Hummingbird Heart Read online

  I wrote Jax’s name on the back side of Toni’s note, over and over, in perfect letters so tiny that you’d need a magnifying glass to read them. I wrote it the way I always saw it: the j and the x small, the A capitalized and oversized, a tall point between them. A precisely balanced pyramid.

  Then I crumpled the paper into a ball.

  Jax would probably go for a girl like Toni: someone outgoing and fun. Someone who wasn’t getting frown lines already. Someone who drew smiley faces on her notes.

  Lunch hour. I sat on the school steps, breathing in the crisp fall air. Across the street, a woman sat in the driver’s seat of a parked minivan, engine idling while she waited, toxic emissions spewing from the car.

  I hugged my knees to my chest. The sky was a clear blue with a few white puffs of cloud. It was strange, the way an ordinary day could suddenly seem so beautiful and so fragile it made you ache. Lots of things were like that though. Odd things, like a pair of white skates in the sports-store window, or a lone wildflower at the side of the road, or a glimpse of a Ferris wheel at night. Things that were so perfect they made you catch your breath. When I was younger, I’d tried to explain it to my mom and to Toni, but neither of them understood what I meant at all. I learned to keep my weird thoughts to myself.

  Toni sauntered over, thick brown curls bouncing, a wide grin on her round face.

  I shook off my thoughts. “Do you enjoy torturing me?”

  She giggled. “Did you guess?”

  “No.”

  “Jax.” Toni’s cheeks dimpled.

  I’d probably be too shy to talk to him anyway. “How did you hear that?”

  She drumrolled her hands against her thighs and paused dramatically. “He told me.”

  “You guys were talking?”

  “I just saw him in the hallway with a bunch of guys from one of my classes and we all got talking.”

  It figured. Guys always talked to Toni.

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. So, is Finn going too?”

  “Course.”

  I studied Toni’s face. I liked Finn. It would be hard not to: he was smart, interesting and a genuinely nice guy. Finn wasn’t the problem. The problem was that since Toni had gotten together with him, she hadn’t had a lot of time for me. I forced another smile. “Great,” I said.

  THree

  When I got home from school, Karma was sitting on the front porch steps, taking apart her bicycle. Technically, we shared the porch with the couple who lived in the main floor—our apartment was the upstairs half of an old house that been converted to a duplex—but they were hardly ever around. Just as well, I thought, looking at the chain and gears and tools that littered the stone walkway.

  “Again?” I hopped off my own bike.

  Karma adjusted her baseball cap, leaving a streak of grease across her forehead in the process. “The gears keep slipping.”

  I wouldn’t have had a clue how to fix my bike’s gears when I was eleven. I still didn’t have a clue. I looked past her to the open front door. “Is Mom home?”

  “Nope. She went out with Scott.”

  “Oh.”

  Karma’s voice was quiet. “You don’t like it, do you?”

  “What?”

  “Amanda and Scott.”

  She always called Mom by her name and that was fine with me. In a weird way, it made me feel less like I had to share my mother, though of course I still did. Mom didn’t mind either. In fact, she’d suggested that I call her Amanda too, but I’d refused. No one I knew called their parents by their first names.

  I shrugged. “I don’t care.”

  “You do too.”

  I hated it when she acted like she knew me better than I knew myself. “Shut up, Karma.” I pushed past her and walked into the house.

  “Check out her new tattoo design,” Karma yelled after me. “She left her sketchbook in the kitchen.”

  I dumped my bag in the front hall, kicked off my shoes and then picked them up again and lined them up neatly side by side. It was different for Karma. Amanda wasn’t really her mom.

  In the kitchen, I poured myself a glass of water and eyed the closed sketchbook on the table. Obviously, it was none of my business. My mother was big on respecting privacy. On the other hand, it wasn’t like a tattoo design was exactly private. And Karma had already seen it. I ran my finger across the cover of the sketchbook, trying to decide. If I didn’t look, I’d wonder about it all evening, and if I did, I’d feel guilty. I looked out the window and started counting. If a car drove by before I got to fifty, I’d look. If not, I’d just go up to my room.

