art by Jonathan Westbrook
The Death and Rebirth of Anne Bonny
i: the imaginary quantity equal to the square root of minus one--symbol i, first quantified through the work of Rafael Bombelli in 1572 AD.
When I was twelve my father used to take me hunting for buried treasure. We'd rove the coast near his beach house looking for devil-fingered trees and rocks shaped like dragons' heads.
I felt close to him, out there between the sun and the sea, dreaming of studded chests and golden doubloons that pressed with the weight of history against your fingers. Waving goodbye and climbing in the taxi to head home; to Mom and winter life and the city... it always felt like yanking out a piece of my heart.
Maybe that's why I started taking Aye with me.
Aye was a Macaw with bright eyes and scruffy feathers, and he didn't really exist. Dad and I made him up one afternoon out on the pier, when I was pretending to be Anne Bonny and needed help escaping the law. Aye burst out of the palms and tugged Dad's hat over his eyes while Anne Bonny, the bravest and noblest of all female pirates, jumped from the pier and fled into the underbrush.
The parrot showed up again the next day, and I named him Aye, as in Aye, Matey. Because he was a pirate's bird.
I don't think Dad could really see Aye, although he pretended pretty well.
Mom had no tolerance for imaginary pets. I still recall the morning she lectured me on the importance of mature conduct while Aye hung upside-down from the chandelier, nibbling the iron links that supported the crystals and sending down occasional teardrops of sculpted glass.
When Mom found the broken pieces on the floor later that day, she fired the cleaning lady.
Aye spent the winters clawing my bedposts and nibbling at the corners of my books. He roved the beaches with Dad and me in the summers, searching for scratches in the rocks where dying pirates had marked the way to secret treasure. We never found anything, but I believed--really, truly, in the way only children can--that eventually we'd unearth a rich pile of doubloons.
And then one day I barged uninvited into Dad's private den.
It was late. I'd been reading a biography of Anne Bonny; a scholarly work that didn't shy from dirty details. Turned out she was just a plain old thief, not the selfless defender of justice I'd always believed in. I threw the door open without knocking and slammed the book on Dad's desk. "Why'd you tell me all that stuff about Anne?" I demanded. "None of it's true."
My Dad pulled off his spectacles, startled. If he'd had a chance to speak, maybe he would have found the words to soothe my anger. But just then my gaze dropped to the half-drawn treasure map spread in front of him.
Aye squawked and flew from my shoulder to pace along the inked lines. He raised his head to look at me in that funny, sideways way parrots have.
I don't know why it took me so long to realize that Dad's weather-beaten treasure maps were fabrications. But that night, watching Aye's tail sweep across the parchment, it was obvious. Dad had drawn the coastlines himself. The blood spatters were ink from an old fountain pen. The corners had been burned off in the flame from his desk candle.
"It's all a lie, isn't it?" I asked. "It was all always a lie!"
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"Stop shouting," Dad said. "You'll frighten Aye."
"Aye doesn't exist!" I yelled. I felt bad afterwards, because Aye cocked his head and looked at me with the strangest, saddest expression in his bright eyes. But I was fuming, and I told myself I didn't care.
My summers with Dad had always been the most important part of my life. I'd treasured every hike across jagged rocks, every secret lagoon. And none of it had been real.
I stalked out the door. Five minutes later I was halfway down the cliff road leading to the bus depot. I was so angry, I didn't hear the rumble of the semi-truck thundering around the bend. The driver saw me too late. He tried to swerve, but it would have been better for both of us if he hadn't, because the truck rolled and one of the extra gas tanks caught flame.
The paramedics told me later I was very brave while they cut me out of the burning wreckage, but I don't remember any of it. All I can remember is Dad's face in the firelight, and the sound of Aye screeching.
I woke up in the hospital with half of my body burned so badly none of it looked like skin anymore. My right arm was gone and so was my right foot. The doctor who treated me said I was lucky my Dad had been close enough to hear the accident and call the paramedics.
I didn't feel very lucky.
Dad visited me every day, sitting by my bed and reading to me from my favorite books.
"Where's Aye?" I asked one afternoon.
Back at the beach house Dad always had a funny answer for that question, because Aye was talented at causing mischief. But this time he just flipped the page and kept reading. A strange, haunting emptiness hung in his eyes.
"It's just as well," I said, turning toward the wall. "He wasn't real anyway."
For years, I wouldn't go anywhere near a beach. I said it was because it's hard to walk through sand with a prosthetic foot, but Dad and I both knew better. The magic was gone; gone like my missing arm, gone like Aye.
There had never been any treasure.
"You know," my Dad said one day from the door of my bedroom. "Things don't have to exist in order to be important."
He patted my shoulder and left, but not before he placed something in the palm of my missing hand.
I couldn't see anything, but I could feel it, as real and indisputable as the phantom pain that sometimes plagues amputee victims.
It was a Spanish doubloon.
My Dad was surprised when I knocked at the door of his beach house two weeks later, but not as surprised as I was when I saw Aye, battered and scruffy, hanging from an overhead perch.
He gave a happy squawk and wobbled toward me through the air. Some of his flight feathers were missing, and I had to lurch and catch him to keep him from falling.
"Aye!" I whispered, my face buried against his wings. I told myself I was too old to cry. "Ahoy there, Matey."
"He came and got me," my Dad said quietly, "the night you were hit by the truck. Half his feathers were singed off. I don't know how he made it so far."
"Why didn't you bring him to the hospital?"
"He wouldn't come. I think maybe he was waiting for you. Waiting until you were ready."
Aye squawked and rolled onto his back in my arms. His feathers tickled against my hands; both the one that existed and the one that didn't. I stroked his scarred feet and let him nibble at my hair.
And for the first time since the accident, I laughed.
The End
This story was first published on Wednesday, January 25th, 2012
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