In the Land of Birdfishes (16 page)

She woke and smiled with the freight of her secret. In her belly, a little bigger each day, pushing and turning inside her, summer grew
.

Mara

I
N THOSE YEARS
at the boarding school, I was more deeply happy than I have ever been since.

The girls respected me and did not ever seem to regard me as the strange burden I knew I had become to the rest of the world outside the heavy front doors of the school. They loved the stories I told them from the Bible and let me make up others too, or tell them about Da, or about how I had come to be blind. Some days I would tell them that my mother had been so mad before she hanged herself that she pulled our eyes from our heads while we slept. “If you could see me,” I’d tell them gravely, “you would see only holes where other girls have eyes.” Or, “Give me your hand and touch the glass eyes they make me wear. They feel real, don’t they? They feel just like yours …” Or, if I was in another sort of mood, I would say it had been an ordinary childhood illness, such as any other child might have.

It was a kind of miracle, for which I was constantly grateful, that they never questioned the revisions I made to my account for myself. One day I might say, “A flight of birds descended on my eyes with their claws and beaks while my mother fought to shelter me from them but was too weak and
could not run as fast as they could fly,” and the next: “Cataracts.” And the girls would make little bird-like sounds of their sorriness for me each time, and we would link our fingers together in the way that we had learned to do to comfort one another and remind ourselves that the darkness we lived in was not empty.

We were not entrusted with our own time at boarding school. Rather the nuns took our time into their care, and released it back to us in small parcels, with instructions as to how best to use it. I was so grateful to have them attend to time for me. There were no long hours with my cheek pressed to the glass of the window, straining to hear what might be on the other side. There was no occasion to question how I might better occupy myself or whether there was any true joy or relief in being so occupied, or where and how
she
might be occupied and why there was not a word from her, not any sign or evidence of her continued occupancy of the world itself, not even its faint consequence, the way a distant leaf might tremble on a distant tree because she had opened her hand. Instead, everything proceeded with a sense of hurry and urgency that was never panicked, only steadily, persistently brisk. All procedures of our day’s activity were as efficiently managed as was possible for such simple undertakings, stripped bare of any possible excesses of movement or hesitation. We learned to walk in straight lines, holding the hands of the children in front of and behind us. We knew precisely how to find our seats at the table with just a simple count of steps and a quick grasp of the back of the chair. It was as if a great engine lay beneath the school, turning us on a wheel that drew us from the dining hall to our classrooms, where we learned Braille and scripture and the few other subjects deemed applicable for
children of our disability, and then from exercise in the yard to prayer to crafts to chapel and back to the dining hall. The fixed intent of that wheel, its unwavering progress, was a great comfort to us.

The girls were mostly soft-voiced and timorous, eager to please. I understood that many of them had come from homes where they had not been welcome. Those who were more confident or spirited were chastised so often by the nuns for being overly boisterous that their little clique lost its status among us and their exuberance became defiance. We were rewarded for three things at the school, and we knew the significance of those three things because they were constantly expounded: diligence, diffidence and deference. Excellence of other kinds—an especially high score on a test or victory in one of the exercise matches that the nuns reluctantly allowed once a year—was treated with mistrust and something akin to reproach, for, it was understood, such triumphs might rob us of our humility.

I did not come to know many of the girls individually, and most of them remained for me part of a single comforting entity composed of many gentle voices and soft, cold hands. Only Agnes, who was my roommate all the years I was at the school; Sister Margaret, who occasionally showed me affection; and Father McGivney, who took my confession and would tell me how to be forgiven with prayer and how many Hail Marys I was to say, emerged from the rest of the nuns and teachers and students. And they were enough. This little group of people who were mostly kind to me came to seem to be what was left of the world, and I did not feel that I needed more. Except at night, when all I could hear was the sound of Agnes’s asthmatic breathing and perhaps, if Sister Margaret
had consented to open the window, as I begged her to do in the summer months, the evening sounds of insects making their calls to one another, which might have been the same calls made by the same insects we had heard back home when we had fallen silent and lain with our heads together on the pillow, waiting for sleep. Then I thought of
her
.

