Fowl Weather (31 page)

Bounding upstairs, I returned with another field guide. “Here's
Butterflies of North America.
It's one of the Kaufman Focus Guides,” I told her. “The book I want will look a lot like this, but it's a field guide to birds, and the author's name is Kenn Kaufman.”

“Let me write that name down.”

“Kenn—with two
n
's—Kaufman. And don't use a sticky-note,” I suggested.

When the magical natal day finally rolled around and threatened to flatten me, I stopped moaning over the toll of years long enough to open a few packages. After thanking Linda for three pairs of socks and a pound of Kenyan coffee, I tore apart the balloon-themed wrapping paper to reveal a coffee-table tome entitled
Lives of North American Birds
by Kenn Kaufman, in place of the tote-friendly field guide. “Oh, this looks nice,” I remarked with a lack of enthusiasm.

“Isn't that the book you wanted? I asked the little guy at the bookstore for a bird book by Kenn Kaufman, and this is what he gave me.”

I muttered something unintelligible then assured her that it would be fine.

As an added birthday perk, Linda announced she was treating me to the $4.99 buffet at the Peking Happiness restaurant in Ionia. I drove while Linda lay in the back seat with her pillow and gel pack. As I followed a dump truck hauling a load of gravel up and down the winding, hilly two-lane road and ran the wipers to keep the windshield more or less free of pebbles, I sunk into a deeper
than usual mire of self-pity.
I only asked for one present,
I whined to myself.
You'd think she could have gotten it right.

At the restaurant, as I picked at my dill-pickle sushi roll, Linda went back to the buffet to heap another plate with such Cantonese delights as squash, corn on the cob, and macaroni and cheese. I was silently lamenting the demise of the Weigh and Pay, which had gone bust within a month of my meal with Bill Holm the previous winter, when a man at the table directly behind Linda's empty chair caught my attention.

“It's Kaufman,” he told the frowning boy sitting next to him. “Kaufman, spelled K-A-U-F-M-A-N.”

I had no idea what the two were talking about. I suspected that Bobo the cosmic clown had decided to make me feel foolish about sulking over a birthday gift from Linda.

W
HISKERS CURLED UP
on the basement rug, then flopped around as I petted him. The shyer cat named Baby watched the scene with skepticism before finally deciding that her back required stroking, too. The two cats belonged to Linda's housecleaning client, Nancy Ann, a strong-willed young woman with cerebral palsy. Upon moving from a relative's house to a group home for the disabled, she had discovered that she needed to petition a board of directors to allow her cats to stay with her. In the meantime, the pair had nowhere to go, and we'd ended up boarding them.

Normally we wouldn't confine cats to our basement. But with a room full of birds just upstairs plus a trio of cat-intolerant cats of our own, we didn't have a lot of choice. Happily, Whiskers and Baby loved it down there. While Whiskers hunted for the hordes of mice that streamed inside each day—we had installed a tiny service door for their convenience—Baby would spend hours stretched out on the windowsill regarding the barren winter wastes.
Chickadees flitting around the leafless spirea bush hypnotized her with their activity, and as an added perk, indoor-outdoor explorer Agnes occasionally hissed her disapproval from the opposite side of the glass.

Whiskers, a big male rag-doll mix, tended toward irrational exuberance, so I couldn't fall into my usual feline-petting reverie with him without risking a nip on the hand. Realigning my arm a few inches, I scratched calico cat Baby behind the ears, then turned my attention to a medium-size black cat that had hopped from the side of our unfinished stairway onto the basement floor, passing through the unoccupied fledgling flight cage like a breeze through the branches of a tree. Agnes, our small black cat, was at the moment asleep on the arm of the couch in the living room upstairs, and this solid-appearing yet shadowy form definitely didn't belong to her. It disappeared as soon as it hit or didn't hit the cement. The ghost cat had returned.

A week earlier, shortly after Nancy Ann's friend Al had first dropped off the skittish Whiskers and Baby, I had seen the not-really-there black feline for the first time. As the two flesh-and-blood visitors tentatively investigated the new space, the apparition popped into our basement long enough to take a few steps, vanishing as soon as I gave it a second glance. Why it had accompanied the pair, I couldn't imagine, but it clearly possessed the tenuous and intermittent toehold in reality that people popularly associate with ghosts, unless ethereal apparitions have nothing to do with spirits. Perhaps at the moment of death a kind of turning inside out of the pockets of the physical form occurs. Unimportant traces of bodily existence show up like pennies that materialize under the cushion of a favorite chair, only to be misplaced again.

