The following day, Nell leaves school after calculus and rides her bike through the slushy streets to Harlow’s garage. He comes out from the service bay, cap pulled low, unshaven, looks up with that when you gonna grow up, girl look.
Harlow is part Seneca. Blue-black hair, tawny skin, snappy, almost ebony eyes. He has the height and grace of the legendary Iroquois riveters who built most of Manhattan, walking skyscraper girders like they were standing on solid ground.
The Murphys live directly across the lake from the Flynns’. Harlow and Billy, in spite of being two years apart, have been best friends since they met and misbehaved in church school. As kids, they rowed, paddled, and drove Harlow’s motorboat back and forth across the lake. Ran in and out of each other’s houses, if you could ever get them to come indoors.
He throws her bike into the back of his truck, flips over the CLOSED sign, and drives to the Flynns’ to pick up Flanagan. Nell has things to say, or thought she did, all fantasy when it comes right down to it. Sitting in his truck, the floor a mess of newspapers, Coke bottles, beer cans, duct tape holding the leatherette seat together, more or less, and oh, God, the smell of him, enough to tongue-tie any girl. She does know how to talk, she reminds herself. Still. The physical fact of him. Next to her. Doors and windows closed. She could just reach out and put a hand on him.
He pulls up to the house. She sits silent, embarrassed by her own thoughts.
“The dog . . . ?” he prompts.
She whistles up Flanagan, who leaps into the truck and settles between them. “You didn’t really need my help, did you?” Harlow asks, as he accelerates on to the highway.
“You’re the decoy,” she manages to say, shoving her hands under her thighs to keep them out of trouble.
“Right,” he laughs. She meets his gaze. Those black eyes. Lashes longer than her sister Rosie’s. Sweat runs down her back, she feels loose and liable to say anything. Presses her lips together.
How is it that everyone else moves, acts, does things, while she remains behind, good girl, good student, good sport. Is she going to end up like her sister Sheila? She couldn’t bear it.
She is not going to end up like Megan. There is no sex in sight, no sex even on the horizon, but she’s been to Planned Parenthood. A dodgy neighborhood in Syracuse, crumbling building, fat counselor falsely friendly. Chose a diaphragm; getting fitted for it was her first internal exam. Hates the way that everything to do with sex and being a girl is humiliating. Sanitary napkins: the discomfort of wearing them, trying to hide their bulk under pants or skirts, the unpleasant task of disposing of them. The smell. Seems strange to hate your own body like this, but how else is she supposed to feel. And now the saucerlike diaphragm in its little blue case, hidden in the back of her sock drawer, smelling of plastic. The tube of spermicide, with its alarming applicator; she’s not sure she’ll ever be able to use the stuff.
She doesn’t think of herself as squeamish, but in this instance she is. The church would condemn her both for premarital sex—is thinking about it a sin?—and using birth control. She wishes she could laugh off the church’s contradictions; even better, shake them off entirely.
Right now, if she could just slide across the seat to be next to him. Just that. Knows she’s lying to herself. She wants more. The next moment and the next, and the one after that.
Harlow flips on the radio, finds the Rochester R&B station; cranks up the volume. Sam Cooke: Bring It On Home To Me. The same song they were playing the night he told Billy he was going to enlist and Billy got pissed as hell, tried to talk him out of it. Told him Nell was too young for the hundredth time. Like Megan wasn’t. Wound too tight. Looking for a fight. Like if they could just draw blood or break a bone, Harlow would come to his senses.
Two years later, spring of his senior year, some asshole recruiter promised Billy he’d fly and all bets were off.
Some men are made for war. He never thought Billy Flynn was one of them.
He looks at Nell. She reddens, turns away. She has no idea how the graces have smiled on her. It’s good not to know. He doesn’t like girls who do know.
Nell’s plan is for Harlow to charm the nurses while she brings Flanagan up the service stairs. The riskiest moment will be leaving the stairwell and walking the entire length of the corridor to Billy’s room.
