The Days When Birds Come Back

by Deborah Reed

  A few months before June returned from Ireland, she’d hired a crew to clean and repair the carriage house. Windows washed, yard landscaped, the daphne and violet thistle and lamb’s ear coming up nicely around the front porch, the rockrose a peach-red arch over the back patio door. Every room was coated in fresh white paint, and the cedar shingle siding was layered with chestnut stain. June had wanted to avoid the distraction and awkward discomfort of strangers coming and going at all hours of the day. It turned out that the roof needed to be replaced; there’d been a leak, some dry rot, and the ancient sewer line from both houses, made of clay, was strangled by twisted roots and busted every few feet. Months ago when June footed the bill, American dollars were worth far less than the euro, and the money seemed abstract and distant, like the life waiting for her on this coast. Even now the extreme tidiness had the feel of a movie set, her life playing out like the part of a young widow living in a small holding on a hill.

  Of course Niall wasn’t dead, though there was a time she’d wished him dead, wished herself a widow to be pitied, but Niall was alive, living with an Aussie named Angie in a white Queen Anne with a green-tiled roof in Melbourne, with Angie’s ten-year-old son, all of which June had discovered before tearing herself away from social media. When Niall told her about his new life on the phone last week, she pretended not to know.

  It helped to think about other things.

  The bungalow was twice the size of the carriage house and severely neglected, the life eaten out of it during its abandonment, though it could have been much worse if Grandmam and Granddad hadn’t taken such excellent care of it for decades. They’d taken care of everything, including each other, until the last moments of their lives. They died two hours apart, in their sleep, and there had been no real explanation. “Natural causes” was written on both death certificates, but June imagined Granddad waking in the dark to find Grandmam had slipped away, and he continued to lie beside her, holding her hand, willing himself to join her before the sun had a chance to fill the house with unbearable cruelty.

  Months before they died, at the age of ninety-eight, Granddad had continued to drive, and Grandmam still walked ramrod straight. It wasn’t until Granddad wrecked the Pontiac on Highway 101 that things began to deteriorate. Neither was injured beyond bruises, yet soon they were dead. Something had been set in motion the day of their accident, and for weeks Grandmam left June long voicemail messages about people June didn’t know—they were not in the accident; no, it was not their fault, hers and Granddad’s, was it? It couldn’t be their fault, she’d say, mixing Irish and English, of which June was pretty sure she was unaware. June could not pick up or call back, could not bear the weight and confusion of Grandmam’s suffering while June’s own life had fractured into sharp, revolting pieces that were getting harder to mend. The drunken fights, the lies overlapping into braided ropes, which June had used to hang them both. Two months after the accident her grandparents were dead, and one year later, in a scene so ugly June was grateful she could not recall it in its entirety, Niall was gone.

  June had entered the bungalow twice now—once to make sure the windows were closed, once to open them again. She’d disrupted the moths, caught her hair in the orb weaver’s web, swiped dead house flies from the windowsills as the windows went up, and again when they came down. She stood face-to-face with a chipmunk on the kitchen counter who looked at her and flicked his tail in a gesture of defiance. “I am a thousand times your size, little man,” June said, sounding like Grandmam. The tiny creature scurried down the cupboard and along the baseboard into the living room. “Enjoy the run of the place,” June said. “You’ll be thrown from the manor soon enough.”

  She had smelled the decay, looked up at the blackened trim, a leak, she assumed, after a massive storm two years ago had ripped an ancient spruce from its roots and sent it flying toward the house. By some measure of grace the tree landed within feet of the dining room windows, and only the gutter was torn away. But even in its current state of disrepair, the house was still worth a small fortune. June hated thinking of it this way, but her finances were dwindling, her backlist of books fading from popularity, the dollar her only currency now, and no telling when she would finally finish her novel.

