The Days When Birds Come Back

by Deborah Reed

  June felt lightheaded, the room a little hazy when she glanced up and took hold of the counter. She closed the notebook, in need of air. She walked out and sat on the back steps and stared across the yard into the white trees, feeling her father nearby, feeling Jameson looking over her shoulder.

  June turned the page.

  Maeve said she could see in his eyes what he planned to do and she just kept calling for me, but I was out of earshot in the work shed. “I cannot bear the love mixed so deeply with the loss,” that poor boy told his ma. “She looks just like her mother. What a gift. What a beautiful, heartbreak of a gift.”

  June gasped.

  Maeve called for me once more and I believe this was the time I heard her, her frightened tone, calling me Cronin when she had only ever called me “Love,” but by then Finn had already walked out the front door with Maeve racing at his back, begging him to stay, even as he crossed the road, Maeve screaming his name, screaming for me, and causing a ruckus with the crows. It was there in the road where I found her, crouched and wailing the way a mother wails when she’s lost a child, a sight no one should ever have to see.

  June’s tears fell quickly. How she longed for Grandmam in this moment. How she longed for them all with an ache that doubled her over.

  Still she read.

  He was never as happy as the day Izzy went into labor. I recall it here as I recalled it then. Finn running around the house, saying she was on the way, on the way, on the way, and though he meant both midwife and baby, it was clear to us that the baby was the one who made him run and shout like that. Poor Izzy. In between labor pains she found the strength to laugh at him, and he wiped the sweat from her forehead and told her so tenderly how sorry he was for the pain.

  June was in the room with them, feeling the love, feeling the weight of so much possibility.

  Then the awful seizures, the quick collapse before the doctor arrived, and the last word she ever spoke was JUNE.

  June’s hands shook so badly she could barely read the words before her. She wiped her eyes and set the notebook on her knees and she read through the blur of tears.

  We’ll never know if she was just calling out the month in a delirium or if she’d meant to name her daughter June, and it never would matter one whit because it was the last thing she ever said, and from that day forward we would all continue to speak her final word, day after day, year after year, June, June, June.

  June stood, feeling something like anger. She’d had no idea she was born at home. Born in the bungalow just like her father. Her birth certificate has Nestucca Beach as the place, and the midwife’s name and signature, but June had always assumed she was born at the clinic several miles south on the highway. Why hadn’t anyone ever told her? Did they think she would blame them for her mother’s death? Did they feel responsible because June had not been born in a hospital? June knew enough to know it wouldn’t have made a difference. Not if her mother hadn’t been diagnosed beforehand. Not if what had happened came on as suddenly as it appeared to.

  June wiped her face and drew a breath that smelled faintly of fall, of something brittle on the wind, and when she glanced inside the other notebook she saw the date of her birth and the outline of the same story, written there as it was remembered by her grandfather in the days after her father’s death.

  June immediately returned to the carriage house and packed up her belongings. Several days later she moved into the bungalow, the place where she was born, among the people who had loved her, who had wanted her so much, the place where all had spent their final moments on earth. June felt their presence around her, not as ghosts but as threads here and there, as lively and real and true as a bird knowing where her springtime nest lay, even when returning from thousands of miles away.

  A steady stream of writing followed in the bungalow, and June finished the novel within weeks of moving in. Leigh, the sister who’d needed love the most, found it, as love is so often found in books.

  June had not taken another drink since the day Jameson wrapped her in a blanket and let her say the thing she needed to say. It helped, too, to have a neighbor who’d become such a good friend to June. Elin was her name, and June had liked her from the minute she saw her standing in the center of the wool rug with a grin on her face. With a single clap of her hands, her accent softly Floridian, she said, “Let me make an offer you can agree to right now.”

  She bought the carriage house the week it went on the market, and a kinship wove between them, as June could sense that Elin, too, had been shellshocked by this world, and had found that here, among the Pacific evergreens and rain and the brightest summer sun, was her true-north home.

  Now, six months and two weeks after June had placed the blank postcard on Jameson’s windshield, it was returned. Elin walked it over with a lopsided smile, fanning the card as if to ward off its heat.

  June recognized the card and snatched it up. She held it to her chest and went inside the bungalow and shut the door before she read what was written on the back.

  A long and strange tale for another time. Love, Jameson.

  June propped the card on the mantel, where she could see it when she crossed the room, the small red circle a reminder of who she was, where she was, the place she was meant to be.

  That same evening, Elin began telling June stories about her sister and mother back in Florida. It was as if the postcard, arriving by mistake at the carriage house, where Jameson believed June to be, had broken through another dimension, and each was able to step across and speak her truth. Elin told June about her nieces and their father, and how everyone’s life had been shaped again and again by tragedy. They made the best of what they had, she said, and she also told June about her divorce. Then slowly June revealed pieces of her own life, sitting next to her friend in the Adirondack chairs, feeling part of a life she could not have imagined months ago, or ever—watching the waves, drinking Elin’s sweet iced tea. “You can steal my story if you want,” Elin told her, and June smiled and said how people often said this to writers, believing novels were based on somebody’s real life, as if only the names were changed and the rest was laid out, ready for the taking, like that. “But all right,” June said. “I just might.”

