The Afterlife of Birds

by Elizabeth Philips

  Henry carries the jar into his bedroom, along with as many books as he can carry, crams the whole lot under his bed, and closes the door. He shifts some of the bigger books lying on the floor nearer to the floor-to-ceiling bookcase behind his armchair, wipes the coffee table, pinches up the most obvious bits of grit off the carpet, and then hurries into the kitchen to fill the kettle.

  The deer and bear and wolves gaze down at him from the cupboards. He knows the skulls make Rae nervous — Dan has told Henry that Rae imagines bugs crawling out of them (she probably would have preferred it if they were still wearing sunglasses). He carefully brushes the rodent bones, delicate skulls and jaws no bigger than a fingernail clipping, onto a strip torn out of an old shirt and places it in a match box. Not much he can do about the crow skeleton — it’s too awkward to move. Maybe if he escorts Rae quickly past it and into the living room, she’ll look at the haphazard towers of books he doesn’t have room for in the bookcase and recognize him as a learnéd autodidact who should have been born in the nineteenth century, when the world was a gentleman’s laboratory.

  There’s a knock on his door at six sharp and when he opens it, Rae is standing with her back to him. She doesn’t turn immediately but continues gazing in the direction of the falling-down garage that’s full of the landlord’s junk.

  “Nice,” she says. “This is the first day I’ve left work when it hasn’t been pitch-bloody-dark.” A last blush of sunlight marks the horizon, suspended in a wave of peach-coloured cloud over the neighbour’s roof.

  “Come in,” he says, propping the door open wide.

  He takes her soft, fawn-coloured coat and hangs it beside his oil-stained parka.

  “Cold though,” he says.

  “Well, it is winter,” she says as she bends to unzip her boots.

  In the kitchen, her eyes find the crow then skim quickly away, to the skulls on top of the cupboards. Under the bright kitchen light, her skin looks sallow. Henry moves to direct her into the living room, but Rae stays where she is.

  “What’s that one?” she asks, nodding at the skull next to her on the sideboard.

  “Bull elk.”

  She stands transfixed, and then very tentatively touches the tip of an antler.

  “Nice horns,” she says.

  “Antlers.”

  “Right. They’re kind of like a surreal candle holder,” she says as they move into the living room.

  “Huh?”

  “A big one, you know. With a bunch of candles.”

  “Candelabra?”

  “Candelabrum.” Rae likes to be right about things, but tonight her voice is flat.

  She sits down on the couch, tucks her long legs under her, adjusts her skirt, and leans back.

  He can’t remember ever seeing Rae look so bone-weary. After a long day at work, or after an important trial, she might be strung-out-exhausted, but always with a bracing hum of energy around her.

  “Can I get you something? Tea — or coffee?” he says.

  “Something stronger, if you’ve got it,” she says without raising her head from the back of the couch. Her long hair is a tangled splash across the maroon upholstery.

  “No, I don’t actually. Or, wait …” He recalls a bottle of brandy somewhere under the sink (a bottle Rae herself left behind one evening a couple of years ago), retrieves it, and pours a generous shot into a water glass.

  “Lovely,” she says, taking it from him with both hands.

  He hits the switch on the floor lamp and the room fills with a honeyed light. He eases himself into his armchair, the arms piled with books he didn’t even see when he was cleaning up.

  Rae sips her brandy.

  “That case you were working on, is it over?”

  “It’ll probably never be over.”

  “You’re working pretty hard, eh.”

  “The usual,” she says. “Mm, good brandy.”

  “You have good taste. You left it here — oh, ages ago.”

  “Did I.” She swirls the brandy in her glass. “You’re a big reader, Henry,” she says with a small bemused smile. “You’re in danger of being buried alive.” She lets her head fall back again, and closes her eyes.

  Henry feels a little foolish, like he’s inside some kind of kid’s fort. He gets up, transfers most of the books to the floor, and sits down again.

