A Bird Called Wonder
When Charlie returned home from work, the shower was running. He knocked on the door of the bathroom, called Jessica’s name and twisted the knob, but it was locked. Jessica didn’t answer him. Shit. He ran to his desk, unwound a paper clip and jimmied the lock. Click. He threw open the door and pulled back the shower curtain to find Jessica sitting on the floor of the tub, arms wrapped around her naked legs. He turned off the water, sat down beside her and pulled her to him. Then he did the only thing he could think to do. He sang.
His voice melted the steamy air.
“If all you told was turned to gold, if all you dreamed was new, Imagine sky high above, in Caribbean blue.”
Jessica’s breathing slowed and she stopped crying. It was their song, the song they’d danced to at their wedding reception in Virginia. They’d giggled when they recited the vow: “For richer or poorer,” and then they’d gone back to the Hotel Blue Ridge and furiously lost their virginities to each other.
“I love you,” Jessica whispered to Charlie, feeling that no truer words had ever been spoken. Charlie whispered it back. He got out of the shower and grabbed a towel off the rack and wrapped it around her.
“Even my crooked toes?” she asked
“Even those.”
“I don’t like it here. I don’t think I can stay.”
Jessica hated herself for saying the words, but her depression had returned, and it was like a sweater she couldn’t take off, like a dog that wouldn’t stop licking her face, like the acidic taste you get in the back of your throat when you didn’t swallow enough water with a pill. She and Charlie had been together a year, since the Spring of 2001, and in that time, the thrill of falling for him had made her believe her moods were behind her.
But since arriving in Los Angeles a few weeks earlier, each day felt like treading water. The smog hurt her eyes. The traffic hurt her ears. It was strange to feel so terrible in a place where Birds of Paradise bloomed most of the year and the sun flooded their tiny studio with light all day. The beauty of the city only reminded her what a fuck-up she was because she didn’t enjoy it. She began to shiver.
“But what about our dream?” Charlie asked quietly, referring to the one they shared, to become famous writers. They’d made a pact: take any job they could to eventually write on television shows.
“I hate our dream. Our dream sucks.”
“We’ll move if things don’t get better soon,” Charlie said.
“Thank you.”
Jessica buried her head in his wet shirt.
Charlie hated making this promise to his wife. He was from a small town in Tennessee and had spent his teen years glued to episodes of “Star Trek” and “Quantum Leap.” Once, as a joke on his mom, he’d replaced all eleven of her Bibles with TV Guide magazines. He wrote poems that got him a scholarship to a graduate writing program in Virginia, where he met Jessica, who was an undergraduate, an English major, too. She’d asked him out and he hadn’t wanted to go. He preferred the company of his television. But the main reason was his fear of women, particularly ones who wore hot pink shirts and had big breasts. Jessica was loud. She hit a bulls-eye almost every time they played darts. Within weeks, they were inseparable. One night he found himself confessing his dream to her at the smoky bar they practically lived in.
“I want to move to Los Angeles and write on television shows. I know it’s dumb.”
She slammed her bottle of root beer on the table and said, “I’d go anywhere with you. Let’s write a script. Conquer LA together!”
Several of Jessica’s short stories had already been published in literary journals and it turned out she had a knack for script-writing, too. Her favorite show was “Friends” so they’d written an episode of it, a spec, and given it to a television contact named Elizabeth, from their college. They packed suitcases and drove from Virginia to meet with Elizabeth, a gamble because what if she hated the script and they’d moved three thousand miles away from their homes? But Jessica was certain things would work out.
“We’re a power couple, Charlie. Hotter than Jennifer and Brad,” she said, in such a serious way that he swallowed a laugh. He believed her.
They met Elizabeth at a coffee shop in North Hollywood where she smoked while reading, never laughing. When she closed the script, she exhaled a plume of smoke above her head and said: “You’re funny. I can help you.”
Charlie got hired as a production assistant on a TV show about a trio of horny witch sisters. Charlie’s main responsibility at work was driving in endless loops around the city delivering scripts and revision pages, and if he wasn’t doing that, he stood in endless lines in crowded restaurants collecting coffee and lunch for the writers.
