Excerpt
The Language of the Birds
1.Arrested DecayCalifornia • OctoberArizona cradles the figure-eight pendant between her thumb and finger and counts the days since her dad died—seventeen, the same as her age, and a prime number. A cold wave rolls from the pendant through her fingertips, up her arm, past her heart. Her chest rises and the wave breaks, coming out as a gasp, a breath cut short by pain. At once she’s in a memory, sea-kayaking with her father. The swell is so deep that she glimpses him only when they are both on crests of the giant waves. All she sees are walls of water, as if the ocean has swallowed her dad along with the rest of the world.
Back in the present, her throat feels thick, her mouth gummy, so she turns from feelings to thoughts. To the soothing power of facts. Waves break when the ratio of wave height to water depth is approximately 3:4, so a six-foot wave breaks in about eight feet of water. How high is this wave? Will it ever break? Is she even getting closer to shore? Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in morning, sailors take warning. She looks out the window of the truck, but there is no red in the sky at all. Just gray.
Mom drives the black F-150 while Arizona’s boxer, Mojo, sleeps on his dog blanket in back. They turn off Highway 395 and head east, past a sign that reads Bodie—13 miles. Dad had loved ghost towns, especially Bodie.
“What’s on your mind, honey?” Mom says to cut through the fog of silence that fills the truck.
“Waves,” Arizona says, then to avoid an explanation adds, “but before that I was thinking about the gathering last week.”
“The celebration of life? What about it?”
“It’s such a stupid name. Who wants to celebrate after someone dies?”
“It wasn’t about death. It was about celebrating the time we had with him. And sharing the burden of pain.”
“Sharing pain doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t add up, literally. When you get ten people together who are in pain, it’s just ten times the pain. It’s basic math.”
“Feelings don’t always work like math. Shared joy can be greater than the sum of its parts. And when pain is shared, the result is actually less pain. Trust me on this.”
Arizona scoffs. Trust is a stone that slips midstream. She trusted her teachers, but they didn’t stop the bullying. She trusted Dad when he promised to always be there for her.
“I think he’d be happy that we’re back on the road, spreading his ashes in places he loved.” Mom hesitates. “It’s been nice so far, don’t you think?”
Arizona wants to say yes but doesn’t like to lie, so she nods instead—somehow, nonverbal lies don’t count. At home, the rambling house and property afforded them space to process the loss in their own ways. But now traveling in the Airstream trailer, it feels like the shiny silver walls are pressing in.
She turns away from her mom and retreats into nature, a world that never lets her down. She watches the landscape change as they climb the winding canyon road, past black cottonwoods thriving in arroyos, through stands of stunted piñon pines, until they emerge into a landscape of barren scrub-flecked hills. In the distance, wooden buildings rise and grow, their weathered sides barely distinguishable from the gray earth and sky. She breathes it all into her lungs—not the scent or the air but the trees themselves, the hills, the very earth—and holds it there close to her heart.
They pass another sign—Bodie State Historic Park, Elevation 8,379 Feet—and pull into the dirt parking lot. Arizona puts Mojo on leash and grabs her daypack from the bed of the pickup.
“Can we explore together?” Mom says while she pulls her hair back through a scrunchie.
“You said you wanted to take the tour of the stamp mill. They don’t allow dogs on that.”
“I know, but there’s plenty of time before it starts.”
Arizona shakes her head. “I could use a little more alone time.”
“Your dad needed his space, too.”
Arizona deepens her voice to impersonate her dad. “Sorry, honey, but the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
Mom forces a chuckle, as if testing out the sound. “All right. Where will you go?”
Arizona shrugs. “Just wander. Find a place to read. Maybe check out the cemetery.”
“Do you think that’s a good idea? You know, so soon after . . .”
Arizona rolls her eyes and sighs. “I like the quiet.”
“This is a ghost town, honey. The whole place is quiet.”
“Why do you always have to question what I do? Like you don’t trust me to make my own decisions.”
“I’m just trying to protect you.”
“Just because I have some disorders—”
“Differences,” Mom says, “not disorders. And everyone is different.”
“Whatever. I don’t need to be protected. I’m not your sister. I’m not going to kill myself.”
Mom sighs, looks at the ground, and dons her sunglasses. “Okay, sorry. How ’bout we meet at the Methodist Church at four? Then we can find a nice spot for . . . the ashes.”
“Sure.”
As her mom walks away, Arizona wonders if maybe she shouldn’t have snapped at her. But Mom’s been so friggin’ clingy since Dad died. And Mom apologized, so she obviously knows she was in the wrong. Right?
Arizona sets her phone alarm and leads Mojo straight for the cemetery. They stroll through a sea of gray-green sagebrush scrub, its cool minty aroma heightened by nocturnal rain, the first of the season and so light that Arizona can count the raindrop pocks on the trail.
As they roam through the 150 marked graves, Mojo’s tail says he’s happy to be sniffing new things, even if they’re headstones instead of hydrants. Cemetery tour complete, Arizona removes her pack and sits against a large monument.
“I need kisses, buddy,” she says.
Mojo licks her face and she kisses his forehead. He curls up by her side, a contented look in his eyes.
“Good boy.”
She opens her dad’s worn paperback copy of Brave New World. Given the circumstances, the sardonic title feels downright contemptuous. But it’s a way to keep Dad close, not to mention a darn good read.
Lost in the book, as usual, she doesn’t know how much time has passed when a movement catches her eye. She watches the majestic bird alight on a headstone, feathers lustrous black, talons latching to miniature dimples in the wind-worn Sierra granite. “Corvus corax,” she murmurs, before scowling at the more familiar name, common raven. There is nothing common about corvids, with a brain-to-body ratio that rivals that of the great apes.
The raven’s goiter of shaggy throat feathers bobs, its beak opening and closing in silence—as if it whispers to the dead. How ironic that the world’s largest songbird would whisper, but she understands. Cemeteries are sanctuaries, like libraries. She puts her book away, opens her pocket notebook, and writes.
Cemeteries are sanctuaries,
like libraries—
quiet, solitude, full of history.
Permanence of stone
to mark the impermanence of life,
like the written word does
for the fleeting spoken word.
Even though she is comfortable in sepulchral settings, this time does seem different. She scans her body, tries to determine what it is, where it comes from. She feels cold and . . . fragile? Like the veil of ice on a pond in early winter. Is it the cool stone behind her back? Or the wind? Certainly it’s not that her mom was right.
Her thoughts are interrupted by her phone alarm. 3:14 p.m.—pi time. One last look, one last breath in this quiet place. She rises and turns in place, surveys the headstones, the desolate hills, the weathered buildings frozen in time. The empty spaces where fires razed nine-tenths of the town, now blanketed with low brush and dotted with an incongruous mix of abandoned vehicles—wooden wagons and rusted panel trucks—like an open-air transportation museum. She multiplies the number of buildings by ten and visualizes the town in its heyday. Eight thousand people seeking gold and opportunity, until the mines ran dry, and they left as quickly as they had come. That’s way too many people. She prefers it like this. Dad did, too.
She walks Mojo down the path against a chill wind that kicks dust off the dirt streets of the ghost town. Preserved in a state of arrested decay. Like her family.
They pass the church, where they will meet Mom at four, and amble down Green Street. Past the park office, surrey shed, and morgue, to the schoolhouse. Arizona peers through the windows and listens. It’s so quiet, unlike the school she’d known, with its cacophonous din and jeering voices. She looks at the rows of desks still laden with books, pictures the ghosts of children returning from their eternal recess, and wonders if, in a different place and time, she could have fit in.
