The Days When Birds Come Back

by Deborah Reed

  She dropped her chin and scratched her scalp and let out something of a growl. She sucked in a deep breath and then followed the rhythm of the waves. Venus glowed like a bulb in the sky.

  “You smell that, June?” her father used to say, standing near the clothesline, looking out from beneath the brim of his straw hat, bearing a striking resemblance to Vincent van Gogh. June would smile at the breezy cocktail of sea salt, bleach, and lavender. Nights when they forgot to bring in the laundry, which was often, June lay listening to the shirtsleeves and bed linens thumping in the wind. Looking back, she thought she should have been frightened by the sounds. Surely most children would have thought of ghosts when they saw the rippling shapes in the dark, but when June got out of bed and looked down from her window, what she saw in the blue light of the Milky Way and the moon was a day when laundry had been washed and hung out to dry, her father having strolled through the yard and kitchen, to the bubbling pots on the stove, and when that happened, what June had felt, looking down in the night, was that the house, even if she didn’t have the words for it yet, had been relieved of melancholia and despair.

  This afternoon she’d rolled onto her stomach and immediately felt the pointed wings of her shoulders and the backs of her legs filling with heat, and she’d thought about how her skin, more than anything else, set her apart from her father and grandparents, who were a pale, Easter pink, too tender for the sun from May through October. June’s mother had gifted her this easy season of summer—an undisputed fact, and one of very few of which June could be certain. Isadora Swan was the mother’s name on June’s birth certificate. According to her father, everyone had called her Izzy, and she had been an art student in San Francisco, where she and Finn Byrne met. Izzy Swan died of eclampsia shortly after June’s birth. Izzy had a seizure, slipped into a coma, and died within the hour. “Her brain was bleeding,” her father once said, after waking seven-year-old June in the night to see the cold, shiny stars. He named them off in a rushing stream, pointing with his entire arm while June shivered in her nightgown, her toes going stiff in the damp grass of April. “You’re lucky to have me,” he told her between Hydra the sea serpent and the Big Bear. “Your mother was an orphan. When she died there was no one to mourn her but me.”

  There was June, of course. June mourned her mother who had been an orphan, and now June was an orphan, and once June was gone there’d be no one left to mourn, and the idea floated toward her as calmly as a bright yellow leaf. Years ago in college, June had traced her mother’s family online. There was no one left to find. Her search turned up nothing but death certificates, and two living cousins so distant that June didn’t feel right bothering them.

  When Grandmam took June to the grocery store downriver to find the freshest produce, strangers glanced from one to the other as if wondering where this creamy-pale woman with freckles and light eyes had found such a girl. A reservation? Mexico? The first day of kindergarten, June’s teacher, Miss Louise, asked June if English was spoken at home. June was as dark as she’d ever been after a long hot summer. “Not the King’s,” Grandmam had said when June told her later that day, and Grandmam laughed at herself while removing her apron at the sink.

  Tomorrow, yes, June would turn this ship around. Maybe her lack of drink had nothing to do with her inability to write. Perhaps she’d just written herself into a corner, taken a false turn, and arrived at a place that could not be reached from the horizon she had set her sights on. Perhaps what she needed to do was go against the grain, pull back, take everything in the opposite direction without hesitation, like the way she’d told Niall to leave.

  The sun took a final bow, but the legendary green flare June had watched for her entire life was not to be seen. The night her father died she’d looked for it. Several days later, when Grandmam attacked the clothesline with a hatchet, June looked for it while Granddad gripped June to his chest, the crook of his elbow shielding her ear from Grandmam’s awful cries, and said, “Shush now,” into the top of June’s head, “she can do as she needs.” The sun was sinking and sinking and then nearly gone, and then it was gone, and June continued to watch for the green.

