Starling Days

by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

  “That’s Ichiro,” Ami said, pointing towards the window. At first, he thought she meant the mountain. Then he saw that she was pointing to the field. A white animal ambled among the yellow grass.

  “Is that a . . .” Oscar paused because it certainly wasn’t a horse.

  “He’s a llama. We moved here so we could adopt him.” Ami straightened the already straight coverlet. As she petted the cotton, she described a documentary she’d seen about the raising of llamas. She hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it for weeks, months even. But, of course, in LA, it hadn’t been possible to keep such an animal. She was a kindergarten teacher and had small humans to care for. But she visited llama farms. She considered the difference between the Ccara and Tampuli breeds. “And then finally we adopted Ichiro.”

  “Congratulations,” Oscar said. Was that the right thing to say when someone made a ridiculous choice? He supposed so. It was what people said at weddings after all.

  “Thank you. When we got him he was so teensy.” She made a pinching gesture. Then she laughed. “Well, not that teensy. I’ll show you a photo later.”

  She left him to get settled. Oscar stood by the window, watching the llama pick its way across the grass. It did not appear to be moving with any great purpose. It looked like a horse drawn by a child who’d only ever seen rabbits.

  Oscar let the thought of Mina enter his brain. He was not a stupid man. His brain had always done what he told it to. If there was a problem, he worked at it and eventually it was solved. Guilt was not a useful emotion. He thought of her in the taxi back from the bridge and the way she’d held onto that stupid rubber flip-flop. It had been dirty with the imprint of her foot. He thought of her lips smeared with vomit. How she used to kiss him all over his face and the top of his head. He thought of moving to New York together after college and how scared he’d been, and how much he’d wanted to be in that city. It was a city without his mother or father and they were going to make it theirs. Mina had danced around that empty apartment, saying, “We’re home. We’re home. We’re home.” He thought of the first time they’d fucked. He could barely hear her over the sound of the sheets rustling against the dorm-issued rubber mattress. He could just make out her voice breathing, “You, you, you.”

  The figure of Ami appeared at the field’s edge. She held out a hand to the animal and it bent its head to the cup of her palm.

  It was just Mina and the apartment, and her fingers going sore from stripping this wall. Days. It felt like one unending day that snuck around the globe. As soon as she felt she’d made it through, the day arrived again. The progress was slow. The wall was wet. And perhaps she had slept too much or too little. The remaining birds glared at her with their scratched and scribbled-over eyes.

  The time on the oven clock was wrong, off by both minutes and hours. Mina could have forgiven it that. But every time she looked at it, it didn’t seem to have moved. Could the hours possibly have stretched so long? Oscar had been gone for five days. On the tracking map, their dots were ridiculously far away. To see them both, she had to zoom out so far that his icon covered the entirety of the island he was staying on.

  Are you okay? she texted.

  Fine, he replied.

  When are you coming back? she texted.

  Soon.

  How soon is soon?

  I just need to deal with some things. A few more days, maybe another week.

  It was only five days. She was a grown woman. But she hadn’t spoken to anyone since Phoebe stayed over. Oscar didn’t call. Her calendar was all downticks. The sharp Vs stabbing downwards.

  She opened her laptop to think about the women who survived. But her mind paraded the fragile bodies of those who hadn’t. She downloaded twenty articles from JSTOR, but as soon as she started reading, her brain slid away from the words. She told herself that life was just a series of moments. She just had to make it through this one.

  There was a noise, short, like a sudden exhalation of breath or a cat landing. She looked around but saw no creature capable of breathing or jumping. A few hours later, she heard it again. More time passed, and looking in the right direction, she saw it. The bunch of peonies Oscar had bought her was molting. How had she never realized petals made a sound as they fall? They seemed like they should be silent but of course they had weight.

  She texted Oscar: Did you know petals make a sound when they fall?

  No reply.

