The Blue Jay of Happiness

1.

I would turn forty this year and my brother, Noah, would now stay forty forever. When my mother called, I knew something terrible had happened. The two of us rarely spoke directly. Communication always passed through Noah. He kept us connected.

He and I were often mistaken for twins. Our birthdays were a mere 364 days apart, but it wasn’t only that we were close in age. My father joked that we were pressed from the same mold: our hair and eyes were identical in color, our faces and bodies the same shape. What happened when half of your likeness was lost? 

They found him in the woods with his frayed and taped-together copy of The Expert Guide to Birds by William Downing. 

A red ribbon marked page 391, the entry for his favorite bird: 

The Blue Jay (Cyanocitta Cristata, meaning “crested, blue chattering bird”) is a remarkable and misunderstood member of the Corvidae family. The famed naturalist John Audubon wrote: “Their movements on the wing are exceedingly graceful. As they pass from one tree to another, their expanded wings and tail—so beautiful in tint and form—never fail to delight the observer.”

2.

In my family, religion and culture dictated a forty-day memorial for the dead. In this time, the soul of a person existed in-between, wandering and being tested before fully separating from our physical realm and moving on to whatever comes next. During the forty days we offered daily sustenance of fresh water, wine, and bread. We left their bed unmade, clothes hanging with expectation in the closet. We spread out photos of the deceased as visible reminders of our beloved. 

I gathered photographs of Noah and put them on the refrigerator. My daughter, Maggie, was enamored with the snapshot of the childhood versions of him and me in our Halloween costumes. While I had gone with a boring, culturally insensitive Cleopatra costume, my brother fashioned himself wings, a crest, and the body of a Blue Jay.

3.

People think black birds—crows or ravens—foretell both ruin and death. But what if the real death birds are the more common songbirds we hear but do not necessarily identify? It could be sparrows. Count them one by one and find how many days you have left. This could account for how death flies into our lives unnoticed and ordinary. 

4.

On the phone with my mother, again, discussing plans for the funeral, I pulled out the small calendar lost in the bottom of my cavernous purse. I wanted to count and mark the fortieth day. October 31, Halloween. Was this a sign? I stared at the square days, marking time, and I noticed an earlier date circled in red. Late. One week had passed and still my body had not cycled through the predictable routine.

I went to the store and bought a pregnancy test. I peed on the stick and waited. It couldn’t be, I thought. I’m too old.

The plus sign, pregnant, glowed in an almost supernatural light. I felt lightheaded.

5.

My mother brought Noah’s book to the funeral home, pressed it into my hand, and asked that I keep it for her. I couldn’t concentrate on the decisions that needed to be made about the cremation urn, the funeral program, or the music. The funeral director chose for us. If only there were other such directors in life. A “Tell your husband you are unexpectedly pregnant but don’t want to be” director. Maybe this all could have been avoided with a midlife crisis director. Step one: go on a diet. Join one of those overly aggressive gyms to “bootcamp” your way into wearing a bathing suit that arrives in pieces. What would be step two? Stop drinking away your disappointments lest you forget to take your birth control pills.

6.

Birds have often been messengers of various fates, harbingers of news, the mystery of them around us, above us at impossible heights. Downing’s book tells me:

A Blue Jay mother will abandon her clutch of eggs if a hawk discovers her hiding spot. She will leave and start over somewhere new. 

I am not able to run from my own body. Omission is a type of lie. Worse, perhaps. If I am pregnant but tell no one, am I really pregnant? 

7.

On the day of the funeral, I spied a Blue Jay digging around in the dirt. I remembered what Noah had told me about how they would forage for nesting materials, rootlets—a keen eye out for the freshly turned earth found in ditches, holes, or a new grave. But fall was not the time for building nests, laying eggs, or raising young. Winter loomed.

In forty days, a Blue Jay can build a nest, incubate a clutch of eggs and fully complete the nestling period. At the end of this time, a brood of young Jays leave their nest but remain together as a part of the flock. 

