Unfurled

by Michelle Bailat-Jones

Lisa bends over the raptor box, tells us a story about finding one of the feathers and then being surprised by the falcon. “It swooped in at us. I think it wanted its feather.”

  She laughs. Lisa is someone who never pretends. She fills the moment with her memory and the emotion she draws from it. She single-handedly changes the air in the room.

  And so it feels almost normal when Neil picks up the heron box and says, “Remember that heron, Ella?”

  I tell him that I do but as soon as our eyes meet, we both look down. We continue pretending as he tells Lisa and George about the camping trip we took when we were first dating, and the injured heron we saved. Lisa tells us how she and Sam have already saved seventeen birds together. And even an owl. That was Sam’s favorite.

  This bird conversation carries us through our meal and an easy dessert and then Neil and I are excusing ourselves, refusing George’s offer to drive us home and walking the few blocks back to my dad’s with our jackets buttoned tightly. Our hoods pulled quick to our faces against the drizzle. We are silent. No longer pretending. We don’t manage a single word between us as we walk along the cold sidewalk but I am remembering that heron all over again. I am remembering how we spotted it across the marsh we’d stumbled upon, how we went closer, how shocked we were that it didn’t fly away. Then we saw its leg twisted up with a piece of submerged garbage or twine, and how agitated it was at being trapped. It reared its head and spread its wings to their full six-foot extension.

  “Can we try and free it?” Neil whispered.

  I was not sure that we should try.

  Neil unlocks the back door, ushers me inside, and I remember how still we were that day, how we tried to make whirring noises and calming clicks, but it was all useless. The heron grew more upset and pulled harder at its foot; as it thrashed and struggled a cloud of blood billowed around its foreleg.

  Which is when I knew we couldn’t help it. And I said as much to Neil. He wanted to try to subdue it, and I told him to give up. But he refused, shaking his head at me and focusing on the bird. I remember how he took another step toward the helpless bird. I watch him shake his head now, even if I haven’t asked him a question, and then he’s stepping into the bathroom and shutting the door behind him. The house is cold, but I’m taking my coat off anyway and I see the heron unfold its neck and let out a growl. It tried to lift itself again and more blood emptied into the water.

  “Stop moving! You’re killing it.”

  Neil turned to me. “We can’t just leave it.”

  But that’s exactly what I had decided to do that day. If I couldn’t save it, I would get as far away from it as possible. Let nature take its course when the next hungry fox or mountain lion came near.

  “Maybe it’s more important for this heron to become food for another animal.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I’m just saying we don’t have the tools to get it free without hurting it irreparably. If it breaks its leg it is as good as dead.”

  “If it gets eaten by a fox it is also dead.”

  “So you see it’s already too late.” I remember wanting to remind him I was about to become a vet. I had taken ethics classes, dissected and autopsied, and even learned how to put an animal to sleep. I understood humane decisions were not always easy ones. “We just have to accept some things are out of our control.”

  He shook his head. “I have to try.”

  He’s out of the bathroom now, giving me a nod that I can go in and brush my teeth if I want to. But I just stare at him until he turns and walks upstairs.

  What patience Neil had that day. He would take one step and wait for the bird to quiet, creeping forward only a few inches at a time. I kept my distance, a little hurt but mostly certain I was right. I was sure Neil would end up torturing the already injured bird and would have to concede he’d let his romantic notions mar his scientific reasoning.

  But before he reached the heron, he took a long step and removed his coat at the same time. I knew he would try to cover the bird but I also knew he wouldn’t be able to hold it and disentangle the foot by himself. And now the bird was getting wild, hopping and flapping its massive wings. Neil stilled one last time, stood frozen, but the bird did not calm down this time. So he threw his coat over the bird’s head and reached around to pin its wings. But what he hadn’t counted on was the utility of the bird’s beak, the way it sliced right through the flimsy plastic of his windbreaker. I saw that Neil would fail. Unless I helped. I did not want Neil to fail, and so I dove for the bird’s legs and plunged my hands into the mud at its feet. The flat side of its beak struck the top of my head, its growls and squawking filled the air. I was soaking wet, Neil was up to his knees in mud and pond water. But then somehow the bird was free, pushing off my back with its good foot, wings beating down on my head with a surprising gentleness. I remember how I could smell the mud on its thin legs and the dusty warmth of its long torso. We watched it float away to the far end of the marsh where it settled on a log.

