Homing Read online

  It was a little warmer today, so the chip trucks were out, lining Spring Garden Road, along with the hippies and the homeless kids — harder and harder to tell them apart these days, they were equally grubby and foul-tempered, even the hippies were kind of mean, which didn’t seem right somehow, but what the hell did Nathan know? He’d always been ridiculously straight, though those who loved him found it an endearing quality.

  “It’s against the law,” Rebecca used to say to him. “That’s your mantra: It’s against the law. So straight, my sweet straight boy.” It was true Nathan had a healthy respect for the law. He had even studied it for a little while, though he suspected, even when he was going to class, that he loved police procedurals and lawyer movies more than he actually loved the law. It seemed like a slender thing to base a career on, especially given how hard law school was proving to be and how many lives might depend on his success were he to practise as a defence lawyer. Or even as a prosecutor. The whole thing was frankly ridiculous. He loved to argue and debate, that was one thing. And he was freakishly logical, that was another. Plus, he was done his math degree, and Rebecca still had several years of school left, and he wanted to be where she was, and she was at school. So, sure, law, why not?

  Well, mainly because it was a hell of a profession to ease into. After a while he realised he was never going to be a lawyer and he just went to the classes because he was interested. It made things a lot more fun for him, and for Rebecca too. He mellowed right out and let her be the stressed out one. He stopped caring about his homework and just listened compassionately when she bitched about hers. He read a lot and played his guitar and thought about asking her to marry him, even though they fought like children. There was something about the way she ran her hand over his collarbone, the way she seemed to memorise the sweep of his skeleton that made the little door in his heart swing open whenever she was around. Oh, god, Rebecca. He didn’t know when he would see her again. It was like a hole in his heart to be away from her like this. To be away from everybody. He staggered to a stop in his pacing, his arms wrapped around his chest. He closed his eyes tight and pulled both lips inside his mouth, head bowed to the ground. It hurt, it hurt. People jostled him as they went by, but he barely felt it. He stood there in front of the Spring Garden Road library near the statue of Winston Churchill and he wept.

  *

  “I’m coming, I’m coming,” she snarked as she got to the top of the stairs. “Don’t get your feathers in a… flap. Heh. Oh god. Now I’m making puns to the pigeons. This is getting out of hand.” She strode into the bedroom and took Sandy’s cage down from the bookcase.

  “Fine, fine,” she said. “I will set you free.” She attached the small paper frog to Sandy’s left leg and carried her over to the window.

  “Happy now?” she asked. The bird gave her a baleful glance. “Jesus,” she muttered. “This cannot go on.”

  She gave Sandy’s plump body a little squeeze, swallowing the revulsion that arose in her throat. She pulled up the sash and leaned her head out the window. The air smelled like snow, which made Leah’s heart sink. Surely it was almost spring. Surely to christ this winter would end sometime. Sandy made a little birt sound and wriggled in Leah’s hand.

  “Yes, yes,” Leah said, “I hear you.” She extended her arm out the window and thrust her hand quickly upward, freeing the pigeon as she did.

  “Godspeed,” she muttered as the bird took flight, its greyish-brown wings stretching out over the neighbourhood, the tiny blue frog attached to her leg marking her. Leah watched her go, feeling a little admiration for the bird’s fine form in spite of herself. “Godspeed,” she said again, then drew in her head and pulled the window closed. In his cage, Harold sat looking sad but resigned.

