Extraordinary Birds

by Sandy Stark-McGinnis

  “How do I look?” She twirls around.

  “You look like a peacock.” This is a compliment. Peacocks are one of the most beautiful birds in the world. Many people don’t realize, though, that the male peafowls are the beautiful ones.

  “Well, thank you, December. They’re noisy birds, too, and I hope to be noisy enough to persuade some people to give the wildlife refuge where I volunteer some money.”

  “Is that how you know about birds?” I feel the weight of The Complete Guide to Birds: Volume One inside my backpack.

  “Well, my mom loved birds. She’d take me birdwatching all the time. She taught me all she knew. Sometimes I visit the schools around here, too. It gives me an opportunity to pass on to kids the knowledge my mom gave to me. You like birds, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.” I wonder just how much Eleanor knows about birds. Does she know seagulls are great parents? Does she know the albatross has the longest lifespan of any bird? Or that one of the first birds on earth was the Archaeopteryx? “Do you know what the fastest flying bird is?” I ask.

  “Hmm, the golden eagle?”

  “No, it’s the peregrine falcon.” When it comes to knowing about birds, Eleanor’s no match for me.

  “What about you?” Eleanor slides her arm through her purse strap. “How do you know so much about birds?”

  “I just like them. I like that they can fly.”

  “But why not airplanes, or helicopters? They fly.”

  “Birds were born to fly.”

  “True. I hope you’ll be comfortable here, December. I’ll do everything I can to make you feel like it’s home.”

  Eleanor opens the door to leave, then turns around. She squints her eyes like she’s trying to see through my T-shirt and jeans and skin to my light, flexible bones. “Won’t you be cold? It’ll be hot this afternoon, but the mornings are cool.”

  “No, I don’t get cold.” Not everything about me is written in my file. Things like, my resting heart rate averages five hundred beats per minute, not as fast as a hummingbird’s, but faster than a chicken’s, and I have an extra layer of skin that, when my wings unfold, will turn into feathers.

  “I don’t want you getting sick.” Eleanor races to her room. “I have a jacket … It’s brand-new. I’ll be right back.”

  The jacket she brings back is fluffy and white with rainbow glitter on it. Nothing I’d ever wear in a million years. White is not my color, and the one word that describes my feelings about glitter is gross.

  “Thanks,” I say, and hold the jacket in my hand. “You know, you get sick from germs, not from being cold.”

  “That may be so, but it’s still nice to be able to stay warm. Keep it in your backpack. Just in case.”

  In the bed of Eleanor’s truck are two shovels, some wood, and a big toolbox. Eleanor backs out of the driveway. “I build houses, and do some repair work.”

  I build nests. Eleanor builds houses.

  As we drive, she turns up the radio. “This is my favorite song. I was named after the woman that it’s about, Eleanor Rigby.”

  Eleanor sings. She sings like no kind of bird I’ve ever heard. Her voice isn’t beautiful, or bad. She doesn’t shout above the singer, and she doesn’t sing so low I can’t hear her. It’s just her voice, not pretending to be anybody else’s.

  We pull up in front of Fairview Elementary School. The walls are painted swimming pool blue with twilight blue trim.

  I’ve lost count of how many schools I’ve been to. I don’t mind going. Most of the time it’s a lot better place to be than a foster home.

  “Adrian registered you already, so you should be set. Your class is in room eight. You want me to walk you?” Eleanor opens the door.

  “No, I’ll be okay.” I grab my backpack.

  “You sure? I better walk you.”

  “No, I’m used to this. It’s not that big of a deal.” I slide out of the truck.

  “Okay, but if you need anything, don’t be afraid to have the school call me. I’ll be here.” Eleanor grabs the jacket from the seat where I left it. “Don’t forget this.”

  Goose bumps do form on my skin, but it’s a natural reaction to the difference between the warmth of the car and the outside air. Eleanor waves goodbye, and as she drives away I can still hear her favorite song playing over the radio.

  And even though Eleanor telling me to call her if I need anything is the nicest thing a foster parent has ever said to me, I still stuff the glittery white jacket inside my backpack.

