Leaving Amarillo(5)
“Look,” Gavin said, nodding to the ground. “Its chest is moving. It’s still breathing.”
A thrill shot through me as I realized it might be a snake or something wildly unappealing, but I looked anyway. And there beside a patch of pond grass, monkey grass Nana called it, was a small, mostly round bird with midmorning-sky-blue feathers breathing rapidly but not moving. Instinctively I reached down to retrieve it.
“No,” Gavin practically shouted at me. “Don’t. You can’t touch it.”
“Why not? It needs help.”
He shook his head and then looked at me with this hollow expression that haunted me for years afterward. “Because if it’s a baby and too young to fend for itself, the mother won’t have anything to do with it if she can smell your scent on it. She’ll abandon it and it won’t survive on its own.”
Funny, the things we remember. I remember that we all debated for a long time, though I couldn’t recall the words of our three-sided argument if my life depended on it. But I remember that look, I remember realizing for the first time, finally comprehending just how different Gavin’s life was from mine and Dallas’s.
We were orphans, sure. We’d gone from a cushy life in the suburbs to a much more meager existence. But after long summer days with Gavin, Dallas and I went home to love. To meals and music and hugs and warm, clean beds. Sometimes he stayed over and sometimes he didn’t.
Even now I don’t know exactly what Gavin went home to when he left us. But I knew then that it was vastly different from where I lived.
Finally, Dallas picked the bird up and cradled it close to his chest on the walk back to our house. The three of us hypothesized the many possible causes of the bird’s state of distress.
Once we’d arrived home, Dallas moved his hand from his chest to allow us a peek at our wounded patient.
It was so small. And so very still.
A sob threated to roll out of my throat and I nearly choked holding it in. Life was hard, Dallas constantly reminded me. You couldn’t go crying at every little thing.
But the unfairness of it, of a small, harmless feathered creature’s life ending with no rhyme or reason to it, hit my thirteen-year-old self hard. It was a reminder of death, of the inevitable and unpredictable ending that had stolen my parents and that loomed over us like a cloudy Texas sky. Just as tears formed in my eyes, the tiny bird opened his and shrieked out a loud, piercing chirp. Maybe a thank-you or maybe a startled cry of shock at finding itself captive in human hands. Before either of us said a word, it flew away, leaving us staring up at the sky after it. I felt like I’d witnessed a miracle.
Nana hollered for us to get in the house and we told her a story I suspect she probably thought the three of us concocted out of boredom.
After dinner, during my nightly piano lesson, I tried my hand at whistling like the bluebird had. I wasn’t great at it. The boys mocked me profusely. Well, Dallas mostly. Gavin just smiled at his best friend’s antics. When I’d finished my lesson and my attempts at whistling, we ate ice cream from paper bowls on the front porch. Once we were finished, Gavin stood to leave. And because I’d seen his face, seen the hurt that flashed behind his eyes when he’d spoke of the bird’s mother abandoning it, I didn’t want him to go.
It was growing darker so Papa offered to drive him home. I stood there, trying to think of a way to make him stay. Once Nana had forced my brother inside to bathe and Papa had gone to grab the truck keys, I reached out for the boy standing solemnly on the porch and staring at the night sky. He stood just out of my reach, as he always tended to do.
“Don’t go. Just . . . stay,” I whispered, feeling my face heat with the words. “You could stay here.” I meant forever, but I never asked if he understood the full implication of my offer.
He glanced over at me with sad eyes, but then he winked. “I’ll be okay, Bluebird. You don’t have to worry about me.”
But I did. I still do.
Just like he stills calls me Bluebird. But only in private, and never in front of my brother.
Snapping back to the present, I snatch the unlit cigarette from his fingers and flick it over the edge of the rooftop. “Yeah, well, I think you can deny yourself cancer.”
“What the hell?” He gapes at me and I shrug.
“Band wouldn’t be the same without a drummer. Probably take us a little while to replace you.”
His mouth quirks up but he narrows his eyes in what could pass for anger to an unknowing bystander. I can tell he’s trying to be all broody and impenetrable, but that version of Gavin is for the public. The random girls who throw their red lace panties at him. But to me, he’s Gav. The boy I’ve known most of my life. The one whose mom was so cracked out or high on whatever the hell most of the time, she couldn’t be bothered to raise her son. Raise is too lofty a word for Katrina Garrison. More like she couldn’t be bothered to keep him alive. But thankfully Gavin is scrappy and tough and sure as shit never needed anyone like her.
When we were growing up, he was the one always keeping her alive, reminding her to eat and bathe. And she was too busy securing the means for her next hit to do the same for him. The Gavin I know has nearly fallen apart in front of us on multiple occasions when his worthless excuse for a mother nearly overdosed. So his tough-guy act is wasted on me.
“All right. You win.” He reaches the hand holding the pack behind him as if to tuck them back into his pocket, but I hold mine out.