Treasure Island!!!

closed the door behind him.
    “I don’t need to make it up to your mother. She’s the one who should be making it up to me.” He drooped as though he might sink to the carpet. Were those tears in his eyes? God no. “I’m so confused . . . ”
    That was enough. I leaped out of bed and steered him out the door. “Back to the car, Dad. Or wherever you want to be right now. I don’t care where you go, but you certainly can’t start having a relationship with me
now.”
    “Is your sister all right?” he whimpered.
    “She’s a mess, but isn’t she always?”
    As soon as he had left—I listened to make sure his footsteps returned to the garage—I let out a howl of fear and indignation. Then I got on the phone and called Patty Pacholewski. She didn’t pick up, but I was frantic and left several messages. In the first I said only “call me back,” in the second I intimated that there was “a bit of a crisis,” and in the third I apologized outright for how pushy I was and begged her and Sabrina to let me move into their spare room, pronto. After the final message, which was quite protracted, in that it contained a lot of subordinate clauses and parenthetical phrases, and ended on a falsely jaunty directive to “call me back, okay?” a depression fell upon me like a ten-ton anchor.
    I tried to sleep but my father’s lost, wet expression kept coming back to me. For twenty years the man had had
no expression,
as far as I could remember. Where did he get off having feelings now?
    When the phone rang I fell upon it.
    “Patty,” I said.
    Richard awoke from the noise and stirred under his cover.
    “This is Sabrina. The apartment thing isn’t going to work out.”
    “If it’s about the bird—”
    “It’s not about the
bird
. He’s great and all, but Patty and I decided. Not interested.”
    “But if it’s a matter of rent—”
    “We never promised you anything. You had your chance, it didn’t work out.”
    “But the parrot, he’s not—”
    “I said, it’s not about the bird, it’s about
you
, all right?”
    She hung up.
    I stared at the phone. “It’s not over,” I vowed.
    “It’s big, it’s hot, it’s back!” Richard said.
     
    In bed that night, my mind was a storm: thoughts, like sea birds, hung screaming and circling in the air. Occasionally a bird landed on the cliff, took a shit, and wheeled off. I tossed and writhed and kicked the sheets into a twist.
    Admitting defeat I snapped on the light. In my desk drawer I had twelve yellow Xanax hidden in an amber bottle. With the heel of a stapler, I hammered them into a powder. Half out of my mind I went to the bathroom and lifted a handful of aspirin, three of my sister’s allergy pills, one Ativan, and two codeine left over from my father’s root canal. These I added to my powder and then I went into the kitchen and prepared a stovetop box of macaroni and cheese. Seven minutes and the pharmaceutical mixture had blended beautifully into the neon grit of orange cheese sauce. I imagined scarfing the lethal dish and being discovered, with a great wailing, by my family as the watery winter morning light spilled across my bed. I took the saucepan into my room and flung the cover off of Richard’s cage.
    “Eat!” I urged like a Jewish grandmother.
    Reader, I felt sadness while he ate it, but I love macaroni and cheese, and this batch was all for him. An hour later he looked much the same, though he was hanging upside down from his perch. “It’s big, it’s hot, it’s back!” he said in a fruity voice, then bit the bars of his cage and said, too joyously, “Scraaww!”
    “That’s the last scraw,” I answered, for his spirit—still buoyant under the weight of pharmaceuticals—maddened me. Would I never be rid of him? Oddly, a phrase from an old report card tumbled back into my mind: no ability to learn. He was a sick bird. From under my bed I took an enormous opaque plastic bag from T.J.Maxx, wrapped it around his cage and tied it tightly with a ribbed stocking. Through the plastic I saw him haul himself heavily from side to side and peck at the barrier, but he weakened before he could pierce a single air hole. He fanned his tail, swayed from side to side, gave one last angry call, and then lay down and let his soul return to its Maker.
    When I was sure he was no longer breathing, I shucked off the stocking and the bag and lugged the caged corpse into the bathroom. Then I returned to my room. I felt both faint and terrified.