  Room eight is at the end of the hall, the last classroom before the playground. The door is closed and the lights are out. There’s a pile of backpacks against the wall, but I keep mine with me and walk outside across the blacktop to a deep green leafy tree. I unzip the pocket with the owl pin on it and take out The Complete Guide to Birds: Volume One.

  The dwarf cassowary lives in New Guinea on steep hills and in forests. Scientists have found they’re very hard to spot in the wild. On the first day at a new school, if I could, I’d change myself into a dwarf cassowary. But it seems there’s no amount of camouflage that could make me disappear so that I could sit in a classroom, or wander a playground, unnoticed.

  I hear singing. “I asked my mother for fifty cents, to see the elephant jump the fence. He jumped so high, he touched the sky, and never came back till the Fourth of July.”

  The girl jumping rope is wearing pink rain boots with a jacket to match. It’s the end of September, and there aren’t any clouds in the sky. We usually don’t get rain for another couple of months. The pink is a big exclamation point standing out against the morning.

  When she’s finished with the elephant rhyme, she says another. “Black birds, black birds, sitting on a wire. What do you do there? May we inquire? ‘We just sit and see the day, we just flock and fly away. By one, two, three …’ ”

  A group of girls glides across the playground. They’re wearing even brighter clothes than the girl jumping rope, lots of lime green and fluorescent pink. A few have bows. Some have their hair braided. One has pigtails that bounce. They look mean. It’s the way their arms are folded across their chests, and how their noses are pointed to the sky. If anyone gets in their way, they won’t notice; they’ll run them over with their pink glittery boots.

  They glide across the blacktop and float into the bathroom.

  The girl jumping rope starts the black bird rhyme over, but when she gets to “May we inquire?” she looks over at me. “You’re new. What’s your name?” she asks, swinging the jump rope over her shoulder. “I’m Cheryllynn.”

  I open my book, trying to ignore her. Making friends has never made sense to me.

  “You don’t want to talk? Too bad, because I’d be a very cool friend to have.” Cheryllynn lets the jump rope fall from her shoulder and catches it before it hits the ground.

  Just because she’s trying to get me to talk to her doesn’t mean we have to become friends. “That song you were singing, about the black birds …” I close the book. “There are several species of black birds that live in America—which species is the song talking about? There’s the raven, the Brewer’s blackbird, the red-winged blackbird, the …”

  Cheryllynn has a confused look on her face. “You know a lot about animals?”

  “Mostly birds.”

  She bends down next to me. Her eyes are dark brown, her skin the color of bark on a paperbark maple tree. “I don’t know much about birds, but last year our class went to the river to see the salmon. The males and females were swimming upstream to lay and fertilize their eggs. They looked really beat-up. You know the salmon die after laying their eggs? The babies are on their own as soon as they’re born.”

  I feel my eyebrows rise a little. Her knowing about salmon is a surprise. “Well, some animals don’t need their moms and dads to survive,” I say. “We do. It’d be cool if humans could just start walking right when they’re born, but we need someone to help us.”

  Birds are different. Some hatch from eggs w
ith their eyes open and already have down feathers. They leave the nest anywhere from a few hours to seven days after being born. But birds that hatch with their eyes closed, like owls and hawks, need their parents longer. They stay in the nest for as long as two hundred seventy days.

  The group of girls I saw earlier glides back across the playground. “Hey, Charlie!” one of them yells. She’s wearing the brightest of the bright clothes. “Sorry, I mean … What’s your name again?” Her voice is more orange than Karen’s.

  The girls move like a flock of starlings, turning in unison as they slide over the blacktop, away from us. Cheryllynn stands up with her fists clinched.

  “Who’s ‘Charlie’?” I ask her.

  “That was my old name. Now I’m Cheryllynn.” She sits against the tree trunk next to me. “What’s your name?”

  “December,” I whisper.

  “That is an amazing name.”

  “Yes, it is.” I have to take out the glittery jacket to get my bird book into my backpack.

  “Where’d you move from?”

  “Everywhere.”

  “Wow! Everywhere?” I can’t tell if Cheryllynn is making fun of me or if she believes me about moving from “everywhere.”

