Sylvia Holland
December 2016
Return to Sender
Teagan's mother had always been brave, though rarely in ways that fostered closeness. Teagan remembered the time they met in the woods, Branagh having made an effort to come near geographically even if not yet prepared to give up what she called Her Opinion and Her Right To It. "You hoo!" Teagan in plaid and corduroy had called out to prevent a misturn as she spottedher coming down the trail, a two-hour hike from the dock, in dressy pantsuit and pumps, valiantly toting her suitcase. The directions Teagan had dotted on a map had guided Branagh across three islands lacking shuttle vans or public transit, a long trek after the nineteen-hour bus trip.
Now, decades later, it was Teagan's turn to walk towards her without benefit of companion or proper map. They were kin in their shared inclination towards bravery and obstinacy.
It began with the phone call, though everyone disagreed about when exactly The Call came in.
It was a lifelong practice of Branagh's: never leave a voicemail message when insistence could be conveyed by calling at the same time every day and letting the ring do it, or by calling six times within two hours and simply letting the same number flash over and over on a caller ID screen. This time she had broken with convention.
Her chief conversational gambit was to ask Why? to any view, proposal or news report. If the speaker had to explain, the link would continue. Intimacy would develop, wouldn’t it? This time she spoke without a question. They all marvelled at that.
After her husband’s death, she had established the habit of calling each of her middle-aged children on a specific day of the week. That left a manageable gap of hours in which she had to keep her own company. She had looked at the calendar: she could manage. This time, the pauses between her calls were only minutes long.
Branagh was leaving, permanently. She would go by choice, but without secrecy, privacy or speed, or with the usual claim to surcease of pain. Death would occur in a public place (she had little choice in that) and in community (if there was to be any praise of her, she wanted to hear it firsthand). If anyone had a problem with her plan, that was their issue, not hers. She wasn't calling to talk about complexities; she never did.
Her calls were her notice, her farewell and her signal of non-negotiability.
On the east coast, the phone rang without answer. Branagh called again on the cusp of every hour. The ring echoed through the narrow dwelling reminiscent of attached houses on the street where she'd been born. When she had visited Teagan, she had always declined the second-floor-bedroom and instead climbed the ladder-steep stairs to the attic dormer. Nestling under the roof slant was a pleasing throwback to loft escapes in the old barn on the windswept farm where she had spent most of her growing up years.
Teagan was visiting out of town when Branagh called. On her fourth attempt, Branagh deposited her message into the emptiness, upturning her habit with words that also, and more deeply, defied convention.
Teagan listened to the message the next day from her roost in the forest. She stared at silvery poplar trunks while she listened, watching silvery rivulets course down the window glass, feeling a kindred wetness on her cheeks and chin. Silvery fog ribboned the horizon of a pale sea. Turning her head, she saw silvery birds skimming a silvery creek bank. Rain fell faster, harder. She remembers no sound to that silvery wash, just the roar of Branagh's words through her.
In another city, the phone rang in the tiny atrium triangle that hung off the twenty-sixth floor of a condo stack in the downtown core. The atrium served, for now, as an office. Aedan looked at the caller ID, then at the clock on his MacBook Air, and decided that he could allow a one-hundred-and-twenty-second break before his business conference call. She would be brief. He had trained her to be brief. He could handle this if it was brief.
Frankly, he was amazed at how much he could handle by keeping everything brief. He had just told Brigitte this, and as she wrapped her arms around his waist for a big squeeze, he tried to mirror her smile so that he wouldn't bark at her to hurry up with that blender noise and stop the godawful sound so he could get his smoothie and get going to the next level. He was always getting to the next level. It helped to be brief.
In another country, Sybil heard the phone in the workshop ring as she crossed the yard from boat dock to driveway. It could wait, like the letters that came from home. She wanted letters to keep coming, couldn't imagine a time when they wouldn't. She was fond of the region they came from, fonder than she was of this flat place with its constant, sometimes enervating sun. Even the stamps on those envelopes, those tiny familiar red maple leaves, made her feel like she was climbing a mountain again. Still, she sometimes shelved those letters for weeks, then responding to a Christmas greeting with "Oh, yeah, thanks for your letter. I've been too busy to open it." Having no job and a mentally ill husband and two grown sons without jobs or their own homes: yup, that could keep anyone busy. Those signs on her place—HELP UNWANTED. KEEP OUT—they were helpful to her in carrying on. Bit of Branagh in her that way.
