The Days When Birds Come Back

by Deborah Reed

  “You’re really OK with going back there?” Sarah Anne said. She’d startled him, but he didn’t let on. It was his habit to protect her from every kind of slight. “I think I am,” he said. “I am. We need the money.”

  “I know we do. I know. I’m just wondering. We could figure something else out. We always do.”

  His throat filled with emotion, his breastbone ached. He wanted to tell her how badly he missed the children, but couldn’t speak of it without keeping her up all night.

  She rolled away, and Jameson reached for her, lightly, brushing a finger down part of her spine. Flickers of memory came to him the way they often did, like a battle of hurt, and he allowed for that, advancing steadily to the other side of so many memories to reach the one where he saw her for the very first time. Such a strange surprise to find a woman on a stool at a potter’s wheel when he’d expected to find the room empty, the ceiling leaking from the damage he’d come to repair. But here, like some Flemish painting from a golden age, was a young woman dressed in a loose-fitting white dress, her feet bare, her back turned, blond wavy hair piled into a slack twist at her neck. He couldn’t take his eyes off her fingers, her hands gliding so delicately, so lovingly, across the top and around the sides of the clay in same way they would one day glide over him. But even then, before he’d seen her face, he felt touched by her, aroused by her right foot pumping the kick, the wheelhead whirling with immense speed for such an ancient wooden tool. The place where it stood between her knees was nearly too much to take.

  He didn’t move, afraid his shadow might register somewhere in the room and startle her. Right from the start he made a point not to do anything that might frighten her. He watched her glistening hands, slick and orchestrating, the trail of caramel-colored water dribbling down her wrist.

  He didn’t need to see her face to know what she looked like. How was it that he already knew by the curve of her, by watching the loose threads of hair lifting and falling to the rhythm of the oscillating fan?

  Recalling her this way gave him a sudden hard-on. He hadn’t expected that, and didn’t want it, not now anyway, not lately. But here it was, a charge, a pulse of life racing through his body. He locked his hands beneath his head, crossed his ankles, and drew in an extra-long breath. They had not made love for at least three months. Maybe longer.

  In college he’d hired himself out as a repairman. At the start of his senior year he’d accepted a small project several miles from campus, near the Mackenzie River. A woman had a leak in a studio that her niece used on the property, and Jameson told her a leak would be no trouble at all, and that was how it all began, with a phone call from a stranger.

  He’d arrived out there at dawn on a Saturday, and nearly missed finding it. The house was a long ranch, easy to spot, but the studio was a small outpost quite a distance in the back. He’d looped around the property twice on foot before coming across a path in the tall grass, which he followed to a small orchard of fruit trees—apple, plum, and pear—and there, across a rolling meadow full of foxglove and Scotch broom, stood the studio, its oversized windows reflecting the flowers and the knee-high grass. Red-tailed hawks and turkey vultures swung high against the rising sun. He’d fixed all of it to memory, including the shift in the air that day, the first crisp push taking them from one season into the next.

  The deep and dusty path led to a red Dutch door, the top portion of which swung fully open, and beyond it in the middle of the room sat a young woman spinning clay. The morning sun lit the milky windows and plank walls and floor with an amber glow, and he took it all in as if he might never again see such a thing in his life.

  He watched for what felt like several minutes before she snapped her head around, as if sensing him behind her. Her foot lifted from the kick, and a bowl flew sideways on the wheel. “Oh, hell!” she said, swiping at her hair as the fan came back around, leaving umber streaks across her forehead. “Are you the carpenter?” she asked, looking exactly as he knew she would, her eyes and mouth familiar in a way he didn’t understand.

  “I am,” he said. “Are you the lady?”

  This made them laugh and blush, at least he believed she’d blushed. He’d dropped his hot face downward so quickly he’d never known for sure. For certain she’d hurried out of his way, telling him her aunt had mentioned he’d be there early, but she thought other people’s early wasn’t the same as hers. He would have liked her immediately if only for that. She washed her hands in the sink and, without looking up, said she’d be just a second.

