The Age of Miracles

4

At last, like a fever, the night broke. Sunday morning: The sky glowed a delicate blue.

Our backyard was littered in pine needles from the wind. A pair of potted marigolds lay overturned on the patio, the soil spilling from the pots. The umbrella and the lawn chairs had been strewn around the deck. Our eucalyptus trees stood listing and windblown. The dead blue jay remained unchanged.

In the distance, a wisp of smoke was puffing up from the horizon, floating quickly westward with the wind. I remembered then that this was fire season, too.

A news helicopter circled the plume like a fly. And it was reassuring to know that at least one crew had been assigned to cover this most ordinary of disasters.

After breakfast, I tried Hanna’s cell phone, but it just rang and rang. I knew it was different for her: Hanna’s life was noisy with sisters, her house a maze of bunk beds and shared sinks where the washing machine ran perpetually just to keep up with the dresses that piled each night in the laundry basket. It took two station wagons to carry her family away.

In my house, I could hear the floors creak.

By the time my father came home from the hospital in the late afternoon, the winds had calmed, and a low fog was rolling in from the coast, obscuring the slow motion of our sun across the sky.

“Had my headlights on the whole way home,” said my father. “Couldn’t see five feet in front of me in that fog.”

He looked exhausted, but it was a relief to see him standing in our kitchen.

He ate half a sandwich standing up. Then he cleared the counters of the dishes we’d left out the day before and wiped everything down with a sponge. He watered my mother’s orchids, and then he stood at the sink, washing his hands for a long time.

“You should get some sleep,” said my mother. She was wrapped in the same gray sweater she’d worn the day before.

“I’m too wired,” he said.

“You should lie down, at least.”

He looked out the window and surveyed the back deck. He pointed at the dead bird. “When did that happen?”

“Last night,” I said.

He nodded and slid open the drawer, where he kept a supply of surgical gloves for use in household jobs. I followed him outside.

“It’s a shame,” he said, crouching low near the bird.

A troupe of ants had discovered the body and were marching back and forth from the edge of the deck, descending deep into the feathers, and emerging with tiny bits of the bird on their backs.

My father flapped a white trash bag in the air until it snapped open and inflated.

“Maybe it’s because gravity changed,” I said.

“I don’t know about that,” he said. “Birds have always had trouble with our windows. Their eyesight isn’t very good.”

He stretched a surgical glove over each of his hands. A wave of rubbery dust floated off the wrist cuffs. I could smell the latex where I stood.

He closed one gloved palm over the bird’s rib cage, the wings sagging like tree branches as he lifted it into the air. Two black eyes the size of peppercorns remained motionless in its head. A few lost ants ran in frantic circles across my father’s wrist.

“Sorry about what happened at work,” I said.

“What do you mean?” said my father. He let the bird slip from his hand and into the bag. The sound was wet and echoey against the plastic. He blew on his wrist to get rid of the ants.

“A woman died, right?” I said.

“What?”

He looked at me, surprised. I understood then that it was a mistake to mention it.

My father was quiet. I could feel my cheeks turning hot and red. He used two fingers like tweezers to pick up the last stray feather from the deck and drop it into the sack. Then he rubbed his forehead with the back of one bent wrist.

“No, sweetheart,” he said. “No one died.”

This was the first lie I ever heard my father tell—or the first time I knew that he was lying. But it would not be the last. And not the boldest, either.

On the deck where the bird had lain, a hundred ants ran in circles, in search of their lost feast.

My father pulled the trash bag’s drawstring shut and tied it firmly at the top.

“You and your mom worry too much as it is,” he said. “I told you two that nothing would happen overnight, and see? Nothing did.”

We took the bag to the garbage cans on the other side of the house. The bird’s dark silhouette showed through the white plastic as we walked, the body folding in on itself as the bag swung in time to my father’s quick paces.

He pulled the hose out to the deck and washed away the ants and the blood, but a spot of grease would remain on the window for weeks, like skid marks after a car accident.

Finally, he went upstairs to sleep, and my mother went with him.

I sat alone in the living room for a long time, watching television, while my parents murmured together through the closed door of their bedroom. I heard my mother ask a question. My father raised his voice: “What is that supposed to mean?”

I turned the television down and strained to hear the rest.

“Of course I was at work,” he said. “Where the hell else would I be?”

We were living under a new gravity, too subtle for our minds to register, but our bodies were already subject to its sway. In the weeks that followed, as the days continued to expand, I would find it harder and harder to kick a soccer ball across a field. Quarterbacks found that footballs didn’t fly as far as they used to. Home-run hitters slipped into slumps. Pilots would have to retrain themselves to fly. Every falling thing fell faster to the ground.

And it seems to me now that the slowing triggered certain other changes too, less visible at first but deeper. It disrupted certain subtler trajectories: the tracks of friendships, for example, the paths toward and away from love. But who am I to say that the course of my childhood was not already set long before the slowing? Perhaps my adolescence was only an average adolescence, the stinging a quite unremarkable stinging. There is such a thing as coincidence: the alignment of two or more seemingly related events with no causal connection. Maybe everything that happened to me and to my family had nothing at all to do with the slowing. It’s possible, I guess. But I doubt it. I doubt it very much.