The Afterlife of Birds

by Elizabeth Philips

  “Yeah. He’s so busy, I hardly see him.” He places his knife and fork together on his empty plate, drinks the last of his coffee, and slots his dishes into the dishwasher.

  AFTER CHECKING MEASUREMENTS along the wall near the checkout counter where the shelves will be, he goes to the shed and discovers that for some reason Dan has a left a pile of uncut boards — hasn’t, in fact, started the job at all, except to assemble the materials — so Henry carries a few of them into the slouching garage and places one on the table saw by his father’s old work bench, behind his mother’s SUV.

  For years Henry thought he remembered nothing of his father. Then when he had to make a little table in shop at school — the only class he liked or was any good at, other than math — the smell of raw wood and the heft of the hammer in his hand brought back a glimmer, a memory trace, from the period he always thought of as before. At that point, he dismissed it as a fragment of dream. But since then Henry’s come to believe that it did happen, that John Jett really must have ferried him into the new greenhouse, a toddler of three, three-and-a-half, snug in his father’s blue work shirt arms. In the memory, Henry floats into a room so new it smells of freshly cut wood. Then his father’s calloused hand wraps around Henry’s small one and together they hammer in a nail. And after comes the sweetly pleasurably dizziness of being borne aloft again, where he sees everything — everything at once familiar and strange — from so high up.

  Now he’s the same height as his father was, so the view Henry gets when he carries the trimmed boards and the rest of the shelf hardware into the greenhouse is the same as he would have had then. Except for some new equipment and the paint, the interior is much the same: the reception area to the right of the front door; a large display area to the left filled with wire-grid-topped tables; the system of overhead pulleys for raising and lowering lights; the small office beyond reception; and a little farther still the sky blue door leading to the much larger, open space of the growing area.

  Henry is still looking around, as if he’s come into the greenhouse for the first time, when Marcie strolls out of the office.

  “Hey there, you,” she says brightly. “I thought I saw your car last night.”

  “Did you sleep in the office?” Henry jokes, and she laughs.

  “I just came in for a few minutes because there was an email I forgot to answer, and I couldn’t do it from home because my computer died.”

  “Dan might be able to fix it for you.”

  “Nah, it’s a lemon. I’ll get a new one.”

  Marcie’s face seems fuller than the last time Henry saw her, and though everyone else he knows is winter-pale, her skin has held its summer burnish — if she’s outside any length of time she picks up a tan, a trait she says she inherited from her Ukrainian grandmother. She’s rifling for something in her purse, and then zips it shut and shakes her head. “I forgot — I’ve quit.”

  Henry’s throat constricts. “So, when do you leave?”

  “I mean I’ve quit smoking,” she says. “I hate to think of leaving here as quitting — it’s more like I’m, you know, ‘entering a new phase.’”

  “Good way to look at it,” Henry says. “But when are you leaving?”

  “Sometime in February probably.” She looks down at the floor.

  “Well, congrats — I mean, on the not smoking. And on the new phase,” he adds, smiling. He knows she’s tried on and off for years to give up cigarettes. And now that she’s standing only a few feet away, he’s impressed by how well she looks. Her caramel-coloured hair is tied back with a hot pink strip of satin, and she has a white scarf draped loosely around the neck of her dark purple ski jacket. Marcie has a patina on her, like she’s done a lot of hard living, but she’s ridden it out, and now she’s pumped for whatever comes next. “So, how long has it been?”

  “Just a couple of weeks, but this time I can feel it’s going to stick,” she says with a determined smile. Then she points at the boards he’s holding. “Great — you’re putting those shelves up.”

  “Yup. On Monday you can fill them with garden tchotchkes.”

  She follows him to where the other boards are leaning against the wall. They talk for a minute about the amount of space he should leave between each shelf and she holds the ruler as he pencils in a clear, straight vertical for the metal railings that the shelf brackets snap into.

  “It’ll be adjustable,” he says, showing her the slots in the rails, “so if you need to raise or lower a shelf, it’s a cinch.”

