“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.
CHAPTER 3
Bridget, Wednesday, March 25, 2015
The comforting thing about high schoolers was they never changed. Every day they were as self-absorbed as the day before, their phones perpetually inches from their faces, fingers flying over the screens, sending Snapchats and text messages and tweets. Drama over boyfriends and best friends and boyfriends-slash-best friends. Bridget kept her ear to the ground: she knew who were BFFs and baes and whose mom was popping pills and whose dad was sleeping with the biology teacher who wore the short skirts.
Even when Bridget had bad days, really, really bad days, when she missed Holden with every breath in her body, when her very cells seemed to vibrate with missing him, with the way his flat, wide thumb used to slide up her arm with a smooth, gentle pressure. It was the little gestures that popped into her mind and stole the air from her lungs in the middle of class, in the middle of a sentence half the time. She swore the kids thought she’d lost her ever-loving mind. Maybe she had. But even then, on those days when she could barely string two sentences together and they all looked at her, mouths agape like catfish, they never let her down. They concerned themselves with her for about one hot minute before they kept on keeping on with their oh-so-gripping soap opera lives.
It was too cold for March. Sneaking up on spring break and still hovering around the thirties and forties. Her Georgia blood wasn’t used to this nonsense, and she wondered for about the billionth time why she didn’t go back, now that Holden wasn’t keeping her here anymore. Maybe because it still felt like he was here, only nine months later. Hardly any time at all, and she could still sense him in the bare, crackling trees in the front yard, their leaves scattered and killing what was left of his precious lawn. She could, what? Feel his aura? Oh, if her mother could hear her thoughts. Ain’t got the good sense God gave a rock, that’s what she’d say.
“Earth to Bridge.” Nate Winters stood in the door to her empty classroom, only three minutes after the bell, but long enough into her prep period to catch her sitting, hands folded in her lap, staring at the far wall of chipped and peeling cinder block.
She gave him a big smile, shaking her head to clear it. “I’m here. I was . . . thinking.”