The Book of Dead Birds

by Gayle Brandeis

  “San Diego?” Now Frieda looks even more confused.

  “Just for the day. My mom wants to show her her egg carvings. Jeniece sounded pretty interested, and…” I can’t bring myself to mention the pelican.

  “I’m not sure,” says Frieda. “I’d need to talk to Ray about it. And Jeniece, of course, to see if she’d even want to go.”

  “Sure,” I say. “I know this is kind of weird, Frieda. We’d take good care of her, I promise.”

  “I don’t doubt that, Ava. It’s just that she’s never been that far away from home. Other than a couple of hospitals, but one of us was always with her.”

  “She’s never been to San Diego?”

  “It’s not like she hasn’t ever been away from the Salton Sea or anything,” she says quickly. “We’ve taken her to the Date Festival in Indio and stuff like that. It’s just kind of hard to get out…”

  “My mom never took me out much, either…”

  “Anyway, I’ll talk to them and let you know. I’m not promising anything but I’m not saying no.”

  “Thanks, Frieda. I better go…” I start to back away.

  “Aren’t you going to stay for breakfast?”

  “I can’t today,” I tell her. “My mom is already cooking something. I’ll be back soon, though, I promise. I know it’s part of our deal, me eating here.”

  “Don’t worry about that, Ava. I just like to see you around.”

  I feel myself start to tear up. “Well, we want to get a pretty early start tomorrow.” I try to wipe my eyes discreetly. “If you could call me before it gets too late tonight, I’d appreciate it.”

  “I’ll do that,” she says. “You take care of yourself, Ava.”

  I nod and rush outside before I start bawling.

  We plan our departure. My mother packs her things in case she decides to stay in San Diego. We hydrate the pelican. We get Yukam’s cage ready. We stay up fairly late, but Frieda never calls. I can’t tell whether I am sad or relieved.

  In the morning, just as I start to load up the car, Frieda pulls up and rolls down the window.

  “She wants to go,” she says. Jeniece cowers in the backseat.

  “I never said I wanted to go.” She crosses her hands over her chest.

  “Come on. It will be good for you,” Frieda tells her. “A change of scenery and everything.”

  Jeniece scowls as she undoes her seat belt. “You just want to go to the movies with Ray or something.”

  “Well, we don’t have a lot of time just the two of us…”

  “So you’re just going to pawn me off?”

  “Jeniece, this is a great opportunity for you. You’ll get to see more of the world!”

  Jeniece rolls her eyes and sighs. I think I’ve seen her eyes rolling more often than I’ve seen them any other way.

  “We’ll have a great time!” I say, my voice a little too bright-sounding. “You’ll get to see the ocean…”

  “We have the sea right here.” She opens her car door, sticks the canes out first.

  “And my mom wants to show you her eggs.”

  Above us, my mother opens the door of the trailer. I can see the pelican scuffling around behind her. I make a motion for her to close the door. Frieda looks up after the door is shut.

  Jeniece sighs again as she heaves herself out of the car, the cuffs of the canes around her forearms.

  “We’ll have an adventure!” I imagine this sounds like something a person should say to a child, but I don’t really know. I’ve never really spent time with kids before. Even when I was a girl, I rarely spent time with other kids aside from school and tae kwon do class, and even then I pretty much kept to myself.

  “I didn’t ask to go, you know,” she says.

  “This wasn’t an easy decision for me, either, honey,” Frieda tells her. “But Ava here was so generous, and—”

  “Forget it,” says Jeniece. “It’s fine. I’m glad I don’t have to look at you today, anyway.”

  Frieda turns to me. “Is this a way a daughter talks to her mother?”

  I’m not the right person to ask, that’s for sure.

  “It’s fine, Mom.” Jeniece’s voice softens a bit. “I’ll be fine.”

  “If she gives you a hard time, you give one right back to her,” Frieda tells me.

  “We’ll be great,” I say, even though I have no idea what I’m getting myself into.

  “I love you, sweetie.” Frieda kisses the top of Jeniece’s head. “You be good now.”