  “Just so you know, I’m a foster kid, and the lady I live with is not my mom. Is there anything else you want to know?”

  Cheryllynn takes a necklace made of Froot Loops out of her rain jacket pocket. “Yeah, I want to know if you want some Froot Loops. I made the necklace myself.”

  They are colorful, like feathers on a rainbow lorikeet. “No thanks. I don’t eat cereal.” I start walking toward my classroom, hoping the bell will ring and Cheryllynn will have to line up for class, and she’ll stop trying to be my friend.

  “Well, where do you live?” She follows me. “We might live close to each other, and we can hang out after school.” Right now, Cheryllynn is a harpy eagle. Their talons can wield a crushing grip of one hundred pounds or more, and I feel like I’m caught in one of them.

  If I tell her what she wants to know, maybe she’ll stop following me. “I live with a lady named Eleanor. She lives out in the country in a rock house with vines growing all over it.”

  “You live with the taxidermist?” Cheryllynn asks.

  Taxidermist, there’s that word again.

  “I know exactly where that house is.” Cheryllynn walks right next to me. “The woman. She came to school to do a presentation. She was with the wildlife refuge. It’s by the river. They take care of hurt animals.”

  Suddenly a ball comes flying by. “Watch out!” a boy yells. He dribbles a basketball around us, and we shuffle our feet off the court.

  Cheryllynn keeps talking about Eleanor. “She brought a raccoon, a fox, but mostly birds—an owl, two different kinds of hawks. She told us they were going to be ready to set free soon. You know people around here call her the ‘Bird Whisperer’?”

  “She can talk to birds?”

  “Well.” Cheryllynn opens her pocket, probably to see if any pieces of cereal are left. “There are two versions of the Bird Whisperer story. You want to hear the good one, the bad one, or both?”

  “Both.”

  The bell rings. Kids are running around us.

  “The good one is that birds make their way to her when they’re hurt—a broken wing, ate something poisonous—or, some say, birds go to her when they’re sad, like if one of their babies has fallen out of a tree or is not able to fly and dies. The bad story is she has a way of calling healthy birds to her with a whistle or a song. When they come to her, she stuffs them and sells them to people.”

  The scar on my back tingles. My heart beats like hummingbirds’ wings.

  “That’s all I know about the lady.” Cheryllynn takes one more bite of her necklace and moves toward the door, yelling, “Maybe I’ll see you at lunch! We can talk more then, if you want!”

  I’ve heard all I need to know about Eleanor. I can’t move.

  Taxidermists stuff animals. They stuff birds. I’ve worried about being captured, but I’ve never imagined being stuffed.

  Eleanor’s a taxidermist, and I live with her.

  A yard duty lady blows a whistle at me. “Young lady! The bell rang! You need to line up!”

  I’m the only one standing on the playground, just like I’d be the only bird of my kind Eleanor would have a chance to stuff, if she ever finds out about my wings.

  6

  In front of the school at the end of the day, I sink against a fence and open my bird book. Now I know why Eleanor sang this morning. She can’t help it. I’m not going to be lured by her song, though.

  Over the top of my book, I see Eleanor’s truck. I live with the Bird Whisperer.

  “December.” Eleanor does have a nice voice, a voice just right for making someone believe she would never hurt them.

  Tomorrow when I see Cheryllynn I’m going to tell her thank you for saving my life.

  “December?” The truck door closes, and her boots scratch the sidewalk. “You ready to go?”

  I hold my bird book close to my chest and make sure I walk behind Eleanor. She tries to open the door for me. “No, I can do it.”

  Music plays on the radio, and I reach over and turn it off.

  “You don’t like the music?” Eleanor asks.

  Hummingbirds, penguins, and hawks are some birds that don’t sing, but most birds do, and the types of songs they sing have to do with their age, whether they’re male or female, and where they live. Birds that live in the forest use short calls, because sound can ricochet off trees or be taken in by leaves.

  Eleanor is not a bird, obviously, but she must have learned what songs attract them. She stands outside, day or night, and sings the “Eleanor Rigby” song, her soft voice traveling miles, the vibration picked up by birds, which fly to her backyard. They eat until they’re full, and then take a bath, cleaning their feathers, and when the birds are at their most vulnerable—fed, cleaned, and sleepy—Eleanor catches them in a net.