  “It’s just for a few hours,” Leah said guiltily. “You know she’ll be right back.” Harold clucked forlornly and turned to face the wall. “Oh for chrissakes,” she said. “You’re just a bird.” But she knew it was much more than that, and that bird or not, there was a bond between Harold and Sandy. Indeed, this was what made them so valuable to Leah, what made it possible for her to do what she needed to, in the way she needed to. It was what made it okay that she hadn’t been outside in almost two weeks. Well, maybe not okay exactly, certainly not if you asked Charlotte, which Leah purposefully did not. But Charlotte being Charlotte, she was only too happy to step up and tell Leah straight out that she did not think it was okay that Leah was holed up, living in her bathrobe and eating nothing but goat cheese and crackers. She did not think it was okay for an instant. Yes, she had helped Leah obtain the birds, but she’d only done it because Leah had been so insistent, and if she’d known what the result was going to be, if she’d known Leah was going to stop washing her hair, and refuse to even go downtown for one little drink after Charlotte’s most trying day at work ever, she never would have agreed to help. And she hoped — no, expected — that Leah would put a stop to her foolishness soon. And it was foolishness, Charlotte didn’t mind saying. Charlotte never minded saying, which was one of the things Leah found so appealing about her. But these days, more and more, Leah found she wished Charlotte felt some compunction to keep her thoughts to herself, even just a little. Leah was finding it hard enough just to get up in the morning and write the notes, she certainly didn’t need to be harangued about her hair or whatever was setting Charlotte off on any given day. She did, however, need Charlotte to bring her fresh supplies of goat cheese and crackers, and things for her recipes, and Charlotte did have a nice way of including a bottle of vodka or scotch on the grocery list, and though she was also a little creeped out by the birds, Charlotte was good about hanging out for a bit, mixing a drink or two and sticking around for a chat. Leah knew she wasn’t much company these days; it was just that she was focused on her project. And she knew she was lucky to have a friend like Charlotte who just took Leah’s latest weirdness in stride. Yes, she rolled her eyes a lot, but at least she rolled them to Leah’s face. And that meant something.

  Leah didn’t know why, exactly, she’d stopped being able to go outside. She’d felt a kind of wide-open vertigo once she realised Nathan had gotten loose. And all she could think afterward was, gotta get home, gotta get home. She hurried along North Park Street in front of the Armoury, its old stone walls perpetually held up by scaffolding. She hurried in front of the new condos on the corner, their new stone walls perpetually defaced by graffiti. Along Moran Street her back prickled as she pulled her keys from her pocket. She fumbled urgently with the lock, threw open the door and dashed inside, slamming the door behind her.

  The panic still tingled in her veins, and she whipped through the house, turning on lights, even though it was barely four o’clock, and muttering aloud. She cast a glance into each corner of the house, as if to give a warning to whatever might dwell there. I’m not unaware, those glances seemed to say, this is me putting you on alert. She didn’t think about it, she just did it. She had to. And later, when the panic had subsided, she pretended there hadn’t been any panic at all. That Nathan wasn’t loose — it was too ridiculous to even think about — Nathan was dead. Her imagination was overactive. She’d seen him because she’d wanted to see him, and now she wasn’t seeing him because; well, because he was dead. That was all.

  But that wasn’t all, as it turned out. While it was true that Nathan was dead, and that her imagination was overactive, she knew something had changed. She could feel it in the air around her front door. It was sinister and forbidding. She could open the door to get the mail, and she could even venture out onto the porch to bring in the newspaper if she had to. But she felt that same prickling panic if she thought about going any further, leaving her front step. And so she’d snatch up the mail, snatch up the newspaper, dart back inside and slam the door.

  But Nathan stayed loose. He didn’t come back to her, and the feeling that he was out there somewhere didn’t dissipate. And eventually, Leah came to realize that she was going to have to find a way to bring him back
, without leaving her house at all.

  So when Charlotte told her about the birds, she knew what she had to do. Or, rather, what she had to ask Charlotte to do for her.

  The night Charlotte went to get the birds was cold and clear. Darkness was beginning to whisper over the city, though the harbour was still bright as she came across Citadel Hill. She jammed her hands into her pockets and hoped she wasn’t on a fool’s errand. One-Eyed Carl, for chrissakes. Homing pigeons, of all things. Still, she had only herself to blame. She’d seen the ad for the birds in the Pennysaver during a marathon laundry session. She’d mentioned them to Leah. She’d been kidding about the birds being a solution to Leah’s problem. She should have known Leah would take it seriously, though. She hadn’t, sadly, thought far enough down that particular road to realise that Leah’s reluctance to leave the house meant that she herself would have to carry out this errand, but hey, that’s what friends are for, right? She smiled grimly, and hoped Carl wouldn’t be any weirder than was altogether necessary.

