A bird will soar, p.13
A Bird Will Soar, page 13
Only, the question on Axel’s mind tonight, without the ticking clock, without the hawk eyes, is about the other side. What if, after Frank fixes the house, what if that means he’s gone for good?
In the teacup room tonight, Byrd doesn’t mess the blankets, and the house is fine and quiet. But Axel’s mind is not. And, as though she can hear the questions stirring inside him, Byrd whispers across the dark, “Take a deep breath. Go to sleep.”
He knows that he should talk to Byrd. He should tell her what’s keeping him awake, but he’s just not sure what it means to send those words out into the air. What it means to say it all at once.
When he was little and he couldn’t sleep, he’d pad across the hallway from his bedroom to Byrd and Frank’s. He’d always go to Byrd’s bedside, the one closest to the door. Stand near her, until, like those eagle instincts, her eyes would flutter open. She just knew he was standing there.
“Want to crawl in?” she’d say, and he didn’t have to reply. Come to think of it, sometimes she didn’t even ask; she’d just raise the corner of the blanket, and he’d crawl in. And there he’d sleep.
When he’d wake up, he’d come face-to-face with the picture on Byrd’s bedside table. It was a picture like so many others in the house, with three people inside a thick frame. Byrd and Frank and Axel. It was the three of them along the bank of the pond at the cabin. The cabin where Frank lives now. The cabin that has water all around, so it has birds all around. Birds, after all, are opportunists. They go where the food leads them. And the cabin, with its own pond to the back, and the river down the bank out front, was special. Is special for birding.
The little family would go and fish and sit and listen. In the picture Axel’s looking to the pond, maybe wishing for a sandhill crane to visit. Byrd’s on the dock behind Axel, her tan pants rolled to her knees, a huge hat hiding all but the smile on her face. And Frank? Frank’s closest in the frame, zoomed in and blurry, with his hat lifted enough to see his thick eyebrows and squinting eyes. The picture, almost like a selfie of Frank, only, the point wasn’t ever to capture his smile, it was to capture his Byrd and his Axel in the place he loved most of all.
It was, perhaps, the last great day that Axel can remember as the three of them. Maybe this is because it was captured in a photograph, or maybe because of the way that Frank’s smile went all the way up to his eyes, or maybe because they actually did see the sandhill crane and Frank fell into the water trying to get a closer look?
So many maybes.
Tonight, in the guest bedroom in Emmett and George’s fine house, Axel thinks of Byrd and Frank’s bed, of the old photograph, and then, of course, of the time at the cabin with the sandhill crane.
Byrd pulls lightly on the cover they share. She takes one of her full belly breaths. The kind she encourages Axel to take when the world swirls inside and outside him.
Maybe it’s the sound of this breath that makes him take his own, or maybe it’s the image of the crane in his head, but something inside him lets him ask.
Ask one more time for what he needs. “Was Frank sick?”
He says it into the night air without the ticking clock or the hawk’s eyes. When she doesn’t answer, Axel thinks that maybe she’s fallen asleep. That maybe she was able to picture the image in her room that helps her feel comforted. Is it the photo by her bed? On the day with the sandhill crane?
The crane’s head is special and reminds Axel now of a Poké Ball, white and red with its circular eye in the middle. He can remember its long legs looked like the stems of the cattails all around the pond. Axel remembers the way Byrd loved the crane’s dancing, the way Frank wished for the bird to make its trumpeting sound, and how he watched and listened for both. “I bet if I get too close, it will—” Frank said, just before tumbling down the soggy side of the pond and into the muck.
The sandhill opened its beak and its wings. Its call less like the trumpet Frank wished for and more like a jackhammer. And when it disappeared, Frank, wet and muddy, hugged Byrd. “How about that?” he’d said.
Axel feels a jackhammer now in his heart. It hurts sometimes to think of the time before Frank went to live alone at the cabin. Did the crane come visit him there again? And it hurt even more to think that Byrd knows why, and hasn’t told him.