Jason

mid-August 1996

I
F ANYBODY EVER TOLD YOU
to be careful about wanting things, you’d better believe the fuck out of them, I’d always known that. I knew for a fact that nobody with a closed hand ever got their fingers cut and so I went around like that all the time, with my hands in fists beside me.

Some folks didn’t know any better than to take whatever they got. They had their hands out all the time, asking for whatever happened to them. It gave me a good feeling to see those people hurt themselves. I liked the looks on their faces, the little round Os of surprise they made out of their mouths when everything came to shit. Like the girl they loved turned out to like some other guy better, to have liked him better all over the back seat of his nicer car. Or they told you that you mattered to them, and then their mouths made little Os when you found some way to show them you weren’t owned.

But there was a problem. A serious predicament, Peter would call it. The predicament had been living in my mother’s bedroom for three weeks and was up before me every morning, with a pot of tea made, sitting at the breakfast table looking kind of happy and proud, like the teapot was a parade she’d thrown me. The predicament said stuff like, “I thought I
came here looking for your mother—isn’t it weird that it was you I found and now that seems more important?” She told me she could see Ma in me and nobody had ever said that before. She said she didn’t see it at first, but now she saw it all over the place, in the way my eyes moved or the way I talked so fast sometimes I’d gasp a little at the end, because I’d forgot to breathe. The predicament said she wanted to stay here with me, that she thought she could make a home of my town. She said I was her whole family.

So I made a little room for her, a little space in between things. I left a pause at the end of the night, when she’d stand there watching me before I closed my bedroom door, and it was enough time for her to get certain words out. And it wasn’t that I hadn’t heard those words before, it was that I let her get them out before I closed the door. It was that I drank her damn tea and got to thinking in the morning, going down the stairs, how it would be good to have a cup and might in fact be exactly what I wanted. It was that her face seemed kinder than when I first saw it, and I liked the lines it folded into when she smiled, and I liked, too, how nervous she was, how she had always looked ready for me to do something sudden or frightening. How I didn’t even mind when she stopped looking ready.

One afternoon, I drove home thinking about the predicament, and when I got there, she was waiting at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette and reading something, and she jumped up and switched the lights off, and while I stood there, staring at her, because even with the blinds drawn tight it was still bright enough inside to read a cereal box by, she leapt up and turned the lights back on and yelled, “Surprise!”

I started pulling my boots off but didn’t take my eyes off her. It was hot as blazes outside, and sweat had sealed my shirt to my back. “What’s this about,” I asked.

She had that nervous, rabbit-y look about her. “I didn’t know what you’d want. I mean, should I have asked Angel and Minnie, or Peter …? I didn’t know if you’d want a big to-do.”

“Why would I want a big to-do?”

She had this paper cone hat on her head, and I had only the beginning of an idea what she was up to, but the hat was a big help. She gave a little tug on the chin elastic, looking embarrassed. “Well, that’s just it. I thought you probably wouldn’t. So I just made a cake, and—”

“You think it’s my birthday?”

She stared at me, her big, wide rabbit eyes blinking, figuring. “It isn’t?”

I dropped myself into one of the kitchen chairs. “We got any beer?”

She turned around, looking lost, and took half a step toward the fridge before turning back to me. “Yes, I got your fav—it isn’t your birthday?”

I let myself grin a little then. She had the hat on and everything. “Nope.”

“But the photo …”

I was just about ready to enjoy myself. “The beer, Aileen?”

She took it from the fridge and gave it to me in a glass, and then she ran upstairs. The really heartbreaking thing, it occurred to me, was the blanket she’d put up to cover the window over the sink that didn’t have a curtain. It was poked through with tacks and looked about ready to come down. And it didn’t make half a difference. You couldn’t have hid a
shadow in the room. But it was the idea of dark. It was enough to make her think she could do something sort of stupid and heartbreaking like surprise someone in broad daylight in their own home, when it wasn’t even their birthday. And then she hadn’t heard the truck or had been so busy with whatever it was she’d been reading that she’d not even been ready when I got there. All round, it was the worst job of a surprise I could reckon, and I couldn’t stop grinning about it.

