The Birds of Dusk

This is what shocks her: that although her husband’s cheeks are rosy and his arm, resting on the pillow, is still warm, he’s stopped breathing. To her “good morning” there’s no response, no embrace or gentle kiss. She touches his cheek, and it’s soft, but cool. His lips: the faintest tint of blue. Robert has died quietly next to her.

Martha knew that her husband’s death could have been expected. Something about the left ventricle, or the right; something to do with electrical impulses. Robert’s doctor had explained, but she wasn’t sure she’d really understood. Still, the possibility that he might have a heart attack was always on her mind.

“Slow down,” she’d say, “take it easy,” whenever she saw Robert doing jumping jacks on the lawn. He was supposed to be mowing, or planting pansies.

Robert simply laughed.

“Look at me!” he boasted. “I’m in better shape than when I was twenty!” He’d had no joint replacements. No surgeries. He’d never smoked. He could do a hundred jumping jacks without stopping.

Nevertheless, she wakes up one morning next to a dead body. Her son Warren comes over as soon as she calls. Robert, now rigid and cold, lies among the tangled quilts, arms and legs half exposed, the fabric still as the body.

“Mom, he looks like one of those sculptures by George Segal.”

Warren is reminded of art by everything he sees. Martha is often amused, but when he says his deceased father looks like somebody’s sculpture, she shouts, “George Segal’s men sit on benches; they don’t lie sprawled out on the bed, dead as doornails.” Warren giggles at that. He is tall and heavy, but when he laughs, his voice is high, thin, almost falsetto. She thinks he sounds like a Disney princess, but she says, “You shouldn’t laugh. Daddy’s just died,” and she begins to cry.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

When he calls the funeral home and arranges for the body to be picked up, Martha tries not to think about it. It’s over, she says to herself, he’s gone. She’s always believed that when people die, they simply disappear.

However, for several weeks, she sees him. When she wakes, he’s leaning over her, his features vague in the dim light. She’s filled with joy because he’s alive, and terror, because she knows he isn’t. When she opens her mouth to speak, he immediately disappears.

Warren explains that it’s a common phenomenon, a kind of hallucination. “They’re called night hags, and they might seem scary, but they’re harmless, because they don’t really exist. As soon as you move, they disappear. It’s all in your imagination, Mom.”

She keeps her thoughts to herself. You’re not a neurologist. I wish you wouldn’t say I’m imagining things. From now on, I’m not telling you anything.

But when she begins hearing strange sounds, she does, after all, tell him. They are booming sounds, she says, like foghorns, or explosions in the hills behind the house, sometimes like shrieks or whistles.

He says they are phantom sounds; she hears them because she’s going deaf.

“That bonging is very distinct, and besides, I can hear you perfectly well.”

Although she objects, she suspects that he may be right. Sometimes she looks out the front window to see someone walking away, and she realizes that she hadn’t heard the doorbell.

*     *     *

“Look at this!” Warren points at a small hole in the kitchen floor. “Next thing you know, you’ll have squirrels all over the house. And the roof. Mom, you have to pay attention to these things.”

“I know,” she says, “I have people I can call,” although the only name that comes to mind is Fred. Who was it that painted the front steps? It wasn’t Fred.

It’s true that there’s always something to fix; he’s right about that. The house has all the charm and all the headaches you’d expect of an old house. Beehive fireplaces, beadboard on the walls, beams on the ceilings. A rather romantic house, she and Robert had thought when they bought it. It seemed less romantic when they discovered a skunk with a litter of little skunks in the crawl space. The neighbor’s dog got involved and it took weeks to get the stink out of the old plaster walls.

The dog belongs to her good friend and neighbor, Jill. Each summer, Martha and Jill garden together, first in one back yard, then in the other. They talk about flowers and garden pests. Jill’s garden is tidy, full of herbs and marigolds, small flowers laid out in squares, with little paths covered in gravel. They spend a lot of time pulling chickweed out of the gravel at Jill’s house.

Martha’s garden is quite wild. At one time, it had been a lovely, natural garden, full of Solomon’s Seal, ivy, lamium …all of it invasive. After Robert died, she decided to let grow what would.