  Now she studied her hands in the twilight, wringing them, flexing them, knowing how important it was to give them something to do. Her hands were Grandmam’s hands, long, slender fingers fitting for a person of measurable height. Maybe her mother had been tall, too. Maybe her father had closed his eyes when he spoke to June because she looked like Izzy Swan. June had only a single photograph of her mother, though it was grainy and taken from a distance, a street scene with people her parents’ age in what appeared to be San Francisco. Izzy is looking at June’s father, and he is looking at Izzy, while everyone else smiles for the camera.

  Izzy had a nose that resembled June’s, though June liked it better on her mother’s face. If June were to assign that nose to one of her characters, she might call it hearty: a nose of proper proportion, not large, but with a bridge that had a slightly high stature when seen from the side. It was the kind of nose that saved a nice face from looking plain, adding interest to the eyes, even if they were already pretty.

  “Why do you keep staring at me?” June once asked Niall.

  “I’m not staring.”

  “You are.”

  “I’m trying to understand your face.”

  “What on earth?”

  “It’s beautiful, but I don’t know exactly how.”

  June had thought of Izzy Swan.

  “The longer I stare, the more it takes me by surprise. It’s arresting. You arrest me, June,” he’d said, and June felt as if he were talking about her mother in a way that drew a direct line to June.

  Someone once said that adulthood was like losing your mother in the grocery store every day of your life. Yes, well, never mind about that. Two months after Grandmam tore down the clothesline June was sent to a boarding school for “vexed and agitated girls,” as Mr. Thornton called it. He was the thin-haired, ruddy-faced director of the school, who’d come all the way from Scotland to take this job, and he spoke to June and her grandparents from behind an oversized mahogany desk. “A long way from home,” Granddad had said to Mr. Thornton in a tone that sounded like a question to June. “Aren’t we all?” Mr. Thornton had replied. Salem, Oregon, where the air smelled faintly of a dairy farm down the road. For nine months June lived with girls of all ages who cut themselves with razor blades or plucked out their eyelashes, who cried long into the night or never spoke a word, who refused to eat or ate too much. Nine months before Granddad busted in and took June home, in exactly the way she had imagined every night of her captivity—arriving in a fit of strength and anger, shoving people to the side, taking June by the hand as they walked out the front doors, daring anyone to try and stop them. But while waiting for that to happen, June shut out the nighttime shrieks and sobs of the other girls by creating a list of seven comforts that she hid inside her imagination like sweets she could reach for when no one was looking.

  All these years later, those seven comforts still held up. June could turn to them, though they embarrassed her. She felt eccentric in the privacy of her own mind. Niall was the only living soul she’d ever told about these things, and how good was he, becoming even more enamored with her. Hot sun on her skin was number three. The scent of horse sweat was number five, especially when tracing the air after a good pat of wool mitten against its neck on a chilly afternoon. This made her sound like an aristocrat, and she was anything but—raised on oatmeal and tea and her Irish Labour Party grandfather’s sense of humor. June would learn later in life that Grandmam, who’d kept the books for several of the shops in Nestucca Beach, had asked each for a loan to help pay June’s board at the home for vexed and agitated girls. June came to call the place the Infirmary of Innocents, and had written a school very much like it into one of her novels, including its old horse, an ancient pony with an arched spine that June had refused to ride, wanting only to pet the poor creature like a dog. Niall once refe
rred to June as a “bit of a lower-class cock up,” someone pretending to be who she was not. It was meant as a compliment, as a way to say that she was fine and good just the way she was—but of course that was before she could no longer pretend to be fine and good. Niall was in no way correct about everything, of course, but he was in the right about her wanting to be someone she was not. It was difficult to remember if there had been a time in her life when some part of her had not been missing. “You’re a bit of a graveyard,” Niall had once said of her, too.

