Page 117 of This Time Around
“Yeah.” Paige fell silent again, and Jack glanced in the mirror to see she’d gone back to gazing out the window.
“I’ve been reading my bird book,” she said.
“Oh?” The subject change threw him a little, but it was a welcome diversion. Birds seemed like an easier topic than cancer or death or forgiveness.
“Want to hear about the albatross?” Paige asked.
She was still staring out the window, and Jack couldn’t read her expression at all. Was she thinking of Allie, or just choosing a bird at random?
“Sure,” he said carefully. “Tell me about the albatross.”
“Well,” she began as Jack merged off the freeway toward downtown. “There’s lots of different kinds. The snowy albatross and the black-footed albatross and the waved albatross. The royal albatross is the biggest one. When a baby albatross starts flying, it takes off and goes around the world a bunch of times all by itself without ever touching the ground.”
“Really?” Jack found himself fascinated, and he wondered if Wade had known any of this when he’d given Allie her nickname. Allie Ross the albatross, the bird who’d rather fly alone.
“Yeah,” she said. “They do that for, like, five years, all by themselves. Just catching stuff in the ocean and making these big circles all the way around the world. But you know what’s cool?”
“What’s that?” He glanced in the mirror again, trying to get a read on her.
She met his eyes and smiled. “When the royal albatross goes back to where it was born, it spends a long time finding the one albatross it likes best of all.”
“They mate for life?”
Paige frowned. “What’s that?”
“Like only one other albatross for the rest of its life.”
“Oh. Yeah, they do that. Anyway, when they’re trying to find their husband or wife, they meet a bunch of different albatrosses. They flap their wings and make weird noises. Then they go off with one other albatross and they practice making a nest to see if they really like each other.”
“And then they lay eggs?”
“Nope,” Paige said. “Then they leave each other.”
Jack blinked. “What do you mean?”
“I mean they take off. In opposite directions. The girl bird goes one way and the boy bird goes the other, and they spend a whole year flying by themselves around the world.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, but you know what’s cool? They come back to the same place. Always. And they land within a few hours of the other albatross, even though they’ve been away for a year and they went to all different places. But they come back and they make a nest and they have babies and then they do it all over again. But they always come back.”
A tightness constricted his chest. He kept his eyes off the mirror, not wanting to her to see how undone he felt in that moment. Not wanting to believe this was anything other than a simple story about birds.
“That’s amazing,” Jack said at last.
“It is.” Paige was quiet a moment, and Jack glanced at her again. She fiddled with the end of her braid, twisting and untwisting the rubber band, not looking at him. “I also learned some stuff about woodpeckers.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” She looked up then, meeting his gaze in the mirror. A slow smile spread over her face. “I think I know what kind Allie’s got.”
“What kind?”
“I think it’s called a northern flicker. It’s got red right here by its eye and speckles on its body and these black feathers here like a necklace.”
Jack gripped the steering wheel tighter, feeling his heart starting to thrum in his ears. “That’s good. That you can identify the kind of bird. Nice work.”
“Uh-huh.” She gave him a smile he swore looked just like Allie’s Cheshire cat smile. “And I think I know what to do about it.”
