The Colours of Birds

by Higgins, Rebecca

  “Jakey, don’t do that, okay, honey? I’ve brought some stuff for you to play with.” She digs blocks and books and some soft animals out of a bag and gets Jake set up on the floor. Olive puts the gum and cards on the coffee table.

  “Do you have any coffee?”

  Of course. But please don’t spill it or let Jake spill it. “Sure, I’ll get it started.”

  When she gets back from putting the coffee on, the machine clearing its throat and getting down to brewing, Jake is playing with the stuff that Harriet’s pulled out for him with one hand, the other digging around in his nose. Harriet is staring out the window at the leaf blotch.

  “That tree doesn’t look that great.”

  “No.”

  “Have you talked to the landlord? Maybe the city can cut it down.”

  Olive bristles. “It doesn’t look great, but it’s healthy. It will be green again after the winter.”

  “But it’s kind of ugly to look at.”

  Jake is wiping what comes out of his nose on the floor.

  “It’s fine. What’s been going on with you?”

  “Well, lots, but for one thing, Andrew’s mother isn’t doing so well.”

  Harriet’s husband is a very good son to his mother, visiting her every day after work, but sometimes it makes it hard for Harriet, alone with Jake all the time. Olive feels for her sister, but being alone is not the part Harriet talks about.

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Yeah, sometimes when he goes in now, she thinks he’s her other son, the one who died when he was little.”

  “I didn’t know Andrew had a brother who died.” This information makes Harriet’s husband more interesting.

  “Yeah, I don’t know much about that; he never talks about it.”

  Shocking.

  “Cwackers.”

  Harriet tries to ignore him.

  “So you were saying that she thinks Andrew is his brother?” Olive has developed a skill she never needed before Jake’s arrival. She is now a prompter.

  “Yes, and—”

  “CWAACCCKKEERRSS.”

  Behind him, near the window, Mim’s leaves are closed even though it’s the middle of the day. Olive doesn’t blame her.

  “Do you have any crackers? I brought grapes, but we ran out of the goldfish he likes.”

  “I might, but I don’t think I have the goldfish.”

  “Whatever you have.”

  In the kitchen, Olive digs some stale saltines out of the back of the cupboard and puts them in some plastic Tupperware for the kid, who is starting to wail.

  “Auntie Olive is getting you some crackers, okay?” Harriet says in a soothing voice to him, slightly muffled. She must have picked him up, her face in his hair. The wail shrinks to a whimper.

  The coffee maker has stopped gurgling, and it smells deep and dark and comforting. Olive stands in front of the machine and breathes in, feeling her body loosen some.

  “Hey, is this the new issue?” Harriet calls. She must be talking about the magazine on the coffee table. Olive loves when a magazine is just new, and she is looking forward to reading it later this afternoon, curled in a corner of the couch with tea that smells like vanilla and cinnamon.

  “Yeah,” Olive calls back. Normally she doesn’t like anyone to read a new magazine before she gets to it—she likes the pages to be smooth and unfolded, the shiny pictures unseen by other eyes—but Harriet knows this, and Olive doesn’t want to hear that sigh again.

  “Go ahead,” she says, knowing that Harriet is already flipping through it, reading the unread stories. She pours the cups of coffee—black for both of them—and puts them on a tray that Harriet gave her for a birthday a few years ago. She adds the Tupperware crackers. Jake is quiet now. Olive breathes in deeply, pauses, and breathes out, long and slow. Then she takes the tray into the living room.

  Harriet is on the couch looking at the magazine, and Jake is over in the corner near Mim. Very close to Mim. Olive’s stomach bottoms out. Still carrying the tray, she gets closer. Jake pulls a leaf and several more fall. He rips another leaf off and drops it onto Mim’s plate, filling with leaf parts and bits of twig and dirt. Mim is nearly naked. Olive shivers and freezes. She wants to stop him but can’t speak, just stands behind him with the tray, tears coming. Quiet things are suddenly loud, and Olive can hear Mim’s parts as they hit the plate, as clearly as she can hear Harriet turning pages behind her.

  My Dad and Me, and Everybody Else

  Every day of the week I steal books, but Sundays are different. On Sunday nights, when other people are at AA meetings or watching nature programs or washing quilts at the laundromat, I take the books to a pond in the big park near my apartment. It’s the swampy part of the pond, full of bulrushes and sludge. On Sunday nights, this part of the park is quiet and empty. I carry the books in a large red backpack, the kind other people use for camping. Before I leave the apartment, I take inventory of the backpack: books, duct tape, plastic bags. If it’s been a particularly good week, I may fill and carry a few extra plastic bags full of books, too, doubled so they don’t break on the way.

  Sometimes I wonder if anyone’s looking out their windows when I walk by with my red backpack every Sunday night. Maybe there’s an old lady who spends a lot of time watching the neighbourhood through her bifocals, and maybe she thinks, “Oh, that nice boy must be coming back from another weekend at home. His mother must be so proud.”

