I Will Leave You Never by Ann Putnam

Author:Ann Putnam
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press

Birds of the Air

It was late but still she couldn’t sleep. She could hear Jay breathing. And the pups made a lot of noise, considering the fact they were supposed to be sleeping all the time. Somebody squawked every now and then, either wedged in a corner or sucked on by mistake. Niki was always careful not to step on any of the pups, careful not to lie on them, when she settled back down. Niki didn’t need anybody’s help.

Zoë was listening to the pups and watching the moon slip into the trees outside the window. She could hear Niki in the whelping box changing position every now and then. She was thinking about the first time they brought Will into her hospital room that early morning in December.

“Here’s your baby,” the nurse had said, handing him over wrapped up tight but for his head and one tiny hand. Zoë tucked his head into the hollow of her neck, rubbed her chin against the top of his head, smelled his baby smell. The whole universe was in that room, the sweet smell of him, the little smacking noises when she fed him, the way she knew just what to do. She’d have done anything for that baby, would do anything for him now.

She looked over at Jay, his face in the moonlight. He’d fallen asleep long ago. She was watching the shadows in the wind. The moon was gone and the room had turned dark. Somebody was wailing outside the window. It was the sound of grief filling the air. A sky full of babies lost in the night.

“What’s that?”

“It’s okay,” Jay said. “It’s just the coyotes.” Babies had been born a couple of weeks ago and you could hear them yipping, and the unearthly cry of the mother. Then they heard Niki moving across the room. They turned on the bed light. Shoes were flying all over the room. Niki was digging shoes out of the closet. Then she tried to curl up into the empty space at the bottom of the closet, but it was too small for that, so she tried to crawl under the bed, just as she’d done a couple of days before the babies were born, when she crawled under the deck, and Zoë feared she was going to crush them. Jay was afraid he was going to have to rip up the deck to get her out. After an hour or so they finally coaxed her out with some bagels and cream cheese, and nothing, it turned out, had been squashed after all.

She must have known it was a den or a cave that would keep her babies safe, not some plywood box, however well constructed. She must have felt the pull of some earlier existence, some wilder claim. It was clear in that moment that she wasn’t anybody’s pet. She wouldn’t acknowledge them or let them touch her until she had finally stopped circling the room and gone back into the box where she lay, keeping watch the rest of the night.

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