The Afterlife of Birds

by Elizabeth Philips

  They play for an hour in wordless concentration, warmed by the fire, which crackles and spits and then settles in to an even, slow burn.

  His mother shrugs her shoulders to loosen them, and sighs. “You know, Henry, this thing with Marcie, I think it might be an opportunity.”

  “Yeah, you could hire someone with better business skills, or,” he extemporizes, knowing how much she likes Marcie, “just different skills.” He places a ten on the stack of tiles in the pile they call the bone yard.

  She adds a ten to his ten. “No, that’s not what I mean,” she says. “I mean an opportunity to change things, really change things. I might want to work less. Or, perish the thought, do something else entirely. Travel, for instance. Maybe I could find someone to come in as a partner, like the guy Marcie was suggesting, who might eventually buy me out.” She keeps her eyes on the tiles propped up on their sides in front of her, arrayed in an arc, like an unfinished wall.

  Partner. His mother has had complete control of the greenhouse since his father died. And being in charge always seemed to suit her. Marcie’s told him more than once what a natural his mother is. A confident boss but never bossy. She never has to say she’s in charge, she just is, Marcie says.

  His mother’s hand, a hard-working hand, with long, square fingers, draws a tile. She places it on the row of tiles face up in front of her, a map of all her previous moves.

  When he gets up to add more wood to the fire, one of the photos on the mantel catches his eye: he and his brother at Christmas dinner one year. Henry’s about nine, and looking self-conscious, like he doesn’t want to be seen, while Dan, a pimply teenager, has his arm slung over Henry’s shoulder and is mugging for the camera. With his broad, cocky grin, he looks so much like their father. Henry doesn’t know who he himself looks like — maybe you can’t see that on your own. Does Dan see a resemblance to their father in Henry’s features? Probably not. Because Dan hasn’t really seen him lately — even when he’s been in the same room with Henry — never mind looked at him closely.

  Throughout most of the game, his mother is way ahead of him, but after three hours, winning is beside the point, with both of them so absorbed in the playing out of tiles, in the clicking sounds they make knocking together, the dots whirling in the air, numbers connecting one after another in a long chain across the table.

  As they fit the tiles back in the box, Henry says, “That old taxidermist who used to live down the road, the one my class visited in Grade 8, he’s still there, eh?”

  “Percy died a few months ago,” his mother says. “His brother Mac still lives on the farm, and the taxidermy shop’s there, but I’m sure it’s closed now. Why do you want to know?”

  When he got back from the field trip that day in Grade 8, Henry ran into the bathroom and puked his guts out — they’d seen a demonstration, the taxidermist sewing up a wolf’s leg, and that combined with some chemical smell had done him in. No wonder his mother seems perplexed.

  “Oh, I wanted to see if he’d worked on birds. Just an idea I had.”

  She says good night, and heads down the hall to her bedroom.

  He gives the fire another stir, knocking what remains of the logs apart so the flames will die out. He feels a little bad, not mentioning that he has been hunting for a talisman Dan can sport while running like a wild man — that he is aiding and abetting Dan in his obsession. But as he stands over the embers, which pulse a little, growing brighter before slowly going out, Henry can see the baculum he wants, a wolverine penis bone, maybe two of them, and they’re lying in a drawer in Percy’s back room, with a bunch of discards and curiosities: coils of strong, waxy thread, grey as old sinew, plastic claws of various colours and sizes, and a handful of real teeth — large, wicked-looking canines.

  Thirteen

  IT’S WEDNESDAY MORNING and Henry is in a line at the Bridge City Donut Shop because Ed, in an unprecedented fit of generosity, gave Henry a twenty and sent him out for donuts. Henry is staring out the shop window at the freshly sandblasted facade of Rae’s law office directly across the street, and the young guy behind the counter has to ask him twice for his order.

  When he gets to his car, he sees Rae standing in front of it, the back of her legs almost brushing the bumper. She’s wearing her fawn-coloured coat and is oddly motionless, staring at the double doors of a boxy concrete building. Pedestrians rush past in front of her but she appears to be oblivious to them.

  “Rae?” he says, but she doesn’t seem to hear him. “Rae!” He lightly touches a finger to her elbow and her head swings toward him.

