Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(66)

Ben was Kara’s turn, though. I’d had him the week before, for the church’s bingo night. What Kara had him for was Tad and Kim Rogers’s fifth anniversary. It didn’t hurt that she was kind of in love with Tad, either. Not in any bad kind of way, just—he was somewhere in his midtwenties, was a thousand years younger than our dads but so much more mature than her college-brother Samuel, and, importantly, he adored Kim, he doted on Kim. Kim could do no wrong, as far as he was concerned.

What girl doesn’t want to live on a pedestal like that?

I thought Tad was all right too, but this is all before, of course.

Losing a child, it ages a person. It sounds like something you’d see needle-pointed onto a pillow, but we don’t need to see it spelled out, anymore; we can just look at Tad. The time off from work hasn’t helped him.

You’re not supposed to judge, I know.

I try not to. It’s sad, though. Hard to look away, I mean.

One night, maybe two weeks after that Friday, I’d decided to just tell them, to get it over with, but I lost my nerve a few houses down, had to pull over to cry. It wasn’t fake, either. Puffy eyes and smeared makeup wasn’t going to be any kind of disguise, any cheap tactic. That was really going to be me.

But when I looked up from the heels of my hands, there was Tad, on the sidewalk by their mailbox. He had Ben’s stupid rehab pigeon balanced there in his palm.

I shouldn’t call it that, I know, but Ben being gone doesn’t make that pigeon smart, I don’t think.

He’d found it flapping in the gutter with a broken wing the day of his preschool graduation, and cradled it all the way home. Kim told me she’d seen it first and tried to steer them away, but it must have been fate.

Some boys have puppies, or iguanas, or fish.

Ben had a dirty gray pigeon.

When I’d babysat for bingo, Ben had let it out of its cage (a converted raccoon trap), and it flap-walked all over the house, finally hid under Tad and Kim’s bed—the room Kim had politely asked me not to go in if I didn’t need to. Under their king bed, I found out why: the clear flat tub rolled under there was where Kim kept her lingerie. It made me study Tad in a new way. A better way.

When it was Kara’s turn to babysit Ben, she had that tub open as soon as Ben was in the bath. I know because she called me, so she could do her thrilled whisper about all of it—crotchless? seriously?

Seriously, girl. Yes.

I dared her try to them on, and try not to think about Tad when she did.

This isn’t where Ben drowns in the bathtub. He never drowns in the bathtub.

If only.

What Kara did then—I’ve known her since second grade—was stand fast and wheel away from the idea, playacting wide-eyed insult, like the choir girl had just been offered a joint.

But she was already unsnapping her jeans, I knew.

What she would tell me weeks later, like the worst secret ever, was that, when that stupid bird started screeching in its wire cage, she’d thought it meant Tad and Kim were home early, so she’d shimmied back into her jeans, stepped into her shoes at a dead run, dove over the back of the couch, because in movies like the one playing in her head, every step can get you caught.

It was the next morning before she realized she still had Kim’s crotchless panties on.

I went with her to bury them in the woods.

She doesn’t think I know, but she went back to dig them up, bury them somewhere different. It’s mostly what she does with her nights now: rebury those panties.

You don’t have to die to become a ghost.

But, Tad, with that stupid pigeon, the day I came to confess everything.

There he was by the mailbox, blubbering and crying in his ratty robe, everybody on the street pretending not to be watching through their mini-blinds. The pigeon just looking around like the pigeon-brain it was.

Kim said it had been hit by a car, probably. Meaning, even among pigeons, this one hadn’t been exactly quick. Now here it was at the edge of the street again. Except now it stood for something. Now it was a promise, an offering. Was its wing going to be good enough to fly? If it did fly, would that mean Ben was coming back?

It had been seven weeks, then. Still, when Tad scooped that pigeon up into the air, my heart went with it.

“Go,” I said into the bad taste of the cracked vinyl horn button of my steering wheel, and the pigeon reached out with its wings, cupped just enough air not to plummet headfirst into the asphalt, and then it remembered what it was.

It caught. It flew. It flapped into the sky.

Tad fell to his knees, his robe pooling around him, and Kim rushed out across the grass, hugged him from behind, and I tried to just stare right into the digits of my odometer.

I had to assume they were exactly sixty-six point six evil miles past where they’d been the night Ben went missing. The night Kara called me in a panic, crying so I could hardly understand her. The night I’d just spent half my babysitting money on a new skirt because there’d been only one left in mine and Kara’s size.

The shoes were from my mom, a surprise.

What I gathered on the phone from Kara was that he’d been in the bath, Ben, he’d been in the bath, and now he wasn’t!

They don’t train you for this in babysitting certification.

Losing your charge—how does this even happen, when you’re already attending to his every need, keeping him from every sharp corner, and enriching his mind and improving his eventual life in between?