The Girl Who Fell from the Sky (4 page)

Crack. Mrs. Anderson’s yardstick smacks down on his desk and breaks in half. The crack is in my bad ear. I can feel it pulse red because there is nowhere for the sound to go.

“Hush. It’s time to be quiet.” Everyone is laughing and not
at all quiet. This is the third yardstick Mrs. Anderson has broken this week, two of them on Anthony Miller’s desk.

“It was me again Mrs. A. Sorry,” Anthony Miller says. “Sorry” sounds different now, or I make it sound different. I hold onto Anthony Miller’s first “sorry,” the one meant for me.
Does it hurt?
No one asked that before.

I am still counting days.

W
HEN
G
RANDMA IS
gardening is the only time she doesn’t seem just a little bit mad. Even when she wakes up in the morning, there’s a frown on her face. Grandma wakes up at 5:15 a.m. She takes the number 7 bus downtown and transfers to the 34. That takes almost two hours. She works for a white lady in the southwest part of town. That’s where the white people live. None of them have time to take care of their grandmothers, and that’s what Grandma does. Grandma is a grandma who helps grandmas. That seems important. When Grandma needs help, I don’t want another grandma to take care of her. I’ll do it myself. I think that’s only fair.

When Grandma is gardening, I sit on the porch in her rocking chair and read. Right now I am reading Chaim Potok’s
The Chosen
. One girl in class said it was the first big book she has ever read. I’ve been reading big books since fourth grade. I have some favorites. I think this book will become one of them.

“You think I don’t like books,” Grandma says. I never said that. But I do wonder sometimes when she asks me to read her the listings in the
TV Guide:
Maybe Grandma can’t read.

“Grandma, you just know things.” I say this like I am giving
her the pat on the head that she wants. Grandma does just know things—like she knows the names of the flowers and plants. She can see only the leaf and tell you what it’s from and what it can do.

Aunt Loretta is different than Grandma. She’s interested in things, new things—not just gardening, good deals, looking respectable, and being clean in pressed clothes. Aunt Loretta doesn’t talk the way Grandma does either. She makes her
t
and
ing
sounds sharp. There is no Texas in the way Aunt Loretta talks.

Aunt Loretta has something that maybe you could call class. It’s not the made-up kind like Grandma has, fake pearls and Sunday hats, but something that comes to you as if you were born to the king and queen. Aunt Loretta understands better than Grandma that reading a big book is more classy than wearing fake pearls watching TV. I wish I knew a better word for what I mean. On the days she’s feeling fussy, Grandma calls it “High Falutin” and then she calls it “white”—like the kids at school.

When Grandma fusses at me, it means she wants me to like her. I will like her enough. Sometimes I can even say, “I love you, Grandma,” and that means something to her. I do love her because I have to. She’s my grandmother.

I have a trick figured out though, so I don’t make mean thoughts about her when she starts to fuss. Thoughts like she’s not so smart, like she’s not as good a mother as Mor. I picture Grandma my age and someone loving her. I picture someone loving her but not someone like me who can curl into her lap while we’re watching TV, and I’m loving her soft squishiness,
and her lavender, and the little bit of sweat I can smell if she’s still wearing her blue dress uniform. I picture someone loving Grandma small. Grandma curled up. Grandma closing her eyes when a warm hand runs through the front of her hair. Grandma’s hands are the ones that are quiet, and the loving one’s touching her.

“It’s true. I don’t know any of them books you be readin,” Grandma says. “But I would of if they let me go to school. To that private school.”

There is a story there that Grandma doesn’t tell. It’s a story that makes her sigh and tut-tut. When she digs again, she is in that story, not looking at the ground, but pictures of Texas in her mind. Or maybe they are pictures of herself young, more like Aunt Loretta—more like a girl who was going somewhere. That’s when she stops looking so mad.

“Grandma, I think if I read you the stories, you could have the same books in you too.”

“You think too much,” she says.

“Don’t listen to that. You keep on making your mind good. That’s important,” Aunt Loretta says.

She’s come home from work, an office job where she types and gets coffee or lunch for the boss. She’s still in office clothes: a skirt, high heels, a silk blouse, and a sweater. Seeing her standing on the porch right then, it’s hard to imagine that Aunt Loretta even belongs here.