Or maybe more like paper clips. Shortly after Joan and Bett moved my mom to the furnished apartment at Testament Terrace,
Bett phoned me to ask, “Remember the rubber bands and paper clips Mom claimed Dad was leaving around the house? I guess he approves of what we're doing. Before we had even started unpacking Mom's things, I found a green rubber band and a paper clip on the floor of her new bathroom. I have no idea how they could have gotten there.”

Perhaps, I thought, if paper-fastening products rained down from heaven, then the K-A-U-F-M-A-N coincidence might be another form of precipitation. Clouds filled with apparent meaningfulness grew heavy over time, dumping symbolic snowflakes onto our heads. The problem was, I never knew how to interpret the fallout. Trying to glean content from apparent absurdity tugged my underpowered brain in conflicting directions as I wondered whether propitious or ill events hung before me. If I had taken a mental step back in time, I might have recalled the coincidence involving another field guide—the
National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Weather
which had nettled me in the wake of my father's death.

A
FTER
I
ARRIVED
home from my morning job, I opened Stanley Sue's cage door to allow her to wreak her usual mild havoc on the dining room. The descent from her cage and clamber up Rudy's cage were sluggish. Once on the summit, instead of taking a few token beak swipes at the rabbit snoozing safely far below the wire top, she sat on the edge of the cage huffing and puffing.

“Something's wrong with Stanley Sue,” I called to Linda, who hurried in from the tiny back room, where she had been working on the month's bookkeeping for her tiny church. “She's having trouble breathing.”

Of all the critters in the house, Stanley Sue received my closest attention. I hadn't noticed the slightest sign of any problem earlier,
except that the previous night she hadn't squawked and rung her bell with her usual annoyance.

“She doesn't look very good,” Linda said, as Stanley's Sue chest rose and fell alarmingly with each breath. “We'd better get her to the vet today.”

Dr. Fuller, the gifted avian vet who usually treated her, couldn't squeeze her into his afternoon schedule at such short notice. Dr. Hedley, who consulted for several zoos in the Great Lakes area and had saved the lives of a number of our pets, managed to clear space for her immediately.

I brought Stanley Sue into the examination room in a shoe-box-size pet carrier. Prickling my conscience with a plaintive series of peeps, she inveigled me into opening the carrier door and letting her hop to the top to wait for the doctor. But the door started to ease shut beneath her. When I extended my hand to prevent it from pinching her scaly grey toes, I startled her. She flew heavily around the room in two slow spirals before sinking to the floor in the corner. As soon as she landed, she toppled over onto her side and didn't get up.

I rushed to her, lifting her body in both hands and placing her on the towel in the carrier. She lay breathing heavily for a half a minute and managed to make it back to her feet just before Dr. Hedley came in. With a shaky voice, I described what had happened.

“Ran out of gas, huh?” he asked with a look of concern.

“I thought she was dead,” I said.

The parrot chittered in protest as he held her on her back and listened to her chest with a stethoscope. “She's got pneumonia.”

The diagnosis shocked me almost as much as Stanley Sue's collapse. I fought a falling-in-the-elevator sensation as a prickling of heat throughout my body announced the leading edge of a panic
attack. It was one thing to hear bad news about an animal that had suffered a lengthy illness. But Stanley had appeared perfectly healthy just twenty-four hours earlier, and I couldn't accept the idea that she was gravely ill.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “This is very upsetting.”

He peered at me over his glasses. “Of course it is. She's your buddy.” His voice projected strength and confidence, two qualities that had never taken root in me.

“Do you think she'll be okay?”

“There's a good chance, as long we caught this soon enough,” he answered as he slipped her back inside the carrier. I pushed my finger through the grate and wiggled it genially near her beak in a halfhearted gesture of reassurance. “We'll try her on an antibiotic and see if she starts to show improvement in a couple of days. In the meantime, it is vitally important to keep her very warm.”

