Byrd (10 page)

Dear baby
,

There are days when the thought of bringing you into the world so that you can be someone else's child is almost too much. I'm like some soul-flattened character in a Kafka story or one of those absurdist plays I used to love
.

People talk about the kind of commitment it takes to be a mother. No one talks about how hard it is to hold onto the decision
not
to be a mother when there's a baby growing in you
.

My doctor has been careful not to weigh in on my decision. She only tests and measures and prescribes vitamins and tries to keep us healthy
.

J.D. tells me I'm doing a beautiful thing and that I should not lose sight of that. I wish I could believe him. Then I could write you letters filled with platitudes about how everything will work out for the best, instead of letters I can never let you read
.

II.

Born

The Infant Survivor

September 14, 1989. Parkertown on a Friday evening. Rows of wooden houses, windows squinting like drunks in the late sun. Women in dresses propped in open doorways. Men inside laughing, glass jars clanking. Every now and then a whiff of reefer. Children and dogs running circles in dirt yards. Tonight the children will stay up late while the grownups get high, because it's the weekend, no school tomorrow.

This is the rundown, furniture-mill part of Carswell, home to bootleggers and drug dealers. It has its own history: the part of town that burned in the Fourth of July fire of 1910. The mill had let out early for the holiday, and in the excitement somebody forgot the oily rags in the finish room. That night, after the barbecue and watermelon and sack races, after the gospel band and the fireworks, everybody went to bed so full and tired and happy and slept so hard that no one heard the explosion, or if they did, they thought it was just more fireworks. Flames shot out the roof of the finish room, fanned across the mill, and rolled through Parkertown—all the little wood shacks, the yards full of trash, the sleeping families. Twenty-five houses burned to the ground and everyone in them died except one child, a boy, Bobo Hairston, who was flung out a window and into a neighbor's yard, where he landed in a patch of soft dirt the neighbor had shoveled up for a garden that never got planted.

A miracle, the firemen called him. The miraculous infant survivor.

Bobo was sent away to the colored orphanage, grew up, married a girl from the home, and brought her back to Carswell to start a family. He got a job at the Fifty-Fifty on Cotton Grove Road where he bagged and delivered groceries until the store closed in 1972.

Bobo's wife is dead now, and he is nearly blind, but whenever anyone asks, “How you doing, Bobo,” he still says what he's always said. “Lucky to be here.” People ask just to hear him say it, like putting quarters in a jukebox.

The spot where Bobo landed is now covered with a house—small, weather-beaten, rough as a scab. There are houses where all the old houses burned. They look like the old ones used to. Like kindling.

Music wafts out of open doorways. Sultry voices—Luther Vandross, Anita Baker. In one doorway a crusty-faced boy huddles against his mother and stares wide-eyed at the street, where a white woman is passing by—a thin, tight-lipped, very white woman. She keeps to the middle of the street, but the street is narrow and the yard so shallow the boy could count the woman's eyelashes if he could count. She walks like somebody in a parade, stiff, stamping her feet. She's carrying a box of Kentucky Fried Chicken in both hands. Her hair is twisted in a bun, black hair with a thick spiral of silver. She is such a surprise the dogs forget to bark; the dogs don't even go after the smell of chicken. The little boy yanks on his mother's skirt. “What you
want,”
his mother says, smacking his hand. He points at the white woman's hair. “Swirly,” he says.

That night Claree gets a long-distance call from Sam, who's in Arizona, visiting his wife's family. Margaret's parents live in the desert outside Tucson. Claree has never been to Tucson. She's never seen a desert. She has never been outside North Carolina. She thinks of deserts not as places but as blanks between places.

Sam is talking about some cactus-tree park Margaret's parents took them to. He's talking fast, like he's afraid of running out of breath. “They're fifty feet tall, some of them. They look almost human. Like giants.”

“They aren't real trees,” Claree says.

“What?”

“Cactuses. They aren't real trees.” She lights a cigarette and wishes he weren't having such a good time. She has been losing him since the day he was born. “Cac
ti
, I mean.”

