The Bird Market of Paris by Nikki Moustaki Page B

birds tried to escape their cages. They became ingenious at escaping. One little green male, Chicky, slipped his cage several times by lifting the cage’s front door and squeezing out of the small space. Or, perhaps, he had his mate, Holly, hold the door up as he unfettered himself of his prison. Once at large in the bird room, he’d fly from cage to cage and release as many other birds as he could.
    I’d walk into the bird room to find half the birds out of their cages and Chicky in the middle of it all, delighting in his mischief, hanging on to the edge of a cage, flapping and chirruping wildly. It took me weeks to determine that Chicky was the freewheeling custodian of the bird room—one day I snuck in to find him in the middle of a jailbreak.
    Birds are optimists. When I locked my birds in their cages, they didn’t resign themselves to captivity. They didn’t fade into a depression so deep that the sky felt like a stranger. Even flightless birds know there’s a place for them beyond the chicken wire. It’s the birthright birds want more than food, more than love—to escape from the cage, to fly, to soar, to see the earth from the appropriate perspective—above.

 
    Chapter 9
    The fall I turned twenty, Nona had a small stroke and lost some movement on her left side. Poppy doted on her, cooking and cleaning, doing exercises with her following illustrations on a photocopy the hospital gave him with her discharge papers. She was mobile, but slower.
    Several months later, on a Friday night, Poppy called and asked if I could come over and help him with Nona. I was about to leave the house to meet some friends at a party. Perhaps he could call someone else? I was over an hour away. My parents were out and I had no way of reaching them. There was desperation in his voice, but I didn’t think whatever was happening could be that bad. If it were, wouldn’t he call an ambulance?
    At the party, I couldn’t shake Poppy’s voice. “ Chérie ,” he had said, “I cannot do this myself. I need to get Nona into the car.”
    I found a pay phone near the restroom of the restaurant, but Poppy didn’t answer, so I called my house, and my mom told me that Nona had been taken to Doctors Hospital in Coral Gables. I was confused about the distance, because there were many hospitals much closer, but that’s where her primary physician was affiliated.
    I teetered into the emergency room in high heels, short skirt, and sequined top, a mint in my mouth to cover the smell of beer, and found Poppy and my parents sitting in the waiting room, gray and anxious.
    â€œYour grandmother had another stroke,” my dad said, the rims of his eyes red and wet.
    Nona was parked on a gurney in the hallway next to the nurse’s station, hooked to machines, clear tubing connected to her in strands, buoying her body on the bed, like she’d sink without them.
    â€œNona?” I said, peering into her face. I grasped her good hand.
    â€œI never thought I would finish in a hospital,” she said in a gravelly voice, tears streaming toward her ears. She was seventy-two. Grandmothers live far longer.
    â€œThat’s not what’s going to happen,” I said. “You’ll be fine. You’ll see.” I couldn’t understand why the doctors walked around and joked with one another as if no one there needed a miracle.
    I stayed the night with her. We were in a low-ceilinged room by ourselves on the second floor, repetitive, disharmonic beeping emanating from every room and bouncing off the concrete hallways like racquetballs. A nurse brought me a reclining chair, but there was no rest. I sat up watching Nona, rubbing her paralyzed hand and foot as if I could shimmy life back into them, like trying to extract fire from a wet stick and a soft stone.
    Early in the evening she could still move her fingers and toes a little. As the night progressed, she lost all use