  “How was school today?” she asks.

  Crows usually don’t sing. They call, to warn other crows to stay away.

  “It was fine.”

  “So you had a good day?”

  “I said it was fine.”

  The superb lyrebird has one of the loudest calls of any bird, but the bittern bird has one of the farthest traveling.

  Eleanor pulls to the side of the road and rests her hands on the steering wheel. “You don’t seem like you’re okay.”

  “I’m fine.” I slap my bird book closed. “Everything is fine.”

  Eleanor pulls onto the road again. The rest of the way home, I wait for her to start whispering.

  When we get to the house, I tell Eleanor I’m going to my room to do homework. I set my backpack and bird book on the floor. Eleanor’s going to start singing. At first, it’ll be soft, like a lullaby, but soon it’ll grow loud enough for the vibration to float under my door and try to hypnotize me.

  I tiptoe down the hallway to see where she is. I peer around the corner, into the kitchen. Eleanor sets a pot on the stove, then walks to the refrigerator. She’s starting to cook dinner.

  Using the front door is too risky. I look across the living room. There’s a window Eleanor’s left open. She must not’ve read everything that’s in my file, because there’s a “To-Do” list foster parents need to follow before I live with them, number one being “Make sure windows and doors are secure. You’ll want to discourage easy access to an exit.”

  Soon as I’m outside, I run to the shed in the backyard. There’s a latch where a lock should be. I have a feeling this is where she does her work on birds, and I want to know what I’m up against.

  Inside, it smells like dust and chemicals Eleanor must use for taxidermy. On a table there are tools and a couple lamps. This is definitely the place where she stuffs animals. They’re displayed on a shelf, all birds, perched on wooden pedestals. I count them. Three crows. Two robins. A great horned owl, and one red-ta
iled hawk. Up close, their eyes shine. I stroke the owl’s feathers, and I swear it twitches a little, like it’s remembering how it used to fly. I take it off the shelf, dust floating from its feathers, and cradle it in my arms.

  I’m going to call the owl Teresa, after Saint Teresa of Ávila. Karen used to take me to church all the time, and she really loved saints. At dinner, she would choose a saint to talk about. My favorite was Saint Teresa because Saint Teresa was rumored to have powers of levitation, which is as close as a human gets to flying without the help of machines, or, in my case, wings.

  I close the door to the shed. Before climbing back into the house, I make sure Eleanor isn’t calling my name. She isn’t, but she is singing. I try not to pay attention to her song as I lean over the windowsill, setting Teresa on the floor.

  The singing stops, and I hear footsteps walking across the kitchen floor. I pull myself inside and hide behind a couch.

  Peeking my head over the armrest, I see Eleanor standing in the hallway. “December? Dinner is almost ready.”

  She turns back to the kitchen, and plates clank together. She’s setting the table.

  I grab Teresa and take her to my room. I set her on the bed, against the wall with my clothes and orphaned dolls. “I don’t know what your life was like, but I can guess what happened to you.” I lie on the bed and stare into Teresa’s empty, glassy eyes. “Eleanor probably set a trap for you. She went to the pet store and bought some mice. Went out to her backyard at midnight and got some chicken wire and used it to build a little corral. She set the mice free, and then waited, with a net, for you to swoop down and grab one. And that, Teresa, was the end of you.”

  I stroke her feathers, and hold up Bird Girl. “I know I look human, but I’m not really. I mean, I am, but I’m part bird, too. And one day, I’ll be all bird.”

  “Look.” I open my biography and show Teresa a sketch of the birdlike me. “See my wings?” I turn the page and read to her: “The weeks after December was born, she would perch on her mom’s shoulder, and they would walk through the walnut orchard. Her mom would hum, and December would sing her song, but when her song got too loud, her mom would put her finger on December’s beak and say, ‘You have to sing quietly. I don’t want anyone ever to take you from me. If you promise to sing quieter, I will let you fly around the orchard a few times.’ So December sang, but softer, spread her wings, and zigzagged through the trees.”