Sometimes when the hurt piles up, Axel can’t do anything but feel every tap, tap, tap of it. Only tonight it feels more like a jab, jab, jab.
He doesn’t know when it starts, but it does, humming. A song. It’s Byrd, awake, like before when she’d ask, “Want to crawl in?” But she doesn’t ask that. She reaches across the bed, takes Axel by the hand. Hums a low song about a bird with broken wings who learns to fly. She doesn’t really pull Axel, but what she does pulls him from the jabbing in his heart, into the comfort of Emmett and George’s fine house.
And so he asks again. “Was Frank sick?” He’s calm now, not like before.
She’s calm now too, and ready to tell the truth.
“Even when two people really, really love each other, like your dad and me, sometimes life gets in the way.”
Axel closes his eyes, sees that soggy hug again between Frank and Byrd. Sees, right behind his eyelids, like a movie, that kind of love.
“When your dad lost his job—” Byrd says.
“What?” Axel interrupts. His eyes flash open to this fact.
But Byrd doesn’t stop; perhaps she’s afraid if she does, the truth will never get out. “We didn’t know if we could keep the house or the cabin, and he called his dad for some money, I mean, we couldn’t ask Emmett and George for one more thing . . . And he got so angry . . . Not your grandfather, your dad. Well, you remember. You remember how we’d fight,” Byrd says. “Money can be such an ugly thing.”
These are not facts that Axel knows, big fights or a lost job. He wants to find the image of Byrd and Frank hugging on the dock at the pond on the last great day, but he can’t. It has disappeared like that crane into the sky with its jackhammer cries. “What?” is all he can say.
“He was so sad, depressed, really. I mean, I know it was depression now, but then . . .” Byrd pauses. One more deep breath. “Do you know how hard it is to see someone you love in such a dark place?”
Axel wants the image of Byrd and Frank, but he can’t find it in his mind, even with his eyes closed tightly again. He can’t open up his brain and look inside. He can’t get to that picture, as much as he wishes he could.
“I mean, the last time we . . . he . . . Well, you know about our Willow,” Byrd says.
Axel knows about Willow, because that’s the kind of sad that a mom can’t hide, not like she was able to hide all this. They celebrated what would have been Willow’s tenth birthday once. A candle. A prayer. And then Byrd and Frank told Axel the truth about a baby that never got to come home.
Sometimes when there is so much hurt, Axel can’t help but think about it all at once. And now, now he can’t find the good picture of Byrd and Frank, but can find them crying at the picnic table, over a birthday cake for a ten-year-old that wasn’t at the table.
But Byrd doesn’t stop to feel it. She gets louder. She gets further away from humming and helping. “His drinking, and his moods . . . When he was good, he was so good, but when he was careless, I couldn’t have him at the house, I couldn’t,” she says. “It was supposed to be temporary. I always thought he’d come back to us, but then when his dad died, and he—well, you remember that night with the snowstorm.”
She doesn’t stop to check if Axel remembers. She doesn’t grab for his hand to hold him to her. She just keeps telling him things that she kept hidden before. Dark things. Murky things.
“And I wouldn’t let him drive you in that old truck. He came for your Saturday, your every-other-Saturday, but I couldn’t let him drive you. Not like that.”
“What?”
“You remember the fight,” she says.
What fights? What snowstorm?
“I needed him to think about what he was doing, how he was getting farther away from us, not closer. That’s when I told him to stay away. Leave me alone to figure out when and if he could come back. I couldn’t take the worry. You didn’t deserve the fighting, the worry. And I needed time to figure things out. And that was the end of it.”
She says “the end of it” like that really is the end of things. Like she can close the book on this bedtime story, in this bed that doesn’t belong to them. Axel starts to form a new picture in his mind; this isn’t Byrd and Frank hugging by the pond, or crying at the picnic table, this is Byrd standing in the cold, sending Frank, a sad and lonely Frank, out into a snowstorm. This is a picture of Byrd closing the book on their family without ever giving Axel a chance to know why.