“It’s a mess,” Jill says. “The ivy will choke everything. Look at it.”

“I don’t mind,” Martha replies. “Leave it alone.” Weeds delight her; she admires their persistence.

*     *     *

Warren thinks she should move into the first-floor bedroom. He says that at her age, she’s likely to fall. As far as Martha is concerned, what she does to the house is her business, but Warren is bossy. He has her health care proxy and she’s sure he would love to have power of attorney, too.

As though after eighty-four years of practice, I wouldn’t know how to conduct myself.

“Your grandmother,” she says, “lived to be almost one hundred and five, and she never fell once.”

“That’s not true,” he replies. “She did fall.”

“Yes. She did. But it was only once, and it was because she tripped on the edge of that little rug next to her bed and I picked up the rug.” She takes a deep breath. “And she didn’t fall again.”

“That you know of, Mom.”

“Anyway,” she says, “I’m not moving into the first-floor bedroom. That’s where Dad slept whenever we had a fight. It’s bad karma.”

“You guys didn’t fight,” he says. “I never heard you fight.”

“Warren, all couples fight.”

Warren looks away.

“Oh, not you and Amy, I guess. The perfect couple.”

He begins to spread tea bags across the kitchen counter. “Do you want a cup of tea?” he asks.

“Well, anyway,” she continues, “the first-floor bedroom is out of the question.”

But she can no longer bear to sleep in the bed she’d shared with Robert. She decides to move into the little room on the top floor.

As a young girl, she’d had dreams about a small room that was all white. Walls, floor, ceiling, all painted white. A white spread on a small cot. It was clean and peaceful. A window overlooking …perhaps a field or a garden …but she’s forgotten; it was so long ago.

The attic room has a narrow window, from which she can watch the birds clustered in the old oak tree. They seem to think they’re hiding, but she sees everything they do. She hears every peep and whistle. They sound like the grackles she heard in Arizona, but these New England birds are probably wrens. When it’s windy, the leaves of the oak strike the window. That’s how close the tree is.

Perhaps, if there’s a storm, it might fall and crush the house.

She looks around. There’s just enough space for a small bed and a little table. Her armchair could be tucked in the corner. The closet is tiny, but there’s a second room where she can store her clothes, and down the hall there’s a bathroom with pink tile and a deep clawfoot tub. She sits on the side of the tub. What a waste of water, and will I be able to get in and out without tripping? At any rate, the toilet still works.

She asks Warren to paint the attic room completely white before she moves up there, but he objects to painting the floor. He says the old wood flooring is beautiful just as it is.

In the end, she paints it herself. She forgets to put on one of those smocks that painters wear and ruins the dressy pants someone had given her for a birthday or Christmas. Their synthetic fabric makes her think of factories with vats full of poisonous chemicals, so she doesn’t care if they’re ruined. Martha likes natural fibers—wool and linen—that bring to mind grasses, and the white and brown Icelandic sheep she once saw from an airplane, scattered across the grey and barren land. Where had she been going?

The whole room looks brighter because of the white floor. The paint is shiny. It makes the floor into a mirror on which lies the outline of the little window, the shadow of the oak shimmering within the square of light. Martha once read that trees communicate using their roots, using scents from their leaves. Whenever she leans out the attic window to ponder the oak, she thinks of the restless birds, flying from oak to beech and maple, as messengers in a vast arboreal network.

She doesn’t want to ask Warren for help moving furniture up to the attic, so she decides to call the handyman. She thumbs through her book of contacts. Fred. But no, not Fred, a similar name. It takes her a few moments to remember the name of her handyman, Ned.

He comes the following day and carries up the narrow cot that Warren slept in as a boy. She has him hang three mirrors she’d bought in Mexico; their bright, hammered tin frames are the only color in the room. It takes her a long time to decide where to place them; in the end, she has them hung in such a way that wherever she turns, she sees the oak tree.

When Warren sees what she’s done, he frowns and marches around the house to inspect every room. At the end of his tour, he confronts her in the dining room.

“Well?” she says. “You look like you have something to say. That room is the only one I painted, so I don’t know why you look so angry.”

“You’re letting everything go,” he replies. “The house is falling apart.”

