Birdspell Read online

  I had the crazy thought that maybe he was trying to tell me to reach out to my dad. That might have been worth a shot if he was anywhere around, but my father works out of the country and is sometimes off the grid for weeks at a time, poking around in the ground doing whatever it is a geologist does. I think his brief taste of family life was what drove him to field work in remote locations, but in any case, he’s not what you’d call accessible.

  I hardly know him.

  Maybe he thinks it’s enough that he pays decent child support. As if that matters when things start to slide out of control and Mom wastes our money on just about anything except food and rent. I don’t mind dumpster diving for food for Sitta, but the thought of doing it for me and Mom isn’t exactly appealing.

  Whatever I did or didn’t have to do, calling my father obviously wasn’t an option.

  A quick inventory of the cupboards had told me there wasn’t a chance the food we had on hand was going to last much more than a week, no matter how carefully it was rationed. Running out of food is always tough and I wasn’t seeing any way around it.

  It wasn’t a great feeling. I’m pretty good at problem solving, but all I’d come up with this time was a headache.

  So there I was, sitting, hunched over, talking to Sitta and searching my brain for an idea, when a sharp knock sounded at the door. My left foot had gone to sleep, and it prickled when I jumped up, but I hobbled over, expecting to find Mom had forgotten her key.

  “Pick on any babies lately?” It was the girl from the laundry room, only without the baby, or the phone in her face.

  “Every chance I get,” I answered.

  “In that case, I’m not sure you’re the right person for the job,” she said. “But I don’t seem to have a lot of options. Do you want to babysit for a couple of hours?”

  “Me?”

  She raised an eyebrow and glanced to both sides, making the point that no one else was there.

  “I meant, when?” I said.

  “Now, if you can, and maybe a couple of times a week regular, if you’re interested. Oh, and I’m Taylor.”

  “Corbin,” I said. “What’s the pay?” I hated to sound so mercenary, but that was obviously a detail that mattered to me.

  Taylor hesitated. “My mom pays me three bucks an hour. I’ll give you that.”

  It was lousy pay but two hours would be six bucks. Better than nothing, and it’s not as if I was doing anything else. Twice a week was twelve bucks and I could make that stretch quite a ways if I had to.

  “Okay,” I said. Then I remembered our nearly naked apartment. “I can’t do it here, though.”

  “Yeah, that’s okay. All of Molly’s stuff is at our place so you kind of need to watch her there. Can you come now?”

  “I have to put my parakeet back in his cage,” I said. “Which apartment are you in — I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  She was about to tell me when Mr. Zinbendal’s door creaked open and his crabby face stuck itself into the hall.

  “Keep the noise down!” he grumbled.

  A lifetime of trying to keep things running smoothly had trained me to keep the peace, so I gave him a stiff nod and said nothing. Taylor, on the other hand, whirled around to face him. I could feel a cringe gathering itself together on my face when she spoke.

  “Hey, Mr. Zee! Sorry about that.”

  And then something happened that I hadn’t seen in any of my encounters with him. He smiled. Not a stingy, forced smile either. It was as though his face lit up with some kind of inner glow.

  “Taylor!” he said, opening his arms. “I didn’t know that was you.”

  I watched in disbelief as she lunged forward, threw herself into the hug, and actually kissed his crabby old cheek.

  “I can’t visit now,” she told him. “But I’ll come see you soon.”

  “Wonderful, wonderful,” Zinbendal said. He patted her arm before stepping back into his apartment and closing the door. For a change, he didn’t practically slam it.

  Taylor swung back around. She smirked, no doubt amused by my dumbfounded expression.

  I switched on a blank face — another skill I’ve perfected over the years. If she was waiting for me to say anything, she’d be waiting a while. That’s how trouble starts.

  “You were going to tell me where your apartment was,” I reminded her.

  “We’re on the ground floor,” she said. “1D. First on the left.”