  “Sorry I scared you,” he said. “I’m in no rush.”

  She didn’t answer one way or another, just gathered her things and darted past him, smiling at the floor.

  It took three days to fix the leak, longer than expected, and when he was alone in the studio with the leak newly repaired, he traced a finger through the dry clay in the grain of the wooden wheel and felt the chalky powder between his finger and thumb as he hummed that old song about the carpenter and the lady and marriage and having her baby. He carried his tools through a warm rain across the meadow to his truck, and they seemed heavier than before. He drove down the country road until his cell phone gained service, then stopped to call the aunt for Sarah Anne’s number, which the aunt rattled off without hesitation, and he wondered if Sarah Anne had said something about him. When she answered the phone, he asked if she would like to meet for pizza, and he waited in a mild state of dread as the wipers creaked and she told him to hold on, and she came back and asked him to hold some more. The third time she returned, she said, “Yes. If your offer is meant for today at noon.” Noon was twenty minutes away, and so was she.

  His shirt had dried to his skin as he drove toward her, and by the time he pulled into Marzano’s parking lot, it felt shrink-wrapped, itchy against his ribs.

  He sat across from her in a booth, and it was easy to do, suddenly the easiest thing he’d ever done. “I’m so glad you called,” she said, as carefree a set of words as ever were spoken.

  His hard-on was thriving now, lifting his boxers, his groin filling with heat, and he wondered how deeply Sarah Anne had fallen asleep, and what she might think of this going on in the bed next to her.

  He knew that sometimes the mere sight of him could remind her of things she’d rather not think about, just like the sight of her with Ernest on her hip could do to him. But he was trying, and Sarah Anne was trying, and every day was its own challenge, its own big picture. He imagined a time when a road that led to letting go would reveal itself, or a valve in hand would turn toward a release, some improved-upon system of life.

  He rested his hand on Sarah Anne’s hip, in the warm curve where her waist dipped sharply. She patted his fingers twice, then tucked her fists up near her throat. After a moment she placed her hand over his where it stayed.

  A year after they met, on another early morning like the first, he’d walked down to the studio to bring her a second cup of coffee. By then they’d spent nearly every weekend at the house, while Sarah Anne’s aunt drove to Cottage Grove to help care for an older, ailing cousin with whom she’d been close since childhood. For Sarah Anne and Jameson, the weekends became a spoiled getaway, an escape from the strain of puny campus apartments and crowded parties and into the quiet green and open air. Sarah Anne woke at dawn for the studio, and Jameson woke with her, each getting their first cup of coffee in before Sarah Anne followed the meadow path with sleep in her eyes. Jameson would return to bed with a book, a novel if he was caught up on school, and lose himself beneath the feather blanket they shared, even as it became more difficult to leave for the jobs he’d have to begin by ten a.m. But on this particular day when he brought her a second cup, Jameson had no work, and he found her in the studio just as he’d found her at the start, facing away from him, pumping the kick. When he called out, so as not to startle her by walking in, she didn’t answer. He called louder a second time, and as he entered, she let go of the kick and squeezed the vase on the wheel to ruin.


  He’d never seen her do this, leaning into the wheel, elbows on her knees, shaking her head no. He said her name, but she didn’t move, and as he came toward her, she sat upright, swept her hair back with her arm, and turned. She had the most tender morning face he’d ever known, and here, even though she’d been awake for hours, was the look of having just crawled from bed, as if her body were still warm from the covers. The desire to hold her was intense. But he had the coffee in one hand, her own hands were caked in clay, and something was going on that required restraint.

  “What?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

  She placed her cheek on his chest, and when she looked up he could see that she’d been crying.

  “Sarah Anne,” he said.

  She said, “If you want this life, it would be nice of you to tell me. And if you can’t, you know, say the words, then tell me that. Either way I need to know, and I would like it to be today.”