Our flock had disintegrated. One member gone can destroy the cohesion of the family unit. 

Would he send a sign? My mother believes the dead manifest signs during those forty days, before they depart us for good.

That night I felt possessed by desire, ravenous in a way that felt dangerous. If my husband had not been close, any man would have sufficed. I peeled off my high-heeled shoes with the residue from sinking into the earth at the gravesite and rolled down my pantyhose. I was impatient. I pushed my husband, Ben, onto the bed, hiked up my dress. I was a bird of death. I perched there on the bed demanding proof of my own life, in the form of flesh pressed to flesh, and it didn’t feel good—just necessary. 

8.

Migration patterns: The migration of Blue Jay flocks remains a mystery. In the fall, the flock will fly south some years, but migration is not undertaken every year.

This is the kind of mystery that animated my brother. How could he have given up on finding the answers?

I wanted to fly south, to escape this feeling of dread that had arrived with leaves falling and the temperature cooling. The countdown to the fortieth day.

9.

The first time I witnessed my mother perform the forty-day memorial, I was thirteen. Her own mother, whom she had not seen in twenty years, had died after a lengthy illness of the heart. It was the first time I understood how much my mother had lost touch with her family connections by leaving eastern Europe and coming to the U.S. My father puzzled over the grieving ritual. The glasses of water and wine paired with bread set out in offering every day. The saint candle burned, a constant fire hazard, a flickering beacon to guide the soul near to you. The candle represented a remnant of orthodox religious underpinnings of these rituals, but the bones of what my mother did was older, deeper.

When my father died, my mother entered the confines of the forty days again. She gathered his favorite slacks, shirts, and ties, and set them out for him in the mornings. She refused to make the bed and slept on the couch, on high alert for signs of him: a dream, a smell, a song. She was driving to the grocery store when she heard my father say, “I love you. I’m fine. I always preferred rye bread.”

Did I believe his soul made a specific request for bread? Who was I to say?

10.

The American Medical Association does not recommend getting a tattoo while pregnant. I know because I looked it up before I made the appointment. I suppose I wanted to know how many violations I was incurring with this action. I was mourning my brother and the next years of my life. I knew too much about how my pregnant body would feel: bloated, stretched, and exhausted. This would go on for years, not merely the forty weeks of gestation. My fatigue would be a constant thing, unabated. My body would be taken over entirely.

At least with my daughter, Maggie, I entered this ignorant of my own failings, the selfishness that held my center firm. I had no idea of the loss that would wash over me when Maggie was going off to kindergarten, in recognition of how much of myself had disappeared in five short years. On her ninth birthday I thought: Halfway there. And now, here we were back to zero. It would be up to me to build the nest, to stay with the new life. It would be me who got lost again in the tangled, thorny place of motherhood. I would be unable to find enough sustenance for my soul in simple acts of caring, and I would feel like the worst person in the world for it. 

Yes, brother, I thought. Send me a sign, won’t you?

11.

The damage, as it were, had been done. So why would I flinch if my husband Ben tried to touch me and offer some small comfort? Only days before I had been so hungry for his touch that I almost felt sick. Now, I veered into a distaste for this gentle man with kind brown eyes and a warm smile.

In the sixth week of pregnancy, the embryo is only ¼ of an inch long, or the size of a pea. I stared at Ben and wondered if his pupils were the size of a pea. Everywhere, I found items small enough to wonder: Is this the size of a pea? 

12.

Armed with a photocopied page from The Expert Guide to Birds, I arrived at Indigo Inks. 

“I’ve never done a Blue Jay before,” said my tattoo artist, George, who I had assumed would be male but was a tall woman.

“There’s a lot of detail here. It will take a long time.” She gently felt along my wrist. Her hands were shockingly cold, and I took a deep, startled breath. “Have you ever gotten a tattoo before?”

I was a proverbial clean slate. 