  Nine

  I GOT TO TAYLOR’S apartment a few minutes later after catching Sitta and putting him back into his cage (with an apology and a promise I’d free him again when I returned). Taylor was waiting at the door. She had a jacket on and a pale brown satchel hung from her shoulder. It was leather, worn and cracked, and it should have looked out of place on her but somehow it didn’t.

  “Molly’s asleep right now,” she told me, already taking steps toward the door. “Her diapers and whatnot are in the bag beside the end table.”

  Diapers. Wet I could probably handle but … hey, was it possible Molly pooped on some sort of schedule? Like, right after breakfast or just before bedtime, but never in the afternoon?

  I couldn’t ask Taylor that, obviously. She might think I’d never changed a diaper before, which, actually, I hadn’t.

  “When she gets up she can have the Cheerios in the bowl on the table — she just eats them dry — and a yogurt,” Taylor added, gesturing here and there. “She drinks from a sippy cup if she’s thirsty — milk or water only.”

  “Won’t she freak when she wakes up and sees a stranger?”

  “Nah. She’ll be fine. She’s used to being around lots of people.”

  “But the only other time she saw me you told her I was BAD!” I reminded her.

  Taylor laughed. “That’s just a game to her. Don’t worry.”

  I felt as if there were other things I should be asking, but the next minute Taylor was gone.

  Molly slept for almost the first half hour I was there. On waking, she stood up in her crib and called out, “Loh! Loh!” until I got there.

  As Taylor had predicted, she came to me willingly and once I’d scooped her out of bed she wrapped her arms around my neck and snuggled against me. We walked around like that for a while, until she got restless and started wriggling to get free. I’d only seen her in a stroller before so I didn’t know if she could walk, but as soon as her feet hit the floor she was off on a wobbly sprint. She went straight to the kitchen where she pulled a chair away from the table, hauled herself up, and gave me a questioning look.

  Oh, right. Snack time.

  I tugged the plastic cap off the kiddie bowl and put it in front of her. She sent it flying in the few seconds it took me to get her yogurt from the fridge. Great start. I tossed the cereal that hadn’t landed on the floor back into the bowl and started scooping yogurt into her mouth.

  Partway through being fed, Molly remembered our meeting in the laundry room. She pointed a finger, grinned widely, and said, “BAD!” forcefully enough to send a projectile of yogurt out of her mouth and onto her pajamas. She found this hilarious and every time her amusement began to wind down she stuck her finger into it and jump-started her own giggles.

  When the yogurt was gone, Molly set about eating the Cheerios, which took a while since she picked each one up and looked it over before popping it into her mouth. When she’d finally finished, she backed off the chair onto the floor and took off. I chased her down with a baby wipe and made an attempt to clean her face, hands, and pajamas. She didn’t exactly cooperate.

  Now that she had a full tummy (unlike me, although I’d been tempted to help myself to an apple from a bowl on the counter) she had enough energy to empty her toy box onto the floor. There was a pile of Mega Blocks in there and I helped her construct a couple of things, which she tore down as fast as I got them together.


  It was a surprise when the door swung open and Taylor reappeared. It hadn’t seemed at all like two hours and the big bonus was there’d been no diaper change needed.

  Taylor picked Molly up and looked her over as if she was inspecting my work.

  “Has she been changed?”

  “I don’t think she needed to be,” I said. Thank goodness.

  “Okay, well, here’s your money,” she said, passing me six bucks.

  I stuffed the money into my jeans. It seemed that was the end of the conversation, since Taylor turned her back and went into the kitchen mumbling something about spaghetti. Then she spoke a bit louder.

  “Say ‘bye-bye’ to Corbin, Molly.”

  Subtle. It’s not like I’d planned to hang around, but that was pretty close to being told to get out.

  “Bah, bah,” Molly said. She stood and waved vigorously. “Baaah!”

  “See you,” I said. And left.

  The six bucks in my pocket felt good, and the hope of making more even better, although I didn’t know for sure if she wanted me to babysit again. I was thinking about what to buy with it when I opened my apartment door and saw that Mom was back. She wasn’t alone.