  “Henry! Whatever are you doing over here — I mean,” she adds, unsmiling, “out of context.”

  “Buying donuts.” He holds up the pretty gold box with the logo embossed in a blue swirl on its side.

  “Those are good,” she says. “I’m sure Ed will approve.”

  “I hope so, he’s paying.” Still she doesn’t smile. “Well, I’d better deliver these,” he says. He takes a step around her toward his car door, but she puts a hand on his coat sleeve. Their mouths are so close, he could kiss her.

  “Wait,” she says. The box of donuts, balanced precariously on the palm of his right hand, begins to slip.

  “Never mind,” she says, as he adjusts his hold on the box, “I’m a little — I have an appointment. Now. In there.” She nods toward the door.

  He can still feel her touch on his skin, the bones in her hands. Sparrow bones. Little sticks.

  “So your doctor’s in this building?”

  “Surgeon. Anyway,” she says, looking at her watch and then up and down the street, as if someone she knows might be coming.

  “Dan?”

  She shakes her head and squares her jaw. “It’s his birthday, remember. I let him sleep in.”

  “God, Rae —” he sputters, but she’s gone, the door closing heavily behind her.

  He places the donuts on the back seat, gets in and starts the car, looks up at the building’s bland face, takes a deep breath, and shuts the engine off.

  After peering into reception areas on two different floors, he finds Rae in a small waiting room, sitting in the chair farthest from the receptionist’s desk.

  He clears his throat. “Rae, I thought maybe …”

  She frowns up at him.

  “Do you want me to …”

  She gives a slight shrug and eyes the desk, where a couple of women are conferring over a file.

  THEY SIT SIDE BY SIDE, Henry and Rae, each thumbing through an issue of Maclean’s. From the outside they must look like a couple: he’s the loyal husband, being strong for his lovely wife, who’s held hostage by a knot of duplicitous cells. But he isn’t her husband, and his thoughts are anything but loyal. He thinks he’s made a mistake; she doesn’t want company. But now that he’s here he can’t just get up and leave.

  Dan should be sitting in this spot, so close to Rae that he can smell her lavender soap. Where is Dan? Still in bed, or running along the trail beside the river, Lazenby at his side cheering him on?

  Henry studies Rae covertly. Her jaw is clenched, as if she’s biting back bile, and she’s staring into space, the magazine open on her lap, to an article about the oil sands. And what Henry can see is a kind of centrefold showing a vast pond of toxic black slurry, with another, smaller photo inset into it, of a different pond filled with a liquid the yellow of pus, a boil of darker yellow erupting in one corner. He can’t help thinking that, even though she has never been near this mess, working on her court case has somehow poisoned her.

  A nurse comes in and says a name, and a man sitting a couple of chairs over gets up and follows her down the hall.

  Flip-flip, flip-flip. Rae’s fingers scrabble at the pages. Henry’s left leg is jiggling, tremoring up and down and he puts a hand on his knee to stop it.

  The nurse is back and this time she calls, “Yvonne Rae” — Henry has forgotten that she goes by her second name. A nurse escorts her down the hall, and Henry picks at a torn finger
nail. Rae has hidden her Yvonne side; an Yvonne must be more vulnerable than a Rae.

  The only other people waiting now are a woman and her small child, a toddler. She sits with the little boy on her lap, and they look at a picture book, the woman reading in a hushed voice.

  The room feels like a cross between a church and a funeral parlour. Henry has the urge to get up and flee, and he can feel what a relief it would be to sprint down the stairs and out into the street — his brother’s brother after all.

  The little boy’s mother catches Henry’s eye and smiles — a tight, apprehensive smile. The boy has flaxen curls, a sturdy little body, but seems unusually passive. He doesn’t try to explore or move off her lap.

  Rae has been gone twenty minutes now. It’s quarter to twelve; Henry’s been outside the frame of his usual life for almost an hour. He can see Ed’s good mood souring as he stands at the reception desk looking in disbelief at his watch.