  “So, Henry. You still work at that garage on 19th?” she asks, her olive-grey eyes watching him closely.

  He moves the boards out of the way and picks up the drill. “Ed’s. Yeah, I do.”

  “You like it? I mean, is that what you want to do for the rest of your life?”

  “Work as a parts man?” He inches back a bit, almost hugging the drill to his chest. “There are worse things, I guess.” It’s almost as if Marcie can see into him, can see that the craving he has — to spend time in a lab with bones, learning from experts how to be an expert — is a recurrent pain, like the ache of a submerged wisdom tooth that flares up for a few days and then subsides.

  “Sometimes I still think about what else I might do, you know?” She idly scuffs the floor with a boot sole, her arms folded across her chest.

  “Yeah,” Henry says, bending to look through the tool box for the right drill bit.

  “I’d like to look at some different scenery, hear different sounds when I wake up in the morning. Not just somebody’s tomcat and the guy next door revving his muscle car.” Marcie lives in town, in a little house she’s rented since she moved out of her parents’ place.

  “I mean — don’t tell your mom this — but I’ve had the same job for fifteen years, and I’ve lived in the same house in the same town almost as long. It’s been great, and I love this place.” She mimes looking all around her but without actually doing so. “But things have to change now, and I just have to go with that.”

  “Right,” Henry says, locking the new bit in place. She’s just going to be working at another greenhouse, which is not what he’d call doing something new.

  Marcie leans toward him, and he shrinks away from her because it seems like she’s going to hug him, and you really shouldn’t hug a guy holding a drill, but then she brushes something off his shirt collar.

  “One of our resident spiders,” Marcie says, deftly lifting the stunned thing up off the floor with the edge of her scarf. She walks it to the display area where there are a few empty pots on a table and shakes the scarf over them.

  “Well, everybody dreams, eh, Henry.” Marcie gives him a kindly pat on the shoulder, as if he’s the one making an inexplicable sideways career move. And then she’s walking with her leisurely, comfortable stride, toward the door.

  The drill vibrates in his grip as he gives it some juice. Not once in their conversation did she mention Gerald.

  His mother comes in as he’s about to screw down the second railing.

  “Marcie stopped by,” Henry tells her, “to send one email.”

  “She’s usually better organized,” she says, “but her computer —”

  “Died, I know. She looks great, eh.” Then he blurts out, “Though I can’t see that working in a greenhouse near the city is going to be such a big change.”

  His mother doesn’t respond to this, so he shows her how the shelves will be arranged.

  “Perfect,” she says. “Now put your drill down for a minute and come with me,” and she motions for him to follow her into the growing area.

  “Mom, I’ve just started.”

  “This’ll only take a minute,” and she stands with the blue door open, waiting for him.

  When he’s beside her, she gestures at the rows and rows of seedlings covering the benches: most are minute sprigs, but a few are taller, identifiable as geraniums or pansies. “Now look!” she says.

  “At what?” he asks, searching the mass of plantings from o
ne side of the greenhouse to the other.

  “New life,” she says almost reverently. “And all of it from a scattering of seeds.”

  “Yeah,” he says, seeing it now. “Everything looks fabulous.” Thousands of bedding plants, with just enough room between the benches for a person to pass between them: a field of shimmering, luscious green.

  He smiles at her and she smiles back.

  “Sometimes a garden is the only thing,” she says, “that’ll cure what ails you.”

  When he frowns, she continues briskly, “Never mind. I’m not ailing — and not to worry, we’ll find someone to take over from Marcie.” Then she gives him a playful shove toward the door. “Now, back to work. I’ve got half a dozen things to do in town, and I’m having lunch with the Robertsons,” her friends who own the other greenhouse in the area.

  STOPPING ONLY LONG ENOUGH to eat the sandwich his mother dropped off before she left, Henry works steadily for the next couple of hours, tapping the drywall to find the studs, driving the screws in and feeling them bite into the two-by-fours his father used to frame the wall. He snaps in each of the metal brackets, knocking them into place with a neat rap of his hammer.

