But she dug in harder.
“Are you trying to tell me something again?” he said. “What about? Lula? Emmanuel? Pierre and the pastry—” Ouch! There she went again. She was telling him something about the pastry thief.
“The dog?”
Ouch. Yes. That was it.
And then she spoke. “Pobrecito perrito.” The voice she spoke in was familiar, because it was Pablo’s own voice, from a few days ago. Birdy’s head was tilted and her dark eyes watchful, as if she wanted him to understand something about the little dog.
“Whatever it is you want me to do, I’ll figure it out,” he said. “I promise.”
They looked out the window. The fronds of the palm trees streamed seaward in the wind. The helicopter was lowering itself, a giant ungainly insect, onto the beach two blocks away. The door popped open and Elmira Toledo, bent low to avoid the blades, her trench coat blowing open in the wild wind, ran across the sand. She was followed closely by her camera crew.
“You ready, Birdy?” he said. He had to keep his voice steady for her sake. He didn’t want her flying away with the sound of him crying in her ears, to stay with her forever. She gripped his arm again with her talons. She was ready.
“Think how great it will be when you’re back in the sky,” he said. His voice did not tremble. He did not cry. He was doing this for her. “The winds of change will hold you up, and you’ll spread your wings, and you’ll fly back out over the ocean. And if you miss me, or Emmanuel, or Lula or Pierre, or Maria, you know what to do.”
Pablo held Birdy with one hand and reached around to the back of his neck with the other. It took a while to unknot the leather cord. It had never been off his neck before. He folded his fingers around the pendant for the last time, then kissed it.
“Hold tight,” he said to Birdy, and she did. “Dios te bendiga.”
Then he wrapped the cord around his bird’s neck and laced it underneath her feathers so it wouldn’t impede her flight. Her talons dug into his arm and he opened the window. He was so used to the breeze blowing in through the screen that the absence of it was startling. The silk-screened fake parrot on the banner flapped wildly from the cable. The palm trees were still bent nearly in half, leaning toward the sea, and no birds darted back and forth across the chasm of the street.
“Here we go,” he said.
He placed her on the windowsill. She lurched forward, immediately caught off guard by the force of the wind. Pablo’s arms shot out and he grabbed her up just in time. His heart hammered in his chest. This wasn’t going to work. She didn’t have enough room to spread her wings and catch the wind, not when she hadn’t flown in so long. Maybe she wouldn’t remember how, and she would just fall straight to the street below.
He thought of the baby birds who hadn’t made it. He couldn’t let that happen to his Birdy. Across the way, the grotesque stared at them, its stone body rigid.
The grotesque’s stone ledge, unlike their narrow windowsill, had enough room for a bird to catch the current. Pablo unhooked the hammock from the wall. Before he could think too much about what he was about to do, he was crawling out through the open window and hooking the hammock to the steel cable. It twitched under his hands, sending that electric feeling prickling through his body.
“All will be well,” he said to Birdy, and then he said it again to himself, kind of like a prayer. All will be well. All will be well.
With Birdy tucked under his arm, Pablo eased himself into the hammock—be brave, he told himself, don’t think about it—and folded the mesh up tight around the two of them. He looked down, but only for a second. It was far too far to the street below. He looked up instead. The moon shone steady despite the rushing wind, and that gave him strength. All will be well, he told himself, all will be well. Birdy settled into his arms, there in the hammock in the sky.
Pablo reached up and gave a tentative tug on the cable. He and Birdy dangled above the dark street, but the hooks held, and the cable held, and across the dark chasm they went. Inch by inch, gradually gaining ground and speed as Pablo saw that his plan was working. All will be well, all will be well—with each chant he hauled them farther across the street, until they reached the banner. He took his pocketknife from his back pocket and sawed at the banner until a slit opened up. The wind took it from there, ripping the banner from its moorings in a matter of seconds. Pablo watched it twist and writhe in the wind, a phantom bird descending to the street below. He hauled the hammock onward.
