The Colours of Birds

by Higgins, Rebecca

  Every morning, George leaves a bottle of water beside our air mattress for me. And by the flap of the tent, he leaves the bucket, so I don’t have to go outside before I’m ready to. He’s still a sweet man, and I hope this storm won’t do to him what it did to our fridge.

  George and a friend of his managed to get the fridge out to the curb when we first got back. They told us not to open the fridges, that it wasn’t safe. They told us to tape them shut and stay away from them. I’ve thought a lot about what was in that fridge when the storm hit. I made a list of everything I could remember. Sometimes when I look at my list, I think I can smell what was in there like it’s not even rotten: leftover chili, milk, yoghurt, cabbage, blueberries, even carrots, which are harder to smell. But after two months, I’m pretty sure that even the hardiest foods in there—mustard, maybe even the beef jerky—are moving with maggots. I stay away from the fridge.

  We cook over a hibachi in the yard. George brings home fresh things sometimes, and we open cans a lot. I salvaged a decent pot from our house, and that’s been working well enough.

  Cooking is manageable, but I hate not being able to go to the bathroom properly. There are a few of those blue portable toilets set up on our street. Some agency brought them by. It was nice of them, I guess, but the toilets are disgusting. I can’t stand going in there. As soon as you open the door, it smells like when we walked down the subway steps in New York that time. It smells like homeless people in those blue toilets. I’m afraid of what will crawl up when I’m sitting there. Sometimes there is brown on the walls. I try to do what I have to outside, at the back of our yard.

  Yesterday I was finishing up, at the back of our yard, when I heard somebody call out a hello. It was the neighbour who used to live behind us. I was glad I’d already pulled my pants up and was just kicking dirt over what I’d done when she called to me. I could pretend I’d been doing something else back there if she asked, which she didn’t.

  “That you, Miss Sharon?” she called.

  Tammy looked thinner, and there was more grey showing through her black hair than I remembered. Her eyes were darker, too.

  “It is. Didn’t know you were back.”

  “I’m not. We’re still in Mississippi at my sister’s. I just drove in to see if I could save anything.”

  “Any luck?”

  “Not much. The place is totally destroyed,” Tammy said, waving behind her at her place.

  I’d already seen it, every time I had to go, but I pretended like it was the first time I was looking.

  The back of her house was ripped off, so you could see everything inside what had been her living room. Beige sofa blackened by mould. Smashed television, kicked in and lying on its side. A pile of boards that could have been a table. The carpet mostly gone, and the floor strewn with garbage and bricks and fabric.

  “Doesn’t look good,” I said.

  “Yours neither.”

  “No,” I agreed.

  “The front is a bit better, I guess,” Tammy said. “The mailbox is still in one piece, for some reason.”

  “Is that right?” Our mailbox was long gone. George thought maybe he’d seen it on another street.

  “Yeah. And you’ll never believe it—we got mail.”

  “You did? Something from FEMA?”

  Tammy snorted. “Hardly.”

  I waited.

  “I open up the mailbox just now, and I get this,” she said, holding up her hand and showing me a white envelope.

  “What is it?”

  “A fucking electricity bill,” she said through tight teeth.

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Nope. No electricity here since before the storm, right?”

  “No,” I said. “We’re using flashlights and candles still.”

  “Right. And I don’t even have a house to light up, even if the electricity was working. And the city sends me a goddamn bill.”

  She crumpled up the envelope, drew back her arm, and pitched the thing towards the back of her hollowed-out house. It didn’t get far and landed in the mud a few feet in front of her. She kicked mud over it, splashing her sneakers and jeans, until the last bit of white disappeared.

  The power was out the night I lost the second baby. I was further along this time, and we were hopeful, more hopeful than we should have been, I guess. The pain and wet woke me up. I sat up and tried to turn on the lamp, but it wasn’t working. I felt around beside me, but George wasn’t there. The screen on the clock radio was black.

