The Days When Birds Come Back

by Deborah Reed

  He took the boy’s hand, and Ernest turned to reach for Sarah Anne with the other. Their attachment had grown even deeper while Jameson was away. They stepped out in a line holding hands, with Ernest at the center, and looked up and around at the giant, ancient trees. Jameson drew in a deep, aromatic breath and felt the magnitude of the world, its vast forests and oceans and ranges of treacherous mountains and all that lived out there, and he imagined losing the boy in these woods, like a boy in a fairy tale with hard lessons to learn. For the second time in as many days, tears filled Jameson’s eyes.

  If the world worked the way it should, Ernest would keep on growing, well past the age of seven and into old age. He’d be around long after Jameson and Sarah Anne were gone, and the thought should have brought some measure of satisfaction, but Jameson found it best to not think such things, and said, “Let’s take a walk in these big piney woods.”

  They followed a rough path and within minutes Ernest wanted to be carried, and he allowed Jameson to be the one to hold him, yet he remained a little shy, listening as Jameson pointed out the trees and fox trails and rabbit dens, and the sound of the river moving over rocks seemed to put them both at ease.

  In the evening they warmed a can of refried beans and cheese and tortillas, and tossed together burritos, and everyone was acting a little shy. “He’s grown,” Jameson said, counting the days he’d been away. A month? It seemed longer. “You’ve grown, Ernest. You look like a big kid now.”

  Ernest raised both hands in the air and smiled, chewing his food. Sarah Anne smiled deeply at the boy, and then a little less so at Jameson.

  An hour later, Ernest had fallen asleep in Sarah Anne’s arms, and when she started to move him to the fold-out cot, Jameson stood to help. She shook her head to say he wasn’t needed, and she laid the boy down and shushed him when he stirred. She whisper-sang a song Jameson had never heard, a new lullaby about snow-covered mountains and a baby swaddled in wool, and Ernest’s eyes remained closed even as he gave her hand a single pat. His foot did not kick the wall. His fist did not slug the pillow. He was as still as a child who didn’t know how cruel the world could be, a child drifting off with innocence.

  The sun settled and the cabin shifted quickly into darkness amid the surrounding trees. It would still be light on the beach, and on the ridge where the bungalow and carriage house stood.

  Jameson took Sarah Anne’s hand, and he thought about the way he had taken June’s the night before.

  “What was Van doing there?” Sarah Anne whispered.

  Jameson slid his hand away.

  “What did he say to you?” she asked.

  “He said he was trying to help everyone out.”

  “Everyone? Who’s everyone?”

  “You, me. June.”

  “What’s he talking about?”

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  “It made me sick to see him. Especially here, on the coast.”

  It wasn’t like Sarah Anne to refer to that other life. She glanced at the sleeping boy, slid a string of hair from his forehead, and sighed.

  “How are you?” Jameson asked. “I mean, how are you really?”

  Her face was half hidden in shadow, but he could make out the small curve of her smile. “I’m happy for the first time in a long time.”

  Jameson kissed the top of her head.

  “I’m exhausted, too,” she said, and what he heard was that she hoped he didn’t want more from her tonight. The furtive glance, the lift of her hair from her neck, and quick drop of her hands. Signals he had learned over the years. “I wouldn’t mind getting to sleep, if that’s OK with you.”

  “Of course. It’s been a long day. You go ahead. I might read a little and then I’ll join you.”

  He leaned back in the dark, listening to the familiar sounds of his wife getting ready for bed on the other side of the bathroom door, the sigh before brushing her teeth, the tap-tap of the brush on the side of the sink, and the rustling of covers when she returned. Another deep breath as if releasing the day’s troubles to make space inside herself for sleep.

  They would not make love tonight, and they would not make love at all in the quiet cabin. There was one purpose here, a singular goal, and that was to take care not to wake the boy. To take care of the boy no matter what. The last time Jameson and Sarah Anne made love, they had reached for one another with a strange, apologetic greed, their pleasure overrun with guilt. And the time before that? Jameson had no memory of it.

