We Never Asked for Wings by Vanessa Diffenbaugh
Letty set the spoon on the table, next to the water, and turned her attention to him. “What do you have to do?”
“That’s what I need to figure out. The assignment is to design an experiment.”
She looked at him with her eyebrows furrowed. “You’ve spent your entire life designing experiments. So what’s the problem?”
Alex sighed. “The other kids have been working on their ideas for a year, and there’s scholarship money at stake—not for this first round, but eventually.”
His eyes wandered to the feathers, and Letty followed his gaze. “You miss your grandpa, huh?”
If his grandpa were here, he would open those drawers himself and unlock the mysteries of the feathers. But he’d left Alex alone, and it all felt too hard without him.
Letty moved closer to Alex on the bed, gently turning his head away from the file cabinets to look into her eyes. “I bet there isn’t one thing you could ask him that you haven’t already asked ten times.”
Alex exhaled ruefully, remembering himself as a little boy, tugging on his grandfather’s shirt, pestering him to explain flight paths and seasonal migration and juvenile bird identification for the hundredth time. “You’re probably right.”
“So if he were here, what would you ask him?”
Alex thought hard. There was only one thing he wanted to know. “I’d ask him what’s so special about a feather.”
“And what would he say?”
Alex pressed a hand into his heart. The missing hurt, but it felt good too. “He’d grab me by the ear and drag me over to look at his mosaic, and he’d ask me how I could possibly ask him that, and then I’d tell him I wasn’t asking about art, I was asking about science, and he’d tell me to go look up keratin extraction and isotope signatures and I’d tell him I already had, five times at least.”
Letty laughed. “That sounds about right. So what’s so special about a feather?”
She’d gotten him to answer his own question. He sighed. “What’s special is that it’s a time stamp. A perfectly preserved record of where a bird has been, and when, and all the food and water and toxins it consumed.”
“How do you find all that out?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, that’s the first place to start, I think.”
Alex sat up and riffled through the file folders, turning to his favorite color and then closing it from his mother’s watching eyes. The note was still tucked among the feathers. They’d never talked about his grandparents’ decision to stay in Mexico, and he had no idea whether she knew Enrique’s flight had been premeditated.
“You don’t think Grandpa would mind me using them?”
“He left them for you, didn’t he? It’s not like he thought you were going to become an artist.”
They both smiled, remembering Alex’s hopeless attempts at feather work. He closed the drawer and turned back to Letty. “Mom? I’m sorry—about what I said.”
Letty stood up and grabbed her spoon, turning around and pressing it onto the top of his head.
“It’s okay.” Pausing, she looked out the window and then added: “Guess what? I found us a house. In Mission Heights.”
“Really?” Alex didn’t know how to feel about this news. On the one hand, he would officially belong at Mission Hills. On the other, he would be farther from Yesenia, and right when she needed him. “When are we moving?”
“This weekend.”
“Wow.”
“I know. It’s sudden. But I think you’ll like it.” She got up, heading to the kitchen. “I’ll call you when dinner’s ready.”
Alex lay back on the bed. He would rest for just one minute before starting to work on his project, he thought, but when Letty called him fifteen minutes later he was already deep asleep, pulled by exhaustion and relief into a dream in which Yesenia wore a headdress of black feathers and danced to the sound of an old man laughing. Alex danced around her, trying to pluck a feather, but when he finally got one, long and inky, the feather turned to tar and sealed his shivering lips closed.
Letty stood alone in her empty bedroom. It had taken all day, but together she and Sara had succeeded in clearing out the apartment, abandoning the furniture in a heap by the Dumpster and stuffing bags full of clothes, toys, and books into Sara’s car. Sara had just driven off with the first load, leaving Alex and Luna to guard the second from Mrs. Starks, who sat in her lawn chair, looking on. Alex had already had to rescue his quilt from within Mrs. S’s “shop,” so he was on high alert. From the window Letty watched his diligence, Luna springing from box to box and Mrs. Starks standing up and sitting down and standing up again. Alex kept his eyes on both of them, pretending to play Star Wars with his sister and wielding a broomstick like a light saber any time Mrs. Starks got too close to the boxes.
