The Days When Birds Come Back

by Deborah Reed

  June drew a long breath. “It’s hot in here.”

  “We can go downstairs.”

  “No,” June said. “I mean about meeting. I’m not sure. We could have. My history. You know. It’s a little spotty.”

  “Oh. Well. Actually, the thing is . . . so is mine. That’s why I’m not sure either.”

  June appeared puzzled by his reply.

  Jameson held up a hand. “Oh, I’m not a drinker. I mean, I drink, but it’s not a problem.”

  June nodded slowly, and it was all he could do to wonder if this was what all drunks said, and he guessed it was. He had no idea how to make plain that he didn’t actually have a problem without sounding like he was protesting a little too much, so he let it go, and thought again of all those meals coming at them, until they’d run out of room in the fridge and freezer and began dumping everything in the trash, turning everyone’s good intentions into garbage.

  “So . . .” he said.

  “What I mean is,” June said, “what stops you from going mad inside all these rundown homes, year after year, with no one to keep you company?”

  Jameson crossed his arms, realized it made him look defensive, and placed his hands on his hips, though he knew that was just a different look of defense. “I’ve worked this way ever since my wife and I were in college.” The mention of Sarah Anne felt pointed—no accidental slip. Some part of him felt the need to set something straight. He was not so isolated. He did not need her pity.

  June nodded at the floor.

  “The thing is . . .” he said.

  “Oh, listen. Sometimes I just say things. I don’t know why I asked you that . . . I apologize. I’ve gotten so personal. And I’ve kept you long enough.”

  Her accent thickened with what appeared to be nervousness.

  “No. I’m happy to answer your question,” he said in a voice that seemed to come from elsewhere, from that bright blue desert sky back home for all he knew, because happy was most certainly not what he meant, and she seemed to know that, and it held her in place. “I piece together the lives of other people,” he said. “I guess that’s what saves me.” Saves me? It had already slipped from his mouth, and he didn’t want to come across like a man lacking confidence by stumbling to take it back. The truth was, no one had ever asked him such a thing before, and the answer he offered sounded eccentric to the world outside his ears.

  June smiled, and faint lines appeared on both sides of her mouth, which he thought handsome. There was no other way to say it.

  Jameson glanced at the floor, at her bare feet at the top of his vision. She crossed one foot over the other at the toes.

  “That’s pretty much what Van told me,” she said.

  He looked through the window at the ocean. “Is that right.”

  “Do you ever wonder what they’d think of your work, the people who lived so many decades ago? Do you worry whether or not you’re doing justice to a place? I guess that’s what I mean, not in any awful way . . . not in the way it probably sounds.”

  How was it that he felt a terrible, pleasurable pang for a woman he surely did not know? He wondered if he’d gone a little pale, the way her eyebrows drew together as she waited for an answer.

  “Yes,” he said. “I do worry. All the time. In fact, I think it’s safe to say the dead inform my every move.”

  June smiled openly, and it caught his breath. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” she said. “My birthday and all. Not that I’m going to celebrate or anything. It changes as we get older, doesn’t it? Forgetting, like that. Becoming just another day. Anyway, it’s back to work for us both.”

  “Happy birthday,” he said, watching her go, listening as she took the stairs one by one, and then the soft creak of the dining room floor, which stalled for a moment, and he guessed she was standing not far from his things. And then the creak of the back porch planks, but not the final steps. She’d hesitated again.

  He waited.

  June called back through the house: “I’ve got a pail you can have!”

  Jameson came to the top of the stairs, puzzled, smiling. “Do I need a pail?”

  “For the bird. It won’t tip when he bathes in it.”

  “Oh,” Jameson said, wondering why he had not thought of it himself. Then the click and zip of the camera, the groan of the steps, and she was gone.

  23

  June woke at six-thirty a.m. to the buzz of her cell phone.

  Victory International Shipping was apologizing for the early call, apologizing for having taken so long to get back to her, apologizing for the short notice: the truck with her belongings would be arriving early this afternoon.

