The Lovebird (37 page)

“No thanks.” He stood close, looking at the passing faces, saying nothing. “Did you find Josie?” I asked.

“Yes, Cora’s with her. Sure you don’t want anything?”

“Yes,” I said, but I wasn’t sure. Maybe I wanted endless orange slices slipped between my lips, and bits of hay in my hair.

Jim lingered. “Okay,” he said finally. After he left, I realized he had wanted me to go along.

I WAS THIRSTY. MY SUNGLASSES KEPT SLIDING
down my slick nose. The hair at the back of my neck now lay flat with damp. I had a brushed-by-an-otter sensation. And then, while I stood in line at the lemonade stand, the atmosphere around me changed. The vibrancy of the colors and the vitality of the beating drums became diluted, as if a drop or two of water, or tears, had trickled into the kaleidoscope and clouded my view.

I smelled him before I saw him, a teary hyacinth note that sneaked through the cracks in the thick wall of fair food scents,
stole into my nostrils, and spoke of sadness and silver hair, of silver charms and the metal of train tracks so cool against the neck.

And I heard him after I smelled him, speaking a name I knew, and speaking it with great familiarity and intimacy because it was the name of the little lass he stirred from bed each morning and folded back in each night, whose hand he now held. “What size do you want, Nettie?” he said. They stood in line, a few spots in front of me, he in his black-and-white-checkered trousers, she with her yellow hair crowned in a feathered souvenir headdress. I watched them get their drinks. Simon pushed his wallet into his pocket. Just before they turned, I left the line and walked away.

I forced my legs to carry me once more past all the vendors’ stands. Could it be, could it be, could it be that he had come for me? I stopped at the fry bread trailer, but Jim was not there. I looked toward the grass on the outskirts of the arbor, where Granma and Ruby sat in matching chairs. Beside them, Josie, flushed from dancing, stood and wove Cora’s locks into twin braids. Cora craned her neck first one way and then another, looking, squinting through her spectacles, her mouth an opened oval of worry, and Josie clasped her head firmly in her hands and centered it again. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” called the MC, “it’s time for the Hoop Dancers. All you lovely Hoop Dancers, this is your time to shine.”

“Margie!” A small, hot hand clasped mine. “Hello!”

“Hello, hello!” I bent down to embrace her. Her feathers stuck to my damp face. “What are you doing here, Annette?” I looked up at him. “What are you doing here?” I asked again.

He hugged me hard, sighed into my neck, said my name over and over. I hadn’t been held so close for so long, I almost swooned from the sweetness of it, and from a simultaneous sick feeling in my stomach. The ladybug left her station at the back of my neck
and resettled in her usual spot behind my eyes, and she was still, and so was I.

“Let me see you,” he said, lifting up my sunglasses and staring into my face.

He, I noticed right away, was not wearing any sunglasses. I looked into his eyes and discovered that the once-impenetrable gems had developed little inclusions, little openings, and I could see sentiments shining through them, like sunlight through the slits in shut blinds. I wanted to hug Simon again.

“You look different,” I said.

“Let’s go,” he replied.

In a way, it was a relief. This was the end to the queasy anticipation. This was the “old friend” I would find at Crow Fair. Of course everything would come full circle, I thought, glancing at the Hoop Dancers twirling their closed rings. Of course everything would come back to Simon, who had, I supposed, started it all. Still …

“I want …” I said. “I wasn’t … expecting …”

“I drove a thousand miles to get to you, and it’s a thousand miles home.”

“Is this the place where you brought my Strawberry Shortcake suitcase?” Annette asked.

“How did you know I was here?”

“The long letter you wrote me. I got it after I gave Bumble the one I wrote to you. You told me you were on the Crow Reservation. We’ve been driving all over this godforsaken place for three days.” Annette nodded. She looked pale, and there were bits of blue cotton candy glued to her chin. “When I heard this big fair was happening, I thought maybe I’d run into you here. And here you are.” He pulled me close. “My Margie, come. You’re so tan and lovely, how long your hair is, come, I want to eat you up.”

Annette looked away, entranced by a Fancy Dancer’s fluorescent clothes. “Dad, what are all these costumes?” she asked.

