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while. She picks it up, hangs up, and then leaves it off the hook. She finishes cleaning the cage, puts the bird in the sun, goes to shower.
    She turns her back to the mirror to disrobe. She has never really looked. Before she was divorced, her husband looked. He looked right away, in fact, behaved remarkably, tried to kiss her where she never wanted to be kissed again. She had actually screamed in her humiliation, a startled kind of half cry, the kind of noise she made when she was badly frightened in a dream. She blushed then, wept, said it was too soon. He gave her time, he made excuses for her when it was past time. He brought home presents, silly and extravagant, he begged her to talk to him. She said, early on, “I don’t get this. I can’t make sense of this. I don’t know what to do.” And then she stopped talking. He seemed like a trick to her: staying the same and getting smaller; holding hertight and disappearing. “What do you want?” her friends would ask. “My God, Alice, what else can he possibly do?”
    “I don’t want anything,” she said. But that was a lie. What she wanted was to be alone. And she told him that until he agreed and let her be alone. He still called sometimes, months after they were formally divorced he still said he was her husband.
    Now Alice dresses in a sweatshirt and blue jeans. She remembers to comb her hair. Then she puts the birdcage in the passenger seat of her car and drives to the park. “Are you my buddy?” she asks Lucky as she drives. “Are you my friend?” He is silent, listening to her. “You and me, Lucky,” she says. “We got the big one.”
    She sees no one when she pulls into the park. It is a workday, a school day, and too late for lunch. Everything is right. She walks along a jogging path, the cage clanging into her leg, the bird’s water sloshing from side to side. When she is deep into the woods, she sits on a rock and puts the cage beside her, watches the bird for a while. He is excited, hops constantly from one perch to the other. “You’re outside,” she tells him, and rubs her finger along the bars of the cage. The bird can say words. He says his own name and, Alice believes, hers too. He whistles and makes soft, comforting sounds. But his wing doesn’t lie flush against him anymore. And he has stopped eating almost entirely.
    She opens the cage door. The bird hesitates, then hops closer. Alice speaks softly to him, holds her finger out to him. “Come on,” she says. “You can go.” Finally the bird steps onto her finger, and Alice pulls him out of the cage. He flies off immediately, lands on the branch of a nearby bush, chews excitedly at the leaves. Alice closes the cage door, puts her arms around herself, feels her eyes fill, her throat tighten. She watches for a while, as the bird flies from the bush to a tree and back again. He seems content to stayin the same area. Alice has imagined this scene so many times, and each time when she opened the door the bird flew immediately out of sight. And she was strong; she didn’t cry. But now the bird stays near her and she isn’t strong. She wants everything back from before—her old bird and her old self and her old life—and she feels the longing as an aching pressure that moves into her chest and steals her breathing. She lies down on the path, closes her eyes, and then opens them again to a piece of grass directly before her. It is arched delicately, weaving slightly in the wind. Ballet. As a child, she had loved this, lying in the grass and watching things close up. She saw bugs in alarming new ways; she saw canyons in pebbles. She liked especially the sudden reorientation that came with seeing her own hand again. Now she weeps softly, lets herself start to think about what she should do, wishes that a hand would open the door for her, because she is so tired.
    She hears the sound of her bird above her, looks up to see his underbelly. He is low in the branches, chatting happily, making