  He was terrible at saying how he felt. There was no excuse for it. There’d been no childhood moment of shaming him against his own emotions, no kind of trauma to teach him to be afraid. And yet, for as long as he could remember, he’d kept things right next to the bone. It served no purpose, and most often it had worked against him, yet he did it anyway. Even here he was doing it, when something more was called for.

  “This life?” he said, and already his words sounded forced, not to mention that gaze of hers, the deadly serious smile a clear message that Sarah Anne was surely wondering if Jameson was getting it. And then he did get it, loud and clear. What he didn’t understand was why, why today, why did she need an answer right now?

  Her smile began to fade, her sights shifting toward the coffee dribbling down his wrist. She was wearing his red flannel shirt, taken over as her own, and he saw past the buttons between her breasts and the curve of them too, and he gazed at her tanned arms beneath the sloppy sleeves rolled to her elbows, and he filled with worry over what to do next. Her shorts exposed much of her thighs, and the longer he took to answer her question, the deeper his desire for her grew. A strange yearning that seemed to be attached to something bigger than themselves, as if Sarah Anne had managed to gaze into the future through a magic viewer to the place where their lives were already set up and running, and she was bidding him to take a look in there, too.

  And he knew, just as sure as he stood there, that a day would come when he’d tell their children—a boy and a girl with golden hair and olive skin just like Sarah Anne’s—about this moment of proposal. And her hands caked full of clay, he’d say. And dry cracks streaking her arms and cheeks, and she was getting a little annoyed with me for taking so long to say the words. He’d describe the intensity of her beauty—always was and always would be, and how, at that wheel, her lovely soul hit hard.

  She’d raised an eyebrow at the coffee meant for her, spilling and going cold.

  “I do,” he said, “want this life.”

  Now, beside him in bed, Sarah Anne’s breathing was heavier, her hand having slipped off of his. That boy and girl, as yet unborn when he asked Sarah Anne to marry him, arrived seven months from that day.

  He removed his hand from her hip and lay there thinking about when he’d stepped back into the house after learning the job in eastern Washington had been canceled, and that eerie silence settling over the rooms in the same way it had three years ago. He’d rushed to the living room and found Ernest asleep on the sofa and Sarah Anne sitting cross-legged on the floor, rubbing a circle on his back. The boy was sleeping, just sleeping, but Jameson had choked up and ducked into the kitchen, where he sat for a time before disturbing Sarah Anne with the news. After that, he’d made them breakfast for dinner.

  Now Ernest began thumping his heel against the wall next to theirs. The pounding was one of the strategies he used to fight his way into sleep. Jameson often thought of him while hammering nails, the way the steady strike helped him fight through something, too.

  “So you’re going,” Sarah Anne said suddenly, with a suck of air, returning to a conversation he’d thought was over.

  A few seconds passed. “It’s not like we have a choice,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “Maybe we do. Maybe we should talk about it. I don’t know. I hate to think of you going back there without me. I hate to think of you being there at all.”

  “I don’t care for it much myself.”

  The thumping continued.

  “That’s an understatement,” he added. “I’m going to miss you something awful. I don’t know that I’ll get much of a break, but maybe you could come . . .”

  Ernest banged his heel especially hard, but didn’t call out for either of them.

  After a moment Sarah Anne said, “You need to get some rest, then. That’s a long drive, and it sounds like a lot of work in a short amount of time.”

  “Wait,” he said, pressing himself into her back. He was harder than before, nearly hard enough to burst, and this surprised her, he could tell, by the way she snapped her head around. It surprised him, too. He reached under her top for her breast, kissed her shoulder, the side of her neck, and she responded, slowly, her arms wrapping him in. And then she flipped forcefully onto her back, and they did not kiss; his mouth was on her breast, his hands, hers too, clutching fiercely onto the other with a clear-eyed greed. She reached down and around, shoving past clothes, and still his boxers clung to an ankle, her pajamas not fully off when he entered her with his fingers, and then himself.