Margaret's parents live in a fake-adobe house, Claree has seen pictures, with a swimming pool and a patio and a built-in barbecue grill. They're all sitting by the pool now. It's earlier there. The sun is just going down. Claree pictures them in lounge chairs, Margaret and her parents drinking their beer out of glasses, snacking on corn chips and salsa, watching their big Western sunset, and Sam sitting off to one side, talking on the phone, saying things he wants them to hear even though they're pretending not to listen. In the background, Margaret's father laughs his deep, confident, businessman laugh. He impressed everyone at the wedding—so relaxed, so smooth with jokes, so tanned. Claree pictures him in expensive leather sandals. Getting up to throw steaks on the grill. She knows Sam will have to hang up soon.

“Your father left me at the chicken place this evening,” she says.

“He what?”

“He stayed in the car while I went in to get our dinner. When I came out, he wasn't there. Apparently he thought he could slip over to the VFW for another drink and get back before I missed him, but then he forgot about me. I waited and waited, but he never came. I had to walk home through Parkertown.”

“Why didn't you call somebody?”

“I wasn't scared. I was too mad to be scared. I got home with our chicken and there was his car, in the Davenports' front yard, parked right in the middle of their big pink camellia. And him still sitting behind the wheel.”

“You should have called somebody. You should have called Addie.”

“She's an hour away.”

“Forty minutes.”

“She doesn't want to be bothered.” She is trying not to let him hear how let down she is, and not only by Addie. “You know, she hasn't been home all summer? Every time we talk it's a different excuse. Busy at work, sick with a cold, something. She won't say what's really wrong, but I know. It's your father. I think she stays away because of him.”

“Is he okay?”

“He's fine. When I got to him he was calm as could be. Sitting in that big bush like he was stopped in traffic, waiting for the light to change.”

In a hospital room in Greensboro, the baby is coming.

After eleven hours of contractions, Addie asks for an epidural. The drugs turn her blood to ice water. She starts to shiver. Then the lower half of her goes numb—solid, dentist's-office numb. Then they stretch her legs apart, sit her up, drop the bottom out of the bed and tell her to push.

She pushes.

She can't tell what's happening with the baby because she can't feel anything from her rib cage down, but she pushes anyway, until she thinks the top of her head will explode. For an hour and a half she pushes, until she's running a fever of a hundred and two.

In the end they have to do a C-section. They take her to the operating room and lay her on a narrow table and put clips on her fingers. The doctor leans over and assures her there's nothing to fret about. The doctor's big face looks freshly scrubbed. Her gray hair is tucked into a cap. “You'll feel a twitch,” she says, “like when your eye jumps.”

Addie can't see what's happening, but when they open her, there is a smell like meat gone bad.

Then someone says, “We've got him.”

Addie isn't allowed to hold him because of her incision. The nurse has to hold him up above her draping. The nurse is short, her arms a cradle of fat. “Your son,” she says, smiling proudly.

Addie draws in her breath.

Whatever she'd been expecting, it wasn't this. It wasn't
him
. His face isn't shriveled but smooth and pink. His hair is a mat of dark wet feathers. His eyes are fierce. Addie raises her head to kiss him, but misses, and kisses the nurse's hand instead. Then the nurse carries him away. Addie can hear him down the hall, his hungry, hopeless squawking.

She names him Byrd. With a Y, like an open beak.

“This probably isn't the best time to mention it,” Sam says to Claree, “but Margaret and I are thinking of moving.”

“Where?”

“Out here. Where it's dry. Where I can breathe.”

“I don't understand, honey. Plenty of people with asthma live in North Carolina. Isn't your medicine working?”

“Sure, it's all working just fine, all the steroids and inhalers. Also ruining my liver. Didn't you read the book I sent?”

“I was going to,” Claree says. It isn't that she doesn't take Sam's asthma seriously; she just doesn't like to think about it all the time. “What about an air purifier? I've heard there's a new one on the market like they use in hospitals. I've heard it removes dust and moisture and everything.”

Sam doesn't answer. Claree knows this silence by heart.

“I just worry you won't be happy in the desert,” she says, “with no trees. You love trees. When you were small your favorite place was the woods. We bought that yellow teepee and set it up in the woods, and you and Addie practically moved in. That was before the Davenports bought the lot next door, remember? Remember the summer you found the bird? A robin with a broken wing, and we built a cage for it next to the teepee, and you and Addie spent all summer nursing it, digging up worms and feeding it until it could fly.”

