Chasing Redbird (18 page)

T
wice I dropped the groceries on my way home, and when one sack split, I had to cram its contents into the two remaining bags. As I turned into our drive, Jake sped past in the red car. Twenty feet beyond me, he honked, braked suddenly, but shot forward again. A minute later, the sheriff's car whizzed past in the same direction, red lights flashing.

Jake had really done it this time. I hoped he wouldn't be arrested. If he were, maybe he would blame me. He might tell the sheriff he'd been trying to impress me, and I'd been such a pill.

Jake's stealing was worrying me. I was all mixed up about it. If anyone else had stolen anything, I would've instantly known it was wrong, wrong, wrong. But with Jake, I'd find myself making excuses for him. Maybe he thought Bingo was mistreated at the Butlers'; maybe he was trying to save Bingo. Maybe he'd borrowed his mother's ring. Maybe he'd borrowed the car.

These excuses didn't convince me. Maybe he couldn't help himself. Maybe he was just a generous, free-hearted sort of person who wanted to make people happy. Maybe he loved me so much that he had lost his senses.

And then I was really mixed up. I was impressed that someone would go to all these lengths just for me. And then I felt guilty that I might be the cause of Jake doing terrible things. And then I worried that something terrible was going to happen to Jake, and then I'd
reall
y feel guilty. Then I wondered why I was thinking about Jake so much, and did I really like him, and if so,
why
did I like him? And then I got angry that he was making me so confused.

At home, Mom said, “Are you packing up again already?”

“Yup.”

“We've missed you, Zinny—”

From overhead came a loud crash, followed by Sam's wail, “Mom—” She dashed upstairs.

“You're not spending the night, are you?” Bonnie asked.

“Nope.”

“I want you to stay, Zinny—it's just that Junie's staying, and I was hoping she could have your bed—”

“Fine.”

When Mom returned, she said, “You've got to stay until your father gets home, and I was hoping you'd stay and help with Uncle Nate tonight—”

“Tonight?”

“Your father and I have been taking turns sitting up with him all night, and we're so tired we can hardly stand up. Maybe you could sit with him tonight?”

“What about May or Gretchen or—?”

“They'd be no good at it. They'd fall asleep and wouldn't hear an elephant crash through the window.”

“What about Bonnie?”

“Bonnie's got Junie staying over.”

“The boys?”

“They're too little. Will you do it?”

I didn't want to watch Uncle Nate. I didn't want to see him like that. But I agreed. “Okay, but I'm leaving first thing in the morning,” I said.

In Uncle Nate's room, I curled up in the chair. He was asleep, still clutching that stick. On the wall next to the bed was a framed wall hanging that Aunt Jessie had cross-stitched. At the top, in blue letters, were these words:
Even a monkey falls from a tree.
In the picture below this saying, a monkey tumbled out of a palm tree. I'd always wondered about that monkey, who looked surprised, suspended in the air, forever falling. I wished he could be back in his tree, safe. I didn't want him to crunch to the ground.

Tucked into the mirror frame above the dresser was the “proof” picture. On top of the dresser was Uncle Nate's camera. Where were Aunt Jessie's lotions and perfume? Her hand mirror?

Her things were vanishing, just like baby Rose's had. There were no reminders of baby Rose anywhere. This had always seemed so sad to me, this erasure of baby Rose from their lives.

Swish!
Out flew an image of a pair of dolls that Aunt Jessie had made for me and baby Rose when we were three years old. They were life-sized dolls (three-year-old-sized), soft and floppy, dressed in our own clothes. Baby Rose's doll had soft yellow hair, and mine had dark hair. What had happened to those dolls? I longed to see them.

I was gripped by the need to look in that bottom dresser drawer, and tiptoed across the room to open it.

Their marriage quilt was folded neatly, taking up most of the drawer. I patted it tentatively, as if reassuring myself that there was no dead body wrapped in it. To one side, and partially covered by the quilt was a square black box. Startled by a snore from Uncle Nate, I closed the drawer.

In the pink bathroom, I looked everywhere for the key to the locked cabinet drawer. I ran my hands along the top of the window frame, searched the remaining cabinet drawers, and opened every bottle and jar on the counter. No key.

I returned to Uncle Nate's room and stared out the window. Maybe Uncle Nate and Aunt Jessie had replaced Rose with me. Was it possible that Uncle Nate would ever replace Aunt Jessie with someone else?

Then I heard the cricket. Automatically, I counted his chirps, watching the second hand on Uncle Nate's clock. Seventy-seven degrees outside.

Uncle Nate awoke with a start and said, “Rose?”

“No, it's Zinny.”

He looked at me for a long, long time. “I knew it,” he said.

“Uncle Nate, you don't happen to know anything about a medallion, do you?”

“A what?”

As I described it for him, he fidgeted with the sheets. “Don't talk to me about it,” he said. “Stop talking.”

“Why? Do you know where it is?”

“Don't talk to me about it.”

