Wings

The same night the first bird hits Marie’s kitchen window, two boys rob the Lucky 7 to 10 Market. Their faces are covered by balaclavas. The taller one carries a handgun, the shorter one bags the cash. They disappear on foot, under the burnt-out streetlight, through the cold night air. Marie puts on her coat and heads outside with a flashlight. She finds the oriole crumpled beneath her window. It’d startled her into breaking the plate she’d been washing, and now it’s dead. When she shines her flashlight on it, its upturned beady eye glints like treasure. She considers finding a trowel and digging a grave, but the dirt is hard this time of year, and there are stray cats who skulk through the woods at the edge of her property—they might dig up the bird anyway. Later in the night, she hears them yowling.

Marie learns of the robbery from the morning paper. No one has been caught; there are no suspects. The boy working the register, Ed Bingham, a real skyscraper of a kid, all lank and torso, is pictured unharmed on the front page, looking nonplussed, but then again, he’s never looked plussed a day in his life.

It’s another two days before the second bird hits Marie’s window, her kitchen again, the sound like a gunshot in her quiet house. This one flutters away in a dizzy arc. Marie starts and ambles to the window in time to watch it disappear. Another bird strikes in the evening, near sunset, the shadows growing long on the house from the poplars. Marie searches her yard for it. She finds nothing. When she rises the next morning, she collects the paper from her driveway and reads of another robbery, a break-in almost clear out of town, at one of the residences in the new housing development. The police can’t determine a clear connection between the two robberies other than the town of Spruce Mill isn’t much for crime and now there have been two crimes in a week. No one was home during the break-in. Altogether, a hair over four hundred is missing. It seems like a misplaced sense of work, Marie thinks—robbing two places and coming away with less than a week’s wages. She drops her toast at the sound of another thud against another window, from the sitting room this time. The bird is alive, beating its crumpled wings against the dirt. It’s a cardinal. Marie holds it in her hands, cupping it like water. She brings it inside and wraps it in a hand towel. It’s quivering. The feathers on its tufted head are soft, like her son’s hair as a child. He never learned to comb it. They watered him like a plant. He grew like one. He moved out west years ago.

“Feathers, just like Tom’s baby hair,” Marie says to Hank, her ex-husband, over the phone. Hank has moved out west too. Every odd month or so, Marie’s phone buzzes with a text from Hank, a photo of him and Tom, together.

“Just like him?”

“Hey, you know birds. Do I put it in a sling?”

“How are you getting on, Marie?”

“I started up violin again. With Sally, and the other church folks. We play together.”

“That’s good.”

“The birds keep hitting my windows, Hank.”

“They make stickers for that.”

“What about the ones who’ve already hit?”

“Marie, I don’t know.”

“Alright then.”

After she hangs up, another bird hits her window. Marie doesn’t know what to do with the injured cardinal; there is no vet for forty miles. She releases it in her yard and watches it hop, trying to flap its useless wings, trilling a pitiful succession of cheeps. The stray cats will almost certainly eat it. Marie frowns at her windows. She can’t fathom why the birds are striking them now when they never have before. She wants to blame someone, but can’t figure who, or what— the windows for existing, or the birds for not understanding better than to fly into them, or her grandparents for building the house all those decades ago where before there’d only been unoccupied air.

The next morning, Marie spreads jam on her toast and reads the paper—the same as every morning. She is predictable with what she considers the important things (full breakfasts, nature baths, evening gin) the way important things (sunrise, gravity, entropy) are so often predictable. The preacher who moved to town last year was robbed at gunpoint in his home. It’s on the front page. He’s the town’s likeliest candidate for a robbery. Makes decent money, unmarried, gives a second-rate sermon. It’s three strikes, as far as most folks are concerned. The preacher says in the paper that he had a silver watch in his family for generations. It’s priceless. The two robbers took it right off his wrist. Marie wonders if he, like any good preacher, recognizes the parable in this, something about flaunting wealth and its consequences. She pictures him sermonizing on the subject, growing increasingly beet-faced and belligerent as his sermon transforms into a eulogy for his missing watch. She giggles and she can’t stop giggling.

She’s supposed to drive into town. It’s the weekly meetup of the more musically savvy congregants to practice hymns for the next Sunday’s service, although the definition of savvy has endured some flagrant stretching. The tenor is perpetually off-key, and the flautist is always a beat ahead, and it’s such an effort to drive into town. Marie has managed to conjure excuses for the last three meetings. but with each passing excuse it is exponentially harder to invent a credible one.

