Page 10 of Wrong Mail

Even from the house, the whole thing looks alive.

I carry a tin of seed down the path and work the outer gate open. They stir before I'm through it, wings beating soft against the air as they gather along the nearest branches. When I scatter the seed across the feeding shelf, they come down around me in a bright, chattering rush, close enough that I can feel the small wind of them on my hands.

Nothing in me argues. That's the thing about the birds. My body walks down here without a fight and stands in the middle of all that noise and lets it happen, and for ten minutes I'm not somebody who is managing anything.

It was Kane’s idea. He put it to me in the first year, in a way that made me think I’d thought of it. Green space and birdsong lower anxiety, he said. They use it in long-term care, in psychiatric units, because it works when almost nothing else will. Get outside. Grow something. Keep something alive that isn't you.

He didn't say the last part. I added that myself, and I've never told him.

I stay until the tin is empty. Then I go inside and get on the treadmill, because moving is the only other thing that empties my head. I run until the shirt sticks to me and the numbers on the console blur. I don't think about water. I don't think about the envelope on the kitchen island. Or the articles I read four times this morning, as if my eyes were trying to tell me something my mind wouldn't hear.

Afterward, in the shower, it happens again. The water is warm and I have my face turned up into it with my eyes shut, and for no reason at all there's rain instead. Cold rain on my cheeks. The smell of mud and grass, and a red light turning somewhere behind my eyelids. On, off, on.

I open my eyes to white tile and steam. My hand is against the wall, holding me up, and my heart is going like I'm still running.

Two years, and it still finds me in the shower. It still finds me at the edge of a swimming pool on the hottest day. I turn the water off and stand dripping in the quiet. On my right side, the world has that faint underwater muffle it always has now. That ear never fully came back. I turn my head to be sure the house is as empty as it feels.

I dry off and find my phone and do the thing I always do after, the thing Kane doesn't know about. I pull up the article. I've read it so many times the screen barely needs me anymore.

The Timberland Chronicle

Woman Killed in Heavy Rain Identified

Kelsi Taylor, 23, died Thursday evening after being struck by a vehicle near the river bridge during heavy rain, according to police. Authorities cited poor visibility and extreme weather as the primary factors. The woman behind the wheel was hospitalized and later released. Following a preliminary investigation, no charges were filed and the collision was ruled accidental. Taylor's family released a brief statement asking for privacy. Her fiancé, who has since declined interviews, said the couple had argued earlier that evening and that she left before he could stop her. She never came home.

That's the part I read twice. The argument. The leaving. The never coming home.

I read it the way I’d press on a bruise, probing for something beneath the pain. A face. A road. A reason I was out there at all. It never helps. All I have is Kelsi, the weather, and a gap where I should be. Everything the article knows, I know. Everything it doesn't know, neither do I.

It's nearly noon, which means it's nearly time for therapy.

Dr. Giles Kane appears on my laptop the way he always does, a few seconds late, filling the frame with his study in Seattle. He has a salt-and-pepper beard and more hair than a man his age has any right to. He adjusts his glasses, then his camera, then his glasses again.

"Mallory. Good to see you. Can you hear me all right?"

"Turn yourself up a little. My left ear's the good one."

"How's that?"

"Better," I say.

He makes a note, or pretends to, and sits back. He has a way of starting gently, never pushing too hard at first. Mostly it works. I have never decided whether that's his training or his nature.

"How's the week been? You look flushed."

"I ran. It's eighty degrees out there and I still got on the treadmill. Hence the glow."

"You didn't swim."

It isn't a question. He knows I have a pool. He knows what the pool represents.

"I know what you're going to say. But I’m making progress. I did stand in it up to my ankles," I say. "That's a personal record. Write it down."

"I will." He doesn't smile, but the lines around his eyes do. "And the birds? Are you still going down to them?"

"Every day."

"Good." He means it. It's the only thing he ever prescribed to me that I took.