Nell Zink - Mislaid

Byrdie wailed, “Mom! Why are you laughing?”

“Because I haven’t heard that joke in a long time.”

“You should relax, Bird Dog,” Lee said. “You’re just jealous of Temple because he got to be big brother and you didn’t.”

“That’s it,” Byrdie said. He picked up his napkin off his lap and dropped it on his plate. “I hate the both of you. I’m out of here.”

“Don’t go. Karen will be back in a second,” Meg said.

“Mom, I’m glad you weren’t around when I was growing up. I just wish Dad hadn’t been there either.”

When Karen returned, Meg was dissolved in tears with her head thrown back, and Lee was finishing Byrdie’s entrée.

“What’s wrong, Mom?”

“I’m a horrible person. I stole you away from a happy life.”

“Am I missing something? I thought Dad threatened to have you committed, so that if you stayed, we would have both grown up without you.”

Meg wiped her nose and sat up. “Good point!” she said.

“Did Byrdie leave? Why is Mr. Fleming eating his food?”

Lee said, “He got upset. He’ll be back. He’s very emotional.”

“I like him a lot,” Karen said.

“So do I,” Lee said. “He’s feeling bad because he chose to grow up with me. He’s thinking what his life could have been like if he’d gone with his mother.”

Lee expected to be called a bitch as usual. But Karen proclaimed resolutely, “It wouldn’t have made any difference. Everything that happens is predetermined. We just don’t know how until afterward.”

“What, you don’t think he had a choice?”

“He was nine years old. You and Mom had a shotgun wedding. How was any of you going to make a choice? It’s silly to think you have choices. That’s what we learned in philosophy class. It’s very liberating.”

Byrdie came back after half an hour, never having gotten farther than the bar. He had drunk two cups of coffee and calmed down a lot. “You ready to grant a general amnesty?” Lee asked him. “Mireille has us convinced we need not postpone joy.”

“You and Mom need to cop a plea,” he said.

“Guilty as charged!” Meg said. “I should have written to you.”

“That’s a start,” Byrdie said.

“I should not have terrified her into going underground,” Lee said.

“I should have told Karen the truth and let her make her own decision.”

“I should have been faithful to your mother, not that I had any choice in the matter.”

Karen and Byrdie cast bewildered looks on Lee, and Byrdie said, “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“It’s true! I screwed around on her because I couldn’t help myself. The first time, it was with a girl she was in love with. I can’t believe I was such a crumb.”

“You’re hardly displaying remorse,” Meg observed. “You’re trying to distract them and show off. What about the time you broke all my portraits of you and your pinhead friends?”

“I should have filed for divorce and paid you to stay far, far away,” Lee said. “You would have done it, too.”

“You don’t make that kind of money,” Meg said.

Byrdie said, “You know, on second thought, forget the plea bargain. Go back to pretending you’re innocent until proven guilty. I like you better that way.”

“But to find out what happened, we need a guilty plea under conditions of amnesty,” Karen said. “And then tabula rasa!”

“That’s only if you want to love me,” Meg pointed out. “Love’s optional. I wrote my parents off a long time ago. I know next to nothing about them, and I could care less. I don’t deserve any better.”

“But I want to love you,” Karen said. “You’re weirdly fascinating, plus you’re my mom.”

“If you think she’s weirdly fascinating, wait till you get to know Dad,” Byrdie said.

“They’re ganging up on us,” Lee said. “Time for another distraction.” He rang for the wine steward.

“Here’s the deal,” Karen said. “We forgive you if you promise to tell us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Okay, Byrdie?”

“I don’t think Dad ever lied to me once,” Byrdie objected. “He never cared enough about how I feel to lie.”

“We could make him promise to be nice from now on,” Karen ventured.

“I’m in,” Lee said. “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

“I would take that deal,” Meg said.

“And what do we get?” Byrdie pleaded. “Nothing?”

“Parents!” Karen said.

It was weeks before Byrdie would let his guard down with Meg. But they were reconciled only a short time after he first glimpsed the beautiful squirrel sanctuary.

His hosts were aware that he had invoked his right to remain silent and refused a plea bargain. This raised him numerous notches in their estimation above a certain immature and dangerous little sister. After all the others went to bed, Flea took Byrdie under her wing. She read his palm and told his fortune with playing cards. She led him through meadows and down to the dock. She started the boat and steered it quietly toward the center of the water where the shadows were palest. She bade him take the wheel and do full-throttle doughnuts. The stars whirled above his head and the lights of the inlet twinkled red and green. He bounced over his own wake until the cabin swayed and shuddered like the howdah on an inebriated elephant. Flea stood straight as a reed in the light of the Milky Way, hair blowing across her face, watching him. Suddenly she reached down to cut the engine. In the noise of water lapping against the agitated hull she whispered, “Save me, please, Byrdie.”

She was sweet and fragile, lithe and delicate, innocent and ignorant, with the face of an angel and primroses in her hair. In short, a person Byrdie had thought existed only in Grateful Dead lyrics and the photography of David Hamilton. Yet here she was, swaying atop her boyfriend’s cabin cruiser, demanding sex as an urgent moral imperative.

Byrdie understood. He would drop-kick Lomax into the shitcan of history. Erase the memory of Lomax from her body. It would be ignoble to refuse a service so necessary and overdue.

When he hugged her his elbows met behind her rib cage. Her waist almost fit in his hands, if he squeezed. Her teeth, her ears, everything was perfect. Her hair was dense and liquid as a child’s. Her long, tiered skirt was nearly as soft as her skin, and instead of a bra, she wore a slippery, patchouli-scented camisole. She was trembling with joy, crying on his shirt, mystified by his belt buckle. When he entered her, he noted that it was epoch-making. He had never been a matter of life or death before, or anybody’s savior. He liked it.

He liked the motion of the creaking boat, like a house trailer standing in the living waters of the lagoon. It was loud with splashing creatures, nothing like a river, so unlike Stillwater Lake. The moon began its metallic rise above the ocean. Satellites chased each other across the sky, and something in the boat beeped because the depth was less than two fathoms. Flea lay exhausted on his cashmere coat, her soft body powdered with fluids drying in the breeze. In his mind he was on the edge of dark water, preparing to dive. She was the last of her kind, endangered, like the squirrels. Of course he would save her. He would fight to win her, and work to preserve her habitat.

When they brought the boat back in, Meg was waiting for them on the dock. “You kids were in trouble for a while there,” she said. “He wanted to tie you to the boat and burn it. But we talked it out. He’s cool now.”

After that, no power on earth could have induced Byrdie to be on poor terms with Meg.

As for the rapprochement between Karen and Lee, it took several minutes. “I underestimated you,” he said, as soon as they were alone together at a gay (the owner, not the patrons; it’s important to realize that progress isn’t when minorities come out of the closet — generally speaking, black people have been out of the closet since time immemorial — but when they can make money selling vital necessities, not cream soda and carrot cake) bakery on Cary Street in Richmond. Byrdie’s sojourn with Meg, Luke, Lomax, et al. had gone on for nearly a month, but Lee was still wearing his bike shorts. Karen had invested in a nine-gore hip-hugger suede wrap miniskirt, red cable-knit sweater, khaki trench coat, orange tights, and saddle shoes. It was a thrift-shop look that combined punk, golf, and Antonioni in a way Lee could not help but admire. “Compared to you,” he declared, “we all have frontal lobe damage. You’re the one who noticed the ground rules had changed.”