Title: Hummingbird
Author: Bluehaven4220
Summary[MIRACLE The day Jim Craig and Tanya Burnaby each held a hummingbird in their hands was the day their lives changed forever.
Reviews: Always welcome, of course.
Disclaimer: I'm playing with other people's toys. Any and all original chaacters are MINE, no touchee!
A tragic victim of my circumstance
Never give the devil a second chance
If you do you know that you never will
Probably best to forget and begin again.
My Apology- Great Big Sea
[MIRACLE
"When the sky falls we'll all catch larks", she used to tell him.
He found it kind of funny that the day the sky fall, it wasn't a lark that flew before him.
It was a hummingbird.
The hummingbird landed in his palm, gently prodding him to see how he would react. Evetually losing interest, the hummingbird fluttered his wings and took off into the bright sunlight, him shielding his eyes with his hand and squinting.
The same day, just a few minutes away, Tanya Burnaby caught the same hummingbird.
It wasn't as though the hummingbird actually meant anything to either of them. It was just a bird, a harmless bird.
But what they didn't realize was that that hummingbird was supposed to bring them together, they just didn't know it yet.
For Tanya Burnaby was stuck in a realistic nightmare, her mother struggling to make ends meet, to give her a good life. Tanya did what she could, toiling at Boston College as a student of journalism, but to go back to the life in which they had suffered so cruelly would mean that her father would have died in vain, a victim of the Holocaust, a slave to the world she no longer lived in.
Her mother, Natalia, had been a gypsy who had opposed Stalin and had been imprisoned first in the Siberian work camps, next in Riga, Latvia, and then to Bergen-Belsen in Germany. She claimed that upon arriving to America, and changing their last name from Kovalev to Burnaby, Tanya's father, Vladislav had not been able to accept the change. A Russian rail worker, Vladislav could not believe that the people of America did not and had never lived in fear of Stalin's tretchery. They were free to do as they pleased.
Of course, the Cold War still raged. There was always that fear that one day the Americans would do something to piss off the Russians behind the Iron Curtain and then suddenly they would all be dead, and vice versa. Not a tree still standing, not a bird still singing, not a human crying tears of regret. To cope he had started drinking heavily, to the point of abuse, of both the drink and of Natalia. When Tanya was born July 24th, 1957, only twelve years after the Holocaust had ended, Vladislav Burnaby had decided he could not endure his own hell any longer. His gun, torn from his father's hands, had done the deed.
A terrified Natalia, still fresh from giving birth, had found her husband face down on the dressing table, the gun discarded on the floor. As a result, Tanya had never known her father, nor her father's secrets in the world they left behind.
In a world far removed from hers, Jim Craig did not know what to think. Upon jumping into the lake and allowing himself to be swept away, he heard a voice telling him that she was gone, that her suffering had ended. Wasn't that what he had wanted?
Not this way though. This way was too painful... he'd watched her lose her beautiful hair, he'd seen her suffer from shingles, he'd gone to the hospital, kept her company as she dwindled to forty seven pounds. To see her suffer had been dreadful.
But to watch her die had been almost terrifying. Margaret Craig was a beautiful woman, to her husband and to her children. Strong, affectionate, bearer of Jimmy and his seven brothers and sisters. Every morning he would leave her a note in the mailbox, telling her he loved her, and for her to have a great day. Later, he found out that she kept every note.
He remembered that each time he went to visit her she would gently enquire about when he was going to play in the Olympics and how wonderful it would be if he ever did. Living out her last days at his older sister's place, he had taken his two youngest brother's swimming, and that's when he had heard that voice. The voice telling him his mother was no longer suffering.
Margaret Craig was at peace.
Then came another blow. His father, Donald, lost his job as a food service manager. Deeply depressed, he sat at home knitting, as Jimmy's two youngest brothers still attended school. Now in university, Jimmy used whatever money he earned and sent it home.
Upon receiving a letter inviting him to Olympic tryouts, the first thing he'd done was phoned his father and asked for his opinion.
Donald smiled to himself. His son, for years and years pushed to play goalie, because he had the natural ability. Starting on Holmes' Pond, he worked his way up to play as Boston University's starting goalie. By all means, Donald told him, do so. Go, try out for the Olympic team, make your mother proud.
And so he did.
Now, as Jimmy and Tanya, still in worlds distanced by circumstances beyond their control, walked down the same street toward their seemingly impossible tasks, they brushed past each other, bumping shoulders.
Apologizing, they smiled at each other and turned away from each other, one never to see the other again.
Or so they thought.
Little did they know that they would indeed, see each other again.
Sooner than expected, of course. The only thing Tanya didn't realize when Herb Brooks called her in Boston to meet him at the University of Minnesota as a PR agent, was that Jim Craig was waiting on the other side.