  He can’t begin to guess why she’s here. Maybe Dan’s planning on running all night — over one bridge and along the river and back over another bridge, around and around till he can’t take another step. Maybe he wants to make it into the Guinness Book of World Records: longest run at minus thirty, at night, in a city under three hundred thousand. Or maybe he’s asked Lazenby to move in with them permanently. And here’s Rae, about to ask him to talk some sense into his brother.

  Henry stays very still, waiting for her to speak.

  Her eyes flutter open. “Sorry, Henry.” She bites at a fingernail.

  “Sorry?”

  “I’m not good company.” She makes an effort to sit up straighter. “I know, I called this meeting, and now …” She glances toward the darkening street.

  “Anything can happen, Henry, you know that, don’t you?” she says.

  “Anything?”

  “Yeah. I mean, imagine this.” She takes a deep breath. “It’s a day like any other at Ed’s Garage, and then this guy comes in — he’s bringing his Merc in for a tune-up let’s say — a real power broker type in an expensive suit. He’s a regular, and he likes you, sees that you’re good with people — don’t deny it, Henry — you are.

  “And when this guy who’s never made anything but small talk with you offers you a job, you’re gobsmacked. And even though you’ll be sad to leave good ol’ Ed, you say yes — you accept the job right on the spot.

  “So you join this company, though you don’t even know what they do really, taking a job you never would’ve applied for in a million years, and which, frankly, you aren’t even qualified for — except that the boss likes you. And you get big pay. More money than you’ve ever made in your life, Henry. And — bonus — the job isn’t even boring. In just a few weeks, your life has done a complete 360. Everything about it has changed — you’ve even moved, bought a house on the other side of the river …”

  Henry looks at her sharply. On the east side?

  “You meet a woman; you get married and have kids.”

  “That’d be a big change all right,” he says.

  Rae rakes a hand through her hair and lets herself flop back, the couch squeaking under her weight.

  Thinking the story is over, he’s about to offer her more brandy when she says, “And then your kid gets sick. The one you favour, secretly, because even though fathers aren’t supposed to have favourites, you do, and it’s your youngest, a girl.”

  Henry can see the little girl, her petite, somber face, a mark on her forehead where she bruised herself when she tripped over a toy. She’s only three, he thinks.

  Rae sits up, puts her feet on the floor. “Sorry, I’ve been babbling. You should have heard me in court.” Her mouth is tight, downturned.

  He doesn’t say anything. And his daughter, the daughter she invented for him and then took away? No, his daughter will be okay. He sees her in the hospital, sitting up in bed, smiling.

  “You’d make a lousy lawyer, Henry,” she says. “Ask me a question, go ahead.”

  “Okay. Why did you call this meeting?”

  “A little health issue. Potentially.” She blinks; her eyes glisten, the skin around them thin, papery.

  Henry makes an effort to unclench his hands. Places them palm down on his knees.

  “I have a lump,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest.

  “Jesus,” he says.

  She pulls at the corner of one eye with a fingertip, then rubs her fingers together, as if ridding them of something.

  “Will they — will they operate?”

  “Yeah, even if it’s not — but I think it is. I think it�
�s bad, though nothing’s for sure yet.”

  “Have you told Dan?” Somehow Henry knows she hasn’t.

  “I haven’t had a chance. That guy is always at our house.”

  “Lazenby,” Henry groans.

  “Yeah. I mean he isn’t sleeping on the couch anymore, at least. I told Dan I couldn’t take it, but he’s over whenever Dan is there and they go out, even when they aren’t goddamn running they go out together, Christ knows where.”

  Henry can see Dan running and running, heading for the horizon. Getting smaller and smaller, a stick man: going, going, gone …

  Rae looks bleakly at Henry and he forces himself to meet her eyes.

  “I was going to ask you to track him down and tell him. That’s why I’m here, Henry. But I can’t believe I even thought such a thing. So I’m sorry, but I’m just not myself right now.” She grimaces at him apologetically. “I’ll do it tonight. I can’t put off telling him any longer.”

