We Love Anderson Cooper Page 7

  Barry didn’t see anything funny about another box of helpless kittens, and Mac the father. But what could he do? He lowered his head into the wind. Tethered to Mac, his landscape would constantly change, the cat moving faster, always, than Barry wanted to go.

  No Shortage of Birds

  A month after Charlotte’s father died, her mother brought home a parakeet. “You can play with him after school,” she said, as if Charlotte were a small child who needed someone to plan her activities.

  Charlotte was in junior high. “I don’t want it,” she said. “Take it back.” It would take more than a bird to make Charlotte forget she hadn’t saved her father.

  Her mother set the cage on the dining-room table and spread paper towels over the plastic bottom. The table sat six, four more than they needed. “Picture him riding on your shoulder. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  The bird stared with black, unfeeling eyes. Its belly was the pastel blue of a Popsicle. Charlotte’s mother stuck a pumpkin seed through the bars, and the bird snatched it with its sharp, yellow beak. “See how friendly he is? What do you want to call him?”

  “I’m not calling it anything.”

  “How about Mellie, in honor of Dad.” Her mother hadn’t spoken her father’s nickname since he died.

  “You want to give Dad’s name to a bird?” The parakeet, which had been investigating the cage, froze. “Dad hated birds!”

  “Keep your voice down. You’re scaring him.” She slipped another pumpkin seed through the bars. “Besides, your father didn’t hate birds. He was allergic to them.”

  Mail fell through the front-door slot. Charlotte went after it, relieved to escape her mother, who had been pale and distracted since her father died but was now smiling over the bird in a way that made Charlotte uneasy.

  Condolence cards still arrived on most days, addressed to her mother, Elisha Melott; to the Melott Family; and even occasionally to Charlotte. Her social studies teacher had made the entire class write them before Charlotte returned to school.

  There were no cards for Charlotte today. She hoped she never saw another—such useless expressions of sympathy, with childish drawings of flowers or the sun. The new issue of Golf Magazine appeared among catalogs and bills, her father’s name, Corbin Melott, on the mailing label. Charlotte dropped the rest of the mail onto the floor and took the magazine to her room.

  She opened it at her desk. Pictures of pros like her father filled every page, men and women lining up shots, driving balls, pushing tees into the earth. Charlotte searched for an image of her father. She found ads for the putter he used, his brands of balls, bags, and gloves, the caps and shoes he wore. But she didn’t see him. In the back of the magazine, his name appeared in the standings. He was ranked ninety-seventh in the world. She tore out the page and fastened it to her corkboard, covering an image of Lydia Ko waving a trophy at the Kia Classic. She threw the rest of the magazine away, thinking how unfair it was for golfers ranked below her dad to move up through no effort of their own.

  They had been at the Raven Golf Course in Phoenix. Every Sunday he wasn’t on the tour, she and her father played. He had hit a long drive and was watching it sail down the fairway. At the same time, an errant shot hooked toward him. Charlotte saw the ball coming, as surprising as a comet, but her father didn’t. She refused to believe it would hit him. The day was too perfect, sun providing gentle March warmth and lighting up the grass, her father beside her, whistling in appreciation of his shot as he leaned against his driver. He wore a Callaway cap set back, smashing wiry curls. The ball sped toward him, but she was too shocked to cry out. It struck his temple with a muffled thud, a sound she would always remember as being too small for the damage it did, and he collapsed at her feet. Only then did she manage to speak. “Dad?” She knelt beside him, her hands tugging his arm. But there was no answer.

  The party behind them drove up in a cart. Charlotte touched her father’s cheek. Above it rose a bump larger than the ball itself, straining against his skin. “Dad?”

  Paramedics moved her aside and took her father. Someone must have called. A golfer who knew him drove her to the hospital and waited with her until her mother arrived.

  While surgeons worked on her father, she and her mother sat in a windowless room on vinyl furniture, a CNN anchor broadcasting in what might as well have been a foreign language. They ignored the hot water dispenser and tea bags provided for their comfort. When they returned home late that night, her mother told her: His brain had swelled; he was in a coma.

