Homing (4 page)

* * *

As he crunched across the darkening Common, Henry felt his pockets for a cigarette. Fuck. He'd left them at home. Whatever. He'd just buy another pack downtown. He felt for his wallet. Double fuck. That was at home, too. He stopped short, sighed deeply. He jammed his hands down into his cold leather pockets, turned around and trudged back to the house.

* * *

Nathan sat on the library steps; the bird perched beside him. He patted her head and dreaded the moment she'd take wing again and leave him. He thought about the collection of little paper animals piling up in the bushes against the library. He didn't pretend to understand what was going on. All he knew was that each day, the bird arrived. And each day, the kid in the parka took a brightly coloured paper animal off its leg and hid it in the bushes. And then he took off, but the bird hung around, flying over to Nathan where he paced near Winston Churchill, or hopping around beside him where he rested on the steps. They spent an hour or more a day together, just sitting, enjoying each other's company.

And then, once the bird took off too, Nathan would tuck himself in between the bushes and the library and look at that day's arrival. So far, there was an orange fish, a red monkey, a green cat and a gold
bird. Today's delivery had been a blue frog. There was something so familiar about the forms. He imagined they must mean something, taken all together, but he couldn't think what, much less could he figure out who might be sending them or for whom they were intended. The kid in the parka didn't seem very interested in them. The most he did was hide them away.

But there was something about their shapes that soothed Nathan, their simple paper lines, the love they seemed to emanate. And anyway, the bird always came directly to him afterward, which made him think perhaps the animals were supposed to be his. And lately, the bird had been staying with him more and more. He even thought she seemed a little reluctant to leave, especially tonight. He stroked the sleek, smooth feathers knitted across her back and sang gently to her, the way he used to sing to himself, or for Leah or Rebecca. He wished he had his guitar, but that, like his ID, had gone missing. It was on the tip of his mind, the whereabouts of his things. He knew he'd see them again, though, once he got everything figured out. Till then, he'd have to make do with just his voice, and the likes of the pigeon for company. It was getting dark though, and the bird seemed ready to get down to business. She straightened up out of her comfortable slump and waggled her tail feathers.

“Okay,” he said to her, “I understand. And I'll see you again, right? Tomorrow? Or maybe the next day?” The bird plucked at her own feathers with her little pink beak and shook herself again. “Okay then,” Nathan said. “See you. Safe flight! And thanks for the frog.”

The bird hopped a few steps toward Brunswick Street before leaping into the air and spreading her wings. Nathan watched her go up over the rooftops of the café, the furniture store, the candy store and the wine boutique. He watched her wing towards Citadel Hill until he could no longer make her out against the darkening clouds.

“Safe flight,” he said again, even though there was no way she could hear him at that distance. “Thanks again.”

He stood a moment staring after her. Then he let out a deep breath, curled his hands into fists and began his nightly route. He paced the path from Spring Garden down to Grafton, turned and paced back, stopping now and again to contemplate Winston Churchill, but never for very long.

* * *

Henry let himself in, turning his key in the sticky lock. Now he had to pee, as well, and he hated being slowed down like that. “Come on, come on,” he said as he jiggled the key. Finally the lock gave, and he was inside. He undid his zipper with one hand while he jogged to the bathroom. He leaned against the wall as the warm urine streamed out ahead of him.

“Wallet, wallet, wallet,” he repeated aloud. “Where the fuck did I leave that thing?” He tried to picture it in a pant pocket or on the bureau in James and Emily's room, but he couldn't conjure up its image. He hadn't felt it among his mouldering clothes on the floor of the upstairs bathroom, and he was pretty sure he didn't have the heart to go through that again. If it came to that, he'd simply have to sponge off Johnny Parker, no two ways. “Think, think,” he said, as the stream of urine slowed to a trickle. He shook his dick off, stuffed it back in his jeans and zipped up carefully. The last thing he needed was a commando-meets-zipper incident. That'd really put a damper on his night. Damper, he thought. The wallet is on the floor in the living room in front of the woodstove. He'd passed out there last night, and remembered taking the wallet out of his pocket before he drifted off. It had been an uncomfortable lump between his ass and the floor. His smokes were probably there, too, come to think of it.