“You should read some Pema Chödrön. She writes about letting go.”

“That’s not what I meant,” he says.

You’re worried about the value of the house, which you’ll inherit after I’m dead. But you’re wrong. Mine is the best room in the house, except for the noise.

“They sing all night, and it keeps me awake,” she says. “I don’t know what to do.”

He looks puzzled.

“The birds,” she explains. “They start singing as soon as I go to bed.”

“You shouldn’t drink tea so late at night, Mom. That’s why you can’t sleep.”

It’s just peppermint, or lemon and ginger. I know enough not to drink black tea in the evening, for heaven’s sake.

But she doesn’t want to argue. She looks out the kitchen window and sees that the Solomon’s Seal is overwhelming the bush with the pretty blue flowers…lobelia perhaps? Or lilacs? She wants to arrange a garden date with Jill but realizes she can’t remember when she last saw her. Was it just a week ago?

“You’re forgetting to pay your bills,” Warren says, interrupting her reverie. “They’ll turn the lights off if you’re not careful. You should let me do it for you.”

Martha suspects he thinks she’s losing her mind. She lifts her chin and squints at him in an attempt to convey that she has everything under control.

“I’m not forgetting anything. The bills aren’t due the moment I get them. Nobody’s turning the lights off. I always pay on time.”

But, in fact, she has forgotten to pay a few bills. Not the electric bill, luckily, but she had thrown out one from Joe, who mows her lawn. Robert never forgot to pay a bill. He was very methodical, and that’s not one of Martha’s traits.

*     *     *     

Warren says, “Do you want me to go with you tomorrow?”

“Go with me where?”

He gives her a strange look. “Sit down, Mom.”

“I was just going over to ask Jill to help me with the Solomon’s Seal. It’s all over the place. Can we talk later?”

“Mom, sit down.”

Something in his tone unsettles her. He sits next to her on the sofa and takes her hand.

“Jill died. Her funeral is tomorrow. I told you yesterday.”

Martha suddenly thinks of Robert, his body beside her in the bed, his cold cheek.

“But Robert died a long time ago, didn’t he?”

“Yes, Mom. It’s Jill that died,” he says.

“Surely she would have told me.”

“She could hardly tell you she died, Mom.”

“I mean, she would have told me if she was sick.”

“Do you want me to go with you?”

Martha thinks about Jill, her hostility toward the creeping jenny everywhere, and the dandelions that crowd the oregano plants.

“Do you think weeds talk to each other?” she asks.

“Mom, do you want me to go to Jill’s funeral with you? I think maybe you’re in a little bit of shock.”

“It’s just that I haven’t been sleeping well. I’m so tired these days.”

After a moment, he asks again, “Do you want me to take you?”

“Yes, dear,” she says, although she is confused. “I don’t know what to expect. Whose funeral is it?” She hesitates. “Did something happen to Jill?”

“It’s open casket, but you don’t have to look if you don’t want to.”

Martha gets up and looks out the big window, the one that Robert had installed to give them a better view of the forest behind the house. Jill’s garden looks perfect, as far as she can tell in the shaded light of late afternoon.

“Jill must have watered this morning. Look at the little rhodies. Their leaves are plump now. Yesterday they were curled up. It’s been so dry.”

His hand on her shoulder. “Mom.”

She turns to look at him. “Warren, you look pale. Would you like some soup?”

“Jill died the day before yesterday. She had a heart attack.”

“Poor Jill. Then she must have watered the garden just before she died.”

When he leaves, she feels lonely. She stands in the kitchen, but she doesn’t hear the birds. Is she going deaf? She listens carefully. Finally, she goes into the garden. The Solomon’s Seal leans over the trellis. She doesn’t mind the larger plant having spread, but on closer inspection, she sees that it isn’t crowding the lobelia, but another plant, the one with delicate white flowers. The name of this plant had something to do with the ocean, but the amorphous flowers reminded her of kittens. Another cat would be company. Poor Lila, she thinks, remembering the white Persian. Perhaps I forgot to feed her. She sits on the garden stool, exhausted by the effort of remembering what she is supposed to do next.

