The Hummingbird (27 page)

Soga leaned toward the window again. “Appears most different.”

“The trees are fifty years taller. But I want you to listen a second.”

Soga sat back. Donny stared ahead, into the sun’s glare.

“Yes?” Soga said.

Donny chewed his upper lip. “Aw, hell.”

“There is a problem, sir?”

Donny removed his sunglasses. “It’s Heather giving you that damn hug.”

“Most excellent young woman.”

“Hell, I know that,” Donny said. “You think I don’t know that?”

“No, sir. Of course.”

“It’s just that if you can become a peacenik, you of all people, after we whipped your country’s ass to China and back, not to mention burning Tokyo and blasting the shit out of two other cities, and yet you come here all these times, and then my daughter can hug you like that, do you get it? Goddamn it, do you get it?”

“So sorry,” Soga replied. “I do not understand.”

“Do you think you’re better than me, somehow?”

Soga shook his head. “Never.”

“Well, that’s my point exactly. If you can do it, and she can do it, what in the hell does it mean if
I
can’t do it?” He banged his fist on the armrest. “Goddamn it.”

Soga made no reply.

Donny glared at him, then put his sunglasses back on. He faced forward, wringing the steering handles. All at once he laughed loudly. “Fine.
Fine
.” He lifted his hands from the controls. “Your aircraft, mister.”

“I do not understand, sir.”

“We’re over your old route. We’ll pass the memorial any second. Fly it again now.”

“Truly?”

“Before I change my mind.”

“Has been many years.”

Donny folded his hands in his lap. “We ain’t on autopilot, bub.”

Soga straightened in his seat and took the wheel, checking the air speed and altitude. He squeezed the handles, testing their feel. Then he eased to starboard, heading southeast, leveling off as they passed deeper over the forest.

“Hah,” Ichiro Soga said. “Most excellent.”

“Yeah.” Donny Baker III interlaced his hands behind his head. “Yeah.”

CHAPTER 17

MOSTLY HE SLEPT.
But that was good news, because it meant the cancer was gentle. No need to stupefy him with pain meds, just maintain the anti-nausea drugs—which were working well. He did not toss in bed, and never objected when two hours had passed and I needed to turn him again. As a result he had no sores, zero. Clinically, his case was one of the better ones.

The hard part for me—and of course I had the easier job by far—was experiencing the decline of the Professor’s mind. During a long doze, he would mutter strange phrases and random thoughts. “Tenure review. . . . De Gaulle Airport . . . cumulo-nimbus.”

But then something recognizable would emerge that told me he was doing some kind of mind-work, some processing task, and his intellect was still functioning. “Elevation above sea level. . . . No stick.”

Yes, I was still reading
The Sword
to him. He seemed to find pleasure in it, even when asleep. His breathing eased. He spent less time tugging on that tuft of hair.

Now and then he would come fully awake, launching into a discussion midway as if we had been talking for hours. Those conversations were jewels.

“Nurse Birch, you said it enlarges people and I disagreed. I have now changed my opinion.”

It was noon on a Friday in high summer, and those were his first words of the day. “What does?”

“Suffering. You asserted it on the bridge. You used the word ‘enlarge.’ ”

“Oh. I probably did. What changed your mind?”

“Contemplating Deirdre.”

I drew my chair closer to his bed. “I’m listening.”

“What did you think of her?”

“Well, what you think is more important right now.”

He threw up his hands. “Will you ever desist from being evasive?”

“All right. I was surprised at how you signed your letter.”

“Barclay instead of Dad or Father?”

“No. That you didn’t say love. As in: love, Barclay.”

“We are not a family that expresses affection overtly. But that is exactly the point I want to make about suffering, and how it is enlarging me: I have realized that Deirdre will experience her father’s love for many years.”

“Through an untrue letter?”

“Through inheritance.” He sniffed. “My daughter will receive this house and all its contents. Oswego Lake has grown so posh, the proceeds will make her relatively rich. Thus I will have provided for her, in spite of her spite.”

“Sounds less like generosity and more like revenge.”

“Not one bit,” he said. “As I allow myself to imagine, her benefits will be free of any fatherly vindictiveness.”