  She opens her car door. “Thanks again, Ava,” she yells out the window before she pulls away, spraying salt and gravel in her wake.

  “She couldn’t wait to get rid of me,” says Jeniece.

  “I’m sure that’s not true,” I say, but what do I know?

  The door to the trailer opens. “I come out now?” my mother asks.

  “I’ll be right up,” I tell her.

  Jeniece waves at my mother; she smiles and waves back. Then the pelican tries to get outside and my mother quickly closes the door.

  “What was that?” Jeniece asks.

  “It’s a pelican,” I say.

  “I thought so!” she says. “Why do you have a pelican in your house?”

  “We’ve been taking care of it. It was pretty sick, but now we’re going to release it.”

  “Today?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “With me?”

  “I didn’t tell your mom because what we’re doing is kind of illegal.”

  “Cool!”

  “So why don’t you wait in the shade under the trailer?” I say. “I’ll go get the pelican and we’ll hit the road.”

  “Awesome!” She shuffles off beneath the landing.

  The pelican is in a pillowcase, but it’s still hard to get it out the door. It will be too much of a handful to try to carry down the ladder, so I put it on the metal lift. It maniacally scrabbles around the metal square.

  “It scared!” my mother yells. She steps onto the lift, sits down, and tries to hold it in her arms. The pelican gets more frantic. The lift sways dramatically. I push the button, and the metal pan falls, way too fast, to the ground. It lands with a crash just inches away from Jeniece.

  “Cool!” Jeniece yells again.

  “Are you okay?” I call down to my mother.

  “I fine!” She grabs hold of the sack of bird before it runs away.

  We wrestle the bird into the backseat floor well of the car. My mother wants to sit back there with it, but Jeniece says she can’t sit in the front seat if there’s an air bag. Before we even make it to the highway, the pelican starts attacking Jeniece’s canes with its beak, making a great clanking sound that I surreptitiously record before Jeniece completely freaks out. I pull over to the side of the road; we move the bird to the floor of the passenger seat in front, and my mother moves to the backseat. The bird thrashes its head around occasionally, nicking my legs with the tip of its beak, getting in the way of the stick shift every now and then, but the drive is otherwise fairly uneventful. My mother and Jeniece talk intently in the backseat, their heads bent toward each other; I try to hear what they’re saying, but I only catch little snippets—“egg,” “mother,” “bird.” A song rises up in me like hysteria. I can’t help but sing it out loud:

  “Sing Lo, sweet chariot, comin’ for to carry you home.” I point to the pelican. Before I know it, my mother and Jeniece are joining in, singing to the bird, filling the car with music. The pelican looks confused—it slams its head against the door a couple of times, but then it settles in. I almost think I can hear it hum along.

  It feels funny to pull into the Casa Cove parking lot as a driver; I’ve only been a passenger here before. A passenger leaving with a squirming bag full of lobsters, not a driver arriving with a squirming bag of pelican.

  “Omma, do you still come here to skin-dive?” I ask her.

  “I go sometime,” she says. “Not so easy anymore. Not so easy hold my breath under water.”r />
  “Do you like to swim?” I ask Jeniece.

  “I don’t know how,” she says. She looks at the ocean, awestruck. I had forgotten that she’s never seen it before. I open the door and the ocean air floods the car. It smells amazing—the scent is big, open somehow, not claustrophobic like the smell at the sea, with its death stench and algae tides.

  “Will you be okay going down the hill?” I ask. I had forgotten that the parking lot overlooked the beach, that there is quite a big trek both ways.

  “I think so…”

  My mother gets out and opens the door for the pelican. I open the door for Jeniece. The pelican starts to bound down the sandy hill, but with its wings straitjacketed, it keeps losing its balance and tumbling for yards at a time. My mother runs after it. I keep an eye on them as I help Jeniece sidestep down the hill, her canes slipping every once in a while, unable to find purchase. Eventually we all make it down to the bottom. I’m grateful the beach isn’t too crowded—I’m sure the four of us make quite a sight. People begin to gather round.

