The Days When Birds Come Back

by Deborah Reed

  “Oh God. Jameson.”

  “I slept in the back seat of the car. Sarah Anne didn’t want me in the cabin with them. I didn’t want to be in there either. Everyone’s nerves were shot. The boy flinched when he saw me coming.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “So this morning I told her to bring me here. The sooner I finish this job, the better off I’ll be.”

  “I see.” June crossed her arms. He had been so quiet in the night, down the hall in her father’s old room. How soundly she had slept knowing he was there. How soundly he, too, must have slept after the night he’d had.

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll get back to work on the house today.”

  “Of course. I’m sorry about the trouble yesterday. It was the last thing you needed to deal with.”

  Jameson put up his hand. “Don’t,” he said. “That’s not necessary. I’m glad I was here, and you weren’t alone.”

  June brought her hand to the knot in her throat.

  “So,” he said, wiping the room clear of the subject, “I’ll wear my earmuffs and get started on the downstairs bathroom. Shouldn’t take me too long to replace those tiles.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “And June?” He turned to face her, and she looked right at him, waiting, though knowing what was coming before the words were said. “We can’t. This is not. You understand, right?”

  “Oh,” she said, as if it had only now dawned on her. “There’s no need.” She held up her hand. “This place is . . .”

  “This place is perfect, June. I’m not trying to pretend that what happened in this town didn’t happen. But for all its faults and horrible memories, I don’t hate it. In fact, I find myself needing it more than I ever have.”

  June glanced toward the window and the racket outside. It was day three, and the men had gotten far, all the tar paper laid, nearly all of the shingles fastened down. “They’re going to be done today, aren’t they?”

  “It sure looks that way. Some of the guys are already packing up.”

  “I understand what you mean,” she said. “I came back here from Ireland. It felt like—excuse me for saying it this way—but it felt like I was returning to the scene of the crime. I wanted to be here. I needed to be here. It pains me, and it also returns me to the person I was before anything ever went wrong.”

  Jameson nodded. “Yes,” he said. “That’s exactly it.”

  “Anyway, this other life of yours. A new life. You can’t give up on it.”

  Jameson drew a long breath. He stood and rinsed his cup in the sink. “I should get back to work. I’m not getting paid to make conversation.”

  “Yes. I shouldn’t like to dock you.”

  “I shouldn’t like that either.”

  “I can keep to myself,” June said. “I mean, I will keep to myself, until you leave.”

  Jameson nodded at the floor, the same way he’d done in the bungalow that day with the truth of something staring up at him, a look that said he’d like to explain things some other way, he’d like things to be another way. “Let me know what I can drop off for you from the store. I don’t imagine you’ll be getting around much with that ankle.”

  “I appreciate that. I’ll leave a note and cash under the mat.”

  38

  It was easy now to imagine—after the bedrock and hemlock compost were poured, and the plum trees were planted, and the dusty red hydrangeas with their giant balls of bloom appeared in the corners of the yard—that this place was about to become someone’s dream. Jameson wondered who that someone would be, and he guessed whoever they were would have no idea how their life was about to change. He already envied them their existence, even as they remained unaware of the good fortune headed their way.

  He had kept to himself while the place took on its final shape, walking the rooms, inspecting the fit and shine, doubling back. More than once he stood near a window just to feel the sash cord, or wrap his hand around a glass knob. There was comfort and pleasure in that, an aesthetic that went beyond the eyes. He could feel the harmony that had taken shape, and was grateful to leave behind this work, to put right this particular house in its highest order, for June.

  He thought a lot, too, as he worked, of the things beyond this house and grounds: a young girl sent away to endure a punishment that did not fit the crime, a punishment that was itself a crime, and how death in exchange for justice seemed too good for some. But that kind of thinking fueled a burning vengeance. It was good that Hicks’s son was not alive when Jameson’s children were dead. It was good that this Thornton character had died as well. Jameson might have gone looking for him.

