A Catalog of Birds

by Laura Harrington

  She pads downstairs barefoot to find Jack sitting at the kitchen table, holding a cup of coffee, his prayer book open, staring out the window. She kisses him. He slips his hand under her nightgown, caresses her thigh. It’s so rare to have a moment alone like this. She kisses him again.

  The weather begins to lift as the wind kicks up from the north. Nell turns the boat slowly, scanning the water, forcing herself to take her time.

  She has drifted farther than she would have thought possible, far beyond Tucker’s dock, far beyond Wheeler’s Point. She twists her head around, looking at each channel buoy, each piling her brother could be clinging to. Nothing.

  She puts the oars in the oarlocks. It’s going to be a long row home with that wind. She knows the news will be too much for her mother and father. She is the one they trusted. She is the one who was supposed to hold on to him. His shadow, his partner in crime and childhood. She is the one he chose.

  Two hours later the sun burns through the fog, revealing a mocking blue sky, clear enough you can almost see tomorrow or, if your God is a cruel God, yesterday all over again, with everything you might have done differently.

  The sheriff, Dale Pope, and two of the divers crowd into the kitchen. Sheila pours coffee. It’s not a social call, Jack wants to holler at her, but holds his tongue.

  “We can authorize the divers for one more day if the weather holds,” Dale Pope offers.

  “And that’s it?” Jack asks.

  “What about dragging the lake?” Marion asks.

  “Can’t be done,” the sheriff says.

  “Is it a question of money?” she presses, sounding angrier than she meant to.

  “We can’t do it. It’s too deep.”

  “And if we can’t find the body?” Jack asks.

  “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  That first night, anybody who has a boat is out on the lake. No one organized it, as far as Jack knows, but when the divers and the police leave and darkness falls, one by one the boats appear. Neighbors, friends, people the Flynns know from living on the lake all their lives. Teachers and firemen and some of the chemists and apple men Jack works with from Cornell.

  Most everyone figures out how to rig a light of some kind. There are heavy-duty flashlights, more like torches, the soft glow of kerosene lanterns, running lights on a few motorboats. One kid loops strings of Christmas lights over the cabin of his dad’s runabout.

  Nell and Jack are in the old rowboat. She’s wearing Billy’s moss-green hunting jacket, the one Marion made him in high school, so soft from wear the sleeves are beginning to shred. Jack passes her his flask. She declines.

  He watches her strength, rowing, and realizes what he’s asked of her getting back into this boat. She’s not crying, nothing as simple as that, nothing that might offer her a moment’s release.

  “Is there any chance we’ll find him?” he asks.

  She shakes her head.

  He thinks, then, about when the kids were little and he and Marion would toss them out of the rowboat with life vests on to teach them to swim. How cavalier they were, how at home they were on this lake, in all its seasons.

  There’s a burst of laughter from a boat near Dobbin’s Bay. And then another and another. Seems the harder people try not to, the more they laugh. It rises up in waves.

  Nell rows to the center of the lake. People give them a wide berth, and in the dark, there’s not much expectation of talk.

  It’s beautiful with all those boats. Beautiful in a way he’ll never forget and may end up wishing he’d never seen. Funny the way Billy can pull all of them up into the light. Everything they’re afraid of: death, drowning, all of it, so close. A layer of wood, a layer of cloth, a layer of skin, that’s all that keeps them apart.

  Nell looks out at the water. “It’s not my fault,” she whispers.

  “Nell . . . ”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Honey . . . ”

  “I didn’t help him.”

  “I know.”

  “I couldn’t have stopped him even if I’d known what he was going to do.”

  A pause.

  “There’s no stopping Billy. You know that, Dad. You know that.”

  The boat rocks in the water. Jack is starting to feel the cold. He offers her the flask again and this time she takes it.