  “Today?” she sat up.

  “We’re pleased to confirm you’ll be home to receive the truck, and we want to thank you for your patience.”

  June cleared her throat. “There has been no patience here.” She glanced at the Polaroids on her nightstand. Here was Jameson caught off guard at his workbench, and there crouched over the rotted floor with the pry bar in his hands. In the latter he appeared to be looking into the near distance where June was standing. He seemed to be looking at her feet. What was wrong with her, taking her camera over there like that? He must think her insane.

  “We appreciate your business.”

  “You people are quite something.” June hung up and realized that she’d mostly forgotten about the boxes, and now their arrival felt like an intrusion. The day was already taking off like a train without her. The hammering had begun next door.

  Sixteen parcels from her other life were about to arrive, and she would need to make room, and there was no room to be made. She would have to shove the boxes into her father’s bedroom, and the stacks would fill all the free space in the room. She could barely recall what she had packed. And after everything was dumped out, what then? Where was it all supposed to go? She had lived for months without any of these things.

  She pulled open the blinds. The ocean was calmer than she had seen it in months, the horizon a tight, steady blue line. Today was set to be as hot as all the others, and June, to her surprise, was beginning to tire of the heat.

  As far as she could tell, Jameson worked nearly every daylight hour of every day, and she wondered if he was drinking enough water. Niall used to ask June that very question, and it had gotten under her skin. She took it to mean that she’d had too many martinis the night before, and it sounded like an accusation, as if he were simply calling her a drunk, calling her a child, too, in need of a minder. June thought she was probably wrong about all of that. Niall was often driven by kindness; he had only ever been kind, for the most part he had. June grabbed her robe and cinched it tightly around the guilt rising in her gut.

  Last night she’d lain awake replaying her conversation with Jameson, running through the beginning, middle, and end, recalling all the details, the sticky give of her soles on the dusty floor, the crash of the pry bar, the way he had said they would take good care.

  We really need to take good care, she had told him. The stonework around the mantel is vulnerable in places not visible to the eye. What could have prompted her to say such a thing to a man who knew better than anyone what was called for? She’d felt the blood rush to her face as he looked away, and again minutes later when he nodded at the bedroom floor where he’d ripped out the wood that could not be saved, and she blushed again with the memory. A good portion of the wood could not be saved. This was what he’d told her in the bedroom, and he’d removed his glove and covered his mouth and sighed as if thinking of a way to tell her that it could be saved, a way to change the truth staring up at him. The gold ring on his finger was dull and scratched, a little loose in fit, and she couldn’t help but think he had brought it to his face so that she might see it and consider what it stood for. But the chimney, he’d said, and when he lifted his eyes to her, he seemed to be thinking of something other than a chimney, something other than a floor that could not be saved.

  I’ve worked this way ever since
my wife and I were in college.

  Her mug. Her pillow. What else had she packed?

  Last night she’d listened to Jameson working up until the final ray of light, around ten o’clock, the same as he’d done since he arrived. But when she saw the shadows from his lantern, she imagined being inside the house with him, sitting knee-to-knee on the dining room floor. She imagined leaning close to his ear to say all the awful details she’d never said to anyone, not even Niall. The way the blood had run down Heather’s back from the scissors in June’s hand, and the sight of scrawny little Claire being led through the dark while June lay safely beneath her blanket. There was more than that. Much more, and June could feel the words forming in her mouth, feel the air of freedom as if she were being let out of a cage.

  “My God, the theater of your mind, child,” Grandmam once said, and looking back, June guessed she had meant that there was now something wrong with her. Something ruined and beyond repair. Grandmam’s side glances when June spoke or ate, as if looking for the weary signs of instability like that of her own son. Before June was sent away, Grandmam had laughed with her whole body. She would hold June close and kiss the top of her head. When June returned from Salem, it was different. “She does not have the constitution to overcome all that has happened in her short life,” she told Granddad when June was supposed to be out of earshot. “She’s a lionheart, Maeve,” he’d said. “More her mother than her father.”

