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.”