You can see how she looked exactly right driving down the street in Los Angeles in a fancy car or riding in a cab in New York City, when she was married to Uncle Nathan.

“My mother means well, Rachel, but you just keep doing
what you’re doing with your studies,” Aunt Loretta says. “It’s important.”

“Ain’t nobody said it wasn’t. But she need to put some common sense up against that book sense.”

“Mama, leave her alone. She’s a good girl.”

“I’m right if I say they used to say that about you too,” Grandma says. “Still you run off just seventeen with that boy Nathan. You slept in the bed you made.”

Grandma and really no one talks about where Uncle Nathan went. Uncle Nathan played football and basketball and baseball. “Real good,” as Grandma says, meaning very well. Uncle Nathan doesn’t play anything now. His “playin around days” are done. I don’t think he died because then Grandma would never say his name. “Bad luck conjurin up spirits and all.” Grandma never says “Ariel.” Grandma never says “Robbie.” Grandma never says my mother’s name.

I have never seen Aunt Loretta look anything like mad. Sad is what she does normally, but right now in her eyes it’s as if all she is is a flame. But she doesn’t say anything. And then it’s like someone’s thrown water on her. “You know what, Mama,” she says, “you’re right. You go on and be right.”

Jamie

Jamie visited the courtyard shrine every day until it rained.

The shrine was made of an old board elevated by two cement blocks a foot off the ground. On the board, covered by a brightly colored cloth, there were candles, flowers, a teddy bear, and balloons—two already popped—attached with barely sticky tape. And there was a coffee can with a hole poked through the plastic lid, like the one passed around at church, that said
COLLECTIONS
.

On that first day, Jamie put a quarter in the coffee can. He wanted to put in more.

A school portrait of the bird-boy was taped to the collection can. In the photo he was six maybe seven, Jamie thought, because he was missing the same two teeth Jamie was missing at that age. And next to that was a photo of the girl with the fuzzy hair and the blue blue eyes.

There was also a framed family photograph. The mother was seated in a wicker chair and standing on each side were the boy and the girl. It was the family from the sixth floor. Jamie had seen them when they moved in a few weeks ago and in the stairwell a few times too. It was summer, but he never saw them play outside.

What is its shape? What shape are its wings?

T
HE TELEVISION CAMERAS
came on the first day. Channel 2, 5, and 7 interviewed neighbors Jamie had never seen. The neighbors said many things:

She seemed regular.

Kept to herself.

Always made sure those kids were clean.

Cute kids, damn shame.

Polite, quiet.

Didn’t know much about her.

She had a man around here for a while. A white man. Kinda scraggily lookin.

Acquire the habit of comparing a new bird with some familiar “yardstick”—a House Sparrow, a Robin, a Pigeon, etc., so that you can say to yourself, “smaller than a Robin; a little larger than a House Sparrow.”

What is its shape?

T
HE NEXT DAY
the shrine was still there. The cameras were gone.

The coffee can that said
COLLECTIONS
remained—no thief brave enough to steal money meant for a grave.

The yellow police tape that cordoned off the spot where the bird-boy and his family had lain was torn. Part of it had blown away, and the rest flapped in the wind.

Jamie had emptied his mother’s pocketbook. He had run his hand beneath the couch cushions. He walked along the sidewalk looking for loose coins. Including the six beer bottles he turned in for change, he collected $5.83. He put the money, two fistfuls of coins, in the collection can.

Jamie who was really James stood before the shrine thinking of his life list. It was still a list of ordinary birds: robins, sparrows, pigeons, gulls. The great egret, snowy white, airborne. If only that was what he had seen that day. He would have become someone worth knowing. He would have been in the newspapers, maybe even on TV. How could he have been so wrong? How could he have made the shadow of a boy into a bird? There were questions he had to learn to ask, to train his eyes to see.

What shape are its wings?

He stood before the shrine for hours that day. When he finally went home for dinner, he was surprised to see his mother seated on the couch. She called him to her and hugged him close. She cooed: “You okay, baby?” She rocked him back and forth. She was yeasty and pale. No new friends in the last three days and his mother needed touching.

