The Hummingbird War Page 5

  “Then what’s it like? Don’t throw away a chance to get to know him better. Come on, he’s good-looking and smart and, who knows, he might end up being a Congressman or even better. And he totally digs you. So what if you’re not sure if he’s on the left or the right? If we want to end the war, we have to do something out of the ordinary. Yes, extraordinary, and I think you find him to be extraordinary.”

  The heat of embarrassment ran up my arms to my face and I knew I’d turned a shade of red. I was behaving like a schoolgirl with her first crush, ashamed at being found in the middle of my daydreams. As much as I tried, I couldn’t find anything really wrong with him. Not enough to stop the march of my feelings down the road of no return. Maybe I was misjudging him, not seeing him like the book beneath the cover as she had said. Maybe he was everything I needed, and maybe he was everything I didn’t deserve.

  “Well, I’m not ready to…” I said.

  “Diane, what are you scared of? Is it Matthew or something else?”

  I stared at her, unable to find an answer for her question because I didn’t have one.

  “What can I bring to your party?” I asked, desperate to change the subject.

  “Just yourself and an open mind.”

  Now that was a tall order.

  *****

  I toyed with the idea of asking Matthew to the party; pushed the thought around my mind of how it would be if we sat next to each other on the couch, laughed a little bit at a funny story, maybe took a walk under the moonlit sky. Come on. When was the last time I’d sat next to a man and wanted more than to just sit? When was the last time I’d told a funny story? When was the last time the Northwest night sky was clear enough to see the moon? I couldn’t ask him. Couldn’t let him think I was interested in him other than as a friend and an employee, even though it was becoming obvious to me that idea was so far from reality I couldn’t even tell Nancy the lie anymore, never mind try to convince myself.

  Other than my roommates, I ended up not knowing anyone at the party and the fear of taking on the unknown surrounded me again. It did little to help me forget I would have to face my in-laws, more strangers, the next day. I was sure everyone saw me for the sham I was, pretending to be enjoying myself and leading a normal life when I was cracked right down the middle.

  I stood in the corner of the kitchen watching Louise through a haze of cigarette smoke as she sat at the table with two guys. They looked pretty square — high-water pants, greasy hair, and thick glasses. I caught bits and pieces of their conversation about the changes they would make in the public health system once they graduated and took over the world. Louise put down her beer, grabbed the sleeve of my sweater, and pulled me close to her so I could hear what she said over the sound of Marvin Gaye coming from the stereo booming in the next room.

  “Hey, Diane,” she jerked her thumb at the guy standing behind her, “This is Bill. He ran a phantom candidate for the president of the student council last year. The president of the student council for the whole fucking University of Washington. There was no such person. He made up a candidate, promised everyone things that couldn’t be done, and his phantom won the election. Isn’t that a kick in the ass?”

  The man she pointed to looked at me as if I might be fair game, being Louise’s roommate and all. And being introduced to me as some political genius, he probably believed I would find him irresistible.

  “Great. Keep up the good work,” I said and walked away.

  I tried my unskilled hand at small talk, standing at the edges of conversations and finding nothing to add until my eyes grew heavy, and I felt as if my bones had been shot full of lead. I thought about excusing myself and slinking off to bed, claiming a headache. But Amy was in our room with another girl, and they were sitting on the bed and smoking one of those marijuana cigarettes, handing the thin talisman back and forth. I didn’t want them to offer any to me, so I went back into the living room and looked for the safety of Nancy’s company. She was just about sitting on the lap of her boyfriend for the night, a grad student by the looks of him — a little older, round glasses, and unstylish corduroy pants. There was no room for me in her cozy corner.

  The political genius, Bill, who’d left the kitchen and was trolling from room to room, tried to catch my eye. He tilted the bottle he held in his uplifted hand towards me as if to say, here’s to us. Beer spilled out of the bottle and onto the floor. When he looked down at his shoes, I grabbed the only seat left on the couch next to a red-haired woman. I decided to sulk until my bedroom was empty of the glassy-eyed girls, and I could crawl in, shut the door, and live with the mistake I’d made by ever agreeing to come to the party.

