Excerpt of The Birdman's Daughter by Cindi Myers

Life is good only when it is magical and musical... You must hear the bird's song without attempting to render it into nouns and verbs.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Works and Days"

When Karen MacBride first saw her father in the hospital, she was struck by how much this man who had spent his life pursuing birds had come to resemble one. His head, round and covered with wispy gray hair, reminded her of the head of a baby bird. His thin arms beneath the hospital sheet folded up against his body like wings. Years spent outdoors had weathered his face until his nose jutted out like a beak, his eyes sunken in hollows, watching her with the cautious interest of a crow as she approached his bed.

"Hi, Dad." She offered a smile and lightly touched his arm. "I've come home to take care of you for a while." After sixteen years away from Texas, she'd flown from her home in Denver this morning to help with her father for a few weeks.

That she'd agreed to do so surprised her. Martin Engel was not a man who either offered or inspired devotion from his family. He had been the remote authority figure of Karen's childhood, the distracted voice on the other end of the line during infrequent phone calls during her adult years, the polite, preoccupied host during scattered visits home. For as long as she could remember, conversations with her father had had a disjointed quality, as if all the time he was talking to her, he was thinking of the call of the Egyptian Goose, or a reputed sighting of a rare Hutton's Shearwater.

Which of course, he was. So what kind of communication could she expect from him now that he couldn't talk at all? Maybe she'd agreed to return to Texas in order to find out.

He nodded to show he understood her now, and made a guttural noise in his throat, like the complaining of a jay.

"The doctors say there's a chance he will talk again." Karen's mother, Sara, spoke from her post at the end of the bed. "A speech therapist will come once a week to work with him, and the occupational therapist twice a week. Plus there's an aide every weekday to help with bathing and things like that."

Karen swallowed hard, resisting the urge to turn and run, all the way back to Colorado. A voice in her head whispered, It's not too late to get out of this, you know.

She ignored the voice and nodded, smile still firmly fixed in place. "The caseworker gave me the schedule. And Del said he got the house in order."

"He built a ramp for the wheelchair and put hand-rails in the shower and things." Sara folded her arms over her stomach, still looking grim. "Thank God you agreed to come down and stay with him. Three days with him here has been enough to wear me out."

"Mom!" Karen nodded to her dad.

"I know he can hear me." Sara swatted at her former husband's leg. "I'm sure it hasn't been any more pleasant for him than it has been for me." Sara and Martin Engel had divorced some twenty years before, but they still lived in the same town and maintained a polite, if distant, relationship.

A large male nurse's aide filled the doorway of the room. "Mr. Engel, I'm here to help you get dressed so you can go home."

"Karen and I will go get a cup of coffee." Sara took her daughter by the arm and pulled her down the hallway.

"You looked white as a ghost back there," Sara said as they headed toward the cafeteria. "You aren't going to get all weak and weepy on me, are you?"

Karen took a deep breath and shook her head. "No." It had been a shock, seeing Dad like that. But she was okay now. She could do this.

"Good. Because he's not worth shedding any tears over."

Karen said nothing. She knew for a fact her mother had cried buckets of tears over Martin at one time. "What happened, exactly?" she said. "I understand he's had a stroke, but how?"

"He was in Brazil, hunting the Pale-faced Antbird, the Hoffman's Woodcreeper and the Brown-chested Barbet." Sara rattled off the names of the exotic birds without hesitation. Living with a man devoted to birding required learning to speak the language in order to have much communication from him at all. She glanced over the top of her bifocals at her daughter. "If he found those three, he'd have 'cleaned up' Brazil, so of course he was adamant it be done as soon as possible."

"He only needed three birds to have seen every bird in Brazil?" Karen marveled at this. "How many is that?"

"Seven thousand, nine hundred and something?" Sara shook her head. "I'm not sure. It changes all the time anyway. But I do know he's getting close to eight thousand. When he passed seven thousand, seven hundred and fifty, he became positively fanatical about topping eight thousand before he got too old to travel."

Ever since Karen could remember, her father's life — and thus the life of his family — had revolved around adding birds to the list. By the time she was six, Karen could name over a hundred different types of birds. She rattled off genus species names the way other children talked about favorite cartoon characters. Instead of commercial jingles, birdcalls stuck in her head, and played over and over again. To this day, when she heard an Olive-sided Flycatcher, she could remember the spring morning when she'd first identified it on her own, and been lavished with praise by her toooften-distracted father.

