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Stuffing her keys into her pocket, Mary Jo Emerson reaches into the passenger seat of her car and picks up the box she'd spent the morning packing and the last half hour trying to keep from spilling all over the floor of her car. She backs awkwardly out of the car, kicking the door shut without setting the box down.
Three careful steps get her across the parkway and another two bring her up to the gate leading to her brother's house. She nudges it open with one hip, shuffles through and then picks her way up the flagstone path, hands tightening on the box with every step. Too quickly, she's standing at the door to her brother's house trying to figure out how to ring the doorbell without taking her hands off the box, something she doesn't, at the moment, seem to be able to do.
If they had a dog, she thinks, but Paul hadn't been home much, and his partner never really saw the point of dogs. None of the neighbors do either, she realizes, hearing nothing but the birds singing behind her in the trees. And the birds are new to the year; there hadn't been birds at her brother's memorial, just the dank heavy smell of ice and granite sweeping down from the mountains and crocuses starting to come up through the still-frozen ground.
Tightening her hands on the box she's come to deliver, she leans against the door to think her way through the problem. A woman's voice singing something high and light slips out through an open window, and then shuts off abruptly.
She steps back as the door swings open. A slight figure in faded jeans and a stained t-shirt is standing in the doorway: David, her brother's partner. The finely sculptured lines of his face are blurred by stubble and the house is dark behind him, the curtains drawn against the clear spring light. "MJ. What are you doing here?"
She swallows hard against the taste of tears in her throat. She hasn't seen David since before the funeral. How much before, she can't remember; she should just put the box down and leave, send him one of those cards that just says "I'm sorry" over and over again, she thinks. "Your daffodils are nice this year," she says instead. They don't make cards for the kind of sorry she is.
David frowns at her. "Paul put those in." He steps out onto the porch, pulling the door shut behind him, his eyes fixed on the box. Its corners are slowly crumpling in her hands. "What's in the box, MJ?" he says hoarsely. "Tell me it's not --"
She lets her eyes follow his and tries to see what he's seeing, but it's just a box, brown cardboard printed with the grinning logo from an online bookstore. She tries to remember what it held when it came to the house but all she can see is what she put in it this morning. "What? I -- oh, no, David, no. No." As if she would even think of -- "David. This is just some stuff I --" she whispers, and stops.
He sags back against the doorframe and pinches the bridge of his nose. "Christ, MJ."
She takes a deep breath and then another, and maybe if she hyperventilates she'll faint and won't have to explain to her brother's partner that all of her brother is in a vault at Arlington and not, as he seems to fear, about to be handed over to him in a used shipping box. It would almost be funny, if him even thinking it might be Paul hadn't been her fault in the first place. "I need to --can we sit down, please?"
The house is a smaller version of the big Victorian farmhouse Mary Jo lives in, its porch a narrow L-shape. Mary Jo knows the first piece of furniture her brother bought for it was the big white-painted swing in the corner. As kids, she and Paul and their grandfather built forts behind the porch swing on her farmhouse's wide veranda, and she'd always thought one of the reasons Paul liked this place was that its beams were big enough to carry the weight of one. "Sit," he'd said the day they brought it home and installed it, and all five of them – her and her then-boyfriend Kent, David and Paul, and Cam Mitchell – had crowded onto to it and swung hard enough to make the beam creak alarmingly. But the bolts had held, and Paul pronounced himself King of the Lumber Yard, and they'd finished off the rest of the twelve pack, warm against the cold evening as the sun set behind the tall narrow pines.
She glances toward the swing, and David reaches out to touch her elbow, guide her toward it. "Set a while, MJ," he says, his vowels double-clutching into a drawl that owes a lot to Cameron Mitchell, and she doesn't know if it's Cam's voice or the thought of actually sitting in the swing that snaps the fine thread of her self-control. She'd thought giving David the carefully-folded flag would be the point where she lost it, but it's just this, the sudden gutshot memory of balancing on Kent's lap, one arm around Cam's neck and her fingers laced into her brother's, that breaks her.
