“Gorgeous but doomed,” her father says of the plants—at least she thinks he’s still talking of the plants. “The laws of nature, they don’t care what you can afford.”
She lets him talk about the island and everyone on it. It’s all she wants. The idle talk. Now and then, he pauses, and though she knows he’s waiting for her to fill him in, to start from the beginning and say what’s happened, she can’t—not yet—and so she stays silent, unspoken words on her tongue like grit.
The next day, he’s home. Another day taken off work. The fact of him as he sits at his desk with his sweatered shoulders and combed hair, it fills her with love. And makes her think of Hewar and Delan and then the rest, and though she knows she will tell her father everything, she also knows that saying these words to him, out of everyone, will be the hardest because he is her heart, and she is his, and because of this, pain goes wider and deeper and is shared, and so to begin, to even find that toehold into what will undo them both, it’s difficult. An hour more, she decides. Just one more hour without the events sitting between them, and then she’ll start the story. I wish they could keep sleeping, Delan said the morning after the raid. Even an hour more. Little breaks of awareness, now she sees their tender beauty.
Then there’s movement in the house. Fast and swooping. A hummingbird.
They try everything. Leaving the room to give it space and quiet, then a broom to shepherd it toward the door. The windows are open and the screens pushed out and both the front and back doors are splayed wide, red fabric draped atop as lures. No matter their efforts, the bird tries to find escape but fails, panicking mere feet, mere inches from the threshold to outside. So close yet frantic, and in its confusion, it returns to the one place it’s decided is safe, perching on the hanging light fixture in the center of the living room. From below, Olivia can see the fluttering beat of its heart.
Her father, as he tends to do, takes to reference books.
“Hundreds of breaths per minute,” he says, a book upon his knee. “And that’s when everything is okay. Terrified, it would be more.”
Outside is a crab apple tree, doused in ruby flowers. Olivia breaks off a small branch and, once inside, holds it toward the bird. Iridescent green and blue feathers flash as it moves away. Its black eyes watch her. “To help you,” Olivia says, as if it could possibly understand. “Please.”
“Each day,” her father continues, “they eat half their body weight in sugar. When active, they need to constantly eat, or they’ll starve. Sugar passes through them in an hour. Just one hour. Maybe that’s it. Sugar water?”
But his words are like a gavel. Because it’s been more than an hour. And with this information she understands that no longer is this a situation where eventually it will be figured out, and time will solve the problem. Now it’s about keeping the bird alive. About every second being one too many for something so small that had so little to begin with. In the kitchen, Olivia fills a shallow bowl with sugar water and returns to hold it up—but the bird startles with a whirring buzz and water splashes and after another desperate attempt, it again perches, trembling, upon the fixture. Once more, Olivia lifts the broken branch, while her father turns a page.
Now Olivia’s shaking. Arm raised and aching. Above her is a tiny creature who didn’t know, who maybe saw the soft blue reflected in the mirror on the wall and couldn’t have known it was going where it shouldn’t, that another world had imposed upon the one it understood. A split second. And now there’s nothing to do but stand with a broken branch and watch.
“I don’t need facts,” she says. “I need help.”
Her face is wet. Her father looks at her, concerned, till suddenly he shuts the book. Without explanation, he heads out the front door.
When he returns, he’s holding a plant with red flowers, still in its black plastic container. He hands it to her. “My neighbor and his ludicrous landscaping. The Sacred Flower of the Andes. When I saw you with that branch, it occurred to me. So I broke into his yard.”
Clusters of tubular red flowers spill from slender branches. With both hands, Olivia lifts the plant to the light fixture, and within a flash, the bird is at a flower, the hum of wings steady as it drinks. All Olivia can do is watch, overcome. She’s holding a plant, and a bird is drinking from its bloom, to live. The connection, it’s magnificent and devastating. An unexpected breech into something wondrous. Never has she seen anything as beautiful as the quiver of its throat.
“Olivia,” her father whispers. “Walk.”
And so she does. Slowly and carefully, eye on the bird that’s not once separated from the flower, its wings a blur. A few more steps and she’s outside. Still, the bird drinks, but then must feel the air on its back, its feathers soaking in warmth, because it lifts into the air and hovers. A pause before leaving.
Back inside, she steadies herself against a chair.
“You know the nickname for this plant?” her father asks as he sets it outside. “Right there on the label. The Magic Flower. That things like this happen. This world, Olivia, I don’t know what went on
