THE DAY AFTER Rose died, Henrietta Ellis came to the door early in the morning, knocked, and let herself in without waiting for Conrad to answer.
Behind her in single file were the other members of the Pleiades. A brood of rock doves, they were dressed alike in suits of varying shades of pale gray, their hair degrees of white tending to blue. Each bore in her hands a twinkly, foil-covered platter. These women had been Rose’s closest friends.
Conrad had been standing in the kitchen, holding on to the sink and looking out the window after having forced himself to drink a glass of milk. He had been trying, in the face of the terrible constriction that had seized his lungs after Rose’s body was borne away, to draw a deep breath. He did not seem able to breathe properly. The sensation frightened him, and he wanted to tell someone, report it, but could not think whom to call.
Henri, tall as a ship, sailed up behind him, turned him to face her, and enfolded him in a wordless embrace. Then she pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and sat down. Each of the Pleiades came in their turn, put their casseroles and cakes upon the counter, and held Conrad close for a moment. They all smelled the same to him, of powder and lotion and something dusty—a moth wing. Their cheeks were soft, their hands gentle and trembling. The little jet buttons on their suit jackets, carved with tiny anchors or fleur-de-lis, pressed into his chest. The short stiff bangs of black netting that jutted over their hats tickled his nose. Conrad allowed them to hold him. Sighing, he drew a deep breath at last and leaned into them, into their familiar female smell and fluttering hands.
Henri pulled out the remaining chair for Conrad, patted it, and set her enormous pocketbook on the table. Conrad sat down and looked around him. He realized he looked filthy, sleepless. A derelict. He would have broken Rose’s heart, looking like that. He saw Nora Johnson glance at her friends and then stand up to fill the kettle. “Tea,” she said firmly.
Conrad made as if to rise, thinking to be helpful, but she put a soft, dry little palm on his shoulder. “I know where the cups are,” she said. “I know it as well as in my own house.”
“I’ll bet he hasn’t eaten, either,” Henri said, looking up from a paper that she had withdrawn from her pocketbook.
“Toast then,” Nora said. “And some of Rose’s apricot jam.”
Conrad looked up at her, saw her face wither and fall and then, with effort, right itself. She smiled at him. “Nothing but the best,” she said, but her mouth wobbled, and tears slipped over her eyes and down her cheeks. Conrad felt his own jaw start to tremble. Nora turned away.
“Conrad,” Henri said after a second, leaning forward and laying a hand on his arm. She sat back then and took off her hat, extracting the pins and laying them side by side on the table. She patted her hair, took a breath. “Conrad, you know we wouldn’t intrude, but I think it’s fair to say that Rose would wish us—to help you. With the arrangements. You just tell us if there’s anything special you want, and we’ll take care of the rest.”
She reached for her pocketbook, extracted her glasses, and shook out the sheet of lilac paper before her. “We did have some—ideas,” she said, looking out at Conrad from over her glasses. “Rose did.”
Conrad looked at her. “We never talked about it,” he said after a minute.
There was a silence at the table. Conrad looked down at his hands and then up at the ring of faces around him. He realized that they already knew that. That Rose had, in her final conversations with her friends, told them everything they needed to know, understanding that Conrad was incapable both of talking about her death beforehand and of executing anything afterward. What had she wanted? Flowers? Music?
What did he want? What was fitting? What would ever be fitting enough?
And then, as if in a contraction of time, he saw Rose on their wedding day, up on the roof of her parents’ brownstone, Lemuel’s pigeons loosened to the skies as Conrad bent Rose back to kiss her, her spine the stem of a flower in his hands, the birds flying up and away, streamers of white.
“I’d like to bring the pigeons,” he said abruptly, looking around at the Pleiades. “I’d like to send the birds up.”
There was another silence. Mignon French, a transplanted Southerner, round and gentle as a fantail pigeon herself, who was always given the role of the victim in the Pleiades’ performances, leaned over the table and touched Conrad’s arm. Her nails were pink, like little shells. “What a lovely notion—” she started to say.