  Dim lights shone on the library path. Winston Churchill cast a halfhearted shadow on the lawn before him as Charlotte rounded the corner, her boots crunching on the thin layer of snow that covered the path. A kid in a dirty bandanna and a huge parka stood near the steps, shifting from one foot to the other in the cold and shrugging his shoulders repeatedly, making the parka jump and slide. “Spare some change?” he said, as Charlotte crunched by.

  “Sorry kid,” Charlotte said. “I’m on a mission, with exact change.” Charlotte looked around the library lawn. “I’m supposed to meet up with a guy named One-Eyed Carl. You wouldn’t happen to know him, would you?”

  The kid wiped his nose with the back of his hand and nodded. “Yeah, but he’s not around right now. He’s gone to Montréal, to check out the French girls. He said he might have some luck there.”

  “Huh,” said Charlotte. “I was supposed to meet him here. He was going to sell me something.”

  The kid looked around furtively, nervously, side to side over his shoulders. “Geez lady,” he muttered.

  Charlotte laughed. “Oh god, no,” she said. “Pigeons, he had a couple of homing pigeons.”

  “Oh, those,” the kid said. “I can help you with those.” He bent down and rustled in the bushes behind him, finally drawing out two cages, a little ball of feathers huddled in each. “Twenty bucks,” he said, “for the two of them, and there’s even a bit of birdseed in the cages to get you started.”

  “Indeed,” Charlotte said. She pulled a twenty from her back pocket. “Tell me,” she said, “One-Eyed Carl…is that for real? For real he has one eye?”

  “Nah,” the kid said. “He just makes us call him that. He thinks it makes him sound tough. You want these birds, or what?”

  “Yeah,” Charlotte said, “I want the birds.” She handed him the twenty and picked up the cages. “Thanks man.” She started to turn away, cages in hand, then thought better. “Listen,” she said, putting down the cages and reaching into her pocket. “You smoke?”

  “Yeah,” the kid said, “so what?”

  “So, here’s a cigarette, that’s what. And furthermore, you around here much?”

  “Every day,” the kid said, his parka bunched up almost to his ears.

  “Right.” Charlotte pulled out a lighter, lit the kid’s cigarette. “Keep an eye peeled for these birds, okay? They’ll be back around here, probably once a day. The guy they’re here for, he’s…kind of slow. If you see one of these birds hanging around, you might need to pitch in, okay?”

  “Meaning?” the kid asked. The cigarette hung from his lip.

  “Meaning,” Charlotte said, picking up the cages again, “if you see one of these birds back here, with a message on its leg, you might need to take it off and I don’t know, put it —” she looked around the library lawn. “Put it in those bushes.” She gestured to a low stand of evergreens that hugged the front wall of the old stone building. “Okay?”

  The kid shrugged. “What’s in it for me?”

  Charlotte sighed. The things she did. “I’ll stop by every couple of days, see how you’re doing, and throw you a couple bucks, okay?”

  “And cigarettes?’

  Charlotte rolled her eyes. “And cigarettes, yes, alright. Jesus Christ.”

  “Deal,” the kid said. He put his hand out.

  Charlotte gestured, a cage in each hand. “Deal,” she said.

  *

  Henry put his guitar aside, leaning it against the doorframe. When he wasn’t holding it, his fingers itched for contact, but sometimes, it was too much. Sometimes it was so intense it burned. And these days, the songs were giving him so much trouble he just had to put the instrument aside now and again and move around a bit. Especially when he’d been playing all day long, the same songs again and again. Times like these he’d roam the length of the house’s upper floor and if that didn’t calm him down, he’d take the stairs two at a time, up and down, up and down. That usually soothed him enough that he could get back to writing or rehearsing or whatever was proving difficult that day. When the going got particularly tough, he’d resort to smoking. But these days, he was trying to walk it off first.