  I scribbled George a note in the darkness and left it on his pillow. I drove myself to the hospital, leaking out onto a towel. Our street was dark, and the next one over, but the power seemed to be on after that. Streetlight blazed into the car. I stared at the road so I wouldn’t look down.

  George was already crying when he came into the hospital room.

  “I’m sorry, Sharon. Sorry. I should have been there.”

  He sat down in the chair beside me and put his head down on the bed. I smoothed his hair. He was breathing into the blanket, but I could still smell the booze.

  He cried for a long time, like it was for both of us. I was sad too, but the sad felt far away, and I didn’t really want to get closer to it. I stroked his hair, already turning grey then. The first time, he was the one touching my hair, telling me we’d try again. The second time, neither of us said anything.

  These days, George is always home before it gets dark. I wonder if he ever thinks of that night, if that’s why he comes home early, whether he’s been drinking or not. Nearly fourteen years now, it’s been, so maybe he isn’t thinking about that at all. Maybe he comes home early because he is scared, more of what’s inside him than what’s in the city.

  We’d only been back a few days when the man opened the tent. He did it softly and quietly, and George was snoring beside me, so I didn’t even hear him until the tent was open. I didn’t have my glasses on, and it was dark, so all I could see was a big fuzzy shape, rooting around the entrance to the tent. I screamed. Whoever it was might have been as scared as me because he backed out of the tent right away. But George was fast. He was up and out the tent after him, moving from dead sleep to chasing in what felt like seconds.

  “Hey! HEY!” I could hear George yelling. There was a shuffling sound, grunting, and some kind of thud. Then there was a whack that made me feel sick. “George. George!” I screamed, crawling towards the tent flap.

  “I’m okay, Sharon!” George yelled. “Stay inside! Stay inside the tent!” His voice sounded strange, wet and scared and fast.

  Then his voice changed into a growl I’d never heard before.

  “Get up, man. Get up and get the fuck out of here.”

  I didn’t hear anything except George’s voice saying that, over and over. Then I heard a groaning sound and some rustling and shuffling and then quiet. There was a chunk of time where nothing happened; I don’t know how long it was. Then I heard George settle outside the tent on a lawn chair, heard the hiss and pop of a beer opening. I sat in the tent, hugging my knees and waiting for him to come back in, for a long time. A cat wailed. Cars whirred down the highway by the Superdome.

  When George finally came back in, everything outside was quiet. I lay down next to him and touched his face, but without my glasses I couldn’t tell what the wet was.

  “George?” I said, softly so I wouldn’t startle him.

  “Everything’s okay, Sharon,” he said in a gentle voice and put his arms around me, and if it had been before everything, the babies and the storm and the man, I probably would have believed him.

  Where’s Edward?

  Joseph’s mother, Agnes, lived the last few years of her life in a nursing home. For a long time, both of her sons visited her every week. One week, when Agnes was ninety-three, Edward didn’t show up.

  “Where’s Edward?” Agnes asked Joseph.

  Joseph looked away.

  “We haven’t seen him lately,” said Joseph’s wife.

  “Wher
e is that little bugger?” Agnes asked the week after that.

  “I don’t know,” said Joseph’s wife.

  Joseph’s adult sons and their families came for a visit.

  “Where is Edward?” she asked them. The ones who lied best stepped forward and said things: they’d seen him, or they hadn’t.

  Nobody had the heart to tell Agnes that Edward had died, so when she died herself at ninety-five, she thought she had one good son and one bad one because Joseph’s wife said it was better to have a bad son than a dead one.

  Windpipe

  Jeannette shuts the door of the rental and doesn’t bother to lock it. Before she turns away, she glances into the back seat. The pink cake box is sitting on the grey upholstery. Dammit, Paul. Her jaw tightens. How hard is it to bring a cake in? She bites down on her frustration—a jolt between her teeth, like cartilage in meat.