But Henri interrupted her. “At what point—” she said, looking down through her glasses at the paper in her hand, “at what point would that be done?”
“At the end, of course,” Nora said, putting a plate of toast and a glass jar of apricot jam down in front of Conrad. She handed him a napkin. “Eat,” she said, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. She waved her hand in the air with a vague motion. “It would be at the very end.”
Henri took a fountain pen from her pocketbook, wrote something in slow, tiny script at the bottom of the paper. “Very well,” she said. She screwed the top back on her pen, set it down carefully beside her, looked at none of them in particular. “At the end.”
Nora sat down again beside Conrad, folded her hands in her lap. After a minute she leaned over, put her head against his shoulder. On his other side, Grace Cobbs leaned in, too, the blue sheen of their twin permanents glowing against Conrad’s white shirt. They both must have been at the hairdresser’s already that morning, Conrad thought, sniffing, the two women’s heads resting lightly against his arms; they smelled the same, like setting lotion. Across from him, Adele Simms and Helen Osborne and Mignon stretched out their hands for Conrad’s, and Henri, too, put hers across the patchwork of laced fingers, so that for one blessed moment, as Conrad sat there, he could feel nothing but the clasp of familiar flesh, the singular sensation of being touched by a multitude of hands, that infinitely reassuring embrace by a constellation of Rose’s dearest friends.
“‘So part we sadly in this troublous world, To meet with joy in sweet Jerusalem.’” Henri looked up as she spoke. She was clear-eyed and strong and held Conrad’s eyes in her own.
“Queen Margaret,” Nora said, lifting her head, smiling. “Wasn’t Rose a marvelous Margaret?”
AND SO CONRAD had brought the pigeons, keeping them in their cages in the back of his pickup truck until toward the end of the graveside service at the cemetery. He stood surrounded by the Pleiades, a dark pool of mourners casting a shadow over the tender spring grass. Escorted to the graveside, Conrad searched the crowd. He could not understand, briefly, why he did not see Rose when so much else seemed familiar.
And then, during the readings offered by each of the Pleiades, who wore a uniform shade of blue black and had feathers—the quills of blue jays and the brown spears of hawks’ tails—in their hats, their lapels bursting with clusters of Rose’s favorite anemone, the exquisite white ‘Honorine Jobert’, Conrad had simply wandered away from the gathering at the graveside.
The Pleiades had watched him go, but Henri was reading, and none of them liked to interrupt her. Conrad just walked away; he had no particular relation to this ceremony. He was just a spectator. He glanced up once at the sky, a solemn and perfect blue, and reached to loosen the knot of his tie at his neck. He felt light headed, almost disembodied, as though his hands were not attached to his wrists. He took off his suit coat, laid it on the front seat of the truck.
In the cages he’d assembled twenty of his whitest pigeons, the fantails and the ice pigeons, the Silesian croppers and the white kings, the frillbacks and the Antwerp smerles. Trying to rid his head of the cottony sensation of dullness, he slid the cages around noisily on the bed of the pickup until they were all facing the open tailgate, and then he bent over to look in at his birds. Something like sand shifted inside his head when he leaned over. But he put his finger to the cage that held Pearl. She held his eye a moment; the world, contained in her black iris, was reduced to a wavering parallelogram. And then, as Henri closed her book and Father Mortimer stepped forward to begin the prayers, Conrad opened the cages.
The pigeons flew out in a shuddering of wings, taking off toward the light, toward the high, etherizing reaches of the sky, just as the Pleiades stepped forward to link hands and bow their silver heads over the dark mouth of the grave. The birds circled up and away, aiming at some invisible passage.
All but one.
