For twenty-eight nights after Jules died, I had the same dream of robbing his grave. In my subconscious he was a bare skeleton in a coffin (although in real life he had been cremated, his ashes spread over the site of his first smile, a deserted off-season beach on the coast of Maine).
In the dream I steal the clothes off of his tiny bones, cover the eye sockets with a crumpled tissue from my pocket, and start running down the corner of 21st and 2nd, the whine of police sirens growing louder behind me.
On the twenty-ninth night after he died, I had no dreams, at least none that I could remember. I returned to work, and haven’t had the same dream since.
***
I normally take the stairs up to my sixth-floor apartment, but today there is a big X fashioned from caution tape across the banisters. “SPILL TAKE ELEVATOR,” says the accompanying sign in dying sharpie, the A-T-O-R more suggested than spelled.
The elevator is small and old and incredibly slow. I listen to the squeaks and rattles as it makes its way down and wonder in the meantime what the spill on the stairs could be. A bodily fluid, most likely. Maybe an escaped milkshake, starting to go sour in the hot weather.
I hear the shift of the elevator grow closer, aligning with the floor before it reluctantly grumbles open. I shuffle inside, fiddling on my phone with impatient, sweaty fingers as I wait for the doors to close. But before they do, I notice a movement in the hall, which I first take to be someone’s foot, or the edge of a purse. I look up to discover that it is not a person, or any part of a person at all.
It’s a bird. A seagull. She is enormous, speckled with a mottled grey and white pattern. She looks at me with that glare that is unique to birds, steady and unnerving, before walking towards me through the open doors.
I am startled, and jump in surprise. I make an explosive movement with my hands, attempting to shoo the bird back into the stairwell, but she does not startle as easily as I did. Now that she is near, I notice her eyes lack the sharp, beady quality that I had expected, and rather are cloudy and glazed. I then notice her wing, a mess of crooked feathers and coagulated blood, and her limp, favoring a bloody, grime-encrusted leg.
By now the doors have closed, and the elevator begins to shudder its way up to my floor, unaware of its new passenger. From where she stands in the opposite corner, the bird gazes at me expectantly. I consider a fitting peace offering, and remember the croissant I had neglected for breakfast, smooshed at the bottom of my tote. I retrieve it from its crumpled pastry bag, tearing off a few strips with shaky hands. The bird gobbles them enthusiastically.
On the sixth floor, I walk a few paces out of sight and wait in curiosity. She emerges after a few moments, bobbing her head and limping on her bad leg with an odd, jerky swagger. I casually turn around and continue to walk towards my apartment door, which I unlock and leave ajar. By the time I have set down my keys and taken off my shoes, she has followed me inside.
The bird cranes her head forward, observing her new surroundings. I follow her eyes across the apartment as she surveys the dusty radiator, covered in precarious stacks of unopened mail, the couch, a mountain range of dirty clothes, and the floor, in desperate need of a vacuum.
With the remainder of the croissant, I fashion a path from the living area to the kitchen to preoccupy her before making a dash for the closet, pushing through tubs of lotion and soaps and old towels to pull out the baby gate for its first-ever use. I’m unsure of whether the bird can still fly, which would render the gate fairly useless, but considering the state she is in and what seems to be greater than a willingness, more of a willfulness, to be taken care of, I have the sense that the boundary will be respected.
On my return she is already at the kitchen threshold, choking the last shred of croissant down her gullet. I wait for her to suction up the remaining flaky bits before ushering her through the door, setting up the baby gate, and hopping over myself.
The kitchen is even worse off than the living area. On the counter, my elbow disrupts a colony of fruit flies from a heap of dirty dishes. When I look around again, I find that the bird has discovered a trove of old crumbs escaped from the toaster underneath the kitchen table. She then hobbles over to the pantry, an alcove with open shelves, and the refrigerator in the left corner, cluttered with photographs, wedding invitations, holiday cards, and various magnets from trips and museums.