  I remember how Neil turned to me with a triumphant smile. An I told you so that burst forth like a geyser from his well of safe memories and impossible stability, from his vast reservoir of confident daring. An I told you so that revealed exactly how far Neil would go to correct what he considered a gross injustice.

  So it should not surprise me so much that even as angry as he is, Neil is not quite ready to give up on us, on me. Before lunch the next day, he hands me two gifts: in one hand is a small branch from a cedar tree, and he gives me this without ceremony, says only, “incense-cedar, these cones are shaped like geese in flight.” I take the branch and hold it; I say, “oh,” and “thank you,” and he reaches forward like he might take it back. His gesture sits between us—both his gift and his hesitation. Can I give him something in return? I have nothing. I stare at the pinecones, at the split where the “wings” are. Neil lets out a low whistle between his teeth, but then he’s handing me something else. In his other hand is Erica Reza’s business card. I step back but he holds it steady.

  “I think we should try.”

  “What? Call her?”

  “We have nothing to do until tomorrow and the service. I think we should go and see her.”

  It takes me two tries—my hand stretching, retreating, stretching again—but I finally take the social worker’s card in my hand. Erica Reza, MSW, 23rd Street Project, 2324 Knott St. The other card, the pair to this one, is hidden inside my shirt, plastered across my skin below my collarbone where I have been wearing it since taking it from the cabin. This card gives me everything I need for an impersonal contact—a telephone number, an email address. I could just send her my questions and let the electricity of fiber optic cables do all the work.

  Neil insists, “It isn’t far. We can go and be back by tonight. Don’t you want to find her first? Before a judge has to, or a lawyer? Just to know?” But he changes tactics, tries another angle, “Don’t you want to know what really happened? Give your dad the benefit of the doubt?”

  “This card is maybe really old.”

  “Nine years. I counted. The letters from her to your dad stopped nine years ago.” He pauses and I don’t realize how I’ve reacted until he says, “What? Yes, I counted. I want to understand.”

  He reaches a hand to his forehead, presses the skin on the bridge of his nose. He continues. “Nine years isn’t that long. And it’s a place. An organization. So I looked it up online to be sure. It’s still there.”

  “You looked it up online?”

  “Didn’t you?”

  I am still holding the card. Yes, I have already looked it up. Quietly, on my cell phone, standing alone in the house. I also know that this place still exists. And I know that it’s an intermediate housing solution for people with psychological disorders, transitioning from the streets back into “normal” life.

  “OK,” Neil says, a sudden volume to his voice. “Ok, Ok. So John messed up. Or something else was going on. So you’re angry. You’ve read the repor
ts she sent.”

  “Only once, just to know what they were.”

  He holds up his hand. “Why shouldn’t you read them? You should read them again and again. Wouldn’t you rather know what you’re dealing with than continue to fight against the fact that you were left in the dark?”

  “I’m not fighting anything.”

  He snorts, but there is no humor in the sound. “You’re furious, Ella. You’re so furious you’ve decided to ruin everything else. Including us.”

  I hold the social worker’s card back toward him. I know what he’s saying. What he wants me to realize. “I was always ambivalent about children. One thing does not have anything to do with the other.”

  “I call bullshit on that.”

  “My appointment is already made.”

  Neil’s jaw is tight. “When?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say, dropping the card on the floor.