My body curled inward like a fist. This instinctual reaction to pain brings tensed muscles as the brain rattles out rapid fire neural orders: Hide! Run! Fight! With extended periods of pain, the suffering becomes almost invisible—the clenched jaw, rigid neck muscles, a whole body pulling into itself—and this state becomes a new normal. That’s why, when George slid her steely hands up my arm and told me to “relax,” I didn’t understand my body was rigid. I’d been frozen in this state for twelve days, long enough for grief to become habit. Unclench. Unmelancholy. Unravel. 

“It will hurt more if you can’t relax,” my artist, my mistress of good-earned pain explained. I didn’t notice the tears at first. They had been trapped in my frozen body all this time. George’s vibrant hair could be a nest; it looked like one. She peeled open my fist and placed a pink rose quartz in my palm. 

“Don’t squeeze,” she instructed. “Let it rest here in your hand.” 

The stone did not grow warm in my hand but colder still. 

“Tell me,” George said, as she returned to her needle and ink, to the space of the pale canvas of my wrist. I worried she would ask about the initials, what N.H. stood for and who this person was to me. Instead, she asked what I knew about the Blue Jay. I found myself breathless reciting the facts. 

Ben came home early and breezed into the kitchen while I worked on dinner. “What happened to your wrist?” he asked me, leaning in for a peck to the cheek as I stirred hamburger browning in the pan. 

I had a bandage covering my new tattoo. 

“I burned myself,” I said. “No big deal.” Why had I lied? Was I worried that one truth would unravel another? 

For the first time, I felt the fluttering. My Blue Jay tattoo wriggled; the lines cast into the shape of the wings burned and itched. I reached down and pressed my hand on the bandage. To keep my bird in place. 

13.

The blue-purple crest, the upper parts of the wings, and the tail of the common Blue Jay are an optical illusion. This perceived hue derives from melanin in the feathers that scatters light in a prism effect. There is no blue or purple pigment present. This coloring of the bird is commonly misunderstood, much like the Blue Jay itself. Negative opinions of the bird persist. The Blue Jay is believed to be a bully at the bird feeder, a nuisance in the garden, and a predator to other songbird nests. Yet, these characterizations are not an accurate reflection of the Blue Jay’s behavior or true character.

14.

Was it crazier to believe my brother’s book could contain an answer to my problems or to believe that the tattoo was moving every time I uttered a lie? I worried my new bird might have the power to peel itself from my skin, to whisper the truth to any willing ear. Every little lie I told elicited movement, a burning, the sensation of coming to life. I uttered words that I didn’t know existed as lies. The thoughts I often wished were not, in fact, true, were revealed from my own skin, from my own blue blood and whispered in birdsong.

15.

I opened The Expert Guide to Birds. My brother’s notes were scrawled in the margin: every sighting, every date and time, location. His final entry: 

6:25pm, South branch Red Run, Soldier’s Preserve Reservation. “Life is a precious thing your parents gave to you.” 

I typed this phrase into my phone. It is an English translation of a warning sign at the entrance of the Japanese “Sea of Trees” forest, made famous for a multitude of suicides.

“This isn’t helpful,” I said aloud, to my brother, to my Blue Jay tattoo, which did not stir at all. 

16.

My mother spent her days looking for signs of my brother. She called and left messages for me: “Have you heard from him yet?” The question stated so simply, as if he was on one of his research expeditions out in the field. 

When I finally answered the phone, she didn’t wait for pleasantries.

“I had a dream about him last night,” she told me. I knew she wanted me to ask what happened. We endured a long pause before she proceeded. 

“He was a boy again. He was making that Blue Jay costume. Do you remember that Halloween?” 

She didn’t know about the tattoo or my photograph of him in that costume, stuck with a magnet to our fridge. 

I felt the fluttering again on my wrist, as if my Blue Jay were moving, making its presence known. Was it a warning? Do not lie …

“Yes, I remember,” I said, and cleared my throat. “He was so proud of that costume. Maggie and I were recently looking at a picture of that Halloween and admiring his work.” 