  IN THE HOUSE, the lasagna his mother took out of the freezer this morning is sitting on the stove with a note beside it reminding him to put it in the oven around five p.m.

  It’s been a while since he’s been here alone with nothing much to do. He wanders from room to room, examining the place in a way he wouldn’t if his mother were home. A new digital clock radio sits on an end table in the living room where an old wind-up clock used to be, a few new paperback mysteries are stacked by her favourite recliner, and open and facedown on the coffee table is a book called The Places in Between, about a guy who walked alone across Afghanistan. The books in the tall narrow bookcase are still the same: bird identification guides, coffee table books about gardening, a haphazard collection of novels and mysteries. The real plant books, their bindings taped and retaped, practical guides on plant care and greenhouse husbandry, are all in her office in the greenhouse.

  He goes down the hallway, past Dan’s old room, still wallpapered with posters of motorcycles and sports stars, and stands at the threshold of his mother’s bedroom. This L-shaped room at the back of the house has always been sacrosanct (his father built it as an addition when they first bought the place and his mother was pregnant with Dan; his father had finished the drywalling and the wiring, and his mother had painted the walls when that was done). The room was not off limits, exactly, but you had to have a good reason to go in there. When they were small he and Dan sometimes sat on the bed and talked to her while she was brushing her hair, or putting away freshly laundered clothes. Or when she was applying lipstick in the evening, in the days when she went out on dates. For a few years, a guy called Jim took her to the movies, or to play cards with mutual friends. Henry doesn’t know how far that went; Jim never spent the night, as far as Henry understands, but then he was a sound sleeper as a kid.

  Her bedroom always had a different scent than the rest of the house. It smelled of a perfume she used to wear, a bottle of which still sits on her dresser, and of something else that Henry could never quite name.

  Privacy, he thinks now. The scent of his mother’s inner life is here, a smell as particular as the smell of her hair, the palms of her hands — it’s a bit spicy, like nutmeg, warm and inviting. It’s a good quality for her to have, this warmth, as someone who sells, in her words, “the dream of the perfect garden.” People are happy to stand near her, to listen to her advice on a shady spot or patch of recalcitrant soil, entranced by her vision of pink astilbes frothing in the shade of a garage, or the blue of monkshood lighting up the back of a border in August.

  He is getting to know his mother in a different way now that he comes home by himself. When he and Dan visited together, it was like the old days, when they all lived together, with Dan regaling them with stories, not only about girls he was dating (frequently more than one at a time), sophisticated city girls, or so he thought, but about his clients, when he was building up his business, and their inability to do the simplest thing with their computers. Once all he did was hit enter on some poor slob’s computer, and then charged him a hundred bucks. Henry and his mother laughing uproariously at Dan’s antics during card games because he went to elaborate, clownish efforts to conceal his strategic moves. At first, as Dan became more involved in his squash tournaments, his labyrinthine social life, Henry felt a little dejected being at home on his own. The place was so quiet, and he worried that his mother was bored having only her shy son home, sprawled on the couch reading, his face buried in some weighty volume or other. But now Henry loves the depth of stillness that surrounds them here, a stillness he longs for when he’s in the city, and that seems to come from the very ground, and from the forest, a quarter mile distant, that forms the northern horizon.

  Henry picks up the photograph of his father on his mother’s bedside table, his father at twenty-nine, his forearms resting on a car roof, almost falling toward his mother behind the camera. Although she wasn’t anyone’s mother then, she was Evelyn Jett, age twenty-two, new wife of John Jett. How strong his forearms look — like Dan’s now, after his hours in the gym with Lazenby.

