Lamb

UP THERE, SINGING

      When Todd asked Abigail to be his wife, she climbed out of the hot air balloon and into a free fall, breaking both legs and her pelvis. Recovery was long and grinding, but she didn’t complain. In fact, she was pleased; it wasn’t death but the wheelchair she was after.

      She loved Todd. He was slight and timid, but clever enough to tease her. She liked that. He didn’t care much for other people, and she liked that too. She wanted him to care for only her. She loved his thick red hair and chapped lips. How they shared the same birthday and weren’t too proud to take the train or tip street dancers. She loved him and would never leave him but lived in crippling fear that once promised to him, whatever magic made her singular would lose its power. He’d learn how unremarkable she was and break her heart irreparably. She fell to end the uncertainty, certain that after a few months of elevators, graceless kisses, and pity-whispers, Todd’s love would lose its pulse, and she’d be free.

      But this life of caring inconvenience suited Todd. Wheeling Abigail here and there, lifting her to and from her chair had made him stronger. Once rawboned and brittle, he found purpose in filling out his shirts, and even began a daily routine: thirty minutes jumping rope, one hundred push-ups, one hundred sit-ups. When they went to the movies, they parked in blue without worry and always found good seats. Doors were held for them, smiles seemed sincere. People talked kindly to him, and when he worked nights at the call center, he began talking kindly to people.

        He listened to Abigail and wrote down her more beautiful insights in a lined notebook—the nature of God, what trees might green the afterlife. He attended his soul, seeking counsel from men of faith. One Sunday he sought the closest congregation to his apartment and spent the afternoon laughing and crying in tongues with the Pentecostals. He arranged a weekly visit with their pastor and was punctual. Todd washed in his wisdom and left their sessions stirring with the beginnings of devotion.

        On their twenty-third birthday, Todd forwent a party of his own to help Abigail try on dresses at the department store—her birthday wish. He plucked her from the dressing stool and danced about the displays, weaving through whooshing racks of clothes they couldn’t afford. She blushed at his new strength and caught glances from the other shoppers, winning their jealousy, she hoped. From the clearance rack, a modest A-line of chiffon in baby blue, embroidered sparsely with white flowers. He bought it, pretending eighty dollars wasn’t too much for a dress. She thanked him with a kiss, pretending he’d outdone himself.

      He spent his days at her apartment, at her side for hours, finding fresh ways to serve as she pecked at her keyboard, writing poems. He’d read each draft aloud to her, surprised to see her wince at words he thought were lovely, lines he thought were working. He’d wheel her to the window to see the clouds burn purple, arrange visits from loved ones, bring her newspapers bursting with golden tulips.  

       Whenever Abigail’s sisters reminded her that Todd was too good to be true, she’d shake her head and grin, wondering clandestinely if they were right, if his compassion might fade with her condition. She spun worried circles in the room until it smelled of rubber, questioning his goodness, glancing at the tulips, saddened by the promise of their wilting. His tenderness was building toward something terrible, perhaps the day of her healing. He’d realize what he’d felt for her was pity, not passion, and leave with the dried tulips.

        These suspicions made his company something to avoid. Sometimes she’d pretend to fall asleep in hopes of his leaving, but he’d only stay another hour humming, holding her blue ankles, rolling her back and forth on the hardwood.

        Todd hadn’t considered why. Of course, there was their birthday. They’d read the same books. A poet strong in her fragility. Beautiful. Her nose turned at its end like a trumpet, and he could run his fingers through her black hair all day without drawing any grease. Though cast in plaster, he remembered her pale, balletic legs with fondness. She loved him, and when she told him so for the first time, his contents wobbled warmly. She had a way of looking at him that made him feel like he could play the stock market. She trusted him because he respected her. Even if her bones could have borne his weight, he wouldn’t have suggested sex. He hadn’t even tried to touch her breasts. Todd was not a virgin, but Abigail was and wanted to wait. He was surprised how much he liked that. There was an open-endedness to each kiss, and he liked that too.

     He had lost all interest in other women and in conversations with female co-workers would ask safe questions about the weather, the new headsets. They could tell he was happy, and if yesterday one of them had asked if he was in love, he’d have answered yes. Now he wasn’t sure. “Why do I love her? Why do I love her?” Over the next few nights at the call center, he posed this question to customers until his supervisor sent him home with a warning. By the time he saw the pastor that Sunday, it had changed.

