A Breath Too Late - Rocky Callen Page 0,28

pile of glass and two white paper birds. I didn’t reach in to get them.

We never drove out to the mountains again.

* * *

There they are in that box.

Two crumpled birds lying side by side on top of heaps of ones and twenties and fifties—money I know immediately that you must have been stashing away for a long time. You reach into the box and hold the origami birds, tracing the edges even though they are worn and might break. You take them in your ruined hands and press them to your heart. You start to speak, shaking your head from side to side with each word, and your chest creaks. I’m afraid your ribs may break.

Your voice is as fragile as the tattered paper birds. “I never meant for us to stay in this cage, my little dove. I always thought that we’d leave it. Together.” You grit your teeth. “I just thought—I had time.”

You open a bright blue-and-orange card and stare at its sparse prose as if it is an incantation. I peer over your shoulder and see it is a graduation card. Addressed to me. You had bought this before I died. I skipped over the little poem centered on the card—I never read those impersonal words—and went straight to your handwriting in gold Sharpie. You knew how I loved that gold ink. We fly today, my dove! We are free.

You tear it in two.

I stare. I stare even as it no longer sits in your hands. We were going to leave. Together. We were going to take this money and your minivan and we were going to leave Father and this damn house and this too-small life behind after I graduated. You had planned that all along.

And it is then that I want to disappear. I don’t want more answers! I don’t want to see any more because this hurts too much to hold. My hands are bleeding from its edges. My heart is splintering into pieces and I won’t ever find them all.

You pick up a letter in the little box and unfold it. As I look over your shoulder, I see it isn’t a letter at all. It is sheet music, and fluttering up and down the bars are notes, and crammed into the space between are lyrics. My name is in curling script across the top.

Your voice is a shiver in the dark. “I wanted to sing for you.” You wipe your nose on your sleeve and give a half-hearted laugh. “You and your loud, blaring music. You’d probably hate all my songs.” You fold the sheet music back into its neat little square. “But … they were still all for you.”

I think of the hurricanes that couldn’t steal your voice. I think of our home that never heard your songs. I think of how even the delicate notes of your humming were stolen by open windows. You said you used to sing because it made you feel strong and then in the quiet, in secret, you wrote your songs for me.

Your finger grazes the edges of one of the birds. “I was never brave enough to do so many things.” You are trembling and I can’t do anything about it. You are trembling and I just imagine all the nights I went to sleep thinking I was entirely alone and yet I had someone writing me songs that one day she would sing to me, one day when we were free.

I want to hear all your songs.

We sit like that for a long time. Tears and tattered edges.

You hadn’t been weak all these years, even though I thought you were. You had been planning and that was what those beautiful secret eyes were all about. A box hidden in your daughter’s mattress, stuffed with money and a pamphlet for trailers in Tennessee because you knew I loved the mountains, and two little birds that were made on a sunny day when the world was bright and full of possibility, and songs to make us strong for the journey as we kept our promises that we would fly away. But I left you.

I left you because I had forgotten. But you never did. You kept a treasure chest of hope by me so that I would be safe. You kept my door locked, your head down, your face painted, and your whimpers low because you were waiting for the moment … the right time.

The tears build in my eyes as I reach for