The Professor had begun using his lecture voice, and I sat back, pleased to hear it once again. “Help me understand.”

“Consider the effect, when she’s living in a nicer house. Or driving a nicer car. I imagine her sipping a cappuccino by a fountain in Rome. Or no. Strolling a side street in Paris—with a lover, for her sake I hope so. Finding a petit parfumerie, and she enters with a little tinkle of the
clochette.
”

He shook two fingers as if to ring an imaginary bell.

“Deirdre will not be thinking of me in the least,” he continued. “But I can sit here with you today, and know that I will be giving her that moment in the future, and feel keen pleasure in it. Money is not love, quite possibly the opposite. But if my years of mortgage payments provide her with middle-aged comfort, I confess to a wry kind of contentment.”

I waited a moment before replying. “Isn’t healing amazing?”

“You find my reasoning to be healing in nature?”

“I do.”

“Then yes, Nurse Birch. It is.”

We fell into a long silence. Even in his awake spells, the silences were getting longer every time. We were preparing ourselves.

“At any rate,” he said at last, “as I am disposing of my estate, one item remains in question.”

“I’m listening.”

“As well you should, given that it concerns you.” He pushed the rolling tray toward me. The black binder lay on top.

“I don’t understand.”

“
The Sword.
I want you to have it.”

“Professor, I can’t possibly accept—”

“Editors are not going to change their minds about my credibility. It will never see print. But to me the book signifies this whole ordeal we have undertaken together.”

“Thank you very much, but I can’t.”

He thumbed the binder forward, inching it off the table. “If you refuse to catch it, my book will fall to the floor.”

“I am serious, Professor.”

But he kept pushing. When the binder tipped off, I grabbed it in one hand. “Too many people at the end of their lives show excessive generosity to their caregivers. I am here because it is my job.”

He sneered. “You mean to suggest that your experience in my home has at no time transcended the professional?”

“Of course not, Professor. I just—”

“Here is a concrete manifestation of that truth. And it is something no other person on earth would comprehend. Only we understand.”

He was right. Deirdre insisted the book was a fiction. I hadn’t made up my mind yet, and the Professor wasn’t helping. About two things, though, there were no questions:
The Sword
was helping me with Michael. And reading it with Barclay Reed was establishing a relationship unique in my experience.

I sat back. “How about if I keep this here until you don’t need it anymore? Then I would love to have it.”

“That would please me.”

I held the binder to my chest. “In that case, thank you.”

“On the contrary,” he said, relaxing back into the pillow. “I should be thanking you. I have labored whole days working up the courage to offer it to you. I imagined you would refuse it. Thus I am immensely gratified that you accepted.”

What a notion. The main thing that giving a big gift required was courage.

Did I have the nerve to give Michael what he needed? And if I managed to figure out what that was, could I have faith that he would accept it? Was I capable of behaving as boldly as the Professor? In that instant, an idea occurred to me—the smartest, riskiest idea of my entire married life.

MICHAEL WAS WEIGHT LIFTING OUTSIDE AGAIN,
this time with his shirt off. People who flaunted their fitness annoyed him—runners in short-shorts, Zumba ladies with tassels on their bum. But that day the temperature was in the 90s. He was working out in the shade.

I indulged in watching his back muscles shift and clench as he alternated curls with each arm. I knew every sinew of that back. Two days before the end of his first deployment, Michael hoisted a generator onto a truck and came home with torn muscles and daily pain.

It was January, Oregon’s wet season. After dinner, I would turn up the heat in our bedroom. I’d microwave a damp towel till it was so hot I could barely carry it, then smooth it across his back while he moaned with relief. I worked massage oil all over his shoulders, thick neck, and especially that clenched lower back. The room smelled wonderfully of sandalwood. I was determined not to stop till my hands ached.

Each time I promised beforehand that the goal was relaxation, not foreplay. But it rarely worked out that way. Michael would reach a certain degree of relief, his back would unknot just enough, and he would roll over.

By then I was in a state myself, and off we’d go. The rain could fall, the wind howl, and we were safe. Michael began to call the bed our tropical island, because we went there for vacation so often.