There was a sudden commotion far, far below on the street. Pablo glanced down and beheld the Committee swarming around Elmira Toledo. She had already made it to their street! Peaches was nipping at her ankles. Sugar Baby kept fluttering up and down, as if she were a tiny avian basketball guard and Elmira the opposing center. Mr. Chuckles kept laughing—HAHAHAHAHA—but there was a dangerous sound to his laughter, and no matter how frantically Elmira Toledo windmilled her arms to shoo the Committee away, they stayed put.
“Quickly now, Birdy,” Pablo whispered in her ear.
There was no time to waste. One tug after another, as smoothly as he could, Pablo hauled the hammock onward as the Committee kept Elmira at bay.
Then they were at the stone ledge. The mud nests of the birds were dark shadows underneath the overhang. Directly above the giant hook that held the steel cable tight across the street, the grotesque’s talons protruded.
“We made it, Birdy. We’re here.”
She knew what to do. She was already crawling out of the hammock, talons hooking themselves into the mesh while she balanced with her wings. She couldn’t make it over the overhang, though, and Pablo reached his arm out.
“Step up,” he said, but the wind whipped his words away. Birdy stepped up anyway, and then, as she balanced there between the grotesque’s ledge and the swaying hammock, she looked down at him. The pendant gleamed, half-hidden in the downy feathers of her chest.
Be brave, he told himself one last time.
“Good-bye, Birdy-bird,” he said. “All will be well. Pablo loves you.”
She swayed on the grotesque’s clawed foot, balanced on the very edge of the ledge, and lifted her wings slightly from her sides. She leaned forward, and he knew she was trying to catch the wind just right, so that it would lift beneath her and sail her out across the buildings, past the bent-double palm trees, out over the ocean.
Beyond the far edge of the town, the sea shone in fractured bits of light. Birdy leaned farther, and farther again, and then she spread her wings wide and let the wind take her.
She winged her way out over the ocean she had floated in on so long ago, and then she was gone.
THIRTY-FIVE
THE LITTLE DOG had fallen back asleep in the alleyway. His head rested on a piece of broken cement. He had spent some time that night trying to tear the burrs and thorns from his fur with his teeth and paws, but his coat was too long and matted and he gave up.
As he slept, the little dog nosed and scrabbled and sighed and panted. Maybe something was chasing him in his dream. Maybe he was trying to hide from someone. Maybe he was hungry, too hungry to sleep well. He had escaped from the awful house, but now he had no home at all.
The strange wind that was blowing with so much force everywhere else in the town did not reach him, there in the narrow alley.
He woke from his restless dreams just in time to see a strange sight. High above him, in the bit of dark sky visible between the tall walls, a bird was soaring in an upward spiral. Up and up and up she flew, a bright small something glimmering in her feathers.
THIRTY-SIX
THAT FIRST MORNING, the first day without Birdy, Pablo walked out the door of his apartment building alone. He had slept very late, and Emmanuel had left a note on the kitchen table.
I’ll be at Pierre’s with the others, mi Pablito. Come down when you wake up.
Pablo’s shoulder felt empty without Birdy balancing on it. He was so used to her warm weight and the grip of her talons. The minute he stepped
outside he wasn’t alone, though. The Committee squawked and gabbled at the sight of him, as if they had been waiting. They all talked at once, fluttering around his ankles.
“Cock-a-doodle-doo! Cock-a-doodle-doo!”
Rhody seemed intent on something, going so far as to peck at Pablo’s toes.
“Hey,” he said. “Stop that.”
“Watch what you’re saying!” squawked Peaches. “Simmer down, simmer down!”
Sugar Baby even flew a little spiral around his head, seeming to surprise herself by doing so, and unfortunately landed on Peaches’s head.
“What day is it?” she said. “What day is it?”
“A hard one, Sugar,” Pablo said.
She cocked her head and looked up at him with her bright eyes. They all did. The Committee drove him crazy sometimes, but right now Pablo felt grateful for their presence. They had been down there on the street last night, after all. They had all watched what happened, all watched as Birdy flew away.