  You’ll be dead in a year if you don’t stop drinking, her doctor had told her two years ago, but that wasn’t enough. If the goal of every living thing was to stay alive, it had seemed that June was no longer a living thing. Some part of her had undergone a dull demise, and it took her sideswiping a child on his bicycle with her car a year later, in the middle of an afternoon in County Carlow to shake June back to life. It took the terror in a boy’s glassy blue eyes, his bleeding elbow and torn jeans as he lay beneath the twisted spokes and cracked frame, looking up at June, for her to finally feel the hot jolt of resurrection. “I was in the lane,” the boy said, shivering, stuffing back tears as she reached for him. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” he repeatedly told her, and June understood that when he got home he’d face a scolding for being careless and unworthy of the gift he’d been given by disciplined and long-suffering parents. “You’re not broken,” she said, though what she’d meant was to ask if anything was broken. He shook his head no. She trembled, handing him all the money in her wallet—230 euros. “You’re a good lad,” she said, or wanted to say, but couldn’t get the words to leave her mouth. “You’ve done nothing wrong,” she said, for certain, and told him to go buy himself a new bike and clothes. It was then he began to cry, hard and silent with his chin to his chest, eyes closed over the notes in his hand, and June curled his fingers to keep the cash from being carried off in the wind. She stepped back and apologized again as she returned to her car, apologizing still as she watched the boy in her mirror, slowly pushing his bike down the sidewalk, his tears breaking with a freedom she knew he would reel in once he rounded the corner to home.

  Rather than driving off a cliff—accidentally or with determined calculation, no matter—June had somehow arrived home and gathered up Niall’s clothes for charity. She remained awake all night, piling her own things into boxes to be shipped. West was the direction of endings, and though she did not feel the shape of an actual plan, the image of the carriage house and its cedar scent, the familiar feel of its temperamental spaces, was drawing her home.

  Now June had landed back in the place where she began, alone and wishing someone would show up, stay just long enough to agree with her about how wondrous the heat felt on cheekbones, knees, and breasts, a simple nod would do, and then he—she would like it to be a he—could hand her a glass of ice water, sit beside her on the lawn without getting in the way, and speak a line or two—some small, smart thing, like how it wouldn’t be long now, not at all, he’d say. In a little while this hurt will hurt no more.

  “How is it, then, being there without your grandparents?” Niall had asked on the phone.

  “It doesn’t quite seem real.”

  “What’s in bloom?” he’d asked, which made everything seem real, and she told him about the iris and foxglove and yarrow she’d seen along the forest shore, and he said he could picture it perfectly. He said how fine it was for her to be there at the start of summer. Like the day they were married in the backyard, and the golfers had agreed to remain quiet during the ceremony. “Do you remember?” he asked.

  “I do,” she’d said, and they shared a small laugh.

  The belongings she’d taken such care to hold on to were now missing, thanks to Victory International Shipping, and yet she knew exactly where Niall’s had gone. When he departed, he took only what he could fit in one suitcase, and this stung as much as anything he might have come up with to punish her, though she did not think he was trying to. Even so, she understood enough to know that everyone was capable of grievous, despicable acts given the right circumstances. What he said was that he didn’t want any of the possessions that had made up their life together, and she did not restrain herself from hurling insults at his back while his steps cr
unched the gravel driveway with an amplified sound. When she’d dropped off Niall’s shirts, pants, and shoes at the Goodwill shop, it occurred to her that in time people would be walking the streets wearing his clothes, and if she remained in Ireland much longer, she’d have seen Niall everywhere she went, which might have been enough to drive her fully round the bend, off a cliff, or falling-down drunk on the kitchen floor.

  How did widows find the wherewithal to march their stalwart bodies to the charities and deliver the cottons and polyesters and denims that contained the scent and sweat and stains of their beloved men, only to come across them another day on the backs of strangers? An act of altruism, that was how June thought of it, how she struggled to think of it, even as her own husband had left at her request, a man still alive and well, making love to someone else the way he’d made love to her—or not: perhaps he was discovering new and better ways of lovemaking in someone else’s bed, surely he must be doing that, the kind of thing that would keep a man from going back to his wife. It had taken a sort of courage to let fall his things from her arms, because to stand up straight and turn her back had the feel of being trapped inside an airless room, lungs gasping for oxygen.