  Her nails dug into his shoulder blades and she told him to fuck her harder and he did just that, and no sooner had she spoken the words than she let go a cry, as guttural as any animal in the wild, and Jameson followed right behind, before dropping his head against her shoulder.

  Within seconds he felt a well of emotion. He could not see her face in the dark, but he knew she was on the verge of tears, too.

  She slid out from under him and cleared her throat while he rolled onto his back. They lay for a moment without a word.

  Ernest kicked the wall.

  Sarah Anne rose onto her elbow and kissed Jameson’s forehead like she was kissing a child. She sat on the bed and fixed herself into her pajamas with her back to him. “Do you think this woman was the one calling and hanging up?”

  “No . . . why?” he asked, though it had crossed his mind.

  “No?”

  “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Yes. It doesn’t.”

  Jameson followed the shape of Sarah Anne through the dark until she braced her way around the doorframe. He could hear her settling Ernest to sleep with the same soft lullabies the twins had always asked for. They’d been born within a minute of each other, and only Piper had cried, if one could call that little whimper, that tiny skirl, a cry. Nate had smacked his thin pink lips over his gums and gone to sleep. “They’re so content, so happy to be here,” the midwife said, hugging Jameson with an outstretched arm, resting her cheek atop Sarah Anne’s sweaty head.

  “Just one more,” the children pleaded of Sarah Anne up to the week before they died. “Please. One more song and we promise we’ll go to sleep.”

  11

  June sat on the edge of her bed, the night clear, stars bursting through the black, the moon illuminating her tidy room, reflecting off the shiny worn surface of her brown rubber flip-flops near the bed. She couldn’t sleep, didn’t feel like lying down, didn’t feel like getting up. The shadowy trees outside gave her something to look at, and she found herself humming Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, the lullaby Grandmam used to sing to distract her from the howling winds of winter and the branches rasping the roof.

  June had sensed a kind of safekeeping afoot. Safekeeping had been a Grandmam favorite. Never what she meant, exactly. Like storing the croquet mallets on the top shelf of the shed for safekeeping. It was really to keep them out of June’s reach. Six years old, too small for swinging a mallet of that size, June wildly missing the large ball at her feet, and yet she seemed to have loved nothing more—the way Grandd
ad turned his ear toward the crack when June finally did hit the ball, and he’d smile, and she understood, even then, that the two of them held a kinship for the strangest things. All the cracks and pops and snaps and jangles of the world. The zest of reds and blues and yellows, every color in between. Have a look, June. Have a listen. Write it down. But when their croquet game was meant to be over, June often refused to let go of the mallet. Why was that? Granddad would try coaxing it from her fists, the balls already put away, and June knew it was only a matter of time before Grandmam got fed up and shot across the yard toward her, and when she did, June ran, slicing the mallet through the air and laughing as she darted toward the trees. Sometimes, after she was caught, she’d manage to squirm free and swing the mallet against the white trees, and the mallet would bounce back with such force that it knocked her flat on her rear. This made her laugh even harder. She’d come to her feet like a tiny drunk, swinging at the ivy if she got that far, or back to the lawn chair on the patio if she’d managed a head start. Grandmam would win in the end, of course she would, a woman three times June’s size, snatching her by the ankles, cheeky, cheeky, cheeky, she’d say, but June could see her stifled laughter as they wrangled to the ground.

  Yet something about it wasn’t funny at all. June remembered a kind of hostility in her hands, a fierce and frightening need to slug and pummel and thrash what now seemed a barely veiled painful existence into oblivion.

  June’s father often watched from the upstairs window. His box seat, Grandmam called it. Maybe his watching was the thing that inspired June to behave so strangely. Maybe she had wanted him to know she was down there having a life in spite of his absence, even if her child’s mind couldn’t call it that. Maybe she was having a normal childhood. Maybe she was having fun.