Thirty #2
“That’s what I want, too.”
She sleeps late on Saturday morning and I feel more at peace than I have all week. I take my time making coffee at the stove, reading the paper. I carry my second cup outside and Clément is stepping out of the coop with two pigeons in his hands.
“I’m about to fly them,” he says. “Stay and watch?”
“Gladly.” I take a seat on a patio chair.
He loosens his grip and the birds dart away. He goes back to the coop, bringing more birds out and letting them fly. Last, he brings out KR, who rises, up and up, leading the flock now. Soon he starts to spin. He’s a wonder, spinning and dipping, all movement. “It never gets old,” I say.
“I know,” Clément says. He sits next to me.
We watch together in the morning sun. It’s May now, a trace of summer in the air.
Soon it will be Nathalie’s thirteenth birthday, and soon after that the kids will leave for New Orleans.
A small dark bird drops away, gives a few quick tumbles and rights itself.
And then it’s KR’s turn again, spinning fast until he stops.
For a moment he’s suspended in the air, as though he’s floating, and now he’s dropping—not flying, not spinning, just a sudden and terrible fall to the ground.
He lands up past the garden steps and we rush to find him.
He’s on the stone path, completely still. White and gray and blue feathers and glassy eyes and a beak, broken from the fall, pointing to one side. Clément’s standing just as still, his eyes wide, panic in them.
“Oh no,” I say. “Oh, honey.”
He kneels. Takes KR’s body, gently, into his hands.
My son, so different from the boy who used to cling to my legs.
Except now he lets out a cry, loud and mournful, and careens forward.
Another cry—long, heaving, cutting through the morning, filling my body with alarm.
So unlike any sound he’s ever made. Nathalie comes running from the house.
She stops short when she sees the bird. She looks at me.
I steel myself for her shriek, her accusations.
It’s going to be my fault somehow. She’ll make it so.
Instead she kneels next to Clément, wraps her arms around him.
He’s still keening. “Shhh,” she says. “Shhhh,” holding him tight, stroking his hair, until he buries his face in her shoulder and quiets.
I sit on the other side of him. Put my arms around them both.
After he’s calmed, Nathalie says to wait for her, that she’ll be right back.
I see her down at the coop, letting the other birds back in, closing them up.
She disappears farther down the garden and then into the house.
Clément’s head is in my lap. His eyes closed, tears leaking through.
KR’s body clutched to his heart. How I wish I could spare him.
And also: how grateful I am, to be with him through it.
Nathalie returns with a bowl full of grass and flowers and some sea glass from her collection.
“It’s a casket?” Clément asks.
She nods. “We could put some birdseed in it.”
Clément shakes his head. “He doesn’t need it.”
Carefully, he sets KR’s body into the bowl, on top of the grass. It fits perfectly. Nathalie sits down, the bowl in her lap. She stares at KR, pets his wing with her fingers. Leans in close. “I’m so sorry that happened to you,” she whispers.
Clément isn’t ready to bury KR yet, wants to keep him in the house in the living room, on top of the credenza by the record player.
It bothers me, to have a dead animal in the house.
But I say, “Okay, that’s fine. For a little while.
” Lionel comes over and Nathalie and I give them privacy.
Nathalie does homework on her bed. I fold laundry, page through magazines. Hoping this peace between us will last.
At night, after Lionel’s gone, Clément comes into my room. “I don’t know how to say goodbye.”
I scoot over and he climbs in next to me.
Gangly limbs, sweet head hung low. “I suppose you need to trust that he’ll stay with you,” I say.
“In your love of flying birds, and your little squeakers in there that’ll grow into strong fliers themselves.
He’ll always be your first bird and you’ll always remember him. ”
“Will you paint him for me? That way I’ll still see him every day.”
“Okay. I could make you a painting of him in the sky. Would you like that?”
“I don’t want it to be a lie. Just paint him in the bowl. We can pick some new flowers.”
“It won’t make you even sadder, having me paint him like this, the way he is now?”
“He looks happy there. His beak makes it looks like he’s smiling. Don’t you think?”
“I noticed that, too,” I say.
In the morning, down in the studio, we set KR’s bowl on the table. Nathalie scours the yard for flowers and comes back with heaps of them. Blossoms in the back seat of my car, shock of ocean water, purple lips. The blossoms overflow, scatter the tabletop.
“Should we add a couple candles?” I ask Clément.
He runs up to the house and comes back with two tapers with glass holders and a shorter, thicker white candle, burned partway down on a little dish. We arrange the candles and light them.
“Does it look right to you?” I ask.
Clément nods. “Nathalie, do you think so?”
“I do.” She’s standing tall, composed. As though KR’s death has wiped away every other concern. “Don’t worry about anything today, Mommy,” she says. “Clément and I will make all the food and we’ll do the chores, too.”
Clément agrees.
“All right,” I say. “I’ll work on this all day, then.”
And I do—in the hours that follow, and the days after that, rising early before work and returning to the studio as soon as I get home.
Nathalie dons my apron, makes breakfasts and lunches to pack in their schoolbags.
They make dinner together in the evenings, Clément sneaking looks at my progress when he comes down to ask what temperature to set the oven, or what to substitute for nutmeg.
They set our places on the patio, serve mushy string beans and mashed potatoes.
Macaroni with an unidentifiable blend of spices.
They stop me from cleaning afterward, sending me back down to work instead.
I’m racing against time as the flowers fade and the bird begins to smell of death.
I’m painting all the feathers I can see, each stripe and curve of neck and wing, the prehistoric feet and claws, the crooked smiling beak and the deadened eyes.
And as I paint, my mind goes to so many places.
I’m in the pink tub and the kids are small, peeking at my body from the other side of the curtain.
I’m on the sand, watching them hold hands and lose their footing as waves come in and lift them.
We’re in my old bedroom, reading Goodnight Moon.
The bird is finished, and the flowers, and the candles, but the painting still needs something.
And then I’m up in the house, opening the game drawer in a trance, finding the velvet bag of Jacks pieces.
Moving to the drawer in the telephone alcove, sorting through to find Nathalie’s long-forgotten envelope of paper dolls.
I carry them down with me and scatter them on the tabletop.
Silver Jacks and miniature flat dresses and hats and trousers.
I touch the canvas to make sure it’s dry, reach for new tubes of paint to mix.
How suddenly the end comes. How difficult to look, and keep looking, until it all loses its strangeness and I see it for what it is.
Shapes and textures and color and absence and with every stroke of the brush a whisper: It’s all right, it’s all right.