Her car is slow to start, the engine grumbling to life after a pause of empty air. She hopes it will stall out, but it doesn’t. Before she reaches the church, she veers off into the hardware store parking lot. She buys a pack of “anti-collision window alert decals”—that’s what the package says, as if the manufacturers are charging by the letter. As she walks toward the checkout line, she sees one of Tom’s teachers from elementary school eyeing the drill bits. She is old now, retired. Her husband is dead. In a different life, Marie and the teacher could have been close friends. Marie skirts by, without acknowledging her. She will ask how Tom is doing, and Marie doesn’t have the energy to lie, to say Tom is doing well, or to tell the truth, that she doesn’t know how Tom is doing because they don’t speak much these days. He’s abandoned her for his new life out west. He’s forgotten her. The sudden wave of bitterness threatens to swallow Marie as it sometimes does, and she grimaces. She has decided this is how life works—accumulation, accumulation, accumulation. And then, after a certain age, erosion. Bones, memories, relationships, the works.

The decals sit untouched in the backseat of Marie’s car for four days. Five more birds strike her windows, limp thud after limp thud echoing throughout the silent house. Marie doesn’t startle anymore; the sound doesn’t bother her. She’s accustomed to noisy and abrupt. Tom was that way as a child. She’d liked it. It was a reminder that he was home, safe. When she finally presses the cutout of a maple leaf decal onto her bedroom window, another bird strikes it. The sound, so close to her, is deafening. Her window shudders.

“Do they need time to get used to them?” Marie asks Hank, over the phone again.

“What?”

“The birds.”

“Used to what?”

“The anti-collision what-do-you-call-thems.”

“The anti-collision whats?”

“The stickers. The stickers. Like you suggested. It hasn’t stopped them, Hank.”

“I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Have you seen Tom recently?”

“You should call him.”

“Is he alright?”

“He’s fine, Marie. He’s fine. I’m sure he’d like to hear from you. That’s all.”

Marie begins keeping a bird tally on the wall outside her pantry door. The marks multiply: after a week, she has tallied three dead birds, and six more who have struck windows. She takes the stickers down; they seem to act more as magnets than anything else. She is surprised by her own sense of relief. The birds shouldn’t suffer, of course, but it would be a shame to lose all that noise.

When Tom was young, they measured his height on the same wall outside the pantry. He shot by Marie when he was thirteen, but Marie kept measuring him. She dragged out the stepstool on his birthday each year, drawing a thin line on the wall at the crown of his head and scribbling the date beside it in faint pen. She was so proud when Tom passed six feet. She can’t remember why now; it’s just a number. The marks stopped when he moved out west. It was after he graduated school. The move had made sense to Marie. She’s never been further west than visiting cousins in Ohio, but she always imagines the people out there as taller, like people are on television. She’d expected Tom to return, though. This was his home, after all, and that’s what kids are meant to do—come back home. He made the compulsory holiday visits, but he stayed only as long as he needed to. Without him, the house was sucked of energy. He never learned to leave without slamming the front door. The sound of the first car he bought crunching up the gravel drive. The dishes when he stacked them, chiming and clanging. His music, the type young people liked (the type Marie now puts on the radio sometimes), booming from his room. After he left, Marie and Hank sat in their chairs in the sitting room, reading the paper, reading their books, listening to each other turn the pages and clear their throats, or cough, or sigh, or point to what they were reading and say, “Now isn’t this interesting?” just to have something to say. Eventually, Tom’s gravity was too strong; Hank uprooted to join him. Marie didn’t have the same illusion she had with Tom. She knew Hank wouldn’t return.

In their absence, Marie’s habits have engulfed her. She cleans the house with something bordering on religiosity, sanding and staining the porch, vacuuming and sweeping and mopping, remaking the beds, dusting pictures, straightening pictures, beautifying the house as one does a body before cremation. The robberies are the most exciting news in months. According to the paper, an older gentleman Marie often sees in the supermarket returned home one evening to the two boys, balaclavas masking their faces, rummaging through the drawers in his bedroom. He says they shoved him to the floor and sprinted from the house. He says he could tell they were young because of their voices—they sounded like his grandchildren. He says he went for his old hunting rifle, just to pop a warning shot at them, but they were already gone.