  Marion is stuck at home with the other kids arriving one by one. Not that she wants to be out on the lake. Feigning exhaustion so she can just get away from everyone, their noise, their concern; their sympathy. The way they all look at her, prod and push. Just let me be, she wants to spit at them. Go home; just go home. You are crowding Billy right out of this house.

  She goes up to the sleeping porch, to Billy’s cot. That side of the cottage sticks out from under the white pines and you can see the sky. She lies down on the bed, the springs loud. The old Hudson Bay blanket, older than Marion, came with the cottage when they bought it, worn soft as a baby’s blanket. She sinks into that bed the way Sheila is sinking into prayer downstairs, the way Jack and Nell are trying to sink into the night out on the lake.

  Holding their breath, all of them, suspended between knowing and not knowing, as Billy is suspended between presumed dead and found dead. This must be one of the rings of hell, having a boy lost where she can see where he is, but not find him. Is every pain of motherhood a physical pain? Childbirth and letting them go and now this. Her ribs could burst.

  Lying on the cot, looking at the black sky above the lake, the curtains of stars, she knows. He’s left them, left the house, their lives, this world. The space where she expected to find him, some trace, a scent, is already empty, an emptiness that makes her shudder and climb under the blanket. The breeze that blows through the screens carries the lake on it, the last trace of her son.

  The people who have no truck with boats, like Asa Alsop and Anna Barnes and Maeve and Evan Alsop, find their way down to the water. They come to stand on a neighbor’s dock or the fish pier or along the shoreline at the state park. Harlow Murphy parks at the edge of the water, ignores the policeman who tells him to move along. Esme Tinker drives up from Ithaca, walks out on the town pier as far as she can go. People gather, drawn by the loss of one of their own; the haunting refrain of another kid gone missing. How many people think of Megan Alsop that night and wonder if she will ever be found. Recount their parents’ and grandparents’ stories of the lake and those who were lost to its depths. So cold, so cold, they say over and over, a body will never surface.

  Sitting in the boat is turning into a kind of torture.

  God, even the Fourth of July was never like this.

  Nell breathes in. She’s been afraid to breathe, afraid to exhale, afraid to let go.

  And there it is. The softest breeze, so gentle; like a caress. She hears the boat rocking on the water, crickets, peepers, poplar leaves like coins.

  Close your eyes and listen, Billy would tell her. You can distinguish the lake sounds from the marsh and the bay. The marina’s easy, all that rigging making all that percussive sound. Listen for the willows in the marsh, the way sounds soften as the weather softens. Use your ears, Nell, pick them out, one by one.

  Is Megan here, she wonders, drifting in the bottomless depths of Seneca Lake? She thinks of the “little water” the Seneca speak of, an ointment so precious and rare it’s kept in a tiny hidden vial of obsidian or diamond. They believe that the little water can bring the dead back to life.

  But first the dead, and the missing, will have to be found.

  Nell ties up the boat and hurries up the path ahead of her father. She ducks around to the back of the house, pulls her bike out of the shed, and rides off. No lights. But there’s no stopping her.

  For Jack, every step gets heavier as he climbs the hill. He doesn’t want to go inside, find and comfort Marion, answer questions for
whoever else is there. He wants the dark quiet of the porch and solitude. Dragging up the hill with him is the word no one wants to say. If it was an accident, then Billy can be buried in consecrated ground, the prayers for the dead recited. If it was a suicide, he will be outside the church forever; outside the embrace of our Lord that is promised to every sinning one of us.

  And if there is no body to bury, what then?

  Marion sits in the dark, smoking a cigarette, a glass of Scotch in one hand. Jack climbs the porch steps, crosses the scuffed wooden floor, and sits beside her on the old glider. She exhales smoke, sets the glider in motion with one bare foot.

  “I didn’t expect to be so angry,” she says.

  She takes Jack’s hand, brings it to her face.

  “I’ll be an old woman. Overnight. From tonight until tomorrow. I can feel it happening. It’s like a blood transfusion, but instead of blood they are pumping old, old, old into me.”