When I came home, I found Linda in the kitchen squatting in front of the refrigerator, eating banana cream pie from a spatula. “How is Stanley?” Straightening up, she stopped chewing when I told her what had happened.

Following Dr. Hedley's instructions, we turned Stanley Sue's cage into a tent that would keep in the heat, covering all sides but the front with blankets. Then I carried in a space heater and proceeded to install a tropical climate in the dining room.

W
E STARTED GETTING
late-evening calls from the staff at Testament Terrace that my mom was wandering the halls, waiting for Joan or me to pick her up. “We send her back to her room, and she's okay for a while. Then just when we think she's settled down, she's out wandering again.” A few nights after I had taken Stanley Sue to the vet and was watching a home improvement show with Linda, the night manager phoned. “Mrs. Kelsey just walked into her room
and found your mom going through her dresser drawers, pulling out clothes. She said she needed to pack for a trip to Port Huron to visit her sister. It might calm her down if you talked to her.”

When I gave my mom a call, she didn't mention anything about leaving town. But she did claim that she had the front-door key to her former neighbors Ted and Lesley's house. “I've got to get it back to them, or they'll be locked out.” I suggested that the errand could probably wait until morning, and she surprised me by agreeing and deciding to go to bed. Just before hanging up, she said, “Have you seen Dad recently?”

I was speechless for a moment. The question somehow reminded me of hearing his dislocated voice on the answering machine. “He's been dead a few years now. Remember?”

“That's odd,” she replied. The news didn't seem to upset her. “I could have sworn I saw him this morning when I was walking to the dime store.”

Since she couldn't recall Dad's passing, I didn't see the value in pointing out that the Jolly Store had gone belly-up at least twenty years ago and was miles away from Testament Terrace. “I think about Dad a lot, too,” I told her, and I could imagine worse delusions than passing his smiling figure on the sidewalk.

I
GOT OFF THE
phone with Mom just as Linda brought out the last two slices of banana cream pie. It proved to be as much of a hit with our twelve-pound rabbit Frieda as it had been with the pair of humans in the house. She interrupted our snack by hopping up onto the couch and thrusting her feet and face onto Linda's plate.

“Frieda,” Linda complained, “you're going to make me drop it.”

“She shouldn't be having sweets anyway. She already weighs a ton.”

After being unceremoniously shooed onto the floor, Frieda demonstrated her displeasure by running behind the recliner and glaring at us. Eventually, her love of being pampered trumped her disgruntlement. She loped back to plop down beside the couch so that I could pet her. Recognizing an opportunity when he saw it, brown bunny Rudy snuggled up beside her, pressing his small body against her massive bloat so tightly, I couldn't stroke her head without petting his as well.

“It's like a dinghy beside an ocean liner,” I told Linda.

My mood had eased since dinner, when Stanley Sue had shown improvement by digging into her veggies, potatoes, and gelatin dessert after days of poor appetite. She had even treated me to an angry whistle when I had thrown the black cover over her cage.

I definitely needed a break from worry. Stanley Sue's sickness had become my sickness. Ever since her collapse at Dr. Hedley's, a steady drip, drip, drip of dread had distracted me from concentrating on anything but her.
Stanley Sue,
my feet tapped out as I walked down the basement stairs. I'd see people chuckling together in the grocery store aisle and think,
They don't know what I know.
If I relaxed my guard or tensed—I wasn't sure which—the dread increased its grip and leaped into the foreground. My locomotive gears would freeze as I stared dully into space until some stimulus jarred me loose. If by an uncharacteristically optimistic surge I managed to banish the worry, I'd pay for my relief moments later when the fear resurfaced with vengeful vigor.

It didn't help matters that Stanley Sue hated being handled, and medicating her twice a day added to our distress. In full bloom of health, she could be timid about stepping onto my finger, and I couldn't risk her flying in a panic around the room and passing out again. So each morning and evening I would open the cage door, toss a hand towel over her, and carry her to the kitchen
countertop. Linda would hold her as I wriggled the tip of a syringe between her jaws. The trick was squirting the antibiotic slowly enough that she would swallow rather than spit it out; but if I took too long, she would chomp down on the syringe and destroy it. By the time I returned her to the cage, her pupils were wide with anxiety, her chest was heaving, and my stomach hurt.