On Little Wings

by Regina Sirois

  He turned guarded eyes to me. “Sure.” He made it a slow, two-syllable word.

  “Why haven’t you ever left? Really?”

  “It’s not because I’m scared,” he answered.

  I wasn’t prepared for those words. I looked at his sullen face, trying to see past the bitter frown. “I’d never think you were. I just wondered why you don’t go to college, especially since you’re so smart.”

  He grimaced at my compliment like it hurt him. “I’m nearly done with my bachelors. I’m not even eighteen until next month. Isn’t that good enough for you?”

  “It has nothing to do with me. It would be good enough for anybody. It’s really impressive. But … now what?”

  “What do you mean?” He entwined his fingers tightly, the tips of his knuckles whitening under the pressure.

  “Well, you have a bachelors in what?”

  “Liberal arts.”

  “So now what? What are you going to do with it?”

  “You like the million dollar questions, don’t you?”

  “Why waste time on the cheap ones?”

  He looked up at the sky like he thought someone would have written his lines for him overhead. “I don’t know. I can’t leave.”

  “Bull,” I said as softly as I dared, without losing the power of the word.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You can’t leave the same way my mother can’t come back. You’re making up your own rules.”

  His eyes sparked with indignation. “You have no idea what it’s like looking out for my family. Being the only man. Four girls! Hormones flying. Heartaches. Drama. They would spontaneously combust if I wasn’t here.”

  “You’re right,” I said, putting my hands up in surrender, “I don’t know what it’s like. I’m sure it’s really hard. But don’t you think you might give them some more credit? Somehow I think they’d muddle through.” An offended shadow crossed his face and I looked down, ashamed that he thought I was belittling his sacrifices. His love.

  “Maybe I want more for them than that – just muddling through,” he replied, clamping down on his words to keep them from sounding too harsh.

  “But everyone has to muddle a little bit. It’s how we figure things out. I just don’t think you need to do everything for them.”

  “What do I do for them?” It came out so spiteful that the blood rushed to my chest, making me feel very hot under the afternoon sun.

  “Everything!” I fought back. “You tell them what to do, when to do it, how to do it, when not to do it! Especially Claudia. And she adores you. Wants to be like you. You could give her the benefit of the doubt sometimes.”

  “I don’t want to control them! I didn’t want the job in the first place. Do you think I wouldn’t give anything to have a dad take over? To have someone else earn the extra money and scare off the boyfriends and talk Judith out of her depression when she wails that she’ll die alone? I didn’t want it. I never wanted it!”

  It was so difficult to restrain my hands from reaching out to him. I wanted him to know that he didn’t need to take care of me, didn’t need to babysit me, didn’t need to worry about me. I just wanted him to let me sit next to him. To stay still and take my hand when he wanted to take my hand. To resist the urge to run away when his heart drew up close to mine.

  I marshaled my strength and gave him the honest answer, the one that broke my heart to give. “But you’ve done it. All that and more. Now it’s time to get out of the way, Nathan! Judith isn’t as bad as I thought at first. She’s got her weaknesses. She hasn’t got love figured out. Who does? But she can take care of the girls. Maybe not like you would, but still. And Sarah’s here. She can help. Little’s here. She can … well, Little’s here.” We both lowered our defenses long enough to give one wry laugh.

  “And if I go, if I just up and leave, what happens when Judith comes home pregnant again? Or Claude?”

  I recoiled from the ugliness of his words. “Is that what you think about your sister? You think that the boys you fought were right? Is that why it made you so mad? You thought it was true?”

  A mixture of shame and defiance burned through his cheeks. “I think it’s easy for people to make mistakes. The heart is deceitful.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t love Will, my heart isn’t deceived, and I know he’s not like that. I’ve spent enough time with him to know …”

  “You don’t think he’d jump at the first chance …” he left it unsaid. Thankfully.

  “No. I think he loves her. Sure he’s attracted to her. He’s not a monk. But he’s not … he’s not what you think he is.”

  Nathan huffed in dissent.

  “There isn’t always an ulterior motive. It’s okay to love people, Nathan,” I uttered, looking at the gray sand.

