Starling Days

by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

  Also by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

  Harmless Like You

  This edition first published in hardcover in 2020 by

  The Overlook Press, an imprint of ABRAMS

  195 Broadway, 9th floor

  New York, NY 10007

  www.overlookpress.com

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  Copyright © 2020 Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

  Cover © 2020 Abrams

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019944014

  ISBN: 978-1-4197-4359-7

  eISBN: 978-1-68335-837-4

  ABRAMS The Art of Books

  195 Broadway,

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  To everyone who struggles with black dogs or

  inner demons or any shape of sadness.

  & To my family—always.

  The task of recording roosts in London is difficult owing to the number of small and ephemeral roosts.

  –“The Winter Starling Roosts of Great Britain,”

  B. J. Marples

  AUGURY n. The practice of predicting the future, revealing hidden truths, or obtaining guidance on the basis of natural signs such as the flight of birds. From the Latin, augur: seer, prophet or official who observes and interprets the behavior of birds.

  AUGUST

  She wasn’t expecting the bridge to shudder. It was too big for trembling. Cars hissed from New York to New Jersey over its wide back. That August had been hot, 96° Fahrenheit hot. Heat softened the dollar bills and clung to the quarters and dimes that passed from sticky hand to sticky hand.

  It was night and the air had cooled but humidity still hung in a red fog in Mina’s lungs. Wind galloped over the Hudson, pummeling the city with airy hooves. The bridge shifted, the pylons swayed, and Mina closed her eyes to better feel her bones judder. Even her teeth shook. The day’s sweat shivered between her bare shoulder blades. The tank top felt too thin, and the down on her arms rose.

  She took a step forward along the bridge. The tender spots between her big and index toes were sore from too many days in flip-flops. She took the sandals off. They swung from her fingers as she walked. Under her feet, the rough cement was warm. She wondered about the people driving their shadowy cars. Were they leaving over-air-conditioned offices, or bars cooled by the thwack of ceiling fans? Were they going home to empty condos, or daughters tucked under dinosaur quilts?

  The bridge was decked out in blue lights, like a Christmas tree, like those monochrome ones shopping malls put up. Still, it was beautiful. Mina readied her phone to take a picture. She watched the granulated night appear onscreen. Perhaps her hands wobbled, because the photo was a blur. It was nothing she could send Oscar. But she wasn’t sure it was a good idea to send him pictures. Not tonight.

  She stopped in the middle of the bridge. Hello, Manhattan. Downriver, apartment blocks spiked upwards. She couldn’t see Queens and the walk-up apartment building she’d grown up inside. Nor could she see the Park Slope apartment, in which Oscar was working late. He’d have a mug on his desk, the coffee gone cold hours ago. The photo of her would be propped up behind his computer. The sparkly stress ball she’d bought him years ago as a joke gift would rest at his wrist. Every hour or so he’d roll it between his palms. When he was working, he didn’t notice time. She was sure he wouldn’t yet be worried. She’d said she was meeting some friends after the tutoring gig. He didn’t know she’d texted the group that she was feeling unwell and would miss movie night. He wouldn’t expect her for at least two hours. No one was expecting her. She was unwitnessed. She lifted her face to the breeze.

  The river was as dark as poured tarmac. They said that when a body fell onto water from this height, it was like hitting the sidewalk. The Golden Gate had nets to stop jumpers. She imagined the feeling of a rope cutting into arms and legs. Your body would flop, like a fish. How long did they have to lie there before someone scooped them out? There was nothing like that here. People said that drowning was a good death, that the tiny alveoli of the lungs filled like a thousand water balloons.

  She lifted one purple flip-flop and dropped it over the water. She didn’t hear it hit. The shape simply vanished into the black shadow.

  That was when the lights got brighter and the voice, male and certain, lobbed into her ears. “Ma’am, step away from the rail.”

  The police car’s lights flashed blue and white and red. Once she’d had an ice-pop those colors and the sugary water had pooled behind her teeth.

  “Ma’am, step away from the rail.”

  “Good evening, Officer. Have I done something wrong?” Mina asked.

  “Please get into the car,” he said. There were two of them. The other was younger and he was speaking into a radio. It was hard to make out his words over the wind and traffic. Was he talking about her?

  “This is a public walkway,” Mina said. “It was open. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “Ma’am, get into the car.”

  “I don’t want to get into the car. Look, I was just getting some air. I was thinking. I’ll go home now.”

  “Ma’am, don’t make me come over there.”

  Mina had never been in a police car. She’d read once that the back doors only open from the outside. Who knew what would happen if she got into the car?

  The window was rolled down and the cop stuck his head out. There was a lump on his upper lip, a pimple perhaps.

  “Where are your shoes?”

  “It’s hot out,” she said.

  “Where are your shoes?”

  “I don’t want to tell you about my shoes,” she said. “I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m an American citizen.”

  “Ma’am, where are your shoes?”

  She lifted up the single flip-flop she had left. “The other one broke,” she said.

