Him being there was probably just stressing her out more, Sam thought. Maybe if he left the room, she would find her way outside. This was how he preferred to deal with most problems—ignore it and hope it goes away on its own.
He backed out into the hallway, closing the door so he could no longer hear that frenzied slapping noise. In his living room, Sam caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. His close-cropped brown hair was pushed to one side from sleeping with his head buried in the pillow, and his face was ruddy. He walked closer to the mirror and studied his reflection as he did so many times a day, pushing out his belly and sucking it back in again so his rib cage protruded over his stomach, pulling at the flesh around his midsection, as if the motion might shrink it.
He was tall and broad, with a frame that could carry a deceptive heaviness, but after a lifetime of losing and gaining weight, he’d reached a sort of equilibrium where, he thought, he was neither objectionably fat nor did he have the kind of body that he ever wanted anyone to see. In a preening, health-conscious place like Los Angeles where everyone talked about their bodies constantly, he spoke of his hardly ever, only to Kat, who understood the way he felt; it was as if he hoped by not mentioning his body, people might not notice that he had one. He fantasized about having the sort of physique where he could post thirst-trap selfies and have his inbox fill up with fawning messages, the kind of body that would make men cruise him at the gym, but he had settled here instead, and as he looked at himself for a long moment he felt silly for caring so much about the way he looked.
Noah had liked his body, Sam thought, and some distant loss pinched him in the form of a memory; he wished he had a partner still, someone to provide backup in the fight against quotidian challenges like a hummingbird invasion.
How would Noah have handled it, Sam wondered, if they were still seeing each other—or, rather, if they were still spending every night together, as they had done until fairly recently? It had never been a real relationship, exactly—more like a fling that had spiraled out of control. They had decided to see other people, but Sam knew that was the beginning of the end: a phasing out of one another, as hourly texts turned to daily check-ins, and soon weeks would pass without them speaking at all.
It wasn’t surprising that it had flamed out. They were both addicts in recovery, which had given the beginning the texture of something laced with a speedy euphoria, all crackling electricity and empty promises about tomorrows that felt so real in the whirl and spill of the moment. But after they had built up a tolerance to one another, they stopped making each other high; they had seen too much of one another’s darkness, in ways Sam was loath to relive now, the way last night’s hangover can poison tonight’s revelry. Addicts, even sober ones, are always using something. If you are lucky, you will realize it when the thing they are using is you.
But Noah would have been handy here. He would have taken charge of the situation with the hummingbird, found some way to fix it, like that’s just a thing that you reflexively know when you are a certain type of man. A basic life skill, like changing a tire or catching a football: evacuating a bird from a bedroom.
As with all the guys Sam dated, Noah was half man and half boy; in his late thirties, he wavered between the infectious excitability of a little kid and a very grown-up seriousness—which was earned, Sam knew, since his life had been hard. Sam had been spared many of the graver consequences of his own using years, scraping by with no lasting material repercussions, although whether that was the product of dumb luck or good hustle or divine intervention he couldn’t say; he’d even gotten a book out of it. Noah had paid a heavier price. Like Sam, he had been an intravenous drug user before getting clean, but unlike Sam, Noah had spent time homeless, living on the streets of London until a nasty overdose brought him to his knees. Now five years sober, he was an advertising executive who had come to Los Angeles to work on a project for a client. Looking at him now, so polished, you would never have guessed that his history had been so tortured.
They’d met at a twelve-step meeting in Silverlake, where Sam went swoony over his loose, slackerish charm. He was tall and lean and the night they’d met he’d worn a hoodie and sneakers that made him look like an implausibly handsome Brooklyn dad, or the guy that the protagonist of a sitcom dates for an episode or two. He was Paul Rudd sun, Mark Ruffalo moon—all scruff and the right amount of smarm. On their first date, over a long, lazy dinner at Soho House—Noah was a member and actually hung out there, which was douchey, but also hot—Sam was so enamored with him, his warm, unaffected amiability and the frank way he recounted the horrors of his past, which in the retelling seemed somehow breezy, less hellish than instructive. Years of sharing his story in meetings had made him a nimble orator, deft at tempering the dark with the light. He didn’t overtell the story, the way Sam always did; he was clear and concise and true, and his accent, to Sam’s susceptible American ears, made him seem automatically important. “Crystal meth gave me wings,” Noah said.
“Then what happened?” Sam asked, even though he already knew the answer.
Noah’s eyes went dark. “It took away the sky,” he said.
“There’s something different about this guy,” Sam told Kat on the phone that night.
“What’s his deal?” she asked.
“I don’t know, dude,” Sam said. “He’s really sparkly. Like someone who knows he’s getting a second chance and isn’t gonna waste it.”
But the thing with Noah had imploded in the most terrible of ways. Sam should have known better. He always got snookered by charisma. It was his favorite drug.
Gingerly he cracked open his bedroom door, hoping to find stillness, but instead, there the hummingbird was again, humming like a radiator in a New York winter. At the sight of Sam, she began to beat her wings even faster, pounding against the glass again, of the wrong window—the one that was entirely closed. Sam stared at her, or perhaps they were staring at each other—it was hard to say.
He retrieved a broom from the hallway closet and returned to his bedroom, brandishing it like a weapon. Gently he lifted its bristled end toward the bird, pushing it in her direction, and she skipped along the surface of the glass like an ice skater on a rink, searching for an exit that wasn’t there. He pushed it closer to her and off she went, back to the half-opened window, her little claws scuttling and scraping. The sun beamed cheerfully onto his face, haloing the bird in light. Once more he pushed the broom toward her, until she found the opening and flew away.
And just like that, he was alone again.
* * *
But all morning, Sam was haunted by her—the hummingbird. Sitting in his living room, he heard the slapping of wings somewhere in the periphery; when he turned to look, though, there was nothing there. By midafternoon, he felt unsoothed enough to call his mother.
His mother was a wise woman, learned and fierce. When Sam was growing up, she had been expansive in her interests: she researched the life of Jesus, then the holy wells of Ireland, then Native American animal medicine, then the pagan rituals of her Scandinavian ancestors, from which a passion for genealogy had sprung, and so she mapped both sides of the family back centuries deep, making pilgrimages to Norway to meet anyone with whom she shared a scrap of genetic material. After Sam’s parents divorced when he was a teenager, and Sam left Portland with his father to finish his last few years of high school in New York, she settled into her traditions, or maybe they settled into her. She moved to an A-frame cottage in the woods of Oregon, where a rosary hung from the door and a carved wooden scepter adorned with the tail of a fox rested against the kitchen table; she said it was her animal totem. Now on Thursday afternoons she volunteered at a nearby women’s prison, teaching spirituality workshops.