Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(5)

I do not count cuckoos. Cuckoos are not part of my numbers. I think cuckoos could be counted with owls, maybe, measured in those columns, but I do not know the rhyme, and I am happy with my corvids—my ravens and crows and jays. They know me and I know them, and I no longer need the bird books that sit in stacks around my bed to pick their familiar profiles out of the throng. There are crows I’ve never seen before, Jamaican and palm and Cuban, here in North America, and a hundred more scattered around the world, in Australia and Asia and Europe, but here, all the corvids are familiar. They are known. They can be counted. I would be a fool to change my numbers now, when I am fifteen, when I am so close to understanding their equations.

“Brenda!” Mother’s voice is thin as she calls me from the kitchen window. I have been on the porch too long, watching my birds attack their breakfast of dry dog food and chopped-up eggs, waiting to see if any more will appear. I would like to count eight before my day moves on, or better still, ten. I would like to be secure.

I turn. “Yes?”

“School,” she says wearily. “You need to come in and eat something before the bus gets here.”

“Yes, Mother,” I agree. If eight comes, I will not see it, nor nine. Some numbers are invisible, seen only in retrospect, when the day does not align with my count. Those days are the bad ones. Those days are the ones where I have to sit in my bed for hours, matching numbers to likely birds, tracing migration routes, apologizing, apologizing, always apologizing for getting the math wrong.

The day my grandmother died, my count said “joy,” but when I got home, it was sorrow waiting on the phone, sorrow waiting in the deep lines of my mother’s face. One’s for sorrow, yes, but eight’s for Heaven. If I had counted that high, I would have known that my grandmother was at peace. Nine’s for Hell. If I had counted that, I would have scoured the whole city, if that was what it took, to bring the count higher, to find her a better ending. Ten’s for the Devil. I don’t believe in him, not really. Eleven’s for penance. Twelve’s for sin.

There are as many numbers as there are corvids, and someday I will catalog them all, and then nothing will ever slip by me again.

Mother is watching me with loving exasperation on her face. She never looks at David like that. He is only eleven, but he is already the good child, the normal child, the child who concerns himself with things that she can understand and does not focus on things she can’t. David understands me better than she does, I think, because he’s never lived in a world where I was expected to be normal; he’s only ever lived in a world where I was his beloved older sister, strange as an out-of-season Steller’s jay. I count on my crows. He counts on me.

Today, I will tell him the corvids have said a secret, and he will smile his small and shining smile, and we will be happy together, he and I.

I sit at the table and eat my cereal. David sits across from me. He enjoys Lucky Charms, the welter of shapes and colors and flavors pleasing to his tongue. I can’t abide the idea of so many unlike things touching inside my mouth. When I have Lucky Charms, I have to separate all the pieces out, one from another, putting them into different bowls before I can eat them. That makes it a bad cereal for me on school days. I would be late, if I had Lucky Charms. I have Frosted Flakes. Sometimes they can be different sizes. I don’t like that. I eat them anyway. I have to make an effort to accommodate the rest of the world, even as the rest of the world is making an effort to accommodate me.

“Eat up,” says David’s father. His name is Carl. He is looking at me. I try to hunch my shoulders, to pretend that I don’t see, but it’s too late; he knows I can hear him. “I’m dropping you off, and I’m not going to be late because of you.”

He never wants to be anything because of me. Didn’t want to be a father because of me; waited until he had a child of his own to marry my mother. Didn’t want to go to family counseling because of me, even when my therapist said that it would help us all, even when my mother begged him. No matter how you sliced it, I wasn’t his fault, he argued, and argues, and will always argue, even when the sky goes black with crows: I am the way I am because the genes I got from my father and the genes I got from my mother counted themselves out and decided on a girl who saw patterns everywhere, who saw the sky falling when they weren’t followed exactly as they ought to be. I am not his fault at all.

This may be the only area where Carl and I have ever agreed. I am not his fault. I am nothing of his. David is his, by half, and I think, sometimes, that all that is good in Carl went into the making of my brother, who is the best thing in the world, and the only thing I do not need to count. He is a constant. There is gravity, and there is oxygen, and there is David.

We finish our cereal. We climb into Carl’s car, me in the back, David in the front, where he can shyly answer his father’s questions about homework and sports and girls—all the things Carl has already decided will be important to his son. I say nothing, even though I know that David would rather talk about art class, and the way sunlight slants through flower petals, and the boy who sits next to him in band, the one who plays the cello with his quick and clever fingers. I keep my eyes on the window all the way to school, watching for the flash of familiar wings against the charcoal sky.

I count two more corvids before we reach the parking lot. Nine’s for Hell.

This will not be a good day.