THE MORNING AFTER WE BURIED THE SPARROW, I woke up on
fire with a fever.
My muscles ached, my throat hurt, my head throbbed almost like a heart. I kept staring at my hands, almost believing they belonged to someone else. When I tried to get up, I had no balance, no equilibrium, and the room spun around and around. I tried to take a step, but my legs weren’t strong enough to carry my weight. I fell back on the bed, my clock radio crashing to the floor.
My mother appeared in my room and for some reason she didn’t seem real. “Mom? Mom? Is that you?” I think I was yelling.
She was holding a question in her eyes. “Yes,” she said. She seemed so serious.
“I fell,” I said.
She said something—but I couldn’t translate what she was saying. Everything was so strange and I thought maybe I was dreaming, but her hand on my arm felt like a real touch. “You’re burning up,” she said.
I felt her hands on my face.
I kept wondering where I was, so I asked her. “Where are we?” She held me for a moment. “Shhh.”
The world was so silent. There was a barrier between me and the world, and I thought for a moment that the world had never wanted me and now it was taking the opportunity to get rid of me.
I looked up and saw my mom standing in front of me, holding out two aspirin, a glass of water.
I sat up and reached for the pills and put them in my mouth. When I held the glass, I could see my hands trembling.
She put a thermometer under my tongue.
She studied the time on her watch, then pulled the thermometer out of my mouth.
“A hundred and four,” she said. “We’ve got to break that fever.” She shook her head. “It’s all those germs at the pool.”
The world seemed closer for an instant. “It’s just a cold,” I whispered.
But it seemed like someone else was talking.
“I think you have the flu.”
But it’s summer. The words were on my tongue but I couldn’t say them. I couldn’t stop shivering. She placed another blanket over me.
Everything was spinning but when I closed my eyes, the room was motionless and dark.
And then the dreams came.
Birds were falling from the sky. Sparrows. Millions and millions of sparrows. They were falling like rain and they were hitting me as they fell and I had their blood all over me and I couldn’t find a place to protect myself. Their beaks were breaking my skin like arrows. And Buddy Holly’s plane was falling from the sky and I could hear Waylon Jennings singing “La Bamba.” I could hear Dante crying—and when I turned around to see where he was, I saw that he was holding Richie Valens’s limp body in his arms. And then the plane came falling down on us. All I saw was the shadow and the earth on fire.
And then the sky disappeared.
I must have been screaming, because my mom and dad were in the room. I was trembling and everything was soaked in my sweat. And then I realized that I was crying and I couldn’t make myself stop.
My dad picked me up and rocked me in the chair. I felt small and weak and I wanted to hold him back but I couldn’t because there wasn’t any strength in my arms, and I wanted to ask him if he had held me like this when I was a boy because I didn’t remember and why didn’t I remember. I started to think that maybe I was still dreaming, but my mother was changing the sheets on my bed so I knew that everything was real. Except me.
I think I was mumbling. My father held me tighter and whispered something, but not even his arms or his whispers could keep me from trembling. My mom dried my sweaty body with a towel and she and my dad changed me into a clean T-shirt and clean underwear. And then I said the strangest thing, “Don’t throw my T-shirt away. Dad gave it to me.” I knew I was crying, but I didn’t know why because I wasn’t the kind of guy who cried, and I thought that maybe it was someone else who was crying.
I could hear my father whisper, “Shhhh. It’s okay.” He laid me back down on the bed and my mother sat next to me and made me drink some water and take more aspirin.
I saw the look on my dad’s face and I knew he was worried. And I was sad that I had made him worry. I wondered if he had really held me and I wanted to tell him that I didn’t hate him, it was just that I didn’t understand him, didn’t understand who he was and I wanted to, I wanted so much to understand. My mother said something to my father in Spanish and he nodded. I was too tired to care about words in any language.
The world was so quiet.
I fell asleep—and the dreams came again. It was raining outside and there was thunder and lightning all around me. And I could see myself as I ran in the rain. I was looking for Dante and I was yelling because he was lost, “Dante! Come back! Come back!” And then I wasn’t looking for Dante anymore, I was looking for my dad and I was yelling for him, “Dad! Dad! Where did you go? Where did you go?”
When I woke again, I was soaked in my own sweat again. My dad was sitting on my rocking chair, studying me.
My mom walked into the room. She looked at my father—then at me.