There’s an emergency on the opposite side of the nurses’ station; they make the dash to Billy’s room undetected. She and Flanagan slide across the slick linoleum and almost crash into the bed. Nell’s still not used to the spit and polish of Strong Memorial. “Nice job cleaning up for your visit,” Billy says, taking in Harlow’s filthy coveralls.
“Wouldn’t want to excite the nurses.”
Flanagan licks Billy’s hand trying to get the taste of him, or trying to wash those last years away.
“Help her get up here.”
“Your nurse will kill me,” Nell says.
“Do we care?” Billy laughs.
There’s hardly enough room. Flanagan lies on her belly, stretched against him. Nell stands beside the bed, leaning against Flanagan, feels the dog trembling. Billy buries his wrecked hand in her fur. His defenses fall away, and she sees how alone he’s been, how hard he works to hold himself together, how punishing that effort is.
She pulls up the side railing, heads to the cafeteria for coffee. When she returns Harlow is sitting in a chair by the window, head resting against the glass, sound asleep.
She sips the coffee, shudders, thinks who is she kidding, she should’ve gotten hot chocolate. Picks up yesterday’s newspaper, searches for a mention of Megan, the ongoing investigation. Nothing. Reads the lists of the dead, the body counts. It’s been a bad week.
She pours the coffee out in the sink, rinses her mouth. Sits on the floor beside Harlow, leans against his leg. Flanagan yawns and settles again with a sigh.
Nell wakes to find Harlow resting his hand on her head, full dark outside the window. She holds her breath.
“Time to go,” he says, leaving the room.
She has some trouble convincing Flanagan to come with her. Billy grabs her hand, says thank you. She wishes he wouldn’t. It makes her stomach ache to have Billy quiet and grateful, she’d rather his usual uproar, running down stairs, slamming doors, embarrassing her.
She looks up to see Harlow chatting with the nurse, her protests about the dog silenced by his explanation. Or the simple fact that he is standing too close, his hand on her shoulder, making her blush.
Driving home Harlow asks Nell about her plans for college, where she’s applied, when she’ll hear. She deflects, wants to know what happened at SUNY Binghamton.
He has no idea where to begin. How to talk about the oblivious privilege of spoiled, draft-dodging eighteen-year-olds. How lost he felt. The waste. Was he too old? Had he missed his chance? He could never quite manage to play the game, take his professors’ authority seriously. He’d had men’s lives in his hands for too long to be able to settle down and acquiesce in the classroom. He’s not stupid; he knows that. He’d done well in school and he’s still interested in engineering. Or the Merchant Marine. Or the Coast Guard. Working with his hands, having a crew, living on the water.
How he’d chafed to get out of Geneva, to escape. But then you come back to the world. Home was all they ever talked about in country, their waking dream: ice cream, whiskey, girls. Nice, clean, soft, getting over.
“Harlow?”
“I asked you first,” he turns the question back to her.
She tells him about the new science teacher, Miss Rosenthal, her independent study project, working on a team at the Ornithology Lab.
“There are hardly any girls. Maybe there will be more in college. A lot of them won’t make it, that’s what Miss Rosenthal says. I’ve already had math teachers who accuse me of cheating, of having someone else do my work, because they don’t believe I can do h
igher-level math.”
“Sons of bitches.”
“Maybe you could teach me how to get mad so I don’t keep getting blindsided.”
She steals a glance at him, his face lighting up and falling into shadow as other cars sweep past. She tucks her hands beneath her thighs. Again. Pulls her glasses off, cleans them with the tail of her shirt. Shoves them back on her face. Right. The boring, bookish, plain kid sister.
Friday afternoon, Esme Tinker walks into Billy’s room carrying a portable cassette player. She is forty-five, handsome, not pretty, an ornithologist at Cornell and one of Billy’s closest friends. She blanches when she sees the scars on his face and neck, stoops to find a plug to hide her reaction. Stands, taking in the extensive bandaging on his arm, torso, hand. Right hand.
