Bluebird
by museHe came with the rain, decades ago when the forest here was still saplings, back when we were growing sod and Mama was crying every night that the drought would ruin us. I heard him before I saw him that first time, a cheerful whistle coming up the road.
“Don’t talk to him,” the neighbors whispered. “That boy’s bad luck.”
But he’d been friendly and young, as young as me, the only other person under thirty anyplace I could get to on foot. A year older, maybe two. I’d never asked. He walked barefoot no matter the time of year, no matter the weather, whistling as he left footprints in the snow. Most days he’d stop and talk to me.
“Hey, Kat.” He smiled with both rows of teeth.
“Bluebird.”
I don’t know where I’d come up with that nickname. He didn’t wear a thread of blue and his eyes were the color of a summer field, but the name suited him. I’d never heard him called anything else.
“Where’re you walkin’ today?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. I’ll know when I get there.” Same answer as ever.
“Can I walk with you?”
“Of course. Walking is always nicer with someone beside you.”
He didn’t speak like the other people from our area. His words came out like books, carefully articulated. He didn’t hop over syllables. Whenever I walked with him I felt a little taller.
Stop seeing that boy, my mother had said, but I liked the way the world looked when I saw it from beside him, greater than the road that ran from our house to the fields and the town. I’d never been anywhere else.
“What’s it like away from this place?” I asked him. It was summer then and I was sixteen and unstoppable.
He was walking with his hands deep in the pockets of a pair of jeans worn through at the knees; the cuffs hung in tattered rings around his ankles and dragged in the mud. He sucked on a long blade of grass he’d pinched from our yard while I pulled on my rainboots. I thought he hadn’t heard me. Sometimes he got lost in his own head, but after a while he shrugged and with a fragile smile said, “Sad.”
“How come?”
“Perhaps loss keeps things beautiful.”
“You lost a lot of things?” I asked, but he didn’t answer.
“How old are you now, Kat?”
I told him, pressing out my chest. He looked in the other direction toward a bog.
“Don’t be in such a hurry to grow up,” he said and then he laughed under his breath. “I sound like them. There’s no point saying things like this. You won’t understand until it’s too late.”
“You talk like you’re ancient. Aren’t you going to ask to hold my hand?”
“I can’t touch you,” Bluebird said. “I can’t touch anyone.”
“Why not?”
“A curse.”
“Mama says curses aren’t real.”
He laughed again. “I’m sure most people would say that they aren’t. It isn’t nice to think about.”
“How’d you get cursed?”
“That’s a secret.”
“If I guess will you tell me?”
“You can try.”
I made a show of thinking, crossing my arms as we walked, the way my mother did when she got serious. I’d left my umbrella back home and screwed up my face tight. “Did you make a deal with the devil?”
“I wouldn’t know how.”
“I hear you go to a crossroads at night and he’ll meet you there.”
“I’ve never met the devil,” Bluebird said.
“Did you kill someone?”
“Not on purpose.”
“Then you killed them without meaning to?”
“Indirectly might be more accurate.”
“And they cursed you because of that?”
“No,” Bluebird said. “That happened because of the curse.”
“Killing someone?”
“Yes.”
“Is that why you can’t touch people? Because they’ll die?”
“I wonder.”
“What if I touch you?” I asked. “What happens then?”
“I don’t want to know.”
“You never tried it?”
“Not in a long time.” Something in his voice sounded thin, the way you can hear ice cracking before the lines show. I grinned and changed the subject.
“Where’d you live before this?”
“What makes you think I’ve lived somewhere else?”
“The way you talk. People around here don’t talk like you.”
He removed his hands from his pockets and laced them together as a hammock for his neck. “I’ve lived all sorts of places, on four continents.”
“Why move around?”
“Nothing stays the same,” he said. “I prefer to leave before I don’t recognize it anymore.”
“Will you be leaving here?”
“Not for a while. and I’d say goodbye before then.”
“You’d really leave me behind?”
“Would you like to see the world, Kat?”
“I think I’d like to see it with you,” I said. “Can’t you take me with you?”
“I can’t stop you if you want to leave, but it’ll be the same as now. I can’t ever touch you, do you understand? This is as close as we’ll ever be. That might satisfy you for a while, but Kat—the day may come when you want more than that. It’s something I’ll never be able to give you. So yes, you can come with me when I leave—I can’t stop you—but I hope you won’t.”
“Are you a ghost?” I asked.
He laughed. Sonorous, rich like the afternoon sun on the fields. “If it helps to think of me that way, sure.”
“They say ghosts stick around because of unfinished business. Is that why you haven’t left here yet? You got something to do?”
“In a sense.”
“But that’s when you’ll leave, when it’s done?”
“No,” Bluebird said. “I can never finish it.”
“Because of the curse?”
“That’s right.”
“If it’s because of you not being able to touch people, I can help. I don’t have a problem touching anyone. Then we can get out of this place.”
“Even with your help, I’m afraid it’s impossible. But thank you. I mean that.”
I smiled at him. Not like I could do anything else. Whenever he was around, my mouth moved on its own.
