Bird Song

Last Christmas I walked outside to wish my next-door neighbor a loving holiday. I saw him out my living room window standing beneath the twisted pine. Don leaned on the curb as if some invisible force pulled him closer to the street. He held a bottle of imported beer and from the distance he looked red and cold in his baggy shorts and sweatshirt.

So many cars lined our cul-de-sac - minivans and station wagons and one black Mercedes. A steady stream of people I didn't recognize streamed into the house, carrying trays of food.

"Hey! Merry Christmas, Don!"

I yelled from my garage. My neighbor returned my greeting, a half wave of sorts, and he motioned for me to come closer. He started walking toward me, fast, and I noticed his eyes were red like his cheeks, red and wet and tired.

"Mandy died."

Don barely got the words out, I had to strain to hear them, and he began wailing, a sound like the humpback whales, low, ominous, full of pattern and meaning I could not grasp.

"What?"

I didn't understand. I stared at Don. Mandy played at my house every day after school. She played with my son. She was eleven years old and attended the same school as my boys and I just saw her two days before when she knocked on my door and asked if they could play.

"She caught the flu. She's dead. She died yesterday at the hospital."

Don gasped the words between wails, and I flooded over with grief, started crying and could not stop. I couldn't understand this, couldn't understand. I realized Don must have dropped his beer. The bottle lay at my feet, shattered into a thousand pieces, and the beer ran into the street and down the hill. I didn't hear it fall.

My boys were lying on the couch, both too ill with flu to enjoy the day. They held their gifts from Santa hugged to little chests, plastic starships and alien action figures and one stuffed velvet penguin. I walked into the house and sat on the floor next to the couch. I told my boys about Mandy. They didn't understand. And even though they sweated with fever and could barely drink warm broth, I bundled them up and drove them to the theatre and we watched a movie, just something, anything, to keep us together, to keep us from melting into the street like Don's broken beer. I can't remember what movie we saw, only remember holding my youngest son and rocking him as he shivered from flu, rocked him to soothe myself, to keep my own child alive.

I'm telling you this in such a stark way. I can't move past the simple details yet. It's been a year, nearly one full revolution around the sun, and the pain is the same. I wrote Kerry and Don a long letter about the way Mandy helped me plant tomatoes and basil in my garden. I told them how she pretended our loft was the White House and she was the first woman president and my son her vice partner, and how they snuck snacks like pretzels and tangerines and left crumbs and soft citrus peels to rot among my boxed treasures. I told them how Mandy stole my copy of Siddhartha and told me it belonged to her now. I took my children to Mandy's memorial service and I stood at the microphone and told everyone of the black hole that spun in her place. I baked cupcakes and lasagna and blackberry pie and we joined the line of mourners bringing food and sympathy to Kerry and Don and their one remaining child.

All I have are energy snapshots of this girl. I didn't know her like her parents, or like my son. I knew her as some kind of neighbor baby bird, the kind that moves from nest to nest to take nourishment, and I regurgitated what I could while she lived, like I do with all the kids down my street. I only have that memory now, that bird song, and a few dried pieces of tangerine peel like Christmas fruitcake, and a dog-eared copy of Siddhartha.