Marie wonders if the robbers will come for her. She’s an easy mark: older, a woman, alone. She has a thousand dollars squirreled away in an Agatha Christie book she’s never finished. It feels inevitable that they’ll make their way to her door. Marie is certain of it without knowing why. She begins leaving her door unlocked so they won’t go to the hassle to break it— it’s antique, after all. When she prepares for sleep, she peers out the window, disappointed to see no faint shadows stalking toward her porch in the moonlight. Often, at night, sitting in the semidarkness in her recliner, Marie imagines the robbers breaking in and finding her as she is: staring at the windowpane, a book drooping out of her hand. She imagines herself flicking on the lamp, calm as a cloud, and asking what it is they’ve come here looking for. They’re both wearing balaclavas again. Their names are Gavin and Wyatt, although Gavin calls himself Cash and most folks have long ago shortened Wyatt to W and then W to Dub and then Dub to D. D carries the handgun. Cash bags the cash. When he’s older, Cash explains he pressed the gun into D’s hand before each robbery because he knew D would never pull the trigger. He couldn’t claim the same for himself.

They’re surprised to find Marie so tranquil, leaning back in her chair as if she could doze off at any moment. It sets them off-kilter. D blurts out the truth: they’re here to rob her. Cash jabs D in the stomach, as if D has divulged information that isn’t already obvious. Marie rises from her recliner. She offers the boys coffee, tea, at least a glass of water. She invites them to sit with her for a spell.

“You don’t have to take off your ski masks,” Marie says.

Cash wants her fucking money. D wouldn’t say no to a beer.

“I’ll grab two cokes,” Marie says.

When she returns, two glasses of coke in her hands, the ice cubes popping as they melt, Cash is pacing the length of the carpet. D is hunched, his hands stuffed in his pockets. Marie can see the bulge of the small gun in his jacket.

“Please, have a seat.”

The boys sit. Marie hands them their glasses. They pull their balaclavas high enough to sip their cokes. Marie settles across from them. She studies their exposed chins. Cash has the prickles of a red beard laying claim to his face. D is baby-faced. He is oafishly large, like a character from a Saturday morning cartoon.

Marie shakes her head. “What are you doing?” she asks. She means it cosmically, and the boys seem to understand this. Neither of them answers. Cash kicks up his feet on the coffee table. D looks like he’s sitting on a rusted nail. Cash chooses the spots they rob. He comes up with the plans. After he pockets the money, he hides it in a hole in his mattress, the way he’s seen it in movies, stacking it in neat piles, feeling its weight in his hands. His parents are always shattering glass: windows, mirrors, liquor bottles. They’re the type of mad that’s loud about it. Cash, when he’s mad—when is he not?—gets quiet like the gap between thunder. Sometimes, it bursts out of him. He can’t control it. He punches trees until his knuckles bleed. D is along for the ride. He’s the type who says the obvious just to have something to say. He returns home from each robbery and takes long, hot showers. The nights are always dry and cold, but his clothes are soaked. His body shakes.

It’s silent for a couple minutes. Marie’s grandfather clock chimes. The phone rings; it’s probably Hank. Marie lets it ring. “My grandparents built this house the year after they married,” she says, “right at the turn of the century. Can you imagine? Spruce Mill wasn’t big enough to be a dot on a map. They raised five kids here. My mother was the oldest; she inherited the house when they passed and then she went and birthed five kids here too. I was her first. I learned to walk in this room. I ate every meal at that same dining table. When Dad got sick, I brought him meals in the bed upstairs. When Mom got sick, I washed her in the bathtub. Naturally, I inherited the house when they passed. There’s no one left for it but me. Everyone’s gone, and they’re not coming back.”

Cash is studying his knuckles. They’re bruised and cut. D is glancing around the house like he cares about what Marie is saying.

“You’re the same boys who stole the preacher’s silver watch? Don’t lie—I don’t care about him. What I mean to say is, if you’re after family heirlooms, you can take the whole house. Steal it right off the foundation. Leave me sitting in the empty drive. Truly, you’d be doing me a favor.”

Cash, finally, turns his attention to Marie. He stares at her. They’re headed west, to Las Vegas. They need enough money to get his old man’s car there. It eats gasoline and can’t kick this bad habit of breaking down on interstates.

“West.” Marie says. “What’s out west?”

D says there’s an ocean out west. Cash shrugs. It’s not here. It’s not Spruce Mill. That’s all it needs to be.

“There’s a lot of places that aren’t here that are a lot closer.”

This is the point. Marie knows it. The west is the edge of the map. There are sandstone and saguaros. The beguiling casino lights at night. Everything is larger: the horizon, the mountains, the myths people tell. The vastness seems dizzying to her, but she remembers Tom, before he left, being allured by it, obsessed with the photos he saw and stories he read.

“Isn’t it too large?” she asks. “Won’t you get lonely?” In her most vindictive moments, Marie slips into fantasies of Tom in his Los Angeles apartment, sitting alone on his bed like he used to on Friday nights in his early teenage years before he outgrew his shyness, except now he is drowning in the pulsing sprawl of the city and he has no mother to turn to. He is always on the verge of calling Marie. He is wishing he’d never left Spruce Mill. After she emerges from these thoughts, Marie feels the creeping need to wash her hands, as if her fantasies are sins on a Biblical scale.