  Victory International Shipping had said early afternoon, but the roar of the moving van was echoing up the ridge before June had a chance to finish her coffee.

  24

  When Jameson returned Sarah Anne’s call, her excitement had carried across the line with a charge he had not heard or felt from her in years. It got into him and all over him, until the enthusiasm he offered her in return was genuine, straight from the heart.

  And yet, he’d thought about the rumpled warbler while Sarah Anne was talking, the joy of witnessing this little bird in a bath, the smallest pleasures he’d lost track of these past three years, but he didn’t speak of it to Sarah Anne. What he did say was “I’m going to be taking a few days off when the roofers get here. What if you and Ernest come out and we rent a place down the coast?” Sarah Anne got her calendar and said how good it would be to get away, the three of them together, and Jameson said, “Yes, yes,” and he could feel the way their words were igniting the system of life, the way so much of what was said was leaving out so much of what was not. But that night he lay awake imagining Sarah Anne driving across the state with Ernest in the back seat, having to stop for gas and pretend there was nothing wrong with her, that she had gotten a grain of sand or speck of dust in her eye, while Ernest stared at her in the rearview mirror, absorbing her lie.

  Now here it was early the following morning, and from the back of the bungalow’s yard he heard the distant roar of an engine in low gear approaching. The ground shook, and Jameson stepped out to the front porch to see a large moving van lurching up the hill. It came to a stop in front of June’s house. It was seven a.m.

  June was on her porch, dressed in the same shorts and tank top she’d worn while lying in the sun, but this time she was wearing a bra. Her hair hung loose down her back, well past her shoulders. She was barefoot.

  Three men climbed out of the truck, came toward her, and shook her hand. Then she caught sight of Jameson and, looking up into the eastern sun, made a visor with her hand. “My things from Ireland!” she yelled, sounding not very pleased.

  “Can I help?” he asked.

  She shook her head and thanked him and said something about there not being much, while the three men began hustling around her, bringing boxes into the house.

  He expected her to say she would see him later, but she disappeared inside. After a number of trips two of the men returned to the front yard, removed their hats, wiped their heads, and waited in the Adirondack chairs. They didn’t appear to say a word, just sat looking out at the ocean and drinking from paper coffee cups they’d retrieved from the truck. Jameson recognized the cups from Helen’s, where he’d been grabbing sandwiches and banana bread since he arrived, and it gave him an idea.

  He washed his hands and drove down and bought a cupcake for June.

  When he returned, the moving truck was pulling away. There was no sign of June, and he did not see her for the rest of the day. She didn’t call, and he got the impression she didn’t want him to call her, either. He didn’t know, but the air had shifted, and come evening her kitchen was dark, and around nine p.m. Jameson ate the cinnamon-spice cupcake with buttercream icing, and twice caught himself moaning at how good it was.

  June didn’t show up the next day, or the one after that. Jameson didn’t see her for another week.

  And that was fine. He had plenty to do before the roofers came, and before Sarah Anne and Ernest got there, and he was glad to see the flooring he’d ordered arrive on time. He worked twice as hard as he believed he was capable, carefully pounding in the subfloor and every tongue-and-groove plank into place. But he couldn’t help wondering if he’d said or done something he shouldn’t have, and if he had, whether it was the thing that was keeping June away.

  His desire to talk to her grew. He wanted to ask her things: Did she listen to the coyotes at night, and did she think those signals were a call to come closer or to stay away? Did she leave her windows open the way he did? Or close them tightly so as to not hear a thing? And how about the flickers drumming the cedars in the early afternoons? Had she heard their amplified clatter from across the golf course? The first time the sounds caught his attention, he thought someone was using a jackhammer.

