We Never Asked for Wings by Vanessa Diffenbaugh
“Wow,” Alex said, when they had finished. “It’s amazing.”
“I felt the same way the first time I saw it,” the grad student said. “You’re lucky. I was almost thirty before I got to see one.”
“I am lucky.”
“I can’t let you use it, because you aren’t Stanford-affiliated. And the chemistry’s pretty complicated. But maybe we could run a few samples for you.”
Alex’s face fell, a look of such disappointment it was like Santa had come back down the chimney to rip his Christmas presents right out of his hand.
Wes showed them his Stanford ID. He wasn’t in Earth Sciences, he said, but maybe they’d make an exception, and the grad student handed him a business card for the director of the lab.
“You might as well ask,” he said. “And if it doesn’t work out, let me know how I can help.”
—
“It has to work out,” Alex said as they started back across the quad. “I don’t want someone else running my experiment.” He tried to imagine it, sitting at home, waiting for someone to call him with the results. “Could I at least be there? Just watch or something?”
“I’ll do what I can.” The business card pressed a rectangle against the thin material of Wes’s scrubs, and Alex wanted to reach inside his pocket, pull it out, and dial the number right then and there. But it was almost nine, and a Saturday. Wes pressed the card deeper into his pocket, as though reading his son’s mind. “I’ll call him on Monday morning, first thing. I promise.”
Alex sighed. “Okay.”
They were quiet as they climbed into Wes’s car. When they pulled out onto Palm Drive, Alex asked: “Do you think I should test a bird from every year?”
“I don’t think so,” Wes said. “I think you’d want to bin them, maybe into five-year periods. You’d want ten to fifteen samples from every period, at least. That way you can determine if any differences you find are random versus actual changes in the feathers over time.”
Alex made the note in his book. Without looking up, he added: “You can drop me off at Yesenia’s.”
“Don’t you want to have dinner?”
“Not really.” Alex felt his cheeks flush pink, embarrassed at his accidental honesty. “I mean, I will, if you want to.”
“I told you!” Wes said. “I knew there was no way you’d want to hang out with your dad on a Saturday night.”
“It’s not that—” Alex started, but Wes cut him off.
“It’s fine, really.” He gave him a gentle pop to the temple. “I was just messing with you, I promise. Go have fun.”
Guiltily, Alex directed Wes to Yesenia’s house, and when he pulled up in front of her building, Alex jumped out.
“Hey,” Wes said, calling him back. “How will you get home?”
“I’ll get there.”
“Are you sure?” Alex nodded, and Wes studied him. Alex could see the uncertainty in his father’s eyes. He had no idea what was and wasn’t allowed, and he wasn’t going to call Letty to ask. Finally he dug a marker out of the glove compartment and pushed Alex’s sleeve up, writing his phone number on his forearm. The ink was the same color as a tattoo.
“Save this in your phone,” he said, “and call me if you need a ride. No matter how late.”
—
The light was on in Yesenia’s bedroom. Alex could see it from the street, and he thought about calling her on his new phone, but instead he took the stairs two at a time and knocked on the door.
“Who’s there?”
“It’s me.”
The door squeaked open. She was wearing a pair of pajama shorts with yellow butterflies printed on them. They were short-short, and she pulled them down self-consciously and adjusted a hooded sweatshirt she wore over the top. “I thought you were moving.”
“We already did. And then I went with Wes to a lab, and then we were going to go out to dinner but I wanted to see you instead.” He pulled the phone out of his pocket. “Look.”
“He gave you that?” Yesenia pulled him into her bedroom, closing and locking the door, even though her mother was at work. “Let me see.”
He placed the phone on her unmade bed, and she moved it onto the pillow, so it sat between them like a third person. The face was blank and glossy, perfect. Alex had polished it on the way up the stairs. She pressed it on and scrolled through his empty contacts, then found the ringtones in the settings. She changed it to an electronic bird noise, nothing like any bird Alex had ever heard.
“I wish you had one too,” he said. “We could FaceTime.”
Yesenia slid the phone back across the pillow. “I don’t think buying me an iPhone is exactly in my mom’s budget.”
Alex felt stupid for mentioning it. Carmen was doing everything she could for her daughter, but she never could have bought her a phone. He suddenly felt undeserving, and he pushed the phone deep into his pocket, out of sight, and rolled over on her bed, facing the ceiling. She scooted toward him, her stomach pushed up against his side.
“What did you do with Wes?” she asked.
Alex sighed, happy for the change of subject. He rolled over to face her. “We worked on my project.”
“Yeah? What did you do?”
“He took me to a lab at Stanford. They have a mass spectrometer in the science building next to where he works. He’s trying to get me permission to use it.”
She took his hand in hers, pressing it under her shirt, on her stomach, up to her bra. “Use it to do what?”
It was significantly harder to explain with one hand reaching under her bra. “I’m working with isotope signatures,” he started, but then his hands were around her back, pulling at her bra clasp, and he lost his train of thought.
She pushed his hands away.
“Hey, you started it,” he said, struggling to hold on to her as she squirmed away and sat up.