D is the one who responds. He shakes his head. They can’t get lonely; he’s got Cash’s back, and Cash has his. Forever. This is the kindest thing D has ever said.

“What will you do when you get there?”

Cash slides his feet off the coffee table. He leans forward. Even through his balaclava, Marie can see his eyes glittering. Has Marie ever been inside a casino? He doesn’t need to gamble; all he wants is to walk up to the blackjack table and watch the dealer shuffle the deck of cards. He wants to see the crisp bills of money, pressed flat like ironed laundry. He wants to see bills where the green is still bright. Where it hasn’t begun to fade. He wants to press the money to his nose and take a deep whiff.

Marie thinks of her emergency funds, a thousand dollars in ten bills flattened between the pages of the Agatha Christie book. These boys are probably the same age Tom was when he headed west. She worried so much for him during those first few years. He still seemed like a child back then, like an outline of himself—like his body had grown but he needed to color himself in. She called him twice a week. More than anything else, she wished she could be there to watch his back when he wasn’t paying attention. He could be so careless, and the world wasn’t anything like Spruce Mill—it was plain nasty. But some days, when Tom picked up the phone, he sounded like he was glowing. After a while, when it became clear Tom had no intention to return to Spruce Mill, Marie’s calls became less frequent. Tom didn’t need her anymore. Half the time, he didn’t pick up the phone. Marie can’t remember when, but eventually she stopped calling altogether.

Marie rises and tells the boys to wait. When she returns, she has the money in her hands.

She hands it to Cash.

“How does it feel?”

It feels light. Cash counts through the bills. It’s the most money he’s ever held.

“You boys be safe,” Marie says. “Don’t make a fool of me. And don’t be strangers either.

I want you to promise you’ll visit.”

Cash nods. He’s smart enough not to say anything that could change Marie’s mind. He rises and D rises after him. Marie escorts them to the front door and watches them walk down the gravel drive until they disappear into the night, first their heads, shrouded in their black balaclavas against the black sky, and then their bodies.

It’s approaching three and a half years later when a young man walks up Marie’s driveway. She’s living in the same house, alone. Summer is ceding to autumn, but the trees haven’t turned and the heat hasn’t dissipated. The young man knocks on Marie’s door. His car broke down outside of town. This is the first house he’s come upon. He’s been traveling, driving across the country from out west. He’s surprised his old beater made it this far. He has long, curly, bright red hair. He asks Marie if she’d be kind enough to get him a glass of water. They sit on the porch together. His glass sweats.

“I have a son in Los Angeles. An ex-husband too,” Marie says.

The young man has traveled all over: Los Angeles, sure, Laramie, Las Vegas, Las Cruces. He grew up out here though. Marie nods. She can hear it in his voice. They watch the approaching dusk. The fireflies are winking in and out, rising like tiny helium balloons. The young man gestures toward the poplars at the edge of the driveway. He has missed this: sitting on the porch on a late summer evening, watching the fireflies. He’s only visiting. He’ll return west again, but he dreams of nights like these.

Marie frowns. “My son says the same thing.”

The young man sets his glass of water down. He shrugs. Isn’t he allowed to miss two places at once? He’s made himself a new life out there. He pulls at a strand of his hair. He grew it out after moving west. He used to keep it buzzed. Marie can’t imagine him with short hair; now it cascades all over his forehead and neck, unkempt. He rolls up his sleeve to show Marie a tattoo high on his bicep. He got it in Las Vegas, and he has a second one on his back. He’s in town to visit his parents, but he’ll never tell them about the tattoos. It’d only cause a fight. He doesn’t even go by the same name anymore. When he was here, he was a different person, as if a harsh interrogation light was revealing other angles of his face. It’s hard not to slip back into that old self whenever he returns.

The evening air is thick with the sound of insects. Marie listens to the crickets chittering. An owl hoots in the distance. In two gulps, the young man swallows the rest of his water. He rises from his chair and, with effort, Marie also rises. “You can stay as long as you like.”

He only needed a glass of water, and to rest for a spell. It’s been such a hot day. He thanks Marie. She’s a good, good person, to invite him in like this, a stranger. When he shakes Marie’s hand, he gives it a small squeeze. He doesn’t mention his car and neither does Marie.