“But, I’m not … I don’t know if I’m ready, today …”

Simon didn’t hear. “We’re going to get you out of this mess. I’m going to try to get into Nettie’s trust fund. We’ll pay for a good lawyer. We’ll get you back in school.” He paused. He poured his eyes straight into my mine. And, just as it had been in those crushy classroom days when he had called me “beautiful, more beautiful, most beautiful,” it was heaven to be seen. “You must have felt like you were dying here,” he said. “It’s so empty. Count on Bumble to arrange for you to come to a place like this.” He shook his head. “Surely there were better options. Who have you been staying with? Have they treated you well? Are they here?”

“Simon, I—”

“You have a lot to tell me. I can see it in your face. You’ve been lonely. I’ve been lonely, too.”

“I can leave tomorrow,” I said.

“No, today. What reason could you possibly have to stay? Come, Margie. We’ve spent three nights at a strange hotel in Billings called the War Bonnet Inn, and tonight will be our last. That will have been more than enough—”

“There are so many bunnies at that hotel, Dad!” Annette noted.

“This is true.”

“Can we get one when we get home?”

“Maybe, sweetheart. If Margie wants.” He squeezed my hand with his cushiony palm. His own hand shook. I was moved, captured, entranced. I remembered our jasmine nights. “Come now,” he said. “Our car’s not far.”

SIMON’S TOMATO RED 2002
was haphazardly parked, blocking the entrance to one of the teepees in the camp. He opened the passenger door for me, and I slipped in and rolled down the window.
I was hot, so hot, so thirsty, and it was hard to see anything clearly through my foggy sunglasses, and my heart pounded in my ears, but still I could hear the MC calling, calling over the sound system, for the “young ladies, lovely young ladies from near and far who will do the Fancy Shawl Dance for us at this fabulous Crow Fair, ladies, you butterfly girls, young Fancy Shawl Dancers, come into the arbor and out of your cocoons …”

I turned my face away from Simon beside me. I pressed it into the nook between the passenger seat and the door. I pressed my wet face into the sliver of space there, bending the bill of my buffalo hat.

“Okay, Margie.” Simon stroked me. “Okay, don’t cry. It’s all over. You’re coming home.”

“Go,” I said. “Let’s go. Let’s just go.”

14
SEAHORSE
(Hippocampus borboniensis)

FIVE MILES OUT OF CROW AGENCY
, I pulled my face out from the space between the seat and the door. I took off my cap and placed it on my lap, upside down so I couldn’t see the buffalo. I grabbed Simon’s hand. Annette reached forward and petted my hair. “I’ll brush your hair and you can brush mine,” she said.

ANNETTE HAD BEEN RIGHT
about the War Bonnet Inn. It was inexplicably populated by an abundance of bunnies. There were hundreds of them hopping all over the hotel grounds, their calico colors vivid in the late-afternoon light. They hopped in the parking lot, on the sidewalk outside the lobby, and in the outdoor corridors between rooms. “I’m tempted to devise some plan to save them,” Simon said, “but they actually seem to be doing quite well. Maybe they don’t need saving at all. And anyway,” he gave me a weary glance, “those days are over.”

I told Annette about Charlotte. “Perhaps she can be our pet when we get back home,” she said.

“I hope,” I said. “If Ptarmigan is willing to give her back.”

“A rabbit—in the house?” Simon asked. “You lived with a rabbit in your house?”

“My studio apartment,” I said. “After I left your place.” He bowed his head, and I felt sorry for mentioning it. “There are house rabbits,” I added. “Many people have them.”

“Is that sanitary?” he asked.

I recalled the scoured, snowy surfaces of Simon’s shadowy abode, the way the big heavy outer doors led to a second set of inner doors, which opened to a spotless, solar-powered realm of closed windows and white walls, everything clean, everything “green.” It would be nice, at least, to sleep in a big bed again, I thought.

Simon had left the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign hanging on the doorknob of their hotel room. Inside, his suitcase was opened, and his and Annette’s clothes spilled out onto the floor. The beds were unmade, and in the bathroom all the complimentary soaps and pocket-sized shampoo bottles were scattered about in disarray, while a soaking wet towel languished on the linoleum.

