Byrd by Kim Church Page B

wrinkled. She sat on the edge of my bed and petted my arm and said “There, there,” like she understood how I felt. Social workers think they know you. They don’t want you to tell them things. None of the forms Janet gave me to fill out asked why I was giving you up .
    She didn’t come to the hospital until after the nurse had taken you away; that was the rule. I asked her if I could see you again to say a proper good-bye. She said that’s what the letters were for .
    Dear Byrd ,
    If I were going to send you song lyrics I would choose the song your father played for me the last time I saw him. We were in his apartment, I was packing to leave, and he said there was something he wanted me to hear before I went. I thought he meant something he’d written (he’s a musician), but he put on a record by Gladys Knight and the Pips. He set the needle to the last song on side one, “Till I See You Again.”
    Gladys’s voice on the song is sometimes smooth and velvety, sometimes raw and brokenhearted. She is saying good-bye, but not forever. Her friend is leaving but he’s coming back. Until he does, she’s going to wait for him, dream about him, save up all her love and put her life on hold for him .
    Your father danced with me in his kitchen. He leaned me against the counter. We knocked over a glass. It rolled onto the floor and broke, but we didn’t stop, we kept dancing, through the key change, through Gladys’s call-and-response with the Pips, all the way to the end of the song, when the record began to skip—“again-gain-gain.”
    Your father gave me the album as a going-away present. On the cover is a picture of a barefoot child looking up at gnarly trees. Your father signed it the same way he’d signed my high school yearbook, with his first and last names, as if I might forget .
    Dear Byrd ,
    You were born in one place but conceived in another, a faraway place near an ocean. There was a man there who swallowed fire. He would light a long stick and put it in his mouth and people would clap and cheer and drop money in his box .
    Everybody in that place went around on wheels—skates, skateboards, scooters, bicycles, unicycles. I saw a two-legged dog with wheels where his back legs should have been, his own little built-in chariot .
    It almost never rained there. When it did, your father told me, children stayed home from school .
    Dear Byrd ,
    This is what my astrologer says about you: You are a Virgo, with a probing mind and a head for logic. You are older than your years. “Like Tom Sawyer,” my astrologer said. “Or was it Huck Finn?”
    Your moon is in Aquarius, which means you will feel different from other people, like you don’t fit in, which can be a problem because your sun is in Virgo, so you’ll want to fit in. (I have a lot of Virgo in me, so this is something I understand.)
    Most of your planets are in the western hemisphere, the hemisphere of fate, as opposed to the hemisphere of self-determination. Your life feels like something that happens to you regardless of what you do. This is also true for me. People come into our lives mysteriously and become important in ways we don’t understand .
    I can guess what you’re thinking: why would I confide in an astrologer? I don’t even know if he’s a good astrologer. He’s a thin, ghosty man with gray skin, damp hands, and a voice that cracks. He wears a huge wristwatch and clothes that don’t match, plaids with plaids. He is so dour that if he ever smiles his face looks like it’s breaking .
    But he is trustworthy. I can tell him things and he won’t betray me, because he has no one to betray me to. He is the most alone person I know .
    Your moon is in the tenth house, which means you have a strong emotional bond with your mother .
    â€œWhich mother?” I asked .
    â€œI don’t know,” he said .

Anything You Love
    A thunderstorm