Sure enough, they were. He grabbed them up, stuffed them in his pocket, remembered his keys, and slammed out the door again.

The bird caught him by surprise, swooped down almost taking his head off. “Fuck is that?” he shouted as it turned and flew up to the second floor window next door. “Jesus bird,” he sputtered nonsensically. “Christ could have killed me.” He scowled up at it as it squeezed in the half-open window. “Fucking pigeon,” he said. “Fucking going in through the window! The hell? Fuck.” His heart was pounding like a snare drum in his chest. “Jesus, someone should do something about that,” he shouted toward the offending house. Then he jumped down the three steps to the sidewalk and jogged back toward the Common. Johnny Parker would be waiting, and at this rate, he'd be half in the bag and half in bed with some young cutie by the time Henry even got downtown. Jesus wept.

* * *

Leah bolted awake. What was all the yelling? The neighbourhood was seriously going down hill all of a sudden. Ever since James and Emily had gone to England, whoever they had living in their house was sure doing a lot of loud swearing and slamming. It was driving Leah nuts. It was almost enough to make her leave the house, she thought.

Neil stretched into the room, paused in the doorway and arched his back. Leah smiled at him and he looked back at her, his eyes glowing iridescent. He yawned hugely and let out a squeaky meow at the same time. Heart melting stuff, even if right after he looked like he would take her down and eat her.

“You might as well forget it,” Leah said. “Who would pull the fur on your back for you, hmmm?” She reached over and grabbed a nice handful of Neil's ample back-flesh. She pulled it up, like taffy, and he purred appreciatively. “Or pour your crunchies? You need me, Neily Neilerson,” she chided. “Don't forget it.”

Above the purring of the orange cat, she heard the flapping from upstairs that signalled Sandy's return. She swallowed the wave of fresh and immediate fear and revulsion that washed over her at the thought of a bird in the house, letting it be replaced by a mixture of relief and anticipation. Was tonight the night Nathan would send a message back? Had he, himself, somehow come back with Sandy? Leah stopped, cocked her head, listened. She didn't hear anything but feathers and flapping, but then, Nathan had been silent, in the conventional way. She stood still and tried to feel him, but there was nothing. She breathed out. Still, maybe he'd sent a message. She took the stairs two at a time, got to her bedroom to find Sandy turning round and round in her cage, as if showing Harold that she was al-right, everything was okay, nothing to worry about now that she was home. And Harold did look relieved, with his little beady eyes and his snubbed beak, his greyish-brown feathers tousled on his head as if he'd just woken up, as if they'd been displaced by some avian pillow.

Leah got up close, looked for a message on Sandy's leg. Nothing. At least the blue frog was gone. Maybe it had simply fallen off, she thought, panicking. Maybe there was a trail of origami creatures strewn from here to Brunswick Street, lost in the snow, bleeding their vivid colours onto the ground. She snapped the overhead light on for a closer look at the bird. No clues there. She looked deep into Sandy's
depthless eyes, for as long as she could stand it. The bird looked — trustworthy. Nervous, but ultimately true. Straight as an arrow. And the holster was secure; Leah had checked it and checked it. She knew she was just being foolish now, just looking for trouble where none existed, looking for explanations where none existed. She would simply have to be patient. She had fucked things up, and if she was going to unfuck things, she'd have to accept that it would take time, that her plan was sound, that Nathan was where he was for a reason, that he'd answer her when he was good and ready, that the bird was reliable. It was a lot of things to take on faith, but really, she didn't see what other choice she had. Unless she was prepared to simply walk away, to not even try, to never know the outcome, but that was untenable. She'd already done that once, or practically anyhow. In fact, if you added it up, she'd betrayed Nathan twice already. She was not interested in doing it a third time. And she knew there was no point in freaking out. The bird had done what she could do for the day. Tomorrow's note would have to be clearer and more pointed. It was the only way she knew.