  “Sometimes,” he countered. “When everything’s in place. When it’s the right time.”

  My head snapped up and I found his lips, bisected with the thin white scar and then his nose, his dark, churning eyes. I felt like Little. Alone. Looking at Newell. “Sometimes you wait for the right time and you run out of time altogether.”

  He studied my face, seeing, I’m certain, a new intensity there. We weren’t talking about Claudia anymore. “So, you’re of the ‘carpe diem’ variety? Just dive in headfirst and if you break your face it’s ‘better to have loved and lost than never loved at all’?”

  “I prefer the ‘happily ever afters’, myself.”

  Nathan smirked mirthlessly. “So you’re more a mythology fan.”

  “It’s not just fairy tales. My mother found a love that worked. But she had to leave first. Go find what life had in store.” In that moment I said out loud what I didn’t realize I knew. My mother left. Little left. I left Nebraska. Sarah went to Africa. Nathan had to leave. Step from the nest. The tree. The entire forest. It was a migration. Away from all you know. It was a tide. Rolling back. I couldn’t capture it with words, couldn’t own the thought, but it sidled up to me, swept through me. I held it for a transitory moment. “You have to have a little faith and go and try.”

  “So I abandon my family and life magically all works out?” he challenged.

  “No. Maybe it never works out. But people leave and learn and come back better.” It sounded so wise that it made me sad, like a good-bye to the days when such things made no sense.

  Nathan closed his eyes and laid back, his head resting against the sand. “I want Claudia to leave and come back better,” he said.

  “Leaving doesn’t count when someone pushes you out. You have to let her choose to go. Like I have to let my mother choose to come back. I think I had it wrong, thinking I could force her here.”

  “I don’t know. It sounded like a good plan to me. Twenty years is a long time.” He cracked one eye and raised his head, squinting at me as the sun hit him in the face. After a good look he lay back down and closed his eyes again.

  I studied his face, traced every feature that I would miss like air when I left, lingered on his closed, slightly purplish eyelids. “What would you do if you didn’t have to stay?” I whispered.

  One cheek pulled up. “Here’s where I say nuclear physicist or neurosurgeon or astronaut, right? Everyone wants to know what the genius will do. How long till he gets the Nobel or is teaching at Oxford? Do you know how impossible it is to choose when everyone is watching? Try it at a library. Have twenty people stand around and cluck their tongues every time you go to touch a book. It’s … distracting.”

  “I asked what you want to do. Not what anyone else wants you to do.”

  He grabbed his forehead like it hurt. “It’s not that simple. It’s the responsibility. When you get a brain – this brain that most people don’t have, you remember things. Too many things. I can tell you passages from hundreds of books. I can recite equations that you will never in your life have to use. So can I go and be a garbage man? Can I waste it?”

  “You want to be a garbage man?”

  Nathan’s eyes grew so still tha
t I could see the pupil vibrate against the dark blue. “It might be nice to have the option,” he said with a small smirk. “What if, just what if, Jennifer, I wanted to get married and buy a boat and take my winters off eating chowder and watching football?”

  “That’s what you want?” My eyebrows arched in disbelief.

  “No! I want to do so much … But why is it okay for anyone else to want that and not me? Why do I have to do more?”

  “Because you are more.”

  Nathan’s long lashes blinked several times and his lips moved like he would argue, but at the last minute he conceded with one reluctant nod. “I might want to teach. Like Sarah. Teach the best of the best. Teach the little, uppity twerps who go to Harvard. Put a new idea in their heads. Or maybe teach the little kids like Hester, the ones who are just on the verge of greatness. Be there when they figure it all out.”

  “So?” I asked, looking at his tormented face. “Why not?”