  “If you want me to —” he starts.

  “No. Thanks, Henry, but no. Maybe it’s the Dutch courage,” she says, waving her empty glass, “but it doesn’t seem so impossible now. I’ll just tell him he has to stay in tonight. And no Lazenby.”

  At the back door, he helps her into her coat, and she leans into him for a moment. The part in her hair a pale broken line.

  “Good night, Henry,” she murmurs.

  A second after the door closes he opens it again and steps out onto the sidewalk. He’s in his sock feet and the concrete is icy cold. “Are you okay to drive?” he calls after her. “I can give you a lift. Wait,” he says more loudly, running to catch her at the gate. He puts a hand on her arm. “I will drive you.”

  She shakes her head, gives his hand a squeeze, and steps decisively through the gate.

  Back in the house, he looks at the elk, the points on its antlers like lit candles. “Anything can happen,” he says to its narrow, pacific gaze.

  Ten

  HENRY SETS OUT GOING THE WRONG WAY, but it doesn’t feel wrong, and of course it isn’t really wrong: this highway will take him home as surely as his usual route. He has a map open beside him on the passenger seat because there’s a turn that he might miss in the dark, where the old highway goes east and he has to go north on a secondary road. But there will be less traffic here than on the newer, better, less direct highway. Why hasn’t he gone this way before?

  He’s tired after a busy week at work, a week made worse by Ed’s foul mood. Ed’s been trying to move his mother into an old folks’ home, the same home his father’s been in for years, and she’s fighting him with every subterfuge she can think of — showing her independence by going for walks she doesn’t have the strength for, and cooking his favourite foods, dishes that don’t turn out well and which give him — to hear him tell it — almost terminal heartburn. It’s driving Ed crazy, and he has to tell Henry all about it every morning before they start work.

  And then there was Rae’s visit yesterday. He resisted the urge, this morning, to phone Dan. What if, for some reason, she hasn’t told him? He still can’t believe it himself; Rae, irrepressible Rae, may be ill — seriously ill. And he knows about it and it’s possible that Dan doesn’t.

  The sun is just beginning to set and the snowy fields have a rosy cast. The car’s warm now, so Henry strips off his toque and unzips his coat. About halfway to the farm the highway will be crossing the same water that flows through the city — though not the same river — and he’s curious to see the shape of that valley.

  Of course, he does know why he hasn’t come this way before. For the last twenty-four years there has always been only the one route, for their family at least, to travel to the city and back. He doesn’t think, even now, that he’ll admit to his mother he was on this highway.

  Henry is sweating now, and struggles to get his coat off, steering for a minute with his knees. He has been on this road one other time, but that was ten years ago, just after he moved to the city. Dan had offered him a lift home, and when Henry asked why they were going this way, Dan said he had to stop at a client’s house — so, there was no choice. Dan was just starting to build up his freelance computer geek business, and he had to go to extremes to keep his few customers happy.

  IT WAS SUMMER, mid-afternoon, and they’d been driving for about ninety minutes, Henry half-asleep in the passenger seat, when Dan braked suddenly. Henry craned his neck, sure he’d see a deer crossing or another car stopped ahead of them, but the road was empty and Dan was turning the car between two cottonwoods and onto a summer road that cut neatly through rows of green wheat.

  “What’s up?” Henry asked.

  “I just want to take a look.” The car bounced along the dirt lane, which was really just a set of tracks that disappeared into the aspen on the far side of the field.

  They rolled along for thirty feet or so and then eased to a stop. Dan sat there, staring out the windshield. Henry cranked down his window, a clay-coloured sparrow’s insectile song buzzing in the distance, and a soft wind sifting in, like a familiar touch, on his bare arm. He was mystified because this was the kind of thing he liked to do, but which Dan hated — looking at nothing, he called it.

  “This is where it happened,” Dan said, a muscle twitching in his jaw.

