The Afterlife of Birds

by Elizabeth Philips

  THEY DRIVE TO THE NURSERY where Marcie is still working three days a week — she gets a discount, she says — and in no time Henry’s car is stuffed with trays of greenery, a few perennials and lots of annuals, some of them flowering in purple or blue, with a few dashes of white here and there — and at the last minute Marcie grabs two six-packs of robust yellow zinnias. He has to lower the rear seat to fit everything in.

  Marcie is starving, so they stop for a quick pizza and eat it in the car so she can keep an eye on her “rescue mission.”

  “You should always have flowers in here,” she jokes.

  WHEN THEY GET TO RAE’S, Henry drops Marcie at Rae’s front door, and then drives around to the alley and pulls in at the back gate.

  He’s unloaded all the flats of bedding plants, and a couple of clay pots for any strays Marcie can’t fit into the garden itself, and has set them on the lawn just inside the gate by the time Marcie and Rae come out of the house.

  Rae is wearing a red — almost scarlet — hat, a kind of turban, to keep her hairless head warm, and a nubbly grey fleece over her shirt, even though the evening is balmy. She has lost even more weight than when he saw her ten days ago, and Henry struggles to keep the shock from showing on his face. He nabs the flat nearest him and walks toward her with it held out in front of him like an offering.

  “Rae,” he says, “Marcie is going to make you a jungle, you know that, don’t you?”

  “I’ll just have to be brave,” she says with a half-smile. “These are sweet,” she says, running a hand over a spray of tiny daisy-like mauve flowers with pale yellow centres. “Marcie, you’re going to have to teach me how to take care of them.”

  She’s swaying a little on her feet. Henry grabs a chair, dusts off its padded seat, and places it behind her, and she more or less falls into it.

  And then he finds himself under Marcie’s direction, wielding a trowel, tucking plants in here and there at amazing speed, moving like a painter’s brush, from one end of the garden bed to the other. No wonder she didn’t want Rae’s dad to help her — he wouldn’t have been able to hop up and down fast enough to keep up with her. Henry’s so absorbed in the unfolding picture — tall spires at the back, some dusty grey groundcover at the front, some explosive colour for the middle of the bed, the yellow zinnias with their coarse leaves — that when he stands and looks up, the sun is hovering on the horizon, and deep shade is encroaching on the yard. He stretches, arches his aching back, and smiles at Rae, who smiles back — he thinks: she’s in shadow now and it’s difficult to be sure. Marcie has fetched a blanket for Rae from the house and is adjusting it over her lap. He has the sensation, in the low light, that there’s more distance between him and Rae than there was when he started planting, as if she’s on a little untethered boat and is drifting away.

  He rakes the riled earth, smoothing it between the new plantings. When he’s done, he puts down the rake and goes over to Rae.

  “Marcie’s making me some tea, but not that herbal bilge,” she says with a faint smile as he pulls up a chair beside her. “What have you heard from Dan lately?” she asks.

  She has a sore in the corner of her mouth, and the skin on her cheeks seems to have coarsened, and he’s so appalled that at first he doesn’t understand what she says next.

  “I haven’t heard from him for a week or two.”

  “He doesn’t phone much these days,” Henry says. Much? He doesn’t phone at all. Dan emails him at work, brief reports about his running times, and Lazenby’s latest insights into Dan’s incredible, and always increasing, prowess. The last email had been sometime in May, weeks ago.

  “He keeps saying he’s going to come by,” she says evenly. “But there’s always a reason he can’t, some computer job, or he’s got to move because he’s worn out his welcome with whatever friend he’s staying with, or he’s spending a weekend away running in a ten K race somewhere. I’m not sure, really, if he’s just obsessed, or if he’s using the obsession as an excuse to avoid me — and god, I’ve been in such a fog, most days I can’t figure out if it’s worth getting dressed, never mind deciphering Dan’s little missives.”

  “Christ,” Henry says, unable to hide his disgust (though he himself hasn’t been to see Rae as often as he should have, and when he does come, he’s with Marcie and lets her do most of the talking).

  “Henry.” Rae lays a cool hand on his arm. “You never know, he still might show up. He says he’s going to, for sure, next week.”