  Closing his eyes, Henry leans against the cool wall of his mother’s bedroom. There was no warning, apparently, no indication that his father’s heart was about to stall on him as he drove down the highway, occupied with everyday, practical thoughts. Or maybe there had been signs, tightness in his chest, twinges in his left arm, but he ignored them, so keenly aware was he of the coming spring, the difficulty of starting a new business, the relief at no longer working in someone else’s garage. Henry, at twenty-eight, remembers so little, but Dan’s four years older, and he at least has memories of the games he and their dad played, throwing a baseball around outside, or playing a game of football, the two of them pretending to be one team, then pretending to be the other. Henry’s mother, too, must house within her memories of evenings and afternoons and mornings spent planning the greenhouse, eating meals, making love. Ordinary time, and then the transformative moments, like the births of their children, and the whole first year they struggled to get the greenhouse up and running.

  Henry opens his eyes, stares at her bed, covered as always with the same yellow and blue quilt, and his heart is stammering in his chest. His mother was thirty-eight then, just a few years older than Marcie is now, and she had two kids, a business barely begun, and this big empty bed.

  WHEN HIS MOTHER GETS HOME an hour later, the smell of the cooked lasagna fills the kitchen, the salad is made, the table set, and Henry’s sitting at his usual place, idly leafing through an old copy of National Geographic.

  “I stopped in to see your handiwork, Henry,” she says, sliding a large square of lasagna onto his plate, and a smaller one onto her own. “Very nice. Thank you.”

  “They turned out pretty well,” he says.

  “Just as I’d hoped. Better even. Customers will be much happier now, standing in line,” she says with a wry smile.

  The lasagna is delicious; he hadn’t realized how hungry he was.

  “You still working on that crow?”

  “Yeah — still.”

  “Slow work. It’s going to be a nice one, I bet.”

  “I think so, anyway — and I figured out, when I saw that owl last night, how to pose it.”

  “You should send me a picture when you’re done. I miss seeing the work in progress.”

  “Good idea, except — no camera.”

  “Get Dan to take one,” she suggests. “He’s got a camera, hasn’t he?”

  “I will, if I can get him to stop running for five minutes,” he says. He stabs at his salad.

  “Running?” she frowns. “Jogging, you mean?”

  “Oh no, nothing as tame as that. Dan thinks the joggers are amateurs. People who get in his way.” Dan has mean names for them, sloggers, the tippy-toe gang …
/>   “What happened to squash?” she asks.

  “I don’t think he even plays anymore.” Henry helps himself to a slice of bread.

  “How’s Rae feel about it?” his mother asks, looking out at the violet swath of light pouring through the aspens. The autopsy revealed that John Jett’s heart attack was the result of a rare, undetected defect: she knows that neither of his sons has it, but still, she must think about it.

  “Hard to tell. Rae’s working pretty hard. At least, Dan says she seems to be tired all the time.” Afraid he’s saying too much, he stuffs a chunk of bread into his mouth.

  “Yes, I know. Marcie mentioned that when she saw Rae last week she seemed totally worn out.”

  His mother isn’t eating; she’s holding her glass of water in two hands, staring into or through it.

  “Dan’s in great shape — he’s muscled up. Never seen him look so good.”

  “I’m sure he knows what he’s doing,” she says firmly, and sets the glass down.

  Henry smiles. He knows she doesn’t mean this and she knows he knows. Dan bought a motorcycle when he was eighteen, and drove it too fast, and one night wiped out on a grid road way up north. He walked away with only a few bad bruises and abrasions, though his bike was totalled. Dan and his mother had increasingly vicious fights about him getting a new bike, with Dan swearing he’d die rather than spend another day being driven around by his girlfriend, until his mother did an about turn in the middle of a threat to ground him for the rest of his life — offering in her most sensible voice to drive him to the city to look at Harleys. A few days later, Dan bought the Mercury coupe. Ever since then she fights, and mostly wins, her battle to say as little as possible.

  They finish the meal in silence.

  He’s worrying that she’s worrying, but maybe she isn’t. Maybe she’s counting on Rae, powerful winsome Rae, to keep Dan’s running craze in check.

  LATER, they set up a game of dominoes on the card table in the living room. She’s turning her dominoes face down, the pieces clacking together like stones, as he builds a fire. He kneels, watching until flames trickle in bright rivulets up through the kindling, then tents a few pine splits over the blaze.