  40

  His dreams were no longer about the children. Mostly they were not. Mostly they were about June, and he would wake in the night feeling her watching, feeling her somewhere behind him, the slightness of her, the feel of her, the smell of her cutting the air like a fragrance. Then he would turn to find Sarah Anne dozing beside him. Sometimes she patted his shoulder. Most times she slept right through, exhausted by her days at the wheel and all the hours with Ernest—the pedagogic play that Jameson neither fully understood nor fully became a part of, the favored meals, the cheese melted in the way he liked. The boy deserved all of this and more, and yet Jameson could not help feeling like an interloper in his own house. He could not watch the two of them without his mind filling with thoughts he could not seem to drive away. Was she ever this tender with Nate and Piper? Did she adore them in just this way? Take possession over them in a way that squeezed Jameson out?

  He believed he could take it. He wanted to believe it was true, that he could go on this way, now that he had become a father again, now that Sarah Anne was back at her wheel and selling her work in shops around the country. He watched her move through the world with purpose in a way he had not seen since the twins were alive. For as heavy as Jameson felt with the passing of time, Sarah Anne appeared lighter, less complicated. He still could not look at her without feeling the loss of the children. His love for her in one hand, his loss in the other. He could not pick up Ernest without feeling as if he were betraying his own children, and in turn failing the real-life boy in his arms.

  He’d catch himself, at the sink or in the shower or in his workshop thinking about June falling on the front lawn, the sound of the washing machine churning in the other room, the way he had held her on the sofa, his cheek against her sof
t hair. Then he’d close his eyes and listen to Sarah Anne’s bare feet on the hardwood, her sighs, her hands shifting jars through cupboards, returning foil to the drawer. Sarah Anne teaching Ernest to sing the alphabet. To tie his shoes and make a bowl out of clay.

  June’s postcard arrived last week in response to the one he’d sent her six months ago, an entire year gone by, and the only communication they had had were these two cards six months apart, with so little written on them. And yet it was enough. Everything that lay beneath it felt fixed and understood.

  The card was similar to the one she’d left on his windshield, another aerial view of Nestucca Beach with her home somewhere down in the trees, circled in red. Jameson kept the card in his shop without showing it to Sarah Anne. A small and simple act that filled him with a terrible guilt. He went out there when he didn’t need to, just to take it from the drawer and stare at the circle and read again and again what she had written, and he had to force the smile from his face when he locked up the shop and returned to the house, to a woman and a child who no longer seemed to want or need him near.

  May those who love us love us.

  And those that don’t love us,

  May God turn their hearts.

  And if He doesn’t turn their hearts,

  May he turn their ankles,

  So we’ll know them by their limping.

  41

  A year and a half after they had said goodbye, and still they laughed about those cards, now placed side by side on the mantel in the bungalow.

  They laughed about the way he came upon her in the back garden that day, and stood in the same place she had stood the first time she came to see him. She had turned in the same startled way, nervous as he’d been nervous, and when it started to sink in that he was not part of her imagination, she felt herself smile, and he came toward her with his arms out, and my God, how long did they stand there holding on to each other for dear life?

  Now, most mornings June watched from bed while he dressed. He liked to make breakfast before she came downstairs, to be alone in the kitchen first thing, with the birds and the quiet and the chance to watch the elk undisturbed. It was summer, and they ate yogurt with granola on the front porch in their pajamas. June liked to pick blackberries by herself, off along the edges of the forest, collecting them in the white pail she’d given to Jameson that day for the birdbath. She’d return with a calm mind and her pail half full, her fingers the stained colors of her dreams.

  Some days June accompanied Jameson at work. She’d read in the yard or she’d write by hand in her notebook beneath the shade of a tree. When the rain returned she’d take cover on a porch or in a living room, and they would share a picnic lunch inside, and she would read to him from the things she wrote and ask what rang true to his ear and what hadn’t yet hit the mark, and he understood the history of words in a way she did not, the paths they’d followed to arrive where she could use them, and she found it strange that he knew such things, and that he’d known just when to come back, and she wondered how it was that they had found each other at all, in a world so large and grievous.

  Acknowledgments

  Grateful thanks to my agent, Larry Kirshbaum, for his continued support, counsel, and much-needed sense of humor. And to everyone at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for guiding and championing this book with kindness, acuity, and patience: Nicole Angeloro, Larry Cooper, Liz Anderson, and especially Bruce Nichols for opening the door and welcoming me in.

  Thanks to Mary and Robert White of County Carlow, Ireland, for opening their lovely home and sharing their knowledge and friendship and appreciation for all living things.

  Thanks also to Sharon Harrigan, Holly Lorincz, and Nancy (this is our life!) Rommelmann for the whip-smart writing advice on very short notice, and for the wholehearted, enduring friendships that stretch far beyond the small circle of the work we do.

  Much appreciation to Amy Pulitzer for the gift that allowed this book to be written, and a life to be lived with imagination, grace, and goodwill. And Kerry Allen for planting the seed of this story shortly after my arrival in this beautiful haven.

  And to Robert Kelleher, whose tenderness and love for the world and for me inspires my work and life every single day.

  About the Author

  DEBORAH REED is the author of four novels: Olivay, Things We Set on Fire, and Carry Yourself Back to Me. She has also written two popular thrillers under the pen name Audrey Braun. Reed holds an MFA in creative writing from Pacific University and is codirector of the Black Forest Writing Seminars at the University of Freiburg in Germany. She teaches creative writing at workshops around the United States and in Europe. She lives on the coast of Oregon.

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