Chapter 15 Brown Pelican
Fifteen
Brown Pelican
Pelecanus occidentalis. A large, odd seabird, the brown pelican is not quite as devoted a parent as was once believed: Legend (not true) says the
pelican pierced a hole in its own breast to feed the blood to its chicks. But pelicans do fill their huge bill pouch with
fish to carry to their young. A large bird, three to five feet long and weighing four to eleven pounds, with a wingspan of
nearly seven feet, brown pelicans dive from heights as steep as fifty feet to hunt for prey. If a parent bird eats the fish
first, it always regurgitates part of the catch for the pelican chicks, which are notoriously voracious. Because of the myth
surrounding their blood, pelicans are often associated in spiritual art with a suffering Christ near the sea.
In narrative, coincidence is a juvenile strategy (“What were the odds that the woman he crashed into on that crowded ski slope
in Utah would be his ex-wife, whom he hadn’t seen in ten years?”).
In real life, though, stuff happens.
One Sunday, near their new condominium in Cocoa Beach, my parents arranged a long-postponed brunch with one of Dad’s fraternity brothers, an engineer at the Kennedy Space Center.
Although they hadn’t yet sold the house where we grew up, they were gradually making the transition full-time to the land of palm trees, pools, and pineapple plants.
Their backyard was an almost sinisterly unchanging absinthe-colored Eden.
Every couple of months, a gigantic storm came along and took out one of their windows, but they were philosophical about it, even my father, who would have blown an aneurysm if this had happened even a couple of years before.
Dad had sold a half interest in his business to a partner, who ran things ably in his absences—my mother thought that this was proof of magic in the universe.
She had worked entirely remotely for several years.
Which brings me to the homily.
Buckle up, folks—this will be a ride to remember.
Patrick and Miranda decided to meet the old friend at this nutty restaurant called Space Alley, where the servers all wore
silver Mylar outfits and the ceiling was a mosaic of spinning saucers and flashing lights. Mom remembered later thinking that,
for somebody, it would be a seizure on a cracker.
As they waited for their Big Bang Burgers and Supernova Shakes, Mom spotted a woman eating a modest salad alone in a nearby
booth. The woman glanced up, alerted by some psychic signal. My mother blinked, then swiftly snapped a picture with her phone
and sent it to me.
At that moment, I was floating in a pool on a big inflatable chair in the shape of a whale, fittingly, as I was pregnant with
our twin boys (when I learned of this, I thought of Fay, so long ago, saying “the requisite two boys”). I was wearing a bathing
suit that my sister called a BINO, or a Bikini In Name Only, because it really was more the size of something you would attach
to the mast of a small sailboat. My phone, in a sturdy zip-sealed plastic bag, was in the cupholder with my plastic bottle
of lemonade. So massive was I that it took me five minutes to flounder my way out of the pool and get the bag open to study
that photo.
It was Ruth Wild.
Though visibly older in ways that couldn’t necessarily be accounted for by the passage of years, thinner, her hair entirely white, her expression sculpted downward by care, it was clearly Ruth, my old chemistry teacher, Felicity’s mother.
Given the location, you will have to forgive the allusion to the wrinkle on the space-time continuum, but it was not all that far-fetched to see her there.
As I reminded Miranda when I texted back, Ruth’s father, of whom she’d been enormously proud, had been a rocket scientist. He had worked on the first shuttle after the Challenger disaster.
Ruth and her sisters had been born and raised nearby, and Ruth came north only for college, for a scholarship at
Minnesota not very different from the one Felicity got to University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Why had I never considered that Ruth would return here to hide in plain sight? Florida was home to her. The truth was that,
after Felicity was convicted, after I wrote the story, I scarcely thought of Ruth at all, except when I imagined the book
I would write, which was on hold for the moment, but which would require revisiting old mysteries.
So much had detoured the plans I made.
What do they say? (And again, who are they, anyway?) Nothing comes with a greater guarantee of giving the gods the giggles
(I still do like alliteration, a lot of alliteration . . . ) than the huge hopes of humble human beings.
All the things I had wanted to happen, had happened—along with a few more. They had, however, all happened at the same time,
which is what probably gave rise to that old aphorism about being careful what you wish for.
That Sunday, Sam was indoors, putting Nelia down for her nap. I yelled for him, and he came running with our naked two-year-old
tucked under his arm in a football carry.