“But you aren’t capable of talking and touching at the same time,” she said, and then: “Talk first. Touch after.”
Alex sighed, sitting up and backing away from her, the distance clearing his mind. “The idea is that birds are what they drink. The water that birds drink while they’re growing feathers stays in the feathers and doesn’t change over time, so when you analyze them you can find out exactly where a bird has been and what it has consumed.”
“Your grandpa would love it.”
Alex went to the hall, where he’d left his box of feathers, and carried it back to the bed. Taking off the lid, he riffled through the folders. “I’m not sure he would,” he said. “It’s a destructive process. I don’t think he’d like to see his feather collection destroyed, even if it was in the name of science.”
Yesenia shook her head, disagreeing. “Wings, remember?”
Alex sucked in a quick breath. Until that moment, he’d forgotten: she’d been there the night he found the note, the night he learned his grandfather had left and wasn’t coming back. He felt his chest contract the way it always did when he thought of his grandfather. Yesenia felt it too. Popping off the bed, she stood behind him, her arms wrapped around his waist. She was so short her head tucked underneath his arm without her having to bend down. “He didn’t mean for you to take him literally.”
They’d learned the Icarus myth in sixth grade, and he remembered it then, imagining a heavy set of wax-and-feather wings, jumping out the window and taking off toward the sun. “I know he didn’t.”
She reached out, her hands on his hands on the feathers. “So what are you looking for? I mean, what do you think you’ll find?”
“I’m not sure yet. All I know is that I want to look for changes over time. I mean, anyone can go down to the shoreline and pluck a wing feather from an egret and put the feather through some fancy process to see where it traveled the year before. Not everyone can then hold the results up against feathers gathered from the same species in the same place in 2005 or 1995 or 1985.”
It was the single thing that made his grandfather’s collections so special, he’d
“They go back that far?”
“Yep.”
“That’s amazing.”
They were quiet as Yesenia pulled out the file folders and arranged them on the bed.
“You could look for toxins.”
“I thought of that. But someone’s probably got a whole lab full of soil samples that would prove or disprove any toxins much better than I ever could.”
She was quiet, lining the feathers up end to end, a long red chain.
“You can really tell from the feather where a bird has been?”
“I think so.”
He drew the shape of a continent on the table, as if this would make his explanation more clear, but she was looking out the window, into the night sky.
“So you could figure out where the birds are migrating. See if it’s really true, what they are saying.”
“About what?”
“About the planet heating up.”
Climate change. It was a good idea—an amazing idea. Looking at her, he wondered, and not for the first time, who she would be at Mission Hills, as Mr. Everett’s student. She’d be like any one of them only better, he thought, but instead she was at Bayshore High, filling in a coloring book full of planets and silent from boredom and fear.
He turned back to his notebook. “So the null hypothesis is that there is no change,” he said. Opening a box, he scanned for something his grandfather would have found every year for thirty years. The Allen’s hummingbird. His hummingbird feeders ensured a constant flow of red feathers. Flipping to the back of the box, he pulled out an envelope labeled SCARLET POPPY V744, ALLEN’S HUMMINGBIRD, JUNE 1995. “And the prediction is that if birds fly south to reach a particular temperature, they might not have to fly as far anymore.”
“Exactly,” Yesenia said. “But you’d have to run the experiment to see.”
“If I win. I only run the whole experiment if I win.”
She revealed two feathers she’d managed to smuggle into her fist, the exact color of the streak in her hair. She held one up behind each ear. “You’ll win. How could you not win, with an assistant like me?”
“Hey, I might need those!” He reached for the feathers, but she leapt away, to one side of the room and then the other, and when he cornered her she crawled up on top of the bed and let herself be tackled. With one hand he took the feathers and with the other he held both her wrists. She winced in pain.
“I’m sorry,” he said, letting go. Rolling away, he took both her hands in his and tried to lift the cuffs of her long-sleeved sweatshirt.
“Don’t.”
She pulled away from him.
“Let me see.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Then let me see.”
Holding her still, he peeled back the bandage until he saw what it covered: a large scrape surrounded by a circle of yellowish green scabs, the color of infection. It made him instantly sick, and his stomach lurched as he pressed the bandage back in place.
“You have to see a doctor,” he said, remembering his own infection, but Yesenia shook her head fiercely and pulled away.
“See, that’s why I didn’t want to show you. I don’t want you to worry. I don’t want it to even exist!” Her voice was filled with exasperation, and her eyes were wet. “I just want it to be me and you, together,” she whispered. “The way it was before.”
The way it had been just moments before, she meant, before her pain had forced him to remember. She wanted him to forget, but how could he? She was so little, and Bayshore High was so big. He lay down on the bed and pulled her on top of him, held her there unmoving, tight. With his whole being he wanted to be with her, wanted to keep her safe.
And then all at once it hit him: he could get her into Mission Hills. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it before. He’d been so busy feeling guilty that he’d missed the obvious. And if she came to school with him he could protect her, every moment of every day.
Lifting her head off his chest, he looked into her eyes.
“I want you to come to Mission Hills with me.”