  He sat in the dim light, allowing his mind to follow through to the end of a road where a flurry of questions remained. Was there a place in this world where he and Sarah Anne could step across a border into some neutral land they could make their own? Did a place exist where they could free-fall back into the people they more closely resembled when the children were alive? If the answer was no, what then? Did it matter? Could they live in separate countries, side by side like good neighbors, like allies for a single cause? Could they do that for the rest of their lives?

  The cabin was silent when Jameson opened June’s novel. He used a pocket flashlight to see the page, glancing first at June’s photograph on the back flap. It must have been taken years ago: her smile appeared easy, relaxed, the author captured in a moment of unguarded happiness. Alongside the photo, the credit said Niall Sullivan. It was his face she would have been seeing. Was it true what she’d told him today about never really loving him the way he had loved her? Or was she, in the way of so many people, rewriting her own history?

  Her novel was titled London Orchard, about an English botanist who survives World War II only to return home to find his beloved cottage has been destroyed by German bombs, his wife and child gone to live in America after thinking him dead, but his cherished orchard has thrived in his absence. As far as Jameson could tell, it was a story of missed chances and wrong turns. It was a story about grief.

  Jameson read long into the night, falling asleep in the chair with the book in his hands. When he woke several hours later, he was confused by the shade of light in the room, by the wooden arms of the chair in which he sat. For a moment he did not know where he was. The sentences June had written still clung to the back of his throat, and in a dreamlike state it felt as if he were speaking them out loud, and then he understood that he was. Sarah Anne was propped on her elbow. “You’re talking in your sleep,” she said. “You nearly woke Ernest.”

  “What did I say?” he asked.

  “Something about plums and hollyhocks and an ocean liner.” She laughed a little in the dark.

  Jameson apologized and crawled into bed next to her. He lay feeling the heat of her, the heavy weight of her returning to sleep while he stared at the strips of cedar ceiling he could barely see. Moments later came the first drops of rain.

  31

  June carried a utility knife upstairs to her father’s room. Her limbs were drained of all energy, though it was only midafternoon and she had barely done a thing. By contrast, the air seemed charged, as if the storm that Hicks had mentioned was indeed on the way. But what June felt was more than tired. She had lived a fairly solitary life since childhood, and grew up to spend her working life alone, yet a sense of loneliness seemed attached to everything now. She felt small, vulnerable, as if the world had expanded without warning, everything overexposed and raw, distorted, like looking through a crooked aperture that was meant to remain closed.

  The clamor next door had shifted into a harsh crash of wood and metal as loose slabs of what had once been the bungalow were being pulled from the heaps out back and thrown into the drop box, and June could not help feeling that she herself was being dismantled, torn apart in pieces, and stripped to the core.

  She kneeled in her father’s room and sliced the seal of tape on the box before her, reached in, and out came blankets and throws and yellow vintage pillows. The air trapped inside was from Ireland, its scent that of her other home, her other life. It smelled of Niall in the kitchen chopping carrots, the concrete floo
rs, and the honeysuckle beneath the bedroom window. June sat back on her heels, squeezing the knife in her hand, feeling the ghosts of her past rising up and closing her in.

  The second box was no different. Her waxed field jacket and knit caps and rubber boots and thick sweaters, every object attached to a memory, to a single hour or an entire season, artifacts of a life that had become nothing more than a place in history.

  Then the familiar scent of books wafted through the air and landed her back in the present. Box after box was stuffed with her collection: stacks of poetry, novels, and short stories. Books on history, on how the brain works, biographies of painters and writers, tall crooked columns piling up around her like ancient ruins, and she thought of the piles next door that Jameson had made and set aside for someone else to haul away. Van Hicks, a man whose presence seemed to alter the way Jameson looked at the world. And how could it not? What had she seen in his face when she came upon the two of them in the yard? Fear? Disdain? What had they said to one another?