  A few months ago, at a dinner party at their house, Rae held up the necklace Dan had just given her, the crystal pendant and its slinky silver chain watery in the candlelight. Dan deftly undid the clasp, lifted her tousled hair aside, and fastened the necklace at her nape. She leaned back and smiled up at him, a melting, sweet look that made Henry feel transparent, as significant as the empty wine glass in front of him on the table.

  Maybe the doctor is telling Rae the odds: a seventy percent survival rate; sixty-forty; fifty-fifty. Maybe he’s mouthing clichés: think positive. Or he’s examining her silently, planning the incision he will make when her body lies inert on the operating table.

  Henry picks up a National Geographic and skims through an article about humpback whales, lingers over a beautiful photo of a sun-bleached vertebra, huge blades of bone projecting from either side of it like the wings on a small plane. What’s that part of the bone called? It has a weird name.

  Transverse process. A phrase which pretty much describes his morning — instead of going back to work with a box of donuts, he’s been transported sidelong and has landed here, in this too-quiet room. On Dan’s birthday. Henry’s given up on finding him a penis bone, wolverine or otherwise — he chickened out, didn’t go see the taxidermist’s brother — and instead bought Dan a fat, earnest-looking book about training for a marathon.

  And now Rae is standing in front of him. Her face rigid and damp-looking.

  They get into the elevator. Rae’s eyes are slits and he’s afraid that she’s about to faint. On the ground floor, as he’s pushing the outside door open for her, hoping to shepherd her as quickly as he can toward his car, someone is pulling on the door handle from the other side — it opens more swiftly than he expects and Rae almost falls out into the street.

  And then Rae is embracing a woman — whoever it is must have been pulling on the door handle because she’s holding the door open with one arm and has the other around Rae’s waist. Henry is irritated; all he can think is that this encounter is slowing them down. Rae should be at home, resting under a blanket.

  The woman tips her face up toward Henry and he finds himself looking down into a pair of grey-green eyes.

  “Marcie.”

  “Hello, Henry,” her tone is relieved and confused at the same time. “I would have been here earlier,” she says, loosening her grip on Rae so she can look up into her face, “but there were flurries at home —”

  Rae smiles. “It’s okay. You’re here now.”

  Tight groups of office workers are flowing toward the large restaurant at the end of the block, talking and laughing — the three of them are being jostled on all sides.

  “I’m going to get some lunch at home and then go back to work,” Rae says.

  “We’ll see about that,” Marcie counters, looping her arm through Rae’s.

  “You’re going to make me put my feet up? Good luck with that!” Rae says with a small, dubious smile, then turns to Henry and gives his shoulder a light up-and-down rub with her free hand.

  “Henry,” she says. She holds him steady in her gaze for a second before letting him go.

  And then Henry is watching as they jaywalk across the street. Marcie, pressed up against Rae, says something that makes Rae throw back her head and laugh. When they get to the other side, Marcie looks back over her shoulder and waves.

  And of course that’s what he should have done — he should have put an arm around Yvonne Rae, should have made her laugh, instead of fidgeting and goggling at ghastly pictures in her Maclean’s.

  He doesn’t go back to work. He drives to the river, parks near the art gallery, and wolfs down a couple of donuts. His car smells like a bakery. Brushing sugar from his pant legs, he heads for the path through the cottonwoods. In summer, the leaves form a thick canopy here, and you feel protected, enclosed amidst a clamour of bird life. Now, there’s the conversational chatter of a single chickadee. It’s the warmest day he can remember for a long while, only minus six or so. The bare branches let in crisp swaths of sun.

  He takes the lower path, nothing between him and the river island but the skirl of dark water. When Henry was a boy, he’d go down to the Torch, a much smaller, more temperamental river, and he’d try to subtract himself from the scene, to become an objective, bodiless eye; but he could never quite erase the human from what he saw. He couldn’t help thinking that the animals he spied on — a beaver, otters on the far bank, a pair of mergansers with a flotilla of hilarious-looking wedge-headed babies — operated by more than just instinct. That they were thoughtful beings, making — or trying to make — intelligent decisions.

  A white paper bag snaps like a flag in the upper branches of a willow, high above Henry’s head. A pair of geese huddle together on the ice surrounding the river island, part of the flock of a couple hundred that opt every year to stay for the winter. When the other geese, the thousands upon thousands that wheel across the city sky over the river in the fall, have all disappeared, have found their way to warmer climes, this pair stayed. And, so far, they’ve survived the winter.