Pearl, her wings held wide in a stately attitude, drifted just above Conrad’s head, caught in a perfect updraft. Conrad craned back painfully, put his hands up—did she want to come back to him? But as he did so, he felt a capful of wind strike him gently around the head, cuffing his ears. And then he heard it, a sudden, low whine, as a long, dark current of warm air leaned in across the cemetery from over the mountains. The air smelled of faraway places, of sandbars and the ocean, a foreign scent laden with spice, the smell of places Conrad knew he’d never been and would never go. He turned to face it, saw the trees turn in the powerful gust, the canopy over the grave flap. Nosegays laid to rest here and there at the heads of the departed came loose, ran across the grass, bright spots of false color. Gyres of tiny new leaves circled and spun. The hats on the heads of the Pleiades tore loose, blew away; those gathered at the graveside clutched at their lapels, at one another, afraid they would be torn apart forever and yet exhilarated, too, by the sensation of abandon the wind created in their hearts.
Conrad staggered in the sweeping, salty respirations of the wind but managed to stand his ground, his white shirt flapping. He saw his pigeons scatter as if they had been shaken from a tablecloth, their primary and secondary feathers spread wide. They were trying to find a grasp on the slippery air, the fields of their feathers separating against the fierce draft, their bodies vertical for a moment before they were blown back and away. He saw Pearl above him, braced impossibly against the wind. He put up his arms again to catch her back, show her where he was. But as he did so, he felt himself leave the ground for an instant, not flight nor falling but an instant of perfect weightlessness, as if the wind were testing its grip on him, too, testing gravity’s strength, testing the intention in Conrad’s heart. It was only an instant, and yet in that moment a wondrous relief came over him.
And as he held there in an inhalation of indecision, his shirt filling with the wind’s powerful breath, he saw a young woman he did not immediately recognize step away from the edge of the huddled collection of mourners, their dark coats shiny as crows’ oily feathers. She was small and thin, dressed in a drab overcoat; her narrow wrists emerged from the cuffs, fragile and stiff. Her light-colored hair was so pale it was nearly white. Delicate strands whipped across her face. All around her blew a brilliant confetti of leaves torn loose, the shorn red foliage of the Japanese maples and the crimped, green paper fans of the ginkgoes, the purple leaves of the copper beech and the notched feathers of the honey locust, pale and buttery.
He saw her leaning into the wind, coming toward him, her eyes lifted in recognition; and at that moment he remembered her—the smile of pleasure she’d given Rose in the hallway, her foolish dress, the way Rose had slipped an arm round the girl’s waist, steered her into the sunlight at the back of the house, and shown her the view.
When his toes touched ground again, he felt his muscles weaken like water. Pearl was beating her wings steadily against the gusts, holding her own above Conrad’s head. Conrad came to his knees, dazed and light headed. He saw that the mourners at the graveside were separating, the women tucked under the men’s arms, teetering backward. The tent was plucked from its tethers, flew off at a tilt. Conrad saw Henri stagger away, her blue gray permanent ruffled up oddly in the back; Mignon French raced past him, taking little running steps, tears streaming down her pink cheeks. Everyone seemed to be calling to him, trying to say something. Conrad raised his arms to the wind, feeling his shirt flatten over his chest like a sail. The sky was sharp and blue, filled with the invisible landscape of the wind as it carved out canyons and valleys, angles of ascent.
And then, as if she could hold on no longer against the steady assault, Pearl veered off and away, a white speck disappearing over the bowl of the hill, toward the river and home. The cemetery was empty except for Conrad and—standing a respectful distance away, clutching the pliable body of a Lombardy poplar, which the wind bent toward the ground—a girl who understood that she’d seen a man caught for one impossible moment between heaven and earth.
IF HE CLOSED his eyes, Conrad could remember the sensation of that moment of weightlessness, and also the sight of Pearl vanishing over his head, the intimation he’d had at that instant that he might never see her again. Now, taking a seat on the bench in front of his loft, he turned away from the view of his garden and looked out over the river toward the mountains instead. Evita had vanished into the dark clouds.
