Bird Read Free

stairs the way she has learned to—sitting, moving backward, moving up, thinking of the seal and its flippers. Hands on the step: straighten your arms: hoist your big butt up.
    She needs a bladder tuck—doctor said so. Her bladder sags, it pooches out of her—unmoored and inelastic—any time she stands. So she sits, and tests it with her finger, and of course she thinks baby . But this one will be pelagic and never come to land.
    Bird reaches the landing and drags her mother’s robe across a nail poked up from the wide-plank floor. A scrap of cloth tears free when Bird stands up, a ragged wing her boy will bring to breakfast in the flat of his hand, saying, “Mama, I found a, I found a, I found a—”
    But it is not, after all, a butterfly like the one that once stood on his nose.
    For now, he sleeps. The boy sounds like seven men sleeping. He is small enough Bird could carry him still from room to room to room, if she could.
    He says, “Carry me like a baby. Feed me your milk like a baby. Feed me the kind that’s cream.”
    She finds the rug with her feet, holds her hands out, blind, finds her bed in the dark.
    â€œWho called?” her husband asks.
    Bird doesn’t answer him. He’ll be down in a beat, in a long-drawn breath—a heavy sleeper, her husband, heavier since the children came.
    Bird slides her cold feet into the heat he makes. She drops off to sleep for a minute, three, for a glimpse of a dream of Mickey, Mickey galloping over the prairie swinging a lariat over his head—roping gophers, roping coyote. Ho doggie. Not another two-legger in sight. But something whimpers, hurt, in the grasses, lost.
    That’s the baby startled awake in her crib.
    Bird moves toward her, the sizzle of panic starting up in her chest: she is too slow, too late, she always will be. The baby sounds like a barking machine. She thrashes in her crib, unboned and blind, good as blind. The weight of her body pins her, strands her in the drift of her sheet: she’s been dropped by the wind, breached from the sea. Shored up here, needing.
    Every living tissue, Bird thinks. She doesn’t want to, but of course she does. Bird wants a shirt that smells of her mother still to ball up in her hands. So to sleep. Sleep and let the phone go, let the school bus pass. Take the day in bed.
    I can’t want that.
    But she does.
    She brings the baby to her breast in bed and tries to sleep. Nothing doing. She’s all stirred up. She smells smoke, or a hurricane coming. Smells the baby’s milky head. She has a tooth already, this baby, a little headstone poking through. A little zing when she nurses. It hurts. If only it would hurt a little more, Bird thinks, maybe she would wake him. Take her man in her mouth and wake him, want him hard again. Gimme gimme.
    She tries to want that, but what she finds to want is the mess of herself, the old dream that Suzie lives. Makes up, or lives, Bird cannot sort it. She cannot sort the news from the wishful, the actual from the dreamed-up muck of what Suzie fears, or Bird does, from what Suzie wants, or Bird does, or half the time what difference there is between wanting at all and fear.
    She will turn a corner and find him there.
    She will never in her life again see him.
    Sacred, she thinks, and narcotic. That’s how it felt to her.
    And now every word Bird utters or hears makes it feel flimsy and dull. But it wasn’t. It was sacred, she thinks, and narcotic. Doomed—but that didn’t matter.
    That Mickey lived for weeks in his ragtop—summer then, the sumac high, down by the Brooklyn Bridge. Didn’t matter to her. They climbed the trusses—in the wind, the rain, the dark of the night they met. They were lit. They were lights in the great swag of lights the river passed beneath with its garbage scows, its freight of darkened souls.
    They kissed, and the air everywhere went sparky.
    Sparky is her boy’s word.
    May he