For the rest of their moons, Maynard and Martha Wolfskill swore they didn’t see the cat until the last second. It was black and it had spent the minutes Jasper clung to the branch slinking through the undergrowth. Slowly, with feline patience, she moved within striking distance at the precise moment when Jasper succumbed to his trance.
Mama saw the cat an instant too late. She dove out of the tree as the beast leaped from the bush and took a vicious swipe at her son. She cawed louder than she’d ever cawed, and dove straight for the black back caring nothing for her own safety. Her instinct to protect her son took over her mind and her body. She wanted blood. An instant later Maynard was right behind her.
Jasper never saw the cat. He didn’t hear Mama and Pop screaming at it like screech owls. The cat’s razor-sharp claws sliced the air and missed his tail feathers by a quill’s width. They sliced his branch and sent him plummeting down the cliff to the rocks and the surf.
He never saw the cat, but he would remember every nanosecond of the fall the rest of his life. At first it felt unreal, and he didn’t actually believe that he was watching the yucca tree and the ledge streaking away from him or that the branch to which he’d clung was suddenly level with his head. He felt like he was tumbling very, very slowly, until he was falling beak first. He was perplexed for another endless moment. The ocean was racing toward him at mortal speed. That wasn’t right, was it? He caught a whiff of sage in his nostril, and it tickled his eyes. He thought, I didn’t know death smelled like sage.
As the rocks rushed toward him, he felt something. At first it was just the sense of a sensation. Between him and the cliffs and rocks was a sort of cushion of air. It felt almost like the bottom of the nest, and at the thought of the nest he flashed to a memory of wrestling with his brothers and sisters, falling over and over in the downy bed. Then he felt it under his belly for sure, a slight difference in pressure caused by him moving through it and by the proximity of the rocks that threatened to crush his fragile body. Mama would later explain something called ground effect.
He saw the warm yellow light again. Only now the color was deeper, nearly gold, and it wasn’t in his mind but all around him in the air. It enveloped him and hugged him and he felt safe. Safer than in his egg, safer than in the nest, safer even than in Mama’s wings. As the rocks rushed toward him he reached for the golden light to see what it felt like and what it was made of. He stretched out his wings as far as he could as if he was reaching for a great and perhaps final secret in the instant before his demise.
And he was flying. The sea rocks and sea foam and water rushed at him but the light was above it and around it. He reached for the light again and executed a perfect snap roll around the closest rock, missing it by a barb. Now the golden light lay above the surface of the water like mist and he reached for it there. His snap roll resolved into straight-and-level flight a few feet above the whitecaps.
From somewhere behind him he heard Pop cawing like a bird possessed. Jasper realized he was losing altitude. Pop cawed again and Jasper forced himself to take his eyes off the transfixing light and look over his shoulder. Above him the light was bands of gold and pale purple, and his father was racing toward him flapping almost as fast as a hummingbird.
Jasper looked back at the ocean surface. The light above it had changed into the same sort of gold and purple, the colors woven like a palm frond. He tried to touch a purple band but missed it. He tried and missed again. He kept trying and kept missing, and a funny thing happened. He was flapping his wings. He was no longer losing altitude and heading for the water. He was climbing.
When he’d flapped a few more times, the purple faded and then almost vanished and he was once more bathed in gold. He stopped flapping as an updraft from the cliff caught his wings and his belly. He was maybe 200 feet above the water now, gliding in a slow figure eight as the current ebbed and flowed.
Pop and Mama caught up with him. Pop was as pale as a mourning dove and Mama’s eyes were as wide as a puffin’s.
Mama reached him first. Jasper, Jasper, Jasper, Jasper! Son, we thought we’d lost you! Lost you, lost you, lost you!
Jasper had already forgotten the terror of clinging to the yucca branch. He’d forgotten the nauseating fall from the nest and Mama nudging him out. In fact, he was forgetting more with each flap. He reached for a pale purple band and looped over Mama. Aw, Mama. Don’t make a big deal. It was just a dive. You guys do it all the time.
Pop leveled off next to them. His color had returned and there was a huge grin in his blue eyes. He didn’t say anything at first, but just looked at his son. Then he started laughing. As he laughed the gold and purple around him gave way to a deep orange light and Pop was hovering. Caaaaw, caw, caw, caw, caw! Didja see that, Martha! First time Jasp flies and he rides the ’cane! A danged snap roll against a cliff! Takes most crows moons to learn that kind of maneuver! Caw, caw, caw, caw, caw! Jasper, boy, you’re a natural! Our boy’s a real Old Bill!
Mama started laughing too as Pop flipped onto his back in midair and grabbed his belly with his wings, cackling uncontrollably. He dropped down and away from them, then caught himself and climbed back up, still choking back giggles.
Jasper saw tears of laughter in his parents’ eyes. The light filled the sky with more colors than he thought possible. There were hundreds of birds in it, climbing, diving, cartwheeling, gliding. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. It was where he belonged. The three of them made a gentle turn toward land and glided home.
Sea-Tac
And it is of the highest importance that this common meeting-place should be reached easily, almost instinctively, in the dark, with one’s eyes shut.
—Virginia Woolf
After the accident and settlement it’s decided Alfred should live at home for a while. The doctors and specialists and therapists all agree it’s the best way for him to ease back into the real world. That’s how they always say it: Alfred needs to ease back into the real world after his accident. He’s just fortunate the settlement provides for his care and rehabilitation. Alfred himself has no sense of having left the real world in the first place, but all the doctors and specialists and therapists concur and so at the age of thirty-five he finds himself parked in his old bedroom at his parents’ house near Sea-Tac Airport.
The transition is hard at first. Before the accident and settlement he had a great big house in Seattle, on Queen Anne Hill. He can’t remember for sure how long he lived there and he can’t remember what he did to afford it, but he remembers the big living room and the bedroom with the oak beam ceiling and windows that looked over Lake Union. He has a particularly vivid memory of standing on the back lawn watching the Blue Angels perform at Sea Fair, especially the part when one of the gleaming blue F/A-18 fighters with the bright yellow US NAVY emblazoned on its wings screamed 300 feet over the house with its afterburners blazing. He remembers that, and there’s a girl in the memory but for the life of him he can’t remember who she was. His parents don’t seem to remember, either.
It’s strange living at home like a kid, but at least his old bedroom isn’t so bad. His parents left up some of his posters from way back, the one from an Aerosmith concert when he was in high school, and the ones of airplanes. It’s on the second floor and he can look out of his window and see the jets taking off and landing a half mile away at Sea-Tac. Their neighborhood of Normandy Park is nestled on a small hill west of the airport. From one window in his room he can see the gymnasium and football field at his old middle school and from the other he can see almost the whole airport over a grove of evergreens. He can see all three runways and the tall cement control tower and the terminals in which he knows there are people on their way to every corner of the world. Most of all he can see the airplanes.
When