Another bird strikes Marie’s window. She jumps. The sound has shattered her imagination. She’s still lying in her recliner, and she pushes herself up. She glances out the window. The sky is dark, the moon obscured by the clouds. Marie is surprised to see it’s snowing. Heavy flakes, spiraling slowly down. As she watches, the snow comes faster, in flurries. It’s been a couple years since Spruce Mill has seen a true snowstorm. It’s already dusted over the grass and is steadily accumulating. There will be no more birds flying in this weather, Marie thinks, nothing striking her windows as they ice over. She wonders how much snow will have fallen by the next morning. When Tom was a child, he loved their occasional snowstorms. Marie loved them, too, how the snow muffled everything. Their whole world became thick, still. They lay on their backs in the driveway, staring toward the crowns of the trees. Together, they listened to the only sound there was: the steady rush of snowmelt and wind under the bright, rising sun. Only when they were shivering and soaked did they return inside. Marie warmed hot chocolate while Tom thawed himself in the shower.

It will never snow in Los Angeles. Another thing Tom has left behind.

Marie shivers. She goes to her room to grab a blanket and remembers the Agatha Christie book on her shelf. When she checks, her emergency cash is there, untouched. Of course it is. There’s nowhere else it’d be. The robbers—the two boys—are out there now, Marie is sure of it. Even in this storm, they’re stalking the streets of Spruce Mill. She’ll read about them in tomorrow’s paper. But they’re not at her house. They’re not her two boys. Marie hopes, whoever they are, that they’re wearing mittens. She hopes they’re just like the boys she’s imagined: good kids when it comes to it, just trying to steal a future. They’re so real to Marie. She almost can’t believe they weren’t here, sitting on her couch, drinking cokes she poured. It’s as if she set the dining table and now the cloth has been ripped from it. Everything has been upturned. She wants to call Tom and tell him she met these two boys; one of them is just like him in so many ways. It’s ok that he hasn’t returned home. It’s all ok. She’s been selfish, wanting him here, wanting him to have made the same choices she made when she was young.

Marie’s hands dial Tom’s number before she even realizes she is moving. The snow is falling in droves. It’s a whiteout. Marie can’t see five feet beyond her window. She feels the urge to stand, an itch to do something, there is so much sudden energy coursing through her, more energy than she has felt in years. The phone is ringing. She’ll tell Tom all about the big storm. Maybe she’ll walk out into the driveway and press her phone against the snow and ask Tom if he can hear the snow, like they used to together. She’ll ask Tom when he plans to come back east for a visit. She’ll say she’d love it if he made a trip soon. Could she even suggest making a trip west? She grips her ringing phone. It’s a long trip, perhaps too far for someone her age. She has never been on a plane, is—she realizes in an instant—terrified of planes, the thundering engines, how frail their metal shells seem hurtling through the sky, the uncontrollability of it all, the tightness of their cabins. Still, the phone rings. She doesn’t even enjoy driving. It’s unfair of Tom, to think she should visit him when he never visits her. She wants to hold his head against her chest, like she used to when he was a small child, sitting on the couch, half asleep. She wants him to answer his goddamn phone.

Another bird slams into Marie’s sitting room window.

Marie drops her phone and as she goes to the window she can hear it ringing on and on, perhaps ringing forever, and she peers out into the tumbling snow and there is the bird, a pigeon of all things, twitching in the snow—isn’t it such a long way from anywhere it should be? Isn’t it such a long way to California? Is Tom out dancing tonight? He loves dancing. Those long limbs of his, meant for dancing. When he was a child, she used to take his small hands in hers, in the kitchen, dancing to fast music on the stereo, he’d laugh and laugh. The pigeon tries to flutter away, but it is caught in the snow. Its wings are broken and it is squawking and writhing, moving as no bird should. It will freeze to death. Or the cats—they will slink from the woods and devour the pigeon. They’ll rip apart it even as its heart still beats, and the snow will be bloodied in the morning, pigeon entrails strewn and freezing.

Marie decides against wearing her coat, decides against even wearing shoes. She wants to feel the snow against her body. It is freezing the way some hearts are freezing. Marie takes the pigeon in her hands. Its feathers are soft. It struggles against her, head cocked toward her. Marie is shivering and it is shivering and Marie hesitates, and then in one fluid movement she snaps the pigeon’s neck and she digs a shallow hole in the snow with her hands and covers the pigeon’s body with the snow and packs the snow down, and the cats may find it buried there and dig it up and eat it, but at least it will not suffer, and Marie returns inside, trembling, to her silent house, to her chair in the sitting room, where she will doze off and awaken in the morning to the newspaper, another robbery, only a hair over a mile from her—they are getting closer, those boys—and she will wait for them to come for her too.