by Louise Ells
This habit of mine, staring at strangers. Staring, and wondering. Could this man be my brother, Daniel? I look at the man’s profile again and he makes eye contact.
“Rough,” he says, dipping his chin towards the whitecaps.
I nod. This is the tail end of a storm which wound its way up from the Caribbean and ours is the first trip out in ten days. I assumed the Captain was joking when he told us to get ready for fifteen-foot waves. Apparently not. I could have paid more attention to the weather report, but this is the right week to come. This was the original plan. The eggs, laid in late May, will now be hatching. Two, most likely, though chances are only one will survive. That will be considered a breeding success, if one baby survives to become a fledgling.
There’s an entire chapter in Dad’s book devoted to common ornithological terms. Semi-precocial, pullus, fledgling - last night in the bed and breakfast, a farmhouse with wraparound porch and flaking white paint - I chanted them from a to z, mentally ticking all the ones that apply to today’s terns. I can feel the book in my inside breast pocket, the binoculars around my neck squishing it to my chest. As a child I loved checking off the birds I’d seen, keeping lists from the Christmas Day count, the summer holidays, our canoe trips. And I loved most of all the pre-dawn walks with Dad when we met other birders with Dad’s book in their hands. I embarrassed him, always, when I told them he’d sign it for them. His is one of the definitive guides to birds of northeastern Ontario, right up there with Peterson and Sibley.
A boater with Daniel, a birder with me.
“Twitcher?” my rail mate guesses. “Here for the puffins?”
“Terns,” I say. And at his blank look, “Like seagulls.” Which is almost true. Families Sternidae and Laridae are closely related.
He gives me a weak smile. “You’re enduring this foul weather for some shithawks? Hope it’s worth it.” A big wave, the boat lifts and slaps down onto the sea, making him gag and lower his head over the rail.
This man is not my brother. Little as he ever cared about our hobby (obsession, Daniel called it), he would never refer to gulls as shithawks. At first glance it was possible. But that’s the thing. It’s always possible. When I can’t sleep I watch family dramas where a shift in the music signals a quarter of an hour until the credits. Just long enough for two estranged siblings, sisters most likely, to meet in some extraordinary place and explain, forgive, reunite. A collage of snapshots showing them as they were in the past and as they will be in the future. All forgiven. Best friends again.
I know how it goes. I also know that if I am ever to see my brother again it’s unlikely to be on a boat tour off the coast of Nova Scotia. I have imagined moments, conversations, envisioned how it might feel to offer an olive branch, practiced a smile. Wonder if I’d turn and walk away, as he did the last time I saw him. In the local grocery store, pushing a full cart which he abandoned in the dried goods aisle. I didn’t even manage a hello because he’d spotted me first. It was late Saturday afternoon before that Thanksgiving Monday. I looked into his cart but there were no clues about his life, just a turkey, cranberries, tinned pumpkin. Exactly what you’d expect, exactly what I was buying.
Later, days later, I realized the correct, the kind thing to do, would have been to buy my brother’s groceries and have someone deliver them to him, someone who knew where he was staying. Shops in our hometown still close on Sunday so he would have gone without the traditional meal. But I didn’t think of that in time. Instead I paid for my shopping, drove to my parents’ house, and made the sage and onion stuffing and the pumpkin pie and the maple-glazed squash for my mother’s last Thanksgiving meal. I chopped a lot of onions to explain away my tears and debated with myself whether it would be more thoughtful to report the sighting or not. I wondered who Daniel was visiting, what friends of his remained in town, what sort of person could see his sister and walk away like that, not visit his dying mother. In the end I said nothing; I couldn’t stand the thought of the hurt in my mother’s eyes.
The doctors had named the disease, explained why parts of her atria were no longer working as they should, but I knew better. More than one ornithologist has suggested that the birds who mate for life, turtle doves, swans, snow geese, can die of a broken heart if they lose a child.