  * * *

  They’d had the parakeet for two weeks. When Charlotte’s mother wasn’t at work, managing money for professional athletes, the bird perched on her shoulder or played with toys she had bought: bells, a beaded carousel, mirrored rings. “What would I do without you?” Elisha said, as she fed it almonds and pistachios. She scratched its neck, rubbed its belly, and called it “my little budgie.”

  At first Charlotte suspected her mother only pretended to like the bird—the way Elisha had once pretended to enjoy chard, to get Charlotte to eat it. If Charlotte approached, the bird backed up and beat its wings.

  Preoccupied with the parakeet, Elisha seemed to forget Charlotte’s father. She traded somber blouses for sparkly tops that attracted the bird. Each night she moved the cage from the den and set it next to her in bed before covering it. Charlotte could no longer deny her mother’s affection for the bird was real. Some nights Charlotte missed her father so much she wanted to crawl in next to her mother, but she couldn’t, not unless she wanted to share her father’s side of the bed with the bird.

  The year before he died, her father had earned more than a million dollars. To celebrate, the family went to a restaurant where waiters wore tuxedos. Her father traded his Acura for a Mercedes and bought her mother a diamond-encrusted pin shaped like a golf cart. They surprised Charlotte with a new two-thousand-dollar bike for Christmas.

  After her father died, Charlotte overheard her mother on the phone saying if they were careful, the insurance money would be enough. Charlotte wanted to know: careful about what? She couldn’t ask without admitting she’d been eavesdropping. Maybe her mother would return Charlotte’s bike. Or they’d have to move to a tiny apartment like the one where her cousins lived. She’d never be able to get away from the bird.

  Elisha was always encouraging Charlotte to get to know Mellie. One afternoon, holding out the parakeet, Elisha said, “Come on, feel how soft he is.”

  Charlotte decided to give Mellie a chance. But as she reached out to stroke the bird, it screeched and bit her finger.

  At the dining-room table the next night, her mother fed the parakeet banana slices from a plate while making kissing sounds. Bananas were Charlotte’s favorite. She tightened a fist around the book report she had brought to show her mother. “Are there any more?” she asked.

  “Sorry, last one,” Elisha said. “How about a peach?”

  Charlotte ran a finger around the edge of the plate, itching to fling it across the room. “You know I like bananas.”

  “I’ll get more tomorrow.”

  “They won’t be ripe.”

  “I’ll get ripe ones.”

  “Those will be too ripe.” She slapped the report on the table.

  “There’s plenty for both of you.” Her mother offered her a slice on a fork. Exposed to air, the flesh had browned.

  * * *

  The Arizona Diamondbacks were playing the Colorado Rockies. Charlotte and her mother sat on the couch in the den and watched the game.

  “I love you,” Elisha said to the parakeet, who had flown to the top of the TV and was walking along its edge.

  “I love you,” the bird squawked.

  “I’m trying to watch,” Charlotte said, furious to hear her mother offer the bird endearments that rightfully belonged to Charlotte and her father. The night before, Elisha had forgotten to say “I love you” to Charlotte after kissing her good night.

  “It’s just a beer ad.”
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  “I like the commercials.”

  Her father’s trophies lined up dull and abandoned on a glass shelf. Her mother hadn’t bothered to dust or polish them even once. When the bird took off from the TV, it landed on his Barbasol Championship cup, but not before soiling the trophy next to it with a fat green dropping. Charlotte leaped from the couch and swatted the bird, catching its tail with the back of her hand and dislodging three feathers, the bird screaming, “I love you! I love you!”

  Elisha came after Charlotte. She grabbed her by the arm and shook her. “He’s a member of the family.” Her mother had never touched her before with anything but kindness.

  Later, as Charlotte undressed for bed, she examined her arm and found a bruise. Down the hall she heard her mother singing R.E.M.’s “Man on the Moon,” the bird repeating the chorus. “We’re made for each other,” Elisha said to the parakeet.

  In the weeks after the accident, Elisha had dragged Charlotte to see a psychiatrist. Charlotte wondered what Dr. Birnbaum would have had to say about the bird.