Jessica got a job as a runner at a post-production house in Hollywood, where for three weeks she delivered reels of film and constantly got lost because she couldn’t make sense of The Thomas Guide, a huge book of maps every person in Los Angeles owned. She quit one night after she ended up in Commerce instead of Encino and now Charlie usually returned from work, exhausted, to find her in bed, her laptop open beside her, the Word document she’d opened always blank. She wanted to turn her focus to short stories. But so far she said all her ideas were trash.
Charlie missed the woman from the bar in Virginia, who’d sworn they were a power couple.
Where had she gone? Would she ever come back?
A small light flickered in the corner of the window. Jessica wiped her eyes. The light flickered again, and this time Jessica clearly saw the color gold. If she wanted to see what was happening, she’d have to leave her bed. Leaving the bed meant bare feet on the cold wood floor. An excruciating sensation.
But the color—it was enchanting.
She brought a small step stool over to the window. She climbed to the top step.
The hummingbird sat on a nest tucked into a bundle of ivy. She blinked exquisite, teeny eyes. A gasp escaped Jessica’s lips. The bird was so little, so sweet. She sat on a small nest, delicately composed of twisted branches and strands of hair. Great tenderness and care went into making such a safe home, Jessica could feel it.
“Whoah,” Jessica whispered. Locking eyes with the bird, she felt a rush of pleasure through her body, from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes, a rush of pleasure that consumed the acid-tongue-dog-sweater.
Jessica used the landline to call Charlie, who upon answering his cell phone told her he was in the middle of picking up lunch at the Cheesecake Factory—several orders had come with dressing on the salads instead of on the side, so he had to wait for new salads to be made or he’d be fired.
“It’s stressful as fuck,” Charlie said.
Jessica didn’t answer. She hated to think she was ruining things.
“Hold on,” Charlie said.
A moment later he said: “What is it?”
She could hear the rush of traffic in the background.
“There’s a hummingbird in our window. Sitting on a nest. You have to come home and see it.”
“A hummingbird?”
“She’s special, Charlie.”
“A hummingbird is special?”
“Just come home.”
It might seem strange that Charlie left work early, claiming he was coming down with a cold, to go home and see his wife and a bird in the window, but Jessica sounded alive again, like the violet-eyed woman who sat in the corner of his creative writing seminar, the woman who asked him on a date when he’d never been on a date in his life.
He drove home like his apartment was on fire and he had to put the fire out.
Jessica dipped fries into ranch dressing and told Charlie she was eating gold.
Maybe Jessica’s depression had been just a phase, like his sister had suggested when Charlie called her a few weeks earlier, late one night, in the hallway outside of their apartment. First he’d asked her for two hundred dollars to pay the rent. Then he confessed what was going on with his wife.
“She could be freaked out because of so much change,” she said. “That’s normal.”
“But her mother….”
“Don’t think like that…and I’m sending you five hundred.”
Charlie knew his sister never thought he’d fall in love, that because of his shyness he was destined to follow in their father’s footsteps and run the pharmacy. Neither wanted to believe the worst, that Charlie would be alone forever.
Charlie studied Jessica for the next few days, watching for signs the phase had come back to prove itself not a phase. But Jessica went for runs. She washed her hair. Suddenly the Word doc on her computer was full of paragraphs.
“I’ve birthed a new story, Charlie! A children’s book about a hummingbird!”
She photographed the hummingbird for hours, anxious for the birth. She’d been ecstatic when she’d caught sight of the eggs.
The digital camera had cost Charlie close to one thousand dollars, which he’d charged to their Visa. It had been Jessica’s idea to buy it. She’d seen the ad for the contest in the nature magazine.
“We could win twenty thousand dollars! Hummingbirds are a symbol of good luck! You could quit the show and write all day.”
This seemed unlikely. But Charlie didn’t argue with his wife. She’d stopped crying. She was eating French fries and ranch dressing, and calling it gold.
Things could only get better, Charlie was sure of it. The showrunner where Charlie worked offered to give him notes on Dead Planet, his script about capitalism destroying a colony of monkeys on Mars, and Charlie came in to work excited. He couldn’t wait for his meeting, which if things worked out would lead to him getting staffed. He’d be the one ordering lunch instead of picking it up. At his graduate program in Virginia, Charlie was considered the best writer in his class.