  Behind him, other cars continued into the night. Did they even notice her standing in the dark, a small woman with bare legs and feet? She was aware of the bluing bruise she’d caught banging her knee on the subway door. In the shower that morning, she’d skipped shaving her legs. In the beam of his headlamps, could he see hairs standing up in splinters?

  “Ma’am, I really need you to get into the car. I can’t leave you here. What if something happened to you?” In his voice, she heard the insinuation that normal women, innocent women, didn’t walk alone on bridges at night.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  Mina knew her stubby ponytail was frizzy. Bleaching black to Marilyn Monroe–blonde had taken four rounds of peroxide. Now it stood up in breaking strands. If she’d conditioned it, would this cop think she was sane? If she’d blow-dried it, would he have let her go home? And, of course, there were the tattoos twining up her arms.

  “We can talk about it in the car,” he said. His shadowed friend was bent over the radio, lips to the black box.

  Mina was tired. It was the heat, or perhaps the wind. So she got into the car. The seat was smooth. Someone must’ve chosen the fabric specially. This must be wipeable and disinfectable. People probably spat on this seat. They probably pissed on purpose and by mist
ake. Between the front and back seats was a grille. She would not be able to reach out to touch the curve of the cop’s ear or straighten his blue collar. The flip-flop lay across her knees.

  The cops wanted to know her name, address, phone number and Social Security. She gave them.

  “We’re taking you to Mount Sinai,” said the cop.

  “I was just going for a walk, clearing my head. I don’t need to be in a hospital. I was just clearing my head.”

  Damn. Repeating yourself was a habit of the guilty. Mina tried to slow her breath.

  “See it from my point of view,” he said. “You’re walking alone on the bridge at night. I can’t let you out. I don’t know what would happen.”

  Only then did she understand that they must do this every night, drive back and forth across the bridge looking for people like her.

  “I have to go to work tomorrow,” she said. “My husband will want to know where I am. Please, please, just let me go to the subway.”

  “We can’t do that, ma’am.”

  The car left the bridge and fell back into Manhattan. She kept telling them she wasn’t trying to cause trouble. She said it so many times that the word “trouble” began to sound like “burble” or “bubble.” Heat rose in her eyes. She pushed the water off her face.

  Finally, they agreed that she could call her husband, and they would go to the paramedics parked near the bridge. If the paramedics said she was okay, she could go home.

  “Oscar,” she said. “Oscar, I need you to come get me. They won’t let me leave until you come get me.”

  “Slow down,” he said. “Where are you? What’s going on?”

  She tried to explain about the cops and how she’d been clearing her head and now they wanted to take her to the hospital. About how she needed him to be there.

  The ambulance was parked under the highway. Was it, like the cops, always there? Always waiting for people like her? The cop got out of the car and opened her door. He didn’t cuff her or even touch her. But her breath came double fast. The pearly pimple on his lip gleamed. He led her to the ambulance. The steps into the vehicle were constructed from a steel mesh. They hurt her feet. A hand reached out to help her. It was soft and firm and female. It was attached to a slim arm and a body in scrubs the color of the swimming pool where she’d made her first tentative laps as a preschooler. Mina smiled into the face and the face smiled back.

  “Please take a seat,” the paramedic said, gesturing to the stretcher. A sheet was draped over the end, which made it look almost like a real bed. Mina sat on the edge.

  “Can you wait here?” the paramedic asked. “We’re going to talk for a minute.”

  Mina nodded, before she understood that we meant the cop. He stood on the sidewalk, his legs spread. For the first time, she saw his gun. It was no bigger than a bottle of Coca-Cola. Then the paramedic shut the door. That had to be a good sign. They trusted her to be alone. Her body was reflected as a peachy blur in the metal drawers. The sour light marked every pore, every scratch on her legs, the tiny specks of dirt under her toenails.

  The paramedic returned with a clipboard. Mina noticed then how pretty she was and how neat her hair. The paramedic’s lips were lipsticked a dark red. Mina had once owned a dress almost that color—oxblood, the store called it.

  “Nice lipstick,” Mina said.

  “Thank you.” The paramedic smiled.

  “I just want to go home.” Did that sound too desperate? Mina disliked the clipboard.

  “We have to do a quick checkup,” the paramedic said. “Can you give me your full name?”

  “Mina,” she said, then paused. “Umeda.” She’d only had her husband’s name for six months and it still felt itchy. To most people, she suited the Japanese name. Mina was short, with a small, flat nose. People never guessed that her DNA came from heavy-bellied China, not Japan’s skinny island chain. It was Oscar who puzzled people with his mixed-race face and English accent.

  The clipboard was uninterested in the intricacies of naming. It wanted to know the same things as the police: name, phone number, Social Security and address. It was as if this one long number and these few lines could tell them all they needed to know. They would probably be the first things asked for when she was dead.

  Mina gave detail after detail away to this stranger. She said, “Can I ask your name?”

  “Sunny,” said Sunny.