  She missed the trust she used to have in the pills. She missed the reassurance of them, and the daily swallow. She missed the way she rarely thought of them, the way you never think of how the toilet works until it clogs. Persephone swallowed pomegranate seed after pomegranate seed and that way became a wife. Were those her last pomegranate seeds? Or did she eat them by the fuchsia handful, damned to Hades as she already was? Or perhaps she didn’t mind. As godly husbands went, Hades wasn’t bad. He didn’t fuck around as much as Zeus or Poseidon. He had a cordial relationship with his mother-in-law. Perhaps it was Hades she should pity. He sat alone every summer. While fruits and flowers and music festivals burgeoned, he had only the dead to talk to.

  That morning he and his father had gone over the suppliers that would be able to meet the demands of a major grocery chain. Now his father was conducting long phone calls in a Japanese so swift and technical that Oscar, waiting outside the door, understood only every tenth word—go, come, there, how much, here, when, month.

  Oscar wished he could call Mina and talk through the pitch. But it was impossible to say, “Hey, can you stop being depressed for a minute and be my partner again?”

  His father had given him access to the cellar and he’d carried some options into the light of the kitchen. He lined them up on the polished oak table in two rows, like a football-team photo. The taller sake bottles raised their pale necks at the back. Beer bottles squatted up front.

  He recognized some of the brands. The pepper ale was as familiar as Mina’s face. It was one he’d pitched hard early on. Others were new to him. He’d never drunk chūhai. The cans were adorned with images of peaches, cherries, lychees. Chūhai were popular with Japanese women. He’d tried this type of pre-made cocktail only once. The sugary peach that masked the cheap sake had irritated his throat and tongue.

  He could parse only some of the kanji. He slid out his phone and opened the camera app. If he took a picture, he’d have the time and privacy to examine the brands and practice pronunciation.

  CLICK.

  After muting the phone, he moved closer. For each drink, he wanted a close-up of the label. As he centered the frame on each can, he became fluid and fast. Each shot took only a second. He reached over the chūhai to grab a blue bottle of sake.

  “Oscar?” Ami’s voice was behind him. He turned quickly, putting the phone down on the table.

  Ami stood just inside the room, looking oddly misplaced, like a hat accidentally left on a subway seat. He wasn’t sure what it was about her posture or her silence that gave the impression. He wondered if she’d lost something, and if he should offer to help her find it.

  “I didn’t want to interrupt.” She adjusted her face into a serious cast. “But I wasn’t sure if I’d get a chance to talk to you like this. And I thought while your father is busy . . . I suppose I just wanted to ask if you’ve ever thought about working somewhere else?”

  “Somewhere else?”

  “Someone else I guess would be a better way of putting it. Not working for your father.”

  He’d taken the family name. Wasn’t that good enough? Maybe she resented sharing it with him.

  “Does he have a problem with my work?” Was this what his father had wanted to talk to him about?

  She turned to the window where the llama pointed its ridiculous ears. “I’d ask my own son the same question. It’s not personal. I’d want him to consider his options.”

  Oscar wondered if all women were so irrational or only the ones in his life. The llama couldn’t work for his father. The llama didn�
�t have a wife to support.

  “Do you not want me working for him?”

  Her expression was tinged with pity, like a girl explaining you’re nice but not really her type. Oscar’s phone buzzed where he’d laid it on the table. The sound was a heavy throb. The sake bottles stood calm. His wife’s ghostly hands were unable to shake them, try as she might.

  “Do you need to get that?” Ami said.

  Mina’s name beamed up from the screen. Next to it was a mouse emoji. She’d snuck the emoji into his contacts. When he asked her why a mouse, she’d said rat was her year. Rats, she said, were smart but difficult. He was rat year too, but he’d never gone in for that sort of thing.

  If he didn’t pick up what would Ami think? Would she tell his father that Oscar, too, betrayed wives?

  So he took the call, nodding to Ami as he stepped out of the kitchen into the hallway. Mina filled his ear: “When are you coming back?”

