Alligator - Lisa Moore [38]
The bird dive-bombed them twice, then settled on the curtain rod, and cocked its head, blinking inquisitively. Mrs. Fowler slowly put a quivering hand into the pocket of her black polyester pants and removed a plastic whistle.
The whistle shook violently in her hand and she dropped it twice and Beverly retrieved it and wiped it clean. When Mrs. Fowler finally had the whistle clenched in her teeth she blew with all her might and it was piercingly shrill and had an otherworldly warble. The bird flung itself at the opposite window and fell with a thud to the floor.
You’ve killed it, Beverly whispered. Mrs. Fowler shut her eyes in the effort to speak.
I am so often uncertain these days, she said. Beverly picked up the bird carefully and the fragile neck tipped over her finger but she could feel its heart, faster than anything, under her thumb.
I don’t know who you are, my dear, Mrs. Fowler said. Wasn’t there a nurse or someone to accompany the poor woman? How had she managed to find her way through the hedge? Mrs. Fowler had held annual garden parties for the neighbourhood several years ago. She served punch in a crystal bowl with floating slices of lemon and orange. People had smoked dope in the back of the garden. Mrs. Fowler had worn jeans and had participated in the New York marathon a decade before. What had happened?
The bird’s heart terrified Beverly, so speeded up and frantic. The heart said the bird mattered. And David, who must have been staring into an abyss, the seductive roil of the Atlantic, convinced it might be pleasant to simply give up; David mattered.
But when she got to the front door, the bird was fighting against her cupped hands and she opened them and it flew straight into the sky.
It flew with such unexpected purpose — it made Beverly wonder if they might have been spared whatever ill luck was about to befall them.
Everybody here is naked, David shouted. Beverly heard a woman speaking German very near the phone.
Your speech is slurred, she said.
They’ve got on leather hoods, he said. I wish you were here. Where are you? she said.
There are girls in cages with nothing on but go-go boots.
Are you with friends? she asked, tilting the bedside clock so she could see the time. She would be awake now until dawn.
David called from Toronto the next day to say his flight was delayed and he wanted more than anything to be home.
You would not believe my head, he said. He said he would give anything to be in her arms. He thanked her for their marriage which he said was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He felt like weeping because he was so hungover, he said, and jetlagged and because she was his wife and he loved her and he was unbelievably lucky to have her. He told her these things couldn’t be said often enough and no amount of talking could ever express how he really felt.
I’ve come to an understanding, he said, about how lucky I am to have you. He said that he’d taken some kind of pill, something a woman had dropped in his drink.
I feel all hollowed out, he said.
A woman put something in your drink? she asked.
I think she was a woman, he said. Beverly had hired a teenage boy from down the street to mow the lawn. It would be the last mowing of the season. Already the trees were bare and the dogberries were violent orange all over the sidewalks. The air had stiffened. The boy was wearing a red eiderdown jacket. She watched him flick the extension cord and bend into the lawn mower.
It was a matter of putting your weight behind something, all of your weight. Giving yourself over to a chore, believing it was worthwhile. She would raise her daughter the same way that boy mowed. She would love