It had gotten quiet in the little room, the stillness that happens before what happens happens.
The bird’s tiny eyes, no bigger or deeper than a drop of oil, reflected all the fear and hope there was in the world. Bronfman felt it, too. The crowd behind the two of them receded into an inconsequential blur; it was just Rufous and Bronfman now, connected by the thread of life. And Bronfman wasn’t the least bit scared. That was the really interesting thing. He picked the bird up, cupped him in his hands, and held him. He heard someone catch her breath, maybe two someones, and then it was all silence. One of the girls may even have touched him on the shoulder. He didn’t know; it didn’t matter. Because he was holding a bird in his hands, a bird he had saved a couple of hours ago.
He brought Rufous to the same window he had flown into—open now—and held him on the other side of it, still nestled in the twin palms of his hands, his beak probing for an opening. The sun fell above a pine forest, the dying light fanning across the small campus, and Bronfman didn’t know how to do this, so he just did it. He dropped Roufus into the air—and the air was all he seemed to need. A brief adjustment, a moment of awkward flapping, and Roufus righted himself and flew, angling left and right, as if to avoid potential gunfire. Bronfman watched as he became smaller and smaller, disappearing into the dusky gloom.
And that was that. The bird, Rufous, was gone. The brief adventure was over. Some of the kids laughed, some applauded. Bronfman’s heart was weirdly heavy, as if what had just happened wasn’t an actual happy ending, when it totally was, for sure; it could not have been much happier. But he missed the rufous-sided towhee, immediately and fiercely. He missed him the way he missed his mother from time to time, with a scary hollow ache. He looked back at the others, his brand-new friends, and they were turning away from him already, returning to their wonderful lives. And that was fine. Bronfman himself was fine, at home in his natural environment. Homo invisibilis. He wasn’t ready to be seen. He knew that without knowing that he knew it. He needed more time, more experience, another fifteen years or so of life on the ground. That was why Carla D’Angelo called him when she did—because he was ready now. Somehow, she knew that. He was ready to be seen for the very first time. By Sheila McNabb. He was ready for the adventure. All he’d needed was a little air.
DAY
THIRTY-SEVEN
ONE
He had no one to share his news about Sheila with but his mother. After work the following day he visited her, a day earlier than he had planned. He couldn’t wait.
She was screaming when he walked in, not an uncommon occurrence.
“Stay away from me, Bettina! I know what you’re up to!” Then silence, as if whatever Bettina had been up to was done. He closed the front door behind him—accidentally slamming it—and Bettina arrived, investigating, and was not impressed.
“Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”
“How is she?”
This was what he asked Bettina every visit before entering his mother’s lair, skittish to walk in there and see for himself. He liked a warning. He wanted to be prepared.
“She is losing her damn mind is what,” Bettina said. “Every day a little bit more. Every day it’s something. Yelling about something. It’s going to be too much for me soon. She’s taking too many pills, Mr. Bronfman. They’re clouding her up. She didn’t know who I was for a little while this morning. Mornings are hardest.”
“What were you up to just now?”
“Up to?”
“She said, ‘I know what you’re up to’ when I came in.”
“Water,” she said. “I was giving her a glass of water.”
* * *
It was like in a horror movie when the man is going into a room where he heard something but isn’t sure what it is, and the camera is right behind him as he slowly opens the creaking door into the frightening shadows where the possibility of evil resides.
“Hi, Mom,” Bronfman said.
She was in bed, all propped up, hair brushed back, her face thickly painted with orange pancake.
“What a surprise,” she said. “My sweetie sweet come to see me. Come over and give me a kiss! On second thought, don’t. You might have something. I might have something. Who knows.”
He was fine with that.
She smiled at him. “I just got back from the Kmart in the sky.”
“Really?”
“Well, I’m rearranging the house, so—”
“Ah.”
“Ah? Ah? What’s that sound mean? Methinks I hate it. Hate it, hate it, hate it.” She shook her head. “No regrets, Edsel. What’s done is done. My time machine is broken anyway. The demons are out of the house now.”