She stuck her finger through the rungs of the cage and patted the air next to Sandy's tail feathers. It was the best she could do for a show of affection, good thing the birds had each other. She measured out some seed and poured it into Sandy's dish, gave some to Harold, though he'd already eaten his evening meal, snapped off the overhead light and went back downstairs to pour herself a drink.

As she passed the study at the top of the stairs, she did her best not to look inside. It was a room of chaos, a place she put the things for which she had no other place. Nathan's first guitar, for instance.

Nathan's first guitar sounded like shit. It wasn't just because he was still learning how to play it. It's that it genuinely was a piece of utter garbage. Special only because his hands had moved over its strings, his fingers had found their places on the fretboard.

The guitar was unremarkable in every way. Leah couldn't even find a manufacturer's mark on it. The neck was worn, the strings now untuneable, she suspected. It had not been played in years. The almost-year since Nathan had died, and who knew how many before that? He'd long moved on to better instruments. This one, he'd played as a teenage enthusiast. A gangly nerd who'd quickly surpassed even
his fellow brainers in his advanced math class, Nathan had turned to music as an outlet for his excess mathematical energy. Leah couldn't understand that part of him — math, just the thought of it, made her scalp itch. But Nathan had picked up this old guitar and learned to play it using what he knew of logic and pattern.

The guitar had always been around, as long as they had and longer. It was battered and worn, a terrible instrument, made of little better than pressboard. Their father had given it to their mother the first Christmas they were married. He had bought it from Consumer's Distributing. It had cost twenty-five dollars, which was a lot of money in those days, especially to a young, newly married couple who were saving to buy a house. It was never clear to Leah and Nathan whether their mother actually played the guitar or was even interested in learning. They'd certainly never seen her with it in her hands. But she loved music, sang along with abandon to the radio, raced their father downstairs on Sunday mornings to be the first to reach the stereo and pick the music that would accompany their breakfast. If she won, it was Buddy Holly or the Beatles. If their father got there first it would be Roy Orbison, or worse, Bob Dylan, or worst of all, Al Jolson.

The guitar had sat in the basement for years, leaning in a corner, its pale wood barely glinting. Then Nathan picked it up one night and slowly, painfully, learned to coax songs out of it. He played “Roxanne” by the Police and sang along, his adolescent voice cracking wide open on the high notes. It was the most lugubrious version of the song Leah had ever heard, but here was someone she knew, her own brother, actually playing the guitar and singing. Leah was impressed enough that the song sounded concert hall ready to her. When Nathan went away to university, he used some of the money from his part-time job tutoring math to buy himself a proper guitar. But he took the first one with him, regardless, and it sat in his dorm room and got played once in a while by some drunken friend whose understanding of logic and pattern was similar to Nathan's, though perhaps not as acute. But then again, with all that beer around, it was hard to tell.

When Nathan died, Rebecca gave that first guitar to Leah. “I can't have it around,” Rebecca had said, inclining her head toward the instrument, but not looking right at it. “I just can't have it in my house.”

It was
my house
already, not
our house
anymore. Leah took the guitar
wordlessly by the neck — it had never had a case that she knew of — and carried it out of Rebecca's house. She put it in the backseat of her car where it sat, like a silent passenger, all the way back to Halifax. Once in a while, she'd glance at it in the rearview mirror. She fought with herself to keep from speaking to it.

At first, she'd kept it on a stand she'd bought specially for it, in the living room. But people asked questions, wanted to hear her play it, and she couldn't. She'd never learned. She, like her mother, loved to belt out songs along with the radio, would sing whatever she could whenever she got the chance. But logic and pattern eluded her, always had, and she could not begin to understand where to put her fingers on the fretboard, how to move her other hand over the strings. And then, too, keeping it in the living room just made her sad. Every time she looked at it, every time she had to explain to someone why she had a guitar she couldn't play, it knocked her breathless all over again. So she moved it to the study upstairs, where it leaned, in its stand, against the bookcase that held Nathan's collection of Hardy Boys hardcovers. Rebecca had sent those on the bus six months after Nathan's death. “
Was cleaning out the attic
,” the note she'd sent along read. “
Thought you might like these.
”