The Days When Birds Come Back

by Deborah Reed

  “Are you still there?” she asked.

  “Sorry. This old wall phone goes in and out. Can you write down my cell in case we get cut off?”

  She said she needed to grab a pen, but then she seemed to have not gone anywhere. “Right,” she said. “I’m here.”

  He gave her the number, and then he asked how old the house was.

  “It’s a 1940 bungalow. A Sears kit my grandfather built.”

  “Oh,” Jameson said. “Say that again?”

  “. . . I still have the instruction book.”

  “A Sears kit?”

  “Yes.”

  “With the original manual?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, hell. Excuse my language. That’s remarkable. You don’t see them much anymore, especially not west of the Rockies.” Jameson turned to Sarah Anne with a huge grin on his face, and she smiled with a raised eyebrow, a look of curiosity, pleased, he guessed, by what she was gathering was good news.

  He shifted his shoulders toward the window and made a point not to let his hopes sail too high. Not yet. Work on a house of that sort could be extensive, complicated—not everyone knew how to build those kits properly, even with step-by-step instructions. The place might be a mismatched disaster, better torn down, and that would mean a waste of a workweek, driving out to wherever she was to tell her there was nothing he could do.

  “And just so you know, my grandfather looked after the place quite well before he died a few years ago,” she said, as if reading his mind. “It’s fairly solid in spite of the winters out here.”

  “Where is—”

  “I mean . . . oh, sorry, you go ahead,” she said.

  “No, no, please, you finish.”

  “Well . . . I was just saying that so far as I can tell, it was in decent shape up until he and my grandmother passed away. Three years now. I haven’t been over there much since, to be honest.”

  “Has it been vacant?” Three years. He could practically smell the run of mice, squirrels, and raccoons. The attic, walls, and subfloors could turn out to be an ecosystem of nests, gnawed hardwoods, coated in fresh and petrified waste.

  “I’m afraid so,” she said.

  Jameson caught himself midsigh.

  “I was out of the country, and then I had my own circumstances—that is to say, my own house to deal with. I used another man. I mean, for my house. A different contractor.”

  He smiled. “Sure.”

  She let out what sounded like an enormous sigh. “My grandfather built my house, too, a carriage house next door. Another Sears. In 1937. He and my grandmother lived here first, before building the bungalow.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. What do you mean?”

  “About it being another Sears.”

  “No, not kidding, not about this bit, anyway.”

  Jameson wasn’t sure he understood her. He didn’t know if he should laugh. “OK,” he said. “So, that’s where you live now, next door to the house that needs work?” He turned toward Sarah Anne with what had to have been a puzzled expression, and he saw that he’d caught her attention. She was staring right at him, her own puzzled look melting into another warm smile. She mouthed, Work? and he nodded, and she beamed and gave him a thumbs-up.

  “Yes,” the woman said, and Jameson wondered if she was what the British called daft.

  He turned to the window. “That’s just so unusual. Pretty rare to find these homes at all, let alone two of them together.”

  “Oh? I didn’t know they were special to anyone other than my family.”

  “Well, I think they are. Not everyone would agree.”

  “You’re just the man, then.”

  “I believe I may be. I take it this other contractor isn’t someone you can or want to hire again?”

  “He moved to Phoenix.”

  “Ah. Sunshine.”

  “Yes. I hear some people like that sort of thing.”

  “God help them.”

  She laughed, fully, out loud, just a laugh, that’s all it was, and yet it sparked across the line with a clarity so pure it was as if she were suddenly with him in the room. He glanced at Sarah Anne’s back and then the meadow outside, his meadow, she called it, and he realized the laughter reminded him of Sarah Anne from before, in years past, not the tone so much as the energy behind it, and it occurred to him to hang up the phone right then without an explanation to anyone.

  He leaned forward. “Whereabouts did you say you live?”

  “Right, yes, sorry, it’s a little town on the northern coast,” she said, and Jameson replied, “Oh,” and Ernest said, “Ohhh,” and Jameson knew without looking that Sarah Anne had handed him a vanilla wafer.