“You seem confused, Mom,” he said. “There are no demons here.” For some reason, he felt this fiction needed to be countered with the facts: there were no demons. And it worked. Just like that, she snapped back. Her eyes cleared up. She knew who he was and, more important, who she was.
“Of course there aren’t,” she said, her voice so soft now, like a girl’s. “I don’t know what the hell I’m saying sometimes. What I’m thinking. That’s me for you, Edsel. Your mother. This is what I’ve become.” She smiled. “I still have something inside me, though. Something real. It comes and goes. Like one of those little silver Fourth of July sparklers. Psssshhhhhh. That’s the sound they make. Then it goes, all burns off.”
He sat on the edge of her bed, next to her feet. She used to paint her nails red. Now they were naked, a little gnarled, browning.
“So what’s the big news?” she said.
How did she know???
“I have a date,” he said.
He blushed, and looked away. Telling her this, it felt like boasting. Worse, it felt like boasting about something no one his age would ever boast about. Like saying, “I crossed the street.” Big deal.
“A date? A date! With whom?”
She seemed a little too surprised for his liking.
“A woman named Sheila. I used to work with her. Then she quit, and I saw her again at Goldstein’s, and we … hit it off. I guess? And … so … anyway. That’s what I wanted to tell you. My big news. I have a date.”
And oh, how she beamed at him! She beamed at him the way mothers beam at sons who have broken a world record in something, who have gained fame and fortune via legal means, who have dreamed the impossible dream. She beamed at him exactly like a mother—his mother.
“Oh, Edsel,” she said. “That is just great. That’s wonderful.” Her eyelids fluttered. “And so it begins.”
“It?”
“Yes. It.”
Hard for him to tell if it was a good thing or a bad thing or just a thing—the thing. But she did not elaborate, and he had nothing else to say, but he stayed on a little longer, sitting on the far end of the bed, and she turned on the television and they watched a show together, a nature documentary, something about whales.
DAY
FORTY-THREE
ONE
A million years passed. Each year seemed to drag on for a decade. Every minute felt like an hour, every hour like a day. Bronfman could hear the seconds ticking by, each one accompanied by the sound of the slowly turning teeth of a giant metal wheel. Even at night, alone in his bed, he heard that wheel. K-choom, k-choom, k-choom. It was impossible for him to sleep. He felt as if he would never sleep again.
And then, finally, Tuesday came.
He had Sheila’s address and telephone number scrawled on the back of the crumpled napkin from Goldstein’s. He kept the receipt displayed on the fading white enamel face of his refrigerator, held there by the only magnet he had: a photo-frame magnet in which he had inserted a picture of his mother, taken when Bronfman himself was probably six years old. He had the telephone number of a woman displayed on his refrigerator beneath a magnet in which there was a photo of his young, fetching mother. That wasn’t weird.
He looked at the receipt often as the days passed, and thought about it. He memorized her ad
dress and telephone number—not on purpose, it just happened from exposure. Her telephone number seemed a more intimate number than her address, for some reason. He worked out the logic of this emotion in his head. The house number belonged to the house, but her phone number—that was hers. It was portable; where she went, it went. He could call her anytime. He could call her right now if he wanted, in the middle of the night, anytime. It was a cell-phone number, so he could call her and wherever she happened to be it would ring. He wouldn’t call her, except in the event of an emergency, but he could, and by giving him her number she was tacitly acknowledging this possibility. It was an invitation to be a part of her life.