A loud bird call sounded nearby.

“Do you hear that?” my mother asked, her voice threaded with excitement. 

17.

Vocalizations: Blue Jays can have a wide variety of calls. Most associate the songbird with the sharp and piercing jeer, “thief, thief, thief” but they make a vast range of sounds. Their whisper song is a series of whirring, whistles, and melodious notes. 

18.

It was hard to miss the Blue Jay tattoo on my wrist once I took off the gauze bandage. The flash of color, set against my pale skin, caught the eye, and as I moved my arms, it was as if the tiny creature took flight. When Ben noticed, he asked, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. This must have been a lie, deep down. My wrist grew hot. The lines of the bird began to itch. In horror, I saw the wings lift gently up from my skin. 

A loud call rang out. 

“Do you hear that?” he asked. Ben looked around, went to the window, and pulled the blinds down to peer out into the darkness. “Is that a cat? It sounds like a cat.” 

Blue Jays can mimic all sorts of sounds: cats, hawks, even humans. 

“Are you okay?”

“Yes,” I lied. The Jay twitched again, unfurled its wings; a soft feathery presence tickled my wrist. The bird pulsed with life.

19.

A Blue Jay has a resting heart rate of 400 beats per minute. 

Too fast for me to count. The embryo has a heartbeat now, though it may be so faint and fast that it cannot yet be heard. 

20.

The number forty represents the biblical symbol of endurance, a test of patience. The flooding of the world lasted forty days; the Israelites wandered in the desert for forty years. Prophets went without food for forty days: Elijah, Moses, Jesus. Forty is significant beyond the bounds of religion. The average human pregnancy is forty weeks. Ages ago, during the plague, forty days was how long a ship would isolate in port to prevent spreading disease. My brother would tell you that minus forty is the only temperature that is the same on both the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales. These were the types of things he would remember. 

21.

I had a brief, fleeting moment of total forgetting. In the morning, inside those first seconds of emerging from sleep, I didn’t remember my brother was gone. 

22.

The days bled into each other. The feelings were all the same. 

23.

Could a day exist without my memory of it?

24.

Now that I was looking for signs, I found them everywhere. A puddle in the shape of a Jay. The city itself sounded like a flock, calling out, heard but unseen. 

25. 

Blue assaulted me everywhere: the box of cereal on the counter, the ring of color around my coffee cup, the ink pen I used to write a shopping list. At the dentist’s office, the displaced tropical fish swimming in the tank, the turquoise pendant hanging around the neck of the receptionist, her eyes that reminded me of a bright summer sky. It was all the same trick of the eye to bring forth a color. An illusion. 

26.

My mother called. She had found another sign. 

“It happened this morning when the mail arrived. Inside the stack of junk was a condolences card from Mrs. Whalen. Such a kind woman. I read the note aloud, to be sure your brother could hear her fond remembrances and then I looked out the window and saw a cardinal perched on the ledge.”

“Is that all?”

“Cardinals are your loved ones returned to say hello.” 

“I see.” 

“I knew it was him.” 

“I’m glad he came to visit you.”

Tiny bird claws pierced my wrist. I had to bite my own lip to avoid crying out in pain. The truth was I wasn’t glad at all. What if this bird nicked a vein? No one would believe it was an accident.

27. 

A flock of Blue Jays has a complex social structure and possesses deep family bonds. 

28.

Until acquiring my tattooed avian guardian, I was unaware of the trivial lies I continually offered others and, most alarmingly, myself. I conjured stories to explain away hurt and, it turned out, those could not stand up to the Blue Jay tyrant of truth. The bird itched his way free to call out these lies. Settling down into the skin was more unfortunate, like the needle marking anew the place, ripping it open, catching, tracing, and then rooting down, burrowing under with a hundred little talons. 

29.

Sexual monomorphism: The Blue Jay is one of the rare birds where the male and female of the species have the same physical attributes.

30.

If my brother and I were the same, was I capable of the same end? 

