The Afterlife of Birds

by Elizabeth Philips

  “Australia!” Henry blurts out at the same time that Marcie gasps, “Oh, how lovely!”

  His mother turns to Marcie. “And I was wondering, Marcie, if you’d like to look after the greenhouse while I’m gone.”

  Henry makes an exasperated sound. “Mom, Marcie hasn’t even had her baby yet.”

  “I know,” she says reasonably, “but I thought you could come out too, to give her a hand. I’d pay you the usual, Marcie, plus a little more. I know you didn’t work at the new place long enough to get benefits, so I figured the money might be welcome.”

  This is news to Henry — of course, Marcie did say she might go back to her new workplace, or she might not. What did she think she was going to live on?

  “Would you mind if I stayed in the house, Evelyn?” Marcie asks.

  “Of course, that’s part of the offer. It’ll make things much easier for you.”

  “I can dash back to feed the baby in between customers! If I can find a babysitter — that’s the catch, I guess.”

  “I might know of someone who’ll be happy to come in now and again. And the rest of the time you can have a playpen or something set up in the office,” his mother says.

  Marcie and his mother are gazing at one another with mutual satisfaction.

  “But how long are you going for?” Henry asks. “And who with?”

  His mother gives him a look of exaggerated patience before answering. “Well, I’ve been waiting …” her voice trails off. “But you can only wait so long,” she continues more resolutely. “I’ll be there a month, maybe six weeks. You remember, Henry, that I have a cousin in Brisbane — he and I have been emailing back and forth about the details. So I’ll travel out from there.”

  “Of course,” Marcie says. “It’s a long way away; you’d want to make the most of it. So. When do you need to know by?”

  “I need to get the tickets in good time,” his mother says. “If you can let me know around the second week of July, that would be great. And it would give me time to find someone else, if this doesn’t work for you. Of course I already know I can’t leave the greenhouse to Mr. Efficiency Pants.”

  “What about Ed —” Henry starts.

  “Ed can live without you for a few weeks,” Marcie says. “It’ll be good for him. And you are entitled to holidays — you’ve only had a week off this summer.”

  “I don’t know …” he says, but he’s not really thinking of Ed. He’s seeing the house on the farm, him sleeping in the basement, Marcie, and the baby, who is just a bright faceless blur, in his mother’s room. And his mother elsewhere — on the other side of the world. And who knows where Dan will be by then. Running across the Sahara maybe.

  “Well, you two think about it,” his mother says, leaning back in her chair. “I don’t need an answer right away. I won’t pretend I’m not hoping for a yes, Marcie, but if your answer is no, that’s just fine.”

  “Evelyn, I think you should buy those tickets now,” Marcie says. “Even if we can’t do it,” she clarifies, “we’ll find you some other person — won’t we, Henry?”

  Henry is thinking of Michael and Mrs. Bogdanov and their long separation. “Yes,” he says, sitting up straighter in his chair. “Marcie’s right, Mom. We’ll figure something out.”

  His mother is smiling at him and Marcie’s hand has found its way onto his leg and she’s giving his thigh a brusque rub.

  “Well, that’s that then,” his mother says, placing her palms down emphatically on the table. Henry hops up to take the tray from Rae, who’s coming down the back steps with a jug of orange fizz, and cupcakes, one with a bright yellow candle stuck into the middle of it.

  Rae makes a little ceremony of presenting the cupcake, which glows with purple sprinkles, to Marcie, then lights the candle.

  “Happy due date, Marcie,” she says. “It is tomorrow, isn’t it?”

  “It sure is,” Marcie says. “Let’s hope this little person is the punctual type.” And then a gust of wind blows the candle out.

  SEPTEMBER

  Twenty-Six

  EVERYTHING ABOUT THE BABY alarms him. The thin stem of her neck and her wobbly head with its spongy fontanel, the bluish, almost translucent skin around her eyes. The way she bawls furiously, with an animal desperation, when she’s unhappy. And though he can never figure out what she needs, Marcie is patient; she tries changing her, then feeding her, or just walking up and down the apartment hallway, jostling her until she settles. And then he’s dumb with relief — and amazed by the change, by the dispassionate, reserved quality of the baby’s gaze. Lu-Lu, that’s what Marcie calls her, almost teasingly, though her full name is Luisa Rae.

