Alecia, Tuesday, April 21, 2015
A month before Nate was fired, nearly a thousand starlings fell from the sky. Not fluttering to the earth like snowflakes, but plummeting, like quarter-pound raindrops. They fell hard and fast in the middle of the third inning of opening day at Mt. Oanoke High field. The first one Alecia saw bounced off Marnie Evans’s shoulder and hit the gravel with nothing more than a soft rustle. She screamed, her fingers threaded through her hair, get it out! Get it out! Get it out! Like it was a trapped bat. Alecia didn’t mind watching Marnie Evans freak out; in fact she kind of enjoyed it, so she just covered her mouth with her palm. Marnie Evans treated minor hiccups—missing basket bingo cards and off-color varsity jacket orders—like national disasters all while chewing Xanax like Pez.
But adversity builds muscle, and since Alecia chipped and clawed her way through every day, it took so much more to rattle her than the Marnie Evanses of the world, and a few little birds weren’t going to do it. So she didn’t mind watching Marnie at all. She hadn’t even expected to be at the game. Nate had asked her out of the blue. It felt nice to be so spontaneous. The day had a fresh-air, college-kid-out-on-the-green feel to it, summer break looming, with all its newness.
It was just a regular Tuesday, except that it was a good day. And all of Alecia’s days were divided clean down the middle, it seemed. Good Days (capital G, capital D) and Bad Days. The deciding factors were variations on a theme: whether they were able to get through a grocery trip, whether Gabe got through his therapy without freaking out, whether she got a call from a bill collector.
Gabe actually did remarkably okay with change, perhaps because Alecia didn’t fight against every wrong turn, every slight schedule adjustment, like some of the women in her special-needs-moms’ group. But it was always easier when things went according to plan. Today there had been no tantrum, no horrific trip to the store, no bill collector. When the phone rang at two, after Gabe’s nap (a record thirty minutes), she picked it up, sort of excited and breathless.
“Hey.” She thought it was amazing that her heart still skipped when she saw Nate’s name come up on caller ID, and on a Good Day, she might count herself as belonging to the apparently few happy marriages left.
On a Bad Day, she thought about packing a bag, leaving Nate to deal with Gabe, to let him see, for once, how it really was. To fully recognize Gabe and all his cracks and scrapes and bruises and bumps and imperfections. No more I’m sure you’re overreacting, hon, or, He’s just his own person, that’s great! To understand her frustration when everyone, including Nate, said, but he looks normal! Or are you sure kids aren’t just kids? To live with autism in a way that wasn’t a blue T-shirt or a charity walk or a foundation, but to live with the ugly. On a Bad Day, she wished all the ugliness on her husband and nothing but windblown freedom for herself.
“Hi!” Nate exclaimed, both happy and surprised that she was happy.
Alecia pulled the phone away from her ear and adjusted the volume.
“Good day?” Nate asked, a note of caution in his tone that lit a quick fire under Alecia’s skin and then settled. The answer to that question would dictate the rest of the conversation: whether Nate would stay on the line and chat, or scamper off with some well-thought-out excuse.
“Yep, so far. He’s just waking up.” She could hear Gabe, his too-heavy-for-a-five-year-old stomps around his bedroom.
“Come to my game this afternoon? Please?” He pleaded with an unusual edge of desperation. Nate asked so little of her, always wanting to be mindful of her time, of her energies, worried about her stress levels and how he could make her happy, to the point of dancing on eggshells. She knew that she couldn’t say no, this one time, even if it meant dragging Gabe into unfamiliar territory. He’d know some of the people but not all. In Mt. Oanoke, people never change: the baseball crowd, the dressed-to-the-nines gym moms, the coaches’ wives, the athletic association groupies. Nate’s mother would probably be there, too.
Maybe Bridget would go. It had been months. Bridget Peterson was one of Alecia’s only friends who didn’t stem from a support network. She was a teacher, with Nate. She wasn’t a special-needs mom, or even a regular-needs mom. She wasn’t a therapist or a sympathetic nurse or a doctor. She was just a person, and sometimes Alecia forgot what that was like, to have friends who were just people.
Years ago, before Gabe, when she and Nate first got married and moved to Mt. Oanoke, Bridget and Holden Peterson were Nate and Alecia’s first real couple friends. They’d spent long, boozy nights at local pubs, laughing till their sides hurt, drunk on cheap rum and Cokes and the golden, sparkly potential of their infant marriages. Before infertility (for Bridget) and special needs (for Alecia) and then, later, the unspeakable.
“We’ll see how it goes,” Alecia said to Nate, noncommittal, because anything could and sometimes did happen at the last minute. We’ll see was a standard translation of yes, unless I let you down.
“That’s a no.” Nate huffed into the phone.
“That’s a maybe.” Alecia sighed, her annoyance creeping in. A crash from upstairs, followed by a quick, air-stabbing wail. “I gotta go.” She hung up the phone and took the steps two at a time.
Gabe stood at the foot of his bed, his lamp cockeyed in front of him on the floor. He turned to Alecia and pointed to the mess, the shattered bulb and fragmented plastic lampshade. The lamp was a gift from Violet; “Vi” everyone called her. Nate’s Mom. Over half of what they owned was a gift from Vi and most of it had been broken by an energetic, well-meaning Gabe. While Vi loved her grandson, Alecia dreaded the quick flicker of disappointment in her eyes when she inevitably asked where the lamp went.
“Oh honey, what happened?” She bent to pick up the pieces, shards of plastic interspersed with razor-sharp glass. “Back up!” She pointed to the doorway and Gabe scampered in bare feet. He sulked, hands over his ears. Her sharp tone, even a hint of it, could send him reeling, and she took two deep, calming breaths. He hummed to soothe himself.
