Flyaway Read online

  A gray-haired woman in black pants and a pink cotton blouse answers. A pair of glasses hangs on a chain around her neck. She looks like somebody's grandma, and I find myself wishing I hadn't worn my black midriff top with the two white buttons right over my nipples.

  "Can I help you, dear?" she asks.

  I cross my arms over my chest. "I found this baby bird..."

  She cranes her neck to look behind me. "Do you have it with you?"

  "No, I mean I found it the other day. By the cemetery. This guy Alan talked me into letting him bring it here."

  "Oh, are you the one who found that wonderful little robin?" She opens the screen door wide. "Well, come in, come in. I'm Valerie, by the way. You'll be happy to know the robin's doing just fine."

  She leads me through an ordinary-looking living room and kitchen to a room at the back of the house with at least twenty cages and laundry baskets stacked against the walls. The air is filled with squawks, chirps, and the rustle of wings. I look around for Alan, but there's no sign of him.

  "Alan works here, right?"

  "Yes. He lives here too, but he took my car out for supplies. He should be back in a little while, if you want to wait."

  Alan lives here? I wrinkle my nose, and not only because the room smells kind of like a pet store. "That's okay."

  She leads me to a row of incubators against the back wall. "There it is, contented as can be."

  I peer inside the incubator. It's Tweety Bird all right, huddled in that little berry-basket nest. Aside from having a few more feathers, she looks pretty much the same as when I found her.

  "Would you like to try feeding it ?"

  I remember learning that mother robins eat worms and puke them into their babies' mouths. "Uh, no, thanks."

  But she holds out a pair of latex gloves. "Put these on. You'll do fine." Then she hands me a syringe filled with some gross brown stuff.

  "I thought robins ate worms."

  "We'll get to those. But this formula is as close as we can get to what the mother bird regurgitates for her young."

  I stare at the syringe. Artificial bird puke. Nice.

  She slides open the door of the incubator, and Tweety Bird starts chirping like crazy. She opens her beak so wide I can see straight into her bright yellow throat.

  "It's okay, honey pie," I coo at the little bird. "I've got your food right here."

  Valerie puts a finger to her lips. "We don't talk to them while we feed them. And you'll want to avoid eye contact."

  That makes no sense to me. I mean, if you're going to go to all the trouble of taking care of a bird, why can't you make friends with it ? But since I'm standing with a goop-filled syringe in my hand and Tweety Bird is opening her beak wide enough to swallow it whole, I decide I should probably feed now and ask questions later.

  "What the bird's doing is called 'gaping,' and it means it's ready for food. So you're going to take the syringe..." She holds my wrist and guides my hand toward Tweety Bird's open beak. "...And stick it in as far as you can. No, farther than that."

  I pull my hand back. "But she'll choke!"

  "She ? There's as much chance this bird is a male—we wouldn't be able to tell until a year from now, when its feathers change color. If it's a female, those spots will disappear, and its breast will turn a pale red-orange." She takes hold of my wrist again. She has bony old-lady fingers. "It won't choke if you get that syringe way down in there, past its glottis—which is that little opening."

  This time I manage to get the syringe in far enough. I close my eyes and squirt about half the contents down Tweety Bird's throat.

  "See ? That wasn't so bad. Look, it's ready for more."

  I open my eyes and there's Tweety Bird, chirping and gaping again. It takes a few more syringe-fulls before she—I just know she's a girl—finally settles down. When I think I'm done, Valerie hands me a pair of tweezers and a dish full of wiggling worms.

  "Let's see if it'll eat a couple of these. Pick them up by the tail if you can—that way they're easier for the bird to swallow."

  I seriously can't believe I'm doing this, but I poke around in the dish with the tweezers until I manage to grab one ofthe worms by the tail. Then I drop it into Tweety Bird's waiting beak. "Oh, gross," I say.

  "You're a natural," Valerie says. "Would you like to feed a few more ? I could use the help."

  Part of me wants to get away before Alan shows up, but for some reason it's hard to leave. In the next half hour I feed a baby crow, two more robins, a sparrow, and a finch. With each feeding I'm less nervous about sticking in the syringe, more confident about picking up worms and berries with the tweezers.