She squeezes her eyes shut against the tears, concentrating on the way the long center plank yields to her feet, counts her way to the end of the porch, eighteen steps, another evening, another memory, and she's glad this time it's not twenty steps. She turns around and lets the swing nudge the back of her calves, and lowers herself and the box onto it.
She's going to need to apologize to Cam, too, but it's gonna require takeout and a six pack, and Mary Jo knows she's not quite ready for egg rolls. She wipes her eyes on her t-shirt, swallows hard, and looks up at David. "You going to sit down?"
He gives her a look she can't read and stuffs his hands in his pockets. His shirt hangs loose on his frame, and she wonders how much weight he's lost since Paul's death. "David…"
His hands burrow deeper into his pockets, but he doesn't move.
"Fine, whatever," Mary Jo says, abruptly weary. She pulls one flap of the box loose and reaches into it, and pulls out a feather. Its long gray shaft is bent but the barbs are intact. She hands it to him, holding it out until he extracts one hand from its denim trap.
"It's the tail feather of a jay." He runs one finger down it, watching the indigo waves sweep down its length. "Where did you get this?"
Mary Jo crosses her hands on top of the box. "Do you remember the day hike Paul took me on last summer, up Mount Rosa?"
He looks mystified but nods, his fingers still stroking over the feather.
"We got lost that day on the mountain, did he tell you?"
The feather breaks with a soft pop. "He said you were having a Bad Nature Day."
She can hear the capital letters. "Bad Nature Day, yeah. Paul tell you why?" He shakes his head. "Kent and I had been fighting. He'd been… we'd been awful to each other that year, and I wanted…" She'd wanted Paul to tell her how to fix it, how to live with this man without tearing him into shreds. "… I wanted my big brother to make it all better."
"He was good at making it better."
"Yeah." She'd talked him out of one of his rare days off, bought new laces for her boots and stocked up on blueberry power bars, Paul's favorite. She'd downloaded the map and stuffed it in her back pack - according to the kid at the mountaineering store, the trail was well-marked, and they'd been up the same trail two years before. "We got a late start, but it was a really pretty day, and Paul kept stopping and kind of staring up at the sun, like he hadn't seen it for a really long time." She reaches into the box and pulls out another feather, this one a glossy, finely-patterned brown.
Abruptly, David sits down next to her, and reaches over and takes the feather out of her hand. "Paul said this one was from an eagle, you'd been collecting them."
David nods wordlessly.
Mary Jo gathers up her voice and plows forward. "Like I said, he kept stopping. He was picking up all this stuff as we went, and taking pictures - I kept yelling at him to hurry up."
"Did he?" He lays the feather on his knee.
"Nope." She laughs, the sound harsh in her ears. "I think it made him slow down more."
"Ah, shit, yeah."
And there is familiarity layered below the words, familiarity and grief and the same loneliness that's kept her inside her house since the day Cameron Mitchell showed up on her doorstep to tell her Paul was dead, killed on a mission whose details she'll never know, fighting an enemy who stripped them both down into brittle exhausted men prone to listening hard in empty rooms. It was why she'd dragged Paul up the mountain that day, not out to a bar, to see if the sun filtering down through the tall straight pines would loosen whatever it was wrapped so tightly around him.
"I just wanted to find the waterfall, and he kept stopping." She picks the feather up off David's knee. "The first fork we came to, there was a tree, one of those big oaks? Paul stepped on a branch or something, and all of a sudden a million birds flew out of it. It was like being in the old Hitchcock movie."
David scrubs his palms over his face. "MJ, seriously, if you just came here to give me a box of feathers…"
"Paul said the first vacation you guys took together was to some hotel in Santa Fe where the whole place was decorated in --"
"-- stuffed birds," he finishes. "Damn things were everywhere. Neither of us wanted to ask if she'd killed them herself, but Paul was convinced she did." His face changes, softens, and he grins at her. "We started serving pork roast at Thanksgiving after that trip."