  Sunny shone a light in Mina’s left and right eyes. She asked Mina to stick her arm out and then wrapped a grey tube around it. Her touch was gentle as she sealed the Velcro. “This is for blood pressure . . . Oh, that’s a bit low.”

  “Don’t worry,” Mina said. “It’s always been low.”

  “Mine too. It’s common in women our age,” Sunny said, unwrapping the arm. Mina wanted to take Sunny’s hand and feel the low pulse of the blood. She wanted to say thank you for not asking anything difficult.

  “This won’t hurt.” Sunny placed a plastic grip around her finger and took note of numbers on a machine without comment.

  “So,” said Sunny, “how have you been feeling? Emotionally?”

  “I’m fine. I was just clearing my head.”

  “Were you clearing it of anything in particular?”

  Mina tried to see what the paramedic saw. What would Sunny make of Mina? This patient was an East Asian woman wearing a black tank top and black shorts. A woman with peonies tattooed up her arms to hide the fine trellis of scars from her teenage years. A woman who didn’t bother blow-drying her hair. A woman who looked younger than she was. A woman in bare feet, who’d let her pedicure grow out so that only the tips of her toes were striped in gold. A woman with a single purple flip-flop. In Sunny’s place, would Mina believe this woman?

  A hard knock on the door.

  “Oscar!” Mina said. There was her husband. He looked like a real adult. They would trust him. He had a linen shirt. “That’s my husband. They said my husband could pick me up.”

  Sunny did not offer Oscar a hand into the ambulance. She asked him to wait outside. Once the door was shut, with Oscar on the other side, Sunny spoke: “Mina, I need you to tell me how you’ve been feeling.”

  “I’ve been feeling fine. I was just thinking.”

  “What were you thinking about?”

  “I can’t remember now. Not with all of this.” Mina didn’t know why she couldn’t lie better. She wanted to lie. She wanted to say, I was thinking about my job or where we should go on vacation or the trash schedule. Her lips didn’t know how to make anything about her life sound convincing. “I just want to go home with my husband. They said I could go home with my husband.”

  “And you’re safe with him? He’s never . . .” Sunny trailed off, and all the things Oscar had never done hung there.

  “Oh, no, never. Not Oscar. I want to go home with him. My husband,” she said, “he’s here to pick me up.”

  They’d been married for only six months, but they’d been together for a decade. The switch from boyfriend to husband felt strange. The word “husband” sounded so stodgy, so like “my attorney” or “my Ford Focus hatchback.” Tonight, though, she loved it.

  Oscar waited in the dark. There were portholes cut into the ambulance doors, but he couldn’t see Mina. Earlier she’d been fine. She’d been reading aloud a review of some superhero blockbuster. They’d made plans to have friends over that weekend. He’d felt like they were finally getting back into the swing of their lives. For six whole months she’d acted like nothing was wrong. Every time he’d asked, she’d said she was fine. “Fine.” And now they were here.

  Finally the door opened and the woman in scrubs stepped outside. She explained that they could not allow Mina to leave by herself. Her activity had been too concerning. But they could release her into his care. Did he think that she needed to be hospitalized? Had she been displaying signs of depression?

  Oscar thought of their wedding night six months before. He thought of how she’d swallowed two weeks’ worth of wisdo
m-tooth painkillers. He thought of the first day of their married life and of her body in the hospital bed. The cot had been rimmed by white bars. They’d put her in a paper gown. Every time he visited her, she’d told him she wanted to go home. She’d told him it was a mistake. That she was fine. She hadn’t meant to take all those pills. It was like when you bought a tub of ice cream and you only meant to have a scoop and somehow you found you’d reached the waxy bottom of the carton. She’d told him the only thing that made her want to die was the hospital and its stink of piss and disinfectant.

  The paramedic was waiting, her head tilted accusatorially, seeming to say that he must have noticed something, must have seen something. Oscar said, “I’ll take her home. She’s fine. Mina’s distractible. She’s an academic.” He tried to say academic as if wandering around bridges at night was part of the job description.

  “You do understand you’d be taking full responsibility if anything happens?”

  “Isn’t that what I signed up for when I got married?”

  The paramedic didn’t laugh at the joke.

  “So can I take her home?”

  “After you sign the form.”

  They caught a taxi mercifully quickly.

  “Mina, what’s going on?” Oscar asked.

  She tapped the window. “It’s raining,” she said. And it was. As each drop hit, it brought with it a bubble of orange light.

  “Mina, I’m serious.”

  “Nothing. Nothing’s going on.”

  “I love you.” He said the words carefully and slowly, squeezing her hand.

  “Love you too. But it was just a walk.”

  “Mina, I’m your husband, not one of those people.” He waved a hand to indicate paramedics, police, psychologists—all the people beginning with p. “How long have I known you? Talk to me, Mina.”

  “Stop saying my name.”

  “Okay, but I know it’s not nothing.”

  “I was just going for a walk.” She slumped against the car door. Her face hit the glass.