  The woman continued talking, saying she would pay him more than his going rate if he could finish by September, when the rain made it harder to sell, but his mind wandered, lurched back, and wandered again to the Oregon coast. He thought of Sarah Anne carrying Ernest back into the house today, the red pads of his feet bouncing at her hips, his skinny back heaving from tears.

  It was a matter of control, a practiced way he put a halt to the ping-pong pattern of memories, but not before the dead faces of his children in the morgue would appear behind his eyes, and the clutching of Sarah Anne’s arm while rising from nightmares of identifying their bodies, screaming himself awake that they were only seven years old! And again, hobbling to retch in the grass near the children’s tree swings while telling Sarah Anne to please get back in the house.

  “Excuse me for just a second,” he said. “I need a moment to see if I can switch some things around.”

  “Of course. I didn’t mean to put you on the spot. Would you prefer I phone you tomorrow?”

  “No, no. I just need a second.”

  He closed his eyes and smothered the mouthpiece with his palm. He could feel Sarah Anne watching from behind, or maybe he just wanted to believe she was. He concentrated on the lilt in the woman’s voice, allowing it to drift through his mind without force or intention.

  A carriage house.

  He replayed her voice in his mind, paying close attention to the slant of her o’s, the slight roll of her r’s, and this single-minded focus opened a door he’d closed long ago on a life he’d known before this one. A life before anything had gone terribly right, in the old sense of the word, and terribly wrong in the new and fuller sense of the tragic.

  He pressed the clunky landline against his ear and fell into what felt like the space just before sleep, his awareness not yet lost, his surrender not yet complete. It was then a series of windows flung open at the corners of his mind, and a distant row of vantage points came into view. He slipped his hand off the receiver, said, “Just one more second, if that’s all right,” and she said, “Of course. Take whatever you need.”

  Take whatever you need.

  He tapped his fist to his forehead. They had no other income. No clue when another job might come along, and there was Ernest to think of.

  Take whatever you need.

  “Just checking one more thing,” he said, and now he hoped Sarah Anne wasn’t watching while he drifted into his twenty-year-old self, an impractical kid in college studying linguistics, that sheepish explanation he’d given his parents, and their inability to translate understanding the origin of words into a paycheck. “You don’t even talk to people!” his father had said. “It’s the wonder of the thing,” Jameson had said, stopping short at mentioning the joy he found in puzzling out the ways populations arrived in a particular place and time, why some communities spoke to each other in a language vastly different from another found a mile away. He liked knowing how these lines had been drawn. “Like why Finnish is closer to Hungarian than any of the Scandinavian languages nearby,” he’d said, clearing out what little air was left in the room. His father’s eyes glazed over, his mother shook her head, no doubt counting the moment as a black mark on her life. “This is not happening,” his father said, walking away. “Why not ju
st take all the money we saved for college and eat it? Why not set it on fire instead?”

  He cupped his mouth, the small grin, feeling younger than his thirty-five years for the first time in ages. In the seconds it took to consider all of this, his mind looped back to the kitchen, to the house, to his life, and he could not find a way to reconcile the jolt of pleasure he felt against the pain of the day.

  It was Irish, her accent, in some pidgin form.

  “So, three months to restore a 1940 Sears kit on the coast?” he managed to say. He turned in time to see Sarah Anne’s mouth fall open.

  “What do you think?” the woman asked. “Is it possible?”

  “It is,” he said to his reflection, and he could see Sarah Anne turning and opening the fridge. His mind wandered once more, no further than the last rain three weeks ago: a passing shower when they’d needed heavy rain, the meadow already a dry sea of purple and silver, like fossilized bone in the fading light.