  I try to picture Alan feeding a baby bird. "Alan does this too?"

  Valerie smiles. "Oh, yes. He's wonderful with the birds. And they're wonderful for him."

  I'm about to ask what she means when I see a cage covered with a black cloth.

  "What's in there?"

  "A jay that a woman brought in early this morning. The poor thing's stunned."

  "What happened to it ?"

  "Flew into a window, probably. It happens a lot. The bird's sailing along, thinking it's free and clear, and then ... boom! It slams into a wall of glass."

  Once when I was a kid, back in Montana, we were driving along the road and a bird flew right into Mom's windshield. It made a sickening whump, and I begged her to stop the car so I could see if it was still alive. It lay there by the side of the road, and it wasn't until I got closer that I could see it was still breathing.

  "It's gone," Mom had said, waving her hand. "Leave it."

  I look up at Valerie. "Can you do anything for it?"

  "It probably has a concussion, so all I can do is keep it quiet for a couple of hours, so the blood has a chance to drain away from its brain. But there's no guarantee that it will live. When one of God's creatures is hurting, it's our duty to do our best to help it heal, but ultimately it's in His hands."

  I've never been big on the God stuff, but her words press against a sore place inside me. I should have at least moved that bird off the road, but I knew Mom wouldn't let me touch it. I always hated the thought that I left it lying there when maybe, just maybe, it had a chance to fly again.

  I'm about to ask her more about the bird when Alan bursts into the room with a plastic grocery bag in each hand.

  "Sorry it took me so long," he says. "I had to stop for gas." Then he catches sight of me, and his mouth twists into its usual smirk. "Well, well. Look who's here."

  "Yes," says Valerie, "I've been having a delightful time with your friend. Goodness, I never got your name, dear."

  "Stevie."

  "What an unusual name. Is that short for something?"

  I glance at Alan, who's pretending to unpack the grocery bags. But I can tell he's waiting for me to say something stupid. "My mom named me after her favorite singer, Stevie Nicks."

  "Oh, yes, I remember her. Fleetwood Mac, right? She sang that one song, something about 'tell me sweet little lies.'"

  I look at her in surprise. I'd figured her for more of the Easy Listening type. "Yeah. My mom loves to dance to that one."

  Alan starts doing a lame imitation of a stripper, gyrating his hips and undoing the top buttons of his army jacket. "I'll bet she does."

  "Shut up! She's not a stripper, she's a dancer."

  "Yeah, right."

  "Alan!" For the first time Valerie's voice is sharp. "Please go clean the aviaries."

  He shoots me a dirty look, then takes his time leaving the room.

  Valerie watches him go. Then she shakes her head and turns back to me. "Don't mind Alan. He didn't mean anything by it." She puts her hand on my arm. "You love your mother, don't you?"

  I pull away. "Why wouldn't I ?"

  She gives me a long look and then says, "How would you like to come back and help me with the birds a couple of times a week? Maybe Mondays and Wednesdays? I can't pay you, but—"

  "Yes," I say before she can finish.
r />   On the bus ride home, my mind keeps drifting back to that bird that hit our windshield in Montana, and I keep hearing Valerie's words: "When one of God's creatures is hurting, it's our duty to help it heal."

  Aunt Mindy's in her bedroom. I knock on the door. "I think we need to help my mom," I say.

  She sits me down on the couch, and I tell her what I saw at Drake's. Not everything, but enough to make her say, "What's his name, Stevie?"

  "His name's Drake," I tell her. "Drake Uttley."

  CHAPTER 7

  Aunt Mindy promised we'd talk about Mom the next morning, but she forgot that Mrs. Watkins had set up a home interview with a social worker from CPS. The lady shows up early and asks a bunch of questions. She wants to know how long Mom's been working at the club, how often she left me alone, stuff like that. Of course Aunt Mindy didn't tell me she was coming, so I didn't have time to think up any good answers. I figure things can't get much worse than they already are, so I mostly tell the truth. She gives me her card "in case anything comes up." Whatever that's supposed to mean. Then Aunt Mindy takes off for work before I can ask her if she's planning to track Mom down at Drake's today.