  Morning after morning came for him as if by prayer or meditation, a rising sun like a rising benediction for a man who was never quite sure he deserved all the good he’d been given, and in turn everything else seemed a punishment he’d rightfully earned. Back home Sarah Anne and Ernest would be battling a heat much harsher than the one Jameson was battling here, and without much comfort of a breeze, and they’d have to wait out the day for the night desert to cool things off. By then Ernest would be asleep, and Sarah Anne would be alone in the house without him, and he wondered why she didn’t call him a whole lot more than she did.

  When June left the other day, Jameson had gone on standing in the bedroom, staring at the empty doorway, recalling the time he’d discovered, in another house, a strange impression on a bedroom doorframe. He’d placed his palm into the groove about even with his head, and his hand fit just right in the indentation, and he imagined that a man had stood bracing himself in that doorway, looking into the room, again and again, for what must have amounted to years. What would hold a man’s attention this way? Had more than one person come to stand there? If so, they would have been of similar height. It didn’t seem likely. Jameson wanted to believe a sick child had been watched over from this place at the door. Or a parent, a grandparent, someone in need of care. He would never know, but even if he had known, the truth didn’t always turn out the way he’d like for it to be. Over the years he’d seen all kinds of things, like evidence that a dog had spent a lifetime clawing to get out of a room. He’d found wainscoting ruptured by bullets, and the spread of black stains in subfloors, proof that at least one person had made his mark. Slivers of green glass burrowed deep inside floorboards might have been the result of carelessness, but there were times when Jameson felt certain that a jar had been thrown in a moment of anger or despair.

  So he’d stood there the other day thinking about all that when June had called up to him about the pail, and he’d forgotten what it was he was doing.

  When Sarah Anne was speaking in rapid-fire excitement about adopting Ernest, Jameson’s heart had pulled toward her. “I know you don’t want me to get my hopes up,” she said, “but Melinda actually requested the paperwork, Jay. She called Jess and initiated the entire thing.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that. Not really. The last thing in the world I would ever wish for is for
you not to have hope.”

  He’d listened and thought about holding the boy, the feel of his tiny arms up against him, but then he couldn’t help recalling Piper and Nate, the weight and smell of them, the sound of their voices, their laughter, their tears, and a hollowness filled his insides the way it always did when Jameson reached out to this boy.

  Sarah Anne was caught inside a fever of her own happiness, if that was what it was, and Jameson believed it was, some form of happiness, and he hadn’t said a whole lot during their conversation, and that was fine, he was glad not to have to speak, and by the end of the call he wondered if he could have been anyone on the other end of the line, so long as Sarah Anne had a person with whom she could share the good news.

  It had been June’s birthday that day, and he guessed she hadn’t celebrated, hadn’t even remembered until later in the day, and so far as he could tell she had spent the rest of the day alone, and he didn’t know what to make of that. He assumed by now that she lived by herself, and of course he’d noticed that she didn’t wear a ring. To each his own, he thought, but it didn’t seem right spending a birthday by oneself, and he wondered if she thought so little of who she was that she could forget the day she was born, no matter her age. But that didn’t seem possible, to look at her.

  He was thinking that he might prepare a little something for the next time she called up and said she was coming over. Like lunch. Not lunch, not really, but what to call it? She could bring that blanket she’d been lying on in her backyard, and he could pick up a few things from Helen’s Bakery after he consolidated the piles out back and made room for them to sit in the shade. Or maybe they could sit on the front porch and watch the ocean while they ate. But how on earth to ask? And what if she agreed to join him for something that looked an awful lot like a picnic?

  For starters, he would need a topic of conversation, something he could rely on once they settled down and unwrapped the sandwiches. He would ask about her own work. How could he not have asked her about it already? He imagined her swallowing politely while he talked, waiting for the point he was trying to make, but even in his own imagination he wasn’t saying a whole lot that made good sense and he wasn’t putting either of them at ease. He chewed too quickly and for too long, wiped his mouth more than was needed, and nodded his head without purpose. And what was the point? He didn’t know, not the full spectrum of it, though he was pretty sure he was no kind of man to be offering a picnic to a woman who was not his wife.