  I leaned over and flipped through the record albums in our bookcase, pulled out one of mine, and slipped it on the stereo. The woman with the red hair turned to look at me, and I smiled nervously, unsure of what to say and too tired to be creative. I was pretty sure she was the oldest person at the party, maybe close to 35.

  “Hi, my name’s Elin. Elin Swenson. Are you Nancy’s roommate, Diane?”

  “Yes, that’s me,” I said, wondering how she knew who I was but suspecting everyone here knew each other, and I was the only outsider.

  “She’s talked about you up and down, girl. Said y’all were a little shy. You sure are a sweet thing.” She slapped my knee playfully. “I think she’s jealous. Your hair’s prettier than hers.” The woman’s southern accent was so thick I had to listen closely to be able to understand half of what she said.

  “Oh, no one can outdo Nancy in the hair department. She spends quite a bit of time on it,” I said, thinking of my roommate spraying her hair with lemon juice to make it lighter, sitting under a shower cap with a head full of mayonnaise to mend the split ends, and setting it with soup-can rollers to straighten it. Hair had fallen to the bottom of my list and disappeared into the muddled air surrounding my fatigue. I was shocked anyone would ever think of my hair as pretty.

  “How do you know Nancy?” I asked Elin, not wanting to ignore her, since she seemed safer than the lurking Bill, even if she was gregarious.

  “We’re in Spanish class together. We usually go for coffee after class.”

  “That must be nice,” I said, imagining the extra time I once had to sit down between classes and relax for a few precious minutes.

  Nancy had finally pried herself away from her date and was opening some bottles of beer.

  “Nancy, how do you manage to have time to do, you know, hair stuff and all that, when you have a part-time job, too?” I asked.

  She picked up one of the beers, took a sip, and leaned over and deposited two opened bottles on the table between us. “I only work ten or fifteen hours a week. Diane, when you said you were working thirty hours a week I thought, that’s far out. But I told you, I know you have other reasons to be in that office besides the money. And who put that music on? Come on, The Everly Brothers? Is that yours, Diane?”

  “Leave it alone, Nancy. I love the Everly Brothers,” Elin chirped. “Okay, back to business. Tell us, girl. Would this be the guy Nancy told me about that boss of yours with the expensive clothes?”

  I felt my eyes widen like some cartoon character, dumbstruck with shock. “Nancy told you about my boss? And his clothes? Nancy!” I looked at my roommate, who’d become absorbed in conversation with her boyfriend again and was ignoring me.

  “Don’t worry, girl,” Elin said. “I ain’t gonna tell no one about it. It’s kinda funny how you are so worried about what Nancy thinks. I don’t care how much she asks about my life. It’s what it is. I got nothin’ to hide.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well, I’m going to this here school at the ripe old age of thirty-four. And look at me at this party with a bunch of college kids.” She waved her hand, circling the air above her head as if she were lassoing all of us into a homogenous group. “I don’t care if people think I’m…I’m acting inappropriate.”

  I guessed she’d been drinking for a w
hile before I had sat down.

  “There’s nothing wrong with that. I have a few older people in some of my classes. I’m twenty-one,” I said.

  “Well, there’s a difference between us more than a few years.”

  “What’s that?”

  She spread her hands on her lap and twisted the place on her finger where a ring’s long-time presence had left a white band of skin. “I left my husband. He’s got the kids, too. I told him one day I just decided I had to find out who I was. I couldn’t be no housewife no more, though I still want to be a mother.”

  “I didn’t know.” My discomfort at her directness left me unnerved, so I reached for a bottle of beer to have something in my hands.

  “How could you? I didn’t know myself what was going on until I was smack in the middle of it. My husband, his name’s Gunnar, he said he’d go to a plastic surgeon and get his nose fixed. He’d do anything to change if I would stay. But I told him, honey, it’s got nothing to do with how you look, it’s me. There’s something I need to know about me, I said to the poor guy. I never had the chance to learn about myself. Got married right out of high school. I thought I was in love and that love would only come once.”

