In the hollow of her hands was a dead baby bird. Its tiny wings tucked in and its head pulled back, beak open. Black spaces for eyes, its body a scaly grey and pink dotted with vivid blue feathers.
She was sitting on the edge of her bed, a look of gentle concentration on her face, singing into her cupped hands. ‘Sad little baby bird. Poor little baby bird. Sleep little baby bird.’
When I stepped into her room, she clutched her hands to her chest.
‘Claire. No.’
She hesitated, staring at me. Her room smelled like fake strawberry, doll-plastic and unwashed hair. The wall was covered in her paintings of the sea—watercolor waves dotted with pencil fish and crude crayon sailboats.
‘Put it down.’
Her eyes were filling up and slowly seeping over the sides. ‘But Mum, I have to take it to the Sand Witch.’
I could see the parts of her that reminded me of him: the high forehead, the bulge of her eyelids, the dimple in her chin. Then I searched for parts of myself: the flecked color of her eyes, the upturn of her nose, the curve of her lower lip. But it was the other parts of her, the pieces I didn’t recognize at all, that scared me.
I slapped the bird out of her hands. She cried into the crook of my arm as I stroked her hair and stared at the painted sea.
We buried the baby bird in the backyard the next day. I used my gardening trowel to dig a hole in the patchy green grass under the lemon tree in the backyard. It was cool in the dappled light and I could smell fresh earth and rotting citrus. I handed the box to Claire and told her to put it in the hole.
I asked her, ‘Do you want to say something?’
Claire shook her head and put a dandelion on top of the box. I picked up my trowel and filled in the hole, smoothing it over.
I made a cup of tea and phoned my mother. The phone was mounted to the wall and I sat at the kitchen table with the cord stretched tight across the room and confessed the whole story.
The phone cord bobbed with my mother’s sigh. ‘What’s a Sand Witch?’
I dipped my answer in sarcasm. ‘A club, a Reuben, a croque monsieur.’
‘Eh?’
I closed my eyes and pressed my lips against the receiver, like a kiss on her forehead. ‘It’s nothing, Mum. It’s a word she heard and ran off with.’
Through her pursed lips on the other line, ‘She needs a male influence.’
I rolled my eyes and wondered if this was a good time to bring up Jeff, how he was new but had already figured out that Claire’s love could be measured in stacks of pancakes—brown sugar, and lemons plucked from the tree in the garden. How fresh his fingers smelled afterwards. Instead I said, ‘Please.’
She said, ‘Okay’ in that way that made me picture her wiping dust off her hands. I could hear the metal whisper of the scissors as she clipped a magazine to pieces.
‘I’m sending you an article,’ she told me.
‘Can you make it a recipe?’
She said there’s a good one for self-saucing chocolate pudding and we finished up the call. I put the receiver back on the cradle and looked through the kitchen window. Claire was sitting on the wooden patio table in the backyard. She’d collected a number of rocks from the garden and was now arranging them on the table. Circles inside of circles, a rise and fall of different sizes. Her lips moving but her mouth closed, concentrating.
I wondered if the article my mother was sure to send me would have any advice on how to deal with stone rings or dead things.
I woke up early Sunday morning; Jeff had snorted in his sleep. He was stretched out in my bed and the sheets were nearly pulled off his body. I kissed the rise of his hairy belly, snuck out of bed and put on my bathrobe.
I had an idea that I would water the garden. I usually waited until twilight but with the sun just about to rise there was a feeling of evening, reversed. The breeze coming off the sea was so strong I felt like I could lick the salt out of the air. The lemon tree swayed and I noticed something sticking out of the ground—the corner of the white cake box. I stood over the grave with the hose in my hand, a gentle hiss of water from the tip.
I strangled the spout and cut the water off. I smoothed aside the loose dirt and opened the crumpled cake box. Except for loose pebbles and soil, it was empty. I told myself it must have been a local cat, a feral thing. Or a rat had burrowed into the ground. I couldn’t even shape the thought of Claire digging with her small fingers, pulling the baby bird from its grave. I reburied the box and decided to leave the whole situation there, under the earth.
After pancakes Claire asked if we could go to the beach and Jeff said, ‘Sure’ before I had a chance to respond. I sat there with my mouth in the shape of a word and blinked, feeling oddly foolish. I wasn’t sure if it was the dug up bird playing on my mind or just a lack of sleep, but even though I was just about to tell Claire that yes, we could go to the beach, I still found myself pulling up anger like tufts of grass. Jeff smiled at me like a little boy caught with a firecracker.
At the beach we set our towels on the sand between oily sunbakers and shaded umbrellas. Me in a one-piece with a sarong tied around my waist, Jeff in his swim trunks and a Tiger Beer T-shirt with a rip under the armpit, Claire in her pink rash shirt and floppy hat, purple zinc spread across her nose, a tight hold on her pail and spade. Claire wanted to build a sandcastle.
‘Don’t go too far,’ I yelled after her. The wind licked sand into my mouth.
Jeff took off his T-shirt and started to rub sunscreen into his body, turning himself momentarily ghost-white, hair matted to his skin. He worked it into his flesh and said to me, ‘We really should take a break.’
We’d talked about a holiday before, while lying in bed, warm in the sheets and each other’s sweat, smiling. We’d leave Claire with my mother for a week and head somewhere tropical, a white-sand fantasy.
He talked about a hammock strung up between two palm trees, water so clear you could see the bottom of the sky, and in that moment, it just seemed like his selfishness. Like it was my life that was the problem. My anger felt like a lump of clay. I worked at it.
‘Let’s just leave it for now,’ I told him. ‘We’ve got plenty of beach here.’
He shook his head and took off his watch. He wrapped it up with his wallet and keys in his T-shirt and asked me to look after it. He walked the distance to the water with that long, loping walk of his, eyes turned to the sky. I was suddenly tired of myself.
I looked along the beach and saw the lonely turret of an unfinished sandcastle. A pink plastic spade sticking from the ground. Claire was gone.
I yelled her name. My feet dug into the sand. I had run away from my body, a limp and useless thing. I was the sky at the bottom of the sea.
I tried to see everything all at once, searching for a flash of pink. People looked up at me from their towels, blank-faced. Sunlight rippled on a wave. The wind moved the scraggly bushes at the back of the beach.
I found her pail near the dunes. I was inside myself again. I scrambled up the shifting sand. My face wet with silt-stuck tears, I prayed under my breath, not a real prayer: a primal, insistent demand.
In the distance Claire was standing at the crest of a dune dotted with bristling scrub. Standing over her was a hunchbacked old woman with a shock of dirty white hair, her tattered cloak flowing in the wind. The woman was about to wrap her arms around Claire. The waves crashed on the shore and the gulls cried, my nose filled with a cuttlefish stink.
And I realized there was no woman.
Claire was standing in front of a large, dead tree branch that twisted strangely from the side of the dune, streams of dried seaweed caught up in it, strips of a white plastic bag clung to the tip. She was holding something, whispering into her cupped hands. From her look of concentration, I knew she was singing. The wind took the words, but I knew them already. She opened her hands and something moved, a flutter of blue.