  “Why you got that pelican all trussed up?” a teenage boy asks. “Are you gonna cook it or something?”

  “You should set the poor creature free!” a woman says, distraught.

  “We are,” I try to assure her. “We’re from the Salton Sea. We just rehabilitated this pelican and now we’re going to release it.” I know we don’t look very official, but that seems to appease her.

  My mother bends down by the pelican. She gets the pillowcase partway up its body, but it thrashes around and shakes the cloth back down. I give it a try, but the pelican won’t even let me get close. Finally, Jeniece lowers herself to the ground and lays her canes a few feet away. The pelican is distracted by them; my mother eases the pillowcase over its head as it tries to eat one of the metal cuffs. The pelican stretches its neck, spreads its wings. We all scooch back. It opens the feathers at the end of each wing tip like fingers. My heart starts to pound in my ears. I look over at my mother; her hand is at her throat.

  The pelican starts to run. The small crowd cheers it on. The pelican runs and runs, wings open, until it gets to the water. Then it stops. It waits a little bit, then takes a tentative hop into the waves. It stays there, bobbing like a buoy near the shore, for the longest time. I want to urge it to keep going, to fly away, but it doesn’t seem to know what to do. The teenage boy runs out into the water and chases it further out into the surf. It keeps bobbing there, bobbing, bobbing, bobbing. We sit on the sand and watch it for a good portion of the afternoon. I almost want to swim out there and bring it back with us, take it back to the Salton Sea, but I know how crazy that would be. We finally shout our good-byes. Only as we’re making our way back up the hill, Jeniece panting with the exertion of it, does the pelican lift off and head for the setting sun.

  The car is incredibly quiet as we drive back to the apartment. It’s as if a great weight has been lifted; I thought I would feel relieved, and I do, but I’m surprised by how empty I feel, too. I’m sure my mother feels the same way. The exhilaration has yawned open into something else, something big and wordless and more than a little sad. Jeniece fidgets around uncomfortably in the backseat. I’m sure she’s eager to see my mother’s eggs, to get our attention focused back into something small, something with definite edges.

  As we pull up to the complex, I can see the door to the apartment is wide open. My heart drops.

  “Omma, did you give someone the key?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Did you lock the door when you left?”

  “Of course I lock it!”

  “Uh-oh.” Jeniece’s face in the rearview mirror is filled with fascination and dread.

  “You don’t think you left it open by accident?” I know it’s ridiculous to say this—she’s been gone for three weeks; even if she had left it open, a neighbor surely would have closed it by now.

  “Ava! You think I not know what I do?”

  “You two stay in the car.” I open my door. “I’ll go check it out.”

  Jeniece lifts up her hands in surrender. “You’re the black belt,” she says.

  “Black brown belt,” my mother corrects her. “She not make it all the way.” Already it’s as if the whole stirring drama with the pelican never existed.

  It feels weird to go up the pebbly steps again, to see the dingy stucco walls, as if I’m stepping back into a skin I thought I had shed. I can feel my body gearing up for the possibility of a fight, my muscles gathering potential energy. I’ve never had to use my tae kwon do in a real-life situation before. I’m not sure I’ll be able to go through with it.

  “Hello?” I say as I near the open door. No response.

  “Hello?” I say again. The scent of my mother’s seaweed soup pours out of the apartment like an exhale, even though she hasn’t been there for weeks. I peer inside, my heart perched in my throat like an Adam’s apple.

  The floor cushions by the coffee table are slashed and—my heart sinks at the sight of this—eggshells are everywhere, but otherwise the living room looks okay. I step through the doorway. Everything seems to be in its place. Nothing is missing, as far as I can tell. My mother’s room is stripped bare, but I’m pretty sure it’s because she brought everything with her when she came to see me. In my room, my mixing boards are still under my bed; my MIDI keyboard is silent on its stand. I’ll have to remember to bring them back to the trailer with me. If I go back to stay any longer, that is. I’m not sure where I belong now. Probably not here. My room feels weird, fake, like the set of a TV show I once watched but am now embarrassed by. I don’t feel any trace of real life inside these walls; I don’t think it’s only because I’ve been gone for so long.