       Plodding the three blocks home, Todd unraveled. He missed Abigail and felt relief at the thought of never seeing her again. In his apartment he draped himself over an armchair and smoked two cigarettes, soaking in the lamplight. He’d learned that yes, God delights in chastity, but also love. In fact, God is love. And were they not in love? In God? It was cruel to ask the one you love to wait so long for sex, he thought, and fell asleep wondering what other worlds awaited.

        Abigail had been dreaming about God since Todd stopped coming by. She had the same dream frequently, but each time awoke not knowing if the memory of having dreamed it all before was but another part of the dream.

God draws from her mouth a silver finch and locks it in a cage. Her knees can bend, so she can run, so God hides the cage in a cobwebbed hole. She crawls inside, she worms her way toward the song of the finch.  For days she crawls, for years to the end of the hole, to a circular room with banana-spotted walls. The floor is tiled with honey candy. On the walls are thick ice shelves, each stacked with glass bottles of water. The hand of God hangs as a chandelier, holding the cage between thumb and forefinger, the finch turning about within, croaking a tired song. Abigail reaches to free it, but in crawling has forgotten how to stretch her legs. Resigned to the floor, she eats honey candy until there is no floor to hold.

        It was five after when Todd stopped to help a pair of misioneras stranded on the median divider in traffic. They kissed his hands and, linking arms, ushered him into El Salón del Reino to be counted among the one hundred forty-four thousand witnesses Jehová soon would save.

      Outside the aviary, flushing in the afternoon swelter, Abigail rediscovered the pleasure of leaning into a flaccid chain link fence. She leaned through hours, birthday dress glued to her nude body, waiting to forgive Todd in the mercy of a maple. But soon dusk swallowed up the shade, and she entered alone to limp the twisted path through the canopy, among the ferns and giant flowers. The birds hushed. Behind her a pair of hooded vultures landed softly, following on foot. A sunbittern joined in line, then a common loon. Lorikeets and lories, an eastern screech owl, a domestic chicken. Tails brushed, claws clacked, but not a yawp from the procession—even the swan geese waddled in silence. A great egret flew above the nonsense in winged expanse, paling before the netted dusk. Abigail turned and beheld the aberrant parade. “Good Lord,” she said. Their heads cocked, eyes agog.

        A child stood at Todd’s ear, translating the discussion about La Atalaya when the door of El Salón del Reino opened, and the brother keeping watch ran in, flapping his hands.

      The congregation charged the parking lot. The brother and the child pointed toward heaven.

      Birds flocking by the hundreds, gathering in a great column of kinds and colors, rising against nightfall. They were silent but for the heavy murmur of wings. They circled and spun above a parking structure then doubled in the bright reflection of the hospital, peeling backward en masse and up again.

      Those in the street stopped to behold. Two policemen sat atop their cruiser, laughing and weeping, admonishing the angry drivers to leave their cars and look! All stilled with wonder as they flew off as if to a long migration. 

        From the darkness they returned, pouring over the city in garish honks and trills, calling all—seagulls, pigeons, starlings, crows—to join in their pageant. They soon were countless, and in an instant broke into a swooping swarm of terror and droppings.

      The traffic resumed. The congregation rose from their knees and gathered up the brightest of the fallen plumes.

        Two employees stood before the closed gate of the aviary: one clawed and bleeding, the other fumbling with a radio. Todd asked if they’d seen a dark-haired woman with a cane, maybe crutches. They said nothing. He jogged on, stumbling along the unlit path, calling her name, but nothing.     

        He’d slowed into a nervous walk by the time he reached the pond at the heart of the park and saw the egret. It was so enormously white in the moonless reflection that he first thought it an angel. From above the treeline it dove and spread into a glide, a gentle landing. It stalked with backward knees, head floating with intent, snapping downward, emerging polished with a black fish on its bill. Todd watched it leave the shallows for the shore in an attitude of sharing. Up in the smooth crook of a eucalyptus was Abigail, cradling a chicken, singing.

Lamb