  Back in his car, Henry recalls Marcie’s shapely eyes taking him in, surprised and maybe even happy to see him, and the women crossing the street arm in arm. Marcie drove four hundred kilometres to accompany Rae to her appointment, and was late, and was still able to make Rae laugh. Toying with the idea of going home to work on the crow, he sees all the little bones he has yet to assemble and it seems like a pointless chore. He snicks the lid on the donut box more tightly closed, looking forward in a way to how mad Ed is going to be when he sees Henry walk through the door as if he isn’t late, or confused, or lonely — as if he’s still got a full dozen in this fancy box.

  THAT EVENING, Henry sits between his mother and Rae at one end of a long narrow table in Hurry Curry, with seventeen of Dan’s close personal friends. The restaurant is so noisy, the piped-in music so loud, that they have to shout to hear one another.

  Henry turns to Rae. “You didn’t invite Marcie?”

  “She has a doctor’s appointment first thing tomorrow morning.” And just as Henry is about to ask what for, she adds, “Nothing serious.” And she and his mother exchange a look.

  Rae, who’s wearing a lot of blush and bright pink lipstick, is drinking red wine at an alarming pace, and with great hilarity telling how her parents, who have been divorced for ten years, ended up holidaying on the same cruise ship, and the ship — “which was huge, like a city on water,” and here she flings her arms wide apart — “well, it just wasn’t big enough for both of them.” And Rae’s mother actually disembarked at one of their scheduled ports of call in the Mediterranean and flew home at great expense.

  Henry’s mother chuckles politely, but Rae and then Henry are killing themselves laughing.

  Trying to keep the mood going, Henry tells them about the stream of eccentric customers they’ve had at the garage lately. The guy driving a Volkswagen Beetle that’s so low to the ground sparks fly when the car drags itself down the street, the woman who is so cheap she’ll only get her car fixed there if the
y throw in a tire gauge worth all of ninety-nine cents. And how Ed has announced that, now that his mother is moving into a long term care home, he’s going to get married to someone he has apparently been “dating” for forty years.

  Henry’s never talked so much at a dinner party. Or at any party, or in one evening. His mother is staring at him with frank amazement. He himself isn’t sure what’s come over him.

  At the other end of the table Dan is hanging on every word that comes out of his hero Laz’s mouth — and after a couple of hours of this, even Laz is beginning to look bored.

  Dan unwraps the book Henry’s given him, The Marathoner’s Bible, and shows it to Laz, who shrugs dismissively, and Henry knows Dan won’t read a word of it. But at least Dan seems to have forgotten about the penis bone Henry’s promised him — until the end of the evening, that is, when Dan’s coming back from the washroom, and yells into Henry’s ear, “Where’s my wolverine?” And then weaves his way back to his chair at the far end of the table.

  Both Rae and his mother look mystified, and Henry rolls his eyes. “Don’t ask me,” he says.

  And then Dan stands up abruptly, puts on a jacket and toque, gives the entire table a little wave, blows Rae a kiss, and walks out of the restaurant with Laz.

  “They’re running home,” Rae says to no one in particular, pouring herself more wine.

  His mother is talking to the waiter about how to care for a fig tree, and doesn’t notice immediately that Dan’s chair is empty.

  Fourteen

  RAE CALLS THREE DAYS LATER and she can hardly speak; he has no idea what’s going on but he flies out of the house wearing sneakers and an unzipped coat and is at Dan and Rae’s in under twelve minutes.

  When Rae opens the door, he doesn’t have to decide whether to hug her or not because she throws her arms around him and hangs on fiercely. He can feel, against his chest, a suppressed sob. She lets go and they move into the living room, where he looks around, bewildered. Dan’s stereo, which was set up against the west wall like an altar, is gone, and so is his pair of huge black tower speakers. Several boxes are piled where the TV was. No clothes are draped over the backs of chairs, no running shoes by the door, no CDs piled on the coffee table, no dirty glasses, no Starbucks cups with a cruddy inch of coffee in them.