The Afterlife of Birds

by Elizabeth Philips

  Michael clasps him by the wrists, his hands encircling Henry’s carpal bones like warm cuffs. “You are a good fellow,” Michael says, his voice warm. “You will do what is right.” And Michael lets him go. “You will find her upstairs,” he says as he reaches for his car door.

  Henry straightens his shoulders, bewildered by the old man’s emotion, and turns toward the house. As he is closing the door he hears the Lincoln’s ignition catch.

  At the top of the stairs, there’s a bedroom on either side, and facing him, a small room where Mrs. Bogdanov is ensconced in an armchair, her feet up on a footstool, her lap and legs covered in a red and black quilt, like a chessboard.

  “Henry?” Her left eye is patched, a lump of white gauze taped over it.

  “I’m here,” he says.

  There’s a small TV on opposite her, the sound muted. She continues staring at the screen with her one good eye.

  He sits on the edge of a chair, at a right angle to hers, elbows on his knees, trying to get into her line of vision, so she doesn’t have to twist to see him.

  “Did you see Mikhail?”

  “Yes.” It’s warm in the room, but not uncomfortably so. A rill of cool air brushes across his brow; the Bogdanov house is a solid house and makes its own weather.

  He looks to see what’s holding her attention. A hand the colour of dark honey is wielding a long, square-bladed knife, dicing a purple onion with incredible sureness and speed.

  “Do you cook, Henry?”

  “Not well,” he says.

  “You should learn. You’re good with your hands. The hands are very important in cooking. The heavy touch, the light touch — you must find just the right measure — it is all in the hands. The fingers particularly.”

  He is good with his hands — sometimes. Other times, manipulating the crow’s tailbones, for instance, his fingers seem too big, unwieldy.

  “I used to be a prodigious cook, when Petya, my first husband, was alive. He had many brothers and they used to come to dinner often. This was when I lived in London. But then, later, with Bogdanov, here in Canada.” She expels her breath in a huff. “I could give him cabbage soup or caviar, poor man, he didn’t know the difference.”

  She tentatively explores the edges of her bandaged eye. The skin around it looks taut and angry. “It is strange, this thing. Never did I dream such a possibility — to replace the lens. The lens, Henry! You know, for some time today — I don’t know how long — the old lens was gone, the new one not yet inserted. I have only felt like that once before. So at the mercy …” Her voice trails off. Her cheeks scored like Michael’s but with deeper lines, like fissures in dry earth, though her skin, in the weak light from the lamp beside her, seems pliable, soft.

  “In our flat in London once, just after the war, I made a seven-course meal. Seven courses for seven brothers, I said, though only four of these friends were brothers. It was June, troistsa, a day to go to the graveyard, to honour the dead. But it was wartime, and our dead were elsewhere. In Russia some of them, and others we don’t know where. So instead, we eat. Many small dishes to start, pirog, we call them. Potato soup. And baked potatoes, and honey cake. Yes. And a pork dish with cream sauce, and mushrooms someone brought with them, a fellow who had just come from home. That is the best, the taste of the lisichki, what’s called the little fox, because of its golden colour. The men, they eat and eat and eat. And talk. They talk politics — we have all fled, you know. We are all that terrible word: displaced. And the vodka. Someone has brought a very special kind of vodka. It tastes of wildness, of a forest where we have never been, but which we know. It is in our blood — those great trees, that place.”

  Henry is leaning toward her, the better to see what she is saying. A room full of men, a small apartment, two or three small tables pushed together and covered with a large white cloth, plates all over it, blue plates, and glasses of vodka. Fists slammed down on the table, and then the same hands, lifted in conciliation. Bellows of laughter echoing off the walls of the narrow, high-ceilinged room. The vodka clear as water, but potent, tasting of an ancient wood.

  “Michael?” Henry says.

  “Yes, he was one. Not a blood brother, but — yes, he was there. He’s the only one —” She stops mid-sentence and pats at her fine white hair.

  “How soon does the patch come off?” he asks.