  When I get to the pond, I check around, just to make sure, but I’m always alone. Then I drop the backpack on the grass and unload everything. Bibles and children’s stories and thin volumes of poetry. I bundle the books into stacks and wrap them in the duct tape. I drop each stack into its own plastic bag. To each bag, I add rocks. I knot and double knot each bag, and add a final layer of tape to seal everything in. Then I fling the packages one by one into the pond like lead Frisbees. Sometimes they’re especially heavy, and I have to use both arms to throw them in. I slip the bag onto my back while I check to make sure no books are floating up to the top of the pond.

  Soon I’m going to have to find another dump site. Under the surface, the pile of books must be growing. At this rate, someday I’m going to toss in a package, and it’ll just sit on the top of the underwater book mountain, not hidden at all.

  On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, right after my shift finishes at three, I go to the library around the corner. I mill around, flip through magazines, pretend to use the computer catalogue. Sometimes I find a comfortable chair and take a nap. I check the schedule to see who’s using the community rooms and when they’ll be finished. The community rooms are in the basement. Seniors knit there, or children do their homework, leaned over by a volunteer. When a group finishes, I watch them from an upstairs window. I watch them stream out the front door and down the steps, some racing off alone, others strolling and chatting with friends from the group. Then I slip downstairs, as quickly as I can without being too obvious, and dip into the smaller of the rooms before the librarian comes down to lock the door. I pull the books out of my bag and from under my shirt. I slide open the window and push the books out onto the grass. Then I go upstairs and out of the building, grab the books off the ground, and head home.

  I wander side streets on Saturdays, looking for yard sales (easy, but limited because they’re seasonal). I browse the small sales but only work the big ones. For one thing, the big yard sales are more likely to have books. For another thing, the owners of the yard are more likely to be distracted, stuck haggling over the price of a ceramic elephant or a macramé plant holder. Too preoccupied to see me.

  Sometimes I’ll luck out and there will be a fire truck racing by or a stroller of twins, so the yard owner (and everybody else at the sale) is suddenly distracted. I’ll lean over, pretending to flip through a crate of old records, and as I lean forward, I’ll slip a few books into the bag I’ve got with me. Sometimes I’ll even buy a record for good measure, even though I don’t have a turntable.

&nb
sp; Tuesdays and Thursdays are reserved for bookstore work. I was at a party once, caught in a conversation with somebody who worked at one of the big-box bookstores. He told me their theft detectors are just for show. That they don’t even work. This information has proven very useful. I mostly stick to one location, the one nearest the park, because I don’t want to push my luck with one of the bigger stores downtown. Sometimes I take the bus out to the suburbs and shop there. The trick is to walk out at medium speed. Too fast and you attract attention; too slow and people wonder. I usually check my phone or my watch, or look out intently at something on the street. This keeps my eyes occupied and my pace even as I leave, spines of books pressing into the flesh under my arms.

  When I was growing up, our house was silent and filled with books. The living room was lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves. Nothing was organized, just crammed in there, regardless of subject or colour. In front of the bookshelves were more mounds. Books lined the hall to the kitchen, and under the kitchen table there were teetering piles that used to fall over when I kicked my legs at breakfast. The staircase between the main and second floors started off clear, but when I was a teenager, the books started going up the stairs too. At first they were only on one side, under the bannister, so it was easy enough to get upstairs or down without knocking over the piles. Later, in the year or two before I left, there was only a narrow pathway up the stairs, flanked on either side by heaps of books.

  The only sound was the ffftt of pages turning. It was just my dad and me. He worked at a library all day and then came home to another one. I don’t remember how my father was before my mother left. She left when I was three. I heard the story once, from my aunt right before she died, the pain pushing out all of her unsaid things, I guess. Anyway, this is what my aunt said:

  “Your mother came home that night. It was late, maybe close to midnight. She was a secretary, and her work finished at five thirty, but she’d gone out with the insurance people after the office closed. She walked over to where your father was. He was in the living room, reading in his recliner. She took off all of her clothes, right in front of the chair, and stood in front of him. He kept reading and didn’t look up. She stood there naked, quiet, looking at him. He didn’t look up. She waited for twenty minutes, just standing there. Then she picked up her clothes, dressed, and went upstairs. Your father didn’t move. You were asleep. She kissed you on your head, packed enough things to manage, and left.”

  Listening to that story made me uncomfortable. I guess it’s good I don’t remember her because when I think of that story the woman’s face is a smudge without features, like she might not be related to me at all.

  After my aunt told me that, she said to send my father in. He was in the waiting room, reading. He finished the page before he stood up, closed the book on his finger, and went to see his dying sister. His reading glasses were still on his face as he turned to shut the door of her room.

  I didn’t do all that well in high school, but not too bad considering I did everything I could to avoid reading. I took a lot of classes that didn’t require much of it: all the maths, music, art, gym. English was the hardest to fake my way through, but I rented most of the required readings and watched my way through the syllabus. Lord of the Flies, Hamlet, To Kill a Mockingbird—all of that stuff was easy to find on video.

  I passed everything and graduated with the other kids. Passing was good enough. It’s not like I wanted to go to university, but I had to figure something out. I needed a job, that was for sure. I wasn’t picky. All I wanted was a peaceful, bookless life.