  I saw my own face in her story, married soon after high school and never having the chance to know the forever-after-happiness I thought I’d found. “It must be hard, Elin.”

  “It sure is, but when Nancy starts digging at me, trying to find out this and that, I just let her dig. She likes to know what makes people tick. You know, she wants to be a social worker, and her asking and talking helps me to figure things out. If I kept it all to myself, I’d lose my mind.” Elin leaned back into the couch and took a drink of her beer. She tipped the bottle towards me. “I finally got me a good divorce attorney, and I’m gonna get back my kids, the house. Let’s drink to my lawyer.”

  “Well, I don’t really drink,” I said, tapping the full bottle on my knee as the Everly Brothers’ All I Want To Do Is Dream glided across the room and wrapped around me like an warm sweater.

  “It might help to loosen you up. Sometimes you just gotta let your hair down.” She reached over and ruffled my long, dark hair with her open hand. “Beautiful hair, girl.”

  “Well, maybe.” I felt sad and happy at the same time. Sad for the loss I still held on to and happy I didn’t have the complications in my life that this woman had. I rubbed the ache at the back of my neck. I could have used a backrub like the ones I’d given to Bobby after he’d come back from long hours of flight training. I thought about how nice it would be to get a massage to work the kinks out of my neck and shoulders, but all I had at the moment was the beer in front of me, so I took it.

  By the time everyone left, it was after two in the morning, and I had to hold my hands flat against the walls to walk to my bedroom. It was the first time in my life I had ever been drunk, and I hoped with each passing minute I’d regain my balance and maybe my inside-out stomach would go back to normal, but when I laid down on my bed it got even worse.

  Nancy walked into the room and stood in the doorway. Her face was spinning in slow motion. “You’ll be all right in the morning. By the time you have to drive to Whidbey, you’ll just have a headache.”

  “Whidbey? Oh no, Mr. and Mrs. Hayes are going to be there,” I moaned, and shook my head.

  “Diane, why didn’t you tell me before that they were your in-laws and your husband died in Vietnam?” Nancy’s voice echoed through the dark wall of my closed eyes.

  Words wouldn’t come. If I had told her any of this in the past few hours, I couldn’t recall where or when, although I had a vague memory of tears running down my face and Elin telling me someday it would be okay.

  My heart ached, kicked one too many times. I’d let the hurt build up in me until it had exploded over the top, along with the all the uncapped beers, and melted into the night.

  I turned from Nancy and stared at the milky light outside the bedroom window. Was it the alcohol making me see things or had morning come already? I sat up and pulled back the curtain. The clouds parted and a full moon shone in on me, tinting my hands the color of pearls. I looked back at the doorway for Nancy, wondering if she could see it, too, but she was gone.

  Through the open window, the scent of lilacs blooming in the yard kissed me like a mother’s good night. I held my hands up to the sky, and the excuses I’d held onto for so long slipped from my fingers and floated into the clear night like bewildered moths. And the old moon, gone into hiding for so long, was something I hardly recognized when I saw it.

  Chapter Six

  Lost between a whopping headache and my fear of what the day might bring, I became flustered and I’d driven almost a half mile past the road to my house before I realized I’d missed the turn-off altogether. It seemed as if I were in the wrong place from the time I’d hit the long stretch of Route 525 between Smugglers Cove Road and home; the trees too big to be the ones I knew, the turns I once knew by heart suddenly unfamiliar.

  When the Volvo finally rumbled up the dirt drive of my little house on Useless Bay, my father was waiting for me, seated in the rocking chair on the porch. With his graying hair and lined face set against the backdrop of the weathered cedar shakes of the house, I could have been looking at one of those Americana paintings by Grant Wood. I could have been dreaming, my apprehension about to fizzle into a warm and comforting dawn, but when he stood up and walked over to my car to hug me, I knew I was home. Funny how all I could think about was how much I wanted to run back to my place in Seattle.