31.

I knew the pumpkin project my daughter brought home would be yet another division between fourth-graders who have crafty mothers and those who do not. Some children would arrive with fashionable pumpkins made with hot glue, paint, glitter, and felt. Those mothers directed their children at the kitchen table to create a masterpiece. Unlike me. I was entirely distracted by the dead, the physical force of my brother’s soul pushing me down. 

“What do you think?” my daughter asked, pulling me from the memory of the funeral home and a navy suit that reminded me of some other man I once knew who only wore blue. 

My daughter got up from the table, retrieved the photograph from the refrigerator. 

“I could make a Blue Jay nest. I could have the mother sit on top and then inside the pumpkin would be her eggs.” 

She wanted me to smile, so I folded my face into the expected shape.

“Uncle Noah …” She trailed off. 

“He would love it,” a voice that sounded like mine said. 

Itching, crawling, burning cold. The whistling of the alarm call sounded. Lies, lies, lies! It sounded like a red-shouldered hawk. My bird could mimic the predator perfectly.

32.

I wanted to tell Ben everything. We were sitting outside on this warm evening, together and alone for once, as the day faded. But all I could manage was a story he’d heard before. When my brother was six and I was five, a flock of Blue Jays built their nest in a corner of our neighbor’s garage, under the eave near the gutter downspout. Would Noah have become so invested in the Blue Jays if our neighbor had not been so focused on their eradication? It was this attempt to, in his words “murder” the birds that caused him to take note, to go and look up the entry in The Expert Field Guide to Birds in the first place. Our father had bought the book for our family trip to Maine, when we visited Acadia National Park and hoped to see raptors. We’d arrived, it turned out, at the wrong time of year. 

When Dr. Whalen brought out a BB gun and tried to shoot the Blue Jay father guarding the flock, my brother started the mission. “They are a family,” he explained to me, as he hurled pebbles at our neighbor. 

We spent the whole summer observing the nest, calling out a warning to save the flock from the wrath of Dr. Whalen. My brother created an entire catalogue of knowledge: what they ate, their distinct calls, how they used their crests to communicate with one another. 

33.

My brother was a truth teller, a person of too much honesty blurted aloud. We need these people, I believe, the ones willing to say the thing everyone can see but is afraid to name. Instead of daydreaming about running away or disappearing, I might pack those suitcases I bought fourteen years ago for my honeymoon in Hawaii. I would simply go. No one tells you how stifling it is to build a happy life. How everything you thought you wanted was nothing that you wanted, really, in the end. No one tells you how it will feel to watch those lines gather in your face around the mouth and the corners of your eyes. How you will cook dinner at night, chopping carrots for soup, and the concentration of mincing makes you clench your face so hard it hurts, and you say to yourself, “Relax,” to try to stave off the pain and the deepening of those lines. Aging yourself, constantly, in this toil of domesticity. Your hair is thinner, skin drier. 

34.

On this morning of the thirty-fourth day, I put on a perfume called “Happy” like a desperate plea to the universe. 

35.

My mother called again with another sign. The final sign. 

“Did he tell you what kind of bread he prefers?” I asked. 

“No!” Her voice was so sharp and brittle it rang in my ears. “I was cleaning out the guest room where I’ve got your old dollhouse, the one you and your brother played with all the time. Inside the small doll family had moved. They were sitting in the kitchen—mother, father, son, and daughter—and there on the small doll table was a real feather.” 

I could feel my Blue Jay tattoo stirring. “What kind of feather do you think it is?” 

“It’s blue. I don’t know.”

I knew it could only be a Jay’s. 

“Maybe it has been there all along, left over from when we were kids,” I said. My tattoo writhed alive on my wrist, sending a shock of pain to the surface.

“The family of dolls is still a family even if some are gone. That’s what he was trying to tell me.” 

I wasn’t so sure. 

36.