She grins back at him. "Paul swore you were allergic to stuffing." She watches the emotions swirl across David's face, wondering briefly, hopelessly, what's keeping him from throwing her off the porch. Vestigial politeness, maybe; it's certainly not because she's Paul's sister, which stopped working the day she told him he couldn't go to Paul's funeral.
He gives her a sharp glance, as if she's thinking loudly enough for him to hear. "Mary Jo. Why are you here?"
She turns the feather over. Paul had left all of the stuff he'd picked up on the mountain with her, knowing she wouldn't realize right away what it was, but confident in his older-brother way that she would figure it out. Now it was time to give it to David: this was what she had come here to do.
She reaches into the box. Her fingers hit something cool and angular, and she pulls out a chunk of rock and holds it up. It gleams like something not quite earthly, the bright afternoon light bending through its leaf-green prisms.
David puts out his hand and she drops it into his palm. There's a bit of brown crystal sticking out one trapezoidal side. "Oh, cool, amazonite – we have the big specimen inside, you've seen it."
"I figured it was yours, but Paul said you gave it to him for your tenth anniversary."
He looks startled. "We'd been… somewhere, Sedona, maybe, one of those places with the art galleries." He looks faintly embarrassed, as if he should have been taking his Air Force boyfriend to monster truck rallies. "Paul hated shopping, but he liked this one store with all these giant rocks for sale."
"So you bought him a rock?"
David's ears are turning red. "Pretty much. MJ… I'd have bought him a wedding ring if he could have worn it. Or if I thought it wouldn't have been worse listening to him explain why he couldn't." He sets the rock down between them with infinite care, his fingers shaking, lingering. "Did you make it up to the waterfall?"
That day on the trail, they'd come across the remains of a rockslide which had taken down the trail marker. "Left here, yeah?" she'd called back over her shoulder, already heading up the trail. Paul had paused, looked up both sides of the trail, and then knelt down to examine the rocks. "I yelled at him again. I just wanted to get up to the waterfall and sit down, you know?" The waterfall, it turned out, was probably up to the right. "We found a meadow instead."
"Meadows are nice." His voice is polite.
She nods. It hadn't really been a meadow but a narrow sweep of granite boulders and spiky purple flowers, cut by a meandering stream that would need another ten miles and a serious drop to make it to waterfall. "So I was told."
He gives her a quizzical look, and she puts her hands back in the box and knits her fingers together. "We stopped when we got to the meadow, and I was like, 'God dammit, where's my fucking waterfall!' and he took off, went for a walk. I'm probably lucky he didn't just leave me there, especially after I'd made him take the entire day to go hiking in the first place."
"What a lovely way to spend the day. I'm so glad I wasn't invited." He bites out the words and stalks over to the steps leading down into the yard.
MJ sets the box down and gets up. "David," she says. The center plank squeaks when she comes to a stop behind him.
He flinches, and she drops the hand she had raised. "Don't touch me right now, MJ, please." He grips the railing and lets himself down the steps, heading for the back yard. Grey slabs of rough stone lead around the side of the house, tall flower spikes just starting to show blue lining the path. At the edge of the property, the yard looks a little bit like the meadow they'd found up on the mountain, a tangle of wildflowers and boulders butting up against the trees.
David stops, his back to her, and kneels down in front of a plant with long spiky leaves. She counts off the numbers in her head, figuring he's doing the same thing – their father's trick, and it had driven their mother walk out of more than one argument - and finally climbs to his feet somewhere around forty-seven. "Come here," he says, not turning around.
She runs her hand along the railing, hesitating before stepping onto the lawn.
"MJ. My compost heap is a vegetarian, I assure you. I want to show you something." The back yard is half weeds and half construction project, and as far as Mary Jo can tell the weeds are winning.
David points past the end of the yard, toward the woods straggling down from the national park. "Look."