  The grey sky is not bright enough for sunglasses, but too bright to see without squinting. Jeannette looks up at St. Elizabeth’s. The roof of the church is the colour of rust. Behind the church is a chestnut tree, its green spiky fruit waiting to fall and be split. Flat green leaves spread out like splayed hands.

  The concrete path leading to the church is cracked and breaking apart. Weeds push themselves up in the cracks. Some of them stretch up, and others droop towards the ground. A car growls on another road. Just to her left is a slight scrabbling: a fat squirrel is bellying through the grass towards the church. It changes its mind and heads in the opposite direction.

  At the door to St. Elizabeth’s, Jeannette stops and listens, but there is no sound from inside. No off-key choir at practice, no chanted creeds. She sighs with relief. She pulls open the thick, heavy door by its old iron ring. In the faded light, she smells the memory of incense and varnish on pews. She moves to the last pew on the left. When she was a kid, her family always sat in the back on the left. If another family was already sitting there, her father would ask them to move.

  Jeannette was mortified then; now, she admires it, how her father took what he wanted instead of just slinking away to another spot for the sake of not making a scene.

  The pew creaks as she sits down. She runs her hands over the smooth wood and looks up at the stained-glass windows. Coloured light filters in, slanting down to the floor. The grey light of outside is changed in here into lines of yellow, pools of blue. She stretches and leans on the back of the pew ahead of hers.

  When she was little, she couldn’t see anything from the back, but she could still hear. “And even if you can’t see the altar, the priest can see you,” her mother would whisper to her when she started fidgeting, flicking off her shoes and slouching down to rub her stocking feet across the hardwood floor, trying to cool them. Shouldn’t the priest be paying attention to what he’s doing up there? God can keep an eye on me for him. She didn’t tell her mother this.

  In the empty church, her view of the altar is unobstructed. It is a brown wood table under a cloth the soft white of sifted flour. The legs of the table look smooth, like you wouldn’t catch your skin or get a splinter, even if you ran your hands up them the wrong way.

  Jeannette stretches and leans back against the pew. She pulls her legs up underneath her and sits cross-legged, closes her eyes and breathes, slowly and deeply, into her belly as her yoga teacher taught her before she stopped going. She bends her elbows to bring her hands to her shoulders, pressing them down so they don’t inch up to her ears. Then she brings her hands into her lap and lets them rest there. She stretches her jaw to untighten it. Inside the church, there is only quiet. Jeannette rests her neck against the back of the pew and concentrates on the in and out of her breath.

  Sometimes, when Jeannette goes shopping in her neighbourhood, she stands in front of a suit store window for a while. The window is full of mannequin men with silvery skin. They are dressed sharply in navy blue and pin stripes, ties immaculately knotted at grey throats. Their lips are pursed, keeping things in. The mannequin men have nostrils, and Jeannette wonders if they are shallow holes, scraped out for show, or whether the holes go right up into their fibreglass heads. She wonders how far they will go for the illusion of breath.

  Paul used to pull her to him after sex. Turn her over and draw her close so they were curled beside each other like quotation marks. He always fell asleep first, his breathing heavy in her ear. She’d hold her breath to match it up with his, exhaling when he did, until she fell asleep too.

  Last night, she got out of bed when he came to it.

  “I think I want to get that cake for the boys started instead of waiting until the morning,” she said. He shrugged and pulled the blankets up.

  In the kitchen, Jeannette wiped her hand across the smooth, wooden island in the middle of the room. White specks wafted out into the still air. She wet a cloth at the sink and cleaned the surface. She pulled out the ingredients she needed and lined them up on the island: dry beside dry, wet beside wet. Flour, sugar, baking powder, cocoa, salt, semi-sweet chocolate. Eggs, oil, vanilla. Two mixing bowls, a whisk apiece. Baking pans, wire rack. Wooden spoons that knocked and echoed against the canister as she pulled them out. Everything she needed for her easiest birthday cake. Every time she makes this particular cake, she adds a secret ingredient, one only she knows about. Every cake has a different secret. Once she put a dash of thyme into the chocolate icing. Another time she buried one chocolate chip inside a pristine vanilla cake. This time she chose something the nephews would hate if they could taste it.