Now those memories were my vacation. Meanwhile, he dropped the dumbbells on the grass and shook his arms loose. The muscles flexed and relaxed. No question, my husband was getting his physical strength back. Between his workouts and all that walking, the man was in formidable shape again.

“Michael?” I called from the edge of the lawn.

When he turned, I expected to see the weight-lifter expression. Instead he appeared sheepish. Maybe even intimidated.

And no wonder. My schedule with the Professor meant that we no longer saw one another in the morning. So we hadn’t spoken since he told me about shooting the dog.

“How was your day?”

“Cars.” He wiped his face with his upper arm. “Broken, then fixed.”

I slipped off my sandals and barefooted it across the lawn to kiss that sweaty arm. “How about Michael? Broken, and then fixed?”

“Still in the shop, Deb.”

“Well, one of the parts you’ve been waiting for has come in.”

“Is that right?”

He bent to pick up a weight, but I pulled him upright. “It is. I hate to interrupt, but I brought you something.”

Michael sighed. “Can I just finish here, please? I’m really not in the best mood right now.”

I was beginning to think I had made a mistake. But I persisted. “Right now? How about all the time, sweetheart?”

“This year.” Michael gripped the handle. “I’m in a bad mood this year.”

“So hold on a minute. I think I have the cure.”

His shoulders dropped, and his expression was pained. He did not even bother to hide it.

Maybe my idea wasn’t so brilliant after all. Maybe I should have mulled it over for a couple of days. Maybe I was too much in the thrall of the Professor and his well-reasoned notions.

“If I see what you have now, can I please go back to my workout?”

“Wait one second,” I said, sidling back to my car. “Just wait right there.”

All my earlier certainty had abandoned me. I felt like a bomber, who might bring peace and reconciliation or who might set a forest on fire.

“When I say three, you have to clap your hands.”

Michael swayed with impatience. “Damn it, Deb. I’m really not—”

“One.” I grabbed the rear handle. “Two.” I opened it an inch. “Three.” And I swung the door wide. Michael, bless him and his indulgence of his wife, clapped his hands rapidly. From the backseat, the dog burst out with a bound. She ran directly to the noisy man, who was squatting by the time she reached him. She barreled into him, knocking him back on his butt and licking his face.

“Oh my God,” Michael said, his voice quaking. “Oh my God.”

The dog, a black Labradorish galoot I’d found at the Humane Society that afternoon, was shameless: sniffing Michael everywhere, snouting his crotch. Michael’s head hung as though he were stunned. The dog leapt side to side over his legs, smacking him with her wagging tail. I inched across the lawn, hoping.

When at last Michael raised his face, he was smiling. “I think he likes the salt from my sweat.”

“She. It’s a she.”

“OK,” he said. “She.” And then his face dissolved in tears.

I knelt and wrapped my arms around him. Michael burrowed against me and bawled like a calf.

I could not help weeping with him. Finally we had arrived at the truth. Not the angry man who barked at me, or punched a wall, or smashed his truck in road rage. Not the frightened man, armed and cowering in his kitchen. But this man, here in my arms, this wounded, grieving man.

I felt wetness from his tears through my shirt, and had one fleeting thought that I had missed something by never nursing a child. But Michael sniffled and brought me back to the present, to his warm and sweaty presence against me. It would not last, it was only for now. So I said nothing, did not move, and was supremely grateful.

Then the dog poked her nose under his arm, and between us, wagging and wiggling till she was inside the embrace as well.

Michael ran a hand down her flank. She was sleek like a seal.

I leaned to his ear and whispered. “Is she OK?”

“She’s fantastic. What’s her name?”

At the shelter they called her Stella, fine enough but not a name to keep. I was about to say we should name her together, when a better idea arrived.

“Shouri,” I said. “Her name is Shouri.”

Michael cradled the dog’s face in his hands. They regarded one another. “What is that?”

“A Japanese word. A patient taught it to me.”

“What’s it mean?”

“Shouri means . . .” I paused, feeling my throat close with emotion. Victory, surprises at dawn, something about a sudden blow. But then I offered my own made-up translation. “It means good things will happen.”

Michael rubbed the dog’s ear and she leaned into his touch. “Hello, Shouri.”