The Bird Saviors (8 page)
    It's a good first day, but by the time he returns to his car he's exhausted and disheartened. Heading home, he loses focus and drives back two years into the past.
H e  r e m e m b e r s  t h e  n i g h t everything went bad. The beginning of the end of his little world. His wife and baby girl at the dinner table, green beans and carrots in a bowl. His wife said she didn't feel right. I think I had better lie down, she said. I don't feel so good. She put her head in her hands.
    Ward remembers staring at her hands, remembers how thin and withered they seemed, all veins and bones. She said she felt like all her blood had been sucked dry.
    Before long he heard her vomiting in the bathroom. He crouched beside her and told her to get it out. She would feel better soon. Maybe it was food poisoning. Something inside that didn't sit well. He wet a washcloth and put it to her forehead. He held the plastic bowl and afterward, wiped her mouth with another washcloth. His daughter stood in the doorway and stared. Shocked and curious.
    Six hours after his wife first fell sick, Ward began to worry in earnest. Her eyes sank into skull hollows. Her skin looked bloodless. She could not sit up. She lay in bed and breathed rapidly, her fever starting to make her skin burn. He called for an ambulance and first the fire department arrived. When he told them her symptoms they nodded and backed away, saying they'd best wait for the EMS.
    The ambulance paramedics wore gloves and masks. They told Ward a lot of this was going around. It was contagious. Wash your hands, they said. Be careful not to let the baby touch anything that her mother has handled. Use sanitizers.
    How can I do that? he wanted to ask. My wife touches everything in the house. It's her house. She should. She touched the baby just before she went to the bathroom and became sick. She fed her green beans with her hands, with her fingers.
    He took his daughter to his mother- in- law's: He'd be back
in the morning, they would all be better. Nurses put his wife on a narrow hospital bed with an IV drip attached to her arm. She grimaced in pain, seized up with muscle spasms. The nurse said it was dehydration. Once we get enough fluids in her, she'll feel much better.
    He slept on the floor of her hospital room, which had no door, only a curtain to the hallway full of bustling nurses and doctors and patients and visitors, a constant burble of noise. He sat in a plastic chair until his tailbone ached and he grew so tired he lay on the cold tile floor and tried to sleep. He woke up bleary with a nurse standing over him. She said he should go to the mercy room. It might be more comfortable.
    It wasn't.
    They said by morning she would be better. She would improve.
    He awoke with a sore neck and gunk in his eyes, twisted up on a short sofa in the mercy room. A woman who looked as if she had been crying was sitting in the chair across from him, watching
Good Morning America.
He walked down the hall to his wife's room and it was empty. He had to find a nurse and ask for help.
Good Morning America.
He walked down the hall to his wife's room and it was empty. He had to find a nurse and ask for help.
    Where's my wife? She was supposed to get out this morning.
    She had been transferred in the night to another room, and had more equipment attached to her when he found her. Her fever was 105, and nothing they did seemed to help. They had her on fluids and anti- this and anti- that. They were giving her something to bring down the fever.
    Is the fever worse? he asked.
    The nurse did not answer. When the doctor came to give him
an update, he said it had climbed to 107 at one point. They had brought it down to 105. We're working on it, said the doctor. He had long blond hair and was short, heavyset. He looked like an old surfer. We're going to get this thing licked. Be patient.
    Ward sat in the hospital room and read old magazines. TV stars from the past, from the time only a year before that seemed to reek of excess and vanity. Celebrity chefs. Reality- TV stars. Dancing contests. Hedge- fund billionaires. The world gone greedy, drunk, and stupid.
    Without sleep or breakfast, his heart was racing. He kept rubbing his eyes to try to wake up. He checked on his wife again. She was asleep, her eyelids dusky purple, a frown creating a crease just between her eyebrows. He sat beside her and stared out the window. The hospital was expanding, a mammoth construction project with cement walls topped with steel bars. A giant crane sat in the middle of the project, a triangular yellow flag at its tip.
    Ward could hear the muffled rumble of dump trucks and earth- moving equipment, could see a rotating concrete truck with a dozen men standing around it. The woman on the other side of the room awoke and started to moan in pain and call out, Nurse? Nurse? Where are you? Help me. Help, nurse.