One morning Robert gestured for Charlie to come in and take a seat across from his desk, which was covered in pens and legal pads, two potted plants with yellow, withered leaves, and a Styrofoam box containing a half-eaten breakfast burrito with extra avocado sauce on the side. Many of the writers were messy like this in their offices, something Charlie couldn’t understand. If he were ever lucky enough to be a real writer and have his own office, he’d keep it spotless.
Charlie waited for Robert to give him compliments.
Robert wore a baseball cap and matching sweatshirt that said KCRW, the name of the local radio station. He took off his cap and rubbed his salt and pepper hair before sighing.
“You’re a good writer. The scenes flow and the descriptions are really vivid and surprising. Poetic even.” So why wasn’t Robert smiling? “The thing is…the Mars shit is just kinda…who cares? Like what are you saying?”
“It’s about how capitalism finds ways to exploit and destroy us even in a system not founded on slavery.”
“No, I get that. But that’s why capitalism sucks. I’m asking you—why does this matter to you?”
The room had emptied of air. Charlie couldn’t think of what to say.
“Aren’t you from some weird town in the South?”
Charlie nodded slowly, feeling like he was standing suddenly in quicksand, the realization dawning on him that Robert was not about to insist on staffing him immediately.
“Look, ignore me if you want. I work on a show about fucking witches, but it’s not where my heart is. Draw on your own experiences and write something new, that’s my two cents. Write about what you know, the weirdo aunt who fries toads for dinner. Don’t people do that where you’re from?”
Charlie thought about his dad filling pill bottles, his mother making creamed corn night after night. He’d never heard of anyone frying toads, and the idea twisted his stomach.
“You win some, you lose some. I’ll read whatever you come up with next. Good luck. Can you run down and grab me an iced mocha?”
Charlie, nodding, stood up. His face was flushed. He hurried out of the room.
The phone rang at dawn.
“I’m on my way,” Charlie said, climbing out of bed.
Jessica groaned. “What time is it?”
“Six. I have to drive to Northridge. Mandy Martindale needs her wheatgrass. The on-set PA didn’t bring it and Mandy can’t take a shit without it.”
This made Jessica laugh and then Charlie laughed. The bed shook.
Jessica turned over to him and kissed him, long and deep.
“Don’t go,” she whispered.
But he had to.
Almost as soon as the lock clicked into place, Jessica heard a faint sound coming from the open window. Scratch, scratch.
She climbed the step stool.
The eggs were hatching.
Chip, chip, chip. A beak.
Jessica began to cry, but not because her depression was coming back. She’d had a memory, a beautiful one. When she was very small and her mother was still alive, they’d been up early and out the kitchen window saw a fawn chasing after its mother. Jessica felt so loved by her mother that day, a rare feeling.
“Someday I will live on a farm,” she’d told her mother, “someday I will have a million animals.”
Jessica tried not to think about her mother and if she did, she pushed the thought out of her mind. Jessica had forgotten about this moment until now.
The air smelled smoky from the neighbors next door. Jessica got the camera.
The next morning it rained torrentially, which was unusual for early April in Los Angeles. The sound woke Jessica and Charlie up, and they melted into each other, their bodies hungry for each other’s skin. This was an intimacy that makes your teeth ache when you don’t have it anymore, and they’d both had a toothache for weeks. Jessica got up for a root beer and was running back to bed with it when she noticed a ray of light shining right on the bird’s nest. She set the bottle down and sprinted to the coffee table and grabbed the camera. The hummingbird’s eyes opened at the precise moment Jessica hit the shutter. The bird’s wings were immortalized as a rainbow of colors. Jessica knew she had her shot.
Two days before the contest deadline, Charlie uploaded all 189 photos onto his blueberry iMac G-3. Jessica said she already knew what picture she wanted, since they could only submit one.
“There,” she said.
He’d seen it on the camera screen and thought it was lovely, but blown up on the entirety of his computer, it was breathtaking.
The mother bird looked at the lens, her face in sharp focus. Her babies, slightly blurry, peeked out from beneath her, which only made the mother look more magnificent and clear. The light on her was extraordinary, extraterrestrial. She had a holy aura.
“Wow,” Charlie said.