But there seemed to be something else on their minds. They kept fluttering around and then hopping a few feet down the sidewalk, as if there was something they wanted to show him. Peaches took the lead, half marching and half fluttering. The others followed in her wake, not even stopping to linger outside Pierre’s, even though the door was open and Pierre was visible behind the counter.
“Simmer down, simmer down!” Peaches called back, craning her neck to make sure that Pablo was following. Which he was.
She halted at the entrance to the alleyway, and the others did too. They fluttered forward an inch or two, then back an inch or two, gradually moving forward until the entire Committee was clustered at the dark entrance.
“What is it?” said Pablo. “What’s going on?”
They all started talking at once.
“Watch what you’re saying!”
“HAHAHAHAHA!”
“Cock-a-doodle-doo!”
And, underneath the others, the quiet murmur of “What day is it? What day is it?”
Pablo made his way through the feathers and clucks to the entrance of the alleyway. And there he saw the little dog, his head resting on a chunk of broken cement. His fur was so matted and dirty and long that it was hard to tell which end was up. But he was sound asleep, and this was Pablo’s chance. He had made a promise to Birdy, after all. So he took one big step forward and—lightning quick, before the dog could wake up and zoom away—scooped him up in both arms. With the Committee on his heels, he hauled the struggling dog across the street to Maria’s.
“Maria?” he called through the door, and arms clamped around the wiggly, terrified dog, waited as she opened it and let them in. All of them.
“Pablo?” she said. There was a question in her eyes, but he avoided looking at her. He couldn’t talk about Birdy yet.
“The dog,” he said.
“Oh yes,” said Maria. “The dog. Poor little guy.”
The dog calmed down the minute Maria’s hands were on him. She had that effect on animals. Pablo and the Committee watched as she felt through his fur, both hands gentle but firm, looking for wounds or broken bones. Then she flipped up his long ears and peered into them with her otoscope. She pried open his mouth and checked his teeth. Finally she examined his lopsided tail.
“He’s a mess,” she said, “but messes can be cleaned up.”
“How did he break his tail? Can you tell?”
“I have no idea, other than that it happened a long time ago. Beyond that, it’s a mystery.”
She looked at him and smiled. “Which gives you something in common with each other, doesn’t it?”
When Pablo didn’t say anything, Maria reached out and touched his shoulder, the same shoulder that Birdy always rode on, and he knew that she knew.
“You know what would make Birdy happy, Pablo?”
Pablo and Maria looked at each other, and then at the Committee, who were quiet for once, watching and waiting. They all looked at the little dog. He looked back at them. And then, Maria’s arms still holding him steady, his lopsided tail began to wag back and forth.
“HAHAHAHAHA!”
“Cock-a-doodle-doo!”
“What day is it?”
“A good day to give a little dog a home,” said Maria, “that’s what day it is.”
She placed the dog in Pablo’s arms. He bent his head to the dog’s fur and breathed in. He didn’t smell good. At all. But he did smell warm. And dusty. And a tiny bit like . . . elephant ears.
THIRTY-SEVEN
IN THE WEEKS to come, the little dog would learn many things.
He would learn that while dog food and elephant ears and fried plantains and bits of roast meat were good, baked sweet potatoes were even better. And that carrots might be the best of all . . . next to cheese quesadillas, that is, even though Pablo would only give him little pieces of quesadilla because, according to Maria, they weren’t very good for dogs. He would learn that a big soft cushion on the floor next to Pablo’s hammock made a wonderful bed. He would learn that he was a good dancer when Emmanuel would pick him up and swing him around the kitchen to the sounds of the Buena Vista Social Club. He would learn that he was a good worker when, in the debris-strewn week that followed the departure of the winds of change, he would help the citizens of Isla clean up by inspecting all manner of spilled trash, especially spilled food scraps.
He would learn that the world was not only loud voices saying mean things, it was also soft voices saying kind things. To him. Yes, even to him.
Things like, “Are you thirsty, little guy?”
And “Do you need your belly scratched?”
And “Want to go for a walk?”