  Where’s my lionheart? What happened to my lionhearted lassie? Her father’s rubber boots had remained in the mudroom for twenty-one days after his death, his razor and comb in the medicine cabinet for seventeen.

  Niall spoke of belongings as possessions; he was the first to say that word choice was no accident. Possessions, as if these things had owned him, as if he’d been bewitched and bound to the place against his will. It was excruciating to hear when he said it, excruciating to recall his flat tone of voice, its quality of pure disdain. It took all she had to keep from shouting like a drunk that it didn’t matter anyway because she knew she deserved to be left, until she did shout, and shout and shout and shout. It was confusing. June was confused. She had had five martinis in the course of the previous hour when things escalated. She threw her boot at his head on his way out the door and missed. She didn’t say how relieved she was to see him go, but she was. When his car neared the road at the end of the drive, June shouted that she hoped he would live long enough to regret what he had done. She crouched as his taillights disappeared in the rain, wept quietly as vodka and bile rose in her throat. She remembered being on her hands and knees, and then lying on the wet gravel, where she woke several hours later in the cold rain.

  She had woken late the following day on the sofa, her cheek still marked by the gravel, so deeply she could feel the grooves with her fingertips, feel a bruise there, too. The same with her knees. After that, she passed out. When she woke the following morning, she did not realize what day it was until it began to get dark and she was trembling with fever. Vomit had dried on the front of her shirt. She glanced around moving only her eyes, saw the lamp and books and a framed photo of herself and Niall knocked to the floor. The sofa cushions had been tossed wildly about, and she lay half covered beneath them. She had done all of this in a fit of delirium after not having had a drink in, what, thirty, forty hours?

  She’d risen very slowly, placed her feet gently on the floor. Her legs shook, all of her shook, her tongue was glued to the roof of her mouth, and she was soaked through with sweat. She had wet herself. She had shat herself. The stench alone was enough to make her sick. She could not stop shaking. She lowered her body to the floor and crawled in the direction of the shower. Each movement seemed like that of a crippled cat, every step forced and calculated against the corresponding throb of agony.

  She finally made it to the liquor cabinet, where she sat on her knees and caught her breath. This was not the time to quit drinking, not like this. She couldn’t do it this way even if she wanted to, so she leaned her head against the wall and swallowed straight from the bottle, breathing harder through her nose as the liquid drenched her throat, her hand shaking so badly she repeatedly missed her mouth, and the bottle slipped and vodka poured down her legs and into the cuts on her knees. She snatched it up with a tempered rage, her mind slowly rousing as the drink set her system back to its fragile stasis. By the time the bottle was empty, she recalled with perfect clarity that the last thing she had said to Niall, that thing about hoping he’d live to regret what he had done, was the very last thing June’s father had said to her.

  4

  It was true to say that their children had been easy to parent, which was partly why Sarah Anne had come up with the idea that she and Jameson could foster a child, surely a single child. But fostering was something else. Every decision seemed in need of approval, every move watched over as if the state had put cameras in the house. It wasn’t true, it wasn’t like that, the caseworker didn’t come around that much, but the shadow of a higher power seemed cast, at least for Jameson. Ever since the boy arrived, Jameson worried that one wrong move could take him away, especially from Sarah Anne, have him packed up like a parcel and delivered to another couple where the father figure had a solid laugh and a grade-A frame of mind that everyone had reason to depend on. The child hadn’t eaten since breakfast. And why was his breakfast always nothing more than a few bites of Cheerios and vanilla yogurt? That wasn’t right by anyone’s standard.

