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“I’ll come home” is all I said, and hung up.
    When I got there he pointed to a space in the mosquito netting. “I heard Sparkles barkin’ around five,” he said. “Some chirpin’, too. But by the time I got down the stairs he was gone. Musta been a stray cat or raccoon or somethin’.”
    “Maybe he got out,” I said. “Maybe he got away.”
    “I don’t think so, kid.”
    “Well you don’t have to think so. You just gotta help me look.”
    So we looked, scouring the ground and the shrubs and the trees around the house, calling out for him. Whistling, like we were happy.
    *   *   *
    That afternoon I didn’t get drunk. I went to the mall for some reason, where I ran my hands along the clothes hanging in department stores and rode the escalators, cleaning my shoes on the bristles, giving people dirty looks. I ended up in the food court and bought a fountain soda, pushed down the little plastic bubble things on the lid— COLA, DIET, RB, OTHER —took a few sips, and threw it in an overfilled garbage can on my way into this specialty grocery store. I wandered around there for a while, then stood poking packages of meat, thinking all kinds of things. Like I couldn’t make him mean enough. Belligerent enough. The-right-combination-of-fearless-and-fearful enough. Like I failed him. Like I should have been there. Like I’m a cowbird. A man dressed in blood-flecked all-white asked if he could help me.
    “No,” I said. “You can’t.”
    Then I got drunk. I was sitting in the back room of The Wharf watching the raindrops race down the windows in stop-and-go jig-jags. I looked through them at the Great South Bay, the drops doing their concentric-circle thing on the blue-brown surface of the water as two mute swans swam by. Mute swans are an invasive species in North America and an altogether nasty, ill-tempered dickhead of a bird. Often they’re used as “watchdogs” to keep geese and other waterfowl out of private ponds. Their aggression isn’t limited to the water, either. On land it’s not uncommon for them to spread their wings and chase people down footpaths or across lawns. They hiss and bark. They’ve even killed people, kind of, knocking them out of canoes and kayaks and pecking them on the head until they drown. Growing up I used to hate them, but I understand now. It works. Mute swans are thriving.
    I finished my drink and headed to the darkest part of the parking lot and punched a car window until my hand busted and the window didn’t. Then I started walking, the back roads quiet and slick, the puddles like little suns under the streetlights. When I got home I didn’t want to go inside, so I sat under a maple tree in the overgrown backyard and listened to the rain spattering the leaves, opening and closing my swollen hand, trying not to cry. I know he was just a bird. I know that. But he was the first good news we’d had in a year.
    *   *   *
    My sister thinks my father, in a drunken stupor, didn’t see Gary on the ground and stepped on him and threw his body in the river. “You know he’s a liar,” she said, barging into my room and waking me up. “He’s a fucking liar that ruins everything he touches, and I’m gonna put it on his fucking tombstone.” She continued to poke holes in his story and pointed to a spot on the porch and another on the bottom of his shoe. Over coffee my brother said she’s most likely right, and I suppose she most likely is. But I for one want to give him the benefit of the doubt. Because he, more than any of us, knows what’s at risk when you care about something. Because he knew better and cared anyway. His heart’s as good and dumb as anybody’s. And besides, “most likely right” is different than definite; “most likely right” leaves a little room for other possibilities. Just enough, it turns out, that every time I come across a telephone pole with a picture of a missing pet on it, or when I see an amber alert scroll across some road