Just a few miles from Branagh's location, another ring echoed in the most orderly of all the places Branagh was calling. Army-barracks precision and an insatiable demand for order ruled Norah's home. Any caller, not just Branagh, must be prepared to justify interference with the routines at this control centre. Branagh depended on Norah's goodwill. She could manage this.
Branagh's notices took less than a half hour and, by tone alone, forbade discussion. It was a relief to her that she could deliver all but one as one-way announcements. She placed demands on no one to come. Her expectation was merely a goodbye salute. Not only about what lay ahead but also about present circumstances, she had no more to say. Branagh delivered her goodbye with a simple: "All my love."
She may have confounded every one of them with this, certainly Teagan. She'd never pbeen so tender before, so empty of conditions with her affection. Teagan wept when she heard these three words. Perhaps this was when the unknowing seized every one of them, and not later, as some thought, when the flurry of calls ensued about whether to go and when to go and why to go or why not to go and with whom to go and for how long to go and really, was there any need to go and then, round and round the same circle of useless questions. That was indecision.
What overwhelmed all of them after those first phone calls was much more profound: how to be with this exit, a part of the disappearing but neither slowing nor hastening it, learning how to care without condescension. “Unknowing” was the name of their state, even though they all thought they were so damned smart and none of them would publicly admit to a moment of uncertainty about what should happen. This state being their common burden, Sarah had thought it might become a bond.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Branagh's words—that "all my love"—had this been there all along? An embrace she had never felt? Teagan remembered gardening at Branagh's, digging in while ice still skimmed the ground after a May snowstorm. "What am I doing here?" she had cried into the wind, and it howled it back to her. She had travelled a few thousand miles to help and been met without welcome. Fifty years old, still returning, still making room for that shard of possibility that she might find affection in her mother's embrace, still coming with every tool she could pack, still hoping for usefulness in the absence of love. There she was, chiselling ice off beds, determined to weed while she could, ignoring the current storm forecast.
Branagh watched from the kitchen window. "I don't know why she comes. I don't know why I let her in the door." She saw Angus in her. He could be equally stubborn, relying also on outdoor work for his refuge. Slam the door and stomp outside. Pretend you hadn't been part of the muck-flinging indoors. Leave it to the wife, the mother, to clean up. "Well, to hell with Teagan. She can learn I have a mind of my own also." When the time came, she would tell them all that.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Blue-eyed Branagh was a whiz at heaving herself out of her nest and flying the whole river valley and then over three, four, five mountain ranges in one go, just to get to a decent perch for those few rest days that a year held. She had travelled thousands and thousands of miles in her pursuit of fresh sights and reprieve. She had nowhere left that she wanted to go.
Branagh lay still now within walls, strangers’ footfalls audible nearby, a rare blue-eyed raven. A raven now as silvery as the place where Teagan had just been. One at a time, visitors arrived by that hallway to see her.
Though born an ocean and continent away, Branagh had been here long enough to learn this grassland well. Small when she arrived, she had nonetheless brought all the old stories, tucked under her wing before she had left. Now she was a full-size bird, though shrinking again. She had not lost all of her gleam. She wasn't old enough to simply topple off her perch and fall dead, just like that, but she was nearing a century of wily ways, beady-eyed oversight, fierce skraaaas from her beak and tough bird scrabbles.
Branagh was old enough, too, to remember the places where the grass grew so tall that it hid the nesting meadowlarks and a person would have to lie still enough so that the rustling stems spoke firstand only then the birds would sing. Now, caged on this familiar grassland, Branagh moved as little as possible. Though the outside aperture of her cage was sealed, a Spirit Bird had entered the space to be with her. She could see it clearly and could hear the low hum of its song.