Sheila lived about two miles away from Bronfman’s apartment, in a nicely maintained complex of apartments called Cedar Court. He was familiar with Cedar Court. Vandals often defaced the sign at the entrance, so that it read:
EDAR OU T
And, no matter how many times the owners repaired it, the vandals would eventually return and deface it, scandalously directing the passing drivers to engage in an act that he was familiar with (somehow) but couldn’t imagine participating in. Literally could not imagine: his mind turned off before he reached that mysterious nexus. But, even though he knew exactly where she lived (he had driven past the sign just the other day), on the Saturday before the Tuesday he drove into the complex and viewed her apartment just to make sure he wouldn’t make some horrendous mistake on Tuesday and somehow get lost. Her complex was clean, orderly, friendly, neat—the opposite of his. His was littered with beer cans, cigarette butts, and oil-stained rags. At night he saw deer roaming through his complex, snacking, munching on retarded shrubs. Something about that was scary. When he came out to shoo them away they would just stared at him, like cows. “The end is coming,” they seemed to be saying. “There is nothing any of us can do.”
Sheila’s complex would survive the apocalypse—that was how nice it was. She had a redbrick walkway and two giant azaleas bordering her porch, and windows that were cobweb-free and crystal clear. The door was green, the shutters black. She was way out of his league. He knew that already, of course, but if he hadn’t, her modest but manicured lawn would have been sufficient indication. Going there on the Saturday before the Tuesday actually sent him into a minor depression, and he wished he hadn’t done it. But it was too late now. Time machine broken.
* * *
He picked her up at six-thirty exactly. He wore khaki pants, a blue jacket, and an orange IZOD shirt, an outfit so daringly different from anything he had ever worn that he might as well have gone out into the world entirely naked. But he had seen this exact combination on a mannequin in a department store at the mall and he bought it, knowing that he couldn’t go wrong. Still, the clothes felt like new body parts that he had to familiarize himself with. He walked stiffly. He didn’t know what to do with his arms. He stood on her front porch exactly like the mannequin. Sheila had a dull golden knocker on her front door. Some time passed before he was able to draw from a shallow pool of courage and knock with it, twice. A moment passed, then another. When a third came, lingered, and disappeared, he wondered if he was at the right door, or had perhaps gotten the date wrong, both of which were impossible. Finally, she opened the door. “Hello,” he said. But she said nothing. She shrugged and smiled apologetically and held up her index finger, mouthing the words I’m sorry, and mutely invited him in. She was talking to somebody on her cell phone.
“That’s not true,” she said. “I was always … in all the important ways … I never told you a—. I’m not—no, you listen. I have to go.” She gave Bronfman another quick apologetic glance. “Sir,” she said. “Please take me off your list. Please take me off your list. Good-bye.”
She clicked off. “I’m sorry. Robocalls.”
“That was a robot?”
“Might as well have been. Mea culpa.”
He was captivated by her apologies. She’d apologized twice in less than a minute. As if she was going for Bronfman’s record of seven.
“So hi,” he said. “I mean, good evening.”
“Forgive me.” Three! “Let’s start over.” She cleared her throat. “So good to see you again, Edsel.”
He loved how she used his first name. “Me, too, you.”
She switched off the lights before he had a chance to take in much of her place. He had been looking at her the whole time—different parts of her, like her calves and her upper arms, her collarbone. They had never left the foyer. He thought he saw an umbrella stand and a hall table and a framed photo of what he’d swear was either a poodle or a furry black cat, and maybe a bowl of red-striped candies beside it? But in her living room—and he couldn’t be sure, because he had only a second to look—were two piles of wood, it looked like, and a tabletop, maybe a hammer. Like a construction zone. As the hallway light dimmed and died, there was that moment of silence, as they prepared to leave, when he heard laughter, applause, a brass band, and children singing, somewhere in the darkness of her apartment.
He stopped to listen.
“It’s the television,” she said. And, when he still didn’t move, she said, “I don’t like to come back to the quiet alone.”
As they walked to the car, Bronfman said what he’d been meaning to say since he knocked on her door, but the telephone call had thrown him off his game.
“You look nice tonight,” he said.
Sheila blushed. Beneath the fluorescent lights at Goldstein’s and in the lobby of the Cranston Building, he hadn’t been able to tell just how marble-white her skin was. It almost seemed as if it were powdered, like a geisha’s, but on inspection he could tell that she wore no makeup at all. The blush made her cheeks turn a milky pink, the color of grapefruit juice.
