Be Light Like a Bird

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Introduction

  1

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  4

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  Monika Schröder

  Copyright

  Back Cover

  This one was still intact. No innards splashed out or bloody tire tracks on the asphalt. Lying on its side, with its legs stiff and the bushy tail forming a perfect curve, the squirrel could have been some kid’s cute stuffed animal, except for the small puddle of blood oozing from its open mouth.

  I got off my bike, pulled on my rubber gloves, and took the trowel from my backpack. It was quiet on 8 Mile Road. No one would see me. The two horses, grazing in the pasture behind me, paid no attention to what I was doing. The soil by the side of the road was moist, easy to dig. I nudged the squirrel with my index finger onto the trowel. When its head rolled back, more blood trickled onto the pavement. My stomach cramped. I hated the blood.

  There was no smell of death on this one yet so I didn’t need to hold my breath as I placed the squirrel in the ground and covered it with dirt. Then I inhaled, waiting for that moment when having done this made me feel better.

  But that moment didn’t come.

  I jumped back onto my bike and rode on as fast as I could, not letting up until my lungs burned. I’d never counted how many animals I’d buried since Dad died. I didn’t make a list or anything. I wasn’t that crazy.

  1

  It wasn’t the crash that killed my dad when his plane went down over the Atlantic. He died from hypoxia, a state of oxygen deficiency that impairs brain function. And it wasn’t his airplane. We aren’t the kind of people who own airplanes. Ma used to work in an old folks’ home, and Dad drove a FedEx truck but dreamed of getting a pilot’s license. He was with his flight instructor, who actually flew the plane.

  They took off from Marietta on a clear, crisp Sunday in February. After takeoff, something must have gone wrong. They didn’t notice the drop in air pressure in the Learjet’s cabin. Or maybe they did but couldn’t do anything about it because they didn’t have any extra oxygen onboard. The plane kept climbing right through its assigned altitude while flying east toward the Atlantic coast.

  Once you rise above twelve thousand feet in a depressurized cabin, it takes only twelve minutes to lose consciousness. I never knew that.

  On the evening news an Air Force pilot said that the jet was “porpoising” while it fluctuated between fifteen thousand and forty thousand feet. As in the way dolphins move through the water. I wished they hadn’t used that word.

  The search-and-rescue team told us that Dad and the instructor had most likely blacked out long before the plane ran out of fuel and dropped thirty thousand feet. They said Dad and the pilot didn’t feel the impact. I hoped they were right.

  * * *

  After the search-and-rescue people called, there was an explosion in my brain, and a cloud appeared, spreading out over everything. The cloud pressed down on me like overstuffed down bedding, the kind you want to push away so you can breathe. Except there was nothing I could do to lift it. The cloud made all my thoughts seem as though they came through a fun-house mirror, like the one Dad and I had stood in front of at the county fair last year, laughing. Everything was distorted, drawn into longer, thinner shapes; or shorter, wider ones; or ones with missing pieces. But now, the effect was disturbing rather than funny. It made it hard to think.

  It was because of the cloud that I didn’t notice at first how much Ma had changed. I didn’t remember her often being angry before. She had always been the more practical of my parents. But given her cooking skills, it actually wasn’t that practical of her to turn down the casseroles that her coworkers from the nursing home tried to drop off at our house in the week following Dad’s death.

  “We really won’t need those,” she’d say, standing at the door with a fake smile whenever someone came by.

  “Couldn’t we take at least one?” I asked when the two of us were alone. “We could have thrown it out if we didn’t like it.” Not that I was particularly hungry. But food would have been a welcome distraction from the cloud.

  “I don’t want these people’s food,” Ma said, a dangerous edge in her voice. “They just want to make themselves feel better.”

  If Dad were still here, he would have told us that there was nothing wrong with helping others. “So one good deed makes two people feel better,” he would have said. “What’s not to like?”

  Perhaps Ma would have shaken her head at him, smiling. She actually used to shake her head often at him, but in a loving way. Like when she called him a dreamer, and Dad said, “Oh no, my dear. I am a seeker of possibilities.”

  It hurt to think that it would never be like that again. Never.

  2

  The only person who came to mourn with us was Ma’s younger brother, Huey. And he only found out because he happened to call that week.

  “You can’t stay long!” was pretty much the first thing Ma said to him when he arrived. Even though she knew he had to stay at least one night since he lived in Texas, an eight-hour drive away.

  “They didn’t find him?” Uncle Huey asked.

  “No,” Ma said with that new bitterness in her voice. “They searched three days, but the plane crashed over deep water. They’ll probably never find a thing.” She let out a sarcastic laugh.

  Uncle Huey took out a leather pouch and rolled himself a cigarette.

  “You can’t smoke in here,” Ma said sharply.

  “I know. I know,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Chillax, sis. You’ve gotta have at least, like, a memorial service or something.” He looked at me. “Wren needs, you know, some kind of closure.”

