Imperfect Birds (36 page)

T
he next day’s sky was lower and rich, silver gilt like vermeil. Fall’s first snap called for sweaters, and Elizabeth usually loved this, when the sky was washed-out blue and cool until you noticed the low sun on your skin, the fresh briskness of the air. This time, as in the autumn when Andrew died, she wished it behind her, wished to be already months past these miserable heartache days.

She called Anthony, who insisted she call Allison Reid. She did, and was stunned by the cost. She asked if there was a sliding scale for payment. There wasn’t. She called the county’s biggest outpatient rehab next. Though it was much more affordable, there were no spaces. “But they come up all the time. I’ll call you the minute we have an opening. Just hang tight,” the receptionist told her, sounding tired.

James wanted to issue a fatwa against Fenn and Alice, or at least a no-contact clause. Elizabeth fought for strictly monitored visits, largely because she felt that this would help maintain whatever peace they could manage and would give Rosie less to rebel against—and something they could take away from her if she fucked up—but also because it would please her. Elizabeth was so hungry for this, and so defenseless against Rosie’s verbal freeze, the thin, stilted monosyllabic tone. Elizabeth felt James’s impatience with this plan, but to her surprise, he said it was her call.

So it was nighttime young people’s meetings for Rosie. Elizabeth and James drove her there together. They planned to stay at each meeting with her the whole time, but she adamantly refused: they would be the only parents. So they agreed to meet her on the porch outside when she was done. Fenn was usually waiting with Rosie when they came to pick her up. Where there had been seven-o’clock curfews for dinner on school nights, now one of them picked Rosie up right after school three days a week, and Alice dropped her off the other two. She had to walk through the door by three-thirty, or she would lose her computer, too. Weekends had been canceled entirely until further notice. If she could put together two weeks of meetings and sobriety, she could meet Fenn for a movie. They would drop her off ten minutes early, pick her up at the theater ten minutes after the movie ended.

Rosie was okay with this at first, relieved if slightly impatient with the new structure. The first few days, she swept through the kitchen like a bear in a campsite, grabbing food. She talked on the phone with Fenn and Alice and did homework. She looked better right away: her skin grew clear, and she began to put on weight. It could have been so much worse. She wasn’t allowed to smoke at all, anywhere, and that was sort of a drag. But she bore down on the long-term homework assignments, and took the Valium that Alice had brought her from her mother’s stash. Some mornings at school she mixed Adderall and Valium. Nothing else, as she was pretty much on the wagon. She’d thought James and her mother would totally prohibit her from seeing Alice and Fenn, so any time at all with either of them was a victory.

There was even a part of her that liked these quiet days, a chance to settle down and regroup, prove to herself she was fine. Being a senior was actually kind of cool, because you ruled the roost, and people looked up to you. She made sure to get her homework done after school and still had time to check in with Alice on the phone. She had boring but mostly friendly dinners with her parents, and frequent AA meetings with Fenn and the chill kids from town. Sometimes the speakers were so hip and hilarious and wise that it almost made you want to be an AA person. Other times meetings gave you funny stuff to talk about later, like this blonde babe named Cassidy who shared that the pain of betraying her parents had been crippilizing—a word that Rosie, Fenn, and Alice now used all the time. Or at the very least, the hour passed quickly and got the parents off her back. She made it a point to share in a pleasant voice with her parents what was going on: Alice had applied for early admission to the Fashion Institute and RISD; Jody’s boyfriend had shipped out to Dubai, and Jody might be coming back from San Diego; Fenn was on a new construction site, in Point Reyes, and he wanted them all to drive out to the coast to see it some weekend. Sometimes, though, it hurt so much to have lost Fenn and her freedom that she felt cold and dead. She tried to stay up about it—this was only temporary. Some days she came home and crashed until dinner. You were exhausted all the time when you were a teenager, stooped with the weight of early mornings, pressure, and backpacks.

“Maybe the worst is over,” Elizabeth said to James one day.

“Oh God, don’t
ever
say that again. It’s the worst possible bad ju-ju. Go get a chicken bone, wave it over the both of us.” They continued to wait for the outpatient rehab people to call.

O
n the second Saturday of Rosie’s confinement, her mother dropped her off at the theater to see a movie with Fenn, who stood there like a young Amish man in a white dress shirt. They waved good-bye and turned toward the door. Elizabeth drove away. One of Fenn’s roommates had seen the movie, and he told Rosie the high points while they sipped cold canned piña coladas in Fenn’s living room on the way to bed.

The movie the following Friday was two and a half hours long, plus trailers, so they took a light dose of mushrooms and sat in his backyard. House finches, goldfinches, song sparrows, wrens; the weather was bright and warm and sweet and cold all at once. He brought out a sleeping bag and they lay on it and looked at the stars, and then they climbed inside to hold each other.

He wanted to make love but she felt shy and cold, and the mushrooms had kicked in hard. It was like the K-hole you hit with ketamine, when you peaked and felt yourself a few feet away from your body, and your body got paralyzed, in a good way. They talked about how he wanted to live in Humboldt County, grow great weed to get ahead, and then convert the soil to organic farming and maybe grow apricots or something. She could go to Humboldt State, infinitely mellower than the colleges her mother was trying to coerce her into applying to. Rural, coastal, close enough to visit her parents.