  Mike was with her and my heart sank at the thought that Mom had probably invited him for supper.

  I was right. They were eating, sitting on the cushions and balancing plates on their laps. Beans with wieners chopped up in them. I walked past them, ignoring Mike’s half wave, and went straight to the kitchen. Two cans of beans sat open on the cupboard and Mom had chopped a whole package of wieners into the pot with them. There was enough left for my supper, but that was it. I could have made three or four meals for me and Mom from that much food and now it was gone in one.

  I scraped what was left in the pot into a bowl and was about to go to my room to eat when Mom suddenly appeared in front of me, eyes blazing.

  “How dare you.”

  “What?” My strategy has always been to act innocent. Sometimes it works. Not this time.

  “When there is a guest in our home, my guest at that, you will not, I repeat, not, behave rudely to him. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, sorry,” I said. “I was just really hungry.”

  “You don’t know what hunger is, Corbin. You have no idea. Have you ever been lying on your belly in the grass wondering —”

  “You’re right, Mom. I’ll go apologize.”

  I took a step forward, but she wasn’t budging.

  “— and whatever exists in your mind as a good reason is, let me tell you, an uphill climb. It’s an uphill climb with a cliff at the top. You understand cliffs are dangerous. People fall. They fall on their faces, sometimes people break their backs, you tell me there’s a good reason for someone to break their back. Just try and make yourself believe that, buster.”

  That was the windup. I took a bite, but I did it slowly and without taking my eyes off Mom. You don’t look away when she gets into one of her raves, which is the only way I can describe them. They go on and on and get more and more scattered — it’s like watching a mirror crack and keep cracking until it’s nothing more than a thousand jagged bits too small to reflect even part of an image.

  “— because I’ve found a way. A path that no one else has had the vision to see, much less mark out for others. They’re struggling, Corbin, barely able to crawl through the days and dark alleys, where things happen that should never happen to a child and all because whoever is making the rules — they want you to blame the government for everything, but there’s so much more happening behind the scenes that you don’t know about and I can’t tell you yet, but soon I will have the whole thing exposed for the entire world to see and CEOs will be begging me for an appointment to learn the secret of my success, but as long as their boardrooms —”

  I lifted bite after bite to my mouth, chewing, swallowing, listening without hearing, never taking my eyes off hers. Suddenly, her index finger flew toward me.

  “Oh! I know! I can show you!” And with that, she rushed away, into her room.

  I made a dash to the living room and plunked down on the cushion Mom had vacated. She came back seconds later, waving a sheet of paper. Mike glanced at me with a raised eyebrow.

  We’d both seen Mom’s “designs” before, and even someone who finds whittling cool couldn’t help recognizing the nothingness of Mom’s diagrams.

  When she passed me the page I saw exactly what I’d been expecting. A sketch that looked like mazes superimposed over each other, along with words and anagrams that made no sense whatsoever.

  “There!” Mom said triumphantly. “You see?!”

  Ten

  IZELLE WAS ON EDGE; I could see that right away.

  “Look, Corbin, I don’t want to be —”

  I held up a hand, testing. If she gave me a chance to talk I might be able to buy more time. She didn’t. She barely paused for half a second before continuing.

  “It’s not fair. You promised me and, I mean, I’m sorry your mom’s been sick, but it’s nearly two weeks since I saw Sitta and if you’re not going to keep your end of the deal —”

  She trailed off there, but it wasn’t hard to figure out what would have come next.

  “You’re right, and I don’t blame you for being upset. Things just got messed up, but you can come today if you want.”

  “Is your mom better?”

  The true answer would have been no. She was worse, in fact. For the past week, Mom had been keeping me up half the night while she speed-talked about her so-called business plan. The details were so jumbled my exhausted brain couldn’t have sorted them out if I’d tried. Which I hadn’t.