Her beak moves closer to one of the magnets, which I picked up from an exhibition last year. It’s a painting by a local artist, Devon Grimes, of two boys, brothers, posed next to each other like for a school photo, dressed in winter clothes, in blues of various shades. The bird pecks at the ultramarine of the left brother’s puffer jacket.
It dawns on me that I should call animal control. I rummage in my pocket, pulling out my phone for the number. It rings twice, before a gruff voice answers.
“NYC Animal Control.”
“Hi. I’m calling to report an injured animal. A seagull. I have her in my apartment.”
“We don’t do pickups for birds,” the voice replies, with no hint of interest. “You can bring her to a local center.”
My brain sluggishly attempts to piece together the necessary logistics. The silence is loud on the line. “Do I need to make an appointment?” is all I can think to ask.
“No.”
By the time I hang up, the bird has moved on from the Grimes piece. Recalling that I have a few spare brightly colored magnets in the junk drawer, I hastily grab them, navigating around her in a large, obvious circle before landing at her side to add them to the fridge mosaic. Thankfully, she finds them appealing enough to merit more pecking.
I return to my phone to look up the closest care center. It’s about an hour’s walk, which strikes me as an improbable distance to carry a bird. I’ll have to call a cab and hope for the best. I’ll also need something to carry her in, I realize. I retrieve an old towel from under the sink, and suspecting she may be thirsty after the croissant, I shove some dirty dishes in the sink out of the way to fill a small bowl with water.
I approach the pantry again with caution, placing the bowl a few inches away from her large, scaly feet. She takes upwards sips with her long beak, flashing her fleshy pink throat, and then uses the water to preen her feathers, gingerly avoiding the area of her broken wing.
I am suddenly overcome by a compulsion to tend to her, to clean off some of the dirt and blood. I sit cross-legged on the floor, unfolding the towel slowly so as not to startle her, and begin to crawl over on my hands and knees. She seems unbothered, and continues to preen herself as I dip a corner of the towel in the cup of water. I slowly inch closer until I am just a hands length from the tip of her beak. Too close. She rears back with a loud squawk, spreading her healthy wing out to her side in full span, and her injured wing out slightly before retracting it back to her side in pain. I had not prepared myself for rejection, and the sound is so loud that I omit an involuntary shriek in return before retreating.
My heart races. I feel strangely calmed from the exchange, as if the worst is over, and feel inclined to win back her favor. I move slowly towards the counter, retrieving an old open box of cornflakes, and pour the remaining stale and broken pieces next to her water bowl. She pecks at them until they are gone, before looking up to where I am sitting at a further distance than before. She stares at me, and I stare back, as if we are only now settling into the distinction of this moment, our partnership in its unique strangeness.
I examine her eyes as she turns her head from side to side; two black pupils and yellow irises with orange rings of pimply skin around. They appear less cloudy than they were in the elevator, somewhat returned to their natural fierceness. I wonder if it is her first time indoors. It is almost certainly her first time inside an apartment.
I am reminded of my son’s first day in an apartment, a day of ultimate firsts. My mother had volunteered to be there with me at the hospital; she had booked her flight one week from when the baby was supposed to arrive.
I expressed my concern about the timing. “What if the baby comes early?”
“Not a chance,” she reassured me. “Zoysa babies are always born a week late. You were born a week late, I was born a week late, your grandmother and her sister and three brothers, all a week late.”
On the day of her flight, she called me. There was a big storm moving across the West Coast, and her flight from Portland was stuck on the tarmac. But there was still plenty of time, she promised. She would wait out the storm, and book the next available flight.
It was two hours after our call that I started having contractions. I waited as long as I could, willing them to be a false alarm, but as the pangs increased in frequency until they were just minutes apart, I had to give up my faith in the continued legacy of overdue Zoysas.
p my faith in the continued legacy of overdue Zoysas. I called my friend Camilla to see if she could make it in my mother’s place, but she was out of the city that weekend, on a trip to the Cape with her husband and in-laws. She said she could be in the car in five minutes, but the drive was at least nine hours (not including Sunday traffic), so by the time that she got back into the city, everything had already happened.