He could not see the sun, though he could sense its hot, distant presence above him, obscured behind the wall of damp clouds; he judged that it must be nearly noon. Conrad felt observed, underfoot; fetching Pearl from the loft, he brought her back outside with him and sat down again, his hand curled protectively over the pigeon’s back. He gazed up at the sky. The clouds seemed to have closed solidly overhead, a wall of rock. For a moment he imagined Evita breaking through them, emerging into a light so fierce and joyful that it would burn the eye, replace the gift of ordinary sight with vision, the mundane with the miraculous. As a child he had believed that if his pigeons could talk, they would tell him the truth about heaven, for he was certain they saw it each time they rose up out of the gritty, particled air of New York, disappearing over the skyline. He believed that they saw the globe of the earth rotating smoothly ahead of them, saw their own dovecotes blinking on the surface of the planet like lighthouses at the dark edge of the sea.
How did they do it? His birds’ ability to navigate home, no matter how far they’d flown, no matter how disorienting the weather, provoked an amazement in Conrad that had grown over the years rather than diminished. In the late 1800s, a famous pigeon, a black hen from Philadelphia named Dinah, had been clocked at faster than a mile per minute, and Conrad’s own racing homers had once flown one hundred seventy miles in just under three hours during a bad storm. This was an impressive time, Conrad knew, one that didn’t allow for much correction or dilly dallying. Rose had believed romantically that it was simply the pigeon’s love of home that brought it back each time. But Conrad, unwilling to settle for that explanation, had been more persuaded by recent experiments with infrasound. A researcher at Cornell had discovered that pigeons were able to detect sound energy at eight octaves below the limits of normal human hearing; this, more than any other explanation he had ever heard for the homing pigeon’s navigational abilities, made sense to Conrad. He could easily imagine that his birds lived in a universe ringing with a complex musical score unheard by human ears, a concert of the noise of movement itself, its massive displacements and adjustments like icebergs shouldering through the Arctic Ocean. It all seemed infinitely reasonable to him. It seemed, in fact, the only possible explanation for his pigeon’s miraculous ability to avoid becoming lost.
Conrad stroked Pearl’s feathers and looked up into the threatening sky, hunting for Evita: the clouds rolled from side to side above him as though he stood on a tilting deck, and there was no sign of the bird. He reached up and put Pearl on his shoulder. Not many of his pigeons were as easy to handle as this one. Rose used to tease him that Pearl was a little bit in love with him; and it was true that she billed and cooed at his approach, that she settled into his hands like a domesticated cat when he stroked her. She liked riding on his shoulder, too, nibbling at his ear. Rose, watching Pearl trail after Conrad one day in the garden as he worked his way down the boxwood bushes with the clippers, had put her hands on her hips and said, laughing, “That bird’s not a homing pigeon; she’s a bloodhound. I believe she would find you if you were lost in Manhattan.”
Conrad had put down the clippers, wiped his forehead, looked up, and put out a hand to Pearl, who fluttered down and landed on his forearm. “She just knows a good thing when she sees it,” he’d said, pursing his lips in a kiss to Pearl. “Don’t you?”
Pearl rode easily now on his shoulder, an acrobat on the high wire, adjusting her balance to Conrad’s stride. “Come on,” he said to her, getting up from the bench.
Inside the loft, Conrad sat down in the cracked-leather swivel chair at his desk and began riffling through the stacks of journals and papers there, Turvey’s Dictionary and Guide for Pigeon Racing, Levi’s The Pigeon, years’ worth of back issues of the American Pigeon Journal and British Homing World. And then, under a pile of newsletters from the Pigeon Fanciers of America, he saw Rose’s notebook, the one she had written over her last few weeks, a guide to the garden, intended to help Conrad remember what tasks needed to be done throughout the year.
How had it made its way here, to his desk? He did not remember bringing it down to the loft. A man from the funeral home had found it under the sheets when Rose’s body was lifted to the gurney, and he had handed it to Conrad, standing mutely at the bedside. Had he carried the notebook here that night? He couldn’t remember. But, then, he didn’t remember much of anything from the last four months.
Now though, shifting Pearl to his lap, he found his glasses in his pocket and fitted them to his nose. He cracked the spine of the notebook and bent it open. Rose’s handwriting sloped downhill, threatening to spill off the page. It was, he realized as he turned the pages, a monumental labor for one whose strength had been so uncertain at the end that even lifting a spoon to her mouth had seemed to exhaust her.