Letty had told Alex and Luna she needed to do a final walk-through, but really she’d climbed the stairs to say good-bye. Besides a handful of nights she’d slept at Sara’s or snuck out with Wes, she’d spent her entire life in this small bedroom, and traces of her were everywhere: fingerprints dotted the windows and the white paint, stains from shoes of every size crisscrossed the carpet under her feet. Walking to the window, she looked out at the same view she’d studied as a baby, looking over the bars of her crib. She didn’t remember it, but her father loved to tell the story of coming to get her after a nap and finding her standing up and pointing at the planes. Noisy birds, she’d said as her father picked her up, and for the rest of her childhood, every time a particularly loud jet would rumble past, her mother or father would look up from whatever they were doing and repeat her observation: noisy birds.
She wondered what her parents were doing, right now, in Oro de Hidalgo. She had finally summoned the strength to open the letters. The first few were as she’d imagined—reminders of things that Letty had forgotten or never known. But in the more recent letters Maria Elena had started to write about her life in Mexico. She’d written that Enrique was working again, and that she had reconnected with one of her old high school friends, who now had thirty-six grandchildren. I guess she decided to go for quantity, her mother had written, as usual leaving what she really meant unsaid: none of them could hold a finger to Alex or Luna. She would write back to her mother after they were settled, she decided, and tell her parents about the move and Alex’s and Luna’s new schools. She hoped they would be proud.
With a final look at the runway, and the bay, and the birds she would forever think of as her father’s, Letty made her way through the rest of the house, walking quickly through her parents’ bedroom and the living room and lingering in the kitchen, where she opened and closed the refrigerator and every single cabinet, whisking dry beans and rice and pennies from the dirty Con-Tact paper her mother had so carefully laid down, all those years before.
Just as she’d pocketed the last coin, Letty heard footsteps on the stairs. It must be Luna, she thought—Alex would never leave the boxes unattended—but when she turned around, she saw Wes walking through the empty living room. He was wearing scrubs. A drawstring held up the loose blue pants; he’d tucked his shirt sloppily into the top.
“Wow,” Wes said, taking in the empty space.
“We’re moving.”
“I can see that,” he said, looking around. “I had no idea. You know, these are the kinds of things you’re going to have to start telling me.”
There was a confidence in the statement that hadn’t been there when he’d called Flannigan’s, and Letty wondered if he’d talked to Alex already, and what he’d said. “I was going to,” Letty said. “It was kind of sudden.”
“I guess so. When I told Alex I’d pick him up on Saturday he didn’t mention he’d be posted in front of a pile of boxes.”
So they had spoken. Alex didn’t have a phone, which meant Wes had met up with him somewhere. As strict as she was trying to be with Alex after his late night with Yesenia, it was impossible to keep tabs on him all the time. She was working, and she stil
Wes walked to the kitchen window and looked out. In the parking lot below, Alex faced off against Mrs. Starks, his broomstick twirling like a baton. “Where are you moving?”
“To Mission Heights.”
Wes dropped one eyebrow, almost imperceptibly. She knew what he was thinking and also that he was trying to come up with a way to say it that didn’t sound condescending. “How’d you swing that?”
“This guy I work with, Rick. He knew I was trying to get out of Bayshore, and a friend of his was looking for a caretaker.”
“Sounds nice.”
“It is. A little remote, though. I’m going to have to get a new car.” She bit her tongue, hoping he wouldn’t ask what had happened to her old one. It wasn’t a story she was ready to tell. When he didn’t, she added: “I’ve almost saved enough.”
“Good for you.”