  She lets her head fall back against the chair cushion and stares up into the grey-green leaves of the tree. “He brought me flowers, you know, when I was in the hospital. Right after the surgery. I woke up and they were there. Four huge birds of paradise.”

  Rae’s mouth, usually so mobile, is still. She and Dan have been in touch since February. February! Henry wasn’t able to goad Dan into talking to their mother on the phone until early April — not that that’s helped her much because she still seems to think Dan’s crazy behaviour means she can’t sell the greenhouse, or shouldn’t. So all the time Henry was trying to chase Dan down, he was communicating, or at least sort of, with Rae. Henry realizes that he doesn’t know anything about anything.

  The back door creaks, and Marcie comes toward them carrying a tray, which looks like it’s balanced on her belly. Henry moves to help her and she sings out, “Just stay where you are, Henry.”

  They all sit in silence for a few minutes, inspecting the new bed. Rae is visibly exhausted, the mug in her hand trembling when she lifts it.

  Henry drains his water glass. “I’d better go get those trees,” he says.

  “Trees?” Rae’s dark eyes widen.

  “Didn’t Marcie tell you?” He looks with mock severity at Marcie.

  “Two shrubs,” she chides him. “You’ll see, Rae. They’re just what this place needs.”

  HENRY COMES IN through the gate with one of the lilacs in his arms. It has big, heavy blooms on it, and a couple of them, creamy white, are open, the scent like a sweet mist mixing with his breath.

  He staggers toward the women, exaggerating the weight of the pot, and they both laugh.

  “I just remembered,” Marcie says, an apologetic hand on Rae’s shoulder, “there are three lilacs actually. Sorry, I got carried away.”

  “Three!” Rae protests. “Was there a sale or something?” Henry can see Rae’s old fire rising, like a rosy shadow just under the surface of her blanched skin.

  MARCIE INSTRUCTS HIM to plant one lilac under the kitchen window and the other two by the patio, in a spot where, she says, they will make a kind of alcove, a more private space in the yard.

  Henry stomps on the spade and it bites into the grass. He marks out a circle and slowly, throwing the spade again and again, slices back the thick layer of turf. And then the work goes faster, as he levers clods of dark earth out of the open ground.

  Marcie and Rae stand beside him as he lowers the tree into the excavation, as he fills it and tamps down the earth around the slender trunk with the soles of his shoes. He turns on the faucet and hauls the hose over and leaves it to flood the base of the shrub. He’s packing up all the discarded plastic pots and trays by the back fence when Marcie’s voice rises in the dusky air:

  Bring me a little water, Sylvie.

  Bring me a little water now.

  Bring me a little water, Sylvie,

  every little once in a while.

  He can just make out the two women, still standing by the newly planted lilac; Marcie repeats the refrain and Rae rests her swathed head, very gently, on Marcie’s shoulder.

  Eighteen

  “THE DAYS ARE GETTING LONG NOW, are they not?” Mrs. Bogdanov says. She has a hand on her porch railing and looks out past where he stands, at the bottom of her front steps, toward the cottonwoods along the river. “Michael, he’s been telling me they are predicting a hot, dry summer. How can that be, I wonder, after all this rain we had in May?”

  Henry shrugs, not wanting to prolong t
he conversation. He’s anxious to get home, to see if Marcie has called. She’s been looking very tired lately and he hopes to persuade her to stop working altogether for the last three weeks before her due date.

  “You’re hungry,” Mrs. Bogdanov says, and it’s true, he is. All he’s done is clean her eaves, but he feels like he’s been lifting weights.

  “Come have borscht. Michael, he brought me fresh dill, and good beets. And I made too much.”

  He guesses he can stay for one bowlful and lets her lead him inside.

  HE SITS AT THE KITCHEN TABLE and the silence from the other rooms washes around him. Then a piercing, musical note sounds in the backyard, and in the window above the table there’s a flash of orange, an oriole swooping toward the river, its colour as rich as its song.

  Mrs. Bogdanov doesn’t eat with him. She sits on the other creaky pressed-back chair, her legs crossed at the ankles while Henry quickly consumes half a bowl of the soup, which is a rich, loamy purple, smoky and a little sweet.