Looks into his face; he has seen her reaction. She holds his gaze: “How you doing?”
“Can you sit on my left? Still some trouble hearing.”
“Eardrum?”
“Concussion. You name it.”
“Your dad told me you’ve got burns and broken bones.”
“And shrapnel. It’s gonna be a while.”
“How’s the pain?”
“They’re generous with the meds.”
She picks up the cassette recorder. “One of my grad students, Danny McNeil, came to your sit spot with me and recorded the dawn chorus.” She presses play.
“Can you make it louder?”
Adjusts the volume.
“Even more?”
Pushes it to maximum.
“Bring it closer.” Billy listens with his ear pressed against the speaker, then: “American robin . . . indigo bunting . . . ” He smiles at her. “Wood peewee . . . song sparrow . . . gray catbird . . . great crested flycatcher?” He guesses.
Esme nods.
“Northern cardinal . . . wood thrush . . . eastern meadowlark . . . God, those sweet, lazy whistles . . . warbling vireo . . . ”
“Danny is convinced soundscapes will help us understand ecosystem health.”
“He’s right. Play it again.”
When Billy was twelve, Esme had walked into one of his preferred sit spots near dusk. She sat down nearby, recording observations every ten minutes or so in a pocket-sized notebook.
A fox had crossed within ten feet of them, screened by chokecherry bushes. Billy caught her eye, directed her gaze, or she would have missed it entirely.
“Can we talk?” she asked.
“Not here.” He led the way to a small spit of land, overhung by willow and oak.
She introduced herself as though he were another grown-up, shaking his hand. “Where do you live?”
“On the lake. What were you writing?” He scanned her notes. “You didn’t hear the junco, the house wren . . . ?”
“No.”
“You only listen to their songs? What about warning sounds? That’s how I knew the fox was coming.”
“The birds knew?”
“They knew it was a fox. I only knew it was a ground predator.”
“Did I miss an alarm call, too?” she asked.
“No. A fox is a different kind of predator than a hawk. Just the usual chat. And body language.”
“You do this every day?”
“I’d like to be a bird, if you want to know the truth,” he said. “And I like to draw. I draw the birds.”
A few days later, on a Sunday morning just before dawn, she showed up again. When she began to take notes, he stopped her. Her typical field methods, the pen scratching across paper, the sound of a page turning, were all interruptions.
Later, by the water, Billy introduced Esme to Nell.
“How old are you?” Esme asked.
“Nine,” Nell answered.
“Why don’t you talk in the woods, but you’ll talk here?”
“If we keep interrupting we won’t see or hear as much,” Billy said.
“You’re noisy even when you’re not talking,” Nell chimed in.
“I’ve been studying birds my whole life and never realized how loud my basic movements are,” Esme said.
The sun was full up, struggling through clouds, shading the surface of the lake from silver to pink.
“You’re kind of a bird plow,” Nell said.
“A what?”
“You’re scaring the birds. They fly up in the shape of a ‘V,’” Billy said. “And then the hawks know where they are. You have to quit being a hunter.”
“I’ve never shot a bird in my life.”
“You’re hunting your next find. That’s why you miss so much.”
Over the years Billy taught Esme a new way to listen, showed her how the birds organize their communication, how to read body language between pairs, the meaning of their back-and-forth chat, how they check in on each other, the various classifications of warning sounds.
Esme refocused her research on birdsong and communication. Billy had already observed in the field what Thorpe, in England, was discovering and documenting in the lab as he raised and recorded chaffinches. She made contact with Thorpe’s protégé, Marler, at UC Davis, and with Marler’s famed student Luis Obispo, who rivaled Billy in his ability to identify individual birds, their songs, and their provenance.
The cassette recorder and the spectrograph were revolutionizing their research methods. The spectrographs make songs visible, recording and displaying frequency changes over time, the essence of a musical score. Recently revealed: the two voice boxes a wood thrush uses to harmonize and sing duets with himself.
