I ran to the side kitchen door and out to the newly mowed grass; the blades slid between the soles of my feet and the leather sandals, smooth and slippery like worms. The cardinal lay in the grass, her wings not flapping but twitching. Her black eyes were open, and I wondered if this was an open death stare. My heart paused; I crouched down a few feet from the bird, tilted my head to stare. She blinked, her stick legs shivering in vain.

I sat, aware, yet somehow not, that the wet grass was seeping through my cotton skirt, that my legs were covered in shredded grass. The aroma of dirt and freshly cut pine washed over me, mixing with the sticky smell of a gardenia bush. The bird and I stared at each other, a kinship of stunned bemusement. Wow, we seemed to say, this has never happened before.

“Should I help?” I asked her. She only stared. I remembered hearing that one should never touch a wild bird in nature because the other wild birds will then have nothing to do with it again. This fact always made me think of The Scarlet Letter, of how once she was touched she was shunned.

“So,” I said to the bird. “I won’t touch you.” She appeared relieved. “I’ll give you a minute to get your wits about you.”

I stared closely at her, never before this near to any small wild creature. I knew the male cardinals were the brightest red birds; the females were brown, with a shock of red bill and tail. A few wing feathers on the right were crooked, and I wanted to reach out and brush them into place. Two red feathers and one brown sat misplaced in the grass; she looked at them as if she knew they were a part of her that she’d lost.

I stared closer; her wing didn’t look broken. Her eyes were bottomless and shimmering.

I waited.

I don’t know how long I was there while this bird and I stared at each other in the damp grass, our eyes blinking and weighing the oddity of our situation, when I heard the house phone ringing. I was almost to the kitchen when the ring switched to my cell.

I grabbed my phone off the counter. “Hello.”

“You never answer your house phone. Why don’t you ever answer your house phone?” It was Dad, his voice loud and stiff.

“I was outside,” I said. “What is it? Are you okay?”

“Your mother—” His voice broke like a twig off a tree during a wicked storm. The kitchen shifted in front of me like puzzle fragments coming undone. I reached for the desk chair, missed, stumbled backward into the corner of the counter.

“What, Dad? What about Mother?”