“This is how I feel with you,” Jessica said, pointing at the babies. “When I am in pain, you take care of me, you make me feel safe.”
Tears glinted faintly in the corners of her eyes and Charlie worried Jessica’s dark mood was returning. But his wife leaned into him. She sighed softly, calmly, and relief flooded through Charlie.
“That’s the one,” Jessica murmured.
Charlie was handing out salads in the writer’s room. The writers were trying to work out a story problem and Charlie was pretending to be absorbed in making sure everyone had the right salad. No one had ever asked for his opinion before. It was understood he had the same job as the potted palm in the corner. Be quiet and give us oxygen. Or in Charlie’s case, food.
“Evangeline’s the only one the audience wants to fuck,” Robert said. “And she needs a backstory. Pitches on young people problems?”
Evangeline was the youngest witch of the three, at eighteen. She’d just joined the cast because the network said the other sister witches, thirty years old, were “dried-up corn husks.”
The writers, a mix of people in their thirties and forties, mused about Evangeline having failed romantic relationships.
Charlie had an idea. He didn’t know if it was stupid. Or embarrassing. He might get fired if he pitched it. But since his wife had stopped sleeping all the time and crying the few hours she was awake, a hopefulness had sprung up inside of him that was hard to ignore. And he’d been thinking about Robert’s admonition regarding his writing.
He raised his hand, his wife’s backstory a blinking, neon sign in his mind.
Daphne raised an eyebrow. “Everyone shut up, Charlie thinks he has a good idea.”
He considered running out of the room. He looked out the window onto Wilshire Boulevard and tried to keep his voice from shaking.
“Maybe her mom died when Evangeline was little…like maybe she was killed by a warlock. Evangeline witnessed it, so she’s ignored her powers because she doesn’t want to end up dead, too.”
The writers were quiet and Charlie was sure he’d messed up. He apologized softly and started for the door. He’d run out and get Starbucks for everyone, tell the writers their $6 Frappucinos were on him, even though since he’d purchased the camera their Visa was nearly maxxed out.
“Charlie, wait,” Robert said. “That could work.”
Heads nodded in agreement.
Later, he was at his desk, still smiling, when Robert stopped by his cubicle.
“Can you make sure I get two cups of blue cheese dressing on the side the next time we get Manny’s? They always skimp.”
This part of the job made Charlie feel the size of a pea. He forced an eager smile and nodded, “Yep.”
“Oh, and your pitch gave us a whole new story for the finale. We’re staffing Naya next season if you wanna be writer’s assistant.”
Robert mentioned this so casually, but the news meant Charlie might get a freelance episode and he’d be on his way to becoming a real writer.
“Wow,” Charlie said. “Thank you.”
Robert waved his hand and disappeared around the corner.
Charlie pumped his fist.
Jessica leapt from the sofa.
“That’s AMAZING!” she said, but she wasn’t really listening.
She threw her arms around her husband.
“We have to celebrate.”
They walked down the street to pick up sushi, a splurge.
Charlie talked about a new idea for a script on the walk home, one about his relationship to his sister, and Jessica pretended to listen. But she was still on a high from finding the farm in Virginia.
When they won the money, everything would change. They would be invincible. They would conquer farm life. She’d emailed a few owners and spoken to them on the phone, but the one in Abingdon seemed the most promising because they could apprentice for a year before taking over part of it. Jessica loved doing the research.
As she typed and made calls, hours disappeared. She felt exhilarated, alive. She ran five miles in one hour, something she hadn’t been able to do in years. She never wanted to stop. She couldn’t stop envisioning their future, and the wide open space of country life, so different from the crushing smallness of their studio apartment.
She’d paint Charlie’s new office yellow. No, green! Maybe she’d even stencil sunflowers on the walls. He’d churn out script after script and mail them to Hollywood. They’d travel back for premieres and then return to their cozy country home.
“I’m okay now,” Jessica assured Charlie as he put a big piece of salmon sushi in his mouth. She didn’t know that he thought this meant they could stay in LA, that his dreams for them were finally coming true.
When Jessica was in this frantic frame of mind, her brain operated at a superhuman speed, like a freight train on acid. In college, she’d written twenty page stories in two hours. Stories that got published! One even won an award! Nothing could stop her from going after what she wanted.