  “Like hell it doesn’t matter!” He folds his arms over his chest and stares at me. There is a challenge on his face but there is also so much fear. I’ve done this—I’ve made him fearful. “You can’t not tell me. You can’t be that insane.”

  Eye to eye for an instant. Does he mean this? Will he take those words back? But he says nothing. And all I say is that my appointment is for the day after the memorial service. I don’t tell him it’s a first appointment. I don’t tell him there’s a mandatory two-day waiting period.

  Instead, I pick up the social worker’s card. I walk around the house with it. Put it in my pocket. I call Trapp in from outside, rub his muddy paws with an old towel and dry his flanks and withers with long hard sweeps with the flat of my hands. I return to the living room and pick up the slender cedar branch with those geese-shaped pinecones. Then I loft them into the air and watch them fly a moment against the gray sky through the window. When they fall they hardly make a noise on the wooden floor.

  Maybe the social worker tells him that my mother is still incredibly unwell.

  But maybe this isn’t how it happens.

  Maybe he cries, his body slumped against the hospital wall, his sobs shuddering through his shoulders.

  But maybe he doesn’t. Maybe it wasn’t like that.

  Maybe it was all completely different. And maybe I have a right to know how it was.

  23

  THE ADDRESS FOR THE 23RD STREET PROJECT takes us to one of Portland’s older neighborhoods, one of wide avenues and stately rundown homes. Naked oak trees rustle above stone lions with their faces worn away and chipped urns flank the crumbling walkways and gates.

  “Must have been some neighborhood,” Neil says as the car rolls slowly along. We are arriving at dusk, the light has gone violet.

  “What a waste. It’s so run down now.” The cars lining the streets are big junkers and the people walking along the sidewalks have the busy, blank faces of the working poor.

  The house we want has scrollwork on the eaves, an ornately carved door, and a wraparound porch. Lattice grids climb between each floor. But the paint is chipped, the window frames and porch sag. Several garbage bins are lined up along the parking strip, one of them is tipped on its side with its contents spilling out onto the grass.

  We check the number. We say nothing to each other. Two men stand together on the porch.

  Neil turns off the engine. “Until college I thought half-way houses had something to do with the Underground Railroad.”

  “I thought they were for released criminals. A teacher told me something about them once but I misunderstood.” I watch the men on the porch who are smoking, discussing something with broad hand gestures. I’m whispering now. “I thought they were for people who had committed a crime. And so this meant that my mother had done that.”

  Neil takes this comment quietly and does not acknowledge that I am telling him something I’ve never been able to tell him before. I do not say more, I do not say that even after I understood that a halfway house could also be a place to give former homeless a stepping-off point, I still believed my mother was a criminal.

  We get out and walk toward the house. The men’s postures shift as we approach and I know they’ve sensed our presence. One of them is wearing nothing but a t-shirt and his arms are blue from the cold. He has one cigarette in his mouth and another in his hand. In the semidark, the tip of his hand-held cigarette glows like the end of a stick of incense.

  When we are only a few steps from the men, Neil stops and clears his throat a little. But he says nothing and I know I should be the one to speak. I open my mouth but I’m only thinking that I shouldn’t mention my mother. This is a transitional place and it’s been so long, no one who is here now will have known my mother when she lived here. My mother lived here, I think, instead of with me.

  I stare at the men’s jerky movements and their shapeless jeans. One man’s hair is greasy, the other’s is shaved. We are all staring at one another now. A door slams at the house next door and two cats sprint out from behind one of the garbage bins.

  The man in short sleeves exhales smoke through his nose. “Just so you know, we’re not interested in religion or charity.” He laughs. “We’re already up to our goddamn necks in charity.”

  “This is the 23rd Street Project?” Neil asks, but his voice is too quiet, he has to repeat himself. Both men nod with a kind of formal benevolence. “We’re looking for someone named Erica Reza.”

  The men eye one another. The skinny man puts his hand-held cigarette between his lips so is now smoking both. He removes them, then says, “I don’t know Erica.”