  One, two, three…It bothered me that Karma thought I had a problem with Scott. I wasn’t narrow-minded or anything. Seven, eight, nine…I wasn’t. I hated it when people made judgments based on appearances. Twelve, thirteen…A blue SUV zipped past. I walked over to the sketchbook, flipped it open and turned pages to find the most recent sketches.

  There it was. A skeleton playing drums. My breath hissed out from between my teeth.

  “I figured you’d look,” Karma said from the kitchen doorway.

  “Karma, you are such a pain in the ass.”

  “Nice, isn’t it?”

  “No. It’s stupid.”

  “I knew you had a problem with Amanda going out with Scott.” Karma’s chin was set, lower lip sticking out, eyes narrowed.

  Karma had made it quite clear that she adored Scott. She’d met him first, and when he and Amanda hooked up less than a month later, she seemed to think she had engineered the whole romance herself.

  “I don’t have a problem with that, okay?” I looked at the drumming skeleton again. I had to admit, my mother could draw. “I just have a problem with her getting a tattoo that is going to announce it to the whole world,” I said. “Especially since she and Scott will probably break up in a few weeks anyway.”

  “No, they won’t.”

  “Yeah, they will.” I knew exactly how it would all play out. They’d start arguing, Mom would say she needed some space, et cetera, and they’d take a break from seeing each other, which would turn out to be permanent. Mom would hang out with Julia, hit the bars, drink more than usual for a month or so, and then she’d meet someone else and start the whole process all over again. Only this time around Karma’s heart would be broken, which made me furious. Mom should know better.

  “I’d give it two weeks, max.” I jabbed my finger at the sketch. “This is as stupid as getting a tattoo of someone’s name.”

  “My mom did that,” Karma said softly. “She had my name tattooed on her arm.”

  “I meant a boyfriend’s name or whatever.” I thought about the tattoo of a hummingbird that Mom got when she was pregnant with me. “Getting your kid’s name is different,” I said. “That’s a permanent relationship, not just a temporary one. You’re supposed to love your kid forever.” I looked at Karma’s dirty face and wished I could snatch the words back. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I know what you meant.”

  I looked down at the sketch again. At the bottom of the page, Mom had written in small block letters: MW, OCEAN FRONT INN, 214. I raised my eyebrows. Pretty ritzy. Mom’s friends were more the Motel 8 type. “Who’s staying at the Ocean Front?” I asked, wanting to change the subject.

  Karma glanced at the paper and shrugged. “MW? No clue.”

  A car pulled into the driveway. Mom. “She’s home,” I said, snapping the sketchbook shut.

  Karma craned her neck to see. “With Scott?”

  “Alone.”

  “Are you going to ask her about the tattoo?”

  “No.” I eyed Karma’s face and wondered what she was thinking. It was always so hard to tell. “Are you?”

  Karma shook her head. “Don’t tell her we looked.”

  Mom shrugged off her denim jacket and dumped a pile of photos on the kitchen table. “I’m making some of these into greeting cards,” she announced. “Julia’s s
tarted working at that gallery near your school. She’s going to try to sell some for me.”

  Julia was an old friend of Mom’s. She used to work in a vintage clothing store downtown, and she’d tried selling Mom’s art from there too. The problem was that there just wasn’t a huge market for Mom’s photographs. Mom scorned anything that she considered “commercial,” which seemed to mean anything that might actually earn money. Greeting cards were a step in the right direction, in my opinion.

  “That’s great,” I said, a shade too enthusiastically. I scanned the pictures on the floor. Fire escapes and telephone wires. I wondered how many people really wanted greeting cards like that. What kind of occasion would you want them for? Congratulations on getting your new phone connected? Condolences on your recent house fire?

  Mom looked up, caught my eye and quickly looked away. “Well, we’ll see. I hired someone new today, anyway.”