It was all very predictable, though. He riffled through the pages and read her instructions—when to feed the fruit trees and how much; when to prune which roses; what needed to be dug up and brought to the basement to overwinter; what needed to be divided and moved.
But then, tucked into the back of the book like an afterthought, on a loose sheet, Conrad discovered a recipe for something called rose beads. He put his finger to the lines, read slowly.
“Put red or pink rose petals through the finest cutter of food grinder,” she had written. “Put chopped petals in rusty iron kettle (back porch) and cover with water. Simmer until petals adhere when pressed. Form into beads.” The recipe went on, arcane and complicated, more of Rose’s necromantic art. Conrad squinted at her script. “Dry in the sun, pierced on hat pins,” she had written, and in the margin, crookedly, she had added, “Hat pins in top right dresser drawer, under necklace box.”
Conrad closed the book. Had she meant for him to do this? All this? Press a clove into each of the still-soft beads, as she had written, to form a puckered indentation like a flower? Thread the beads on black twine? What for?
He put his hand over the notebook to momentarily silence the voice within it, the expectation. And yet he could hear it, Rose’s wandering tone, meditative, considering: “Beads will retain the faint attar of roses.”
He sat back in his chair and thought. Well, it was as good as anything else, wasn’t it? It was, as Rose had said, something to do.
Rising from his desk, Pearl stepping lightly on his shoulder, Conrad climbed the stone steps up to the rose garden and filled his hat with petals, more than he could carry. They gave easily to his grasp, falling and scattering in a path at his feet as he walked between the beds. He heard music then, like wind chimes, tinkling notes. And in the kitchen he filled the kettle, the splashing water an echo of voices—his voice, Rose’s, their conversations back and forth among the rooms, up and down the stairs, calling and answering. He poured the petals into the kettle, lit the flame on the burner, stood by as the mass swirled into black.
Dust to dust, he thought, pressing the mixture between his fingers when it had cooled. And finally, squinting, he pierced the beads on the hat pins, which were just where Rose had said they would be, laid them on a tea towel, and sat down on the terrace wall, staring, the clouds gathering overhead, gaining speed. Then, clumsily, the unfamiliar needle in his fingers, he laced each rosy bead, now dried hard as a cherry stone, onto a length of black thread. And at last he held the necklace in his hands. He brought it to his nose, sniffed, detected the faint smell of roses.
He turned the necklace in his hands, marveling at Rose’s strange body of knowledge, the uncertain embodiment of her here now, out of sight yet close by. Where had she come across this recipe? He closed the lid of her sewing basket slowly over the flashing silver needles, the spools of colored thread, the tiny, velvet-covered cases of pins, her thimble with the grinning face of a monkey, the curling bias tape, and tiny scissors whose handles closed neatly over the blade, the wings of a stork. He thought then of Rose herself bent over the dining room table, her basket spilled beside her, the Singer whirring, her foot pumping the pedal, her furious pace.
For several years she had sewn all the costumes for the Pleiades’ performances. Conrad remembered the women closeted in his dining room, the pocket doors pulled almost shut, Rose kneeling at her friends’ feet, her mouth full of pins. The sound of sporadic laughter came from the sunny room, glancing off the polished circle of the table, Adele’s silver service on the sideboard, the flowering sprays of Rose’s orchids nodding low on the radiator.
