The Birdcage Dare

I drove out to Hendricks Field on a Tuesday in July, the kind of heat that made the dashboard vents feel useless. I was thirty-four and had spent most of the summer talking myself into and out of visiting Chris, so when I pulled into the gravel lot of the little flight school I still wasn't sure what I was going to say. We had broken up eight years ago, back when I was twenty-six, and it had been the most polite breakup in the history of breakups. No screaming, no thrown glasses. Just two people who liked each other but wanted different lives, which honestly might be worse.

Chris came out of the hangar doors wiping sweat off his forehead with a rag. He was thirty-five now, broader in the shoulders than he had been, in a gray work shirt that was sticking to him everywhere.

"Well, look who it is," he said. "Monique Delacroix, at Hendricks Field. Do you even know what a plane is?"

"It's the pointy thing with wings, right?" I said. "I googled it on the drive."

He laughed at that, and the laugh was the same laugh, and that did something to my chest that I wasn't ready for. He hugged me, brief and damp, and then held me at arm's length as if to see whether I'd changed. I hadn't, much. Still a hairdresser. Still drove a Camry with a cracked taillight I kept meaning to fix.

"You look good," he said.

"You look like a wet towel."

"That's the heat. Come inside, it's worse in here but at least there's a chair."

The hangar was enormous and mostly empty, two small training planes parked at one end, the other end just concrete and shadow. The break room was the size of a closet and had a broken vending machine and an air conditioner bolted into the window that had given up on life sometime that morning.

"AC died around nine," he said, kicking the unit. "Whole county's booked. So it's just us and the muggy."

"We could go somewhere with air conditioning. Anywhere. The bank lobby. A funeral home."

"Stay," he said, and then he shrugged like he hadn't just said a thing. "I'll give you the tour. It's a ten-minute tour. Then we can sit and melt together like old friends do."

So he gave me the tour. He'd been doing ground crew work here part-time for about a year, on top of his massage practice, which made two jobs' worth of exhaustion and one job's worth of pay. He showed me the two Cessnas and named them like pets, which I made fun of, and he showed me the fuel pump and the tie-down ropes, and I pretended to care, and the whole time I kept noticing how he moved, how he still had that habit of touching your shoulder to point at something and then not moving his hand right away.

That's when we found the birdcage. It was up on a steel shelf near the back, behind a box of old charts. A domed cage, brass-colored, about knee height, with a little door hanging open. No bird. No owner in sight. The place had been in the owner's family since the seventies and apparently nobody had thrown anything away since the Nixon years, so who knew how long it had been sitting there.

"Chris," I said, "why is there a birdcage in an airplane hangar?"

"Honestly? No idea. There's been one sitting on that shelf for as long as I've worked here. Somebody's grandpa's canary, maybe."

He took it down and turned it over in his hands, and then he got this look on his face. I knew that look. I had dated him for four years. That look had gotten me into a hot tub at a ski lodge and a karaoke bar in Binghamton and one memorable situation involving his sister's borrowed car and a car wash.

"What," I said.

"It's empty," he said. "It's unlocked. And we're bored, and it's hot, and I have a dare."

"You do not."

"Whoever takes the cage has to use it. Like a prop. A game. First one to chicken out loses."

I should describe the game properly, because later on the details matter. The idea, as he laid it out, was this: we'd each had a long, lonely summer, and we were both adults, and we had always been able to say things to each other that we couldn't say to anyone else. The cage would sit between us, door open, on a tarp spread over the concrete. Whoever set the pace first, the other had to match. Keep up with the other person, whatever that pace was. Whoever stopped first, who backed off first, lost the dare. That was the entire structure. Nobody was risking anything except pride, and a little dignity, and possibly eight years of careful friendship.

"You're insane," I told him. "It's ninety-eight degrees in here."

"It's a heat wave. Heat waves make people stupid. Come on, Mon. You drove two hours."

The truth is I wanted to say yes before he finished asking. Not because of the dare. Because of the way he said my name, like eight years was a weekend. Because I had spent the summer going home to a quiet apartment and a catsitter's worth of houseplants and I wanted, badly, to surprise myself. So I said yes, and he spread a canvas tarp out on the concrete in the shade of the wing, and I took the cage from him and set it down between us, door open, like a little brass border marker.

We sat facing each other across it. Cross-legged, my skirt over my knees, his shorts riding up his thighs. The planes ticked and cooled. Somewhere outside a grasshopper was losing its mind.

"So who goes first," I said.

"Fine, I'll start. You keep up."

And this is the part I keep coming back to, because it should have been awkward and it wasn't. First he asked, "Is this okay? Say stop and we stop." I said yes, and so did he when I asked it back.