Her arm dangled limply across his shoulder. “Your mama’s not so bad, is she?”

He took the love she gave, the broken pieces of affection. Maybe the bird-boy had changed things after all. “Mom,” he said, “I saw—”

Just then the bedroom door opened. A new friend stood in the doorframe. “What you waitin on, girl?”

Only then did Jamie see the familiar marks on his mother’s arm and the haze that she seemed to be seeing him through, the glassy look in her eyes. The feeling that rose between them became a chasm, an opening wound. How could he ever be certain of what he saw?

There were questions he had to learn to ask, to train his heart not to feel.

His mother retreated to the bedroom. “Mama’s gonna go rest. Tell me if you go outside.” The sound that kept out the sound played.

“Going outside,” Jamie said a few moments later. He grabbed his book and walked down to the second-floor landing where he sat and read.

Learn bird songs. They can identify a species even when the bird may secrete itself in thick cover.

Jamie thought: He could have known the new new friend was there. He thought: Had he listened for the sounds, he would have heard thick shoes on the bare parquet floor, the belt clasp undone, and its click on the opening zipper. He would have heard the folding down of sheets. He would have known his mother’s limp hug was pure apology.

A
FTER TWENTY MINUTES
in the stale stairway—minutes that felt like hours as he waited for the new new friend to leave—Jamie walked downstairs, then slid down the banister to the landing. A man with woolly-looking orange hair sat rocking back and forth, blocking the path to the door.

“Excuse me.” Jamie’s voice was so small the man batted it away as if it were a fly. “Excuse me,” he said, a little louder.

“What?” The orange-haired man looked up. His eyes didn’t focus right.

“I just need to . . .” Jamie’s voice trailed off as the man scooted to the side.

Jamie ran to the shrine where half a dozen people were gathered.

A reporter—pretty and young like his first schoolteacher—wanted to make the bird-boy’s story one that made sense. The reporter tried to coax out their stories the way Mrs. Gordon had when she wanted the kids to say their ABCs. Still no one would talk to her. Then she approached Jamie.

“Hey,” she said. “Did you guys play together? You and the boy?” she asked.

“No,” he said. He hugged the
Peterson Field Guide
tightly against his chest as his armor.

“Go to school together?”

“Huh-uh.”

The reporter wrote “no.”

There were questions she should ask, Jamie thought. These were not the ones.

“What did you see?”

I saw a bird, he wanted to say. A great egret in the sky. I saw it swoop down below my window. I wanted to see it land.

Jamie who was really James didn’t give that answer. What did he see? It didn’t matter. His eyes saw everything wrong. Shadows, mothers, birds.

Instead he said, “I saw a man. At the top of that building. He pushed them off and ran.”

The reporter asked him more questions and he answered.
Jamie who was really James was shaking inside with delight. The reporter wrote down every word he said.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “That’s exactly what I saw—the way it happened.”

“Great.” She continued scribbling. “Did you tell the police?”

“Ma’am?”

But the reporter had forgotten the question as soon as she’d asked. She turned and said to the photographer, “I want a picture of him.”

“Could you hold this up?” the photographer asked Jamie and handed him the framed family photograph from the shrine. Jamie’s hands were trembling with excitement.

“What’s your name, sweetie? And tell me how to spell it,” the reporter asked.

Jamie thought of the great egret, of his life list, of his father James. He thought of how much he wanted a new history to his name, and he said, “My name’s Brick. I’m eleven. B-r-i-c-k.”

T
HE NIGHT
J
AMIE
who was really James became Brick he could hear the rain on the courtyard window. He heard the wind and the clank of metal garbage cans that had lost their lids.
Learn bird songs. The call note, the song.
Jamie hummed himself to sleep, a tune buzzing into his dreams.

In the morning he left without eating the cereal his mother had left for him. The milk was warm and the bowl was half full of cornflakes that were mostly crumbles. He ran to the newsstand by the bus stop to see the morning’s paper. Page B3. His was the hand that held the photo of the bird-boy’s family. When the newsstand man turned, Jamie ran off with just the B-section in his hand.