  But here, this place was like a truce offered up to a world full of heartache and regret. The season was bringing a well-groomed close to these days, and soon he’d be home.

  June had stayed off her ankle and sent word by text that it was healing nicely. He didn’t know if she was drinking, but he kept himself from going over to see. He sensed she was doing all right, that she would be OK, though his mind kept going back to those bottles on the counter. He should have poured them out. He shouldn’t have said what he said when he was there that last time, either, even though it was true.

  He took the cash from the porch and bought what June wrote on her list—coffee, yogurt, and bread on Tuesday; Dubliner cheese, strawberry jam, and pistachios on Friday—and the weeks went on for them in this way, Jameson delivering the small bag of groceries to her mat, and texting her afterward to make sure she’d taken everything inside, out of the heat. June’s replies were always the same: Thank you, Jameson, this is lovely. He could hear the sound of her voice in those simple words. Once he was at his truck and saw her front door open and her arm reach out to retrieve the bag. A rush of blood kicked his heart and filled his face and he turned away so quickly he had no way of knowing if she had seen him.

  Then today she called.

  “He never charged me,” she said, referring to Hicks. “Called it gratis and hung up.” She sounded well. She sounded distant, too, as if they’d never shared a personal word between them.

  “Would you like to come over here?” Jameson asked. “I could show you the house . . .”

  June hesitated. “My foot is still a bit unstable . . .”

  “Right. Right. Well, I’ll come to you, then. I wanted to tell you some things about Hicks. Some things I’ve been thinking. I’ll only be a minute.”

  Moments later he appeared at her door. “Hey,” she said, so gently.

  “Hey,” he replied.

  She didn’t invite him in. Instead she stepped out with a small limp, and they sat on the first step, settling in with forearms on knees, their sights directed to the ocean.

  “I know for certain that Hicks used to have money,” Jameson started in. “He had a well-run construction business and a wife he cared about, so far as I could tell, and two kids. His daughter grew up and went to college in Seattle and never seemed to come back, but his son . . . he was younger, and troubled.”

  “Listen—you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want.”

  “No, no. I can tell you. I want to tell you.”

  June smiled with a hint of sadness.

  “That boy, early on, it seemed to me, wasn’t quite right. What happened to him, I don’t know. What I do know is that his mother was cooking the books of the business, but I don’t know if Hicks was in on it and let her take the fall. She went to jail.”

  “Wow.”

  “After that, Hicks’s life pretty much went to hell. He lashed out at everyone who came near. I imagine his boy got the brunt of it. But the thing here is, the thing is, Hicks ran into Sarah Anne one morning, the morning I mean, the day everything . . . He ran into her at the Little Grocer. From the sound of it he’d been drinking. He seemed out of touch with reality, telling her I ripped him off on some job we’d done years before. She told him to go home, and he just sort of snapped, grabbing her by the shoulders and shoving her against the shelves of crackers and chips by
the register. Grahame jumped in and got hold of him by the neck, I guess, and threw him out of the store. When Sarah Anne came home and told me, I got on my bike and took off after him. She begged me to leave it alone. So . . . yeah.”

  “That’s when you got into the wreck?”

  Jameson wiped his forehead of sweat. There was no need to answer.

  “Well,” June said, “that’s simply awful. It’s tragic. There is no other way to say it.”

  “I heard—and listen, I don’t know, people talk, but I can easily imagine it’s true—I heard Hicks went home and got into it with his boy. The boy picked up one of Hicks’s guns and drove off. Seventeen years old. I don’t know that he even had a plan so much as a deep hatred for the world, and that day he’d had about all he could take. Just a kid. A goddamn kid.”

  They fell into silence, and Jameson imagined June on the sofa where he’d held her, imagined her in the kitchen where he’d last seen her, the windowpanes behind her head, the old teacups on the wall shelf across from her, the apron on the copper hook. But she was right next to him, as lovely, if not more so, than the woman in his imaginings.

