At summer’s end, Mal and I left 1938 House at five in the morning with coffee mugs and extra pairs of shoes. We complained about the hour, but it was exciting and almost mystical to be up this early, in the slowness and silence, driving toward the pale-blue fingers of dawn.
Mal told me about a date she’d been on with a union organizer who’d moved to D.C. from Boston. She mentioned that Nick and Adrian wanted us all to go to the Korean day spa in Centreville next weekend and that Katherine was about to leave for her annual trip to Morocco for the embassy. I listened intently, filing details away. It had been a long time since I’d been a good friend to Mal—to any of my roommates—and now I wanted to make up for my selfishness. I was grateful to Mal. I imagined us, years in the future, living in our separate, grown-up row houses nearby. I’d go over to her place for a glass of wine on my way home from work, and we’d laugh about the time I took a job playing Teddy Roosevelt and had a breakdown, running out of the stadium in costume, and Mal had to swoop in and save me, putting me on a plane to my mother’s. We’d tell the story over and over, until it was seasoned properly, the way cocktail-party stories marinate over time, the high and low tones perfected, the predictable pauses for laughter. Until we had to work hard to make it seem fresh each time. Tell us that one again, someone would say, and we’d link arms and remind each other how it went.
When we were done, I’d walk up the front steps of the house where I lived—a proper house, no roommates. I’d drop my keys with a clink in the bowl on the front hall table, and maybe from somewhere deep in the house Lucas would call out to me. That you? And I’d say, Yes, it’s me, I’ll be right there.
Now, from the parking lot at the halfway point, Mal and I collected Van from Colette. We were headed to the marina to meet the osprey watchers. A half-dozen birders were already there when we arrived, binoculars around their necks, all of them several decades older than any of us but polite and curious about our connection to the Maryland Birders’ Association.
When Larry joined the group, there was a small but eager round of applause for him. The protesters were long gone, just as I had promised. Luna’s chicks had died in July, and Larry had carted them down his ladder and brought them to the university lab for study. The rest of the Choptank River osprey would soon begin their long migrations south.
Larry and I had exchanged several emails, mostly about birds, but in one he’d enclosed a copy of “The Retort,” the photograph he’d taken long ago of his parents at the county fairgrounds, the one my father had praised, and I saw the depth of feeling in their faces—neither of them noticing the camera or their son behind it, who, untutored and yet possessing a gift, would place them down forever on coated paper.
Larry came toward us. “Good to meet you,” he said to Van, shaking his hand and looking him in the eyes. My father may have been an irresistible performer, but Larry was alluring in a different way, sincere, with a quiet kindness.
Soon Van and Larry were examining the binoculars I’d brought. I’d gotten them with my first paycheck from my new job, as an assistant at a nonprofit that advocated for press freedom. It wasn’t a journalism job, but it paid decently, and everyone there seemed on their way somewhere else, grateful for this good waystation and plotting their own big futures while they did. I had begun writing at night, by hand, various starts of personal essays. Lucas wanted me to show him one that I’d just begun, and after saying no a few times, I thought I would let him see it one of these days.
Larry explained to us how to identify what kind of fish an osprey had caught: A deeply forked tail meant a menhaden; a thin yellow flash was bay anchovy. We took turns holding the lenses to our eyes, scanning the riverbank, and I saw that the nests had become smaller as the chicks grew to fill them. We trailed the Maryland bird-watchers through the quiet morning. The water was high from the summer’s rain, a gray murmur above which gnats mated in columns, forming new cities in the air.
“Larry says there’s a nest down there with birds,” Van signed.
“Let’s go,” I signed back.
I’d been learning ASL through an online course and practicing with Van. Little by little, I was getting the basics. Colette had even said she’d get Sadie, Anna, and me lessons for Summer Christmas next year. I wondered how much longer we’d keep celebrating these holidays out of season. Maybe we always would, or maybe they would come to an end. But if I was invited, I would go. I thought I would always go.
Van led the way, venturing down the slim spit of grass. Then Mal, Larry—who carried a big stick—and me. We passed an empty nest, where twigs had begun to fall and chicks had died or never hatched. Or perhaps the chicks had survived and flown south, where they’d stay for several years before making their first migration north, alone, instinctively knowing how to come home. Patchy the nest stood, high above the ground, and I wondered whether, if I could have seen inside, there might be one black plastic garbage bag, shredded. One ice cream sandwich wrapper.
More pieces of the nest would be swept away when winter came, when wind and snow and sleet would return the materials to the bay. But for now we pressed our feet to the marsh, beach grass pricking our legs. Dragonflies lit out over the channel. I took my father’s baseball from my purse and held it in my hand. Scuffed white, stitches faded to pink, a symbol of betrayal, of regret. Of love. A testament to the possibilities that existed between two people, the conversation that was passing a ball back and forth.
“Hey, Van!” I signed, and my arm went up into the air and swan-necked to release. We tossed our father’s baseball back and forth, until Mal and Larry joined in.
“Van, would you like to have this ball?” Larry asked, looking to me for approval. I nodded. “I think it should belong to you. If you’d like it, it’s yours.”
I did my best to translate what Larry had said. “Gift,” I signed. “Belongs to you.”
Van held the ball to his chest solemnly, seeming to sense the gravity of the moment. Of course he should have the baseball—it should have gone to him all along. Maybe he would actually use it; he would take it out once in a while over the course of his life and play with the ball that had been his father’s. Sometimes you are given a gift you don’t think you want, but then you do. The opposite of Ellie is a tie rack.
Maybe when Van was older, I would tell him about the saga of the baseball and the tie rack. “The Baseball and the Tie Rack” had a legendary quality to it, like “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat,” a poem my father had read to me when I was very young. As for the tie rack, it had been relegated to the same kind of place where it had been before my father died. Right now it was on a high shelf in my closet, above my winter clothes. I thought of the way that people who were in possession of their dead loved ones’ ashes sometimes didn’t know what to do with them. Maybe the tie rack would occasionally be on display and occasionally disappear onto that high dark shelf, though I would always know it was somewhere nearby. Not unlike a baseball being tossed by friends, eventually making its way back to you.
For now Van didn’t need to learn about any of this. For now he would know Summer Christmas. Van Morrison records. Playing ball in summer’s perfume. He’d remember our father’s hands and how he shaped them to tell Van bedtime stories, how his hands caught baseballs and tucked him in and poured razzleberry fring frongs and told him he was loved.
Van pointed out an osprey nest balanced high in a tree. Two young osprey perched on the edge, flapping tentatively, testing the air. Cars passed along the road, heading west to Washington and east to the sea. The osprey took flight, one after the other mastering the air, and as I squinted to see their passage, shading my eyes from the sun, the road fell away, and all the cars did too, and the houses and streets and spires shimmered and vanished until all that was left were the rising osprey and the four of us at the river’s edge, witnesses to the commotion of wings.