Free In the Land of Birdfishes by Rebecca Silver Slayter Page B

He’d only been gone a few weeks. Was it stupid to leave, when the only way we could reach each other would be for him to find me in that house? He knew where I was if I stayed there. If he doubted. If he hesitated.
    “We’re like an old married couple,” he used to say if I was naked in front of him unceremoniously. Cutting my toenails into the trash or dressing in a hurry in the morning. “We
are
an old married couple,” I’d said to him. Again and again, he said that, I said that. I’d thought there’d be things like that we’d go on saying all our lives.
    It could have become the kind of thing we’d look back on later, together. Not an ending, but a strange time that we got through, together. Maybe he was at my door the day after I left. Maybe he was at a bar somewhere right now, thinking of me, growing tipsy and dizzy with thinking of me.
    “I’m going to find Minnie,” Angel said, getting out of her chair so fast I gasped in surprise. “Maybe Minnie will know where he is.”
    I nodded. She walked away, and the eyes of the dirty men with their backs against the bar took the long measure of her and the way she walked across a room and out a door.
    Stephan would get halfway to one place and then turn around and go back the way he’d come. He reached decision like steel reaches flint—a snap of thought and a glint in the air and then all was certain, but fitfully so. A question or a glimpse of something in the distance and everything could be changed. I’d seen it before, how I’d say something dull or too cloying and he’d become hard and far from me, defensive and even cruel. I’d feel him leave the room from across the table. There would be no way to bring him back into it. I could only wait until he saw a woman be kind to a dog, or a warm wind pushing the curtains apart and entering the house before a storm, and something would alter in him again and he’d be mine. He had the caprice of something horribly light in the air. A falling leaf that is lost to you at the last possible moment, that is taken by a wind so slight you only know it by the sudden, surprised emptiness of your open hand. I saw him at my door. It was yesterday, it was seven o’clock last night, it was exactly right now. That moment, whenever it was, would keep all of his secrets. His back at my door, his hand on the bell, peering through the window for light inside—what he looked like, what he thought of as he stood there before my empty house. His return to me would be forever bound to that moment, in conspiracy with a regret or hesitation I would never know of. Because I hadn’t been home when he came back to me.
    “Another,” I said.
    A bluegrass band was playing at the other side of the room. I hadn’t noticed that they’d stopped tuning up and started playing real songs, but now the hands of some nicotine-faced man were fluttering up and down the neck of his guitar, and an ancient-looking singer was baying.
    A plywood door swung open beside the bar and slapped against the wall like it was hardly worth the effort to stay on its hinges. Jason walked through the door and leaned against the bar and a beer slid in front of him. He picked it up without paying and began to drink. The old men at the bar were speaking to him, but he kept his eyes on the band and his mouth shut around the neck of his beer.
    There was nothing of my sister in him. By now, I supposed, my sister would have looked old like me, but I remembered her soft, pink face and corn-coloured hair. His eyes were a dark slice across a hard brown face. There was no gentleness to him. There was swing in his walk, in his weight against the bar, but it was a violent sort of swing. Like there was something in him so fretful and charged, he was full of the mysteriousness of it. Like he was the wonder of something that might soon happen. You’d watch him, close to you, like you’d watch an animal that had been raised without kindness.
    So then it was a man from here