  “So, when I say it, I mean it. But then I think of the field researchers for museums, debunking myths thousands of years old. And I want to be one of them. I know I could.” I opened my mouth, but he held up his hand and sped up, cutting me off. “And then think of mission control at NASA. Think of looking at that black screen and everyone’s looking at you, because you’re in charge, and the first picture flickers and through the static you see a brand new universe. In color. I could do that, too,” A slightly manic gleam came over his face as he spoke, but when he looked back at me, he was just Nathan. On the beach. “So what do you choose when you have too many options? Whatever you choose, you lose. You throw away a hundred possibilities that would have been equally rewarding. And forget it all, because they all mean leaving and the girls are here and I have to stay.”

  “Says who?”

  He rolled his eyes up to the sky and swept them back across the wild landscape. “Says life. Says God. Says everything.”

  “Not says Sarah. Not says me.” His chest swelled as he took a breath, and I lowered my voice. “If we count for anything.” I imagined him a crouched eagle, throwing open his strong wings and diving into the world “like a thunderbolt.” But his wings were as fragile as mine. As locked in place as the ink trapped on Little’s back.

  He didn’t answer, just shook his head despondently. But he didn’t move away, either. I looked down to the coarse sand where his fingers rested inches from mine. And we stayed, the waves beating the shore as our thoughts beat the insides of our heads, a silent, ripping undercurrent pulling us out to the uncharted sea of our future.

  CHAPTER 37

  The next day Sarah’s backyard transformed into the quintessential scene of a holiday by the sea. Nathan made an impromptu table large enough for all of us by laying a long board across two sawhorses and Sarah draped it with red plastic tablecloths. Around it flocked a mismatched collection of lawn chairs and camp chairs posed like strange, exotic birds stopping on their flights to warmer climates. Colorful sand buckets sprinkled the grass haphazardly, resting where the last person dropped them. The meat smoker ran all day, puffing out a steady stream of white vapor as it cooked pork ribs and salmon fillets. The usual smell of salty air was nearly obscured by the roasting meat. Little griped at us for moving too fast, laughing too loud, breathing too hard and in between her complaints she kept her sharp eyes trained on Nathan and me. I tried to ignore her as I helped Sarah and Judith carry the food outside. Even Darcy managed to convey a bottle of soda, which no one dared open after being dropped so many times.

  “Save it for the fireworks,” Sarah suggested. “It’ll make a good explosion.”

  For only eight people, the noise was fantastic. Maybe I was comparing it to life as an only child, or three long weeks of quiet days with Sarah, but the commotion of the milling bodies, arms reaching for spoons, paper plates sliding to the ground with their full burdens of food, and the savory smells crowding the air made it seem like there were far more people in the backyard.

  The sea, which I always considered strong and somber, joined the festivities and frolicked with the younger girls. The waves darted up to the rocks, batting them playfully and jumping back from shore. When I saw Hester scream in delight and leap to avoid the rushing tide I knew that the holiday had put its carefree spell on everyone.

  At seven o’clock Sarah called for final clean-up and Nathan, the sole male in the crowd, made a general bathroom announcement. “No bathrooms on the rock. No bathrooms on the pier. So wherever you are going, go here first!” There was a flurry of shoving dishes that didn’t fit into the refrigerator and packing last minute provisions before our party divided.

  Claude left first when Will’s familiar car pulled up with a friendly honk. While the rest of us wished him luck at the show and pressed food samples into his hands Nathan melted into the background, scowling. He was still sulking when Hester climbed into the middle seat of the truck, her skinny body settled between Nathan and I. Judith and Sarah tried to convince Darcy that fireworks on the dock were much more exciting than the rock. Unconvinced, she let out a shrill wail until Judith reminded her that they could get ice cream from the general store in town, but no one sells ice cream on the rock. After that she gave us a smug, slightly sympathetic wave as we pulled away.

  “So, how exactly do we get to this rock?” I asked as we neared town. I’d never seen the road so busy. Cars lined Main Street and bodies spilled out of the stores and restaurants, crowding the sidewalk.

  “We row,” Nathan said, passing Main Street altogether and pulling on to a road closer to Shanty Street. “The Lawsons have a dinghy they let me use whenever I want.” Nathan parked at a small house and helped Hester out of his door before pulling a backpack from the bed. The motion lights on the house sprang to life as we followed him through a yard that backed up closer to the water than any of the houses on the cove. I glanced back at the unremarkable structure. It looked like one good wave …

  “Okay, Hess, grab the oars,” Nathan directed, pointing to a shed with weathered, white oars leaning against it. “And get some life vests.”