  “You exaggerate.”

  “Nothing new there.”

  “Nell took off on her bike.”

  “She’ll be back.”

  “She feels responsible.”

  “We all feel responsible.”

  He kneels down then, the hard wooden boards a shock under his knees. “You’re praying,” Marion says to the back of his head. Jack hears the ice clink as she takes another drink from the glass.

  He wouldn’t be surprised if she put a foot in the center of his back and kicked him over onto his face. Instead she gets up and leaves the porch, the glider swaying empty, Jack on his knees waiting for a miracle they all know will never come.

  Anna Barnes stands on Geneva’s crumbling stone pier looking at the boats on the lake, some far enough out they’re no bigger than fireflies.

  People will talk about this, talk about and remember it for years to come. It makes her sick to imagine Billy in that water, his family gathered and waiting.

  When the boats start to scatter and head to shore, she climbs into her truck and drives home. Billy left her a package earlier in the week, told her not to open it until he gave her a sign. This, no doubt, is the sign.

  She unwraps his field journal from 1962, opens to the first page, where he was mixing greens, then blues. Turns the page to a sketch of an American bittern, then a green heron, with its blue-capped head; the nest and eggs for each bird rendered to scale on the opposite page. Impossible to think that a fourteen-year-old boy created this.

  Nell rides to Harlow’s apartment. Drops her bike near the outside stairway leading up to his place, where it clangs against the garbage cans. She lifts her hand to knock, thinks she hears a woman’s voice, and is about to leave when he opens the door. She tries to look around him.

  “I thought I heard someone.”

  “Just me.” He holds the door for her.

  She is surprised at how neat it is. One large open room with a peaked roof, windows on all sides. Kitchen along the back wall, bathroom in an alcove, bed, couch, record player, bookshelves made of planks and cinder blocks.

  “You want something to drink?”

  “Just a glass of water.”

  “You riding your bike without a light?”

  “I had to get out of there.”

  “Were you out on the lake?” he asks.

  “Yeah. You?”

  “I couldn’t get in a boat tonight.”

  He hands her a glass of water. She drinks it down, knowing she should leave, not wanting to. She imagines him asleep in that bed. She wants to climb in under the blanket, lie against him, smell his skin, feel his chest rising and falling; take her time.

  If he lets her into the shelter of his arms, she might never want to leave.

  “Harlow,” she says, and stops. Gathers her courage to ask: “What if Billy and Megan had waited?”

  “Not like that was ever gonna happen.”

  “I swear he’d still be here if Megan . . . ” She wipes her nose on her sleeve. “I’m tired of trying so hard. I thought with you I could just . . . stop.”

  She can hear him breathing, her own breath loud in her ears. She can hear the brush of his sleeve as he moves his arm, the rasp of his rough hands. Holding her breath now. She has waited so long.

  She moves toward him. “I need . . . ”

  “Nell . . . ”

  She shivers, shy, blinded as she pulls her shirt over her head. For a moment she can’t remember if her brother is alive. The word dead sinks into her, the impossible fact like a stone in her mouth. She remembers that strange kiss underwater before he left for Vietnam. Breath, she thinks, the breath of life, imposed or given or snatched away.

  Harlow draws her to him. This kiss, when it comes, an invitation, a claiming, that jolt of desire, and knowledge. This is life, she thinks, living, her hands on his back pulling him against her, fierce now with need, with want, the wanting its own kind of nakedness.

  His blunt hands are on her belly, back, breasts. She wraps her arms around him, legs shaking. She folds inside his arms, curls against the length of him. When he kisses her neck, she goes soft beneath his hands.

  Eyes open, she pulls him down to her. She wants to see his face, his eyes, when he’s touching her. Her nails dig into his arms and he is inside her. Body and blood, those words inside her, too; pain, then something else entirely radiating the length of her. Kissing him, moving with him. The shock and surrender of it.

