Dark Water - Laura McNeal [10]
Robby looked glumly at the spindle in his hand, the frayed bit of fluff. “I thought about it. I considered just bursting out of the bushes like a policeman or something. ‘Nobody move! Hands in the air!’ ”
“What did you do?” I was too hungry not to eat some tuna. I scooped up the lukewarm stuff on a cracker and tried to chew quietly. I can eat when I’m upset is the problem.
“Sat in the bushes awhile longer, then walked to the truck.”
“Did you miss the audition?”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t say anything. I knew he’d really, really wanted to go to that camp. And Mr. Van der Does has a seriously long memory. If you’re two minutes late for a madrigal practice, you can kiss your solos goodbye. But after my father left us, after we found the receipts, after the forensic accountant did the math, after eleven (repeat eleven) of my mother’s friends said, “Is he gay?” it was hard to care about madrigal solos. Sometimes it was like my blood had turned to sand.
“Where’d you go?” I asked.
“You mean when I drove around?”
“Yeah.” I thought he’d say the river. We started going there when he first got his license, and it was what I was looking forward to when I turned sixteen, just driving over to the Santa Margarita and hiking to the place where the river fans out green and wide. I liked to walk down into the reeds and sit with my bare feet in the cool shallow streams and watch the tadpoles scoot around. I could spend a whole hour on the table rock that splits the current in a wide bend of the river, crouching there like a bird and just listening to the water gurgle and staring at the clear brown rocks all speckled and shiny under the surface. Spring was the best time because the willow fluff catches on the wind and snows itself through the air.
“I spoke to … this ostrich,” Robby said, kind of sheepishly.
He startled me out of my river thoughts. “Metaphorically?”
“I didn’t mean it metaphorically.”
“So you literally spoke to the ostrich?” We’re both scornful of people who say they literally freaked out or they literally jumped out of their skins. I offered Robby a cracker lightly spread with tuna, but he shook his head, so I ate it. Robby touched his blocky fingertips together in this way he has. It’s like one hand is a mirror image of the other hand: tap, tap, tap. All five fingers checking to see if the other five fingers still match.
“In that big pasture to the south of us,” he said. “You know, the one you can see from the freeway?”
“Where the cows are sometimes?” It was a place I liked staring at from the car, actually, because it didn’t have any houses on it or even a golf course, so it was soothingly au naturel.
“Yeah. There’s this honest-to-God ostrich living there, too,” he said.
“A talking ostrich?”
Robby lay back down on the sofa and closed his eyes. The silkworms sounded like Pop Rocks in an open mouth. “No. Not a le talking ostrich.” He sounded deeply annoyed.
“No offense,” I said. “Pardonnez le moi.” I ate another cracker and wished for coffee.
Robby started up again. “I was just driving along that frontage road, you know, planning how far I could go on a tank of gas and thinking I could hang out in Tijuana for a while, maybe busk my way down to Ecuador, and then I looked over and I thought, No way. It can’t be. I pulled over and there’s this ostrich. Right there by the fence. Staring at me with its big freaky eyes.”
I wondered whether you could even busk yourself to the next town with classical clarinet, but I decided he was too touchy to be teased about that. “So what did you, um, say to it?”
“Nothing,” Robby said. “Nightclub patter. What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?”
I hoped nightclub patter wasn’t going to be part of his busking routine. “It was a girl?”
“No idea.”
I started to make coffee. My mother says I’m going to stunt my growth and I say, Good. It keeps that feeling at bay, sometimes, the sand piling up in my veins. “Then what?”
“I guess I startled it. The le bird ran away.”
“Maybe you could tame it. I think people used to ride ostriches, didn’t they? In Africa