  Mom had a cleaning business called Urban Organics. The Organics part was my idea—I thought she should be using all-natural cleaners, so when she and Julia started the business a few years ago, I helped her make all her own products. It wasn’t really much of a business, just Mom and Julia and a few other women, mostly mothers of kids I’d gone to elementary school with. Mom did all the scheduling, and she still cleaned houses most days as well. She’d kept the old name, but these days, her cleaning products came from Costco, and there was nothing organic about them.

  “Yeah? What’s she like?” I asked. Mom tended to hire people either because she liked their politics or because she felt sorry for them.

  “Nice. Friend of Julia’s. Her ex had a drug problem and she’s on her own, trying to support the kids. Anyway, she hasn’t done cleaning before, but she needed the work, you know?” Mom grinned at me. “I think I’ll pair her up with Katie. She can show her the ropes.”

  “I have to go,” Karma said. “I have a baseball game. And I’m sleeping over at Ashley’s, okay?”

  “I remember. Have fun.” Mom turned to me. “Just you and me tonight, chickie.”

  Usually, I was happy to get time alone with Mom. Karma had been living with us for three years, since her own mother died, and while we got along okay, I liked it when I had Mom to myself. But tonight, I wasn’t so sure. There was something about the way Mom was looking at me—something about the forced cheeriness of her tone—that made me nervous.

  Four

  There was something so cosy about having routines, I thought, as I slid the creamy block of mozzarella across the sharp scalloped edges of the cheese grater. Beside me, Mom was slicing a heap of mushrooms. Pizza night. Before Karma came to live with us, Friday night was always pizza night. Unfortunately, Karma wasn’t a fan of anything involving melted cheese. She said it was gross and stringy and complained that the smell made her gag. So that was the end of our weekly pizza night. Now, whenever it was just me and Mom, we always made pizza together. I loved it.

  “Goddamn it.” Mom dropped the knife and looked at her thumb for a second. “Knife slipped.” She stuck her thumb into her mouth and used her free hand to refill her wineglass.

  I made a sympathetic face and turned my attention back to the mozzarella. Something was definitely going on. Toni always said how cool it was, the way my mother was so young and talked to me like we were friends, but I didn’t always think so. Mom had a tendency to give me way too much information, especially when it came to her boyfriends.

  There were things you didn’t want to know about your mother. Things you didn’t want to talk about.

  I knew it was wrong of me, but I couldn’t help wishing she was more like other people’s moms. She was thirty-three but looked younger, and people always thought she was my babysitter or my older sister. And I knew it was snobby, but I wished she had a more professional kind of job, like being a nurse or a teacher or something. I had no shortage of wishes: I wished she’d finished high school; I wished she’d stay single for a while; I wished she wasn’t going to get another tattoo; I wished she didn’t drink so much; I wished she didn’t smoke pot.

  Sometimes I felt like she was the teenager and I was the parent. Mothers, I thought, should be more reliable. More predictable. More grown-up.

  “Mom? Do we have pineapple?”

  No answer. I glanced sideways at her. “Yo, Mom? Pineapple?”

  She was done with the mushrooms and was just standing there with the tomato-sauce spoon motionless in her hand.

  “Earth to Mom? You’re dripping sauce everywhere.”

  “What?”

  I shook my head. “I asked you if we had any pineapple.”

  “I don’t have a clue. Look in the cupboard.”

  “Fine. Don’t bite my head off.”

  “It’s been a long day.”

  “Whatever.” I turned my back and rummaged in the cupboard. Cat food for a cat we don’t have, canned mystery-meat ravioli, soup, beans. No pineapple. I snuck a glance at Mom. She’d knocked back that second glass of wine in less than a minute and was scratching the back of her hand, leaving a red welt. Something was definitely up. “All right,” I said. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  Mom stopped scratching and folded her arms defensively. “What do you mean?”

  “Please.” I fought the urge to roll my eyes.