I heard her feet on the stairs. That was like Ma, how light she was on the stairs. I spent about half a thought on it every time she went up or down them. Only the creaking of the stairs themselves let me know she was coming down. Chuckling to myself a little, I picked up the envelope she’d been looking at that had had her so distracted that she missed the sound of my truck in the yard. The address was typed in giant letters and in the corner there was only an address, no name.

“So you got a letter from Toronto,” I said, as she walked toward me, holding something in her hands.

“Oh,” she said, tipping her face down like she could hide it from me, “I just wrote to a lawyer. I wrote to a divorce lawyer, Jason. He had to write to Stephan’s sister, because I didn’t even know where he was.” She dropped into her chair like an axe. “I didn’t even know where to send the damn divorce forms.”

“You okay about this?” I asked.

“Well, I’m not going to stay married to a man who doesn’t care what end of the country I’m in, am I?”

“But he doesn’t know you’re here.”

“Just leave it, Jason,” she said. “Okay?”

“Sure thing,” I said. “But did you ever think that maybe he’s looking for you?”

She was white as a stone. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, yes, I have.”

“So the letter’s from your lawyer?” I asked, and she looked at me without saying a word. I shrugged. “Well, it’s your business.”

“Look,” she said, holding out the thing in her hands, which was a photograph. “See? On the back it says, ‘August 11, 1984.’ I had to use a magnifying glass to read it. Is that her writing or his?”

I’d forgot what day it was. “His,” I said. I looked at the photograph. He had a cone-shaped paper party hat on hardly any different from Aileen’s. Cavemen, probably, had worn hats like that. He was sitting beside me at the end of the table. There wasn’t any cake, just a pile of cupcakes on a plate, with icing two inches high on top. The sign hung behind the table read, “Happy birthday, Jason.” There were a few people around the table, but I could only guess who they were, with their backs to the camera, looking at me and him, who was the only one looking back at whoever was taking the picture. She wasn’t in the photo. I wondered who had taken it, and why they hadn’t waited for my mother to come back from the kitchen or wherever she had gone, outside the camera frame. “She couldn’t write.”

Aileen covered her eyes for a second. “Oh,” she said. “Of course.” After a moment, she asked, “So she didn’t take the picture then.”

“She was blind, Aileen. She wasn’t a photographer.” I would have been twelve years old, but I looked younger. I was looking at the cupcakes like they were happiness itself. It was my father’s face I couldn’t read. And I hated how much I recognized his face, not from remembering him but from the reflection of my own face and what it was turning out to look like.

“So why does it say it’s your birthday then?”

“It doesn’t. It was his.” I gave the photograph back to her and took a slug from my beer.

“His …” She thought about that. “His name was Jason too?”

I gave a nod and slapped the table. “So where’s that cake?”

“In the … I’ll get it.” She tucked the photograph into her apron pocket. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I didn’t know.”

“I know,” I said, and then she went into the kitchen. “So what the hell are you doing with a cigarette,” I asked, pulling what was left from the ashtray on the table and sucking the last puff or two out of it till I got the sweet, metallic tang of filter.

“Oh, I only do it from time to time. It’s no big deal. I smoked in high school, you know.”

“I can’t picture that,” I said.

“Did Mara smoke?”

I closed my eyes and imagined coming home to find her in the dark, a cloud of smoke rising around her, the dull, mechanical return of her hand from mouth to ashtray and back. “Nah,” I said. “Hardly ever.”

She set a plate down in front of me. It was about the sorriest piece of cake I’d ever seen. “I never made a cake before,” she said, sounding angry.

“Looks good,” I said. I took the fork she gave me and shovelled a piece of cake into my mouth. It was dry as dirt, but the icing was sweet and I figured I could finish it off no problem. Watching me eat seemed to be making her happy. “So how’s the job hunt,” I asked.

“Fine,” she said. “I put an application in at
The Northern Light
.”

“The newspaper? To do what?”

She looked down. “To write, I guess. I used to think I might like to be some kind of a writer. When he interviewed me, Melvin, the editor, made me come up with three ideas for stories. He said I had good instincts. I guess he liked my ideas.”