  The other man is dumpy, with skin that is pocked and scarred. He can’t be much older than twenty. He stuffs his hands in his pockets, says, “She’s not here anymore. She left.”

  The skinny, bare-armed man rolls his eyes and stomps a foot. “Man, you’re always doing that. I feel angry when you do that.”

  “I was being honest. You can’t ask me not to be honest.”

  “I was being honest. I used to know Erica. That means I don’t know her anymore and I won’t know her again until we re-acquaint ourselves through dialogue.”

  Neil shifts his weight, clears his throat again but the men continue.

  “I believe I always know a person, just a little. I have the right to say I know them, even someone I haven’t seen for a long time but used to know really well. Or even if we’ve just met and have only spoken for a few moments.”

  “Like the postal person?”

  “Like the postal person.” He swipes at the lank chunk of hair hanging over his forehead.

  The sleeveless man gestures toward us with a flick of his index finger. “But you don’t know them at all and yet now you’ve spoken.”

  He considers this, then turns his attention from the skinny man back to Neil. “Why are you looking for Erica?”

  “Did she leave a long time ago? Do you know where she went or how to contact her?”

  The men eye one another, the earlier challenge back in their eyes. The heavy one says, “She left this afternoon for her evening work at her office. She’ll be back on Monday. She doesn’t come on Thursdays and Fridays.”

  The skinny man hops up and down. “You see, man, you’re always doing that. That makes me angry.”

  Before they can re-launch their earlier debate, Neil interrupts, “Can you tell us where her office is.”

  “We’re not supposed to bother her at her office. We’re supposed to resolve our conflicts without her intervention.”

  “If there’s an emergency we have to call the walk-in clinic or the police.”

  A radio turns on in the house, somewhere on an upper floor. The music strikes out against the quiet cold air of the street. The skinny man lifts his head and mumbles something under his breath, then he whips a notebook from his back pocket, fishes for a little stub of pencil in his front pocket, and then he writes something down as my body chills with the memory of being in public with my mother, the shame of her note taking and constant suspicion.

  Neil put
s his hand to my lower back, stopping my slow retreat toward the car in a gesture that feels like an accusation.

  “This is useless,” I whisper. “They can’t help us.”

  “They know this Reza woman.”

  “These men are unwell.”

  Neil’s eyes darken. He removes his hand from where it was touching me.

  “Why should we tell you about Erica?” the skinny man yells across the lawn. “We don’t even know who you are.”

  Neil is still looking at me.

  “They won’t help us,” I say. “They’re on a different planet.”

  I have been whispering but Neil answers me in a normal voice, “You are going to have to try harder than this.” He turns and speaks to the men. “My wife’s mother used to live here. She’s missing and we’re trying to find her. Erica might know where she is.”

  The heavyset one breaks rank with the skinny one, heads toward us. He is much bigger when he arrives, as tall as Neil. Even his beard is greasy and he smells of sour sweat. But his teeth are perfect. White and orderly. Shining “You should have said so in the first place.” He points to a building attached to the big house. “Her office is on the second floor. She’s normally there until six o’clock.”

  It is only just after 5:00 PM but she is already leaving as we approach the office door—we find ourselves face to face with a woman, a nameplate nailed to the door casing beside her shoulder. She has turned her head quickly upon hearing our footsteps and strands of her long black hair catch on the nail. Bright eyes behind spectacles. Long streaks of gray at her temples. She could be the twin of the first lab technician I ever worked with, a woman named Jamila, a woman who once lifted a greyhound’s enlarged heart with her bare hands during an autopsy and held it up to my face—“drugs, far too many horrible drugs in this animal!”—that I stare too long without speaking.

  Neil steps right in, asks her what we need to know and gives her my mother’s name like it is any ordinary person’s name.

  The woman blinks. Glances from Neil to me, back to Neil, but quickly back to me. Too quickly. “You’re talking about quite some time ago, yes?”