“My parents just saw Felicity’s mother in a restaurant,” I told him, as Nelia, who did not know fear, clambered onto Sam’s shoulders and then leaped into my arms.
Sam said, “No way. They did not.” I was about to show him the photo when I realized that Sam would not recognize her; he had
never seen Ruth Wild. By the time he and Felicity met, Ruth was gone. “Are you going to try to talk to her?”
“It can’t be her. But if it is her, I don’t have any actual reason to talk to her.”
“Aren’t you curious?”
“Madly. But it’s nothing to do with me.”
“You should probably tell the aunts. Then they can follow up if they want to.”
“True. I’ll do that right away. I’ll send them the picture.”
I thought that over as I got Nelia settled for her nap. When I returned, Sam was asleep on a recliner, so I waited alone,
pacing the pool deck with my big water bottle, for my parents to return and tell me the rest of what transpired over lunch.
Sam was spent, crushed by his own work and parenthood but also trying to help my dad with a particularly gruesome stage of
remodeling the vintage Spanish-style place we’d purchased while trying to ignore Patrick’s muttering about romance versus
common sense. My father had a point. We were swayed by the charm of the house before we realized that previous residents had
included many generations of rodents and marsupials, not to mention the odd alligator strolling the neighborhood. When I found
out about that, I wanted to leave. (How had I not realized this? Well, I was a Midwesterner! And who actually expects . . .
alligators?) Sam pointed out that we would have to go to Missouri to entirely avoid them, so we installed a very tall vinyl
picket fence with secure locks on the inside and the outside of the gate.
During that indefinite interval, we lived with my parents, who had four bedrooms and were gallant.
Their place wasn’t far from our base in Vero Beach and boasted perks including but not limited to that pristine and heated pool.
I was sure that we would have a pool as well, by the time we started collecting social security.
At my folks’ house, I could be both mother and child.
I got up at five, literally threw my toddler at my mother, sometimes worked from their house, sometimes drove an hour to work in the kind of traffic that made me wonder if all my fellow commuters had bathrooms in their cars, worked until six, by then so hungry that I actually relished whatever half-baked comestible Miranda provided, then fell into bed with Nelia tucked against my spine.
We didn’t even try to put her in a crib; she was too spoiled and we were too worn-out.
By the time my parents returned from their brunch, I had done too much thinking to keep up the pretense of nonchalance. I
was ready to go out right then to search for Ruth, but Miranda and Patrick were adamant. Patrick, particularly, insisted that
Ruth wasn’t going anywhere, and although I didn’t really believe that—for what if Ruth had seen my parents at the same moment
they saw her?—I was too bulkily burdened to dispute them. Mom told me they’d asked the server if she knew the woman in the
booth across and one back.
“She said, of course, that was Mrs. Copeland,” Miranda told me. “I asked how she knew her and the server, who was just a kid,
said she was a substitute teacher at the middle school and all the kids liked her. She came in a few times a week, always
had the Cobb salad, always took half of it home in a poly clamshell for dinner. Then she said, ‘She brings her little girl
sometimes.’ I said, ‘Ruth’s daughter is grown-up,’ and, before you ask, I didn’t say she’s incarcerated. The server seemed
confused. She said, ‘You must be thinking of someone different. Mrs. Copeland, the science teacher?’ I said, ‘Right, I must
be thinking of someone else.’”
“It can’t be her then.”
“It is her. You saw her yourself. Maybe she babysits for somebody. Maybe she had a baby.”
“Ruth’s sister said she wouldn’t have any more children because she has a heart condition. That was one of the reasons the marriage broke up. But maybe she did.”
I thought I would never have the patience to wait. I really did want to be able to deliver Ruth back to her sad sisters, now
mourning not only her but Felicity as well. But a few days later, I learned anew how arresting it could be to give birth to
nearly full-term twins, after twenty-three hours of labor, during which I couldn’t feel pain because of an epidural, but I
could feel a sensation like my midsection being dug up with a backhoe. I learned how awkward it could be to fall asleep nursing
one baby with a book propped open in the crook of my unoccupied elbow and a two-year-old sprawled across my lap. As I sat
up during the night, I remembered watching soap operas with my great-aunt Bridget, and how puzzled I was that these shows