Blue Jays gather vast quantities of high energy food including acorns and beechnuts in late fall in preparation for food scarcity in the winter months. Blue Jays are scatter hoarders, burying their food supply in the soil of multiple locations within their established territory. A recent study found that a flock of Blue Jays can bury upwards of 100,000 acorns and beechnuts in one month’s time. Many go unused by the birds and develop into tree saplings. Thus, the Blue Jay can repopulate forests in a brief time. Researchers estimate that the vast forests that emerged following the retreat of the glaciers in the last Ice Age were a direct result of Blue Jay “plantings.” 

37.

In the ninth week of pregnancy, the embryo is 1″ long and will soon be a fetus. The arms and legs are moving though they cannot yet be felt. There are toes and the ears are developing. All the essential organs are present. The woman’s body has started expanding to accommodate the new life growing inside. Evidence is visible. 

38. 

The pamphlet at the visitor’s center of the Soldiers Delight Recreation Area explained that this serpentine barren was bedrock formed more than 500 million years ago when magma escaped from the tectonic plates. The gray, green, and brown rocks along this path are part of the earth’s mantle. Walking in this place was to view what should’ve been miles beneath my feet, an underworld exposed and laid bare. The trail edged against Red Run, a dark fast-moving river with rapids and eddies. A heavy rain had fallen the night before, drenched the earth too fast to be absorbed, and a small stream crossed the dirt footpath. I went to the place where they found my brother, on the far edge of the park near the grove of oaks. 

I sat and waited, expecting to find a flock of Blue Jays. There were birds calling out in the trees all around but none of the familiar Blue Jay vocalizations. Maybe the flock had migrated, embarking on that mysteriously timed journey. Maybe they had moved on to better land, pushed out by hawks or other birds that could thrive better in the encroaching pine forest. Maybe they were there, watching me and keeping themselves hidden from view. 

39. 

Despite its tattered nature, I could not discard The Expert Guide to Birds. Condition in this case did not indicate value. It was almost too delicate to open and review any more: One feared completely breaking the spine, which was soft and held together by duct tape. It would hold space on my shelf and remind me of a cut so deep it’s a curse. I could still recite the snippet of a poem written inside in his childhood print: 

The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar and soaring ever singest

There is so little white space left in the book, my brother’s notes are in equal measure to the printed words. He was out of room. It was time to go.

40.

We gathered at the grave, yet unmarked and still only a nondescript rectangle of dirt. In the spring, the roots of the grass would spread to cover it cleanly.

My mother sang “Love is as strong as death,” from Song of Solomon. She then offered a prayer:

“Give rest, O Lord, to Noah who has fallen asleep in your goodness. Whether his spirit travels in the wilderness or the city, on the sea or land, in every place give him rest and count him worthy. Come to us no more, Noah. It is time to move on to your eternal life.” 

Without thinking, I rubbed at the place on my wrist where the tattoo rested. Was there movement or the slightest whisper of a song? 

All was still. I felt the burning need to lie, to see if that would bring my brother to me, to keep him close so I could stay honest. This might have been possible on the day of the in-between worlds. 

“I’m fine,” I said to everyone, but really to my brother. It was a lie, but nothing stirred on my wrist. I felt more than disappointment. I was more alone than I ever had been in my life. 

Later, at my mother’s house, we poured out the water and did not refill the glass. We disposed of the bread, breaking it into crumbs to scatter on the ground. We packed up Noah’s clothes and possessions. We stripped the sheets from his childhood bed. We prepared to live without him. 

“I will call you next week,” my mother said, warning me. Even without our connector we could still be tethered together. Our own flock. “I want to hear the story about your tattoo,” she said. 

In response, I felt a new fluttering sensation welling up from deep inside my body. The quiver held an echo -- calling out to the visible and invisible beyond me. 

JENNIFER MARIE DONAHUE

Jennifer Marie Donahue’s writing has appeared in Marrow Magazine, The Journal, Dappled Things, Catapult, Grist, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives in Massachusetts and is always delighted by unexpected Blue Jay encounters.