All the Dancing Birds (24 page)

I spend the next moments working to remember how I traveled from my former vibrancy to this current state. I manage a mere stipend of simple words and allow them to float through my mind:

Lettuce

La La La Girls

A whistling moon

A yellow shirt

Notes on a mirror

Letters in a box

Bewilderment

Memories

Breaking

Another glass of red

Sticky, sticky starfish

A spoiled trip

Piteous

Behavior

My Ivan

Longing

Stripping

Sparkles

Banging

Crumbling

Evaporating

A sonnet unwritten

A cat comes home

A singing woman

Fluttering hands

All the dancing birds

Darkness

Arms

Lifting

Cradling

Frightened legs

A rolling chair

An elegant awareness

A falling leaf

Such few words for one who once was a poet. A writer. A wife. A mother. Where it was once flowing water, language is now constricted, abbreviated. Mere drops of watery thought. As a poet, I should be delighted. Every poet wants only the essence of thought, the merest of words to tell her story. Nevertheless, a poet shouldn’t be stripped of nearly every one of her words in order to tell that tale. She should be able to select and weigh the gravitas of each word in connection with its importance to the others around it.

There should be choices.

She should‌—‌at the very least‌—‌be able to make sense, if not to others, at least to herself.

The maddening thing is my full awareness of all the blanks. I’m slowly being stripped of my color, deconstructed day by day, word by word, ability by ability. The incomprehensible thing is that I continue to know all the things I can no longer do or say or contribute.

I’m aware.

I look down at my legs. They are thin as twine, as are my arms. They surprise me with their simmering uselessness, but I let them be. I’ve learned that it’s of no consequence to argue with the failures of a once-lovely body when the brain has other intentions. I sit quietly with John Milton the Cat under my hand. The windows are open and the curtain sheers drift and snap with the breeze, waving themselves like white flags of surrender.

The front door comes alive with my beautiful Allison. She’s wearing a white dress and floats into the room like a cloud on a breeze. She drifts onto the couch, wrapping the cloud of her dress around her slender legs.

She looks at me. “Bryan told me,” she says. “A wheelchair.”

“Uh hum.” I nod my head. My brow is furrowed with worry for myself.

My hand moves from John Milton to the arm of the chair. I don’t know why, but even with a newfound freedom from the burden of lengthy conversation, I feel ashamed for my answer.

I’m also ashamed for the chair and for my trembling legs.

“Do you need anything?”

“New legs?”

“Oh, Mom.” Allison’s chin trembles.

The breeze from the windows goes slack, and the curtains settle back against the walls. Allison sighs; we sit together silently. She stays a while and then rises to float away, again a beautiful cloud in an endless sky. Before she leaves, Allison walks behind my wheelchair and wraps her arms around my shoulders.

“I’m so sorry.” She whispers into my ear, leaving a tearful mark on my cheek. “I have to go now. I’ll come and check on you tomorrow. I’ll bring some magazines for us to look at.”

“It’s okay,” I whisper back. “Oh, look! You rained on me.”

After Allison leaves, I realize I’ve cupped my hand around her tear to hold it tightly to my face.

I hear my woman’s throaty voice singing from the kitchen. The breeze returns and my curtains fly as flags once more. After a while, I go back to thinking of words and wondering when my children might ever visit me again.

I think it’s been a terribly long time.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

M
y woman wakes me, trilling into my ear, “I heard from a little bird that today is your birthday.” She sounds like a singing nightingale and I’m instantly confused.

“That’s not true,” I say. “I’ve not discussed my birthday with
any
bird… ever!”

“You’re right, ma’am… actually, it was your son, Bryan, who told me. Your children are coming for a special dinner tonight. We’ll make your favorite chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy.”

I clap my hands. “Oh, goody. Yes. Well, then… yes, it’s my birthday. I’m sure it is.” I crook my finger and motion my woman to bend her ear closer to my lips. “You’re forgiven for your lie,” I whisper into her startled ear.

After I’m washed and dressed and combed into something resembling a proper birthday girl, after I am wheeled into the living room, after a Happy Birthday foil balloon is tied to my chair, and after the television is turned on to provide its illogical white noise of game show companionship, my woman leaves me for her kitchen chores.

I sit in my chair, happy it’s my birthday and I have a balloon bobbing above my head, announcing that lovely fact. I clap my hands and smile. It’s my birthday!

Slowly, however, as someone might carefully shift from one hip to the other in their chair, over the next hour, my mood turns. It occurs to me that even with a silver and pink balloon tied to my chair like a buoy marking my place, I’m drowning and there’s no one to pull me up and out of this black water lake into which I’ve fallen. I’m a small, fragile presence held by the silence of gravity and the stillness of coming death.

Surely, this isn’t right.

My shoulders slope, my neck is rounded into a crescent shape of defeat. Birthday or not, I’m a body filled with the gathering terror of one soon to die‌—‌maybe today, on my birthday‌—‌and I don’t even know how old I am.

How can it be that I don’t know my age?

The icy water of dementia curls around my feet, swirls up my legs, covers my chest, and flows over my head. Yes. I’m drowning. Yet there’s no pain, unless I count the agony of all this terrible forgetfulness.