To all these things the little dog would learn to say YES, which in his case took the form of turning in a fast circle, chasing his lopsided tail until he fell right down on the floor. But even that wouldn’t be so bad, for whoever was on the other end of the question would pick him right up and make sure he was okay.
He would also learn that he had a name. It wasn’t the name he had been born with, if he had ever had one besides WORTHLESS MUTT, that is. His name would be given to him a few days after Emmanuel and Pablo adopted him, when they were giving him a haircut.
At first, Emmanuel would try to trim out the burrs and matted tufts, but there were too many of them. So he would end up cutting off the little dog’s fur, until he was a shivery skinny thing standing on the kitchen floor, tangled piles of fur rising around him.
“Osito,” Emmanuel would say. “That’s what all that fur made you look like, a little bear.”
Within a day everyone on the block would know him as Osito. It was a good name.
When Pablo and Maria walked into Pierre’s the morning after Birdy flew away, in the company of the scruffy little dog but not Birdy, Emmanuel was the first to figure out what Pablo had done.
“Pablo,” he said. “Mi Pablito.”
He stood up and folded Pablo into his arms. The others sat at the table, the chalkboard filled up again with possibilities for hiding Birdy, for keeping her permanently hidden from the likes of Elmira Toledo.
“Where’s Birdy?” said Pierre, not understanding.
Lula stayed silent, looking from Pablo to the back door of the bakery, as if there were a clue there. Maria, wise Maria, looked at Pablo and smiled a sad smile. Then she went to the front door and pushed back the curtain and looked out, up at the sky, as if hoping to see something. But the sky was clear. Pablo put his hand to his T-shirt and felt for the new pendant he was wearing, the pendant he had stayed up the rest of the night to make. It was a new Painted Parrot seashell that he had made with special waterproof paint and strung on a leather cord, a tiny painting of a beautiful bird winging her way across a dark sky, a bird with lavender feathers and dark eyes, a bird trailing a nearly invisible blessing necklace behind her. This seashell painting had no need of a caption.
Lula squinted in surprise. “That’s a brand-new necklace you’re wearing, isn’t it?” she said, and
Pablo nodded. She leaned over to examine it, turning the little seashell this way and that so it caught the light. Then she kissed her finger and wordlessly touched it to the tiny painted bird.
In the days after Birdy’s departure, they comforted themselves by laughing at the funny news footage Elmira Toledo’s camera crew had taken of her battling back the fierce Committee, and how satisfying her disappointment at finding no live specimen of the legendary parrot had been. How Darren Mandible was much shorter in person than on television, and how disappointed he was that the winds of change had lasted less than a day. They tried not to laugh out loud when Mr. Chuckles looked Elmira in her trench coat and Darren in his disco pants up and down, as if they were churchgoers on Sunday morning, and let loose with a “HAHAHAHAHA!” They looked forward to the return of the marine expedition, which had been blown off course by the winds of change, and to filling Oswaldo and the others in on how funny it had been. They liked watching the end of the Special Seafaring Report, which featured the same scientists grouped around the same empty cage and frowning.
“May it stay empty forever,” said Maria, and everyone applauded.
THIRTY-EIGHT
“EMMANUEL,” SAID PABLO a few days after Birdy’s departure, “I want to talk to you about something.”
Emmanuel had made arroz con pollo for dinner, and now he and Pablo stood at the sink washing dishes with the Buena Vista Social Club playing softly in the background. Plate by plate, bowl by bowl, pan by pan, Emmanuel washed and Pablo dried. Nothing was different and everything was different, with no Birdy standing on the counter next to them.
“I’m listening, Pablito,” Emmanuel said, and he took the dish towel from Pablo’s hand and dried the last pan. Pablo took a deep breath. If Birdy were here, she would flutter up to his shoulder and the feel of her talons holding on tight would be a comfort. But she wasn’t here. Be brave, he told himself.
“I’m sad that I won’t ever see my first family,” said Pablo. “Or hear their stories, or know what they look like or sound like, except for, for . . . the sound of my mother’s voice when she let me go. And I hope that doesn’t hurt your feelings.”
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