“So do I. But you know I can’t. My mom isn’t like your mom.”
But Carmen didn’t have anything to do with it. He’d thought of another way.
“I can get you in.”
She shook her head. “No, you can’t.”
“I can.” He saw it all coming together, imagined himself and Yesenia racing to the school, logging on to the computer using Mr. Everett’s password, and making her a new student profile. “We just need to say you live with me.”
“But why would I live with you?”
“We could say you’re my cousin. And you just moved here.”
“Gross.”
“It’s not gross if you’re not my girlfriend.”
What classes would he give her? He wondered if it would be too obvious if they had all the same classes. Probably. But he didn’t like the idea of letting her go off alone, even for an hour. The kids at Mission Hills might be learning, but they weren’t any nicer and many of them were just as stupid. More, even. The more he thought about it, the more he realized she would have just as good a chance of getting bullied at Mission Hills as she did at Bayshore, with one difference: he would be there to protect her. She would have to have the same schedule, the same exact schedule he did.
Yesenia squirreled up higher on the bed so their foreheads aligned on the pillow.
“Not your girlfriend?” she asked. “Alex Espinosa, are you breaking up with me?”
I’m not breaking up with you, he thought. I’m saving you.
But instead he asked: “Are you in?”
Yesenia chewed on her lip, then took a deep breath and smiled.
“When do I start?”
The light from the west-facing window was only enough to see Luna’s profile against her pillow. It was still early, but Alex had been gone for an hour at least, setting his own alarm and heating up the scrambled eggs Letty had left on a plate in the refrigerator the night before. She hadn’t seen much of him since they’d moved in. Every day he stayed late at school to work on his project, and afterward he called her on his new cell phone to say he was taking the bus to Stanford, to see Wes—which Letty took to mean Bayshore, to see Yesenia, or at the very least a combination of the two.
She really should wake Luna, but she didn’t want to, and she didn’t want to go to work either. She’d picked up a co-worker’s shifts the weekend before, which meant she’d been at the bar nine days straight, two of them with her daughter. Rick had spent most of the afternoons in the hallway with Luna, so she hadn’t been alone, but she was still a distraction, climbing up onto his shoulders and sliding down his back and racing him to the escalator and back while Letty tried to concentrate on measuring with the jiggers that still felt awkward in her hands, looking up complicated recipes she’d not yet memorized. Now, she was tired. She wanted a break from the bar, and even more she wanted time to unpack and to explore her new treasure chest of a house. The owners hadn’t emptied it, and every drawer contained a different surprise: embroidered dish towels in the kitchen and doll clothes in the closet and an entire medicine cabinet full of seashells. The tool-chest drawers in the living room were her favorites, though. Alongside the hammers and nails and screws of every size she’d found a collection of crystals, strings of dried flowers, and a heavy metal deity in the shape of an elephant. The elephant was on the windowsill now, light glinting off its golden back.
With a yawn, Luna stretched awake, wriggling across her mattress and climbing off. She staggered over to Letty’s bed. Crawling in, she pressed her bony butt into Letty’s soft stomach.
“I’m cold.”
Letty wrapped her arm around her daughter and tucked the blanket under her chin. It was her favorite thing about their new room: the air that leaked around the closed window, which smelled of forest ins
“Do you want to go to school today?”
“No.” Luna parroted the answer out of habit, and in the quiet Letty could tell her daughter was considering her quick response, whether or not it was true anymore. Every day at dinner Luna added to the long list of things she loved about her teacher: the color of her hair (lemon sorbet, Luna called it), the way she read stories aloud, her crazy hat collection. Finally, she lifted her head off the pillow and turned to look at Letty. “Are you saying I can stay home?”
Letty dropped one eyebrow. “Don’t think this is going to happen all the time,” she said, and then grinned conspiratorially. “But if you want to, yes. Your grandma used to let me take a day off. Just one a year—if my grades were perfect—to help her make tamales. What do you say we find out where the backyard ends, and then you can help me get ready for our Christmas party?”
“We’re having a Christmas party?”
It was too much good news at once. Luna sprang out of bed, jumping from Letty’s mattress to her own and back again.
“Of course we are. Now put on something warm while I make us breakfast.”
After big bowls of oatmeal with brown sugar (or brown sugar with oatmeal, the way Luna made it), Letty called in sick, and then she dialed the school secretary to report Luna’s absence too. They put on the rain boots they hadn’t worn since they left the Landing and headed into the woods. Letty wanted to know if there was a fence at the property line, or if the forest rose unobstructed to the summit and then down the other side, to the ocean. A step in front of Luna, she led the way through a tangle of manzanitas and into the redwoods. Their boots padded softly on the duff, and Luna kept popping off the trail and balancing on one foot as if waiting to sink. But here, the ground was firm.
While they walked, Letty pulled her daughter forward with one hand, firing off a hundred questions to keep her mind occupied and her feet moving. It worked for a little while, Luna chatting away and following without complaint. But ten minutes later, Luna announced she wanted to turn back. Her feet hurt, she said, and she was hungry. Again. Already.