Home > These Women(7)

These Women(7)
Author: Ivy Pochoda

Dorian rolls over and presses her face into the pillow on Ricky’s side of the bed. She counts to twenty. Then she counts again, this time to a hundred. When she looks up Lecia is gone.

She sits up and turns on the light. The first thing she sees is the three birds on the bureau.

It’s still dark out. The Santa Anas are shaking the windows. Just like back East, the winter sun hides until nearly seven though the sky doesn’t have the same frigid menace. She finds a shoebox in the closet, fills it with old socks, and tucks the birds inside.

In the kitchen, she heats yesterday’s coffee, then scatters stale biscuits in the backyard for the birds and checks her planters to make sure cats and possums haven’t been tearing up her vegetables. She overfills the bird feeder, which doesn’t need more seed.

Her feeders attract a strange crowd—not just the birds she wants, the orioles, the warblers, and the finches, but also pigeons too lazy or too refined for the sort of junk they find on the street and even a few seagulls thrown off course on their way to the ocean.

She checks the sky for a sign of the parrots. They usually come around in winter, mostly in late afternoon or early evening. But sometimes in the morning. They’ve never landed in her yard, only flown overhead and settled in the towering palms one street over.

There’s birdsong somewhere in the murky sky. Not parrots but the repetitive chee-chee of violet-green swallows singing in the early dawn. Dorian closes her eyes and listens, knowing that the song will die out at first light. This time the song doesn’t last even that long. There’s a rumble overhead, the sonic groan of an airplane flying too low. With a wild rustle the birds take flight, rising into the sky where they are lost in the dark, leaving Dorian with only the morning sounds of the slow-moving city and the whip-whip of the wind.

She catches the silhouette of a cat slinking along the fence. She watches as it stops and considers the feeder. The airplane drove the birds away so the hunting’s no good. But the cat lingers. Dorian follows its gaze. It’s not looking at the feeder but at something under a desert sage bush.

Dorian waits. The cat waits.

She listens for a rustle, a shift, a flutter or twitter, some indication of what the cat is hunting.

Then it pounces. In one swift move, it’s off the fence and beneath the bush. In a split second it emerges, something in its jaws. Dorian leaps with a shriek that will probably bring her neighbors to their windows. The cat drops its prey and is absorbed into the early dawn gray as if it hadn’t been there at all.

Dorian squats to pick up the cat’s quarry. It’s a scrub jay—long dead, rigor already set. It’s possible to feel the substance of its life in her hands. Cradling the bird in her palm, Dorian glances beneath the bush. There’s another jay on its side—tipped like an empty bottle.

The dead jays bring Dorian to her knees, a sob trapped in her throat. Unlike other birds, unlike other animals, jays can travel into the past of their own minds. Like humans, scrub jays have memories. She brings the jays inside and places them in the shoebox along with the hummingbirds and puts the box in a shopping bag.

Dear Idira, Once you figure out that no one’s going to hear you, you’ll still have to listen to the echoes in your head, a funhouse of memories that get distorted with time. That place will spook you. I could go on about the things that will remind you of your kid, the things that will never let you sleep. A dead bird for instance. But these things should be a caution to you, a warning about the senselessness of rage. Because in the end it’s just you. It will always be you. So it’s a waste of energy sending all that venom and anger out into the world because the return is nothing. It’s a one-way ticket. You give and give your anger and get nothing in return except more anger, leaving nothing behind.

THE SKY IS SOFTENING. It’s Saturday so traffic is light on Western. Still the girls are out, pulling their coats tight against the strong gusts—some working hard to snag a last customer before the hour gets too polite, others being collected by their pimps.

It’s a twenty-minute walk to the fish shack to grab the two boxes of birds stashed in the kitchen, then another twenty-five to Southwest Station. About a decade ago Dorian was a regular at the precinct, so well known that she was used to the detectives busying themselves with inconsequential tasks when she arrived.

She got used to being ignored. But she spoke anyway, her voice angry and insistent. Her fury unnerved even herself. It was as if her voice belonged to someone else. She hated saying Lecia’s name in the stale precinct. She hated summoning her daughter’s memory under the cold fluorescent lights between the static of radio calls and the clatter of ringing phones.

It’s pretty much what you would expect in the station early on a Saturday—the aftermath of the previous night, the angry, the drunk, the lost, the violent, the wronged, the insane. Dorian checks in at the desk. She wants to file a report: someone has been poisoning birds behind her business and now her house.

The sergeant gives her the once-over, sniffing for a whiff of crazy. Then he pages someone in the back.

Dorian drums her fingers on the shoeboxes as she waits. It takes twenty minutes but eventually the door behind the desk opens. “You’re in luck,” the sergeant says to the person stepping out from the back. “Caught a poisoning case.”

Dorian looks up to see a short female detective. She’s clearly Latina but she’s dyed her dark hair blond, giving her skin a pasty pallor. “Not my beat,” the detective says. “Vice, remember?”

“You want it or not?”

The detective doesn’t reply. She just holds the door open for Dorian to follow her.

“But don’t get too excited,” the sergeant adds. “It’s only birds.”

Dorian pretends she doesn’t know every inch of the station’s ground floor—every desk, every interrogation room. She’s been in all of them. She’s been listened to, taken seriously, consoled, indulged, told to leave, escorted out.

Let the professionals do their job.

I hope you’re not suggesting we are doing a third-rate investigation.

How well did you really know your daughter?

Spend enough time on my side of the desk and you’ll learn all about the things children keep from their parents.

I asked you, how well did you really know your daughter?

The short detective leads her to a far corner of the floor unfamiliar to Dorian—to a desk crammed between two filing cabinets. Away from the action.

Dorian sits with the shoeboxes in her lap. The detective hasn’t said a word. The dregs of last night’s makeup are visible on her face, the faded paint of a day at the office. Dorian can see that her dye job needs a touch-up. There’s a furrow of half-inch roots framing her face. This sort of maintenance is the reason Dorian let her own hair go gray.

But this detective, she’s a different story. It’s as if she’s trying to be someone else with hair and makeup suited to a person with a different complexion. And yet she’s a cop. In Dorian’s experience cops don’t try to be other people. They just try to be cops.

Dorian glances over the desk to a nameplate: Det. E. Perry.

The woman sitting in front of her sure doesn’t look like a Perry.

“What does the E stand for, Detective?”

The woman looks up as if she’s only noticed Dorian for the first time. “Esmerelda. You?”

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