All her working days, Branagh had made peace with flying the public transit corridors in the city, the same routes day after day, year after year. But she prized the escapes when she could make them. Her flights deep into the woods. The returns to open prairie. At twenty-seven, riding the rails to Vancouver; at sixty-seven the flight to Athens, carrying only what she could stuff into the tiny giveaway shoulder bag from Wardair. The "$300 to Ride for a Year" Greyhound trips first to Yosemite and then to bluegrass country in Kentucky, into truck stop diners in Idaho and south to the skipping stone islets of the Florida Keys, from dripping Pacific rainforest to the fiery autumn foliage of Cape Breton. The long trip to the isle of her birth, entailing cobblestone treks from one cousin's parlour to another. The afternoon hush of crisscrossing ski trails on mountain sides. The weekly hikes, once Old Age Security cheques had replaced pay envelopes. Now Branagh rested willingly, giving strength to presence instead of escape.
Nothing in this pen came close to the beauty that the others saw in Branagh. At one time, people had even called her an exotic bird. You couldn't call this place exotic. At the window, the curtains hung limply, their dull gold no pretense at sunshine. Worn green counters, battered metal cabinets on creaking wheels, yellowed linoleum floors, thin towels, cheap trays, chipped arborite: everything scrubbed, nothing pretty. There was no delicate porcelain bowl for the tiny, welcome slivers of ice. It was impossible, in this place, to set even one chair suitably for comfort. The only flowers in the place looked garish. Other attempts at beauty were stuck with push pins into decaying cork. Trite dominated. If only the place breathed “Rise up,” not “used up.” Yet from here Branagh would go.
It was winter and the days were short, the nights were long. Sometimes, one of the visitors stayed longer than the others and into the night and they would listen together to the hum in the room.
None of her visitors could really read her, even if Branagh stayed still and the visitor watched for a long, long time. She was practiced at hiding her power, like all Trickster Birds. What belonged to her stayed hidden. She soon stopped twisting on the platform where they had placed her, appearing to some as a docile bird now. From where she lay, Branagh could see a little sky beyond the glass. The sill cut from view the land she knew well. She looked at other things, closer things. Her blue-eyed gaze revealed the storms that periodically blew through her, and they mirrored also the radiant light that follows storms, but her face showed little else. She was composed without being slack. All those shiny bits she had once collected: she still had many to drop and leave in others' safekeeping, but she left her trail while others were not looking. Let them do the hard work of spotting them; she'd done hers.
The room smelled. When visitors arrived, they imagined the smell might come from her. She was offended when she heard them say as much. When she was bathed and repositioned, it was clear she could not be blamed. When Teagan came in, she could smell it too: eau de disinfectant mixed with the smell of a neighbour's shit and stagnant flower water.
Food arrived for Branagh. Unlike the room, the food had no smell. She refused it, smiling, but not because it had no smell. Teagan heard her give thanks for all the offers of what she did not want. Branagh tugged the edge of her bedcover without the strength to pull it taut now, to straighten things once and for all. Her legs, now useless, hurt. They’d once been the object of many compliments, like those intensely blue eyes. She had been known for her constant motion, her legs and her wings reliable before this. Now it was an orderly who moved fast around her. He sponged the bed frame, the picture ledge, the metal cabinet with its ill-fitting drawer. Another mopped the floor. “You needn’t do that for me,” Branagh said with a smile, "I'll not stay long."
Another delivery arrived for Branagh: fresh ice in a plastic maroon tumbler. Teagan dipped a spoon to collect a single chip no bigger than the nail of her pinkie finger.
"It's heaven to me,” Branagh said, her lips smacking over the ice, one of four very small chips she allowed herself daily. She held the liquid in her mouth for the longest time, shutting her eyes as if, by not seeing her surroundings, she could make them less arid. When Teagan bent to stroke Branagh, she found that Branagh herself smelled a bit dry, like the prairie in August and the oak leaves in early November. Branagh whispered that she loved living in a place of distinct seasons.
Branagh was turned on her side now, bone stacked on bone, five cushions around her so she couldn't flop, nothing inside her to soften the stack. On the rocky island where she had been born, they say that when you are ready to die, you can just turn sideways into the light and disappear. Some days the light around Branagh and Teagan was so bright that it hushed everything, but still she did not disappear. Branagh knew, by the number of times that her visitors stepped into the hallway to call one airline or another, that days had turned into weeks.
Branagh did not know who lay in the room's other bed, but she knew everyone else standing or sitting. The one on the other bed never spoke to Branagh, and Branagh never called out to her. It was no time for words. The space they shared was anonymous and deeply familiar.