The deckhand’s commentary continues: leatherback turtles, whales, the cod fishing industry. A mention of my pink-breasted terns, their distinctive two-note call, the likelihood of only one of the two babies surviving to adulthood. They are accustomed to a certain amount of loss, says the deckhand, as if he knows this, as if he’s spoken to the birds and they’ve reassured him, it’s all right, we’re accustomed to this.
I turn to the man at my side and start to tell him more. Roseates are an old species, I explain. They breed in colonies close to, but estranged from other terns. They take, or are given, the less favourable nesting areas and create a scrape in the sand or gravel which they cushion with softer reeds and grasses. His daughters interrupt us, rushing back in mid-argument about whose turn it is to use the iPhone. He mediates, sends them off, shrugs at me. “Siblings.”
I thought it might be one good thing I could do for Dad, finding Daniel. For myself, I wasn’t sure that seeing him again would restore the part of me I’d lost when he left. The days of skating on the river, summer camping holidays, secrets in our treehouse - so long ago. And even farther back, the nights we’d snuggled on the sofa to listen to Dad’s bedtime stories which always started the same way: “When I was a little boy in Nova Scotia.” Until we could recite them, word for word, and I had a clear picture in my mind of the boy who bullied him in fifth grade, the one Dad had raced and beaten to the forest for the best Christmas tree. The smell of the hogs his parents raised, the taste of his mother’s apple brown betty. The vignettes from Dad’s childhood had been one of the anchors in our childhood. Or, at any rate, mine.
My brother had made clear his choice. I wrote to him, two letters, years apart, both returned with a ‘not at this address’ message, scribbled over the front of one, stamped over the other. His handwriting, perhaps, or that of a new tenant in the apartment building, new home owner? I didn’t know if it was true, no longer at this address, or his way of declaring that nothing had changed. As stubborn and as proud as he’d always been. So like our parents. “No contact! No contact ever!” was the last thing he’d yelled at me the day he left.
Last year I tried online, typing his name into Google, LinkedIn, Facebook and several of those websites that promise to find anyone anywhere, for the low low price of. I paid. I read random obits in case he’d predeceased us both. I called his childhood friends. It was only when I seriously considered hiring a private investigator that I told myself I had to stop searching. For Daniel, for the real reason he’d left the family, for any hope of truly understanding how an argument about a career choice could lead to estrangement. Instead I gathered maps and books and sat with Dad and planned this holiday for the two of us.
The puffin island comes into sight and there’s a Parks Canada man waiting in a Boston Whaler. I thank the captain, say goodbye to the man with the kinked baby finger, and make my way across the gunwale of the big boat to clamber down into the shallow dinghy.
Once we’ve set off, I raise Dad’s binoculars to my eyes, scanning the sky, focusing in on the birds that are catching the wind and diving for fish. Black guillemots, great black-backed gulls, eiders, and - there - our terns. Their long tail feathers and blush pink breeding colours as elegant as Audubon promised. As we near the rocky shore the Parks Canada man cuts the motor and points out the scrapes where the eggs and days-old hatchlings are.
In January we visited the doctor’s office, the same doctor who’d given us the best-case scenario of three months for Mum. I’d panicked. “I can’t lose you too, I can’t let go. I don’t know how to.” I had clung to my Dad’s arm like a selfish child and added, it’s not fair, I can’t do this again, you can’t leave me alone.
Dad had patted my han
d, held it tight against his arm. “You’ll be OK Daisy-girl,” he’d said, using a nickname I’d not heard in years. “You know how to cope. You’ll figure out what to do.” That was the evening I found his notes about this trip, read them aloud to him, got down the same maps and books we’d looked at with Mum.
I don’t believe the deckhand’s version is correct. I don’t believe a tern becomes accustomed to a certain amount of loss. She must hope, every year when she lays two eggs, she must think: maybe this is the year both my children will thrive.
I take the mulberry bark envelope from my inside pocket where it’s nestled against Dad’s book, and lean over the edge of the whaler, holding it close to the water, opening one end. I’ve been warned this won’t be romantic, a gentle breeze won’t pick up the ash and carry some of it to the heavens, sprinkling the rest on the surface of the sea, sparkling in a ray of sunshine which breaks through a grey cloud, illuminating a clear path ahead. But this envelope, this urn, is supposed to help the process, float for a few moments before gracefully submerging.