  Jeannette pulled out three beets from the crisper. She scrubbed them and peeled their thick brown skins into the sink. She held them by their dark red-green hair and rinsed them again. The exposed beets were purple-red and dripping. She thunked them against the side of the sink and left them on the counter while she got the food processor from the shelf under the microwave.

  She chopped up the beets on a wooden cutting board, staining it dark red. Her fingers were purpling, too, vegetable blood under her nails. She scooped up the chopped beets and dropped them into the basin of the food processor and plugged it in, smudging the cord with beet blood. She clicked the top shut and whirred the red into a smooth blur.

  When the noise of the food processor stopped, the doorframe creaked behind her. Jeannette looked over her shoulder.

  “What are you doing?” Paul said.

  “What do you mean? I’m making the cake for your nephews. I told you that.”

  “Why are you putting beets in their cake?”

  “To make it moist,” Jeannette said.

  Paul looked at her for a long time.

  “Can’t you put applesauce in it or something? Beets seem like kind of a weird thing.”

  “Do you want to make the cake?” Jeannette snapped.

  Paul sighed.

  “Never mind. I’m going back to bed.”

  He pushed himself off the doorframe and walked away.

  Since the beets were no longer a secret, thanks to Paul, she needed something else. She moved through the kitchen, opening the crisper in the fridge, the cupboards above the stove. Her spice rack was full but nothing was right.

  The plant on the windowsill needed water. A dusty leaf was next to it on the ledge. Jeannette picked it up, her red fingers rubbing the new secret ingredient clean.

  It was very late by the time the cake was cooling on its wire rack. Jeannette took one of her cookbooks to the couch and read until she fell asleep.

  When they pulled into the driveway for the twins’ party, it sounded like there were a dozen other ten-year-old boys there, too. Shouting without words, then a “Hey! Asshole.” A screech of laughter, a smash. A metallic clatter: something colliding with something else.

  The smell of hot dogs, almost burned, drifted through Jeannette’s open window. Her stomach turned.

  “Smells good,” Paul said.

  “I’ll be back in a bit,” Jeannette said.

  Paul frowned, green eyes squinting under greying eyebrows. “Do you have to?”

&nb
sp; “Yes,” she said.

  They argued about it for a few minutes, out of habit.

  “Do you have to go to that fucking church every single time we come out here?”

  When Paul cursed he always sounded like a ten-year-old trying to be an adult.

  “Yes,” she said. “I like it there.”

  “Why? What’s the big deal? You don’t even go to church anymore, and it’s not like you know anybody who’s buried there.”

  Exactly. I don’t know anybody there. It’s peaceful. It doesn’t have you and your family in it.

  “It’s peaceful. I like the quiet,” she said.

  “Our whole life is quiet!” Paul snapped.

  Not quiet enough.

  “Why don’t you come in for one hot dog and then you can go?” he whined.

  She shook her head.

  “Hot dogs are difficult to get out of your windpipe if they get stuck,” she said quietly.

  “What?”

  Nothing.

  Paul rolled his eyes. “I think the boys know how to chew. They’re ten. The whole point of coming out here is to see my family, and you’re not even coming in.”

  He rubbed his face with one hand. His fingers were pink and slender, his nails long. He didn’t look at her as he bent down, collecting presents from the floor of the car. He snagged a nail on some shiny purple paper, ripping the wrapping into a crooked scar. A yellow Lego box peeked through. It didn’t seem like he noticed, but maybe he just didn’t want her to mention his nails again.

  She looked away. Paul hit the door shut with his hip. Once she reversed out of the driveway onto the road, she glanced back. He was already inside.

  They used to hold hands a lot, his fingers threaded through her olive-skinned, rugged ones. Her nails were always short, for baking, and her hands never seemed as clean as his.