  “There won’t be a funeral,” Ma said. “Or anything else for that matter.”

  “You can’t just move on, sis.”

  “We’re okay,” Ma said. She shot him a look that made him lower his head and study his woolen socks.

  But I wasn’t okay, and Ma wasn’t either. Dad’s death had changed both of us. The cloud was pressing down on me, while Ma had turned angry and distant.

  Later we ordered pizza and watched a cheesy movie on the Disney channel. Uncle Huey didn’t try to make any more conversation, but stepped out into the garden several times to smoke. When he came back and didn’t wipe his feet on the doormat, Ma yelled at him. She made him put his beer on a coaster too. Uncle Huey just sighed, and soon Ma went upstairs to her room, slamming the door behind her. A few minutes later we could hear her pacing back and forth above us.

  It felt good to just sit there with Uncle Huey, even without talking. Three days had passed since the phone call, and by that point I had cried more than I thought possible.

  When I went up to bed, I found three garbage bags with Dad’s clothes in the hallway. From my bedroom window I saw Ma
outside, throwing a bunch of papers onto the grill. Then she lit them on fire.

  * * *

  The following week there was a problem with the mortgage. Apparently Dad had spent all of our savings trying to get a pilot’s license, and he hadn’t paid the bank for the past few months. When Ma learned that we would be evicted before the end of the month, she cried.

  At first, I was actually glad to see her show some emotion, because she hadn’t cried at all since it happened. But when she started throwing Dad’s model airplanes against the wall, I realized she wasn’t crying because she was sad — it was because she was so mad.

  Then she told me to put everything I wanted to keep into a suitcase.

  How do you decide what to keep when your Dad has died and your mother has turned into a raging woman you hardly recognize? If it were up to me, I would have kept everything the way it was before. But that was obviously not an option.

  Ma continued to be angry at Dad’s stuff — even his furniture. She called some guy who came and emptied Dad’s study. Just before he packed it all up, I managed to save Dad’s bird-watching binoculars. His were better than mine. Then I sat in my room and looked around, trying to decide what to pack, but the cloud was making me numb. None of the stuff really mattered anymore.

  Next to my bed was my bird book. But how could I ever watch birds again? That had always been Dad’s and my thing. I loved those weekend mornings when he wouldn’t go to flight school, and we’d go out to look for birds instead.

  I let my hand glide over the soft leather cover of the birding journal Dad had given me last year for my twelfth birthday. On the first page, in the little box with two lines, I had asked Dad to write my name in his nice cursive: Wren Kaiser, with a little loop on the W and a tiny straight line above the i. He had written it with the fountain pen Ma and I had given him for his birthday. We’d made a special trip to a fancy store in Atlanta where they only sold fountain pens, some of them for more than a thousand dollars. The one we’d picked was shiny black with a golden tip and a marbled cap, and only cost a hundred dollars. That was still a lot of money for us, but Dad had loved that pen and had carried it with him all the time.

  I suddenly remembered to look for it, but by then the guy had already taken all of Dad’s stuff. I ran downstairs to tell Ma that the fountain pen was gone. “We should have kept that at least,” I said.

  “It’s better this way,” Ma said. When I tried to protest she threw me her angry look and said, “It’s gone!”

  I walked back to my room, tears in my eyes. I didn’t understand. Why would she yell at me now?

  Before he’d left, Uncle Huey had told me her anger was only a phase and that Ma would act normal again soon. “She’s just shutting down for a while,” he’d said. “Just leave her be, and she’ll snap out of it.”

  I wished I had asked Uncle Huey how long it would be until she snapped out of it. I was ready for her to talk to me about Dad now. I wanted her to hug me. I wanted us to cry together. I didn’t want to be alone with all this pain.

  Back in my room, I put the bird book and journal in my suitcase and filled the rest with clothes. Then I stuffed my shoes into a plastic bag.

  The next morning we bolted north on I-75 in Dad’s old car, a Volvo station wagon. It was the only thing of his Ma had kept.

  “A fresh start,” she said.

  Even that sounded angry.

  3

  Our first stop was Chattanooga, Tennessee. For years Ma had been taking care of elderly people back in Georgia, and she quickly found work in a nursing home. We moved into a furnished apartment, and I joined sixth grade.

  Being the new girl at school was hard. Not that I used to have a lot of friends back home. Fitting in at school had been hard for me even before Dad died. I had never hung out with the popular crowd, and I didn’t have a best friend. It was more that I tried hanging out with different girls, rather than just one group, but it never came easy to me. Bird-watching was just not the kind of hobby that made you popular in sixth grade.

  “Please, don’t mention Dad,” I told Ma when she registered me at the new school in Chattanooga. “I don’t want them to know yet. If they do they will make a big deal out of it.”

  “No problem,” Ma said. I knew she would understand. She didn’t want to talk about Dad either.

