Hummingbirds

Three years after mine. Same machine, second turn of the crank. This is the one that let me finally read the whole of it.

Paige died on a cold night in January, and I was there, and I could not do one single thing about it, and there's no torment anybody could dream up worse than that.

Let me set her down proper before I set down how she went, because she deserves at least that much from somebody, and it's plain nobody living is going to do it. Paige was the kind of good that doesn't get noticed until it's gone. Not showy. She worked the register at a garden center out on the state road, and she knew the Latin names of things and never made you feel small for not knowing them, and she kept a little jade plant on her windowsill that she'd rooted off a cutting she stole from her grandmother's, and she talked to it. She was a soft touch for anything hurt. She'd pull over for a dog on the shoulder. She laughed too loud at her own jokes and then got shy about it. She had her mother's dark hair and none of her mother's cold, which I used to think was the whole of the good news about that girl and turned out, in the end, to be the whole of the trap.

By then she'd moved back in with her mother. Of course she had. My savings had been spent down to the studs years before I ever died; my insurance (the reason I died, but I'm getting ahead of the file) had run its course too by now, three years on, and there was no money left in that house and none more coming. And Paige was broke, and Paige was breaking, and the ones who help you do a terrible thing are always the easiest to keep, because they can never, ever tell. So home she came. Back inside the orbit. Back inside the reach.

And one night her breath went wrong. She'd been asthmatic since she was a girl, one of those kids who couldn't run the whole length of the block without hauling up wheezing with her hands on her knees, and that little blue inhaler was as much a part of her as her own hand. She'd had it in a pocket her whole life. It had hauled her back a hundred times. This once it did nothing at all. I've turned that over more than I've turned over anything: a thing that works a hundred times and then, the one night it has to, doesn't. I know what a fixer thinks when a part that always works picks the worst possible minute to quit. I'm going to make myself set that thought down and leave it lay a while, because I can't hold it square, and I swore I'd only carry what I could hold.

Her fella drove her to the hospital fast as tires would turn. I was in that car. I couldn't touch the wheel and I couldn't touch her and I watched her lips go the wrong color under the streetlights, that gray you never forget once you've seen it, and he was talking to her the whole way, saying her name over and over like a name could be a rope, and she was trying to answer him and couldn't spare the air. By the time they wheeled her through those doors she'd gone too gray to come back all the way. They kept her a few days on the machines. A tube breathing for her, a screen doing her counting. Her fella slept in a chair that wasn't built for it. Her mother came and sat and held her hand and cried, and I want to tell you those tears were fake, and the terrible thing is I think some of them were real, because a person can grieve the very thing they broke, that's the part nobody warns you about. And then the counting on the screen ran down, and they let her go.

And here's the one bit of light in the whole ugly chapter, so let me give it room: she was a giver to the very last. She'd checked the little box on her license years back, the way she checked every box that meant helping somebody, and so they passed her heart and her eyes and the rest of her along to strangers who needed them. Somewhere out there right now a person is walking around seeing the world through Paige's eyes and doesn't know whose morning they're looking at. Somewhere a heart that laughed too loud at its own jokes is beating in a chest that gets to keep going. Paige got to save a few lives on her way out the door. She'd have liked that more than anything anybody could've said over her. It's about the only thing in this entry I can stand to look at head-on.

Here's where that word comes back. The hummingbird.

All that long time between my funeral and her last night, Paige kept coming to my grave, the one place on this earth her mother would never once follow her, and leaving a little glass hummingbird on the stone. The cheap gift-shop kind, blown glass, red throat, no bigger than a thumb, the sun coming through it. Over and over. She never left a note. She didn't need to. A grown woman does not drive across town in the winter to set a glass bird on a dead man's headstone unless she is carrying a thing she cannot set down anywhere else. Paige was sorry. Whatever she did, however much or little, she was sorry down to the ground.

But the birds kept vanishing. She'd set one on the stone and come back a week later and it'd be gone, and she'd bring another, and that one would go too, a whole long cold string of months of it, and she never knew why. It wasn't the groundskeeper. It wasn't the wind.

It was my sister.

You'll remember the name I gave Sarah, back in the good days, back when I still believed she was the soft place I'd finally landed. My little hummingbird. I said it into her hair. Everybody who knew me knew it, and my sister knew it best, my sister who came to my burial dry-eyed and rod-straight and certain from the first shovelful exactly who had done this to me. So when she came to tend my stone and found a glass hummingbird sitting there, left plain as day by somebody, she read it the only way a grieving, furious woman could. She thought Sarah left it. She thought that cold creature had the gall to come lay a little glass token of my own pet name on my grave, some sickening valentine to herself, and my sister swept it into the dirt and ground it under her heel, every single time, standing guard over me against the wrong hands entirely.

So the one true sorry in this whole rotten story, the only apology a living soul ever tried to lay at my feet, got taken for the killer's sentiment and stamped into the mud, month after month, by the one person who loved me enough to keep coming. Paige never knew why they kept disappearing. My sister never knew whose they really were. And I hung over the whole sad snarl of it with no way in this world to say the one thing that would have undone it: not her. The girl. It's the girl, and she is dying, and she is trying to tell you she is sorry.

I forgive Paige. Free and clear, and I'd tell her so if the wall between us were a hair thinner than it is. She was a child in that house, coerced and used and going under. Forgiving was always the easy part for me. It was the seeing I could never manage. And I'm doing the seeing now, too late, which is the only hour I ever get anything done.

Now. Do I know her mother killed her? No. I swore to you I'd never claim a thing I can't hold, and I can't hold this one square either. Asthma takes real people every winter, and Paige was real and sick and sad. But I am a man who reads machines for a living, dead or alive, and I know in my hands what it looks like when the same one runs twice.

Set her death down next to mine and look at the shape of it. A person inside that house. The money runs dry. And then, right then, right on the beat, that person dies of a thing that could pass for an accident, a thing no tired coroner is going to cut too deep on, and somewhere there's an insurance line with the survivor's name at the end of it. That was me. And then, three years later, same tune, same house, same beat: that was Paige.

One death is a tragedy. Two deaths on the same money-cycle is a diagram. It's a machine, one that eats a single insured soul each time the account runs dry, and turns that death right back into the money it runs on. I couldn't read it off my own turn of the crank; one stroke tells you nothing. It took the second body, poor Paige's body, for the pattern to stand up off the page and show me its face.

And the moment I saw the machine, the old thought came roaring back, the one I told you to hold onto, the one I said out loud over my own grave: there has to be a hand behind this. A thing this cold, run twice, on a schedule. Somebody's doing the arithmetic. And I still, even here, even now, could not make that somebody be her. So I did what a fixer does when the diagram won't close: I went looking for the missing wire.

And the missing wire was the money.

Because here's what wouldn't sit still, no matter how I turned it. Two insurance payouts came into that house, mine, then Paige's, real money, big money, the kind that ought to buy a person out of every trouble they've got. And that house was always broke. Always clawing. Always one bill from the edge. Two small fortunes came in and vanished, and money that size does not just evaporate. It goes somewhere. It goes to somebody.

So I followed it. It's time I told you about the man in Florida.