  He was on his third lap of the top floor — bathroom, hallway, landing, study, landing, hallway, bathroom — when the phone rang.

  “Thank Christ,” he said, scrambling for the cordless. “Thank Christ,” he said again as he answered it.

  There was a moment of silence, then the voice of Johnny Parker. “Man, I don’t know who you were expecting, but it’s just me, dude.”

  Johnny was by no means Henry’s oldest friend, but in many ways, he was his most important. It wasn’t that Johnny had influence, because he didn’t. He was pretty much where Henry was in that regard. But Johnny had something else, and Henry was hard-pressed to name it, exactly. It had something to do with the amount of time they’d known each other. A little under ten years, but they’d been ten formative years. The three years in school and the six or seven since, a couple of long-term relationships each, followed inevitably by as many nasty breakups, followed, of course, by a lot of drinking and cussing and staying out late, all night if necessary. And a lot of shit-talking and bluster and locker room crap too. They’d get together when they were both in town and exchange road stories, and though on the outside it sounded like the sad bravado of a couple of rootless road-pigs, Henry knew it was really their way of staying connected to each other and to their own sanity. He would never express this, in so many words to Johnny Parker. Hell, he’d barely even describe it to himself in that way. But he knew, at the bottom of his road-pig heart, that it was true. Johnny Parker understood him in a way no one else had or could. Truth was Johnny Parker understood him in a way that Henry longed to be understood. It was understood between them that this was a strictly off-limit topic of conversation, but sometimes, sometimes, Henry longed to say it aloud.

  Now, though, he simply said, “How’re you?”

  “Crazy, man,” Johnny Parker said. “I’m fucking crazy. How’re you?”

  “Was about to go over the side before you called man. Wanna get a drink?”

  “Thought you’d never ask,” Johnny Parker said. “See you there?”

  “Damn straight,” Henry said, and clicked off the phone.

  He rummaged through the pile of clothes on the bathroom floor and wondered when he’d stop living that way. Damp shirts and pants embraced each other; socks and underwear clung to each other in mildewed clumps. It was horrifying, he knew, and it didn’t use to be this way. And even though he knew it would pass, knew he’d get back to his usual slightly-messy-but-not-health-code-violating ways, knew this was just a way of getting back at Tina and sure, at himself, for her leaving, knew, ultimately, that this was just play-acting, that didn’t make it better right now. It didn’t make him feel any better about sifting through the fetid pile for the least offensive shirt, the darkest pants so they wouldn’t show the dirt, a pair of socks that didn’t make him weep with
despair. The underwear he’d given up on. He’d go commando, no big deal. There was no way he was putting those grey jockey shorts next to his skin. He imagined himself chucking all the stuff in the big old claw-foot tub, running a warm bath, dissolving detergent in it and just letting the stuff soak all day, but it was too much effort now. Maybe when he got home. Maybe when his edges were a little blunted by alcohol and conversation and proximity to Johnny Parker and a bar full of pretty girls who thought the two of them could show pretty girls a good time. But now? Too much like reality for him.

  He managed to scrape together a shirt that, though damp, smelled only slightly, and a pair of black jeans that seemed to be alright. Socks, socks, socks were a problem. It was too cold to go without, so he grabbed a pair of thick grey work socks and turned the hairdryer on them. They sailed out in his hand like nubbly flags, and the warm blowing air felt nice against his skin. Once the socks were toasty, he pulled them on his feet and shoved his feet immediately into his boots. If he just didn’t think about what was going on in there, he figured he’d be okay. He grabbed his leather jacket off the newel post at the bottom of the stairs and slammed out the door to meet Johnny.

  *

  The teacups rattled on their shelves as Leah waited for Sandy to come home. She flinched at the sound, imagining the delicate bone china she’d inherited from her grandmother shifting and chipping in the cabinet. She wasn’t sure which neighbour it was who kept doing that, but if she ever left the house again, she planned to give him a piece of her mind.