  I go back into the living room. Who would tear up some cushions and break some eggshells and leave? Was it kids? Cats? My mind starts to spin—maybe it’s the Salton Sea killer, maybe he found out my mother was a prostitute…

  A strange sound shakes the apartment, a weird metallic thumping.

  “Hello?” I ask. No answer. I stand behind the door—which I stupidly left open—and assume the ready stance. The thumping gets louder, closer. My muscles feel ready to spring. So ready to spring, in fact, that when the sound gets even closer, like someone is clomping across the balcony with coffee-can stilts, I jump out from behind the door and let out a “Hi-ya!” kind of sound.

  Jeniece and I scream at the same time; she scoots back and almost topples over the railing. My mother grabs her by the elbow and helps her steady herself.

  “I thought you were going to stay in the car!” I can barely breathe.

  “She need to pee,” my mother says.

  “Too late,” Jeniece says. A wet patch spreads along the inseam of her pants.

  “Oh, Jeniece.” I usher her into the apartment.

  Jeniece nods; she’s trying not to cry. My mother pushes past us; when she sees the eggshells all over her room, she drops to her knees. She scoops up fragments and lets them fall again to the floor, somber confetti.

  “Who do this?” she whispers.

  “It wasn’t me, Omma…”

  “I know it not you! You think I think you come up here and break my eggs?!”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised…”

  “I wouldn’t be surprise, too, but you not do this.”

  “The eggs were pretty, I can tell,” Jeniece’s voice trembles. She bends down and picks up a piece, tendriled with carvings. The sharp scent of pee wafts up; the stain on her white pants is orange, from vitamins, maybe, or dehydration. I’ll try to remember to offer her some water later.

  “They pretty—they beautiful!” My mother runs her hands across the carpet; little pieces of eggshell jump up like popcorn. “They take hour and hour of work—hour and hour! All gone!”

  “But you can still use them, right?” Jeniece says. “You can still use the broken ones, you said.”

  “This too many broken.” My mother crunches some in her fist. Jeniece’s face drops.

 
I go to look for some clothes for Jeniece to change into. Most everything would be way too big. I finally find an SDSU T-shirt that’s just about the right size for her to wear as a dress.

  “I hope this will be okay.” I hold it out for her to peruse. “I’m afraid I don’t have any underwear that would fit you, but this should go down past your knees, so I don’t think you have to worry.”

  “Thanks.” She takes it from my hands.

  “Do you want to take a bath or a shower?”

  “I take baths.”

  “Well, the bathroom is down the hall,” I tell her. “Feel free…”

  She looks hesitantly down the hallway.

  “I’ll get you a towel.” I hope there is a clean one somewhere in the apartment.

  “I don’t know…,” she starts. “I mean, sometimes I have a hard time…I mean, could you maybe set up the bath for me?”

  “Not a problem.” Her face just about breaks my heart. “I’m happy to do it.”

  “I don’t do this all the time, you know,” she says. “I mean, we were in the car for a long time…”

  From the floor, my mother says mournfully, “It okay. When I laugh, I wet my pants, too.”

  She must not wet her pants very often.

  “It’s certainly nothing to be ashamed of,” I say. “We all do it every once in a while. I don’t think we have time to run a load of laundry, but we can rinse out your pants and bring them home in a plastic bag…”

  She nods, a little teary. I go to prepare her bath.

  The bathtub is filthy, coated with dirty soap scum and hair. I find some scouring powder and the desiccated remains of a sponge under the sink and set to work. The ghosts of Estonian swans float above my scrubbing hands. I never imagined this tub would hold a girl from the Salton Sea, never imagined my Salton Sea shower would hold a pelican, never imagined I’d go to the Salton Sea in the first place.

  As I fill up the tub, I can hear my mother’s voice over the rush of the water. Her pansori voice, not her regular voice. I race out into the living room. Jeniece looks terrified. My mother’s voice can get pretty scary-sounding, low and guttural and torn.