  On top of that, it's Tuesday, the day of my first tutoring session with Rick. I decide to celebrate (ha, ha) by dressing up a little, so I wiggle into a retro black cocktail dress and slip on a pair of gold strappy sandals I found at the bottom of the Goodwill discount barrel. I check myself out in the mirror. Mom would be proud.

  I'm due to meet Rick in the library conference room at one. By twelve-thirty I'm standing at the door to the room, feeling so antsy I'd chain smoke if I could stand the taste of cigarettes.

  He shows up at 1:03 with an armload of books and breezes past me. "Hey, Stevie. Nice threads." He plops the books on one of the round tables and pulls out an orange plastic chair. "You ready to get to work?"

  I take a seat beside him. While he's shuffling through his notes, I scoot a little closer so I can smell his cologne and study his diamond stud.

  "Let's start with math," he says.

  Wouldn't you know he'd pick my absolute worst subject ?

  "I got this book from your school counselor. Do you remember where you were when you started having trouble ?"

  He flips through the pages. Algorithms. Equations. N equals X plus 3. I don't remember any of it. I must look as sick as I feel, because he says, "We'll just start at the beginning, then."

  He opens to page one and jots the first problem on a piece of lined paper, then slides it over to me. I take the pencil he gives me and stare at the problem as hard as I can, but nothing happens. It's like everything I ever learned about math has flown out of my brain. I stare and stare and chew on the end of the pencil.

  Finally I push the paper away. "What do I need to know this stuff for, anyway? It's not like I'm going to be a physicist or something."

  Rick gives me a gentle smile that crinkles the corners of his cat eyes. "What are you planning to be, Stevie ?"

  Oh, God. There it is: The Question. When they asked us in kindergarten what we wanted to be when we grew up, it was easy. A policewoman. A movie star. An astronaut. But now I know you don't get to be one of those things when you can barely make it through school and your mom can't even pay rent on the cruddiest apartment in Ballard. Mrs. Watkins is always bugging me about The Future and am I going to take the SAT and apply to college. But how can I think about that when I don't even know where I'll be living next week?

  "No clue," I admit.

  "There must be something you care about, something that makes you really happy."

  What makes me happy? When Drake doesn't call for three days straight. When we don't have to pick up and move one more time.

  Rick takes one look at me and says, "Tell you what: Let's move on to a different subject."

  Gladly.

  We switch to Biology, which seems completely pointless, and then U.S. Government, which is the world's biggest snoozefest. To save myself from death by boredom, I imagine Rick and Mom together. I see them getting married and him buying us a humungous house and taking us for rides in his Maserati. I'm just starting to plan our trip to Hawaii when he raps his knuckles gently against my head.

  "Hello. Anybody in there ?"

  Turns out I was in outer space when he gave me my assignment for Thursday, which is to write a review of a book I've read recently. I tell him I can't even remember the last time I cracked one open.

  "Perfect," he says. "Now is a great time to start. Your homework is to find a book that interests you and read it."

  Homework? I can't believe it. Here it is, almost the start of summer vacation, and I'm stuck in a library doing homework.

  He stacks the textbooks into a neat pile. "I'm going to let you hang on to these. No pressure or anything—open them up and flip through them if you feel like it. Just to get back into practice."

  If he wasn't so danged nice, I'd give him my "whatever" look, but instead I dredge up a smile. "Sure."

  After Rick leaves, I consider hanging out in the library to look for a book, but the thought of staring at all those titles makes me tired. So I lug the textbooks back to Aunt Mindy's and shove them under the guest room bed. Then I slide out of the dress and pull on a pair of sweats. The afternoon sun is streaming through the window, so I lower the blinds.

  To take my mind off Rick's questions about The Future, I close my eyes and go to our NTD House. This time I make it a funky little place out in the country. It's got furniture made of logs and sticks, and there's a real tree growing in the living room. I laugh but get so into it that I grab a piece of paper and a pencil and start to draw.