  “Tomorrow.” She sighs. “I have to put drops in for a week, and I am not to bend over. Or to carry any heavy thing.” She fumbles for the remote control on top of a pile of books on the table beside her and switches off the TV.

  “There was a moving van next door,” Henry says.

  “Yes,” she says, and she fumbles around under the quilt, as if looking for something, “and that reminds me. That smoking daughter, you know, the blonde one, she brought over a key.”

  “To their place?”

  “To ours. I gave it to them years ago, you know, the way neighbours do. Here,” she says and pulls a hand out from under the quilt, the key in her palm.

  He looks at it blankly.

  “For you,” she says.

  He takes it and slips it into his jeans pocket.

  “Well, I should make a list for you, Henry. There is a pen and paper over there.” She indicates a small desk in the corner of the room that he hasn’t noticed till now. It’s blanketed in papers — bills and letters. When he reaches for the notepad, two photographs slide to the floor.

  He picks them up and in the larger one — a bear! Standing like a man in a clearing in the woods. No, not a bear, but a man in a dark wool coat, with a head of thick black hair. Is it Mikhail? Henry thinks he recognizes the man’s stance and the tilt of his head, his bemused smile. The other, smaller photo is of two people in a garden: a woman is holding a child’s hand, a small child of three or four, and she’s smiling down at him as the boy faces straight into the camera, dark-eyed and serious. The woman’s hair is long, but the face is Maria Bogdanov’s, rounder and fuller, and dark, as if she’s spent a lot of time in the sun.

  He returns the photographs to the desk and offers Mrs. Bogdanov the pen and paper, and she scratches out a list of some ten or twelve items. Does she really want so many books? She tears the paper off and hands it to him.

  Potatoes, green onions, tinned peaches … Of course — groceries.

  “There’s some money,” she says, “on the kitchen table.”

  She is low in her chair, her chin sinking toward her chest.

  She’s old, Henry thinks, as if he has never quite taken this in before — and she’s beyond tired.

  WHEN HENRY COMES BACK an hour later with the groceries, he puts them away in the cupboard, but can’t decide where to stow the potatoes, then remembers that the old woman keeps them in a cold room in the basement. He opens the door: steep wooden steps, a broom and dustpan on the small landing before the last few steps down to a concrete floor. He starts down. On the wall opposite the landing, there’s a small, brightly coloured painting, spot-lit by the glare from a basement window. He stands, absorbed by the lush colours. A Madonna and child, both with strangely elongated limbs, their hands entwined. And on the narrow shelf below the painting sits what looks like a prayer book.

  He finds the cold room and places the potatoes in a bin. Remembering that Mrs. Bogdanov is supposed to rest, he rips open the bag and carries a few back upstairs, edging cautiously past the Madonna’s sloe-eyed gaze.

  When he goes to tell her that he’s bought everything she’s asked for, Henry finds the old woman asleep in her chair, head canted to one side. Half the quilt has slipped to the floor, exposing one arm, the sweater she’s wearing short in the sleeves, the bones in her wrist surprisingly thin. Henry carefully pulls the quilt back up around her.

  ON THE STEPS OUTSIDE, he is moving fast, glad to be out into the light and air, and there’s the blonde emerging from next door at the same time, a cigarette between her lips. She nods curtly and hurries toward her car. Henry remembers the key in his pocket, inserts i
t, and turns the stiff bolt, locking in the sleeping Maria.

  Twenty-One

  WHEN MARCIE COMES IN, her arms loaded with cartons of Chinese food, he takes them from her and sets them down on the kitchen table. He’s moved the crow to the counter, at the end farthest from the table, and now he stands in front of it, blocking her view. And though he’s vowed to himself that he will tell any woman he’s interested in about his bird-building, he just doesn’t want to see Marcie’s face fall the second she comes in the door.

  “I’m famished,” she says, and then, “god, it’s hot,” as she rolls up the sleeves of her white blouse, which is unbuttoned over a very stretchy, very yellow T-shirt. She starts opening the food cartons. “Have you got bowls?” And when he just stands there, “Henry?”

  He slowly moves aside.

  “Ah,” she says, her eyebrows shooting up as she approaches the crow.