  “Hey, little girl. What’s up with those sunglasses? It’s pretty cloudy today,” he said.

  I took a deep breath of low tide — salt and dried seaweed “Is it? I guess I stayed up too late last night.”

  “Diane, you’ve got to get out and have yourself some fun while you’re young. It’s what you need. All this studying stuff, what’s it gonna get you?”

  We walked inside and I sat down at the kitchen table. I could have used a few dozen aspirin but didn’t want give away the fact that my head was about to explode. I was afraid he’d put two and two together and figure out why I needed sunglasses on a cloudy day.

  He’d made lunch for me and pushed a plate to my side of the table. I picked at the turkey sandwich he’d brought. He’d remembered I liked it with avocados and Russian dressing. I was surprised. Bobby couldn’t get over the fact that I hated mayonnaise but loved avocados more than just about anything.

  “You okay?” my father asked, as I pushed aside the uneaten half.

  “Just nervous, I suppose. I’m meeting Bobby’s parents for the first time, and he’s not here with me.”

  “He ain’t gonna be by your side no more, Diane, but I will, for whatever good it does.”

  I reached across the table and took his hand in mine. “I don’t think I could face them on my own. They probably want to have some of his things, and I don’t want to give them away.”

  He lowered his eyes as if he took my statement as a condemnation of his own actions when my mother had died. “Don’t worry about something that ain’t happened yet.”

  We went back out to the porch chairs, pulled our jackets tight against the spring dampness. Clouds moved in from the west, heavier and darker as the minutes passed. I remembered the feeders needed filling and moved through the yard, apologizing to the birds waiting in the trees for me to finish. I’d taken too long to get back home. But the fields and the garden were ripe with seed heads of millet, lilac, and last year’s rose hips for them, and I knew the birds weren’t holding the emptiness of the feeders against me personally. Except for the hummingbirds. As I hung the red feeder back up by the kitchen window, a female Anna’s sideswiped me and clicked her notice of disapproval. A male pushed her away and began to drink the fresh sugar water as if he’d crossed a desert to remind me of my forgetfulness.

  “Sorry,” was all I could find to say, as he eyed me indignantly and the hot-pink iridescent plumage on his face flashed its warning.
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  Just before two o’clock, a car rolled up the driveway, sending a plume of dust across the dry little meadow I called my front yard. The newly-gathered finches at the feeder scattered into the nearby trees.

  A familiar-looking man got out of the driver’s side, smiled at me, and said, “I’m Don Hayes. You must be Diane. It’s nice to finally meet you.”

  I gave him my hand, and he kissed my cheek. We turned to look towards the other side of the car, and Bobby’s mother stepped cautiously into the dusty driveway. She was dressed in a suit and carried her purse on the crook of her arm. I walked haltingly towards her, and she gave me a tentative hug and pressed her face against mine. Her skin was as dry and smooth as chalk. She smelled overwhelmingly of perfume and the woodsy scent of her raw silk jacket.

  “Diane, we finally meet,” she said.

  I felt her eyes rest a moment longer than necessary on my old bell-bottom blue jeans and faded turtleneck sweater.

  “I was worried about meeting you,” I said. “And now I feel silly. Bobby looked like both of you.” I turned back and forth between them. “I feel as if I’m standing with him again.” I fought back tears and forced a smile.

  “I suppose you miss him almost as much as we do,” Mrs. Hayes said.

  I shook off her comment as one spoken by a grieving mother as I pulled my father to my side. “Mr. and Mrs. Hayes, this is my father, Edward Miller,”

  “You folks are from, where’s it, Rhode Island? You out on this coast for a vacation?” my father asked.

  “Visiting relatives in …” Mr. Hayes said, before his wife touched his arm with two gloved fingers. He offered no more.

  My father commented on the wetter than usual spring we’d had and how well I’d been doing in school, and finally we walked into the house where they looked up and down and around in a way I would have expected a real estate agent to peruse a property. Maybe they didn’t know what to say, so I thought I’d start the conversation. It seemed the grown-up thing to do.