to move along.” His thumb pressed against the vinyl covering on the steering wheel until the nail went bloodless. “And I think about the shoes.”

  “Of course.”

  Finch stopped watching the road and looked at him, surprised.

  “You understand that?”

  “Well, yes.” Stephen gestured toward the windshield. “Shouldn’t you be concentrating?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Hundreds of people in the airport, hour after hour. So many people crossing that same spot. It would be dirty. Filthy, probably. I don’t blame you for not wanting to think of her there.”

  Finch eased up on the accelerator. “Yes. I absolutely cannot stomach that part.”

  “You probably have to cook for yourself, then, don’t you?”

  Finch stared at him, aghast, but then broke out in laughter that must have started from somewhere deep in his chest. “I suppose you mean do I miss her? Yes. I miss her every second.”

  “I can’t imagine,” Stephen said.

  “I would think you could.” Finch responded to the cascade of brake lights in front of them and slowed to maneuver around a mattress in the middle of the road. “When your father died, you were in Europe, weren’t you?”

  Stephen squirmed. A familiar hint of bile rose in his stomach, and he smelled the banana skins in the backseat, no longer pleasantly tropical. The car steamed like a fetid jungle, the defrost faltering; warm, moist air fogged the bottoms of the windows like the breath of a ghost. “I was in Rome. I wanted to see Caravaggio’s Saint Matthew cycle, so I was on my way to the Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi.”

  “Well?”

  “I saw it.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “A wife and a father—it’s not the same thing.”

  “It might be.”

  Stephen stared at the floor, nubby strands of carpet embedded with crumbs and mud. Heavy rain pelted the roof. “There’s an exit in another twenty miles. We can dump the trash there. I need more lozenges, anyway.”

  “You certainly have the right to tell me you don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Finch quickly glanced in the rearview mirror, then pressed down on the gas firmly, causing the back of the car to fishtail and Stephen to throw both hands against the dashboard. Finch looked at Stephen and smiled. “Fine with me.”

  Stephen felt the blood leave his face. “You’re going to get us killed.”

  “Possibly. As you pointed out, the odds would favor us meeting our demise in a car as opposed to on a plane. But you’re welcome to try your hand at the wheel anytime.”

  “It would serve you right if I did. I can’t imagine my driving could be much worse.”

  “That’s debatable.”

  Stephen pressed his face against the cold glass of the side window and shut his eyes. His stomach was somersaulting; a film of sweat formed above his upper lip. Traffic up ahead had slowed to a crawl and the hours of travel left stretched endlessly before him. Another flip of his gut and he contemplated leaving Finch at a rest stop and hiking the rest of the way.

  He stared into the car in the lane next to them. A child with a sticky-looking mouth galloped a stuffed horse across the landscape of the side window. Stephen thought of the cave paintings at Lascaux, the Chinese horses and the Confronted Ibexes, more than seventeen thousand years old, so breathtaking in their simplicity. As adviser to the Scientific Committee in 2003, he’d donned the required biohazard suit, the booties and face mask, and made his way into the Axial Gallery, where his breathing went ragged and he cried at the persistent bloom of white mold dusting the backs of the horses. Like they’d run through a snowstorm. His father would have understood his reaction. He imagined the two of them standing in the quiet dim of the caves, in the cool, restive damp, studying the gently furred lines of manganese dioxide and ocher, of charcoal and iron oxide.

  “I was a disappointment to him,” he said, turning to Finch.

  Finch accelerated gently, for once keeping his eyes on the road. “Your father was tremendously proud of your abilities.”

  “My father wished I was someone else. My mother, too. Someone more ordinary. Isn’t that an odd thing for a parent to wish for a child? That he would be less than what he is?”

  “Wishing that your child might have done something differently isn’t the same as wishing that he was different.” Finch stepped on the brake again, and Stephen swallowed several times in short succession.

  Finch grabbed Stephen’s left hand and poked it hard. “There’s a pressure point called the Joining of the Valleys on the web between your thumb and index finger. Squeeze your thumb against the base of your index finger. Look for the highest point of the bulge of the muscle, level with the end of the crease. Press down hard on it with the index finger of your other hand.”

  “What’s that supposed to do?”

  “For one thing, keep you from throwing up in the car.”

  Stephen pressed his left index finger firmly against the spot where he imagined the Joining of the Valleys might be on his right hand. He began counting backward from sixteen thousand and two hundred, the number of seconds he estimated he had left to be in the car. Even for a Bayber no one’s seen, he thought, this is a lot to ask of a person. Hot air blasted against his cheek as he dozed off, and he dreamt, first of Chloe, the moist warmth of her breath as she whispered in his ear, then of Natalie Kessler as she was in the painting, her tanned arm reaching out from behind the love seat and beckoning him to join her.

  SIX

  October 1971

  Alice drove to the cabin alone. She didn’t tell Natalie she was taking a few days off, fearing it would resurrect their ongoing argument about the cost of her education. Natalie would have insisted that if Alice wanted time away from graduate school so soon after starting, she would be better off at home, where her room and board would not chip away at their meager resources. And home, or what was left of it, was the last place Alice wanted to be.

  Everything she was driving away from—school, the remnants of family, a persistent grief, and the growing shadow of her diminishment—blurred outside the windows of the car. The hum of the tires was hypnotic, pushing her toward sleep. She was driving into the sun, and warmth radiated around her; off the vinyl of the dashboard, from the wheel under her hands, through the glass. Only a thin wedge of cooler air pushed into th
e car from the driver’s vent window, which had never closed all the way.

  Somnolence. Was this what had overtaken her parents nearly two years ago? Had they felt so safe, so warm in the car with the dark night enveloping them, that they’d simply drifted off? No. She’d imagined their actions that night a thousand times, and with such clarity, that she refused to turn the radio on now, despite the fact it would keep her awake. Just putting her fingers on the knob was enough to make her flinch. Her father would have been singing along to the radio, his eager, off-key notes causing her mother to curl up in her seat with her hands over her ears, laughing. He would have turned to look at her the way he did when he thought no one else was watching, and whispered a single word, a secret language between them that had nothing to do with their daughters. Had he taken one hand from the wheel to reach out to her, to bring the back of her gloved hand to his mouth?

  The officer who had come to the door that November night, pale as chalk and not much older than she was, stood with his chin to his chest, as though the weight of his news made it impossible for him to raise his head. She’d kept him standing on the doorstep in the blowing snow, under the shrouded porch light, afraid that asking him in would make whatever he’d come to tell them true. But it was true anyway, and when she’d asked him again what had happened, he would only repeat we just don’t know.

  The silence in the car became deafening. Alice talked to herself, reciting her own version of the alphabet: the common names of birds, starting with the alder flycatcher and ending with the yellowhammer. Once she finished she started over again, this time using their scientific names, Accipiter gentilis—northern goshawk, to Zonotrichia leucophrys—white-crowned sparrow.