  Today he’s stopped in after work, as he does most days, and he’s hustling around the kitchen, about to make Marcie tea, but he hesitates, holding the filled kettle, wondering if the noise it makes when it boils will awaken the baby, who is asleep in her bassinet on Marcie’s pine table.

  Marcie is in a chair nearby, attempting to sew up a tear in what she calls the baby’s favourite pair of sleepers. Henry isn’t going to ask how Marcie knows the little pink onesie, identical to the other sleepers as far as he can tell, is the baby’s favourite.

  “Hasn’t she grown out of that?” he says.

  “Mmm,” Marcie says. “You can plug the kettle in, Henry, it won’t wake her.”

  He does, and when he sees Marcie is watching, he goes into a crouch and tiptoes around the table on his way to the living room.

  Marcie laughs her unrestrained, throaty laugh, and the baby sleeps on, unperturbed.

  A few minutes later Marcie joins him on her couch, where he’s reading Hawks in Flight.

  “You can go, you know,” she says, her bare arm slung across the couch behind him. “Your mom will appreciate it, and I can spare you for a few days.”

  A week ago, after a month of silence, an email arrived from Dan, thanking him for mailing the pair of runners and for the awesome boner, and inviting Henry to come to Banff to watch him run his marathon. At first Henry ignored it, but then he relented a couple of days later and sent a friendly but noncommittal reply. Yesterday, he got another email giving him more details about the race, and asking him point-blank whether he’s coming or not. And badgering him about Rae.

  “I got another email from Dan,” Henry says, “and he asks, well, more like orders me to bring Rae. She’s obviously not answering his emails — well, she told you as much, right — but still Dan insists that she’ll want to be there.”

  Marcie snorts, “As if.”

  The page Henry’s on shows the underside of the dark morph of an immature red-tailed hawk as if you were standing right underneath its flight path, the feathers along the tips of its wings spread like fingers.

  He passes the book to Marcie so she can see it. “This is what they call ‘a dark juvenile,’” he says.

  “You can’t be considering actually asking Rae,” Marcie says. And when she gives the book back, there’s a wet spot the size of a dime over one of her nipples.

  “I feel like I should at least go through the motions,” Henry insists. “I know Rae’s in Calgary next weekend, and so does Dan, and I’m sure he thinks she can just blow off that day in court and come to Banff for the race.” Henry drops the book on the end table and picks up the phone.

  “I’m just going to get it over with,” he says.

  He’s dialing Rae’s number when Marcie says, “Being there when the oil sands case is decided — there’s a good chance they’ll win, you know — or waving her pompoms as the guy who left her to face a mastectomy on her own goes running by. Hmm, tough decision.”

  Henry lets the receiver fall back into the handset and a thin wail starts up in the kitchen.

  “I’ll get her,” Henry says.

  He takes the baby to Marcie. After a few minutes of contented suckling, Luisa lets go of the nipple, and he carries her to the rocking chair his mother gave Marcie, eases into it, and begins to rock. In a few minutes, the baby is asleep
, her small, hot body dense with surrender on his shoulder. He keeps rocking, afraid that if he stops she’ll wake, and soon he’s almost asleep himself, a series of landscapes, flashing dark conifers and grey-blue mountains, playing across the inside of his eyelids. A man who looks like his brother, but is so muscular he’s almost disfigured, is running up a road strewn with a landslide of rocks.

  Henry opens his eyes to see Marcie shifting Luisa out of his arms and into hers, the baby very awake now, more awake than he’s ever seen her, as if she’s come out of an infant stupor into the peace of the apartment, the autumn light waning as the clouds come up and a light rain begins to fall.

  LATER, WHEN THE BABY has been changed and has fallen asleep again, Marcie lays her in her bassinet.

  “Can you stay a little longer, Henry, just till after I’ve had a shower?” she asks as she tucks a blanket around the baby.