"He'd just spotted the Woodcreeper when he keeled over right there in the jungle." Sara continued her story. "Allen Welch was with him, and he's the one who called me. He apologized, but said he had no idea who else to contact."

Karen shook her head, amazed. "How did you ever get him home?"

"The insurance paid for an air ambulance. All those years with Mobil Oil were worth something after all." Martin had spent his entire career as a petroleum engineer with Mobil Oil Company. He always told people he kept the job for the benefits. They assumed he meant health insurance and a pension, but his family knew the chief benefit for him was the opportunity to travel all over the world, adding birds to his list.

They reached the cafeteria. "I'll get the coffee, you sit," Sara said, and headed for the coffee machine.

Karen sank into a molded plastic chair and checked her watch. Eleven in the morning here in Texas. Only ten in Colorado. Tom and Matt would be at a job site by now and Casey was in math class — she hoped.

"Here you go." Her mother set a cardboard cup in front of her and settled into the chair across the table.

"How are Tom and the boys?"

"They're fine. This is always a busy time of year for us, of course, but Matt's been a terrific help, and we've hired some new workers." Tom and Karen owned Blue Spruce Landscaping. This past year, their oldest son, Matt, had begun working for them full-time. "Did I tell you Matt's signed up for classes at Red Rocks Community College this fall? He wants to study landscaping."

"And he'll be great at it, I'm sure." She sipped her coffee. "What about Casey? What's he up to these days?"

Karen's stomach tightened as she thought of her youngest son. "Oh, you know Casey. Charming and sweet and completely unmotivated." She made a face. "He's failing two classes this semester. I'm beginning to wonder if I'll ever get him out of high school."

"He takes after his uncle Del." Sara's smile was fond, but her words made Karen shudder.

"The world doesn't need two Dels," she said. Her younger brother was a handsome, glib, womanizing con man. When he wasn't sponging off her parents, he was making a play for some woman — usually one young enough to be his daughter. "Are he and Sheila still together?" Sheila was Del's third wife, the one who'd put up with him the longest.

"No, they've split up." Sara shrugged. "No surprise there. She never let the boy have any peace. Talk about a shrew."

"I'd be a shrew, too, if my husband couldn't keep his pants zipped or his bank account from being overdrawn."

"Now, your brother has a good heart. People — especially women — always take advantage of him."

No, Del had a black heart, and he was an expert at taking advantage of others. But Karen knew it was no use arguing with her mother. "If Del's so good, maybe he should be the one looking after Dad," she said.

Her mother frowned at her. "You know your father and Del don't get along. Besides, for all his good qualities, Del isn't the most responsible man in the world."

Any other time, Karen might have laughed. Saying her brother wasn't responsible was like saying the Rocky Mountains were steep.

She checked her watch again. Eleven-twenty. At home she'd be making the last calls on her morning's to-do list.

Here, there was no to-do list, just this sense of too much to handle. Too many hours where she didn't know what lay ahead. Too many things she had no control over. "Do you think he's ready yet?" she asked.

Her mother stood. "He probably is. I'll help you get him in the car. Del said he'd meet you at the house to help get him inside, but after that, you're on your own."

"Right." After all, she was Karen, the oldest daughter. The dependable one.

The one with sucker written right across her forehead.

Of course Del was nowhere in sight when Karen pulled her father's Jeep Cherokee up to the new wheel-chair ramp in front of his house. She got out of the car and took a few steps toward the mobile home parked just across the fence, but Del's truck wasn't under the carport and there was no sign that anyone was home.

Anger gnawing a hole in her gut, she went around to the back of the Jeep and took out the wheelchair her mother had rented from the hospital pharmacy. After five minutes of struggling in the already oppressive May heat, she figured out how to set it up, and wheeled it around to the passenger side of the vehicle.

"Okay, Dad, you're going to have to help me with this," she said, watching his eyes to make sure he understood.

He nodded and grunted again, and made a move toward the chair.

"Wait, let me unbuckle your seat belt. Okay, put your hand on my shoulder. Wait, I'm not ready...well, all right. Here. Wait —"

Martin half fell and was half dragged into the chair. Sweat trickled down Karen's back and pooled at the base of her spine. She studied the wheelchair ramp her brother had built out of plywood. As usual, he'd done a half-ass job. The thing was built like a skateboard ramp, much too steep.