There is none of that. A stickiness and a sinking and then a wave snatches it, leaving only a dark smudge on my hand which is rinsed away by the next wave. The poem I start to recite is drowned out by the harsh call of a tern. A few feet away there is a reply from another.
Grafting
You understand trees; Mum thinks you can speak to them. She used to tell me, often, of the wild land next to your grandfather’s farm in Nova Scotia where, as a teenager, you discovered an orchard so many years abandoned that your grandfather recalled only his eldest brother gathering windfalls for the pigs. She describes how you cared for that orchard over the course of three summers, pruning, splicing and grafting, bringing those trees back to fruit-bearing life.
She remembers the summer before the land was sold, when she was heavily pregnant with me, spending hours in the kitchen. You brought her apples and the two of you baked pies and crumbles and tea cakes and canned applesauce until every jar in the pantry was full. All the middle sisters must have helped too, but that’s not the only time Mum has left them out of a story, making it just about the two of you. Sometimes she grows melancholy and regrets not buying those acres for you. But she was the eldest, the sensible one, and she couldn’t have imagined borrowing money from the bank, not for a parcel of scrubland, not when she and Dad were so broke themselves.
There are photos from the following spring of a fat baby lying on a picnic blanket under one of your favourite trees, laughing up into a shower of blossoms. You’re leaning over me, tickling my belly, probably cooing that you are my Aunt Hazlenut (this is the name I have called you from the time I could speak). I believe my mother’s expression holds the merest hint of jealousy, but maybe that’s just the way the shadow falls across her face.
Throughout my childhood, if the phone rang at three in the morning, I knew it was you. Time has never been something you cared much about, except on New Year’s Eve. The year I was six you took me skating on the lake on the last day of December. You’d spent all day shovelling a rink, and then you built a bonfire on the shore. You had little pots of chemicals and when we’d had enough skating we tossed them into the flames to make coloured sparks. Make a wish, you said, so I did, and then I asked you what your wish was. You didn’t answer the question but told me how you loved this annual midnight. “Fresh start. The chance to resign.” You said it twice and I got that it was a trick word, and knew you were signing up again, not quitting. Then you pulled a bottle of sparkling grape juice from a snowbank and taught me the words to Old Lang Syne. I thought we were drinking champagne and I knew I would never again see anything as magical as green and purple flames. I think of you every single New Year’s Eve.
So many treats you gave me, so many wonderful memories. Like the fall I was five and couldn’t decide what I wanted to be for Halloween until the night before, when I chose Babar disguised as a dinosaur. Mum said that was impossible, I’d have to look through the dress-up box the next day and find something else. But you said nothing is ever impossible. You must have stayed up the whole night sewing. By breakfast you’d made the elephant part of the costume and when I got home at lunchtime he was dressed as a dinosaur. I was so excited I put him right on and refused to change when I went back to school or that night after the trick-or-treating. Mum scolded you for spoiling me but you only laughed, saying it was unconditional love.
When I was eight Mum and Dad told me about the baby (hadn’t I always wanted a brother or sister, wouldn’t this be fun?) and I panicked that you might love him or her more. “Never. Never more,” you said. Your gift for my new sibling was a tiny seedling, a hazelnut tree, which you planted in the front garden. Aunt Sally’s husband, Uncle Daniel, said it would never grow, we lived too far north, but you laughed and told him, “This tree will weather.”
Soon after Judith was born I had to do a report on potato farming in Prince Edward Island. “I’ve never been to Prince Edward Island,” I complained. “What do I know about their potatoes?”
You said you’d help me, and told my parents we’d be back on Sunday, that you’d give them time alone with the new baby. Then we flew down to the Maritimes. We toured the Anne of Green Gables house and ate lobsters with our fingers and knelt in that red soil to dig for potatoes. You took me to a farming museum and a fishing village and we had french fries for breakfast.