Wes turned as if to leave, but instead he walked down the hall to her old bedroom. Letty followed him to the window, watching as he ran his fingertips along the sill. The cracked paint was still stained orange in a waxy ring where she’d burned pumpkin candles, her signal to Wes that she was awake, and waiting. From the top of the pedestrian bridge over the freeway he would see the light and come running, climbing a rope through her window and lying beside her, his sweaty heart pounding and neither of them speaking through the silent minutes, sure Maria Elena had heard. But she never did. Or she ignored it, loving Wes and trusting him completely. Letty had always wondered.
“Feels like forever ago, doesn’t it?” she said.
“Not really.”
With a fingernail she scraped at the orange wax, flicking it onto the floor. Next to hers, his forearms looked pink, sunburned and spotted. She remembered lying beside him, comparing their colors by moonlight, making up new words to describe them.
“Remember vermocean?”
The orange-ringed blue of his eyes.
He nodded. “My feet still hurt.”
They’d come up with it the summer they’d challenged each other to a barefoot contest, and even now she remembered exactly the way he looked, stretched out on his front porch, feet propped up on the swing, a sunset of oranges and yellows spreading out from his pupils, bleeding into the blue of his irises. She’d still never seen anything like it. “Vermocean. Of all our words, that was my favorite.”
“I liked aquanude.”
As soon as he said it he looked away, and she knew he was remembering the night they’d invented it, hopping the fence to the junior high school pool and swimming naked, making up words to describe the color of their bare skin underwater.
“No,” Letty disagreed. “Sounds like a sex-offending superhero.”
Wes laughed and turned back to her, studying her face as if trying to compare the Letty of his memory to the Letty standing before him now. “You were so crazy,” he said. “Remember that barbed wire? I don’t know how you convinced me.”
“I don’t know either.” It had caught on the frayed edges of her jean shorts, scraped a bloody line up her inner thigh, and yet she’d kept climbing, and convinced him to climb too. “I wasn’t afraid of anything.”
She marveled at the words, trying to remember what it had felt like to be that girl, breaking the law and baring her body to Wes, not to mention anyone who happened to walk by. Life had changed her. She was afraid of so much now, but even as she thought it she felt something shift, the great jaws of fear loosening, and in its place was a flicker of excitement, as if she were back in high school, with all the world still hers to conquer.
In the distance she saw Sara’s car turn up Mile Road. It was time to rescue Alex from Mrs. Starks and pack up the final load. Reluctantly, she turned to go.
“You want to follow us over? You can see our new place, and take Alex from there.”
Wes nodded, and Letty waited until he’d retreated down the stairs before she closed the door to her room, and then the door to her parents’ room, and then locked the front door of Apartment 31C for the last time.
—
As soon as they’d unloaded Sara’s car, Sara said good-bye, sweaty and late for a first date, and left them to manage the pile of boxes and bags on the front porch without her. Luna started to unpack her toys but deserted the task within minutes, spending the evening instead lining up her barn animals on the window seat and fashioning a fence out of screws and washers she pulled from the tiny drawers. Alex dragged his own bags into his bedroom and then tore through the remaining boxes in search of the telephone, which he carried down the hall and plugged into the jack by his bed. Letty and Wes listened to his hushed conversation with Yesenia as they carried labeled boxes into the house one at a time. Letty found herself moving quickly, her mind drifting back to their conversation at the Landing, and she realized she wanted to continue where they’d left off.
After they’d carried in the last box, Letty retrieved her new set of barware from above the refrigerator. It was a housewarming gift from Rick, left on the front porch with a note: Make me a drink. Letty had stuffed the note in her pocket before Wes could see. Lining up the strainer, jigger, and long, shiny bar spoon, she reached into the back of the cabinet for a jam jar labeled GINGER SYRUP. Rick had made it himself and brought it to the bar for one of his specials, and she’d snuck the not-quite-empty jar out of the bar at the end of one of her shifts. The syrup was thick and slow to pour. When she’d finally scooped it out, she added vodka and sparkling water, and then opened the freezer. Rick had filled it with Hoshizaki ice—cubes so expensive she thought they should have been made from something besides water. She could feel Wes’s eyes on her as she shook the drinks, poured them into glasses, and squeezed in a wedge of lime.