One day, passing down the hall, Conrad had paused, glanced in through the crack of the doors. Mignon French, round and shapely, her hair combed into a thin knot on her head, stood in her brassiere and skirt, her arms outstretched. Rose knelt at her feet, her hands busy at the green velvet hem. Conrad had seen the white accordion folds of flesh at Mignon’s waist, the tumult of flesh contained in the brassiere, the wings of flesh beneath her arms—and the slim rounds of Rose’s calves as she knelt in her stocking feet on the rug, her toes curled, pulling the fabric taut, running it through her hands. The other women stood around the room in their underwear and skirts, shawls or sweaters draped over their soft, bare shoulders, holding up their costumes, exclaiming to one another, touching and caressing. He had seen Rose raise the hem of Mignon’s skirt, reach beneath it to tug the fabric, saw Mignon’s heavy thigh, the dimpled flesh, the heavy ankle, the lifted heel. And he had started guiltily when Henri Ellis, coming downstairs from the bedroom with her arms full of folded costumes, had stepped to the landing, the floorboards creaking beneath her weight.
A long stare passed between them. And then Henri had brushed past him into the dining room, pulling the doors closed behind her.
“Cover up, girls,” he heard her say. “There’s a Peeping Tom in the house.”
Conrad heard shuffling, what sounded like laughter. And then Rose’s voice.
“What do you mean?” He winced at the tone, aggrieved, alert.
“Your husband,” Henri said, her voice muffled, “is standing in the hall, feasting his eyes on all these half-naked American beauties.” More giggles.
“What do you mean?” Rose asked again. And now her voice was sharp, clear. Conrad drew back, moved down the hall, his heart in his throat. But in a moment, Rose had slipped through the doors, closing them with a whisper behind her.
“Conrad,” she said, low.
He turned, saw her strained face.
“I was just—passing through,” he said.
Rose said nothing. He saw her wind the fabric in her hands.
“It was nothing, Rose,” he said, trying to keep his voice low.
But after a second she had turned and gone back inside. Conrad fled out the back door.
That afternoon, after the Pleiades had left, waving gaily as they walked down the front path, he had wandered the garden, moving in a desultory way from one task to another. He had been afraid to go back inside. Finally, as dusk began to fall, he had approached the house. It had been quiet except for the cuckoo clock ticking in the hall; long, dim shadows fell over the floors. At the kitchen sink he rinsed his hands of dirt, cleaned carefully and slowly beneath his fingernails with the tines of a fork.
“Rose?”
He spoke her name into the empty kitchen, the shadowy dining room with its litter of costumes, the sewing machine black and silent. He stood at the bottom of the stairs. Listened. No sound. He climbed quietly then, the treads creaking. The door to their bedroom was slightly ajar. He stepped to it, pushed it open.
“Rose?”
She was seated at her dressing table, the two lamps with their silk-tasseled shades lit, soft and yellow. She was undressed to the waist. Her hair, loose, was brushed over her shoulders. She wore a necklace of dull beads at her throat.
“Rose?”
He stepped into the room. She did not move, nor did she take her eyes from her own face, staring back at her in the mirror. He moved closer, stood reflected like a ghost in the dark glass. Rose’s eyes were black, the pupils large. Her shoulders and collarbone glowed white, sharp.
“I’m very thin, aren’t I?” she asked quietly.
“Thin, yes,” he said. “Not too thin, though.”
Her hands floated up, cupped her tiny breasts for a moment, then dropped again to her lap.
“If I’d had children, I wouldn’t be so thin.”
Conrad, his heart clenching, touched her shoulders then, moved to stand square behind her.
“I like you the way you are,” he said.
He felt her shoulders lift, a sigh, saw the necklace at her throat rise and fall with the breath. She closed her eyes briefly, opened them again.
“Are you hungry?” she asked. “What time is it?”
“I’m—I don’t know,” he said, and he felt then that everything was slipping away from him—some moment when he might have explained himself, might have prevented this, fixed it. She stood, moving away from his hands toward the door.
He looked at the bed, her shirt tossed there. “Do you want your shirt?” he said.
She turned to him briefly before walking out the door.
“I think I’ll just stay like this,” she said. “If you don’t mind.”
And in the kitchen she had made a salad, sliced the bread, turned fish in the pan, the harsh, penetrating scent of garlic making his eyes smart. She had said nothing, moving between table and stove, her bare back glowing, the beads of her spine shifting like the locked skeleton of a fish. When she sat at the table and pulled up her chair, he looked at her face, saw the tears there.