They sat beside each other and he reached under the table and took her hand. They laughed, trying and failing to eat sushi while holding hands.
Jessica woke up early and checked her email. She started to cry when she saw the message and called Charlie’s name. When he appeared beside her, she cried, explaining her plan for the farm when they won the money. She showed him the information she’d gathered.
But Charlie didn’t seem excited about this new chapter in their lives. His bleary eyes grew wide. He seemed scared. “I don’t want to move, Jessica.” He said he needed to take a walk. He changed his clothes and left.
Jessica climbed the step stool and looked into Wonder’s eyes.
“Wonder, he doesn’t want to go. And I don’t know how I will go because we didn’t win the money. A snow leopard in Africa won. A dumbass snow leopard.”
Jessica disappeared, once again, beneath the covers.
Charlie walked around the block a few times, eventually stopping at Romero’s for a breakfast burrito. While he ate, he thought about his promotion next season, the life he’d started to dream up for himself and Jessica. A house in Silver Lake with a balcony, a yard. They’d plant flowers. They’d make breakfast in a huge kitchen with shiny appliances. Charlie never dreamed as a kid he could make it in a city. And he sort of was.
He pulled out his wallet and found the picture of Jessica he kept behind his driver’s license. He loved her so much. If she left and he didn’t go with her, her depression could come back and get worse. For weeks the hummingbird and the hope of winning the contest had kept her sadness at bay. When he returned home, she’d be back in bed. She’d stop showering and eating.
Jessica’s mother had hung herself in the attic and Jessica, a little girl, had found her. When Jessica told him the story on one of the first nights they met, Charlie was grateful she didn’t suffer the way her mother did, that she didn’t inherit her mother’s pain. But it was clear that wasn’t the case.
During the time they’d dated, occasionally Jessica was moody, wanting to stay in bed longer than he thought she needed to, crying when she burnt a red velvet cake, and the next minute laughing hysterically at an episode of Seinfeld. Charlie always chalked this instability up to her being a creative person. The move to Los Angeles must’ve ignited something terrible inside of her, something connected to her mother. Charlie pictured one of the monkeys from his scripts shrieking inside of her.
When he took his vow to her, for better or for worse, this is what “for worse” meant. Only he could get his wife back to “better.” It was his most important job.
Charlie called his sister and told her about the camera and the children’s book, the lost contest and the not getting out of bed. The words poured out of him in a rush and he was breathless when he finished, the burden of what he’d been carrying momentarily lifted.
His sister sighed. “I can’t afford to pay for therapy. That’ll be a million dollars in Los Angeles.”
“I’m not asking for that. We just need money to get back to Virginia. There’s a farm—”
“A farm?”
Now he was quiet. Charlie considered explaining to his sister how thrilled Jessica would be when he told her they were moving, how the fresh air and new start would be better for her than therapy. He considered telling her how when Jessica smiled at him, when she laughed at his jokes, when she clapped her hands, these things lit him up inside, made him see beauty in the everyday. Even a hummingbird. But his sister didn’t understand the weight of his responsibility. She just thought Jessica was broken.
“If you don’t want to give me the money—”
“No, no, just… promise me you’ll think more about this before you do it.”
He agreed, but had no intention of changing his mind.
Jessica couldn’t say goodbye to Wonder. It was crushing to think she’d never see the little thing again. She focused on the future at the farm, the beautiful new chapter in their lives about to begin.
The drive to Virginia would take five days. While he drove, Charlie played music, bands Jessica loved. Le Tigre, The Pixies, the Magnetic Fields. At every gas station he bought her a key chain with her name on it and a can of root beer. They stopped in diners and ate piles of French fries dipped in ranch dressing. They swam in the pools at the different motels they stayed in, late at night, when no one else was around. Jessica was sure she’d made the right decision for them.
But one night, they were twisted up in scratchy motel sheets, eating a bag of microwave popcorn, and laughing at David Letterman. The episode ended and Charlie grabbed the remote and flipped the channel. Star Trek. Charlie switched off the television.
“You don’t want to watch?” Jessica asked, surprised. “Live Long And Prosper” was the only bumper sticker on Charlie’s car.