  Henry hears the hiss of the showerhead. The fall of water lessens — she must have stepped under the spray — and he puts aside his book and gets up. He approaches the bathroom door nervously, his bare feet sticking a bit on the hallway tiles, and knocks once, softly.

  “I’m coming in,” he says, in a tone she couldn’t possible hear. He takes off his clothes, says it again, more loudly, and draws back the curtain. Marcie’s face is streaming with water, her lips very red, her curls flattened, eyelashes blinking away a sheet of false tears.

  The water is pouring down in a blunt torrent and their first kisses are blind. They both laugh. He kisses her again, more slowly, the water in his mouth making him more and more thirsty.

  SOMETIME AFTER MIDNIGHT, he wakes up and looks at Marcie asleep next to him. The ends of her hair are still wet, darkened to a dull gold.

  The room is warm, and a little humid, the sheet rumpled up at the foot of the bed.

  He rolls over on his side to face her, props himself up on an elbow, and she slides her hips over, making more room for him — and then she draws one knee up and lets it fall to one side.

  He looks, and she opens her eyes and sees him looking.

  “Yes,” she says. And she smiles drowsily, brushing her fingers over a breast, her arm falling, loose-jointed, onto his bare thigh.

  Twenty-Seven

  ON HIS WAY OUT OF TOWN a week later, he pulls up in front of Maria Bogdanov’s house. She’s out in the rain, which is more like a mist, raking up leaves with the girl from next door, the new neighbour’s eleven-year-old daughter, a tall bony kid who, Maria’s told Henry, can’t seem to keep still. They’re both wearing yellow rain gear, the girl in a jacket, the old woman in a cape he’s never seen before. The leaves of the birch growing in the neighbour’s yard carpet the two front lawns each fall; she is raking gold leaves while the girl scoops them up in enthusiastic armfuls and tosses them into a large brown paper bag.

  Mrs. Bogdanov is talking animatedly, her rake idle now — and the kid is standing there, hugging a clutch of leaves to her chest, listening. Henry smiles and drives away.

  BY TEN A.M. he’s speeding west, and a few miles beyond the city boundary he’s driving in fog, a lucent white-blue low-lying cloud that lies on the earth in airy strips, heightening the intensity of the yellow of the aspens and the green of leaves that haven’t turned yet.

  Saying goodbye to Marcie this morning, in the doorway of her apartment, he said he thought he might spend a few days with Dan after the race.

  “Maybe he’ll need me to apply poultices to his feet,” Henry joked.

  Marcie smiled and kissed him, and urged him to take as long as he needed.

  “I’ll give him five days, tops.”

  “Well,” Marcie said, “you’ll know right away.”

  “Know what?”

  “If Dan’s coming back. If he wants to come back.”

  But Henry hasn’t thought that far ahead. He’s going because the thought of not going, of letting Dan run his big race without anyone from his family there to witness it, makes Henry’s stomach cramp up. And he’s curious, too. About how Dan will look, when he’s done this great thing he’s been flogging himself toward for months and months. Henry wants to have some kind of information to bring back to his mother, so she can go off on her Australian adventure knowing Dan is okay (not that she has mentioned her eldest son very often lately). Henry hopes fervently his brother is all right, hasn’t admitted to Marcie that’s the real reason he’s been putting off the trip till the last minute — the nagging fear that Dan will be far from okay — so that now he has to drive straight through, not stopping at the famous dinosaur museum on the way as he originally planned. When Dan crosses the finish line and Rae isn’t there? What then?

  Thanks to his procrastination, Henry can’t stop and wait out this fog, which is much thicker now — he can only just make out the tail lights of the car ahead of him — he’s got to tunnel through it. He tightens his grip on the wheel.

  After an hour or so, the heat of the rising sun penetrates the gauzy air to reveal a world he’s only seen in dreams, colours wash across the rolling landscape in marvellous succession — white, blue, yellow, lilac grey. The road over the gentle swell of hills is narrow, shoulderless; a weak, impermanent strip just skimming across the land.

