The-Hummingbird-s-Cage(4)

I put the phone down.

We hid Tinkerbell in the woodshed and fed her till she looked less raggedy. Filled out, rested, bathed and brushed, she was a beautiful dog, with a caramel coat and a white ruff, a tail like a fox, her soft almond eyes lined with dark, trailing streaks like Cleopatra. When she was healthy enough, we presented her to Jim. I suggested she’d make a fine gift for Laurel’s upcoming birthday, less than a month away.

Jim was in a good mood that day. He paused and studied Tinkerbell, who stood quietly, almost expectantly, as if she knew what was at stake. Laurel stood at my side, just as still, just as expectant, pressing her face hard against my hand.

The risk here, it occurred to me, was in appearing to want something too much. This gives denial irresistible power.

So I shrugged. “We can always give her away, if you want.”

Jim’s lips twitched, his eyes narrowed, and my heart sank. Manipulation didn’t work with him.

“You want her, Laurel?” he asked at last, breaking out that awful grin. “Well, okay, then. Happy birthday, baby.”

Laurel wriggled with pleasure and beamed up at me. She went to Jim and kissed his cheek. “Thank you, Daddy.”

I was confused, but only for a moment.

Then I understood.

Jim had one more thing now—one more thing that mattered—to snatch away from me anytime he chose, quick as a heartbeat.

Two weeks before Christmas, just before Jim was jailed to serve ten days for disorderly conduct, he did.

Laurel sits on the porch sometimes, waiting for Tinkerbell to come home again. Sometimes she calls her name over and over.

“Do you think she misses us?” she asked yesterday.

Jim ruffled her hair playfully. “I bet she’d rather be here with you, baby, than where she is right now.”

Every Valentine’s Day, Jim gives me a heart-shaped box of fine chocolates that, if I ate them, would turn to ash on my tongue. When he touches me, my blood runs so cold I marvel it doesn’t freeze to ice in my veins.





February 29





Snow fell last night, dusting the junipers in the yard, the pickets on the fence, the thorny bougainvillea bushes under the front windows, the woodshed’s red tin roof. Jim was working his shift, so I bundled Laurel in her parka and mud boots and we danced in the field next to the house, twirling till we were tipsy, catching snowflakes on our tongues, our hair, our cheeks. The sky was black as a peppercorn.

This morning, Jim noticed I took longer at the dishes than I should have, from staring out the kitchen window at the red sandstone mesas still layered with unbroken snow, like icing on red velvet cake.

By noon the sun came out and melted it all away.





March 2





This evening after I put Laurel to bed, I opened the small storage space under the stairs and removed the boxes of Christmas decorations and summer clothing, the beautiful linen shade from the antique lamp that Jim had smashed against a wall, files of legal paperwork for our mortgage and vehicle loan, tax documents. Where the boxes had been stacked, I took a screwdriver and pried up a loose floor plank. In the cubby space beneath is an old tea tin where I keep my Life Before Jim.

Jim doesn’t like to be reminded that I had a Life Before. Or, rather, he doesn’t like me to remember a time when I had behaviors and ideas uncensored by him. A time when I wrote poetry, and even published a few poems in small regional literary magazines. When I had friends, family. A part-time job writing at the university’s public information office. Ambitions. Expectations. Thoughts.

He thinks he’s hacked it all away—good wood lopped off a living tree—and he has.

All but one.

My German grandmother, my Oma, who lost her father to the Nazi purge of intellectuals, used to recite a line from an old protest song:

Die Gedanken sind frei.

Thoughts are free.

No man can know them, the song goes. No hunter can shoot them. The darkest dungeon is futile, for my thoughts tear all gates and walls asunder.

In my tea tin I keep my first-place certificate from a high school poetry contest, the clinic receipt from the baby I lost nine years ago, a letter my mother wrote before she passed from cancer, and a note scrawled on a slip of paper: Run, girl, run.

It’s not much of an insurrection, I know. But it’s my only evidence of a Life Before, and I cling to it.

By the time Jim moved me to Wheeler, I had already banished Terri from my life. Just after I met Jim, as he began insinuating himself into every waking hour—the classes I took, the books I read, the people I hung with—Terri’s enthusiasm for him waned.