Mum was furious when we got home late Sunday night. “Where did that money come from? I bet that was your rent for the next two months.” I wasn’t supposed to be listening but I heard you both shouting in the kitchen, even over the screams from the baby’s room.
“I guess it’s my money, Rebecca.” (I’d never heard you call Mum by her full name before. She was always Becky, Becks or Bee.) “If I want to eat cheap pasta for two months in exchange for a weekend with my niece, then that’s my choice.” The door slammed so hard the house shook, and the baby screamed even louder and I hated you both for ruining everything and when I got my report back, A+ circled in red on the cover page, I didn’t even show you.
For a long time after that the highchair was in the place where your chair should have been.
It was Dad, sitting on the side of my bed one evening, who told me you were in hospital. I sat up, demanded to be taken to see you. Again Mum was angry, she said I was too young. But Dad disagreed and in the end we all went, even the baby.
You didn’t look sick. You were wearing pyjamas, curled up on a bed, the way I’d seen you curled up on a sofa many times before. But you didn’t look at me, not even when I squeezed your hand and told you I loved you. I watched tears roll down the side of your nose and plop onto the thin white pillow.
“You shouldn’t have brought her,” you said to my parents. “I didn’t want her to see me like this. I only ever want you all to see me on good days.”
My Mum’s voice held the same softness she used with Judith. “That’s not your choice,” she said. “We love you on your good days and we love you on your less good days.” Then she started crying too, and Dad took the baby and I out of the room and down to the hospital cafeteria where he let me eat two slices of fake chocolate cake, layered with fake icing. He explained about your sickness, the manic times when you were full of energy and didn’t sleep and the sad times when you needed to sleep all the time. About how it was tough, sometimes, for you to make good decisions and that it was his and Mum’s job to help you even when you found it very difficult to ask for help. Some people get stuck with bad eyesight or a heart that doesn’t work very well, he explained, but your poor aunt got stuck with this.
I kept shoving cake into my mouth and tried not to listen to what he was saying. You were my favourite, I didn’t want you to be sick. I didn’t want all our expeditions to have been a manic phase. I didn’t want you to have to stay in this sickly lemon-scented building and I didn’t want you to joke about being nuttier than a fruitcake, that’s why you were Hazel Nut. In the car on the way home I vomited up all the cake.
Judy’s Christening was postponed until you came out of hospital and then Mum threw an enormous party, inviting all the other aunts and uncles to come and stay with us. After the church service and the formal reception were over we sat round the table and the sisters talked about their childhood. Sally driving the car through the garage door. The time the raccoon broke into the kitchen. We all laughed. But you were the one who told the best and funniest stories.
“How do you remember that?” asked Aunt Sally. “You were only four when that happened.”
“I am the Keeper of the Stories,” you said. “That is my job.”
“And something to stay well for?” asked my mother. Her voice was tentative, then she passed Judy to you to hold. “There are a lot more stories to come. And these meds are working. They’re working well.”
You didn’t reply.
We were all sent to bed at some point, myself and all the cousins on camping mattresses on the floor of Dad’s study, but no one noticed when I crept out to sit on the landing at the top of the stairs, out of sight of the adults. The men were smoking cigars, a gift from Uncle Daniel, and my mother was - yet again - telling everyone about Hazel’s Orchard. “You’re a tree whisperer,” one of the sisters said.
“I only worry when they stop whispering back to me,” you said. You were the only one who laughed. “Oh for fuck’s sake.” I had never heard that word aloud before in this house. I waited in shocked silence. “You have to lighten up. It’s my illness so I get to joke about it. I told the head-shrinker the other day I was feeling sanguine. Get it?” You laughed again.
“Does joking help?” I think that was my father. “We all want to know what we can do to help.”
You didn’t answer his question. Instead you started talking about the hospital, how you were so detached from your body that you saw it from a distance. So dulled by the drugs, so sluggish that it became a coping mechanism, cutting yourself off from the pain. That’s what it was about trees, you tried to explain. The rough bark, the smooth petals, the stickiness of the budding leaves, things that made you believe if you could feel something so tactile maybe there was a way back into feeling emotions as well.