“It was a blue jay.”

She lights another cigarette, sighs into the receiver. “I still think about that lot next door. We should have bought it when we had the chance, before the Davenports cut down your woods.”

“Did you know,” Sam says, “that most kids whose parents smoke get asthma sooner or later?”

“That can't be true. Where did you hear that?”

“Something like sixty-five percent. It was in the book I sent you.”

“Does this book say anything about air purifiers? Because I've heard the new one is supposed to take everything out of the air.”

Non–Identifying Information

Dear Byrd
,

My social worker, Janet Worry (not her real name), says I should write you letters. She doesn't know I've been writing you all along
.

She says a lot of her mothers (that's how she talks, “my mothers”) have trouble getting started. Some copy out favorite poems or song lyrics. Some send greeting cards
.

“Greeting cards?” I said
.

“It's a start,” she said
.

“What do your mothers write about?” I said
.

“Everything,” she said, “anything. Sometimes it's easiest to start with the facts, details of the child's birth. Whatever you think your child might like to know. Just be careful to leave out any identifying information.”

On the day you were born, J.D. took me to the hospital and went with me to the maternity floor. The carpet in the elevator smelled like iodine. One stop before ours, an orderly got on pushing a woman on a gurney. The woman's arms were covered with needle bruises. She had a high, weak voice, and she kept asking the orderly, “Why are you doing this, why are you doing this?”

They took me to a room and put me in a bed and J.D. came in and planted himself in the recliner and turned on the TV, some show about dolphins. I watched him watching. I watched the dolphins in his glasses. The room smelled like him. I felt safe. Then a nurse came in all crisp and efficient and said to him, “Are you the father?”

“The driver,” he said
.

“Maybe you'd like to wait in the waiting room
.”

J.D. stood up. He looked like Paul Bunyan. He came and stood over my bed and laid his hand on the top of my head like he had something to tell me. “Let me know how the show comes out,” he said
.

He waited fourteen hours before they called him to the nursery. Could you see him there, pressing his big face to the glass? He said he knew without asking which one was you. He said you looked like me, sort of, and sort of like the man on the dolphin channel
.

Three days later he took me home. He had a present waiting for me, a grab-box from his latest estate sale. Grab-boxes are how the sale companies clear out a person's small, junky items that can't be sold by themselves. Twenty-five, fifty cents, you take your chances. J.D. had gotten me a fifty-cent box. It had a pot of dead chrysanthemums, a glass frog for flower-arranging, a crocheted Kleenex-box cover, three shrimp forks, and a pair of ladies' worn-out terry cloth slippers still attached by a plastic thread. J.D. shoved his big feet in the slippers and tried inching along in them. “Here she is trying to get to the telephone,” he said. He wanted to make me laugh, and I wanted to. But I could only picture the old woman from the hospital elevator, the one who kept asking
, Why are you doing this?

Dear Byrd
,

Dolphins help women have babies, and not just by swimming around on TV screens in hospital rooms
.

There's a man in Russia, a famous midwife who delivers babies underwater, in the Black Sea. He says dolphins are attracted to mothers. It's like they know. When a woman gives birth, the dolphins gather around her, smiling the way dolphins do, and lift the baby on their long noses and carry it up to the surface where it can breathe
.

Dear Byrd
,

When I was growing up there was a strange old man who lived next door to my grandparents. Mr. Junius Beck. When my family went for our Sunday afternoon visits, my brother and I would slip over to Mr. Beck's. He lived in a small white house with artificial flowers stuck in the ground outside the front door, his plastic garden. He would invite us inside and offer us candy hard as fossils. Then he'd take out his family album, a green notebook worn at the edges, and turn to a picture of his wife and infant daughter, who had died years earlier from a gas leak while he was away from home. He had photographed them at their funeral—in the picture, they were lying together in a coffin in their frilly clothes. “Here's Annie Mae and the baby in the corpse,” he would say. My brother and I knew better than to laugh at his wrong word. Even as children we knew enough to say, “We're sorry, we're so sorry.” The words seemed to work like a drug. Mr. Beck would let out a little sigh, a soft, rumbling sound from deep in his throat. Then he would close the picture album, set it back on the shelf, pass us the candy jar and let us fill our pockets
.