  “And where is everyone now?” she asked. “I mean, his wife and daughter.”

  “His wife got out of jail and married a guy she’d worked with at an accounting office. His daughter, I don’t know. I guess she’s gone somewhere else to start over.”

  “If only it were that easy,” June said.

  After a moment he said, “I’ll be leaving tomorrow.”

  “Oh?”

  Jameson rubbed his palms down his thighs. “I’m finished. I finished yesterday, in fact.”

  June let out a long breath, propped her elbows on her knees, and cradled her forehead in her hands. “All right.”

  “The guy who’ll paint the outside trim will be here in a few days. That’s the last of it.”

  “You’ve finished in record time.” She continued to look down at her feet.

  “It was a pleasure.”

  “Well . . .”

  “I mean that. The place came together pretty much in perfect order. I don’t think I could have pictured it any better.”

  “Thank you.” She looked up at him now. If he had touched her face just then, if he had kissed her like he wanted to, he believed she would have let him, he believed she was waiting for him to do just that. “For everything,” she said, turning away.

  “Thank you, June. For letting me come back like this. For being here again under these conditions. I think it was what I needed. I know it was. It’s been good for me in ways I’d never expected.”

  “Then perhaps it’s Van Hicks you need to thank.”

  “Perhaps you’re right.”

  “It’s done wonders for me too, you know, having you here, having the place returned to what it was. I’m going to get emotional here, so . . .”

  “Yeah, that’s all right then . . .”

  “I don’t plan to go over until you’ve gone. If there’s anything . . . I don’t expect there to be, but of course, if I have a question about anything I’ll be in touch.”

  “All right.”

  “All right.”

  “So . . . I’ll see you, or I won’t.”

  “Yes. That’s right. And Jameson?”

  “Yes?”

  “You know, don’t you, that you can always come back.”

  “I suppose,” he said. “In theory.” He stood and brushed the seat of his jeans. “June,” he said.

  “Take care of yourself,” she said.

  He nodded at his feet. “You too.”

  “Goodbye, Jameson.”

  He looked directly at her, but she did not take her eyes away from the ocean. He thought of the way paint splatter and rust and the raw scent of turpentine struck him as the most beautiful things, and how he’d never said that out loud, but he wanted to say it to June.

  “Goodbye, June,” he said, and walked away.

  39

  This morning a bald eagle snatched a seagull, a juvenile, right out of the sky, and June looked up from the beach in horror and wonder as the young bird’s companions dive-bombed the powerful predator in vain. The eagle continued to fly gracefully with its prey, its wings streaking across the sky above June. What shocked her as much as seeing the capture in midair was how the eagle made a wide turn like a jetliner and swooped through the center of the frantic gulls with the juvenile dangling motionless in its talons. For a moment June had to look away. All her life she had witnessed how brutal nature could be, but she had never seen such calculated cruelty as this. The eagle headed north at what appeared to be full speed, and June watched until it disappeared into the trees along the cliff. She wondered if it had the capacity to feel pleased with itself, or if she had simply misunderstood what the bird had set out to do. She wondered what Jameson might have said had he been standing there with her.

  It had been six months since he drove away, but June continued to see the world through his eyes, and in this way a part of him remained. She often wondered what he might say on any given day if she pointed out to him the things she saw, like the burst of yellow salmonberries on the ridge where she walked nearly every afternoon. She wondered what he might think if she baked a marionberry pie just to let the scent of buttery crust fill the kitchen before giving the pie away.