  It was going to be all right. They were going to be fine, though Jameson knew he should have told her he couldn’t promise to finish a house in three months without seeing it. But it wouldn’t be the first time he’d faced down rain, mold, and salt—a domino effect of untamable, weathering erosion. Not to mention creatures ready to protect their young against his hands inside the walls. There would be termites fluttering into his face and hair, their translucent wings sticking to his skin. But what the hell. This was his work. And anyway, this was not the third bad thing. Going back would save them. Going back was a second chance to make things right.

  “What town did you say?”

  “Nestucca Beach,” she said, and a weighty knot shot through Jameson’s calf where the bone had once pierced the skin. “I have . . .” he said, massaging his left leg. “I used to live there.”

  “Did you?” she said.

  Jameson turned to Sarah Anne, as if the sight of her might convey what he needed to know, might afford him some comfort. She hadn’t heard what he said, couldn’t have, not the way she was bouncing Ernest on her hip. They were making faces at each other, their eyes opened wide as if practicing the expression of astonishment.

  “Do I know you, then?” he asked. “I must know you.”

  Now Sarah Anne turned toward him with straight-faced concern. Ernest looked at Sarah Anne, then Jameson, in the same stark manner. They all turned away at once.

  “I don’t think so,” the woman said. “Did you grow up here?”

  “No. Just spent a few years out that way. I’ve been gone for a couple. But I thought I knew everyone, or they knew me.”

  Sarah Anne was frowning, biting her lower lip. She had heard him, he was sure of it, the way she didn’t look at him or Ernest. She was busying herself at the open fridge, shifting the contents around with one hand.

  “I suppose it’s possible,” she said. “Though I doubt it. Your name . . . I would have remembered your name.”

  “And your houses, I must know them. I can’t picture where they are.”

  “I’ve been away, of course, so there’s that. But the houses, yes, they’re up the hill. Way up. I’ll text you the address.”

  “But you? You didn’t grow up there, right? I mean, your accent . . .”

  “No, yes, well, I did—for the most part. It’s quite complicated around here. Maybe I’ll know you by face? I hadn’t heard your name before he . . . Oh, it just came to me. Van. The guy who recommended you. Van Hicks.”

  “Oh,” Jameson said. “Van. Yeah. I know Van.”

  Sarah Anne dropped a bottle of mustard on the floor and the crack startled Ernest.

  The woman on the phone offered again to compensate Jameson for more than what he would normally be asking, for coming so far and for getting the house ready in time to sell.

  “That’s really not necessary,” he said, feeling his irritation rise at the mention of Van. But what choice did he have other than to take this job?

  “Well, then, I’ll have to insist,” she said, and for a moment he was caught inside a funnel of his fractured past, that stream of mourners at the door—“I’ll get it, I’ll get it,” he’d told Sarah Anne with every knock—all those people pushing charity in the form of marionberry pies and casseroles when he had no appetite, their arms pulling him into an embrace even though he was on crutches with a broken leg and the last thing he wanted was to be touched. “The sand from my children’s shoes is still on the tile,” he’d told someone before shutting the door. “In the grout. It sticks to the soles of my feet.”

  It wasn’t like him to refuse income. Especially not now. Maybe he’d flung himself around some benevolent corner, like his father, changing with age. Lately the need to make amends in every way seemed to cross his mind more often, and that was saying something.

  Sarah Anne was coating a large soft pretzel with mustard, and Jameson suddenly yearned to be the one to offer it to the boy, to be the one who cared for him the most.

  If Sarah Anne had any idea what Jameson had just said about the extra money not being necessary, she would have gladly filled him in on the necessary.

  “Well, I have to say, it sounds like an interesting project,” Jameson said, hoping his tone didn’t give him away.

  Something had come for him, an invitation, or command, to pay attention. This exact moment, the mustard jar in his wife’s hand reflected in the window, his face and shoulders superimposed over hers, this woman on the line—he could feel it was the beginning of an end, a slip from the fractured life he’d managed to hold together for three years, and into another, unmoored.