  She pulled letters from a wooden keepsake box, warm sentiments from readers, and friends from whom she no longer heard. Eleanor Black used to be in touch, her letters purposely charming, meant to evoke a mood, an idea of who Eleanor was supposed to be. She’d married a Brit and lived in London. One of her letters had said something about June stealing the facts of Eleanor’s life to use in her own work. Have at it, Eleanor had written, not trying to disguise her arrogance. June had done no such thing, and Eleanor should have known as much, being a writer herself. We find what we want to find in others’ stories, see ourselves where we want to be seen, strolling through bright rooms of flattery, steering clear of the dark.

  Eleanor was having a great run of success, but June hadn’t spoken to her since the divorce. Their friends had mostly been Niall’s, and the rest, she understood, had tired of her drinking. She’d been drinking when she packed these boxes and did not recall now what her reasoning had been. Two forks from the kitchen drawer. A clay bowl she never much cared for. To look at them in her hand was to look at the drunk who’d tossed all of this in a box. She was sentimental and sloppy. She was pathetic.

  The vision of Jameson’s hands returned, and June allowed this much, allowed herself to wonder if he was thinking about her in that cabin with his wife, wondering if she had made any sort of impression on him at all.

  And here in a box was the violet sundress she’d worn the night she met Niall. She held it against her chest, expecting to feel some kind of loss, but what she felt was nothing at all. She liked the dress, even now; it was as simple as that. She would make a point of wearing it again.

  The violent crack of shingles and plywood being torn away had begun in earnest, and in between the materials being ripped apart, the men yelled to one another while others whistled and sang. June stretched her neck side to side. It was a mistake for her to have stayed home. How perfect a cabin on the river would be.

  And now her pillow, her mug, the Ulysses butterfly in the glass box frame she’d forgotten all about, its broad, Prussian-blue wings nearly painful to stare into, so electric and charged, as if chemically concocted in a man-made lab. It had been a birthday gift from Niall, the first he’d ever given her. It would look nice in the living room near her mother’s drawings.

  After June put away as many books as she could fit on the living room shelves, she removed the tape from the boxes and stomped all over them, jumping up and down with a great show of grunting that grew harder and louder as frustration built in her bones. What were they doing in their cabin on the river? How desperately had they wanted to get their hands on each other? She had seen the way Jameson smiled at the boy. How easily his heart could be won.

  June tossed the flattened cardboard onto the front porch, where the mess spilled out onto the lawn. She would ask that charmer Van Hicks to haul it away.

  By dusk the roofers had gone, the ridge was empty of everyone except June, and the whispers began, telling her she would sleep much better tonight if she had a drink, if she had two, in fact, because everyone knew that a little vodka would loosen the shoulders and hands, and June’s hands often clenched in her sleep. You’re a fabulist, she said to her brain. Full of wild notions. And lies.

  Clouds were beginning to roll in. The barometric pressure had dropped so quickly that June could feel it in her inner ear. It was going to storm, and summer rain would bring the rich aroma of lavender and grass and jasmine. It would fill the air with “Forest Pete.”

  She imagined the shelves of liquor down in Wheeler, all those beautiful glass bottles, such lovely works of art, every one filled with a promise, a story, gifts to be opened and shared in celebration of love and life, holidays filled with peace and joy. How pretty they were, how delightfully they kept company with each other in those colorful rows. The darker stories they housed, like genies, had not been let loose, and at first glance were nowhere to be seen. Where were the blackouts and bruises? Where was the infidelity and depression? Show me divorce and broken bones and lost careers, June thought. Show me the troubled children at the bottom of every bottle.

  June didn’t have to drive all the way to Wheeler. She could easily walk down the hill to the Little Grocer and buy wine. They carried a decent selection of deep reds with eloquent shapes, and they came with an actual cork. How she missed the sound of a cork, missed the waft of that old-world aroma, and the taste, that lingering sizzle on her tongue, heat filling her hands and cheeks and ears.