“Rose,” he said, protesting. “Come on. Come on now. Put your shirt on.”
“Isn’t this what you like?” she said, weeping openly now. And he had pushed back his chair roughly then, raised her in his arms, held her tight against him. How could it matter so much? But he kissed her forehead, her ear, the smooth fall of her hair, over and over, and as he felt the narrow rib cage relax between his hands, he thought how easily everything could be lost—how, in a single second, everything you were sure of could disappear when you weren’t looking.
CONRAD RAISED HIS eyes from the necklace he held in his hands, saw Pearl flutter down from the terrace wall and hop along the ground, pecking at the thyme that grew between the flagstones. Following her with his gaze, Conrad saw that the thin fingers of a trumpet vine had crept over his boot while he had been sitting there stringing the beads, thinking. The miniature orange horn of its blossom, a speechless mouth, curled around his ankle. Delicately he shook his leg free.
Pearl, advancing over the flagstones, vanished into the low fog that rolled gently toward them, and Conrad realized that the afternoon had slipped away while he had been making the rose beads. The silence of the garden rested heavily around him, though behind it he heard the occasional distinct click of an insect’s voice, as if occurring behind a curtain, or the sudden ruffle of leaves as a bird rose from the undergrowth in alarm. He looked out over the garden, which appeared and disappeared through the mist. The distant mountains were shrouded, invisible, but he could feel their heft leaning toward him, the paper-thin layers of compressed mica and settling shale. How different was this silence from the quiet years of his retirement, he thought, when he and Rose had worked in the garden together, tying and cutting, pruning and weeding, planting and mulching. They had sat together, resting, watching the monarchs drift over the borders. They had wiped the sweat from each other’s brow. He had felt sometimes, on those long, uninterrupted days, that they were the last people on earth, the last of their kind. He had wondered how different it might have been if they’d had children. And he thought now that one could feel triumphant as the last of two, a matched pair of animals entering the ark, or the mirror images of a butterfly’s wings, things that belonged together, that were not whole unless joined; but it was another thing entirely to be simply the last—to be the one left behind.
He felt cold now; he stood and whistled for Pearl. She flew suddenly at him out of the mist, veered around his head. He put up his hand for her, welcomed the damp and chilled weight of her. And then he remembered Evita, the mother bird. He put Pearl on his shoulder, stepped into the fog, and headed down toward the loft to let Evita back in. As he reached the lower terrace, the mist parted for a moment and he saw Evita circle the roof of the loft and then alight there, her head turned, listening.
And then it seemed as if he could not move fast enough, had not ever been quick enough, for he felt the disturbance in the air above his head, felt the mammoth webbed shadow of the owl as it flew over him, saw the blanket of its wings shaken out like a cloak, heard the impact as the great bird’s talons clasped the pigeon and bore the body away over the river toward the dark wood. It was, after the short scream as the owl’s talons bit into Evita’s breast, quiet. Conrad was dazed. He lifted his hand a moment toward the sky, then turned slowly to regard the black spaces in the woods on the far side of the river, their baffling silence, the mist closing in. He opened his mouth, but there was nothing to say. On his shoulder, Pearl hunched into his neck. What had that scream sounded like to her, a creature tuned to the aperture of sound itself, the pinprick on the scale, the passage from one world to the next?
Pasquale was still sitting on the nest. Conrad stooped to peer in at him but turned away after a moment, frowning at the floor. He heard the bird rustle his feathers, shifting position. Conrad was not sentimental; he had seen pigeons killed before, though usually it was hawks who took them, a battle of feathers and spurs in air. But he did not want to look at Pasquale now. He passed on down the aisle, sifting grain into each pan.
And then, because he could not think what else to do, he took down the broom and began to sweep, raising clouds of dirt and feathers, the empty hulls of seed, everything that was left. Pearl, offended by the rising dust, left his shoulder and flew to the landing board. But Conrad leaned hard on the broom, felt the fragile stick bend beneath his weight, felt how close he was, just at that moment, to falling.