  He only ever ate small bites—pecking, Sarah Anne called it, throughout the day—and yet he wanted food nearby, just in case. Especially at night, even if it meant only a single swallow of applesauce. Sarah Anne said why not. She said we’re looking at the big picture here. You can’t ruin a child raised on violence and starvation by setting a jar of applesauce near his bed.

  Too many things had gone wrong today, beginning with Ernest’s forced visit with Melinda at her court-mandated rehabilitation center. Afterward, Ernest walked out holding hands with the caseworker, the laces of his bright white sneakers double-knotted by Sarah Anne, and the sight of the child’s faltering steps caused Jameson’s heart to clench. He flashed on the video he and Sarah Anne had been required to watch on neonatal abstinence syndrome—the shuddering newborns, fish mouths gasping for air, wails of agony that Jameson had to excuse himself from and get to the bathroom, where he let go of the vomit rising to his throat.

  When Ernest saw Sarah Anne, he darted and dove upward into her arms. She lifted him to her hip, mouthing, What happened? to the caseworker. Before the woman could answer, Sarah Anne felt Ernest’s diaper and whisked him off to change it. The caseworker took Jameson aside and explained how Melinda had checked her phone nonstop while Ernest stared at her. Neither of them touched or even moved within two feet of each other. Their only real interaction had been Melinda’s waving a plastic truck in his direction as an invitation to play.

  “It’s not as if anyone ever played with her as a child, you understand,” the caseworker said. “She’s a product of the system too, and it failed her in unspeakable ways.”

  Unspeakable ways.

  Jameson wondered why she insisted on talking like this. He found it distracting, a performance of some kind.

  They’d understood that Melinda wanted to hold on to Ernest, however threadbare the tie would turn out to be. It was her way of gaining control over a system that had abused her, and she’d said as much in the court filings. You can take him, but you can’t have him. Even so, they’d hoped that as time went by she would change her mind and let them adopt, something Sarah Anne began suggesting within weeks of bringing the boy home. Two months earlier, on the night they heard that Ernest’s father had died from an overdose, Sarah Anne woke from a dream in which Melinda had died too—at Sarah Anne’s feet—clawing her ankles, convulsing across the floor. “It was horrible, Jay,” Sarah Anne said. She called him Jay when she was saying one thing and meaning another. “It was too real.”

  He’d held her hand in the dark while she held a fist to her heart, but he couldn’t find a single set of words to comfort her. He couldn’t find an honest way around the fact that Melinda’s death would be the most straightforward solution to adoption, and he knew Sarah Anne was thinking the same. In thr
ee months the state could force Melinda to give up her rights. Ernest would have been living with Jameson and Sarah Anne for well over a year by then. But what if the state didn’t enforce it? What if Melinda convinced them she was rehabilitated and prepared to be a mother? What if she truly was?

  Jameson worried daily about Sarah Anne and Ernest in equal measure. He also liked to imagine a happy ending to this story. But which story would that turn out to be? The one where a child returns to his mother after more than a year away? He would give his own life if it meant Nate and Piper would be returned to their mother.

  He couldn’t remember the caseworker’s name, and didn’t feel right about asking so long after the fact, especially when she kept calling him Jameson. She smiled often, had certainly worn braces as a kid, though her appearance was plain, so nondescript that the pink, satiny gloss on her lips came across as a poorly chosen add-on that didn’t go with her coloring and clothes. He thought of her as a house he was hired to renovate. It wasn’t right, and he knew it wasn’t right. But his life’s work was to return things to the way they were meant to be, to the original state in which they’d shined, and this girl, this young woman, was simply out of sorts. She couldn’t have graduated from college more than a year ago, and spoke like a pedagogue, her exaggerated manner like someone who’d recently become acquainted with the jargon and big ideas of her field. New concepts were still unfolding in her brain, and Jameson thought how far removed he was from such a thing, how nothing could surprise him, nothing could take a sudden turn toward discovery, ever again.