His bones pulse under his skin. His feet shake. Axel leaps from the bed unable to keep his legs from moving. He paces the long boards of the wooden floor.
“Shhh,” Byrd says. “You’ll wake George and Emmett.” Like that matters, like everyone shouldn’t be awake to hear what Byrd did.
Or worse, that they should all be awake to tell Axel that they knew. They knew about the lost job and the sadness and the snowstorm. They knew all this, and they hid it, like Byrd hid it.
Could that be another part of the truth?
“Shhh,” Byrd says again.
But Axel doesn’t want to stop pacing. He doesn’t want to take a deep breath and save his worries for another day. He wants to think, and there is only one way to do that. So in George and Emmett’s fine, quiet house, with all of Byrd’s secrets out in the open, Axel slams the bedroom door, closing her inside. He doesn’t care who he wakes up.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Feathers
Worry has no wings
Not light
Not air
Not feathers.
Worry is made of stone.
AXEL RACES DOWN THE STAIRS, across the creaky wooden floor, out the front door. This door he leaves wide open to the night air. Wide open to all the secrets that people keep trying to shut away.
He runs through the darkness as words swirl in his mind, and buzzing, like one hundred buzzards, fills his ears. He runs like being chased through the field by raptors. Like the worries are predator, and he is their prey.
Like those raptors, he can taste something on his tongue. For him, it’s a word; for them, it’s blood.
Axel hates blood. But he hates this word on his tongue even more. Anger.
It makes him want to throw up, like cooked carrots or bananas or figs. Or the smell of moldy basements. Or the feel of Byrd’s betrayal.
All along, Byrd had secrets locked away beneath her blue shirt, under her canvas hat and gloves, tucked into her cold, stone bones. Frank had a secret, too. A secret that made him too sick to be with Axel.
Why had they kept these truths from him? Was it that he didn’t deserve to know, or that they didn’t think he could handle it? Who wants to be treated like a baby? Not him.
The anger boils from his insides and out his throat in long, loud screams. If he wakes up the world, or Emmett or George or Aunt Nancy, he doesn’t care, because if they knew and didn’t tell him, they deserve to wake to anger.
The moon from earlier has gone behind thick clouds. Darkness fills his field, not the light from before. From when he’d seen the eagle dad on the nest. There’s no eagle dad, no moon-soaked field, nothing but night and anger.
It isn’t until he crashes into the nest that he knows where in the field he’s run. Not until the slice of sticks on his skin that he realizes he’s lost his way.
Ray’s bark breaks into Axel’s pain, followed by Emmett’s voice.
“You’re okay . . . You’re okay,” Emmett says. He takes Axel into his thick arms, pulls him into his soft, round belly. “Shhh . . . shhh,” he says. Emmett starts to sing a gentle song about a bird in the dead of night. Ray licks at Axel’s leg.
“The nest,” Axel says, like Emmett can’t tell that’s where they are. But it isn’t location that Axel calls to, it’s more pain. “She made me break the nest.”
Ray turns and barks at the shadows moving through the field.
“Axel,” Byrd says. She reaches for her son.
“Don’t,” Axel says. He pushes himself to his own two feet. He can do that all on his own.
“Axel.” Byrd tries again.
George turns the light of his phone on them. On Emmett still on the ground near the nest, on Ray licking at Axel’s hurt leg, on Byrd’s pleading, on Axel standing on his own two feet.
“I’m not a baby,” Axel says sharply, the taste of anger still on his tongue.
“I know,” Byrd says. “I know.”
Emmett rises, touches Byrd on her shoulder. “Let me,” he says to her. “Let’s go inside, get cleaned up,” he says to Axel. “You’re bleeding.”
Axel hates blood, but he hates secrets even more.
“I don’t need help,” Axel says. Not just to Byrd. “I can get cleaned up myself.”