  “Look, I…I’m sorry. You’re right; I’m distracted.” She fingered the stem of her empty wineglass. “There’s something I have to talk to you about.”

  “Is it about Scott?”

  “No.”

  There was a long pause, and I felt an unexpected rush of fear: ice in the belly and an electric tingle shooting down my arms. What if it was something really bad? What if she had cancer? I stared down at the tablecloth still folded on the table and studied the embroidered flowers.

  “Dylan?” Mom reached out and touched my arm. “Pickle…I had a rather weird phone call this morning.”

  I wondered if it was a teacher or something, but I hadn’t done anything wrong that I knew of. Teachers generally liked me. “Who from?”

  She hesitated. “Mark. From back east. Your…you know. He’s in town. He wants to come and see us. To meet you.”

  A split second’s relief—there was nothing wrong with Mom—and then the words sunk in. My father, even though Mom wouldn’t say it, wouldn’t ever call him that. My heart was doing something crazy, crashing around in my chest like it was trying to bust out. I could hardly breathe. Was it possible to have a heart attack if you were only sixteen?

  “Dylan, you don’t have to see him. I’ll just call him back and tell him to get lost. You can say no.”

  I swallowed hard. “Why? Why does he want to see me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So he just suddenly got curious or something? Like, maybe he was bored one day and remembered, ‘Oh yeah, I have this daughter. I wonder what she’s like’?”

  “I don’t know.” She hesitated; then she cleared her throat as if she was going to say something.

  “What?”

  She dropped her eyes, shook her head. “I really don’t know.”

  “He just called? For no reason? Why?”

  “Oh, Dylan. I’ve told you everything I know.”

  I just looked at her. Maybe she didn’t know why Mark was here, but there was something she wasn’t telling me. I’d put money on it.

  “I have,” she protested. “You know I haven’t seen him since before you were born.”

  “I know. But…this is really weird.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  She’d never told me much about my father. Just a one-night stand, she’d said. No one important. She’d happily share all kinds of details about her current boyfriends—and I mean way too much information—but whenever I asked her anything about the guy who got her pregnant, she basically brushed me off.

  Was he tall, like me?

  Yes.

  What color were his eyes?

  Shrug. It’s too long ago, Dylan.

  Mom…

 
Blue. Okay? They were blue.

  It was like pulling teeth.

  I only had this one bad photo of him: Mom in denim cutoffs, looking very pretty despite being too skinny and having dyed black hair and heavy black eyeliner. Standing behind her, out of focus, was Mark. All I could really tell about him was that he had brown hair and a blue T-shirt.

  She wouldn’t even tell me his last name, because she just didn’t want me going online and searching for him. According to her, he was an asshole and a selfish prick who had never even wanted to meet me. End of story.

  Only now he was here, in town. And he wanted to see me. I looked at my mother and blinked back my tears. “I guess you don’t want me to meet him.”

  She shook her head. “It’s up to you.”

  “I might not bother. You know, since he’s never bothered before.”

  “That’s fine then. Fine.” That was all Mom said, but the expression that flickered across her face looked a lot like relief.

  FIVe

  Mom and I seemed to have some unspoken agreement not to talk about it again, which was fine by me. I didn’t even want to think about it, though of course I did. It was hard to think about anything else. The air in the house seemed to be getting heavier and harder to breathe, full of the thick sour smell of unsaid things. By the time Saturday evening rolled around, I was desperate to get out of the house, even though parties weren’t my favorite thing.

  Toni was sitting on my bed, applying purple nail polish she’d borrowed from my mom. “What are you wearing?” she asked.

  I looked down at my jeans and blue sweater. “This?”

  Toni looked up from her fingernails and studied my face for a moment. “Okay, what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.” She might have money for a dozen different outfits but I did not. “You don’t think this looks okay?”

  “It looks fine.” Toni gave me a scrutinizing kind of look. “It’s just that usually we try on different things and…oh, you know.” She blew out a breath of frustration. “Come on, Dylan. You’re so not into this party. Just tell me what’s wrong.”