He’d first come around when I was fifteen but it wasn’t until I turned twenty-four that I noticed he looked the same whenever we met. My mother’s hands were going spotted from the sun and she had a pair of lines between her eyebrows like weathered fence posts. She squinted when she thought too hard. But Bluebird looked the same as he had the day we met, like time had skipped him.
By that point people were used to seeing us together and had stopped warning me about him. Instead, I’d become a part of the warning—the spinster from the sod farm, the one who’s always barefoot. Seeing him go without shoes all those years made me wonder what the mud felt like without them. My mother yelled at first but she didn’t bother with me so much anymore, not when she realized I was serious about not marrying.
“What will you do instead?” Bluebird asked when I told him. We were tucked under a barn eave where the rain couldn’t reach us. He wouldn’t meet my eyes and I convinced myself he looked the slightest bit pleased.
My mother sold the farm after my father, then forty-six, collapsed in the field. I moved with her into a two-bedroom house closer to town where the streets were paved. The sun made skillets out of them and I laced my boots again. I took a job waiting tables and another tutoring and put food on the table. On rainy days, sometimes I’d see Bluebird in the street through the windows. He walked a little slower when he went past the new house but he didn’t stop or come to the door. Most of the time he didn’t look my way to see me waving, and eventually I stopped waving at all.
A man, a baker, proposed when I was thirty-seven and he was forty-three. He hadn’t grown up in the area and didn’t know about Bluebird or about me. He called me Katherine but not the way my mother pronounced it, as though she was scolding me. The baker (Edward, he’d written beautifully on his white name tag) had welcomed me the first time I came to buy bread and every day after. He’d only been open two weeks and the sales were poor.
“I probably don’t help with that,” I said.
“You’re my best customer, Katherine.”
“I likely chase off the others. If it’s a problem, I’ll get my bread at the grocery store instead.”
“If someone won’t shop here because of your patronage, I don’t need them as a customer.”
So that’s how we started dating. On his days off we’d pack a picnic of sandwiches and eat it at the park along with the other normal families. When we were done eating we’d stroll the park hand in hand, always with shoes on.
I was fifty and widowed and Bluebird looked exactly the same as he had when I was a girl.
It had been years since we’d spoken, not since I’d given up my part-time jobs to work at the bakery. Edward and I had lived above it, a one-bedroom apartment. The bedroom faced an alley. I kept a sheer curtain pulled across it not for privacy but to hide the adjacent brick wall. A bank, I think it was at the time, and later a bookstore. I pulled back the curtain for some reason, to dust or clean the glass, it’s been too long to remember now. That’s when I saw him sitting in the rain on a stack of boxes we’d stacked for recycling. His hands were laced together, his back curved as though he’d been sitting a while. And like what had always happened when it was the two of us, he looked up, as though he could feel me watching.
He stood in the doorway to the bakery a while later with the same expression he used to show me from the road. The years hadn’t touched him. He had no wrinkles, no sun spots, and even darkened by rain his hair was still the same color of straw and shone under the store’s fluorescent lights. I hid my wrinkling hands in a flower sack apron.
“Hello, Kat.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t call him Bluebird. It was a child’s nickname and I was long, long an adult.
“Get you anything?” I asked brightly.
“A croissant, please.”
I wrapped one in paper and put it on the counter. My croissants were every bit as good as Edward’s had been. Better, if you ask my mother.
Bluebird laid his hand on the counter along with the money. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” he said.
What exactly had I lost that he had anything to be sorry for?
“I’m leaving,” he said.
I thought he might say that.
“Where?” I asked, feigning indifference. The little girl inside me started to weep.
“I don’t know yet. I won’t know for a while.”
I hated him then, this picture of youth, this sad boy who would touch the road, a door, a croissant, but not time. Not me. I placed my hand on his. It slipped through like water, like he wasn’t even there.
“Oh, Kat,” he said, whisper thin, the last words I’d ever hear from him.
He was gone. I ate the croissant alone.
I didn’t believe in curses until the day Bluebird vanished. All that time I thought it was a story he made up so he didn’t feel guilty for rejecting me, something to protect us both. We talked, sure. We walked plenty of places together, but he’d never once touched me. I could say that honestly, if anyone had asked. I used to think that’s what he wanted.
Now, though, I know better. I don’t know where he’s gone, where he came from, why he chose me. I think I must be part of the curse, though how or why, I couldn’t say. He doesn’t come around anymore, but when it storms, before the rain starts and the air is pungent, I feel him in the wind as though he’s waiting for me, as if he’s still watching.
It’s raining now. I go into the storm and spread my arms wide. The rain is howling. My daughter is yelling at me to come indoors, but this is the only way we can be together. Between claps of thunder I swear I can see his outline, feel his hands in the shape of rain.
“I won’t touch you this time,” I promise. “I’ll be happy just walking beside you.”
His hands stream over me and through my hair, soaking my clothes. I haven’t been beautiful in decades but right now I’m sixteen and holding my arms out. Bluebird, Bluebird, take me with you—