  * * *

  Two months had passed since Charlotte’s father died. Outside, the temperature soared to a hundred and five degrees. The company her mother had contacted to fix the air-conditioning hadn’t shown up.

  At three, her mother called to remind Charlotte to refill the bird’s water. “He could die without it.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Charlotte said.

  “Do it now.”

  “I’m talking to you on the phone now.”

  “As soon as you hang up.”

  “Okay.”

  After the call, Charlotte lay in bed with her iPad and pulled up the Katy Perry channel on YouTube. Clicking All, she raised the sound as high as it would go and closed her eyes. Over and over she saw the ball hit her father. The music drowned out the sound but couldn’t erase the image.

  The desert sun baked the house. Sweat coated Charlotte’s palms, and she wiped them on her denim cutoffs. When she rose to give the bird water at five, it was too late. In the den, the bird lay at the bottom of the cage, rigid white head and stiff blue belly, dark eyes open. She looked away, through a window that opened to their backyard. A sparrow nested in a palo verde tree, and crows perched on the wood fence. She told herself there was no shortage of birds, and with the parakeet gone maybe Elisha would go back to being her mother and would remember the real Mellie was dead and behave the way a widow should.

  Charlotte poked her hand into the cage and petted the bird’s soft feathers. She touched its smooth, tiny beak, feeling the sharp point. Lying utterly still, the bird couldn’t help but remind her of her father. Taking a pink foot between finger and thumb, she said, “Good-bye, Mellie.”

  At the side of the house, the contents of the trash container fermented, filling the air with a sweet, rotten scent. A hot wind seared her face. “Too soon he was taken,” she said, the words of the pastor at her father’s funeral.

  It was nothing to kill a bird when you had already killed your father. Opening the trash container, she uncinched a plastic bag and pressed the parakeet beneath banana peels, Styrofoam, coffee grounds, an empty milk carton, and other discarded layers of their lives. The plastic lid slapped shut.

  Her mother would be upset. But it would serve her right for having tried to replace Charlotte’s father with a bird. And what could Elisha do? Take away Charlotte’s phone? The joke would be on her mother, because no one else called or texted Charlotte, and Charlotte had given up on social media. “You’re too sad,” her former best friend, Maxine, had explained before blocking her on Snapchat.

  Back inside, Charlotte filled the bird’s water bottle, so her mother wouldn’t find it empty. She spread out her math homework on the dining-room table as if she were doing it. When she was younger, her father had helped her with math, drawing half and quarter pies with his fancy silver pen to teach her about fractions. Finishing a lesson, they would go into the kitchen and eat bakery pie, large cherry-apple slices, raining crumbs on the embroidered tablecloth and the tile floor. Her father used the same silver pen to write checks and sometimes handed it to her, trusting her to fill in the amount and to figure the new balance.

  Lately, she had stopped doing her math homework. “Are you all right, Charlotte?” Mrs. Rapps asked when she didn’t turn it in. Each day, “Are you all right?” Charlotte wanted to poke out the woman’s soft gray eyes with her father’s pen.

  Charlotte usually greeted her mother with silence, but now, even before her mother had time to set down her briefcase, Charlotte hugged her, rubbing her cheek against her mother’s shirt and breathing in her worn-out smell. You still have me, she wanted to say, anticipating her mother’s grief at losing the bird. “I’m sorry,” she said instead.

  Her mother’s thin, dark eyebrows came together. Charlotte thought it was ridiculous for Elisha to pluck them when there was no longer anyone to impress.

  Elisha headed toward the den. For a moment the house was quiet. Then her mother shouted, her voice tight, “What have you done with Mellie?”

  Charlotte joined her in front of the empty cage. “I didn’t do anything. I gave him water just like you said. I found him at the bottom of the cage.”

  “What did you do to him?”

  It wasn’t like the bird was human. Charlotte adopted a grim expression. “Sometimes bad things happen and we don’t know why.”