They drove in silence, Sheila absorbed in what seemed like a sad thought; Bronfman thought it was the phone call. He had no idea where they might be going. Was he supposed to? Had they even talked about it? No. He was certain they hadn’t. He did have some dinner ideas, having done some research on the computer at work. He had made a list of a nice selection of restaurants of every stripe, from American to Italian to Chinese, but he was sure they hadn’t discussed it yet, so he just drove, taking the occasional right, the intermittent left.
“It’s getting so hot,” she said. “But sometimes you can feel a cool undercurrent to the air. It’s nice.”
“Yes,” he said. He hadn’t noticed the cool undercurrent. He was just making a sound because it seemed that one was called for. He turned to her at stop signs and red lights, for something, he wasn’t sure what, but she had fallen into her thoughts and seemed far, far away. She didn’t want to be with him. She was sitting there thinking how to get out of this, her date with him.
Bronfman persevered. He cleared his throat. “Well,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about where we should go to eat. I have some choices, a variety of cuisines. We could talk about them.”
She didn’t immediately respond.
“I like almost anything,” he said, his need to fill the silence overwhelming, painfully so. “As long as it’s not too spicy!”
Levity. He smiled and allowed the smile a single laugh to accompany it, because a lot of food was spicy, so it seemed misleading to say that he liked ‘anything.’ He was about to correct himself when she said, “I’m not really hungry now, Bronfman. Do you mind if we just go on a walk?”
This was unexpected.
“A walk?”
“There’s a park at the next block. It’s pretty.”
He tried to remember the last time he’d gone for a walk on purpose. “Okay,” he said. “Sure.”
“Unless you’re starving.”
“No,” he said. “A walk would be great. Fresh air, trees…” He was unable, off the cuff, to come up with other things that were outside.
“Great,” she said.
* * *
He parked the car in a lot behind some old concrete tennis courts. Two elderly people were batting a ball back and forth in th
e dim light, mostly forth, as it only rarely scaled the net. Their skin was whiter than the peculiarly professional-looking tennis uniforms they wore, uniforms that suggested they were about to play the circuit. A path led around the courts to a baseball diamond, which was mostly dirt, empty, forlorn. What’s more melancholy than a worn-out old playing field? Almost nothing. Sheila led him to first base, and then left. Before getting to second, she veered off into the woods. Was this a park? It wasn’t much of one yet, or, at least, not the kind Bronfman had imagined—it was just a trail, etched into the world by repeated use—but then, as if they had passed through an invisible doorway, the abbreviated forest concluded and before them was a field of wildflowers and grass, waves of hillocks and giant oaks, a swing set where children were being swung so high that Bronfman feared, as he had since he was young, that they would be catapulted into space. There was a seesaw, a merry-go-round, and, his favorite, a hard plastic pony attached to a thick metal spring corkscrewed into the ground, which, when you sat on it and leaned backward and forward on the saddle, rocked and rocked and rocked. No one was on the pony. The trail, bordered by honeysuckle, edged away from the playground and into a glade, where little yellow birds with black crests sang. There were other birds, too, and there was a pond with a log across it where turtles sunned, catching the dying summer light angling through the canopy. But, as Sheila and Bronfman approached, the turtles seemed simply to fall off the log and into the water, as if their genetic coding had warned them that these two approaching animals might use them for soup. Bronfman followed a step behind Sheila, whose icy sadness he could almost feel, like cold radiating from a freezer. This was so not what he expected.
When they came to a long wooden bench Sheila sat on it and Bronfman mimicked her, allowing a good eighteen inches between them, which he felt was friendly without being intimate—not that he had any idea of the protocol in these situations, since he had never been in one even remotely like it. Unless he counted the summer before his senior year in high school, when he showed Maria (what was her last name?) the little bamboo patch in his backyard. She walked into it of her own free will. She kissed him, but he didn’t follow up on it and she stopped. He had only wanted to show her the bamboo, which he thought of as foreign and exotic. His priorities had always been misplaced like that.