  Henry stared. His brother’s posture was tense, his dishevelled red hair obscuring his eyes — and when Henry made himself look away, their father’s face appeared. The image of the man in the photo his mother kept by her bed. Shaggy hair, the same red as Dan’s, and the easy, ready-for-anything grin of a man in his late twenties — a few years younger than Dan was now. Their father, leaning on the roof of a car, gazing tenderly at the photographer.

  Henry swallowed hard. How could Dan know this was where the car was found? He couldn’t, could he?

  Dan got out and Henry followed. The wheat was about eight inches high, a deep, lustrous green, the earth beneath it very black and radiating heat. They walked, under the polished arc of summer sky, to the middle of the field. It felt to Henry as if they’d careened off the road, as if they’d rolled the car and been thrown from it into this field, and were standing now on seasick legs, the world spinning around them.

  Was their father in the car when he was found? Henry didn’t know. Was he collapsed against the door, as if he’d been trying to get out? Maybe he’d opened it and his upper body had spilled toward the ground, and he’d stayed that way, halfway out of the car, until one of their neighbours discovered him the next morning. Maybe he was lying fully stretched out on the earth, one cheek against the cold wet soil — cold because it was early May, the ground still colder than the air. That’s all Henry knew, the time of year, and that their father had been on an errand for the greenhouse. Henry had long ago given up trying to get his mother to tell him more.

  Dan turned, surveying the field, and Henry revolved with him, as if they were partners in a dance where you didn’t touch but pivoted side by side. And in all directions the earth beneath the supple young plants was undulating, as if a broad, shallow wave was shrugging its way from east to west beneath their feet.

  “Okay,” Dan said after a long minute, “let’s go,” and they headed for the big white Mercury coupe Dan drove back then. With both doors open, it resembled a badly made airplane, its wings too short, the body too thick and heavy, the nose angled toward the ground because of a dip in the land just there.

  It’ll never fly, Henry thought.

  As they walked back to the car, their footprints weaving among the marks they’d left going the other way, Henry found a few deer tracks among them, and felt a rush of tenderness for the delicate, leaf-shaped prints, for the deer that must have passed through in the night.

  “C’mon, Hank,” Dan called to him impatiently when Henry fell behind.

  Henry was still closing his door when Dan threw the car into reverse, and then they were out on the highway again and barrelling north.

  They didn’t talk about where they had been; they didn’t mention t
hat day in May, when their father was forty-five, the day his heart failed them. Dan didn’t explain how he knew that this was the actual field where it had happened.

  In a little one-street town off the highway, he quickly installed whatever computer part he had for his customer, while Henry waited in the hot car, sun burning along the flesh of his right arm where it rested in the open window. Then they drove the rest of the way, the final hundred and some kilometres, to their mother’s house, the wind slamming through the car, percussive, deafening.

  A SEMI ROARS PAST HIM, horn blaring, surging by so fast it feels like Henry’s little Nissan is standing still, and he has to swerve to avoid a mangled roll of bloody fur smeared across his lane, all that’s left of an unlucky raccoon, or maybe a fox. His urge to stop, to see what actually has died there, is crazy. As if it matters now.

  One June day during that terrible time when he was twelve, he arrived at the fox den and there were only four kits. He counted again and again as they played, wrestling on the ground and winding in and out of a bush, sure that he must have been confused by the mix-up of tumbling red bodies. Hoping the other kit was out hunting with the mother, Henry tried to fabricate a frisson of excitement, tried to imagine the two of them returning with the day’s catch. And then the next afternoon, the predator fox attacked a kit right in front of Henry’s eyes. He shouted, the fox opened its jaws, and the kit scurried, yowling, into the den. After that, it was a battle between the fox pair who wanted these kits gone and Henry, but Henry had nothing but a homemade slingshot, and he was a terrible shot, he never even grazed a hair on one of their heads. Henry was horrified, in thrall to his emotions: his terror for the vulnerable baby animals, his anguish when one after another of them disappeared. He couldn’t bring himself to admit that they must be dead, that he, and the mother fox, had failed to protect them.