Darren looks up from his phone and asks if I want to go for a walk. My son has made a request that involves spending time with me. I try to play it cool — but yes, I would like to go for a walk!
We haven’t said much during our days working on our sunburns on Clearwater Beach. We don’t ever talk much, to be honest, but I think that’s what we both want. At least I know it’s what I want, or at least it’s the only way I know how to be. Darren, though — when he’s with his mother he can’t shut up. The number of TV shows they manage to watch and then discuss, it makes me wonder if he’s ever sleeping when he’s in his bedroom with the door closed.
There’s an old pier right near the spa, and we walk along its curving and pitched wood. The constant sea air’s made the surface waxy. Our sneakers tilt and squeak. At the end of the pier is a fisherman, a young guy with a University of Florida T-shirt who I figure is plucking fish out of their water for kicks and not for food. He doesn’t catch anything in front of us, thank God, Darren would not be into that, but I can feel my kid getting withdrawn as he smells the blood and scales.
Darren dutifully plucks up any scraps of loose fishing filament we come across, balls them into his pockets. He doesn’t want them flying into the sea and garroting mermaids or whatever he’s worried about. He doesn’t want to see things that aren’t even human get hurt. He’s an absurdly sweet kid, my son.
Amelia called me a week ago, saying Darren had been moody until he’d finally explained to her that I’d said it didn’t matter if he was gay, or if he was green-skinned or ate babies or was a terrorist. Did that seem like the right way to talk to him about that? she wondered. I told her that I was sure I didn’t put it that way, and if I did it was a joke because I was nervous because I love the kid so much. Of course I don’t think being gay is the same thing as being a terrorist, but how am I supposed to find the words to tell Darren that? And now it’s like we’re never allowed to discuss the topic ever again.
I stop to talk to this nice woman in a tight top about where she’s from and whether she knows good places to eat near here, and when I look up Darren’s gotten away from me and he’s almost back at the spa. He’s a fast kid, his skinny legs made twitchy by all the swimming. I say goodbye to the lady, she was probably too young for me to be flirting with anyway, and catch up to my kid.
He’s at the entrance, where there’s this two-lane road clogged with glossy cars pumping out exhaust while they wait for the four-way stop to clear. Something’s caught Darren’s attention, but I can’t tell what. On the other side of the road is nothing special, just a six-story apartment complex that’s under construction. The earth around it is ripped and raw, and the apartments aren’t finished or anything. It seems like a nice enough place to live, though. I’d take it.
Darren looks upset, and I get worried that all the dried fish guts we saw on the pier are going to make this spa stay go blammo. I’m sure he’d be telling his mom just what was the matter, but I don’t know how to get him talking. I like everything he says to me, I just don’t have a lot to say back, that’s all. I scratch at the sweaty small of my back. “Something wrong?” I finally try.
“Nothing, Dad,” he says. But I know there’s something. It would be a bummer if your view got blocked by that new building, but I can’t see why he’d get upset about that.
He’s looking toward the spa, like he’s ready to go back and chill in the room, but I focus on where he was looking before, and see there’s an egret, a white spindly thing, pretty and harmless unless you’re a fish. It’s fluttering beside a stopped tractor, beating its wings uselessly against the side of the machine. It’s only going to hurt itself. That tractor’s not going anywhere until the crew returns on Monday.
What does a bird have against a tractor?
We have nothing to do with ourselves anyway — I’m at a getaway spa with my kid, and the awkwardness is hitting me more and more hard core — so we wander into the construction site. We poke around the boundary of the scalloped orange tape, check out the derelict backhoes and the homes without doors as we make our way to the bird. If you don’t count the line of stopped cars or the egret or the ladies in white jeans going to the Starbucks on the corner, we’re on our own. Eventually Darren and I make it to where we both know we’re heading: as close as we can get to the tractor and the egret.
The bird goes all still when we get near, like it’s trying to camouflage itself into the tractor. It seems to me that something spindly like an egret should fly away if a couple of humans approach. But it doesn’t, and the wrongness of that leaves me fluttery. Darren, too, he gets this posture like, Let’s leave, Dad, but he doesn’t say any words, he just folds his arms over his slight chest and stares at the bird.
Look, I’m not a knucklehead, I had enough smarts to get onto that trivia show in the first place. I put it all together quick enough: new construction, maybe getting ready to show a model apartment to prospective clients, first-time landscaping around the building, someone knocked down the bird’s tree or whatever, and its nest and its eggs or — God, little birds? — are gone now, but it’s still fighting the tractor, like it can get the babies back. Maybe the dead birds are still under?
“All right, Darren, let’s not bother the bird anymore.”
“What do you think happened?”
“I don’t know, but we’ve upset it, look.”
“I don’t think we upset it,” Darren says quietly. “It was already upset when we were back across the street.”
“Okay, but it’s not going to calm down with us around. Come on, let’s check out the pool.”
I walk away, but Darren doesn’t move. He’s like a kid in a horror movie sometimes, his attention gets so focused that all other things fall away.
“Can we help it?”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “Whatever it’s upset about is over now.”
“Poor egret,” he says in a whining way that makes me worry about how guys treat him at school. But he’s always tight with the girls in his violin section, chatting away, and I bet they’d all be making friendship bracelets for this egret right now. I decide my kid’s life is fine. In general, at least. For the next two days, I’m not as sure.
“You hungry?” I ask.
He shakes his head. I don’t need to look to know that his eyes are wet. “Okay, we can just stand here and look at the bird, if that’s what you want.”
That’s what we do. Cars are going by, sweat is dripping down my back, more ladies in white jeans are going into the Starbucks, and the egret is still freaked out, but not about us, and I wonder how long it’s been there, fighting this metal thing, and it’s making me sad too, even though my emotions are cinder blocks, so I go and try to investigate, like maybe if it can show me the broken eggshells the bird will feel better, but it flutters its wings at me, with its beak open, and that’s when Darren says, “We can go check out the pool, Dad,” so we head back to the spa.
While we walk I ruffle the hair at the back of his neck. It’s limp and wet. I know he’s gotten sad. He and his mother have always had plenty of melancholy in them, and I’ve never been able to do much about it for either one. They’re just not sturdy, but my own dad made me be sturdy above all else and I’ve come to realize that sturdy isn’t an especially healthy thing for a person to be.
“Maybe there’s chicken fingers at the spa restaurant,” I say.
No reaction to that one. He’s always loved chicken fingers. But thirteen is different from twelve.
The valet kid welcomes us back in that same go-tell-Aunt-Bertha-thank-you tone. By the time we’re at the indoor pool and steam room, my sweat has chilled.