  “Borscht, there was a time I never wanted to eat it again, when I was a girl, we had it so often. But when we had rabbit stew, that was always a happy day for me. Until there were no more rabbits. It was when I was eight or nine,” Mrs. Bogdanov says, her white hair like a nimbus around her head, “that the rabbits disappeared.”

  Henry raises an eyebrow, his spoon hovering over the soup. Rabbits? “Hares, you mean,” he says, and takes another couple of quick mouthfuls. At this rate, he’ll polish off the whole pot.

  Mrs. Bogdanov places her hands in the square of sun falling across the table. “These were rabbits my grandfather raised for food,” she says, taking his bowl, refilling it, setting it in front of him, and when she sits down again, gazing absently toward the window.

  “Not hares then?” he prompts her.

  “It was June,” she starts, stroking her cheek with one hand, “and the wild ones, the hares, were scarce already, food of any kind was hard to find. This was no ordinary time I speak of. This was the early thirties: famine time.”

  The rabbits lived in a hutch behind a hedge at the back of their house, the hutch divided into two compartments, to keep the strongest pair separate, for breeding. One morning her grandfather went out to feed the rabbits and discovered the hutch broken apart and the rabbits gone. It had snowed in the night — a few inches of wet, heavy snow, a freak squall, and there were big boot tracks leading to and from the yard.

  “And the hay he’d piled up around the hutch to keep them warm,” she says, “it was blowing all across the snow, broken boards everywhere, like there’d been an explosion.”

  Mrs. Bogdanov’s hands wrestle with one another in her lap. She and her sister had held the newborn rabbits in their hands, so warm, and soft as pussy willows; and for that short time, before their fur came in, their skin was a dark, silky black.

  Yuri had told them more than once, smiling and pressing a calloused finger to his lips, that the rabbits were their secret — as if the hutch were not standing in plain view at the bottom of the yard.

  “Mikhail and I, we were talking last night, about those creatures. And he said of course the whole village knew about them. It was a small place, maybe twenty families; everyone knew every inch — we could see, we could smell. But then I believed my grandfather could do anything, even make people forget what they had seen.”

  She bows her head. “It was Valentin, Mikhail’s father,” she says, “who stole the rabbits and butchered them. A dozen or so. Killed even my grandfather’s best breeding pair. I cried for the poor creatures, and when my mother she explained that now there would be no more rabbits, I cried even harder.

  “‘No one is thinking of the future,’ my grandfather said.”

  Valentin had given the meat to his family, and to neighbours, feeding maybe twenty, twenty-five people, and then he complained that the meat was tough, joking that the old fool Yuri didn’t even know how to raise rabbits any more. And the next day, Valentin’s son Mikhail, a wild boy of thirteen, pelted Maria and her sister with snowballs, repeating his father’s taunt word for word. But when he saw Maria crying, he stopped, and the look of devilish glee he’d had on his face fell away, and he came to where she was kneeling in the snow and tried to help her to her feet.

  “I thought I would never forgive Mikhail for what he said.” But she sees now that when the villagers looked at her grandfather they saw the count, his five spoiled children, his sickly wife. They remembered how Yuri had been given easier work and better pay, because he was patient with animals. But now everything in the country had changed — and Yuri was a peasant like everyone else.

  “And as Mikhail said last night,” she lifts her shoulders, “his people weren’t just hungry then, they were starving. His family, and soon my family, and the whole village would have nothing to eat but grass.”

  Mrs. Bogdanov smiles sadly and nods toward the high pane. “That day the sky was just that blue,” she says, “just the same, and the air was sweet with spring. But there was snow, and the wind was cold.”

  Henry’s bowl is empty and he drops his spoon into it — then clamps a hand over it to stop it rattling. He wants to ask her how they came to leave, how she ended up here, on the prairies, thousands of miles from Russia, but her head is turned away, leaving him with a view of her left ear, its crushed-looking, elongated lobe, and he gets up and carries his bowl to the sink.

  MRS. BOGDANOV IS FIDGETING with the doorknob, twisting it back and forth, as if the door were closed, not open; as if she were struggling to get out.