Esme continues to feel a sense of urgency as she captures and maps birdsong. The woods are quieter than when she was a child. She does not want the next generation or the next to be born into silence.
The first time Billy visited her lab he was sickened by the drawers full of preserved and dissected specimens. But he’d been drawn to the birds, to be able to handle them, see the shape of wings and beaks, the patterns of color, though faded, even more subtle and exquisite than he knew. This study allowed him to make corrections to his drawings and paintings. He argued with Esme that observation in the field was enough, that the true colors were gone from the birds shortly after death. She countered that she’d never had another student like Billy, and that these were valuable study aids.
“Your students aren’t worthy of these birds.”
“If I teach thousands of students to appreciate and respect birds and the natural world, that has value. Unforeseen value. People need to be educated. Average people. Not everyone likes to sit in the woods all day like you do.”
No one she has ever worked with has hearing or sight as acute as Billy’s. She used to tease him about it, called him an extraterrestrial being. He took it entirely for granted. He watched and listened his way inside the birds, merging into the sky with them.
She looks at him now, his ear pressed against the speaker, and feels a bitter sorrow.
Billy shifts to try to find a more comfortable position. Futile. Presses play again, shuts his eyes against the pain; lets the birds fill his mind, a white-throated sparrow: Oh, canada-canada-canada.
On Wednesday, Jack waits for Nell outside of school. Realizes this is the third time in two weeks he’s picked her up and tries to push thoughts of Megan Alsop out of his mind.
“We need to bail out Trevor’s truck and drive it down to Dresden.”
He writes a check at McBride’s and hopes it won’t bounce. Climbs into Trevor’s truck and follows Nell down County Road 2. He left a message at the coffee shop in town now that Trevor no longer has a phone, but has no idea if he will be there to meet them. They’ll cruise through town looking for him if he isn’t home.
Trevor comes outside when the two pickups pull into the yard. Jack tells Nell to wait while he takes care of things with his brother.
“Hi, Uncle Trevor,” Nell cal
ls out.
“You don’t want her coming in here.”
“Didn’t know what we’d find,” Jack says.
But Jack is surprised. Trevor is sober, the cabin swept clean, dishes washed and put away. The fridge stands open and empty. A duffel bag sits by the door beside a few boxes tied with twine.
Trevor’s face has been scraped raw by a razor. His shoulders, slumped as though he is a tall man trying to fit into a low-ceilinged room, straighten up when he’s near Jack.
“About the truck. I’ll pay you back,” Trevor says.
“I’m not worried.”
“Sure you are. You’re just too much of a gentleman to say so.”
“Where you headed?”
“I hear there’s steady winter work in Maryland. Maybe the Carolinas.”
“Home for the summer?”
“We’ll see how it goes.”
“Place looks good.”
“I drained the pipes. Can you keep an eye on it for me?”
“I will.”
“Any news about that girl?” Trevor asks.
“Not a word.”
“It’s an awful thing. How’s Billy doing?”
“Few more weeks, he should be home. The right arm. It’s a mess.”
“He’s young. He’s got you.”
“I sold Gram’s highboy. Marion wasn’t pleased, but I figured you could use the cash.”
He hands Trevor the bills, then pulls his brother toward him, a quick, awkward embrace.
“Marion wasn’t glad to get rid of that old thing?” Trevor asks.
“She’ll come around.”
“Good thing you got Billy out of that VA hospital. They’re a rat-infested disgrace.”
“Private hospital’s bleeding us.”
Trevor folds the bills, gives them back.
“No, we’ll be okay. You keep it.”
Trevor peels off a hundred. Gives the rest back, insists. Walks out to the truck. Nell hops down, hands him the keys; throws her arms around him. Thinks of all the times she’d ridden in the back of her uncle’s truck with her brothers and cousins. Summer nights, Trevor at the wheel, flying over bumps and railroad crossings. Skylarking, he called it.