    Ward walked down the hallway to the nurses' station and told them of her calls. They nodded and said they were busy with an influx of flu cases. Someone would be there in a moment. He saw two nurses talking to each other and frowning. One of them said, Oh, good Lord.
    He drove to his mother- in- law's and found his daughter vomiting, her face pale and skin hot. She was crying and calling out for her mother. Mama's sick, baby, said Ward. She's in the hospital. But she'll be better soon and then she'll come home.
    Mama, said his daughter. She held up her hands and said, Mama.
    Ward drove his daughter to the same hospital that held his wife, with his mother- in- law in the backseat holding the child, trying to comfort her, a washcloth on her forehead. The emergency room seemed busier than before, with more people in the waiting room, watching television with worried looks on their faces. All the nurses and staff wore gauze masks over their noses and mouths. It muffled their speech and gave Ward a strange vibration in his chest. A tremor of fear.
    The hospital put his daughter in the same room with his wife, moving their beds side by side. The older woman who had been calling for the nurse was gone. Ward stood beside his daughter in the hospital room and tried to calm her. She was crying so hard she hiccupped and had to be held down to put an IV tube in her arm. She looked into Ward's eyes and said, Go back home.
    She didn't know how to say
I want to
yet.
I want to
yet.
    Go back home, she said. Mama Mama Mama. Go back home.
    I'm sorry, pumpkin, said Ward. You and Mama are sick and have to stay here until you get better.
    Go back home, said his daughter. Now. Go back home.
    Her lips were chapped and swollen. Her breath was ragged. When he put his hand on her back, he could feel each inhale, a rattling inside her. His hands were shaking as he tried to push the hair out of her eyes, as the nurse said, Please. You shouldn't be touching her. She's contagious.
Go back home, cried his daughter, stretching out her hands.
She never did.
He remembers returning to the empty house, how still and silent it seemed.
    He didn't want to move a thing.
    At first he was so exhausted from days without sleep and his body fighting the virus that he slept for twelve hours. He awoke groggy but with no fever. He half expected that he would come down with the virus, and every moment he felt queasy he thought he'd start vomiting and become weak.
    He wanted to die, to get it over with. He didn't see the point in anything. He quit eating. He thought that maybe he would simply fade away, become too weak to get out of bed, close his eyes and sink into darkness.
    But the days passed and he grew stronger. He starved himself until his body rebelled and he took to buying doughnuts and cheeseburgers. Food he had not eaten regularly since being married. He read constantly. About birds mainly, but other scientific works as well. Anything to ignore the hollowness of his world.
    Months passed. He applied for grants to study the birds of the Colorado prairie, his specialty. One day a man from the Audubon Society left him a voice mail saying, Congratulations.
    After he recovered from his weakness, he found that he could not fall asleep without his wife. When he was so tired he could no longer keep his focus on a book, he watched television until four o'clock in the morning and fell asleep on the couch. It became normal for him to watch the blue hour twilight before dawn. His wife's sister, Nisha, lost her job and came to his home, fixed meals for him, talked constantly, filled his house with cooking smells and sound. Late one night he found her weeping in his daughter's nursery. They hugged and kissed and told each other that they would watch out and care for each other. And then they were in bed.
    At dawn he dressed and stole away, hands trembling as he packed a duffel bag and carried it to his car.
    He left everything plus a note, asking Nisha to move into his home.
Pulling into the parking lot of the Buffalo Head Inn, he realizes this is home in his new lifeâ a motel room with a toilet that won't stop running, bad cable TV, free beer at happy hour, and a Jacuzzi by the pool, closed for repairs.
R u b y  w a k e s  in a dark room. A clock ticks somewhere nearby. She blinks, feeling unmoored, adrift in an oily black sea. The sound of high- pitched barking in the distance. The smell of wood smoke. Her skin burns and her mouth feels parched and raspy, her lips cracked and chapped. She's sweating, the sheets wet against her body. Her eyeballs burn and she can keep them open only for a moment. As her sight adjusts to the dimly lit room, she focuses on the wall across from the bed. The wallpaper looks familiar: cowgirls with buckskin skirts and lar iats. Longhorn steers and prickly- pear cactus.