She looks.
Tiny daffodils are making a valiant effort in the dry-looking lawn, but on the other side of the stream cutting across the foot of their property, wildflowers have dressed the ground in skirts of vivid color. "This is what we were working on, getting all those damn lupins planted. It was August, remember? We had to get the seeds in before winter. And Paul didn't get a lot of days off." He points toward the clearing she knows is there, where the blues and yellows shift toward a patchy red-purple. "That's fireweed way in the back, the same stuff Paul brought down from the mountain. I found it in his pocket when I went to do laundry, after he went back on duty."
"He said he said he hadn't realized anything still made flowers so late in the year." She hadn't seen him slip the flowers into his pocket. He'd come back looking pleased with himself, and now she thinks it must have been the plan for back yard he'd been working out while he was gone.
"Yep, the guys at the nursery said it's a weed, but it's pretty from a distance."
"Your garden is beautiful." She's glad, though, that the daffodils are the little wild ones and not the huge kitchen-yellow florist kind she remembers from Paul's funeral. She's starting to see the appeal in hiking someplace with rocks and sand the next time Kent says he needs to get away for a few days. "Can we go back to the house now, please?"
"Only if you tell me the part about getting lost. Paul just said it took a while to get off the mountain, it was why you were so late." He guides her up the kitchen steps and through the house. Dust hangs in the still air as they walk through the house. It's a relief to get back out onto the porch.
"The Bad Nature Day part," she tells him, and picks up the box, folding her hands on top of it. "We hung out for a while, and then we had trouble finding the trailhead leaving the meadow, and then we'd gone left when we should have gone right, and… well, you know how it works." She hadn't let Paul take point until they were even more lost, and when she finally gave in, it was starting to get dark. "And even then – he had the compass, but he just kept dithering around and looking at the ground and – " Her voice trails off and the birds take up the narrative, tuneless and enthusiastic.
"MJ. Paul didn't dither," David says tightly. "What happened?"
"Nope. He didn't. And he wasn't. He got us off the mountain, and we drove to my house and –" He'd parked the truck and hefted her pack out of the back and carried it in, and she'd tried to give him coffee but he'd looked at his watch and said no.
"How? How did he get you off the mountain?" He's almost figured it out, she realizes, figured out that the story of how Paul had gotten them off the mountain is the one she's come here to tell.
She reaches into the box and lays her hands on the flag they'd handed her father there at the graveside, on a soft spring day like this one back in D.C. "He wanted to get back to you, to get home, but before he left he emptied out his fanny pack, and there was all this stuff he'd been picking up all day. Rocks, feathers, little tiny pine cones – it was like I'd been on a hike with an eight year old, you know?"
"MJ –" he starts, and the ragged note tells her she needs to close the circle for him. She hands him a scrap of pine, two tiny cones nestled into a spray of fine brown needles.
"Your first Christmas together you made him put up a tree. He hadn't had one since –"
"—since he left home," David finishes. "You always put up the tree."
"Yeah, or my folks. And if he and Cam were stationed anywhere near Colorado, they'd show up on Christmas morning. But you wanted your own tree." There's a look on his face like he's starting to understand, and she closes his hand around the pine cones. "Anyways, it's how he got us off the mountain - the rocks and the feathers were like trail markers, they told him which way we'd gone at the forks."
She wonders if he gets it, or if it's going to take a couple of days of thinking about, the way it had for her. She'd dropped the feathers and the rocks into a drawer, tucked the pine branch over her mirror, and finally come to the conclusion that her brother was trying to tell her something about the press of Kent's fingers on hers the day they got married, that the memories shaping the spaces between them would tell them how to get back.
She needs David to hear the same story, needs him to know that of all the stories Paul could have told that day, the one he kept coming back to was his and David's, the one that should have ended with "… and they lived happily ever after."
She can't give him that. But she can tell him she knows how it should have gone.
She pulls out the flag, and closes the circle.
"