“Melvin,” I said like his name tasted bad in my mouth. Melvin weighed three hundred pounds on a good day and was from Alabama or some made-up place like that. He’d been in Dawson a decade and still acted like his feet didn’t touch the same dirty ground the rest of ours did. “Here’s an idea. Twenty-two years we’ve been negotiating our claims, and we’re the only ones without a dollar to show for it. How’s that for a story?” That morning I’d run into a buddy of mine who said it could be another year till we saw a cent. Or maybe we never would. His brother worked in the government and said that they were refusing to buy out the claim some mining company had on Tr’ochëk, where our people used to live. And we couldn’t reach a settlement till somebody budged, and till then they were playing chicken with the feds. While the rest of us got old waiting to get what even the goddamn feds said we were owed.

She hesitated. “It’s not really that kind of a paper. It’s not really … hard news. More like cultural stuff, community pride, you know.”

“Yeah,” I said.

She looked worried. “Maybe, if I get the job, you could help me. You know, give your perspective on Dawson’s history—”

“Just forget about it,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.” When that money came I could leave. Go far enough away that I’d never find my way back even if I wanted it. Maybe take her with me.

She didn’t seem convinced. “Jason, can I ask you … I mean, I understand that these … settlements … are important to you. It’s a matter of justice for your people, okay, I get that.”

“You think we’re just looking for a handout?” I gave her the eyes I looked at tourists with.

“Of course not. I understand”—she fluttered her hands around her face—”they did something wrong here. White people just came and kicked you off your land—”

“They didn’t kick us off it. They bought it for nothing. Our people back then didn’t understand they were buying our land. They didn’t know you could own land. They just thought the white folks were taking the little houses they’d built on the land.”

She sighed. “So the government owes you the proper worth of your land. And reparations. I understand that. But what I don’t understand is why this money is so important to you. You’ve got a house, a job. What do you need this money for?”

I took the pack beside the ashtray and pulled out another cigarette. “I don’t know, Aileen,” I said, with the cigarette clamped between my teeth as I lit it. “Guess that’s a real mystery. Well, here’s another one. How come this letter with a date of two weeks ago stamped on it is still all sealed up, tight as teeth? What are you waiting around for? You worried that lawyer’s going to tell you Stephan signed the deal? Maybe all you wanted to do was give him a scare, getting a lawyer after him for a divorce, without even telling me a word about it. And maybe it didn’t work. Maybe it didn’t scare him at all to be done with you. That what you’re worried about?”

She looked more tired than insulted. “You can drop it, Jason.”

“Or maybe it isn’t from the lawyer at all,” I said, taking a long drag and feeling her want a cigarette of her own. Almost enjoying myself. “Nothing about this letter looks official to me. What’s this address, Aileen? Who lives here?”

She rubbed her face, and I couldn’t tell if that was what brought the red to it or not. “Yes, Jason, you don’t miss a trick. The letter’s not from the lawyer, it’s from him. From Stephan. And that’s our address on it, mine and his. And he used the magnatype. My special typewriter. He used the magnatype so I could read it.” She picked the envelope up and stared at it, shaking her head like it was full of wonder. She seemed now hardly to be talking to me at all. “And that means he must have gone back to the house. Maybe he’s there now, for all I know. And I’m not ready to read this letter. Maybe I should tear it up. Maybe it’s him just sending back the papers, signed like you said. Or maybe it’s something else and I should tear it up anyway. But I just keep thinking about picking up the phone. About just seeing if he’d answer if I called our home. About how good it would be to talk to someone, to really talk.”

And somehow that made me feel a hot, dull anger in me, because what did she need to go to him for to talk of things. “I talk to you,” I said.

“Yes,” she answered slowly. “You do. But you don’t listen much.” And as she spoke, there was a crash at the window behind her. In the crack of light between the window and the closed blinds, I saw the body of a raven slide down the glass, dead, its eyes watching me as it fell to the ground below. Aileen seemed not to notice. I wanted it to fly again, as it was, the dead and broken thing it was now. I wanted it so hard I saw a flap of black feathers pass the window and head up toward the
sky, past where I could see. I had wanted the bird into flight, and it made me glad to see that. “You know you don’t, Jason.”