  “Can I touch it?” she asks.

  “Sure,” he answers.

  She taps the bird’s cranium with a fingernail. “That’s a tough nut,” she says and he smiles tentatively. Her hand appears very dark against the small white skull.

  “So many bones,” she says, running a thumb along the ribs. “Henry, how on earth did you do this?”

  “I have a book,” he says.

  “There’s a book that tells you how to make a crow?”

  “I didn’t make it,” he corrects her. “I just reassembled it.”

  “Thank you,” she says.

  “For what?”

  “For letting me in,” she says, and then leans over and plants a quick kiss on his cheek.

  Before Henry has a chance to figure out what has just happened, they’re sitting down at the table and Marcie is ladling out won-ton soup.

  She looks across at the moose skull on the sideboard as she eats. Her face relaxed and open, her cheeks buffed to a soft pink shine — her trip to the day spa has been good for her. There’s no trace of the fretfulness in her, the anxiety that’s been there off and on since the beginning of the month.

  While they eat, she studies the other skulls from a distance, giving each of them a long look.

  “You were a strange boy, Henry,” she says.

  “Was I?” She’s always known him, he thinks hazily — and then, well, no, she hasn’t.

  “With your bones, and before that, what did you collect? When you were really small.”

  “Stones. But lots of kids do that.” She really does look wonderful tonight, the gold of her skin against that white shirt.

  “But not just any stones.”

  Henry shakes his head, “No, the smallest stones I could find.”

  “Your mom told me you got mad at her every time she vacuumed the floor of your bedroom,” she laughs. “We’re talking sand, I think, eh?”

  “Yeah, I guess my room was kind of a disaster. But she’d given me a magnifying glass one Christmas and I loved to look at the grains up close. I liked how I could make the sand grow into boulders.” He pushes aside his bowl, folds his greasy paper napkin, and deposits it in an empty carton, then shoves his chair back and stretches his legs out in front of him.

  Marcie hovers over the last of the kung pao chicken.

  “Go ahead,” he smiles, “finish it off.”

  Chopsticks flying, she asks between bites, “Were you always such a watcher?”

  “A watcher?”

  “You always seem to be a bit removed, sitting a little ways back, you know, watching things unfold.”

  “Well, I am tall,” he says, lifting his sneakered feet in the air to emphasize the length of his legs.

  “That must be it,” she says dryly.

  Henry stands and with exaggerated care lifts his chair and places it right up against the table. And then has to pull it out a bit, so he can sit down again.

  Marcie laughs.

  When she’s chased down the last smidgen of rice noodle in her bowl and he’s cleared away the empty cartons, they move to the living room, where it’s cooler, and sit side by side on his couch.

  “God, Henry, this thing is so uncomfortable,” she says, shifting her hips back, then turning and adjusting the small cushion behind her, doing it again, then tossing the cushion aside.

  “I know, sorry.” He gets a pillow from his bed and wedges it in behind her.

  “Ah.” She sighs and settles back. “That’s better.”

  Henry tries not to focus on her big belly, but it’s impossible to avoid, especially when he thinks he sees, through the veil of her yellow T-shirt, a disturbance under her skin, there and then gone.

  “Mmm,” she moans softly, and shakes her head, placing a palm over that very spot. “It’s like that sometimes,” she says. “If I pay close attention, the baby goes quiet.”

  They don’t speak for a while. Birdsong floats toward them through his bedroom window, a yellow warbler, and the trill of a chipping sparrow, undercut by the low rumble of a car passing on the street.

  “Henry, you must be wondering. I mean,” she takes a big breath, “about this baby.”

  He opens his mouth but doesn’t speak. He picks up the cushion, puts it down again, upright against the back of the couch in the space between them.

  “Gerald,” she says, dragging his name out. “I was happy with him. Well, happy enough. And I could picture it. I could see us, a neat little family, living in that beautiful big house he has, you know, up on the hill on the east side of town.” She rubs her beaky nose with a forefinger.

