Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Henry is at my gate, holding a bird.
I see him from the front room window, but I'm not afraid. What goes through me first is confusion, then curiosity, because nobody comes to my gate like that.
He's got a small wire travel cage in one hand, held low and level so it doesn't swing. Inside, there's a flash of color moving. He isn't ringing the bell. He's just standing there in the late-morning heat on the other side of my gate, waiting to be seen. David left for the hospital hours ago.
I go out.
He lifts a hand as I come down the drive, a small wave aimed at nothing. "Hi. Hey there."
"Henry." The gate's still between us. “From the other day."
"How are you?"
"I'm all right." I stop on my side of the gate. "What's, um..."
He holds the cage up level with his shoulder.
"A bird," he says.
“I…can see that." I know I'm frowning. I can't seem to stop.
"Oh, I've done this wrong, haven't I," Henry says. "I know how this must look. A man turns up at your gate with a bird."
"It's an unusual opening."
He lifts the cage a little. "It's a canary. A hen, so she won't sing much, which the man at the Bellevue pet store seemed to think was a defect. I thought it was a mercy. You said you kept them, so." He lifts the cage another inch, like that settles it.
I didn’t say I kept them.
The thought goes through me.
Then it hits the same wall everything else does. I say a great many things. I lose a great many of them. I've spent two years learning that the gap in the middle is where I live now.
Did I say it? On his step, with David walking up the road?
I don't think I did.
But I can't be sure. That's the whole trouble. I never am.
"It's just my way of saying thank you," he adds, easily, because I've said nothing for slightly too long. "For returning my mail."
What am I going to do? Tell him he's wrong? On what evidence?
"Henry," I say. "You didn't have to do that."
"I know." He's looking at the cage instead of at me.
"But it was kind of you. Walking it over to me, when you could have dropped it back in the box and never had to look me in the eye.
I've not had a great deal of kindness lately.
I've barely been in the house a week, and the only other person who's knocked on my door wanted to know what I paid for it. " He shrugs. "So. A bird."
He sets the cage down on the driveway by the gatepost and steps back with his hands up. As if he'd rather not be seen holding the thing at all. "Take it or don't. I'd only feel stupid taking her home."
She's beautiful. Of course she is. Yellow going to soft orange at the head, gripping the perch, tilting to look at me with one bright bead of an eye.
I open the gate.
Luna comes out of the house at a flat sprint, all noise and no threat, and puts her front paws up on him.
"Whoa," Henry says, lifting a knee to keep her off. "Down."
I reach for her collar. "I'm so sorry. She gets excited. She doesn't usually take to people this quickly."
But she's already down. She drops instantly and looks up at him, her whole tail going, before my hand gets anywhere near her.
Henry leans down, rubs the top of her head twice, and smiles.
"No, my fault. The knee’s a reflex. My sister had one."
"It's okay. It's fine.”
It is fine. It's a perfectly fine thing to have happen. But Luna has never once sat for anyone on the first ask. Not for David. Not for me. And here she is, sitting by his feet, her whole body going, gazing up at him like she's known him her whole life.
I turn it over once, and I put it down, because the alternative is to stand at my gate being frightened of a neighbor who has brought me a canary.
"Is David around?" Henry asks.
"Work. He's at the hospital until seven or so."
"Ah." He looks down at the cage. "Do you want a hand getting her in with the rest of them? They can be funny about a new one."
"They can be vicious about a new one."
I should say no. I've known him for less than five minutes. David’s at the hospital, and I know exactly what Julia would say about all of this.
"Sure," I hear myself say. "Okay."
At the aviary, the birds are already restless.
They hop and flutter above us in the filtered green light, yellow and blue and white shifting through the branches while the new canary grips her perch inside the travel cage.
Henry is good with birds. That's the thing I don't know what to do with. Everything about him being here should feel wrong, and somehow he keeps getting it right.
He keeps back from the cage. He doesn't talk over the fluttering and chattering. When I open the outer gate, he waits outside until I tell him to come in. He watches where my hands are. He puts the travel cage down where I point.
"She'll sulk for a day," I say. "They all do."
"And then?"
"And then she'll be one of them and I won't be able to tell you which one she was."
Henry looks at the mesh, at the branches, at the birds shifting and resettling above us.
"That's a nice thought," he says.
My phone buzzes in my back pocket.
It’s Julia.
"Take it," Henry says. He's already stepping back through the aviary gate.
I take my phone out.
"Hey, Mallory, have you heard from Peggy?"
“No, why?"
"Not one of us has heard a word from her all day.
" Julia's voice has an edge in it I don't recognize.
"She's not answering her phone. She was supposed to meet us at the flower shop to finalize the flowers for your birthday.
She didn't come. She didn't call. Lil has been in the parking lot for over an hour imagining the worst."
"Maybe she’s ill or late.”
"Mallory. Peggy Erickson has never been ill in her life. As for late? Peggy Erickson would attend her own funeral early to check the seating."
I laugh.
"Then, perhaps she's gone into Seattle and forgotten," I say. "Or she's punishing somebody. Don't fret, she'll probably turn up and it'll be somebody's fault."
Julia doesn't laugh. “Yeah. Probably."
She hangs up.
Henry is up by the side gate with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the water, giving me the length of the lawn to be private in. He turns when he hears me.
"Everything all right?"
"Neighborhood politics."
"The best kind." He straightens. "Right I'm going to go, before I outstay a welcome I didn't strictly have."
"And there was me about to offer you coffee."
"Don't." He smiles. "Truly. Your husband looked at me on Friday like weather coming in off the water. He was right to. I’m not going to be the neighbor who's in the kitchen when he gets home."
It's so exactly the correct thing to say that I don't know what to do with it. He's giving me an apology for something he hasn't done, handing it to me so lightly that refusing it would be rude.
He gets to the gate and stops, with one hand on it, and he doesn't turn around all the way.
"Can I ask you something?" he says. "And you can say no."
"Ask."
"Those clippings." He's looking at the gatepost. "I've been staring at them for so long I've stopped seeing what's there. I know what I think they mean, but that's the problem. Maybe I'm seeing connections that aren't there."
Now he looks up.
"You'd know. I'd like a fresh set of eyes. Would you be interested?”
The heat is coming up off the drive. Down the lawn, my birds are going insane over the new arrival.
"I'll think about it," I say.
"That's more than I expected. See you around.” He opens the gate, and he's gone, up the hot road, hands in his pockets, not looking back.
I stand there for a while.
It's only when I'm back inside, running the tap, watching water fill a glass, that the thing Julia said finally settles.
Peggy Erickson has never missed anything in her life.
So where is she?