They were killing each other. She could see that. She would have to save herself and go.
But Bird was better at staying than going. She could conjure every sweetness still — it was all tucked away in her head.
One last time, she thought — and got right into bed. She kissed him everywhere she could think to. She licked him between his toes. She breathed into the loops and channels of his ears. She wore him down, in short, with every tenderness that was hers to summon.
They slept afterwards and dreamed the same dream, which is one of the gifts we are given when we are sharp enough to know. They slept touching, and the dream-story shuttled between them, reckoning by friendly stars. The moon passed its light through the window.
It was the light of the moon Bird saw by when she waked, mercifully dim and blue. She waked screaming. A corkscrew was turning in her navel, how it felt, and their bed was soggy with blood.
Mickey didn’t wake right away; she had to shake him. Their phone was cut off so they bundled Bird in the dog’s old hairy blanket and went down the stoop into the street. The blood kept coming, pleasant almost, warm at least, for a minute. She wished he would carry her, but this was silly. The bodegas were closed, the pay phones smashed. There was hardly a car on the street. At last a cabbie stopped, took a look at Bird, and peeled off.
By the time they got to the ER, Bird was shaking with cold and delirious. Mickey had tried to carry her. Blood was matted in his hair, streaked across his face, across Bird’s face, the mark of the dream they shared. Bird whimpered and talked to her mother. She wouldn’t talk to Mickey or look at him. The room flew up if she looked at him and whipped around her head.
They knocked Bird out to finish up with it, the old D & C, the flush and suck, dilatation, curettage, good to go, up and out. She could have watched if she had wanted but she didn’t. Mickey walked her in in her paisley shift, in stages helped her lie down. A gentle man, good to her. Loving of the lesser animals, good to her and kind.
They would find a way to speak of it. He would tell her in bits when she wanted to hear and stop should she ask and she didn’t. She waked and slept and when she waked at last, the day was lifting and blue. She kept her head turned away and said nothing. The sun blazed through the murky window and blotted out the room.
When she spoke, it was to say she was ready to hear whatever Mickey had seen. Hear it all, she insisted, and be finished with it — Bird who was finished with nothing.
What was left was all tatter and thread, he told her. Broth and a bloody dumpling that caught and flinched in the tube.
“The tube?” she asked. “No, don’t tell me.”
How the brew splatted out in pickle jars, he told her—tickle jars was what Mickey said, by accident. Everything about it was accident, wantonness, and they laughed at the slip out of habit — hard for a beat and then harder until Mickey couldn’t quit.
Bird hung back and watched him. She thought, Here is a man drowning, a boy going hopelessly down.
They had set her big feet hard in stirrups: same for the dead as for the living.
“This will hurt,” she remembered. “You’re going to feel a bit of a — easy — a bit of a — pinch.” Yes. How they said it.
A pinch, a breeze, a prod. A leaf on its back with its feet in the air blown dryly down a road. Sort of that. They thought up things to say sort of about it.
“Time to go to the butcher,” they said, and after that they said nothing at all.
They found a booth in back of a coffee shop, a heater working feebly against the season. Bird pulled her chair up to it; she was cold and she couldn’t get warm. She tossed toast crumbs into the vent to burn and fed it strands of hair. Bird thought to call Suzie, but Suzie was elsewhere. Suzie was straddling an icy crevasse, rappelling down a palisade of stone. Suzie was hang gliding, you should try it, sugar, off the highest live volcano in the world.
“We lost our little Caroline,” Bird told the waitress when she came. “We had a baby and now she’s gone.”
Mickey was gone, too. Bird didn’t know where. She couldn’t think how anything happened.
“Did he tell you what I should do?” Bird asked the waitress.
“He said to wait here.”
Bird had made a mess on the bench she was trying to hide.
“Not to worry,” the waitress told her. “He’ll be back, sugar.”
Nobody called her sugar but Suzie.
A whale is closer to a camel than to a fish, sugar.
Bird would never speak to Suzie again.
The bench was Naugahyde, a mottled red, the whole world should be red when you are bleeding. Bird lay down on the bench as if into the blood she had lost and sleep carried her away.
The place was closed by the time Bird waked again, but the waitress was still there, talking to Mickey. Bird feigned sleep and watched them.
If you touch her, Bird thought, I swear to you—but she couldn’t think what she would do.
She half knew where she was. She raised her head and knocked into the table and her hair hung up in the flashing that prettified the rim.
“Hello, sleepy,” Mickey said, and walked Bird through the snow to the buckaroo’s car they were to drive across the country to Cheyenne.
He opened the door for Bird. “Nice rig.”
“I’ll drive.”
He had smoothed a garbage bag out for Bird to sit on. He laid the seat back for her; she bumped it up again. She cranked the heat to high and they turned for the west, toward the last light leaving the sky. Three exits, a bridge, and they were lost, making hard blind turns down quiet streets, squinting into the snow. These were streets without even bodegas, block upon unlit block in collapse, a maze swept of anything living. The snow floated up, spun among leaves and wrappers in the piddly light their headlights cast: the world was flat after all, flipped over, repeating its small features. Bird was queasy; she leaked. Her head was still a mile from her feet and wind blew lightly through it.
“I give up,” she said, pushed the words from her mouth.
Bird was asleep before Mickey found a road out and slept through dark and daylight; she waked to a stubble of corn on the plains and the slow-swung heads of oil wells, glad for the clean rim of the land, glad at last to see. She saw the Cross of the Plains in a bean field, the wing — ripped free — of a Cessna lashed to the bed of a truck.
She said, “My mother appeared in a box in my sleep to bring me a loop of pearls. Quick: before the doctor found out who she was. He was handsome, they are always handsome, with a ringlet of hose and a scissors.”
They had scraped the mother in Bird out. Her mother was tiny, Thumbelina, set out on a rind of lemon across a bloody stew.
They drove dirt roads, a farmy grid, the houses high and white.
“Slow,” she said, “I want to see.”
A boy sat a log hung from a rope from the generous branch of an elm. Mickey stopped the car; they rolled their windows down. The day smelled of willow and grass, the grass brittle and furred, palomino.
The boy’s sister wound him up by his knees. It wasn’t winter here yet; they had thrown their coats to the ground. A last leaf rocked down and the boy lunged at it and swung his good leg up. He had lost his other leg at the knee. The boy’s sister wound him up on the swing, away from her, into the paltry shadows. He was a long-haired boy and his hair was loose and in his teeth was a grass blonde as he was.