  “Well, he took care of the contraception — because the pill made me bloat, and it threw me into such an awful funk there was a real danger I might throw myself off a bridge. Besides, he liked having the control.” She puts a hand to her mouth, then clasps both hands firmly together in her lap. “When I told him I was pregnant, I said, ‘Listen, these things happen.’ I’d looked up the failure rate for condoms — I forget what it is exactly but it’s higher than you’d think — and told him the numbers. Said it was silly, really, that they’re called ‘safes.’ And the more I talked, the more I felt like I was building a case — against me.”

  Henry is chewing on his lip, not trusting himself to say anything.

  “I mean, he’s an accountant, for god sakes, I’ve heard him say often enough that statistics don’t lie. Still, he just wouldn’t believe me.”

  She looks at Henry, the little white scar above her eyebrow disappearing when she smiles, takes his hand, which has been lying tense on his pant leg, and strokes the back of it and puts it back down on his thigh, as if his hand were an object she’d like to buy but has decided against it.

  “He wanted the baby to have a test.”

  “To prove paternity?” The guy is sounding more and more like a total jerk.

  “Yeah, he said that he’d have to wait till it’s born to make his final decision. Till after the blood test. And that I couldn’t picture. Having the baby with Gerald there, then taking blood from the baby’s little arm. And then what would he do, if it wasn’t his, would he up and leave? Though of course it is his, but you see what I mean?” She takes a deep breath after this speech. “I just couldn’t understand his thinking.”

  “I think it’s just a cheek swab,” Henry says, “not a blood test.”

  She gives him an annoyed look.

  “Sorry,” he says. She doesn’t say anything for a moment, and Henry repeats it, “sorry,” smiling a little.

  “Anyway,” she goes on, “when I refused, that just confirmed in his mind that he was right. But Henry, how could I raise a child with a guy who was suspicious from the start. Who wanted proof. The only thing that I can figure is that I’m paying for all those years I was a wild girl —”

  “You weren’t that wild,” Henry interrupts her.

  “Oh, I was, Henry, you don’t know the half of it. But I really want this kid. I’m thirty-four, and I might not get another chance.” There are tears at the corners of Marcie’s eyes. He watches one inch down her cheek and reaches out a finger to wipe it aw
ay but stops, hand in mid-air, and she grabs his fingers, presses them to her cheek. She laughs.

  He pulls his hand away, startled. “What?”

  “I was just remembering something that happened early on with Gerald. How he kept track of the pros and cons, when we were first together, he actually made a list, on a pad of graph paper.”

  “The pros and cons,” Henry echoes.

  “I guess I was fooling myself. But you, Henry,” she said, shifting herself effortfully to one side to look him full in the face. “You aren’t like that.”

  He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t know in what way she thinks he isn’t like Gerald — is it that he doesn’t have a beautiful house, or a good job, or a beautiful pregnant girlfriend?

  “You’re not calculating the value of things all the time,” and she puts a hand on his leg, and leaves it there.

  Henry likes the weight of her hand, and at the same time prays she’ll move it soon, before his interest in that hand, and how else it might touch him, becomes embarrassingly apparent.

  She covers a yawn, then runs her hands through her hair, which is damp at the hairline. She picks up a magazine off the coffee table and fans herself with it.

  “I’ll open a window, try to get a cross draft going,” he says, and goes into the spare room, his bird room. As soon as he forces the sash up, he feels a cool rush of air — he’s propping the window open with a wooden ruler when he hears Marcie come into the room behind him.

  “Wow,” she says. Most of the birds are on a shelf on the north wall, while three of the smaller ones are on an old scarred table. She bends in close to peer at the goshawk, moves to bow over the rock dove, and then the kestrel.

  “Oh, ignore that one,” he says, putting a hand on her shoulder to try to draw her away. “I made a mess of it,” he says. It’s one of his earlier birds, and the skull sits awkwardly at the end of its neck, making the bird seem quizzical, a ridiculous pose for a bird of prey, even a small one. He should take the thing apart and rebuild it.

  She brushes his hand away absent-mindedly, and takes her time gazing at each of the birds in turn while Henry stands awkwardly in the doorway.