I studied him. He looked guilty and afraid. “Did you take it?”

“I never. Stop it. My heart's jumping.”

I was in my
Zinnia Taylor: detective
mode, and there was no stopping me. I was heartless.

“Where were you really going on those mountain walks? Were you meeting someone?”

He grabbed his stick and raised it in the air. “Stop it! Stop it!”

I was so angry it scared me. I left the room and paced the hall. Up and down, up and down. I didn't want to hate Uncle Nate. I loved him as much as I loved my own father. More. I loved him more.

What a thought! It went through me like a hundred little lightning bolts. I knew Uncle Nate better than I knew my own father, and I'd known Aunt Jessie better than my own mother.

When I looked back in the room, Uncle Nate appeared to be asleep. I opened the bottom dresser drawer again, and removed the black box. Inside was—
aha!
—the medallion—and a key.

The key fit the bathroom drawer. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I was surprised by what I found. There was a box, nearly full, of syringes, and an insulin pamphlet. In all the time I'd known Aunt Jessie and heard her talk about her
sugar
, I'd never known she'd taken insulin shots.

But there was more in the drawer, beneath these things. In a pink heart-shaped box was a locket containing a wisp of hair. Folded beneath the box was a child's drawing of a stick-figure woman and
M-O-M
in crooked letters.

I touched the hair, and ran my fingers over the drawing. It was Rose's hair and Rose's drawing. What bothered me was that these two things seemed to be all that Aunt Jessie had saved to remind her of Rose, and that she had locked them away in a bathroom drawer.

Uncle Nate was mumbling in his sleep. Once he said, “Bury it,” and another time he said, “Redbird!” and, worst of all, he kept saying, “Let me out of here! Let me out!”

I couldn't bear it. His legs jerked under the sheet and sweat rolled down his forehead. With a cool cloth I mopped his face, and when I tried to straighten his pillow, I found a silken cloth tucked beneath it: Aunt Jessie's embroidery about the hyacinths, the one I had placed in her coffin with her. There were the hyacinths, the bread, and that hand coming down from the sky.

This really spooked me. How did this get out of the coffin and under Uncle Nate's pillow?

“Redbird! Redbird!” he called.

I held his pillow and looked down on his contorted face, and I don't know what came over me. I was somebody else. I was God. I placed the pillow over his face, blotting it out. I pressed hard.

A
s I hurried up the trail early the next morning, I couldn't bear to look back at the house and the farm. If I stole one look, it might suck me up and imprison me.

I kept returning to that moment when I pressed the pillow down on Uncle Nate's face. I was full of love and full of hate. I hated his being sick, trapped like that. I hated myself for thinking that he might replace Aunt Jessie with someone else. And mixed in with this hate was huge, overpowering love for Uncle Nate, my Uncle Nate who wouldn't hurt a flea, who so desperately missed Aunt Jessie, who so desperately wanted to be with her.

When I pressed on the pillow, I was thinking,
Catch her, then, catch her!

His hand flapped in the air, caught my wrist, and squeezed it. I saw my hands. They were my hands, not God's hands. I snatched the pillow away from Uncle Nate's face.

He stared up at me, and that stare was like the beady eyes of the salamander and the knowing eyes of the fox. I fluffed the pillow and placed it beneath his head. Then I folded Aunt Jessie's hyacinth embroidery and slid it under the pillow. All the while he watched me. I sat in the chair beside his bed and squeezed his hand all night long. Neither of us said a word.

When I heard Mom groping in the kitchen, I snatched Uncle Nate's camera, stuffed it in my backpack, and gathered my food.

“You're up early,” Mom said. “Leaving already?”

“Yup.”

“How did Uncle Nate sleep?”

“Fine,” I lied.

“Zinny, I want to ask you something.”

I winced, afraid that she knew what I'd done.

“Can you come home next Saturday—instead of in ten days?”

“Why?”

“We're all going to the circus in Chocton.”

“I don't want to go,” I said.

“Are you sure? We're all going.”

“Uncle Nate?” I asked.

“Oh. Right. Well. If you don't want to go to the circus, maybe you'd come home and stay with him? Would you, Zinny? How about it? What's the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you upset about Uncle Nate?” she asked.

I couldn't answer. I yearned to tell her everything—but everything was jumbled up in one big spaghetti pot. Uncle Nate and Jake and Rose and Jessie and the ring and the medallion and the trail were all twisted around in a huge tangle of guilt, and I longed to empty that whole pot into someone else's lap. I wanted to stop feeling guilty about baby Rose and Aunt Jessie and Uncle Nate. I wanted to understand what Jake was doing and why, and I wanted to stop feeling guilty for his stealing.

Instead, I felt like the monkey in Aunt Jessie's wall hanging: frozen, forever falling, falling, falling.

I ached to be like Sam, stirring his soup saying, “Don't blame me,” and to be like baby Rose, perpetually
doing
the old lady without actually
being
one, and eternally riding around in a shopping bag pleasing Aunt Jessie.