  THE TREELESS GREAT PLAINS must look the same as they did hundreds of years ago. The land spilling with tall, bleached grass, the wind making a sound that isn’t howling but cousin to it, a kind of fraught exhalation with no time between breaths, shaking the dry stalks as if searching for the last vestiges of life and moisture. There are no electrical wires, no phone wires, no houses — nothing to mar the muted blue above, filmy with cirrus, and the expanse of hilly grass below — a pure meeting of earth and sky.

  Thirty kilometres down the highway, knowing this won’t be a shortcut and may actually add an hour to his journey, but not wanting to pass through this emptiness that is not emptiness too quickly, he turns onto a side road. When he slows at an unmarked crossroad at the base of a hill, movement catches his eye along the east-facing rise. An antelope, its smoky-black face contemplative, lowers its head and stares at him, then stalks unhurriedly on, picking its way upslope, toward the clean arc of horizon.

  The car skids a little on the loose gravel as it climbs, and the first building he’s seen in a hundred kilometres coasts into view, an abandoned farmhouse at the edge of a field. A grand house, three storeys of weathered-to-grey-satin clapboard, long unlived in, with not even a track leading up to its door. And yet it’s still seaworthy and may last another century, the lines of the exterior walls as straight as the year it was built. The house sits facing south, floating on the tattered yellow light of wheat stubble. He pulls the car over.

  Wending his way through the brittle stalks toward it, he wonders how the house would have appeared when it was new. Fresh, flesh-coloured boards, and kids in the yard, playing excitedly in the sawdust where the boards were cut — though they have to watch out for dropped nails in the dirt. How many kids? Six at least. The oldest boy up on the roof, with his father, finishing the shingling.

  When the father’s working on the other side of the peak, the boy shows off to the smaller kids below, pretending he’s about to fly, throwing his tanned, stringy arms open wide.

  Now there’s no sound but the wind lashing through the tall, empty window frames. Something moves near the foundation and Henry jumps — a grey cat arches and hisses, and streaks away around the corner. A bony, long-legged feral cat, the same colour as the weathered siding.

  Does he really want to look in through gaping, glassless windows and see the ruined floors, smell the miasma of cat piss and dead mice and who knows what else? He takes a last savouring look at the house, and then turns away, toward the low scroll of fallow and harvested fields under a sky that’s blown itself cloudless. Behind him, the boy and his father are hammering in a jazzy, syncopated rhythm, and one of the little girls is dancing in the grass, in her thin cotton dress. And the mother’s in the kitchen, sweeping ashes out of the stove.

  FOR THE LAS
T HOUR AND A HALF of the trip, Henry’s flying through the dark, his headlights illuminating slashes of ghostly rock face, stands of spruce and pine, piles of scree.

  When he checks into his small hotel in Banff around nine-thirty, the desk clerk tells him some guy dropped this off, and gives him a grocery bag that weighs almost nothing. In his room, Henry washes his face and hands, flops down on the bed, and dumps the contents of the bag onto the bedspread: a map of the marathon course, folded into squares, and a little blue cardboard box not much bigger than a matchbox.

  He opens the map. Just above the finish line, Dan has scrawled in blue pen: “Here, ten a.m.” There goes any hope of seeing his brother before the big race.

  Henry pries the lid off the blue box to find a large tooth inside it. An ancient canine — a fang — tannic brown, the colour of old parchment.

  On the phone with Marcie a few minutes later, they laugh about the cave bear tooth, which is a fossil, tens of thousands of years old, imported from Europe for sale in the Rockies. An irony that would be lost on Dan.

  “Give the baby a kiss for me,” Henry says. He winces, smiling, as Marcie makes a big lip-smacking noise in his ear.

  As he’s falling asleep, he sees the tooth lit up, magnified — its surface scarred, pitted, runnelled, alien — suspended like a fragment of moon over the empty, wind-scoured plains.

  Twenty-Eight

  HENRY GETS UP A LITTLE AFTER SEVEN-THIRTY, pulls on his jeans, slides the bear tooth into his pocket, and steps out onto his tiny balcony. And there are the mountains: blue-grey in the early morning sun, their jagged, slanted peaks softened by wisps of cloud. He could almost be dreaming, the distances are so strange, the mountains near but also far — untouchable. Three floors down a stream of people passes by, the street echoing with shouts and chatter.