  While Hester obeyed I followed Nathan to a tiny wooden boat, overturned in a patch of weeds. “Is that big enough for all three of us?” I asked.

  “Easily. Grab that side and push toward me.” we leaned down and gave it a shove but two seconds and one scream later I was standing ten feet back.

  “Spider. It touched me,” I said, too upset by the black memory of its spindly leg to care if he laughed at me. He did.

  “It wasn’t anything poisonous,” he assured me.

  “You don’t know that and I don’t care,” I answered, keeping my distance. “I’m not getting in unless any spiders get out first. Seriously, if one of those crawls on me when we’re on the water I will go overboard.” Nathan laughed again and began a lackluster search of the boat.

  “They’re gone. There were only two. Probably interrupted their date.” I was about to say something when his foot slammed against the side of the boat. “Okay, three. But not anymore!” he called.

  I gasped and took another step back, nearly knocking into Hester. “I’ll go check it for you,” she offered. “Nathan doesn’t understand about girls and bugs. He doesn’t even care if a bee lands on him!”

  “Thanks, Hess.” It wasn’t right to let a little girl half my age do the dirty work but I couldn’t bring myself to touch the boat again until I knew. She ducked her head gingerly into the dinghy, checking the floorboards under the seats.

  “It’s okay now, Jennifer,” she promised.

  I shuffled forward, watching my feet carefully. Two of them got away, after all. “Put it in the water first,” I insisted. “Just wash it off a bit. Then I’ll get in.”

  Nathan shook his head, chuckling as he pushed the boat toward the water. It clattered and grated its way to the waves where it sank gratefully into the water. “You never disappoint, Jennifer! You know that?” he said as he stood shin deep, holding the boat steady, waiting for us. “I never know what is going to
come out of your mouth.”

  “Glad I amuse someone,” I muttered dryly as I followed Hester. She stepped into the water, shoes and all, and waded out to Nathan who picked her up and deposited her in the back. When I got to him I paused awkwardly, knowing the obvious thing was to give him my hand, but worried what the touch would do to his face. Before I could overthink it he took my elbow in one hand and my hand in the other and steadied me as I made a high step into the boat. It rocked under my feet and I put my hands out like a tightrope walker as I took a seat at the front.

  Nathan pushed the boat and then followed, his tennis shoes and the bottom of his shorts sopping wet. “Sorry,” he said as some drips hit me. He didn’t mention the torn, floppy lifejackets at our feet so I assumed they were there for emergencies and not necessary to wear at the moment.

  “Is it far?” I asked as Nathan pulled against the waves.

  “Over there,” he said, pointing with his jaw at a tiny island far to my right. “But the water is shallow the entire way.”

  “If anybody sees a yeti, I want to know. That’d be something to tell them in Nebraska.” Hester laughed and I relaxed in my seat, turning sideways to hang my hand over the edge, letting my fingers skim through the tips of the waves. We rowed in relative quiet, interrupted only by the sound of the oars breaking the surface and the calls of a few curious gulls who followed us. I asked Nathan if he wanted any help rowing. That only made him laugh again and roll his eyes. “Just enjoy the ride, Jennifer.”

  The sky was not darkening yet, but it was adorned with vibrant silk ribbons, dropped from some heavenly seamstress onto her milky, blue floor. The dark pinks reflected in the distant water and I forgot to make polite conversation as I watched the ripples of light weave patterns of dark and bright atop the sea. As Nathan neared the rock (is it actually named the rock ? I asked him. He assured me that it was, as yet, unnamed and I could take a stab at it.) I saw that it was bigger than I realized. A huge boulder stood up at one end like a hunchback giant rising from the ocean, but it tapered into a narrow, flat band of pebbly land before plunging back into the water. At the flattest edge of the island a few shrubs grew large enough for Nathan to secure the dingy to the bottom of their trunks where they grew the thickest.