*     *     *     

Warren takes her to the funeral. She is brave enough to look at Jill lying calm as could be in her coffin, eyes closed. Oddly, Jill is wearing lipstick, she who never wore any make-up. Why did she decide to put on lipstick now, of all times, when she obviously wouldn’t be going to any dinner parties, or whatever it was she did when she was alive. This woman couldn’t be Jill. Maybe she had a twin sister she never talked about.

Martha stares at the stiff body for a long time, trying to figure out if it’s really Jill or if the face of this woman in lipstick is actually a stranger’s. Warren whispers something in her ear and pulls her away from the casket. He wipes tears from her cheeks.

Then she’s shaking hands with people who may have been related to Jill, but whom Jill had never mentioned, as far as she can remember. And yet one man says to Martha, “I’ve heard so much about you.” He is younger than Warren, or perhaps just a little older, and she thinks he is rather good looking, in a Spanish sort of way, with intense, dark eyes and longish black hair. He clasps her hands in both of his, and she wonders if he is flirting with her.

Afterward there is a party of some kind, and she drinks too much. There is a man who seems to be keeping an eye on her. Someone takes a glass of sherry from her hand.

“Where am I?” she asks him.

“Jill died. You’re at her funeral,” he replies.

Martha shakes her head. “This can’t be a funeral. People don’t stand around talking and laughing at a funeral.” She hesitates; there’s something, perhaps a scene in a movie. “Do they?” she asks.

*     *     *     

She opens a bill from the electric company, which she clearly remembers having paid. Some flyers from CVS, two-for-one deals. She sets those aside. There is something from Jill, too. Martha is puzzled. Jill would surely have come over if she had something to say. She opens the envelope to find a card. The message is short:

Dear Martha, Warren told me that August 20 is your birthday. It’s hard for me to get out of the house these days. I haven’t been feeling well. So forgive me for writing instead of coming over to celebrate with you. I wish you the very happiest of days, and I pray that we will be able to see each other soon. Your friend and neighbor, Jill.

There’s no date. Martha doesn’t know why Jill can’t leave the house or what her condition is. When she’s tired, she forgets things. She wants to take a nap, but someone at the kitchen sink is making tea. He looks somewhat like her brother Andrew, she thinks, although her memory of her brother is no longer sharp. He had a long face with a square chin, like this man. His hair was auburn.

“Do you dye your hair?” she asks. “It’s nearly orange. Is it natural?”

“I’m going to move in,” he says.

“But why?”

“Look around, Mom. The house needs work.”

Martha starts to explain that she can call Henry, but then realizes that Henry is not the handyman’s name. She’ll check her address book; the handyman’s name is in there, if she can find it.

“I’ll sleep on the sunroom couch. You won’t even know I’m here.”

“I will indeed know you’re here, young man, if you’re hanging around hammering things, or whatever it is you plan to do.”

“For Christ’s sake. I’m trying to help.”

He looks out the window, and she studies his profile. There is a dark circle below the eye that she can see.

“What’s wrong with your eye?” she asks, but when he turns to look at her, she understands that he is exhausted. “Aren’t you sleeping?”

He hesitates. “I can’t stand being in the house without her.”

But Martha has a sudden recollection of a party, a handsome man.

“I had a little too much to drink,” she says, and after a moment, “Was it a birthday party?”

“No. It was a funeral, Mom.”

Martha realizes she had, for just a moment, forgotten that this man is her son. Now she remembers the wedding picture: Warren with his bow tie and buzz cut, Amy with her hair worn in elaborate, ribboned braids. Their faces looking at the camera, bodies pressed close, relaxed, at ease with each other already. Warren’s big grin displaying the bright dental veneers for which he had paid a month’s income, Amy with her mouth pursed tight, to hide her slightly crooked teeth.

“Did Amy ever get her teeth fixed?” Martha asks.

“She moved out six months ago, Mom. Don’t you remember?”

“Well, when’s she coming back?”

“She’s not. She left me.”

“Why? What did you do?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” He turns away from her.

She sees that Warren is distressed, so she doesn’t ask. She wonders if she should give him a hug, but something in the way he is standing stops her. His back is rigid.

“You’re giving me the cold shoulder.” She’s not entirely sure why she says that, but he turns to face her.