A breeze from the open patio door fills my mouth like the first gasp of brackish water. I suppose one in my position will either sink or swim. There is no simple straight line that marks the difference between alive and dead. I’m as dead sitting alone in front of a flickering television (that’s now dinging loudly,
winner, winner, winner
) as I would be if I were lying on a bed the moment after my last breath.

Slyly smiling at this simple insight, I decide dying would be an appropriate response to my birthday. Appropriate, indeed!

With great effort, I turn my chair and paddle my feet and arms until I propel myself across the living room to the kitchen door. I keep at it until I find my woman, who is bent over a broom, sweeping up flecks of dust from the kitchen floor.

“I’m ready to die now,” I announce. “I’ve thought it through and I’ve decided. I’m a burden in this chair and I’d like you to kill me now.”

Jewell straightens and turns to me, looking over my small and crumpled body. She smiles. “You don’t mind if I finish my sweeping first, do you?” she asks. “It’s hard to concentrate on killing people when the kitchen floor is only half done.”

“You’re laughing at me… I can tell. You shouldn’t‌—‌”

Tears sting the back of my eyes as I plunge my chin forward into the pose of one consumed by stubborn resolution. My hands fumble toward my chest. “Look… in here,” I say, patting my breastbone. “I mean it in here. I want to die. On my birth… it’s my birthday and I want… don’t I get what I
want
for my birthday?”

Jewell sets the dustpan down and stands the broom against a corner cabinet. She moves to my chair, kneels beside me, and takes up my trembling hands into the warmth of hers.

“Can you feel this, ma’am? Can you feel my hands around yours?”

Water breaks over the dam of my lower lids. “Yes, but shouldn’t they be around my neck? You can’t kill me by holding my hands.”

Jewell looks down at our fingers that are now entwined like ivy across a trellis. She flips her eyebrows and looks around the kitchen like she doesn’t want the walls to hear what she is about to tell me.

“I have a secret. There is magic in my skin,” she leans into my ear and whispers. “Magic.” Jewell elongates the first syllable until the word sounds like,
maah-jic
. “Right here in the skin of my hands. You’ve asked me to
kill
you. But my hands‌—‌these
magic
hands‌—‌they only know how to bake special birthday cakes with ingredients so magic themselves that just one bite will make you feel better.”

“Stop it… I want‌—‌”

“I know you’re sad today. But your children would be so disappointed if I killed you on your birthday… before your party. Let’s just put that idea off for a different day. Okay?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe.” Reluctance rides the edge of my voice, but for the moment, I’m talked out of the attractive notion of my woman’s hands tightly circled about my neck.

Jewell returns to her broom. “I’m almost done with my morning chores,” she says. “Would you like me to wheel you to the patio for some fresh air while I finish?”

“Mmmm,” I say, nodding. “It’s still my birthday, though, and I still want to die.”

“Yes, ma’am… I
know
you do.” She places her hand softly on my shoulder; her stout, warm fingers feel like a fire burning through my blouse. I pull the heat into my bones. Her touch is divine and I hold on to the promise that later‌—‌maybe even tonight‌—‌she’ll be kind enough to slip her magic hands around a pillow and crush it to my face.

Jewell wheels me out to the patio where she leaves me to watch several peeping birds as they peck their way across the yard.

YOU PASS. You pass the rest of your morning watching small dark-winged birds. They bob their way through bright-faced flowers looking for snippets of small bugs or fat caterpillars, clinging tightly like prizes under green garden leaves. It’s obvious the birds see that you’re nothing more than an oddity slumped in a chair. They continue clacking their small beaks against stems and leaves. There is gladness in their feet as they hop from leaf to leaf, their heads turning this way and that as they listen for the scatter of breakfast. They dance with unspeakable joy tucked into the sleeves of their wings. They make you ashamed for wanting death to swoop down upon you. Your shame makes you want to die all the more, but still, the day goes on and the birds continue on their way and your heart somehow finds a way to sing and weep for it all.

By the time my children arrive, each holding a little bag filled with the weight of a small gift hidden under crinkled tissue paper, I’ve stopped asking my woman to kill me. The distraction of my chattering Allison and my somber Bryan delight me and, for now, I forget my throat and how I so desperately want someone to squeeze their fingers around it until it forgets to take in air.

Instead, I clap my hands with the pleasure of my children. Their bodies are warmth and comfort and I’m fascinated by their arms and their legs and how they move and gesture. Their mouths are mesmerizing and they shake their heads and laugh with abandon. The late afternoon light seems to have settled across their skin, helping me follow and translate their movements into meaning.

The Happy Birthday balloon tied to my chair bobs above my head like a celebration dance. I’m at last in love with the day and, in spite of the few words still available to my lips, my heart is filled to bursting.

My woman bustles about the periphery of the room, setting the table for dinner and pouring glasses of wine, offering beer or tea, all the time humming under her breath. She seems enlivened by the presence of my children.

Allison approaches me on legs that seem to dance across the room. She dangles a gift bag in front of my face. “Guess what’s in here,” she trills. “Guess.”