ONE /
TONIGHT, FIVE YEARS TO the day since I lost you, forty-eight white-throated sparrows fall from the sky. Tomorrow, the papers will count and photograph them, arrange them on black garbage bags and speculate on the causes of the blight. But for now, here on the roof of Teta’s apartment building, the sheen of evening rain on the tar paper slicks the soles of my sneakers, and velvet arrows drop one by one from the autumn migration sweeping over Boerum Hill.
The sparrows thud onto the houses around me, old three- and four-story brownstones, generation homes with sculpted stoops, a handful recently bought from the families who have owned them for decades and gutted for resale. Nothing has stayed the way it was since you died, not even the way we grieve you. Downstairs in Teta’s apartment, I’ve drawn the curtains, tucked Teta’s glasses back into their drawer so that even if she wakes, she won’t look down on this street dashed with dying birds. Five years ago, when your absence stitched her mouth shut for weeks, I hid your collection of feathers, hid the preserved shells of robin’s eggs, hid the specimens of bone. Each egg was its own shade of blue; I slipped them into a shoebox under my bed. When you were alive, the warmth of each shell held the thrill of possibility. I first learned to mix paint by matching the smooth turquoise of a heron’s egg: first aqua, then celadon, then cooling the warmth of cadmium yellow with phthalo blue. When you died, Teta quoted Attar: The self has passed away in the beloved. Tonight, the sparrows’ feathers are brushstrokes on the dark. This evening is its own witness, the birds’ throats stars on the canvas of the night. They clap into cars and crash through skylights, thunk into steel trash cans with the lids off, slice through the branches of boxed-in gingkoes. Gravity snaps shut their wings. The evening’s fog smears the city to blinding. Migrating birds, you used to say, the city’s light can kill.
A sparrow’s beak strikes my hand and gashes my palm. I clutch the wound, the meat of my thumb dark with my own blood. You taught me a long time ago to identify the species by the yellow patches around their eyes, their black whiskers, their white throats, and their ivory crowns. You were the one who taught me to imitate their calls—Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody. In your career as an ornithologist, you taught me two dozen East Coast birdcalls, things I thought you’d always be here to teach me. I reach down to scoop the sparrow from the rooftop with my bloodied hands. He weighs almost nothing. There is so much of you—and, therefore, of myself—that I will never know.
Tomorrow, when the ghost of you enters my window with the smell of rain, I will tell you how, since you died, the birds have never left me. The sparrows are the most recent of a long chain of moments into which the birds, like you, have intruded: the red-tailed hawks perched on the fire escape above Sahadi’s awning, or the female barred owl that alights on Borough Hall when I emerge from the subway. For all my prayers the night you died, the divine was nowhere to be found. The forty-eight white-throated sparrows that plummet from the sky are my only companions in grief tonight, the omen that keeps me from leaning out into the air.
* * *
My gynecologist is using purple gloves again. They are the only color in this all-white examination room. I set my feet in the stirrups with my knees together, only separating my thighs when he taps my foot. The paper gown crinkles. The white noise of my blood thrums in my ears. There is no rainbow-colored ceiling tile with dolphins here like the one at Teta’s dentist. Last spring, I got my teeth cleaned while she had a root canal just so I could hold her hand.
I clench and unclench my sweaty fingers. The speculum is a rude column of ice. I focus on a pinprick of iodine staining the ceiling tile and force myself to imagine how it got there. I will myself out of my body the way I used to do when I was bleeding. The summer after you died, my periods were the heaviest they’d ever been. I spent the rainless evenings standing in fields at sunset, waiting to be raptured into the green flash of twilight, wishing there were another way to exist in the world than to be bodied. It had been less than a year since I’d closed my hand around those eggs in the nest, and still I wanted nothing more than to disappear into the weightless womb waiting inside each round, perfect eggshell, that place of possibility where a soul could hum unburdened and unbound. The man between my legs checks for the string of my IUD, and I am flooded with the urge to return my body and slip myself into a different softness: the stems of orchids, maybe; the line of sap running up the trunk of a maple; the fist of a fox’s heart.
Instead I am jolted back to my body by the shiver of lube running down the crack of my ass. He pulls off his gloves and tells me to get dressed. There are never enough tissues, so I use the paper gown and ball it up in the trash. My gyno returns just as I tug my T-shirt over the shapewear compressing my chest.
“Everything looks good,” he says, sitting down at the computer. He adjusts the pens in the pocket of his lab coat, though none of the doctors in this place write on paper anymore. “I can’t find any reason for your pain.”
“But I’ve been spotting and cramping ever since I got this thing.”
By the look on his face, he doesn’t take this seriously. He hands me a pharmaceutical pamphlet on the IUD, the kind with women laughing on the glossy front, shopping or hiking or holding their boyfriends’ hands. He urges me to wait a few more months until things stabilize, then asks me if I’m using backup protection. I say yes, though I haven’t had sex in years. For some reason, my first crush pops into my mind, the white girl in my high school biology class who loved acoustic guitar music and coconut rum. It’s been so long since I’ve allowed myself to want anyone or anything.
“I thought this thing was supposed to stop my period.” I pick at a hole that’s starting on the knee of my jeans. “And my chest is sore. Didn’t know that was a side effect.”
“Sure, breast tenderness can happen in the beginning.” The gyno looks at me like I am a puzzle he’s lost a piece to. “It might make your periods heavier, too, but that should settle down after a few cycles.” He asks me about my moods, but I can tell bleeding, cramping, and sore breasts aren’t going to be enough to convince him to take the thing out. In his mind, a woman should be used to these things. There is no way to explain the eggshell or the fox’s heart. My insufficient, unnameable suffering is my own problem.
I hop off the table. I say, “It’s probably just that time of year again.”
He softens. You went to him before I did, and you still hang between us in the waiting room when I come for my appointments. He asks me if I’m back to painting, trying to make small talk, but I don’t know how to answer.
“You need to get inspired. Get your mind off things.” He suggests an exhibit at the Met on Impressionist painters. I try not to roll my eyes. He pats me on the shoulder as I leave. On my way out, the receptionist calls me miss.
The sun is low when I step outside. It will be angling red through the window when I arrive home, and Teta will be dozing in her armchair. I can’t stand the thought of another summer sunset in that silent apartment, so I take the 6 uptown to the Met. Now that I’m taking care of Teta, their pay-what-you-wish policy for New York residents makes it one of the few museums I can still afford. Maybe a change of scenery would be good, I tell myself.