Still, it was just a lamp, and a fairly cheap one. Vi had picked it because Gabe liked the colors, the red, yellow, and blue fluted plastic splaying bright light on the ceiling and the walls, and also because it was hardy, but no matter. They could get a new one. Maybe next month with what was left of the first baseball check.
“Hey, buddy.” Alecia pushed the hair out of her eyes with the back of her wrist, the broken glass and plastic pinched between her fingers. Gabe hummed louder, covering his ears, so Alecia said it again, a bit more forcefully, this time meeting his eyes. She smiled. “Hey, buddy.”
He stopped humming. Smiled back at her, his eyes crinkling at the corners and for a brief second, worry-free. She pantomimed a deep breath and he took one, too. Their little inside joke, breathe, Mama. Breathe, Gabey. It’s just breathing, easy peasy.
“Do you wanna go see Daddy? He has a baseball game. Remember?”
His eyes flicked away, disinterested.
She tried again. “Gabe, let’s go see Daddy.” He brightened. She tried again. “On the way we can stop at the construction site. We can’t go in, but we can look.”
“Yes!” He jumped up and ran to her.
Alecia yelped, pointing to the spot with possible shards of glass. “I have to vacuum! You’ll cut yourself!”
Instead, Gabe lifted off, jumping over the fallen lamp and landing heavily on the bed, where he bounced crisscross-applesauce and whooped. He recoiled off the far edge of the bed, making a big show to avoid the mess and giving Alecia a pointed look. She laughed. Gabe made her laugh every day, not so much with his words, which sometimes were few and far between, but his wry sense of humor. The way he outright mocked her. No one else could see it. In many ways, Gabe was textbook: standard comedy failed him, TV shows were filled with nuance he neither got nor appreciated, humor in any regular way went over his head, or more likely, he just didn’t care. But to Alecia, he was funny and warm and she walked that frustrating tightrope, stretched taut between content and flailing every minute of every day.
With her free hand, she leaned over and plucked a small metal toy front-end loader off the ground and waggled it in his field of vision. “Sneakers on. Right there.” She pointed to where he stood and he looked down at his Velcro Nikes. He sat, working the Velcro straps, his eyes on the toy in her hand. When he was done, he stood with his arms out and his back straight. Alecia tossed the toy gently and it landed softly on his comforter. He snatched it up, rubbed it against his cheek, and stuck it into his pocket.
“Go, Mama.” He gave her a big toothy grin. The vacuuming could wait.
So they went.
And everything was just fine. Gabe was fine. Alecia was fine. She watched her husband, leaning against the wood frame of the dugout, his thumbs hooked into the pocket in his navy blue athletic pants, his hat low on his brow, looking no older than any of his boys, his eyes only on the batter, and flicking periodically to two men in the upper corner of the bleachers. Recruiters. They came around to one of the first games every year and made Nate pace. His boys. His seniors being shunted away to major colleges, maybe, one day, major leagues. He’d always hoped, anyway.
He hadn’t even looked up to see her there before the birds started.
As they fell, dead or barely alive, two small ones landed between second and third base, four on the infield, one between home plate and the pitcher’s mound, and more than a smattering of black bodies against the green grass of the outfield. Alecia shielded her eyes against the sun and surveyed the sky. A cloud of black birds, thousands and thousands of them, swarmed like mosquitoes. The whole cloud seemed to hover, suspended on some invisible air current while the crowd murmured. The pitcher, Andrew Evans, paused, his hand clutching the ball high in the air and then sort of wilting as a starling hit his feet, his face tipped up to the sky, wondering what the hell?
Then, pandemonium. Everyone tumbled, panicked and screeching, running for the small overhang under the concession stand, or the dugout, or their cars. Even the players ran, as strong and tough as they liked to pretend they were. Everyone pressed together. Parents and coaches and players and teachers, people who sometimes could hardly stand to be in the same room together, stood next to the open concession window, the smell of hot grease and pretzels thick, and all you could hear was the thunk, thunk, thunk of starlings as they hit the dirt, their wings twitching.
Alecia had the sensation of watching something huge, momentous, but on television. Removed and staticky, a broken broadcasting voice through the haze. She looked around, and even the recruiters—men in sports jackets or windbreakers, with clipboards, their radar guns tapping nervously against their thighs—watched the sky with an open-mouthed, gaping wonderment.
The whole thing lasted no more than three minutes; three whole minutes during which even Gabe was quiet, pulled in against her hip, although Alecia knew he had no real grasp of the situation. He wasn’t scared, he wasn’t picking up on the cues of everyone else, and she barely had time to be grateful for that before it was all over.
Everyone looked up and started talking again, whispering, really, stunned and reverent, blinking back into the light, as though they’d weathered a real storm, and surveyed the damage. Hundreds of small black forms, crumpled and fluttering in the wind, like wrinkled carbon paper.
Someone called 911 and a few people scurried away, gathering up their sons and hustling them to their minivans away from some presumed noxious invisible gas cloud. Alecia stayed and waited for Nate, watching Marnie Evans sweep two small carcasses from the front hood of her Pathfinder with her peep-toe sandal, hopping around on one foot. It would almost be comical if Alecia’s stomach wasn’t so twisted, or she didn’t feel like crying, or the back of her tongue didn’t taste metallic and bitter.
They were small birds and could have fit in the scoop of her hands had she desired to pick one up. She imagined that—cupping its small, broken wings underneath its still warm body, its eyes shocked open in fright. Where did they come from? Why did they fall? The question would be asked a thousand times over the course of the next month.
Until, of course, more important questions arose, at which time everyone promptly forgot a thousand birds fell on the town of Mt. Oanoke at all.