They tripped without speaking for an hour or so, listening to the birds in the redwood. Fortunately, they began to come down; she had only an hour until she would be picked up at the theater. He made them fresh-squeezed orange juice, with a bit of vodka to soften the edges. It was funny that her parents hadn’t figured that they needed a Breathalyzer.

Over drinks, Fenn looked deep into her eyes, and said, “I want us both to live by different codes than our parents did. This is my only dream. I’m reading a book called
Songlines
, about Aborigines, and I think it may be what I’m looking for. They had a system to communicate throughout the vast lands, which was so alive to them. Like birds do, right? There were invisible paths the Aborigines traveled by, that crisscrossed Australia because the Ancestors taught them that geography had a song—it’s alive and singing, and you are never lost or alone, because you can hear it telling you where you are.”

“Hey, we’re having Ancestors’ Day soon at Sixth Day Prez if you want to go,” she said. God, how stupid that sounded after what a brilliant thing he had just described. He did not respond for a while, but stroked her shoulders. “Don’t you totally love Aborigines?” he asked finally. She guessed she did. They came down gently as clouds.

J
ames,” Elizabeth whispered in the dark one night, “Rosie really is doing better.” They held each other tightly in bed, and she was about to drop off. She had begun to recognize her life again but still lived for bedtime. The dark was warmer than the light of day had been, skin to skin: it was nice not to see each other’s worn faces and flaws. He yawned loud as a dog. She knew every single personal noise James made—grunts when he got up, light snores when he went to sleep, medium snores throughout the night, groans from repositioning, occasional farts, all part of the marital soup. They hadn’t made love in so long. She had the sex drive of a haggis, but when he slid his leg between her legs that night, she smiled and climbed on top of him. It was a temporary but very sweet fix. He knew the moves, the combinations, and it was lovely once they started. Then she was able to fall asleep, all thoughts chased from her head.

E
lizabeth spent the next few days killing time as pleasantly as possible while waiting for the county rehab to call. One Thursday, she went to an early AA meeting after dropping Rosie at school, and took the ferry to San Francisco afterward with Rae to see a new exhibit at the Asian. Rae looked like a buttercup in the drizzle, wearing a soft yellow parka and a knit cap. Elizabeth enjoyed the boat ride, although the whole time they were on the water she thought about jumping overboard. Her psychiatric meds dulled this desire but did not take it away—she had always wanted to jump out of any window, fall overboard and be done.

Rae’s cheeks grew red on the windy deck, and after a while they went inside. Elizabeth bought two cocoas with whipped cream from the bar, and as they sat nursing them below deck something leapt onto Elizabeth’s pant leg. It scared her out of her mind. But it was just a grasshopper. She pointed it out to Rae. It looked like a husk, desiccated and vigorous at the same time, a seedpod that could spring way high.

The grasshopper quivered a moment on her knee. “Wow,” said Rae, bending down low to peer at it. “It’s so pretty, isn’t it, like dry grass or foxtails.” It leapt off Elizabeth’s leg to the floor and then into the shadows. Elizabeth clutched her heart as if she felt faint.

“Oh my God,” Rae exclaimed. “Do you even understand what a great omen that is? It’s almost as auspicious as encountering a cow.”

Wary but game, Elizabeth said, “Okay, I’ll bite. What does it mean? Money, I hope.”

“Someone helpful and distinguished is about to enter your house. True!”

Nothing happened the first night, or the second. But on the third, while heating up soup, Elizabeth heard someone at the door. It was probably Witnesses, or maybe Rae was right and the grasshopper person was here. Maybe it was Ed McMahon. She smoothed her hair behind her ears, and went to open the door.

She found a tall person of nonspecific gender standing or rather jouncing on the stoop, beaming, chubby and beautiful, and it took Elizabeth a moment to recognize Jody in the punk shirt and pegged black jeans, long straggly blond Kurt Cobain tresses and kohl.

Jody cried and threw herself into Elizabeth’s arms. Elizabeth half lifted her in a hug. “My grasshopper girl.” Jody stepped back and peeked, puzzled, through unkempt bangs. Elizabeth yelled for Rosie:

“Rosie, Jody’s home!”

Rosie came barreling down the hallway toward them, shouting, “Jody!”

“Ro-Ro.” They hugged as if someone had told each of them that the other was dead, and Elizabeth joined them in a group hug, so there were six long arms, women’s arms, everywhere, cries and chirps of disbelief. Jody said not to look at her, because she was obese; she looked healthy and soft and sturdy.

“I quit smoking,” she announced. “Oh my God, and look!” She pulled up the T-shirt, and Elizabeth thought she was displaying the baby fat on her stomach, but something dangled from her belt, a chain of colored plastic key tags, strung together like soda-can pop tops, whites hooked onto white, then orange, then green. “I have sixty days clean in NA.”