Tyto Alba

We were ill-suited and perhaps this is the reason she was my wife for a very short time. As if it were preordained that we wouldn’t be growing old together. I should have known from the start. She was too lovely and lively to be married to an academic. Now she’s gone.

We were never supposed to live to be eighty and gray while holding hands in our perspective rockers while our children and grandchildren amassed around a grand front porch. In fact, even the two bedroom apartment that we shared was a study in contrast. My black Eames across from her purple lovesac came across as one of the most egregious of the schizophrenic designscape. I was concerned about the number of clocks in the space and she was insistent on having a dizzying array of mirrors and crystals. She loved her Mac and I preferred a PC. She took long baths everyday and I took showers with a California drought-trained efficiency. Musically her tastes ranged from Adele to Chloe x Halle, mine Rachmaninoff, Dave Brubeck and, as she repeatedly told me, “Anything that can put a grandfather to sleep”.

The first time I saw her in Wilmette, Illinois, I was wearing a tie and a tweed blazer with the requisite patches that any professor-to-be should wear, carrying two books on bird watching on Chicago’s North Shore. She was stopped on the path, hovering over a yellow beach cruiser, a water bottle at her lips and wearing a lavender sundress that should be required for every girl of my dreams. I stopped dead in my tracks and stared until she lowered the bottle and looked at me directly for what seemed a lifetime.

“Are you geocaching?” She asked. I had no idea what she was referring to but that didn’t stop her from continuing on the topic which I considered a gift as my tongue felt thick and I was starting to sweat as she took steps towards me. “Are you okay? You look a little gray...” It was the last thing I remembered as my eyes clouded over and my knees buckled. I opened my eyes again a few moments later and she was kneeling above me with swift moving clouds above her. “Thank god! I was about to call 911.” She said in a calm alto that I still hear every moment I am awake.

“Am I dead?” I asked her and stretched my extremities and took a deep breath.

“I sincerely hope not. This would be even more awkward if you were.” She smiled as if prompting me to follow suit. I start to sit up and she leans back. “Maybe you should take off your jacket? It's a bit warm for tweed.” She asked and I had never been happier to remove a garment from my body as her hands innocuously touch my chest and shoulders. That’s how we met. “Meet-cute” the critics could call it, if our life were a movie; a romantic comedy with an odd couple, ill-suited and star-crossed.

***************

Now, three years and six months later, I’m almost alone in the middle of the night, in the middle of a jungle, listening for spindalis or thrashers, but thinking of her wide set green eyes. I remember when I had already asked her to marry me, I told her those eyes were the most beautiful shade of green that I had ever seen. She quipped back quickly that they changed their hue according to the temperature. I knew better though. Yes her eyes were chameleons, their vibrancy dependent on her mood rather than the weather. Her skin surpassed the idea of alabaster to claim a mother of pearl luminescence that shamed anything from the sea. Her brown hair curled with humidity into tight rings that she wore in a proudly haphazard mop in homage to her, I later found out fictitious, Jamaican grandmother. She laughed when I called her out on her lack of Jamaican traits and features. She said I should have known from looking at her that she had no such ancestry and shook her head and laughed again at my gullibility. She would loathe the idea of birdwatching in the middle of the night hoping to greet the sunrise amist the foliage and ruins.

It’s warm even in the dead of night on this island. I see the clouds rolling in and wonder when the rain will fall and for how long. I start to hum inaudibly to anything that doesn’t live in this jungle or Tenoch, the research assistant. He touches my shoulder and puts a hand to his lips. Even in the dark I can see him give me a look that all but asks if I’m an imbecile. Thankfully I’m saved by a call in this wild. Tenoch smiles and points towards the sky.

“Tu eschuchas eso?”

“Si, una lechuza?”

“Si, Tyto Alba, un barn owl.”

“Aqui? En Cozumel?“

“ No es normal.”

“Claro que no.”

“Only in the last year. There used to be two, she had a mate, but something happened a while back and now she is alone. She calls in the night for him but he hasn’t come back.“ Tenoch raises binoculars to his face and looks back to the night sky towards the sound of the owl.

Tyto Alba. The literal meaning is white owl. In the nearly onomatopoeic ancient Greek Tyto means owl and in the Latin Alba means white. A wide ranging species commonly called the barn owl. Here the owl was among the small brightly-plumed bananaquits and woodpeckers and wrens. It seems comical to think of the owl as a fish out of water. My erstwhile wife would not have thought this funny but would have laughed because she loved me. She was too beautiful to be married to an academic anyway and that was the reason she was not on this quaint little island. She preferred the resorts of Cancun to the quiet of Cozumel.

The subjects that delight me, the classics, architecture or bird watching, were ones she couldn’t care less about. Etymologies, doric or arcado-cypriotic forms of ancient Greek, bored her to tears. She didn’t care for any of those sorts of things. Or shall I say my sort of things. Here in Cozumel where I still am quarantined six months later, she would appreciate Alberto’s on the beach and home of “The Best Tail I Ever Had,” rather than the Mayan ruins that hid a lonely owl far from home.

In the last days of our marriage, Jacinda was already five months pregnant. I wish I had known that the last days were at hand. I remember her coughing the first time and me recoiling from her. Had I known those were our last days together I would have taken her in my arms and cradled her. Four days later and she is in a heap on the floor of the bathroom. I kneel down and say her name over and over, “Jacinda! Jacinda? Jacinda…” I hold her in my arms while shouting into my phone to the operator.

When the ambulance reaches the hospital I follow them as far as they go until I am stopped by the Guard at the entrance to the emergency ward. I show him the Northwestern badge and he sees it says doctor and he allows me past. I catch up with the gurney and walk assuredly behind the nurses now pushing through another set of sliding doors. The stark white light brings the haloes around the eyes that I’ve grown accustomed to in recent days of staring at the phone and tablet and computer for fourteen out of the twenty four hours. In a moment there are four people surrounding her still unresponsive body. I lean on the glass outside the Intensive Care Unit, and I can see them put the tube into her nose or mouth and throat and I swear I see her lungs inflate. Two more doctors rush past me and enter the room, they consort and touch her abdomen and then her face, neither of them show any reaction. In a moment, three of them looked at me. One of the doctors says something and one of the nurses walks over and pulls a green curtain. I quicken and I know that it is finished.

More than an hour later I’m told that I would need to quarantine immediately as my wife was in a Covid-19 induced coma. The nurse said that they wouldn’t know the severity of it until the labs come back. I am ushered to a closed ward and to a stark white room with only a bed and a chair. The door is locked from outside. I am told they will come back for testing shortly. But when they do return it is one of the doctors I’d seen before. He tells me Jacinda, the girl of my dreams and mother of my child, has died. My wife is gone.

***************

The rain begins in earnest and Tenoch touches my shoulder again. I flinch.

“I don’t think the rain will stop soon. It’s time to go. Maybe she’ll be here tomorrow.”

“At least we heard her tonight.”

“Claro que si.”

The End