And where does he want to go? He wants to go home. To the comfort of his own house, with his own room, and the hawk’s eyes on his walls, and the ticking clock.
But he’s not home, and nothing about this night is comfortable. He leaves all of the adults outside. Byrd can tell them about letting out the secrets. Byrd can tell them that now Axel knows the truth.
And Axel? Axel goes inside, looks down at his scraped-up legs, and makes a new plan.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Dear Frank
Ostrich
Penguin
Steamer duck.
Kiwi
Emu
Wounded, cut.
IT ISN’T AS EASY to stop the blood on his own, what with it making him want to throw up. So Axel has to let one person help. Aunt Nancy is his choice, but she’s already taken something to help her sleep. So Emmett is next in line. And it goes okay, because at least Emmett doesn’t try to talk about anything.
Emmett does his job. He puts the Band-Aids on and stops the leaking blood. He makes a cup of hot chocolate with extra mini marshmallows. And he gets a comfortable blanket for Axel on the couch.
“Come up if you need anything,” Emmett says.
Axel won’t need anything. “Thank you,” he says, because Emmett really did help.
Axel takes his iPad to the corner of the couch, lets Ray curl up next to him in the now-quiet house.
There are two emails to send. Both of them the truth. One to Dr. Martin. One to Frank.
As he always does, he rushes the email to Dr. Martin. It pours from him easily, black letters on white screen.
The next email is harder to write. Harder still to send.
So he doesn’t.
He leaves the words on the white screen, unsaid.
Maybe it is harder to tell the truth than Axel had ever realized?
Or maybe he just needs the light of day to help him hit the arrow icon that will send his question off to Frank.
So he goes from his email to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology online library. Lets the birdsong fill his corner in the otherwise sleepy house. Lets Ray’s ears perk to the sound of a sandhill crane’s cries.
Lets himself linger over the facts about eagle instincts. There’s a line, “instincts don’t rule out learning.” A fact that no one has shared with Axel before, not Ms. Dale or Dr. Martin, not Emmett or even A. P. Brown’s Collection of North American Birds.
An eagle can learn to swim before it flies.
Eaglets learn to play before they hunt.
Telling the difference between instincts and learning isn’t all that easy—especially when it comes to learning how to navigate secrets and lies. Byrd thinks that they are meant to protect, but that doesn’t seem quite right. How could a lie be better than the truth? If Axel expects Byrd to tell the truth, to speak up, to keep promises, then he must do the same. It won’t be easy, but that hasn’t stopped Axel before.
From: Axel Rastusak
To: Dr. Taylor M. Martin
Subject: This is Axel
Dear Dr. Martin,
This is Axel.
I ran into the nest. I ran and hit the nest with my human scent. And Ray was there, too.
What if the dad won’t come back? What if he smells me, smells Ray, and leaves the nest for good?
You should know that the nest is still standing. It did more damage to me than I did to it, at least on the outside. At least from what I could see.
Do you think he was looking for his baby?
And now he’ll give up on him?
Sincerely,
Axel Rastusak
DRAFT
From: Axel Rastusak
To: Franklin D. Rastusak
Subject: This is Axel
Dear Frank,
This is Axel.
Byrd told me everything.
Why didn’t you come see me anyway?
Sincerely,
Axel Rastusak
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Dear Axel
From: Dr. Taylor M. Martin
To: Axel Rastusak
Subject: Re: This is Axel
Dear Axel,
It is a common misconception that birds abandon their babies because of scent. Really only turkey vultures could pick up the scent of a human. And we aren’t talking turkey vultures here. I asked you to steer clear of the nest because the birds won’t fly to it if they see you—not smell, but actually see you near it.
If they assess that they can’t return to that nest, then they will either steal or build another.
I don’t know about the adult. Most adults abandon fallen or missing babies for one reason: HOPE. They hope that their baby made it. That he left the nest to learn to fly. That he’s started a life on his own. They trust that nature will do its thing. Instincts are powerful.