“Sorry it’s not very tidy,” he said. “I guess I’ve been pretty preoccupied with tracking you down.”

“I don’t have any of my things,” I said, picturing the Strawberry Shortcake suitcase and all of its contents tucked into its usual corner in Cora’s bedroom. I could never ask Jim and Granma to ship it to me. I could never speak to them again after the way I had left. I felt gray inside, not rosy or healthy, but gray with shame.

“It’s okay,” Simon said. “You can wear something of mine. And
you
”—he coaxed the TV remote gently out of Annette’s hand—“need a bath.”

I stood in the bathroom and watched the dirt of the day, along with a few fine cotton candy filaments, slide from her slim sylph’s body into the water. She told me about the seahorses in the nature documentary she’d watched on TV the night before.

“Did you know seahorses are raised by their fathers?” I asked.

“I wish I had that kind of tail,” she said, “to curl around whatever I wanted. I would curl it around you right now.”

Simon called me back out to him. The air conditioner droned, and the whole room smelled of Annette’s teensy bar of strongly perfumed hotel soap. He sat me down on the bed, pushed my hair behind my ears. “Did you get my letter?” His voice was low and intimate. I nodded. “Did you understand everything?”

“Yes.”

“Margie, I made a mistake, pushing something special out of my life because I was afraid of losing it. I mean you. I’d rather have you, and face my fear of losing you, than be without you. I want to do the brave thing. I’ve worked through my troubles. I’ve missed you, my
rara avis
.
^*
I want you.”

I stared into Simon’s face. The new lights in his eyes sent sharp sparks into my left ovary, as did the familiar shakiness of his smile. “Thank you,” he said, “for coming with me, and for giving me a chance. I think we can be a family.”

I pressed my face into his neck.

“Who was it you were with?” he asked.

“A family,” I said. Impossible—it was impossible, I thought, to speak of them, to speak of her soap opera, to speak of his ink stains, to speak of her spectacles.

I ran my fingers over his strong Russian cheekbones, pinched his earlobes. We lay down beside each other and embraced. A long time passed. Just by lying there beside me, fully clothed, he coaxed all the loneliness out of my limbs and brought blood back into my touch-starved body, but there was nothing, nothing to be done about the stifled sob that had formed an enormous lump in my throat.

“Simon.”

Annette splashed and sang to herself in the tub. “She’s okay,” he said. “She won’t hear.” But I pushed him away. When he got up to answer her calls (“Dad! How do I do this drain?”), I rose
and looked out the window. The room was on the second floor. It was already almost dusk, and in the pearl light I could see, not too distant, the new strip mall where we had gone to get the supplies for Cora’s leggings. I had to turn away. The dusk was the same no matter where it happened, I thought. It held the secrets of all hearts and made them visible for a few minutes, held them suspended in the air like thousands of tiny beads.

ANNETTE SNORED IN THE BED BESIDE OURS
. Simon pulled me to him and we pressed close together as we had in days of old, noses touching. I felt his pulse quicken, and he stirred in secret and familiar ways beneath the sheets.

“No, Simon,” I murmured. “I can’t—”

“Oh, dear,” he said in his bone-dry way. “It’s like we’re already married.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I just can’t. I’m too tired. My heart—I mean, my head aches.”

“I know, I know. It’s all right.” He pressed his mouth into my cheek and whispered, “Go to sleep, go to sleep,” and I breathed in his hyacinths. He stroked my forehead and my hair. “My girl,” he said, “my dear girl.” And as I drifted off (it was easy to sleep in his remembered arms), pondering those words, I recalled what Granma, what Evelyn, what the root digger had told me about being a girl. “You’re a girl,” she had said, “as long as you allow life to happen to you.” And when I woke up hours later at dark face time, for no reason other than it had become my habit, and I heard not Granma’s soft sneakered footsteps but only the whirr of the air conditioner against a sterile silence, I remembered the rest of what she had said. “You become a woman,” she had told me, “when you start living according to your own instincts, your own intelligence, and your own desires. You’re a woman when you take hold of yourself.” And
though it terrified me, I knew, staring into the dark, which one I wanted to be.