  She wishes they were outside, grass beneath them, sky above. This room is too small to hold all she is feeling, loss and yearning, living and dying, knowing and not knowing. Impossible to articulate or describe.

  He holds her close, not talking, stroking her hair. She is drawn to that stillness in him. It’s like communion: so ephemeral the rest of the world needs reminding every Sunday. Remembers drifting in Harlow’s dinghy the night before he left for Basic. The town silent around them, streetlights blinking out along the shore, houses darkened beyond. Harlow let them float, playing out a hand line. She tucked herself into the bottom of the boat, his coat wrapped around her. She knew she was there on sufferance as Harlow and Billy passed a bottle back and forth over her head, but she felt unaccountably happy. And sad. For all they had and all they stood to lose. For a long time, an hour maybe, they didn’t speak at all.

  She closes her eyes now against sudden vertigo, against the black lake at their feet and all that it contains; lift me up, the prayer on her lips.

  The search is called off after two days. Dale Pope comes to the house to inform them and has to endure Marion’s sudden burst of fury. He stands in their living room like a small boy being scolded, apologizes again, and dares to lay a hand on her shoulder before he replaces his hat and lets himself out the door.

  The authorities wait two more days for the body to surface. When it does not, the coroner rules the death accidental. With no body and no note, the ruling is a mercy, but does nothing to stop the wag of tongues in town.

  They look everywhere for a note. All the obvious places, some less so. His desk, bedside table, beneath his pillow. Jack searches Billy’s toolbox, combs every inch of the garage, taking the opportunity to throw out clutter and sweep the earthen floor.

  Marion and Nell look through his clothes, empty each drawer. Finding nothing, they sit on the bed and fold every stitch, putting everything back, stacked and waiting.

  In the middle of another sleepless night, Marion strips each bed on the sleeping porch, creates a storm of feathers as she removes every pillowcase. She pushes the beds this way and that, their iron legs scraping the soft pine. When no note falls to the floor, she upends the beds one by one so she can search their springs.

  There are a dozen books on the floor under Billy’s bed. Each one picked up in hope, discarded in anger. She pages through them.

  Maybe he’s slipped away, boarded a bus to Colorado. No, not Colorado, he’d need a lake or an ocean. San Fran
cisco, South Carolina, the coast of Maine. Maybe he just needs to get away for a while, get his bearings; get out from under his family and the weight of their worry.

  She wouldn’t put it past him to disappear for five or ten years, drift, heal, explore.

  Maybe one day there will be a postcard in the mailbox.

  Jack watches her from the doorway. When she senses his presence, she looks up at him, dry-eyed. She doesn’t send him away, but goes back to turning pages. Even from the doorway, Jack can see the vibrant colors of Audubon’s birds.

  He crosses the sleeping porch, sits on the floor behind her. She shakes off his touch. He knows enough to wait, let the energy of her search wind down. Her unwarranted hope fuels her just as her anger fuels her. Neither can be sustained indefinitely.

  When she finishes, he pulls her into his arms. They sit among their children’s empty beds and wait for the dawn.

  Brendan arrives on the dock as Harlow finishes loading the runabout: two canisters of gas, two old army blankets, rope, a torch, a thermos of coffee and a bag of sandwiches.

  Harlow fires up the engine and heads south. Their plan: trace the perimeter of the lake, explore every inlet, outlet, and lay-by on the off chance the police missed something.

  It’s 5 o’clock in the morning; there’s a faint blush of pink on the horizon. They huddle into their jackets as they make their slow way along the shore.

  Shortly before noon, with the sun high and warm, they reach the marshy thickets south of Dresden and the Keuka Lake outlet. They’re a mile or so south of where Nell reported she’d seen Billy last.

  Harlow turns into the small cove and noses the boat carefully among the sunken branches and tall grasses. There are two new beaver dams. Twice he has to back out, turn, and take another approach. Nothing.