  She was going to stay put in the carriage house. She was going to keep company with a bottle of red vitamin water, and the campfires seen from afar like stars. She was going to watch for the flash of green with the setting sun.

  Then she recalled the evening her father put Nina Simone on the record player. They had danced together at dusk, fingers entwined—“like this,” he showed her, and their arms went up in an arc over June’s head as she spun. June remembered it that way. She wanted to remember it that way. It was the way it came to her, though she was old enough now to understand how memories could be unreliable. She knew the difference between truth and lies, of course she did, the difference between fantasy and fiction. She had known Jameson for several weeks, but already she had forsworn herself, already abused what little trust in her he might have had by not telling him the truth. We find what we want to find in others’ stories, just as we find what we want to find in our own.

  32

  Jameson should have told June the truth: he may have found out more about her family than she knew herself. He should have given her the notebooks before he left, even as he could not yet bring himself to read them, and did not know how harmful or helpful they might turn out to be. It was none of his business. It was not his decision to make. This was what he was thinking, what he seemed to be dreaming, and then . . .

  What he heard was a gunshot.

  He leaped from the bed, not knowing where he was or who was moving in the dark. He did not recognize the voices in the room, the screams, he could not see his own hand in front of his face, could not understand where the cries were coming from, but he was certain that at least one had come from a child.

  The other was a woman, shouting, begging for something to stop.

  Jameson stumbled, caught his foot on something soft as he groped for balance, and finally grabbed hold of what felt like a table leg. Then a crash, and the child shrieking even louder.

  He crawled toward a fissure of light shining beneath a door, snatched up a fishing rod next to it, and stood grasping the rod with both hands like a sword. He sliced the air, hitting someone or something, and the woman was now screaming his name.

  A flashlight swirled into his eyes. Fragments of the room came into view—blankets, and tin cups on the shelves. Jameson dropped the fishing rod. He was in the cabin.

  Another shot went off with a flash, and Jameson realized that it was not a gun he’d heard, but the crack of lightning.

  Then the back door swung open and there was the shape of Sarah Anne holding
the boy on the threshold, both looking terrified as they rushed into the downpour toward the river.

  33

  First the roll of thunder, then rain like buckshot hitting the roof.

  June vaulted out of bed toward the window. The roofers must have known it might rain. A blue tarp was fastened onto the exposed roof, but the corners flapped wildly in the wind.

  She thought to call Jameson. To say what? She didn’t know. The bungalow seemed to belong to him. He had been its truest, most loving caretaker since her grandparents died.

  June pulled her robe over her peach pajamas, hurried downstairs to the living room, and turned on the TV. It was 3:42 a.m. A weather alert ran along the bottom of the screen. Forty-mile-an-hour winds, gusts up to sixty-five, with possible flash floods. June had lived through storms her entire life, and this one was mild by comparison. The battering of wind and rain, the groans of trees, an enormous crack that might follow when one snapped in half. She was used to landslides and sinkholes and flooding that could shut down Highway 101 within minutes. So why did she feel such crippling fear as she sat alone in her living room with a half-assed storm picking up all around her? Why did she feel as if she were hiding beneath that blanket in the Infirmary of Innocents again? Hiding even when she knew it would offer her no more safety than standing up and taking Claire’s place might have done.

  A thundering boom, the house went dark, and June pulled her knees to her chest and clutched her robe. She thought of the glass of chocolate milk on the table that day, the swirl of cocoa and fresh, toothy-yellow milk, that offering, that swallow of tangy and bitter and sweet, that moment of waiting to be told her father was gone forever. Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral. Her skin felt bristly, as if infested with mites, and she scratched her arms and legs, backed up on the sofa, turned sideways, and dug her heels into the cushions. And now she held her fists to her eyes and screamed to drown out the sounds inside her head, to drive away the images that followed.