Sunday, January 3, 2010

Behind the Wall

Kayleigh, my seven year old daughter cracks open a book. The splitting covers make an actual audible crackle and the pages between fall open for her upon her lap. With her pinky finger, she flips through the pages to the beginning and starts to read the words aloud. Her words come to me like divination, as evidence of the ingot of intelligence and personality growing in her little body. I look at my wife Rheia to share a smile. I love to see my daughter this way. Through moments like this, I can see the eternity of time and life, the fixture of the present and the future. My daughter is reading and her words float into the world like weather balloons; silver vehicles of thought lighter than air.
Rheia leans over to her side in her chair, twisted in ecstasy and she moans sweetly. She gets up from the chair and kisses Kayleigh on the head. She comes over to me at the computer desk.
“She’s getting so big.” She says and she moans again. “I want another baby.” I look at her with alarm before I can edit it, and she catches it with its full meaning. At the age of thirty and feeling her reproductive career dwindling within her, we had had this discussion before. She had come to me one night after Kayleigh had fallen asleep and told me what she wanted. As a high school teacher at the age of 43, I enjoyed seeing Kayleigh come upon milestones that my students had already passed. I felt like she, and me with her were accomplishing something, right on the schedule that prescribed our lives. Having another baby would tack on another 20 years of dependency and I couldn’t see myself at the age of 60, seeing my son or daughter off to whatever plane in life he/she would be departing on. I’d already had a vasectomy as well, so we had agreed long ago that it was an impossible thing she was asking for; something we both wanted yet could not have.

I walked away from the argument by simply getting up and walking away, busying myself with the dishes in the kitchen, leaving the issue with a huge sense of potential elastic energy. I don’t know what Rheia did in response to my avoidance, but she was suddenly quiet with a profound and poignant silence.
I went to bed that night feeling low, staring into the darkness, apologizing to the silence while my wife slept with her back to me, wrapped in our bed sheet and lost to me. I laid there for a faceless amount of time until finally I descended into my own oblivious solitude of sleep.
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One day, a few days after, I woke up to my alarm at 6:00 and began my normal morning routine. I was not feeling rested but I made my coffee while the rest of the family slept, eating my toast with jam, browsing the internet for the news. Although I appreciated the unchallenged quiet of the morning as I always did, I was feeling as if something was fighting my every move; the air, the world. I dressed slowly to not wake anyone up, putting on my business casual clothes; my compromise to the higher powers, then leaned across the bed to kiss Rheia goodbye. She didn’t respond at all, so I let her sleep on.
At work, I was feeling as if I was speaking into a void. My first period students were listless and inattentive, talking under me, but I did nothing to quiet them. I really just wanted to stretch out on my bed at home and sleep. The entire class and the next following went by blankly and I was glad when the bell rang and I could break for lunch. As usual, I called Rheia at home and she picked up the phone, breathless. There was a sound coming from behind the wall at home; something squawking and scratching, something alive. I asked how something could have gotten behind our wall and she said she didn’t know but there was a definite noise, there was a definite living thing that seemed to be trapped behind our wall. She sounded like she wanted me to come home, but the drive home and back would have consumed more than my lunch hour and I would have been late for my next class. I looked at the clock and saw that I had already waited too long to call, even though of course there was no way of knowing that this duty was waiting for me, just as there was no way for me to make it home in time. I now wanted to be home, rescuing my wife, or at least rescuing this poor thing that had trapped itself between the walls of my home.


When I finally did come home, Rheia pulled me to the kitchen, grabbing my arm so tight her strength surprised me. I laughed at her urgency, but she shushed me to be quiet, waving her hands severely to pipe down. There was nothing at first, but after a minute, it happened. There was something trapped behind the wall. Some little creature was scratching against some impenetrable barrier, squawking in rage and fear. I felt my hairs on the back of my neck standing on end as I looked at Rheia who was transfixed, and Kayleigh, who had come into the room and froze. The look in Kayleigh’s eyes was wild with a feral kind of intensity, the creature's fear translating to her. As soon as it began, it ceased, leaving everything quiet though charged with the certainty of its presence. It had made itself known. Then again, I heard it but only for a brief moment before it was silent again. I thought of the creature, exhausted into silence, depleted of energy and without hope, resting then jumping to life with some kind of implausible drive, an almost innate inacceptance of the circumstance, wanting to obliterate reality and be free.
The sound seemed to be coming from the part of the house where the chimney was, so I went downstairs to the cleanout hatch to see whether or not I could see anything. I slid the door out of the way and looked in, but saw nothing. The basement light was poor and afforded no view into what was in that little chamber at the bottom of my chimney. I went and got a flashlight, lifted the hatch and looked in to see two beady eyes looking back at me. Frightened, I dropped the hatch quickly before it could escape. It was a bird, a young bird by the look of it. My muscles felt like gelatine, I’d gotten such a fright from just realizing that there actually is something alive in there. I'd viewed the other side of the wall, and there was life. I called Rheia to help me by holding hold the light so I could use both my hands. She protested, not willing to participate, hoping I would carry through with this on my own, but Kayleigh wanted to see , asking in such earnest insistence that she agreed. I knelt down by the grate under my wife’s lifted light, slid open the hatch and reached in with my gloved hand. I felt it and it did not protest and when I closed my fingers around it, it let me embrace it without any struggle at all. Somehow it knew my clutch was not captivity but freedom. I picked it up and brought it out to show Rheia and Kayleigh. It looked like a juvenile, but I wasn’t sure what kind of bird it was. It looked like a robin but it was all black with white speckles on its breast and wings, with iridescent orange sheen in its black plumage. Even in the light and the awed audience of my wife and daughter, it didn’t struggle though it looked around wildly, probably wondering what was going to become of it.
“Is he okay?” asked Kayleigh. “He’s not hurt is he?”
“I don’t know, K.” I said. “Let’s take it outside and let it go and we’ll see.” We, the family, brought the bird outside and set it down by the shrubs where it could hide if it were hurt in any way, but to our surprise, it scuttled away, under our car. We followed it and it emerged out the back and flew away into a tree. “There, it must be healthy if it can do that.” I said.
“Thank God,” said Rheia. I turned to look at Kayleigh and she looked extremely relieved.

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