“I’ve got to drive,” he said, when Letty handed him one.
“There’s less than an ounce of vodka.” She sat down at the built-in kitchen table, taking a sip. The ginger was intense; she imagined it burning Rick’s hands as he grated and peeled and pressed the spicy root.
Wes lifted the glass to his nose. “Smells good.”
“Tastes good too.”
From the opposite end of the hall, Alex’s voice rose. For a second it sounded like he and Yesenia were arguing, but then he dropped his voice and began to whisper again. Letty heard the words anything for you, and she felt color rise to her cheeks, remembering her drunken attempt to teach Alex how to play hard-to-get. It hadn’t worked.
Letty took another sip of her drink and nodded for Wes to sit across from her. “So how long have you been back in Mission Hills, anyway?”
Wes didn’t answer. His expression had changed; he shook his head and turned away from her. Holding his untouched cocktail over the sink, he tipped the glass until ounce after precious ounce slipped down the drain. Letty had an urge to jump up and rescue the drink, but instead she gulped down her own and did nothing.
He handed the empty glass back to her.
“Listen,” he said, letting out a huge, exhausted sigh. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life mad at you—I really don’t. But I can’t sit at your kitchen table and have a drink and make small talk. I’m not over what you did, Letty. Honestly, I don’t know if I ever will be.”
It had felt too good to be true, the nostalgic banter of those final moments in her old bedroom, and now here it was: the truth of how he felt. Letty set her empty glass on the table next to the one he’d handed back to her. Lipstick and fingerprints dirtied the glass she’d used; his was polished and clean.
“Look,” she said. “If I could do it over again, I would. I promise you that.” She stood up and carried both glasses to the sink. Warm water filled them and spilled out the tops. “But I was eighteen, Wes. And I loved you. I know it was wrong, but even tonight, when you walked into the apartment in those scrubs, for just a split second I thought that I was right to do it.”
“You weren’t right.”
She set the glasses down on a d
“Which life?” he demanded. “Maybe it wasn’t the life I wanted.”
Letty blew out a loud puff of air, exasperated. “Do you even remember yourself in high school? It was exactly the life you wanted.” She turned back to the sink. In the window over the faucet, the world was dark and close, leaves and branches and sky pressing in all around them. All of a sudden she felt claustrophobic. Opening the window as wide as it would go, she turned back around and continued: “Do you remember the first time we went out?”
Wes nodded, though the term went out was a bit of a stretch—what they’d really done was sneak out of a track banquet and up a fire escape with a miniature bottle of tequila Letty had nabbed from a passed-out neighbor the night before. One swig and tipsy, Wes had declared his future.
“You told me you’d be a bachelor for life, that there was no other way to live in the world and do the work you wanted to do. You said you wanted to die alone.”
Wes rolled his eyes to the ceiling, shaking his head at his sixteen-year-old self. “Did I really say that? I’m surprised that wasn’t the end of us, right there.”
It sounded ridiculous now, but she’d loved that Wes. Smart, determined. So, so sure.
She shrugged. “You had plans.”
“So did you,” Wes reminded her. “I mean, didn’t you think about—”
Letty’s glare cut him off. “About what? About not having a baby at all?”
“It’s a fair question.”
It was fair, but it didn’t feel fair now, not with the murmur of Alex in the other room. “It was too late when I found out.”
Wes fiddled with the strings on his scrubs, pulling the bow tight and double-knotting it. He said nothing, but she knew he was considering what she’d said, playing back his life as he’d lived it: college, medical school, international work on four continents. Sara had Internet-stalked him when she found out he’d come back. He’d done well. In medical school at NYU he was elected to the Alpha Omega Alpha honor society, and he’d published an article in The Journal of the American Medical Association before he even turned thirty.