  Her mother looked like she wanted to slap her, and Charlotte was afraid she might. Instead, Elisha lifted the cage from the wood stool and slammed it down again. The parakeet’s bar jumped. The water bottle crashed to the cage bottom. Birdseed flew everywhere. “Where is he?”

  “I buried him,” she said, because it was what her mother wanted to hear. From the look on her mother’s face, Charlotte could tell Elisha didn’t believe her but chose to let it go, reluctant for the time being to learn how Charlotte actually had disposed of the bird.

  Closing her eyes, Elisha rested her head against the cage. When she raised her forehead, it was imprinted with the pattern of the bars.

  * * *

  Charlotte had kept the cotton twill golf cap her father was wearing when he died. The hospital returned it in a green plastic bag with his clothes, shoes, and wallet. It was easy enough to claim the cap as her own in the days before the bird came into the house, when gauze seemed to cover her mother’s eyes, and Elisha answered anything Charlotte said with “Yes, honey.”

  “I’m going to blow my brains out now,” Charlotte said once, testing her.

  “Yes, honey.”

  The sides of the cap came over her ears; the brim reached her eyes. A ring of sweat darkened the inside. The cotton bore the metallic odor of his mineral sunscreen. Charlotte didn’t go to church. She didn’t know if she believed in God. But she felt the cap was holy because the sweat, the lotion, and stray black hairs trapped in the metal buckle contained remnants of her father.

  Behind her closed bedroom door, she slipped it on. “Flex your knees, Charlie,” her father used to say when he stood over her at the tee. Clapping, he said, “Bull’s-eye,” when she hit it straight. “Let’s grab a beer,” they would chime as they headed back to the clubhouse, though they both knew she would get a milkshake. Surrounded by acres of manicured grass, her father, long-legged and confident at her side, Charlotte felt she had won a prize. It never occurred to her that luck was fragile, capable of vanishing in an afternoon. She had pictured her future as a pro, signing autographs for young girls. Now she refused to go anywhere near a course.

  Sitting on the carpet, she yanked the bill down and murmured, “Fore,” wishing she could go back and warn her father. She touched her temple.

  Charlotte heard her mother in the den, rattling the cage as she cleaned it, and she remembered how the bird would shake the bars, searching for an escape. She wouldn’t miss the metal clattering in the afternoon, but she didn’t like seeing her mother so distressed.

  Later that night, she and her mother sat down to dinner in the kitchen. Elisha had cha
nged into old shorts and a black tank top, and her hair knot was unraveling. Briefly, Charlotte missed the mother who had dressed up for the bird. “I’m sending you back to Dr. Birnbaum,” Elisha said.

  Charlotte speared a chicken breast on her fork and waved it at her mother. “You know chicken is a bird, right?”

  Her mother smacked a serving spoon filled with mashed potatoes onto Charlotte’s plate, spraying white clouds across the table.

  This was what Charlotte remembered from her previous three therapy sessions: the doctor’s soccer ball belly pressing against his Oxford shirt and a white noise machine that couldn’t fill the endless silences.

  * * *

  After Charlotte pulled on her father’s golf cap at school the next morning, kids parted around her in the hall. When her father died, all the news stations had carried it. Hats were not allowed in school, but no one objected to her wearing one.

  “Charlotte! I’ve been meaning to talk to you.” Mr. Marcus, the golf coach, hurried toward her. It was too late to duck into a classroom or the stairwell. He wore a team shirt and carried a clipboard, his tan skin thick as a hide. “How you doin’, Charlotte?”

  “I’m not playing anymore.” But his presence made her think about it. How good it felt to hit a long drive, to sink a putt.

  “I’m not asking about golf. I’m asking how you’re doing. In life.”

  “Great. My father’s dead and my mother’s insane. I’m doing great.”

  “Sorry to hear that.” Mr. Marcus told Charlotte for the umpteenth time how much he admired her father, how he’d followed his career from when Mellie was a junior. “Listen, I’m putting together a trip to Colorado. Nice and cool there. Just a fun trip. No drills, just play. How about you come?”

  It would be like returning to the scene of a crime. “I can’t.”

  “Just think about it.”