“I’m tired.”
He got up and went to the bathroom. Jessica heard the shower turn on.
The next morning Charlie was at the front desk paying the bill. Jessica went around to the back of his car. The Star Trek bumper sticker was gone. Only a sticky residue remained.
One morning, very early, he woke up and she was smiling at him, like she had a big secret. He asked her what it was and she said, “Just that I adore you.” They made love and Charlie felt as good as if he’d gotten his own show on the air, as if he’d been told he’d won an Emmy award. He’d saved his wife. They’d returned to the “for better” part. Finally.
Before he saw her smile that early morning, Jessica watched Charlie sleep. Sometimes he made angry faces, sometimes he farted. Once he laughed. Jessica knew all of this because for their entire marriage, she’d woken up and watched him. She loved him so much and this was why he couldn’t go with her. He believed a career in TV was his future, and she’d taken that from him, turned it into sticky residue. And a future with her would never be stable.
They were only twenty-four years old. Charlie could find another woman, one who never spent days in bed, who wanted a big, fancy life in Los Angeles. Jessica never imagined she’d find someone as kind as Charlie. She hadn’t expected someone as good as him to love her.
Her exuberance about the farm had already started to wane. This happened. She’d get excited about things and then the energy would fade, like a light bulb that had run out of juice. She’d stupidly believed Charlie, kind and gentle, so different from the other boys she’d dated, was the antidote to the rollercoaster ride she was always on.
The only excitement that had never waned was for Charlie. Her pulse still raced when he looked into her eyes. This would be a hard thing to get over, but she had to, for his sake.
The note was on the dresser.
You have to go back. Don’t come after me. Please. I love you.
Her suitcase was gone. He threw open the door and stared into the parking lot. The car was still there. She must’ve walked somewhere. Charlie grabbed his keys.
He drove in circles. Where the fuck were they again? Somewhere in Texas. She’d probably gone for a walk. She couldn’t have gotten far. Sweat pooled on the back of his neck. What if she hurt herself? What if she did what her mom did…. This was his worst nightmare—that Jessica would need him and he wouldn’t be there. He began to cry, something he never did. Jessica cried so much. It never felt like there was room for him to do it. The sensation of tears wetting his cheeks shocked him so much he pulled off the road into a gas station parking lot. He turned off the car. Closed his eyes.
He remembered the day he’d found Jessica sitting in the shower. He’d worried she might be dead. He imagined a future of more of these times, his life becoming a series of ups and downs mimicking her emotions. The mood of the house would always be Jessica’s mood.
She’d cast off the camera after she didn’t win the contest. She’d cast off their future in Los Angeles. Maybe one day she’d cast him off, too.
For the first time in their relationship he admitted to himself he was tired, and this wasn’t a tired he imagined would ever pass. If Jessica lived to an old age, he would be grey-haired and wizened, shuffling along after her, a part of him always terrified.
He remembered his promise to his sister. The show where Charlie worked was on hiatus and he’d never told Robert he wasn’t coming back. Robert said he’d read Charlie’s next script.
Jessica’s face appeared in Charlie’s mind. One night, while they were falling asleep elbow-to-elbow Jessica had whispered: “I named the hummingbird Wonder. She is the most magical creature. If I was ever going to be an animal, I’d be Wonder.”
Were there hummingbirds in Virginia? Charlie hoped so.
Jessica heard the squeak of the Civic’s brakes before she saw him. He was at the light across the street, staring straight ahead.
She’d been sitting on the bench outside of the Greyhound station for hours, watching people come and go, the weight of sadness in her chest a boulder now. But he’d come for her. He always did. When she got in the car, she’d tell him how much she adored him. Insist they blast “Caribbean Blue.”
She stood up and waved furiously, kicking out a leg to get his attention, and he turned to her. He smiled. Tears filled her eyes and she closed them. She wished Charlie away, but also wished him to her side. Why could her brain handle making two wishes at once but couldn’t handle staying happy?
She opened her eyes.
Charlie was gone.
Since 2015, Jennifer has worked as a book coach and writing teacher for women in Los Angeles. Her fiction has appeared in The Florida Review, JMWW, Maudlin House, Isele Magazine, Blackbird, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Hedgebrook residency and a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.