  I'm just putting the finishing touches on the second bathroom, which has a shower that looks like a waterfall, with water tumbling over rocks, when there's a knock on the guest room door. "Stevie ?" says Aunt Mindy. "Can I come in?"

  I look at the clock; I can't believe it's after five.

  "Hang on," I tell her. I fold up the NTD House drawings and stick them between the pages of the math book. "What do you want?"

  Worry lines crease her forehead. "Can I sit down?"

  I scoot over and make a spot for her on the bed. The way she's picking at the maroon polish on her thumbnail makes me nervous.

  "It's about the intervention. Things are moving a little faster than I expected."

  My throat goes dry. I swallow hard.

  "I got on the phone with Uncle Rob this morning, and we lined up an intervention specialist. I gave him the name of that Drake fellow, and we were planning to try to track your mom down at his place this weekend. But she beat us to it. She called me at work today and asked to borrow some money."

  Of course: It's almost the first. The day our rent is due.

  "I said I'd meet her at the apartment tonight at eight. She doesn't know that Uncle Rob and Dave, the intervention specialist, will be there too."

  Typical Aunt Mindy move, getting everybody to gang up on Mom when she's least expecting it. I hug my legs to my chest and frown. "You lied to her."

  "Now, sweetie, don't look at me like that. I'm only trying to do what's best for your mom."

  "And you think what's best is playing a dirty trick on her?"

  She reaches out to put her hand on my shoulder, but I jerk away.

  "I'm sorry you're upset. But Dave thinks we need to take advantage of this opportunity, and he's had a lot of experience with these things. Anyway, I didn't come to ask your permission. I came to ask if you want to be there."

  My jaw drops a mile. For sure I want Mom to get some help, but I'd be nuts to let Aunt Mindy drag me into this lame setup. "No way."

  "You could make a big difference, Stevie."

  I can't see how. Mom always does whatever she wants. And how could I look her in the eye when I'm the one who ratted her out in the first place?

  "I'm not going," I tell her, and turn away.

  I spend the next couple of hours staring at the ceiling. At first I worry that not showing up at the interventio
n will be a big mistake. I picture Mom framed in the window of Drake's house with the skin of her cheeks stretched tight and those dark circles underneath her eyes.

  Then a sharp claw of anger rips at my gut. If Aunt Mindy had kept her big nose out of our lives, none of this would be happening. Let her do the dirty work.

  At seven-thirty Aunt Mindy pokes her head in and says, "Wish me luck." I feel cold and hollow, like someone scooped my insides out, and I wonder if I should have kept my mouth shut about the whole thing. There's no way I can sit here all night, thinking about what's going on at the apartment. As soon as I hear her car pull away, I try out my new cell.

  "Hey, Tonya. That party still happening? Because I think I might be up for it after all."

  By the time the bus gets me to Tonya's, the party's hopping. Lights blaze in every window, and people are spilling onto the front porch. I jostle my way through the maze of sweaty bodies. Everyone's shouting to be heard over the rap music on the living room sound system; they've got it turned up so loud every beat feels like a minor earthquake. The whole place reeks of beer. Even if it is the last week of school, only Tonya and Doug could get this many kids together on a Tuesday night.

  "Stevie!" Tonya's waving a bottle at me from across the room. Her hair is a mass of ribbons, a different color tied to each dreadlock.

  I surf through the crowd till I'm standing beside her.

  "Isn't this awesome?" she says. "Like, everybody's here. All of Doug's friends, and guess what?" She leans in close, and I can smell the alcohol on her breath. "The Professor said he'd show."

  I'm glad I took the time to change into my red vinyl skirt, leopard print top, and white go-go boots. The pair of dangly bead earrings Mom made really pulls my look together.

  I grab the bottle of rum from her. "Give me that thing."

  I take a big swallow, and for a moment, my throat feels like it's on fire. Then a warm feeling spreads across my chest. I take a second one. I forgot how much better this makes you feel, how it puts you somewhere outside yourself.