  I couldn’t tell Izelle that, of course, but I did need to prepare her just in case.

  “She’s getting better,” I lied. “In fact, some days she can manage a short walk, so she might not be there. But if she is, I’ve gotta warn you, the meds the doctor gave her really rev her up. If she seems kind of babbly don’t worry about it.”

  “Sure, okay. I’m glad she’s improving,” Izelle said. She gave me a shaky smile. “I just miss my bird, you know?”

  “Of course,” I said. I didn’t challenge her about calling Sitta her bird, when he was mine now.

  It was a huge relief when we got to the apartment and Mom wasn’t home. And there was a bonus I hadn’t been expecting. Izelle had stopped on our way and bought Sitta a bag of kale and a large bunch of cilantro. But even better than that was the bag of birdseed she hauled out of her backpack.

  My heart jumped when I saw that, since I was down to a few days’ worth of seed. That wouldn’t have been a problem if my babysitting money (eighteen bucks so far) and anything else I managed to earn only had to feed the bird, but with Mom out of work I had more than Sitta to worry about.

  I felt like I should offer her something — a snack or drink or whatever, but the food supply had dwindled down to a package of frozen bagels, a few cans of soup, half a jar of applesauce, and a brownie mix that I had no eggs or oil to make. I’d thought about swiping a couple of eggs the last time I babysat Molly, but I hate stealing. I’ve taken food out of desperation a few times — but it always makes me feel like crud.

  “Sorry, but we’re out of bottled water,” I said after I’d gone and brought out Sitta.

  “That’s okay,” Izelle said. If she found it odd that I didn’t offer her something else instead, she didn’t say so.

  Izelle stayed for almost an hour and I could tell Sitta was glad to see her. He showed off more than usual, prancing and cocking his head and just generally being a goof. Izelle kissed him goodbye when she was leaving and then, to my shock and horror, threw her arms around me and gave me a hug.

  “Sorry,” she said, laughing, when she’d let go. “I didn’t mean anything by that. I’m just so happy to have seen Sitta.”

  “Sure,” I said. “No problem.�
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  I toasted half a bagel after she left, spread a big spoonful of applesauce on it, and ate it as slowly as I could. Sitta marched around like a small, feathered soldier, grumbling and giving me pointed looks until I got the hint and grabbed some kale for him.

  “It’s not always like this,” I told him. “Besides, Mom honestly can’t help it when this happens to her.”

  Sitta let out a long low whistle.

  I laughed.

  “You doubt it, huh? Well, it’s mostly true, but I don’t blame you for getting mad at her. You should be enjoying yourself, flying around, learning new things, not worrying about when your dish is going to be filled next. I get it.”

  It’s probably a coincidence that Sitta chose that exact moment to leave a rude deposit on the floor right beside me. But a few minutes later, he turned into a small, flying hero.

  I was putting my plate in the sink when he swooped into the kitchen and landed on my shoulder. Something white was hanging from his beak and when I tugged it free I could hardly believe what I was seeing.

  “Where’d you find this, buddy?” I asked.

  He wasn’t telling, but that didn’t matter. What I was holding in my hand was the receipt for the bunch of office supplies Mom had brought home right after she quit her job. The bag was still tucked in the back of my closet, useless to me because I hadn’t been able to find the bill of sale.

  A glance at the total told me Mom had spent $46.18 on stuff she was never going to use — for a business that would never exist. That might not sound like much money if you’ve never been in a tight spot, but to me, at that moment in time, it was a fortune.

  “Man, oh, man, Sitta,” I said. “You don’t know what you just did.”

  And then I wondered. Did he know somehow? Was it possible …?

  “Stop!” I said to myself. What had just happened was a fluke. I knew that.

  I hate it when my brain comes up with weird ideas and, considering the gene pool I came out of, I guess anyone would worry.

  I took in a long, slow breath and let it out even slower. Sometimes that helps, but exhaustion was getting to me. I suddenly felt as though my insides had turned into a quivering mush.