  Oscar flattened his voice so that it would sound calm and she would hear her own hysteria. “I’ve been busy.” The phone was hot against his cheek. He held it slightly further from his ear.

  “I thought we were going to paint this apartment together. I bought a ladder.” She sounded so sad, her voice almost keening.

  “I’ll be home soon,” he said. Despite the big bed and the lavender-scented sheets, Oscar had been tired all week. He didn’t know where his body-clock was set to—London, New York, or just some airplane, full of endless rounds of naps and foil-wrapped meals. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “I miss you. Can’t you do whatever this is back here?”

  Oscar had the uncomfortable feeling of shirking. He’d never liked skipping class, though he had once or twice with Theo back in the day, wandering to the woods to smoke and listen to CDs on Theo’s Discman. In college, he’d always been the first to drop his paper into the hand-in box. And yet, as a husband, he was procrastinating.

  “There’s something I need to figure out with Dad.” Oscar sat on the staircase and rested his head against the wall. It was white. All the walls of this house were white. He didn’t know if it was grey-white or yellow-white, if it was called Wax or Jasmine. It beamed only the idea of white.

  “Oh. Is everything okay?” she asked.

  “It’s fine.”

  “You sound angry.”

  “I’m not angry,” he said.

  “You sound angry.”

  He added, “Sometimes even sane people get tired.”

  There was a time when she was his rest, when they’d lie in bed, her back pressed against his belly, his arm looped over her, and he’d whisper his worries into the nape of her neck.

  He lay back. The stairs jabbed his vertebrae. Above him, the bulb rested in its tasteful Art Deco globe.

  “It’s so fucking lonely here without you. Why are you being like this? You’ve never been like this before.”

  “Mina, you weren’t like this before either. I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “Just come back, please. I love you. I need you.”

  Some memory of his former self leapt up and out of his body to save her, but his body stayed sprawled on the staircase. He would go to her eventually, but he was so tired. He would rest here with the absurd llama and the white walls. Then he’d figure out what to do about his wife. “I should go. I don’t know, why don’t you invite Phoebe over? You had fun with her at that gallery, right?”

  A few minutes after he’d hung up a notification popped up on his phone. More than a notification it was an instruction: Mina’s location services are not available. Ask them to correct their settings.

  This was what doctors called a Cry for Help. But he couldn’t bring himself to call her back. Maybe she was right. Maybe they never should have got married. God, he’d stood up in front of all of their friends and told them he was getting married. He’d seen couples squeeze hands under the rented tablecloths. Afterwards, there had been a tumble of copycat weddings.

  He’d drunk a lot of toasts at the wedding. His father had supplied the booze and the bar had been generous. But he hadn’t felt drunk. They’d walked from the reception hall. Their closest friends were staying in other cabins nearby. The bridal cabin was the largest and the furthest from the reception hall. There had been plenty of night air to open his brain cells.

  The room had smelt of candlewicks. It was a good smell. Mina’s stockings had got torn and she slipped them off over her thighs. The thong had been new and oddly tricky to remove. When he did, he threw it over his shoulder and it landed as soundless as snow. Mina’s dress was old fashioned, with a corseted waist and the thrill of bustles and ruffles that seemed designed for plunging his hands inside. Her thighs were honey-gold in the low light. He remembered that they had rocked gently under his hands. He remembered saying, “I want my wife.” She’d laughed, hadn’t she? He’d fiddled with the buttons, but there were too many. They were lined up along the back of the dress in a string, like a pearl necklace, and were fastened with tight loops of silk. So he’d left it on. The taffeta petticoats, flipped upwards, had tickled and teased his chest. At one point, she’d reached up and stroked the long ridge of his nose. “Forever,” she’d said. Her eyes were shut and her head flung back. At one point, he’d felt the cool rub of the wedding ring against his neck.