  Montgomery Clift came in at number six after June saw the scene of the crippling phone call he makes to his mother in The Misfits. “Ma, Ma, are you proud?” She watched the film for the first time in the days after her father died and before she was sent to Salem. While her grandparents whispered in fierce bouts of Irish in the kitchen, as if afraid June might suddenly understand what they were saying, June sat on the braided rug in the living room, watching the black-and-white film on their small TV, and it was then she began kneading the blue velvet hem of her favorite skirt between her finger and thumb. Kneading blue velvet was strange, she knew. Odd for a child to caress her clothing like a toddler fixated on the satin trim of her baby blanket, but it became a habit, a refuge ever since. It was number seven on her list. To have six and seven at the same time deserved a number all its own, like six and a half. When June turned thirty Niall bought her a robe with blue velvet trim. She’d packed it with the things she brought directly here to the carriage house, knowing better than to take a chance on its getting lost in transit.

  It was no secret that Niall had resembled Monty Clift. In the early days of their courtship there’d been a moment when he held her face in his hands, ready to kiss her, and she asked him not to take what she was about to say the wrong way, but up close, she said, he looked even more like Monty Clift, and to be clear, she meant Monty before that awful car wreck altered his face and made him look like Monty’s attractive brother close in age. Did Niall take her compliment the right way? He’d laughed inside her mouth, hearty and quick, with a yes, yes that landed on the back of her throat. Thank you, love, he’d murmured across her tongue, and his words became her words, his breath her breath, and that kiss made them feel like innocents, they both said it, so young and tender, so grand and brave, shivering like high schoolers afraid of getting caught under the bleachers.

  Taking instant photographs with the Polaroid was number two. The chemical smell and zip-zip of the ejector was a full circle of satisfaction. Tracing a map with her finger was number four. The thick, nearly cottony paper beneath her sliding fingertip, the smell of dusty, yellowed maps, while searching for a place to go.

  And number one? Speaking to her mother. Words strung together, flung together, in ways that didn’t need to make sense. Aperture, fractures, rifts, on her lips in the dark, and then her mother’s whispery replies in June’s ears—poppies, marigolds, fleece, like cradle songs that gathered June safely toward sleep.

  June told herself that if she could make it past sundown without taking a drink she would call the contractor and not hang up. She would follow through with asking, or at this point begging, him to restore the bungalow, as she was told his work was like no one else’s, and she would sell the place by fall.

  If this guy agreed to do the work, then June would swear to herself to get through the intrusion by drawing on her seven comforts, none of which were a drink, and she would allow these summer days and then the future beyond them to unfold with a new neighbor living close by, and she would not try to control every crease and corner of her life, would not try to be someone she was not, and here she would vow that the season of summer, her season of watermelons and berries and the blue and gold thrush’s return to the yard, could officially begin today, in this first week of June, with Venus and the moon and a warm breeze deepening with the last hint of decay from the by-the-wind sailors.

  8

  The day had passed with no third black mark. Sarah Anne hit the switch on her way out of the kitchen, throwing Jameson into darkness at her back. He glanced over his shoulder into the dim room, the blue kettle on the stove signaling morning, and he thought of the new day that would come for them tomorrow. They would drink their coffee with milk as slowly as they pleased, with no place to be, and there in his small chair, Ernest would have yogurt and Cheerios, making a show, at least once, of chewing with his front teeth and grinning, which would make them both laugh, and they would forget, yet again, all that happened today.

  The hours might have folded away right then with Jameson turning toward the living room, Ernest to be scooped up and slipped into his bed. But the hushed, somnolent house was interrupted by the phone in the kitchen.

  Jameson snatched the receiver off the cradle, held it to his ear, and faced the window with his fist on his hip. “What the hell do you want from us?” he said.

  “I beg your pardon,” a woman said.

  “Oh,” Jameson said.

  “I didn’t mean to intrude,” she said with some kind of accent.

  “I apologize,” he said. “I thought you were someone else.”

  “Well, then. I’m pleased to say that I am just me.”

  Jameson smiled, perplexed.

  She introduced herself, though he did not catch her name. Ernest was whimpering in the living room, and Sarah Anne was telling him that everything would be OK, while the woman spoke with a soft foreign lilt, her voice plush with a silky cadence that distracted from what she was actually saying. “Jameson, is it?” she said, with a strange bit of laughter that made him wonder if she’d been drinking.