By the time we were in the cab home from the hospital, the suffering of the previous hours was a distant fog. I gazed in awe at my fellow passenger (a tiny, impossible creature, not of this world) sitting in his brand-new car seat (disregarding necessity, suddenly a ridiculous contraption, overwrought in its many straps and buckles). I bent over to kiss his bowling-ball head, too heavy for him to lift from profile, and take in another breath of his incredible smell, an ambrosia of sweet cream and almonds. When I drew back, his exposed eye was open and alert.
I followed it in its precocious tourism of the new world, as it wandered to the driver’s thick silver-ringed fingers on the worn leather steering wheel, the wooden rosary beads swinging from the rearview, the window on my side of the car, where the sidewalks and scaffolding and trees rushed past with delicious fervor, and back into his eye, where he returned my gaze.
I had read in a book that newborn babies have blurred vision, so I squinted my eyes to try to see what he saw; moving colors, varying degrees of light, the outlines of blurred shapes.
“Hi, baby.” I squinted at him, now a fleshy blob. “It’s mommy. I’m mommy.”
When I refocused my eyes, I caught the driver smiling at us through the rearview. He had good teeth. Neat and strong. It reminded me of the smile in the donor book profile, from which I made my decision instantly. I have always been a sucker for a nice smile.
“Congratulations,” the driver said. I thanked him, feeling an untethered grin spread across my own face.
Camilla joined me that night at the apartment. She made me a cup of my favorite jasmine tea, but by the time she placed it on the coaster on my bedside table I was already almost asleep. The crib was set up right next to the bed where the baby lay inside, wearing his first set of pajamas—a onesie decorated with little rabbits, to match his sign in the zodiac.
Camilla crawled into bed beside me, stroking my hair and speaking in soothing whispers. “What’s his name?”
I had Jules for six months before he suffocated. It happened one morning as I vacuumed around his low baby bouncer on the floor while sipping at an espresso, wrestling to stay conscious after a sleepless night. The vacuum was showing a red line, and it occurred to me that I could not remember the last time I had changed the bag. When I picked it up to throw it into the trash, the seam split open in midair, sending bits of hair and dust across the room. Jules began to cough and cry.
It was too late by the time we got to the emergency room. “You never could have gotten here fast enough,” one doctor said, in an attempt to console me. “It was too much for his lungs. It’s not your fault.”
In the coming weeks I spent my nights combing through online grief support threads, falling asleep in intervals of two or three hours in front of the computer before continuing to scroll upon waking. I began online shopping for things I never would have bought for a living baby—expensive, ridiculous things: bibs monogrammed with his initials in gold lettering, onesies made from organic bamboo fabric, designer leather booties, baby wraps with cushion support, special diapers for babies with sensitive skin (his skin was never an issue). When the boxes arrived, I would leave them stacked and unopened in the corner of the living room. The day after my mother moved in, they all disappeared. She must have intercepted every one after that, because I never saw another. I often wonder where she brought them, but I’ve never found the courage to ask.
As the rest of his things disappeared, I managed to save a small few. Like the baby gate. I couldn’t bear to have it gone. Just two more months, I kept thinking, and we would’ve needed it. I would have been ready.
Having lost interest in our staring contest, the bird has resumed her fastidious feather preening. I ready myself with the towel, opening it low to the ground as I slowly slide across the floor to get an angle on her from the side.
When I trap her, I am careful not to squeeze the left side of her body. I firmly grasp her from the chest, binding the towel just tight enough to subdue any flapping, and using my other hand to take hold of her legs. She squawks loudly, struggling against me, before finally accepting defeat.
“It’s ok. You’re ok. It’s mommy. Mommy’s here,” I hear myself cooing. I release an involuntary shudder, which jostles the bird. She protests with another subdued squawk.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her.
I lift us both from the ground, holding her gently against my chest with one arm, as I use the other to find the number for the cab.