  Afterwards, she went to the bathroom. She was gone a while and he lay on the bed. Outside the window, he could see the lights on in the other cabins. It was March, and rain, which had held off for the ceremony, had begun to fondle the trees. He wondered how many of his friends were fucking, making love, sleeping. He thought briefly of his mother alone in her own cabin. He worried—it was absurd—but he worried that she’d be jealous. He had thought how strange it was to have everything you wanted. He might’ve dozed. Just for a moment, slipping into contentment, like it was a sudsy bath.

  When he woke, there were no window lights on outside. And his wife was not in their bed. He found her in the bathroom. Her face was squashed against the toilet seat. There was vomit everywhere. It filled the gaps between the tiles and clung to her carefully ringleted hair. He’d had to step in it in his bare feet. With horror, he felt that it was cold. Cold vomit meant it had had time to cool. He shook her, and her eyelids had opened, the pupils as large as blueberries. He hadn’t understood then. He’d thought it was food poisoning. Or alcohol. He’d thought it was an overflow of too much joy. And still he was afraid. He called 911.

  He’d taken his wife out of her wedding dress. Button by button. Under the bright light of the bathroom, he saw that the white dress had white peonies embroidered into the fabric. The threads were barely raised above the silk. Button by button, he revealed the smooth triangle of her back. Button by button, he ended his wedding day. As he reached her waist, his fingers began to hurt. The skin was red where the dress’s struts had pressed into her ribcage. He pulled her out of the heavy garment. He washed her face with the guest-cabin towels. He held the water under her nose until she gargled and spat it into the toilet. Her eyelids kept rolling shut. Then, as he heard the emergency services rapping at the door, she tried to keep her neck straight. Her mouth opened and closed, trying to make words. But none came out. She stuck a hand out towards him. And he knew, he just knew, she wanted him to hold it. How could you stay married to a woman like that? But how could you leave her?

  I love you, he typed into the phone.

  Okay, she replied.

  Oscar had been in America for a week and on the West Coast for five days. He’d fulfilled his usual orders. But he hadn’t found the right products to send to Eileen Johnson. He’d drawn up spreadsheets with their products and regional sales figures. Nothing felt right. He kept thinking about Mina. He was there in order not to think about her. And yet there she was, ricocheting around his brain, like a poltergeist. To make matters worse, the cut on his hand was oozing a brown-yellow gunge. The internet said that sort of thing came from scratching. But he didn’t scratch, or not in the day, and there was nothing he could do a
bout his sleep self.

  Oscar needed to go for a run to clear his head. The island was a place where the elderly retired and the rich built summer homes, leaving them empty, like crystal tumblers saved for special occasions. He ran past these houses to the shore. The air smelled the way all those taxi air fresheners hoped to, of sap and generations of pine needles deep in the soil. Brambles lined the track. The workout wasn’t as vigorous as he’d have liked, because he kept stopping to consult the map Ami had drawn. Her landmarks were mysterious. Crow Lane was a real street name, but BIG TREE was just that: a very big tree. The fir sloped so it shadowed the house beneath. At the shore, busybody pelicans bulged their fat chests.

  Perhaps it was time to try a less numerical approach. He looked at his phone: two bars of signal, each only a few millimeters tall. But those millimeters should be enough to reach New York.

  “Jimmy, you there?” Oscar asked.

  “It’s early.”

  Oscar looked at his watch. “It’s noon where you are.”

  “Exactly.”

  They’d known each other in college. Oscar had gone to work for his father, Jim had got his bartending license. He was the one Oscar tested new products on and he made them move. The skinny bartender was somehow always at the center of grinning group-selfies. To his right and left were always beautiful women holding drinks in unusual colors.

  “Can you tell me who’s been ordering that sweet-potato IPA?” He’d persuaded Jim to persuade the bar owner to order a crate.

  Jim launched into an anecdote about this cute Iranian girl with eyes that knew things. She’d sat at his bar all night drinking straight out of the bottle. Her friends had been there but he could feel her watching him. Oscar let the story spin out.