Page 28 of Meet Me in the Garden

Lionel lifts his hands. “What you’re hearing is pure enthusiasm.”

Clément squeezes me tighter and I think of walking him back down to the car. I still don’t understand why we’re here. But then J.J. opens the coop, and there’s an exodus, wings beating, birds darting up. I gasp at the suddenness of it.

“They got away!” Clément shouts, eyes wide, whole body stretched skyward.

“That’s the point, little man,” Lionel says, but his voice is reverent. “We’re here to watch them fly. Just look at them.”

The pigeons move in a group, changing direction every so often in the blue sky, far above the telephone wires and a tangle of branches. “You just wait a moment and the real show will start,” J.J. says. Soon, one of the birds falls away from the rest, spinning, plummeting, catching itself and flying up again. Another does the same, spins and falls even farther than the first. I’ve never seen anything like it.

“What makes them do that?” I ask.

“It’s neurological. Just this one breed does it—the Birmingham Roller. No one knows much beyond that,” J.J. says.

“See those two?” Lionel’s close to my ear, pointing to a pair of pigeons breaking away from the rest. “They’re us.”

“Are they?” The birds spin and fall, and I’m not sure whether they’re ecstatic or struggling, if it’s freedom or an affliction. Either way, they’re mesmerizing. That Lionel sees us in them perplexes me, delights me. Moves me in a way I don’t fully understand.

When the pigeons go back in their coop, J.J. tells us we have to go. His wife will be coming home soon and they’re entertaining. Lionel asks questions about the birds all the way out to the street. “I want to fly them,” he says as we climb into the car. “Try my hand at breeding them.”

“You can have your own birds?” Clément asks. “That fall in the sky? And come back?”

“A man can dream.”

Clément scoots off my lap and onto Lionel’s. “A boy, too,” he says. My son, four years old now. Suddenly his own person.

Lionel starts the engine. “That’s right, little man. A boy can, too.”

Clément waits at the window on a Saturday a few weeks later, jumps up and down when Lionel pulls up just past four. He’s taking us with him to Union Station, where he has a bird set to arrive on the 5:15 train. None of the local breeders would sell him one.

“I was on a call with Ginny, long distance,” Lionel says as we climb into the car.

“How’s Montana?” If he hears any particular interest in my voice, he doesn’t let on.

“She likes it pretty well. Says every morning she greets the incoming train along with the Blackfeet Indians in their giant headdresses. She’s made friends with some of them. Apparently, they don’t really dress that way, or live in teepees anymore, but the hotel pays them to do it for the visitors. It adds to the overall effect.”

“You and Ginny,” I say. “You’re both making your own lives.”

Lionel smiles. “Oh yeah?”

That burning in my chest again. But I’ll get there. Clément and me, a place of our own. Someday.

“’Scuse me,” Clément says. “Can we talk about birds now?”

I want to know more about Ginny, but the topic is pigeons all the way to the station, where Clément is struck by the majesty—the soaring ceilings and stone walls and giant wooden chandeliers. It comes back: Lionel and me, Bernard and Claire, Al and Adele and Rudy, stepping off the train and into our new lives. “We were right here, weren’t we?” I say to Lionel. “This platform. The night we got here.”

“That’s about right,” he says.

“Imagine,” I say. “Being a little bird, arriving to a place like this.”

“The bird will be in a crate. He’ll have no idea where he is. I only hope he isn’t too discombobulated by the journey.”

The train pulls up and passengers swarm the platform, suitcases in hand, scanning the station for where to go. The crowd thins and Lionel’s searching the train cars for someone carrying a crate. He bounces on his feet, nervousness setting in. A Pullman porter appears in the doorway of the next car and we head toward him, but just as Lionel begins to explain what he’s waiting for, there’s a voice from behind us: “I have a special delivery for the one and only Lionel Dumas.” We turn to see another porter with a small crate in his hands, high cheekbones and smooth skin, a thin mustache over a full mouth, a glimmer of familiarity in his eyes.

“Felix!” I say. I’m searching for the last time I saw him. Maybe it was my wedding day. Yes. He was holding an arm out, catching me when I stumbled.

Lionel’s shaking his head. “Unbelievable.”

“Once I saw your name on the label of the box here, I resolved to treat this little guy as well as my first-class passengers. Figured odds were slim there’d be another Lionel Dumas in Los Angeles, let alone one peculiar enough to have a bird sent to him by train. But I didn’t dare imagine you’d have this angel here with you.” He hands Lionel the crate and puts his arms out to embrace me.