  Days ago she had come upon a baby seal, white with black spots, sleeping on the shore. She kneeled in the sand several yards back, far enough so as not to disturb it, yet close enough to warn tourists to keep their distance. This wasn’t the first time. They would think it was injured or beached and try to “rescue” it, somehow lift it back into the water. She knew that its mother had left it for safekeeping while off on a hunt. June waited for the sun to lower and the tourists to stop coming, and that’s when the tide lapped at the sleeping pup, and it woke at the movement. Its eyes, round and black and unblinking, fixed immediately on June. The tide rocked the pup harder, and the rocking became a swaying that buoyed its body up, until suddenly its head snapped around as if a loud noise in the ocean had caught its attention. June heard nothing, but sensed the mother must be nearby. She watched as the pup hobbled into the water, struggling at first when the tide pulled away, until finally it was deep enough to dive into the curl of a wave where the pup disappeared. Jameson, June thought. You would have loved this. Your children would have loved this. Jameson, she thought, all through the day.

  Six months since they had said goodbye, a mild winter come and gone, and here it was the start of another spring. They hadn’t had any contact at all. The days were beginning to get longer, the sun traveling farther from the horizon, the shadows shortened across the lawn and kitchen and porch. In all these months, June recalled, often, the words that came to her the day she first saw Jameson.

  Long after the sky lowered its gray blanket onto her skull and the rain fell without end and the air turned to thin, stringy wool in her lungs, long after her body became heavy upon rising and her mind slipped into dark, familiar places, she would recall his fluid shape in the sun on the hill exactly as it was in this moment, and the memory would take over like branches rupturing her heart, sprouting stems of white heat, and she would welcome the pain, all she had left of him, even as her ribs seemed to crack with every breath, she would smile while drinking her morning coffee, and she would smile at the unrelenting rain.

  The morning Jameson left, June had slipped out before dawn and placed a blank postcard on his windshield. The photograph was of the beach, taken from atop Neahkahnie Mountain. Where June’s house was located she’d drawn a tiny red circle, the way her father had done on the maps. After that she remained inside the carriage house behind closed blinds, sitting very still on the sofa in her robe, kneading the hem, remembering to breathe, and she listened to the sounds of Jameson in reverse of that first day, until finally the truck door closed, he backed out of the drive, and the sound of his engine faded. She had gone on sitting there long afterward, afraid to move, feeling the threat that whate
ver was holding her together might suddenly tear loose.

  It wasn’t until later that afternoon that she’d gathered the courage to step inside the bungalow.

  The rooms still held his presence, the feel of his body cut the air, and she recognized the scent of his hair and the coffee he had drunk that morning. The spaces shone beyond the reflection of the wood, everything plumb and square and warm in the way of memory, of something known and true, and to stand there was to be wrapped in the arms of someone who loved her.

  The garden was sprouting with color, and the front porch, with its bright strips of pine, took her breath away: it was where she and Jameson had shared a picnic, and where she had sat between Grandmam’s knees while Grandmam braided her hair. To stand in the house was to be filled with a belief that a world full of sorrow was also a world full of grace.

  But it was the manila envelope on the kitchen counter that changed everything that day. Across the front, Jameson had written: I found these in your grandfather’s work shed, tucked inside a false drawer. They are something you may have been looking for all your life.

  Inside the envelope were two field notebooks that June had never seen.

  On this 21st day of April, the world, our world, is bursting with spring and rain alike, the primroses spreading color was our first sight of the day, mine and Maeve’s, and it gave us hope for all things, including that our Finn would someday find his way to being well. He’s been slipping so far so fast. Even I am willing to admit that this is true.

  It is now after the fact, the 25th day of April. It has taken several days to comprehend how one is supposed to hold a pen in hand, how to write down words, how to breathe. Maeve asks where I find the wherewithal, and she says it like she’s cross with me, as if I don’t feel what she feels, as if I have somehow escaped being ravaged by the loss. I tell her I write because I do not want this time to pass unnoted. I do not want to behave as if these days were not the most grave and perilous of our lives. It’s just, poor Maeve. If I could take her pain and add it to mine, the entire world would feel a little lighter. She was the last person Finn spoke to. “Promise me that you and Da will take care of her. Promise me you won’t let June grow up to be like me. She’s her mother through and through, Ma. Please keep her that way.”