“Could you not think about yourself for one minute?”

“I’m sorry, dear. Did you say Amy moved out?”

“Oh, Mom, what’s happened?”

“People do what they do, you know. You can’t control them. They’re like weeds. My mother taught me that.” She strokes his trembling shoulder.

“I know,” he says, “It’s not that. I meant to you. What’s happened?”

“I’m fine, darling. I get a little messed up sometimes, that’s all. It’s because I don’t sleep. Have I told you that? The birds keep me awake. Isn’t that strange?”

He takes her hand and brings it to his cheek. “Mom, don’t leave me.”

“Of course not. Where would I go?”

She wishes he would loosen his grip on her fingers, but she senses that he needs comfort.

“I understand,” she says. “Things are always so difficult. Would you like a little soup? I made chicken soup. You know they say it cures anything.”

“I’m not hungry.”

Her hand is wet with his tears. “Come,” she says gently. “No more tears.”

She takes his arm and leads him to the living room couch. He lies down; she sits on the edge and, leaning over him, she strokes his face.

“You were such a crybaby. You cried over every little thing. Do you remember when that boy took your pencil at school? And you came home crying! Over a pencil! What are we going to do with you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Warren says. “What pencil?

Martha is astonished. But perhaps this is not her son, although he calls her “Mom.” He is confused, clearly, but she doesn’t mind. He’s unhappy. And after all, what does it matter if he no longer remembers that he once made a fuss about a pencil; it was so long ago. She studies him. He is thinner than Warren; perhaps he has not been eating enough.

“I made a wonderful lemon cake,” she tells him. She gets up to go to the kitchen.

“Don’t go.” He clutches her sleeve.

She is halfway to the door. “I do think you should eat something. You’ll feel better.”

*     *     *     

The man lies on the living room couch, staring at the ceiling. He’s shivering.

“Are you cold, Andrew?”

He doesn’t answer, but he shifts his gaze to look at her. There are dark circles under his eyes.

She remembers there may be lightweight blankets in the kitchen closet. When she goes to look, she notices some mail on the table: an electric bill, a flyer from CVS, an opened card from her neighbor. Perhaps Robert had brought in the mail—but no, Robert died, some time ago, weeks or months earlier.

Is someone crying? But that’s impossible; she is alone. Perhaps it’s the sound of a bird, or a feral cat on the hunt. She opens the kitchen window. “Shoo!” she shouts. Martha is always on the side of the birds, which she knows are vulnerable. Maybe Jill’s dog will go after the cat, she thinks, although she doesn’t want the cat to die, either. Was it the dog next door who’d attacked poor Lila? There was the torn tendon, the bloody grass. Martha turns away from the window.

She suddenly feels very tired, and she begins the long climb to her attic bedroom. She uses the stair rail and pulls herself up, first one flight, then the next. When she enters the little room, she sees that the bed is made, although she does not remember making it that morning. The window is open, and the sky is changing color. It’s sunset, and the birds have settled in the oak tree. There are many of them, but they make space for one another. After all the chirping and flying about, they fold their wings and become quiet. She looks out and sees that the neighbor’s garden needs watering. There are weeds taller than the marigolds. She decides to go over in the morning to help Jill water the flowers.

She leaves the window open and sits on the bed to rub her aching legs. The reflection on the painted floorboards is a rectangle of light tinted red, and within it, the flickering shadow of a tree. The reddish light fades to black. She lies down on the white cot and waits for sleep with open eyes.

In the darkening sky, there is a waning moon surrounded by faint stars, but she doesn’t see the moon or stars, nor does she hear the sound of muffled sobs or the whispered conversations of trembling roots deep in the forest soil. She is afraid. A terrible thing once happened while she slept. She tries to remember what it was, but it’s like trying to find a carrot in a pot of soup, she thinks; it’s somewhere at the bottom, and it’s dissolving.

NANCY TEMPLE

Nancy Temple has been a tapestry weaver, commercial space planner, and saddle designer. After she retired, she received her MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University, where she majored in playwriting. In addition to plays, Nancy writes short stories. Her stories sometimes further develop characters and situations she has explored in her plays. Nancy lives in Boston with her cat, Milo, and her partner, David.