    She comes to realize she's back in the house of Lord God, back in her old room, and feels a sense of drowning, of seeing the surface of the water high above her, a glimpse of sunlight she will never feel upon her face. Here the room is dark, only a thin blade of light at the base of a closed door.
    In the musty- smelling bed she lies and listens to coyotes howling on the prairie that stretches beyond the broken fence, the stony fields of juniper and sagebrush. The coyotes yap and bark, high- pitched and playful. Yard dogs join in
el coro
, sounding more like wolf howls than barks, envious and mournful.
el coro
, sounding more like wolf howls than barks, envious and mournful.
    Beyond the closed door she hears Lila crying. Her nipples begin to leak, the wetness sudden as an adrenaline rush. She tries to raise herself out of bed. The sheets cling to her, sodden with sweat, the blankets heavy as a funeral pall.
    She stands and wobbles, her skin tingling and tensing into goose bumps. She moves to the door and each step reverberates in her head, soft explosions in her skull. She makes it to her door and finds it locked. She struggles for the words, the words she needs to say. How to phrase them? What can she say? What can she call him now? Lord God? Sir? Daddy? Father? You bastard? She never knows what to call him anymore.
    Lord God he is but you do not take the Lord's name in vain. Not in this house. One of the commandments. The numbered sins.
Papa? she calls. The door is locked. Let me out.
    She pounds on the door, pleading for help in a weak voice. A wave of dizziness washes through her. After moments in which she feels as if she's falling, huddled against the doorjamb, she hears the thump and hiss of his prosthetic leg approaching. The click of the door. He opens it wide, his face like that of a prophet watching his predictions made real.
    See? he says. I knew you'd be coming back. I knew you'd need me.
    Please, she says, can I have something to eat? I'm hungry.
    You still have the fever. Get back in bed.
    I'm weak. I need something.
    Do you want Lila to catch your sickness?
    Where is she?
    She's fine. No thanks to you. He shakes his head. You're shameless, you know that?
    I want my baby.
    He tells her again that she's sick, and her baby will die if she catches the infection. Doesn't she have any sense?
    Look at you, he says. What kind of woman abandons her baby? And what kind of girl gets herself pregnant with no husband? I know what kind. I can't even say the word.
    Ruby pounds her head against the doorjamb. I want my baby.
    Lord God pushes her face away from the gap in the door, the smell of his palm against her nose. He pulls the door closed and tells her not to make a spectacle. Once again the room is dark and she alone. Through the door he tells her to get back in bed and sleep.
    I'll bring you soup in a while, he adds. I've got other things to do. At the moment I don't have time for a girl who abandons her child. You want your baby now? You should have thought of that before.
    I bet you thought it was funny, he says. Running away from a man with one leg? Who's laughing now?
Ruby awakens again, curled in a heap on the floor, the dusty smell of the wooden planks in her mouth and nose. The room is lighter now, a bluish tint of dawn light out the eight- paned windows. She becomes aware of her own smell, notices how dank and sour she's become. The door is still locked.
    As soon as she moves, she feels intense cold, as if her body has been drained of all its blood. She shivers as she grabs at clothes in the closet, yanking a wool sweater over her head and over her flannel nightgown. She pulls off her underwear and dries her clammy, goose- pimpled skin with a flannel shirt from the closet, then hurries to her dresser to get a pair of jeans and wool socks, her hands shaking from the cold, her head pulsing with dizziness, eyes blurry from tears.
    It's all she can do to stagger to the bed and crawl into it, smothering herself with the blankets. Outside, the wind sings against the low- looped power lines, a high- pitched chorus that mimics the keening of dust- bowl furies. It sings against the bleached slats tacked onto the staggered, crooked fence posts beyond the woodshed. It sings and buffets and thrums over the bunchgrass and juniper and aspens. Enough to drive a body out of her head. Of weaker flesh and mind. You have to take it. To not think about it. To become accustomed to it. Like any pain. You get used to it.
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