Big Bird

Val is where my heart is.
Val, and my dog, and the family I grew up in. And out in the green-smelling woods of this big messy extraordinary world. This is where I keep my heart.

I need a lover to define my edges, to draw the shape of my body out of the air.

I need the people of my heart to show me where the outlines of my mind are. Without them, I am a blue bird against the blue sky: aloft and moving, but hard to make out. My people provide the red leaves behind the bird, the rocky gray slopes where her echo bounces back. When I talk to my people the smoke of my thoughts begins to coalesce and I begin to see myself.

Val and I were driving through Oregon wine country. Gorgeous gentle hills plush with rosy clover; sunny vineyards like cross-stitched quilt squares. My heart was pounding.

Val had been riding her bike. Breathing good air, pumping her legs, pumping sweet oxygen around her body, gliding past field and vineyard, Val and her pals twined into the rope of bikers unrolling to the beach. Thousands of riders, laughing and pedaling and wearing signs on their bodies bearing the names of their friends: Reach the Beach, the annual fundraiser for the American Lung Association.

The cancer lay dormant in Val’s lungs. She moved freely in the world. Her body brought her joy, and me joy too, seeing her strong and ornery and laughing and moving.

I didn’t bike. I couldn’t walk. I spent the day in a lovely little cabin in a quiet valley, limping from window to porch, my feet too injured to step a single step on the trails to the woods, the wetland, the field surrounding my little house. I’d already been a year immobile. Maybe the craziest plantar fasciitis of all time. Maybe not. I brought my binoculars and shuffled to the porch to watch the birds flitting among the treetops. I ate some yogurt, watched the light shift westward.

Later, a friend brought me to the beach and we picked up the weary bikers. Took them back to the cabin, had a little party. Ate and drank and talked some smack, and then slept. There in the dark next to Val, long-ago lover, beloved friend, my family, I lay awake, listening to the branches of unfamiliar trees, achingly wistful for a tired body.

In the morning, friends dispersed. Val and I started a leisurely drive home through the fields of clover and grapes. My heart was pounding. I needed to tell her something, something I’d known for two months. I’d been keeping it from her. I’ve never kept anything from Val in my life.

A friend had died. Not a friend, a person we’d known. Not even that, really. But this person had died; suddenly, young, of cancer. She’d sold us her house; she’d written me some kind and wry letters, and wrote a couple novels; and then suddenly, her husband must have found me in her address book and was writing to say she was gone.

Oregon wine country is so pretty. I was afraid to speak. I’d been afraid for two months. I was afraid it would pitch her over the cliff of fear into the black place. I’d seen that happen, and I didn’t want to be the cause. I wanted to preserve this vivid time of body joy.

But the rocks in my gizzard kept grinding uncomfortably, working and working on this gristly bit of information, this abrupt story ending. I had shaky fits. I cried for two days when I found out; not because I’d loved this woman, Lisa, although I liked her and wished her well; but because of the fragility of that paper balloon punctured. The danger we are all in. She had lived in my house, loved in my room, made this plot of earth a home before me and then gave it into my hands. And disappeared.

The words rose up in me so many times, urgent for release, and I bit them back from Val and told my other family instead, calling them up, sobbing on the phone. But they hung between Val and me, edgy little midges only I could see, crowding my vision; and the thing is, Val holds my heart. Val sees me as clearly as any person probably can.

I wanted to protect her.

I wanted to open the window wide between us.

Who was I to decide what she got to know and not know?

Who was I to foist my fear and sorrow on her?

Who was I?

My hands got really shaky and I couldn’t get the words out at first. Baldly I told her: Something sad happened. Lisa died. Lisa who sold us our house. She died. And I didn’t want to tell you. I’m so sorry.

I cried. Val didn’t. It turned out this particular news, at this particular time, was okay. Or maybe I was crying so she didn’t have to. Or maybe the fear of someone dying is the fear I live with, and it’s a different view from her own shaky ground.

You can tell me, she said. It’s okay. You can always tell me. You don’t have to carry that alone.

And I wondered. Can I? Because I’ve seen the slightest touch push her into black depths of anxiety and confusion and sorrow. I’ve given that touch before, unknowingly saying the wrong thing, the right thing to breach the delicate membrane that lets things be okay, and I’ve pushed her into that airless well.

I want to protect us both from that. I want to lift away some of her burden. I want to be seen by her. I want to speak of despair, this tandem despair of mine that runs parallel to hers, so different but so near. I want to keep pointing out the view to one another so that we see as much as we can within these astonishingly overlapping lives of ours.

On we drove, Val at the wheel, me beside her looking out the window, the intimate road-trip rhythm another kind of home. Flower-dusted fields rolled away from the road in all directions. There was a brown heap on the gravel verge, something jagged, no, feathery — a hawk, flipped and fallen. “Big bird died,” I pointed out, in the shorthand of the recovering sobber. “I mean,” I added, for clarity and as an offering, a goof to bring us back from a brink, “not Big Bird. Just a big bird died.”

Val looked over at me. “Big Bird died,” she confided, and waited a beat. “Of plantar fasciitis.” Beat. “… I didn’t want to tell you.”

And for the next fifteen miles we both laughed so hard we shrieked like porpoises, we howled like teakettles. We nearly killed ourselves laughing. But we didn’t. We lived.