  When I got the job at the shredding company the summer after graduation, I was happy. There was “room to grow” at the company, my manager told me after they offered me a position as a customer-service rep. Meaning I could stay there and eventually make more money, maybe even be a manager someday. Best of all it meant I could move out. Soon.

  I saved up every cent and moved out six months after I started working. I didn’t take much, just my clothes and stuff, and moved into a basement apartment, already furnished. I didn’t stand in front of my dad when I left. I didn’t even look at him, really. I said goodbye and waved over my shoulder and left him to his library. He probably didn’t look up, but I can’t say I turned around to check.

  It’s not like we never spoke again. We’ll have an awkward phone call every few months, basically the same conversation every time.

  “Hi, Mark. It’s Dad.”

  “Yep.”

  “How are you?”

  “Good. How are you?”

  “Oh, you know. Busy.”

  I never understand this. My dad’s retired now, and he doesn’t have any friends or anybody to go out with, and the only activity he likes to do is read. How busy can the guy be? But maybe it’s just one of the things we say to each other. My dad and me, and everybody else.

  “How’s the job? Still liking it?” he asks.

  “Yeah, it’s good. Nice people.” And I love being in the document destruction business, I think. It’s true, but he won’t get that, or he will and it will hurt him, so I try not to say that very often.

  We might say a few more things, about the weather or something, and then one of us makes an excuse to get off the phone, and the other one agrees, and we say goodbye.

  Every year for my birthday, my dad sends me a book in the mail. I can’t help reading the titles before I get rid of them. Two years ago, he sent me a novel by some Russian guy I’d never heard of. I took that book to work and shredded it on my break. It went quick. It got rid of it, but I don’t do it that way anymore. The pond is a better high.

  I started doing it around my birthday last year. My dad sent me a dictionary of symbolism. I didn’t get it. What did that have to do with anything? It would be a bad present even if I were a reader. That book arrived on a Friday, and I wouldn’t be at work again until Monday, and the last thing I wanted was that book in the apartment over the weekend. So I started walking around looking for a good place to dump it. I could have just left it on a lawn or in the garbage, but they have those trash cans now with the round holes, no good for squishing books into. And if I left it on a lawn, it might have still been there the next time I walked by, and I just wanted to get rid of the thing. So I kept on walking, holding on to that book, wanting to get it as far away from my apartment as I could. I wandered into the park, and there were wider garbage cans there, but I had the idea by then, and I kept walking with that book until I got to the pond.

  Getting it to sink took a while. First time, I drew back my arm and flung that stupid dictionary with all the strength I had, but it didn’t get very far out at all, and then it just fucking floated there. I got right to the edge and leaned way out and pulled it back in, dripping and heavier than ever, and figured I’d better weight it down somehow. I left it under a bush and went to get a few supplies from a convenience store across from the park, feeling like a serial killer, determined and guiltless. Excited.

  When I got back, I shoved the wet book in a bag with a few stones and wrapped the whole thing up with tape. And then I whipped that thing away from me. It flew out of my hands, way out into the water. It splashed and went down, and I felt my shoulders relax and something releasing in my chest. It felt better than shredding. I felt like I did when I went out with a couple of guys one Friday after work, and one of them gave me a few Xanax at the bar, and I gulped them down with my beer and, after a bit, I felt good. This felt like that except I wasn’t sleepy at all. I was relaxed and awake at the same time, and I couldn’t remember feeling like that before.

  It’s Tuesday, and I’m on my way across the parking lot to check the truck before my first customer call. I hear my name and turn around. Susan from human resources is having a cigarette near the front door. I wave and she comes over. Susan’s okay, not too chatty like some of the other people at work, and her tits usually look great in whatever top she’s wearing. Today she’s wearing something shiny and black, and the light glints off it
as she walks over.

  “It’s your birthday this week, right?” she says, blowing smoke out of the side of her mouth and up.

  “How’d you know that?”

  She tilts her head. “I’m in human resources, Mark. I have access to ALL of the personnel files.” She does a fake witch’s cackle and throws her head back, and the skin of her throat looks smooth and like it might taste good.

  “Do you want to go out on Friday for it? We can get a bunch of people together.” She looks down, dropping her cigarette on the cement and grinding it out with the toe of her black, shiny shoe. Maybe that guy with the Xanax will come again, and maybe Susan will get a little bit drunk, and it might be a good birthday this year.

  “Sure, Susan. Good idea.”

  “Great! I’ll get something organized.” She smiles and turns and heads back to the office. I watch her hips and her ass until she gets to the building, and then I get to work.

  On Thursday evening, I come home from shopping and head straight to the back of the building to put all the books in the garage as usual. The other two tenants in our little building never seem to use the garage, but I keep the books covered with a tarp just in case. All that pile of books would get me is a lot of questions.

  After I’m finished out back, I walk around to the front door. There’s a manila envelope sticking out of my mailbox. I don’t even need to look at the return address—there is only one person who would send me a package this size and shape.

  I should take it out back and stuff it under the tarp with the others, but I’m curious to see how off the mark my dad will be this year. Maybe it’ll be a good story to tell Susan at the bar.