  Sarah Anne was wearing that sweater he loved, and as he was thinking of the honeycomb pattern, the cream-colored Irish wool stretched across her breasts, evoking the smell of her hair and skin, a persuasion had entered the room, an impulse, the first of many to come that would have him acting on the needs of . . . “What did you say your name was?”

  “June.”

  “Oh. Right. Well. June. It’s just begun. It’s your month.” A dumb joke she’d probably heard all her life, and now he couldn’t take it back, and didn’t know her well enough to cover one joke with another.

  “You still there, June?”

  “Yes. Was that your phone?”

  “No. Yes.”

  “Jameson?”

  “I’m here,” he said. “I was just saying that the answer to everything is yes.”

  Part Two

  9

  June often dreamed of colorful, blooming dyes and rocky scapes—land or moon she couldn’t say; they had the feel of porous tints and textures that she recalled come morning, a tactile sense of craggy coral beneath her bare feet. She climbed to get where she was going, and though she was never quite sure where she was headed, it seemed there existed a place she was expected to be. She ate lemons and wild strawberries and Grandmam’s marionberry pie. The air smelled of animal and fermented earth, of salads and cocktails and sweets.

  She’d wake after these dreams feeling a little queasy, and now that she was no longer drinking it seemed unusually cruel. The sun hurt her eyes the way it had when she was hung over, and it was all she could do to lie still and not think about the blue and red stains lingering behind her lids, not recall the tart flavors on her tongue. On those days she felt as if she’d already lost the plot before her feet hit the floor, and she would think how nice it would be to have a cup of cinnamon-ginger tea and a tangerine, how nice if there were someone to offer it up. But she didn’t keep tea and tangerines in the house, the way she didn’t keep wine, vodka, or beer.

  Last night June dreamed of the hands of a man she’d yet to meet. Hands everywhere she looked, lifting and pulling and holding this piece or that of her grandparents’ house up to the light, to give her an awareness of what was to come, a vision of the past resurrected. “You know I’m going to bring it all back,” this man—Jameson?—said, and June woke in the dark, damp with sweat, and went to the window, her hands fumbling to close the blinds she’d already closed before bed. Was she a sle
epwalker now? The world did not operate in a vacuum. Remove one thing, and another rushed in to take its place.

  She’d returned to bed after that, hot and unsettled beneath the duvet, which she’d kicked off and laid on top of in her peach pajamas, made of a fabric so soft it was too soft, a silk that somehow left her feeling self-indulgent for wearing them while alone. So she sat up and undressed and lay back down, naked and wide awake for the next hour in the same Milky Way–blue light of her childhood, imagining the linens and shirtsleeves on the line wrestling in the wind. Imagining, too, Leigh and Cordelia in the claustrophobic kitchen where they’d been lingering, neglected, for over a month. She needed to get them out. She would get them out. The hour passed, and June gave up on sleep and went downstairs in her robe with the blue velvet hem to see if there was any chance The Misfits was playing on TV. She kneaded her velvet cuff and paced the braided rug with the remote in her hand, aiming it like a laser gun at the television set from different corners of the room. Infomercials flashed a different kind of blue light, and June wondered if her grandfather might have left a bottle of Jameson next door in one of the old shed cupboards where she’d yet to fully rummage all the way through.

  10

  Ever since the phone call, sleep had not come easy for either of them. “The crickets seem especially loud,” Sarah Anne said, and Jameson thought the same. The chirrs had risen above the coyotes’ howls, and Jameson was glad for it. Those haunting yelps often kept him awake, not the sound so much as his need to translate the messages, the chronic fearing and craving and the public admission of one animal submitting to another. The worst was the lone howl that went unanswered. It often caused Jameson to throw off the quilt and stand in the kitchen drinking a glass of water until it quit. Sometimes it didn’t quit. God bless the crickets and their love songs, he now thought, those males pulsing with faith in all corners of the yard. Jameson’s feet were too warm for the quilt and he lay on top of it in his boxers, shirtless, immersed in the rhythmic trills beneath the window. At last he began to fade.