  “Yes?”

  “You came highly recommended,” she said, now sounding sober and clear. It was then he understood about the call, what it was she wanted, and his body flushed with relief. “Oh,” he said. “Well.” He nearly laughed. And then he did laugh, quietly, at the ceiling. “Can I ask who recommended me? This number, it’s not the one I give out . . .”

  “What was his name . . . It will come to me. I phoned him weeks ago and he told me that you’re just the man for this job . . . this particular house . . . my grandparents’ . . .”

  “Was it a guy from eastern Washington?”

  “I’m not sure where he’s from. He only said that he used to know you some years ago.”

  “Oh.” The offer was so unexpected that Jameson moved toward the kitchen table, to the chair near the window, where it was all he could do to sit, grasp a knee, and remain still.

  The small light popped on over the stove. Sarah Anne appeared with Ernest, a sight that often gave Jameson a jolt even on the best of days—a child on her hip—the fine wavy texture of his hair from behind, the familiar blond strands.

  Jameson rubbed his eyes closed as if a headache were coming on. Perhaps one was. “Was he a customer or a contractor?” What did it matter? He opened his eyes to Sarah Anne’s legs in cutoffs, and the sight filled him with a vague sense of guilt, as if he were doing something wrong, as if he were always doing something wrong, but especially here and now, alone in the dim light talking on the phone to a woman with a beautiful voice, a woman he didn’t know, but who was, in fact, offering him some much-needed work.

  “I apologize for the time. The day got away.”

  “Not a problem. I was just closing up shop around here.”

  “But your number, yes, I located it through information. The guy, whose name will come to me here, he used to be a contractor, hauling scrap now, as I understand, and the number he gave me no longer worked.”

  “Yes. Well. Here I am.”

  Sarah Anne tried to kiss Ernest on the temple and he leaned away. She bounced him gently and smiled into his eyes as if to say it didn’t matter if he rejected her, because no way in the world would she ever be rejecting him.

  “This fellow, I don’t know him personally. Obviously.” The woman caller laughed. “He said you’d be perfect for the house, and of course, I understand that you live on the other side of the state, and, I’m sorry, I don
’t want to put you out, but it’s somewhat urgent. I’m afraid I’ve waited so long to get this project going, and anyway, I’m praying you might find the time on such short notice.”

  “How short is short?”

  “The thing is, I’ve no idea what the work will involve. How long the entire project will take and all that, but I’m guessing several months, as I hear you like to work alone, for one thing, and I’d like to sell the house by fall, so . . . Something like this week. Tomorrow? ”

  Jameson couldn’t contain himself.

  “Oh. You’re laughing. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

  “Well,” Jameson said, a little lost in the wonder of his luck. He was lost in so many things at once, like what else she might have been told about him. And what did the other side of the state mean? The coast? Portland? South along the California border? “I’m glad you called,” he said. “I appreciate it. Thank you for going through the trouble.” Before he had a chance to ask where she was calling from, she said, “The house means a great deal to me, and he said you were better suited than anyone. I understand your work is a little unorthodox.”

  Jameson took a moment to let that sink in. He came close to asking if she cared to elaborate, even opened his mouth before clamping it shut. He didn’t always know how to talk to people, and it seemed to have gotten worse in recent years.

  “I guess,” he said. “I don’t know.” But Jameson did know, and anyone who’d ever worked with him knew that stains and scratches spoke to him of smokers and drinkers and lovers and cooks, guiding him toward what needed to be done and where. Maybe she’d been told he began each job by strolling the rooms, resurrecting the lives of those who’d lived hundreds of years before, playing out the patterns and habits that marked their days. Every home filled with stories, and he followed along with the beginning, middle, and end. He would offer the place a new ending, but first he had to pay close attention to the ghostly silhouettes where chests and picture frames had come between sunlight and layers of wallpaper, until he knew where everyone had stood and sat and rocked and ate and thereby loved and despised and mourned and celebrated one another in every room. After that he would know what to do.