  On my first day of school, Ma dropped me off. We’d brought my bike from Georgia, but it was raining too heavily for me to ride it. I waited for her to say something, like, “Good luck,” or “Hope you have a good first day,” but she seemed absentminded and eager to get away.

  Feeling lost, I watched her drive off. The cloud made me raw, like I had lost an outer layer of skin, and everything reminded me of Dad. As I was walking toward the entrance, I saw another girl being dropped off at school by her father, and I had to run to the bathroom to cry.

  On the second day, Mrs. McKee, my new homeroom teacher, made me stay after school. “I saw you stayed all by yourself during recess,” she said. “Should we assign a buddy to you?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want a buddy. I’m fine. I’m just shy.”

  “You need to make a friend,” she said. “It can be hard to be new at a school.”

  You need to make a friend. I almost laughed at her. How do you make a friend if you don’t know when you might have to run to the bathroom to cry? Being new wasn’t even my biggest problem. I couldn’t tell anyone about Dad. I didn’t want to become like Cynthia, a girl at my old school. She had been super popular and a really good writer, but then her mother had died suddenly. After our teacher had told the class about her mother’s death, no one wanted Cynthia to be his or her peer-editor in language arts. Robyn, her best friend, stayed with her, but I’d watched them on the playground, and they hardly ever talked.

  That’s why I didn’t want anyone in the new school to know about Dad. You mention that someone close to you died, and everyone thinks you’re contaminated with death. It makes people feel uncomfortable. They don’t know what to say. They might pretend to care, but the truth is, your sadness sticks to you like skunk-stink. You might as well have leprosy.

  On my third day at the new school I noticed that my science teacher had hair on the backs of his hands, and the only thing I could do for the rest of the morning was try to remember what Dad’s hands had looked like. When I came home I asked Ma.

  “I don’t know,” she said shortly.

  “Doesn’t it bother you that you can’t remember?” I asked.

  “No,” was all she said.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said.

  “Well, that’s your choice,” Ma answered in a tone that made it clear she was done with the topic.

  It was quiet then, with just the refrigerator hum filling the silence between us. Some people say there’s an elephant in the room when there’s something between two people they don’t want to talk about. Our elephant was a 35-year-old man, sitting unconscious in the cockpit of a small jet, about to crash into the Atlantic Ocean.

  4

  After we had been in Tennessee for about a week, Ma took on a second job as a waitress in the evenings. I hardly ever saw her anymore after that.

  “Why are you working at night now too?” I asked.

  “Because we need the money,” Ma said.

  But I knew the truth — she was busy getting over Dad’s death without ever feeling sad, and didn’t want to stay home with me and my grief.

  After only a few days at her new job, Ma came home one evening whistling.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “More than okay,” she said. “I met someone, and he’s taking me out for dinner.”

  I didn’t understand how that would make her happy. But then after she’d left the house wearing a short skirt and too much makeup, I started to get this cold feeling in my stomach.

  I stayed up waiting for Ma to co
me back. I didn’t like the furnished apartment she was renting for us. An earlier renter must have smoked, and the smell still clung to the curtains. But there was a TV with cable, and I passed the time flipping through the channels.

  It was almost midnight when I heard a car park in front of the apartment complex. From behind the curtain, I watched Ma climb out of the passenger seat of an unfamiliar car. The man driving got out too and walked her to the entrance. He was older than Dad and wore a tie. Dad had never worn ties. He hadn’t even owned any except for the one with little pink airplanes on it that I had given him last Christmas as a joke.

  The man with the tie walked Ma to the door, and I watched them stand there for a while, talking in low voices. Then the most unbelievable thing happened — they kissed!

  I had to calm my breathing, and when Ma came back into the apartment I confronted her. “How can you even do that?”

  “Do what?” Ma asked.

  “Kiss another man.”

  “He’s very nice,” she said, but I could tell she felt awkward at having been caught.

  “So you’re dating another man already? After such a short amount of time?” I asked. “It hasn’t even been a month since Dad died.”

  Ma shook her head. “You don’t understand.”

  “Exactly. I don’t understand,” I said quietly. “You’re betraying Dad. It would hurt him to know you didn’t even take time to be sad about him being gone first.”

  “Betray your dad? That’s almost funny,” Ma said with that sarcastic laughter I had heard the first time the day she burned his papers.

  “It’s not funny, it’s…” I couldn’t find the right words. Finally I swallowed and asked, “Are you in love with this new man?”

  “Wren, you don’t know anything about love,” she said without looking at me.

  “I do, too,” I insisted. “I know I loved Dad.” I wanted to add that I also knew I loved Ma — or at least that I wanted to love her, but she was making it hard.

  But Ma wouldn’t let me finish. “Let’s not talk about this anymore. I’m sorry this upset you. That’s the way things are. We have to move on — both of us.”