  “I can delay no longer, I have to have that operation,” she says finally.

  “The cataract surgery?”

  “Yes. If I put it off one more time then they will cancel and I go to bottom of list. So — I must have it. Which is okay. I am ready now — spring is a better time, as Mikhail says.”

  “When is it, the operation?”

  “A week from now. I will need a little assistance. Perhaps, occasionally, I can trouble you to help out?”

  “That’s no problem,” Henry assures her, and she opens the door and they both gaze down at the poppies growing by the steps, their papery yellow and orange petals quivering with bees.

  Nineteen

  HENRY’S AT HOME FOR THE WEEKEND; he wanted to stay in the city, he was planning a river walk with Marcie, but his mother had sounded so frustrated on the phone that he drove out early Saturday morning.

  They’ve just had lunch, and she’s leaning on the table with her chin in her hands. “Don’t tell Marcie, but this new guy is driving me bats. I have to explain everything to him, and it’s hard to believe he grew up on a farm because he doesn’t know a cucumber from a watermelon —”

  “What?” Henry says with an unbelieving laugh.

  His mother stares at him for a moment then smiles thinly. “I mean a cucumber vine from a watermelon vine.”

  “Right. Well, that’s not good,” he says.

  “He wants to streamline, to eliminate some of the plants, like clematis, that don’t sell as well. And when I explained that I always like to stock a good variety of perennials, he said we should focus on the products that sell. Products! As though the plants were shampoo or something.”

  “How is he with customers?”

  “Okay,” she allows reluctantly. “Well, pretty good, really.”

  “Maybe give him a little time?” Henry doesn’t think there’s any point making a change now, when he suspects she still wants to sell the greenhouse — as soon as she gets her courage back. Dan does call her sometimes now, and has answered his cell the odd time when he recognizes her number.

  “Yeah. I guess that’s the thing to do. I’m going to give him till August,” she says decisively, standing up. “If he’s still annoying me, I’ll let him go then.” She reaches for his empty plate and stacks it on top of her own. “So how’s Marcie?”

  “She’s ever-expanding.”

  “Naturally,” his mother smiles.

  “Yeah. But p
retty wiped by the end of each day. I tried to persuade her to stop working, but she said she’d just be sitting around her apartment twiddling her thumbs.”

  “Marcie loves being busy. And last time I talked to her she said the greenhouse manager was pretty nice about giving her less demanding tasks.” She picks up the bowls and the spoons and the water glasses and sets everything on the kitchen counter.

  “You must miss Marcie,” Henry says. And then he scolds himself; she’s pissed off with the new guy, he shouldn’t be pouring salt in the wound.

  “Yes and no,” she answers calmly enough. She opens the dishwasher and puts the plates in.

  “Her heart just wasn’t in it anymore. I didn’t expect — didn’t want — her to stay just to make my life easier. And yes, before you ask, I did know about the pregnancy, but her situation was complicated, and I wasn’t going to make it more so by blabbing.”

  Henry refrains from saying that he doesn’t think talking to her son constitutes blabbing.

  “So what happened to Gerald?”

  “Still working in town, as far as I know,” she says.

  That’s not what Henry meant, but he knows he won’t get any more out of her.

  She brushes a stray wisp of hair out of her eyes — she always has it up on the back of her head when she’s at the greenhouse, but today it’s untidy in a way he’s rarely seen before.

  “How’s Rae doing these days?” she asks, rinsing the dirty cutlery under the tap.

  “Not so great, but hanging in there, I guess.” He tells her about the new flower bed they’ve made for her.

  “That’s sweet of you guys,” she says. “Has Rae seen anything of Dan?”

  “Not a glimpse,” Henry says, and he wrings out a sponge and goes to wipe the table.

  “He sent me this,” his mother says, stepping into the living room and coming back with a beat-up cardboard box, which she sets on the table in front of him. “What do you think it means?”

  He opens the box. An ugly plastic squash trophy, some videotapes that, from their labels, must be recordings of various squash tournaments — and a heap of mixed tapes he made for the girlfriend he had in grade eleven, the only one who left him and not the other way around.