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STORY DRAFT 1 -- BY SYLVIA HOLLAND PAGE 1

Sylvia Holland

December 2016

Return to Sender

Teagan's mother had always been brave, though rarely in ways that fostered closeness.

Teagan remembered the time they met in the woods, Branagh having made an effort to come

near geographically even if not yet prepared to give up what she called Her Opinion and Her

Right To It. "You hoo!" Teagan in plaid and corduroy had called out to prevent a misturn as she

spotted her coming down the trail, a two-hour hike from the dock, in dressy pantsuit and pumps,

valiantly toting her suitcase. The directions Teagan had dotted on a map had guided Branagh

across three islands lacking shuttle vans or public transit, a long trek after the nineteen-hour bus

trip.

Now, decades later, it was Teagan's turn to walk towards her without benefit of companion

or proper map. They were kin in their shared inclination towards bravery and obstinacy.

It began with the phone call, though everyone disagreed about when exactly The Call came

in.

It was a lifelong practice of Branagh's: never leave a voicemail message when insistence

could be conveyed by calling at the same time every day and letting the ring do it, or by calling

six times within two hours and simply letting the same number flash over and over on a caller ID

screen. This time she had broken with convention.

Her chief conversational gambit was to ask Why? to any view, proposal or news report. If

the speaker had to explain, the link would continue. Intimacy would develop, wouldn’t it? This

time she spoke without a question. They all marvelled at that.

After her husband’s death, she had established the habit of calling each of her middle-aged

children on a specific day of the week. That left a manageable gap of hours in which she had to

keep her own company. She had looked at the calendar: she could manage. This time, the pauses

between her calls were only minutes long.

Branagh was leaving, permanently. She would go by choice, but without secrecy, privacy

or speed, or with the usual claim to surcease of pain. Death would occur in a public place (she

Commented [JM1]: Predicament contained within the

qualification of how she is brave. Very good beginning.

Commented [JM2]: This feels vague. She spoke when

without a question?


had little choice in that) and in community (if there was to be any praise of her, she wanted to

hear it firsthand). If anyone had a problem with her plan, that was their issue, not hers. She

wasn't calling to talk about complexities; she never did.

Her calls were her notice, her farewell and her signal of non-negotiability.

On the east coast, the phone rang without answer. Branagh called again on the cusp of

every hour. The ring echoed through the narrow dwelling reminiscent of attached houses on the

street where she'd been born. When she had visited Teagan, she had always declined the second-

floor-bedroom and instead climbed the ladder-steep stairs to the attic dormer. Nestling under the

roof slant was a pleasing throwback to loft escapes in the old barn on the windswept farm where

she had spent most of her growing up years.

Teagan was visiting out of town when Branagh called. On her fourth attempt, Branagh

deposited her message into the emptiness, upturning her habit with words that also, and more

deeply, defied convention.

Teagan listened to the message the next day from her roost in the forest. She stared at

silvery poplar trunks while she listened, watching silvery rivulets course down the window glass,

feeling a kindred wetness on her cheeks and chin. Silvery fog ribboned the horizon of a pale sea.

Turning her head, she saw silvery birds skimming a silvery creek bank. Rain fell faster, harder.

She remembers no sound to that silvery wash, just the roar of Branagh's words through her.

In another city, the phone rang in the tiny atrium triangle that hung off the twenty-sixth

floor of a condo stack in the downtown core. The atrium served, for now, as an office. Aedan

looked at the caller ID, then at the clock on his MacBook Air, and decided that he could allow a

one-hundred-and-twenty-second break before his business conference call. She would be brief.

He had trained her to be brief. He could handle this if it was brief.

Frankly, he was amazed at how much he could handle by keeping everything brief. He had

just told Brigitte this, and as she wrapped her arms around his waist for a big squeeze, he tried to

mirror her smile so that he wouldn't bark at her to hurry up with that blender noise and stop the

godawful sound so he could get his smoothie and get going to the next level. He was always

getting to the next level. It helped to be brief.

In another country, Sybil heard the phone in the workshop ring as she crossed the yard

from boat dock to driveway. It could wait, like the letters that came from home. She wanted

letters to keep coming, couldn't imagine a time when they wouldn't. She was fond of the region

Commented [JM3]: Ha! Love this reveal.

Commented [JM4]: So what is her emotional reaction?

Sadness?

Commented [JM5]: Why can't I know what the words

are?

Commented [JM6]: This is very good: the repetition of

"brief" demonstrates his fixation and the example of his

exchange with Brigitte particularized and made concrete this

notion of brevity.


they came from, fonder than she was of this flat place with its constant, sometimes enervating

sun. Even the stamps on those envelopes, those tiny familiar red maple leaves, made her feel like

she was climbing a mountain again. Still, she sometimes shelved those letters for weeks, then

responding to a Christmas greeting with "Oh, yeah, thanks for your letter. I've been too busy to

open it." Having no job and a mentally ill husband and two grown sons without jobs or their own

homes: yup, that could keep anyone busy. Those signs on her place—HELP UNWANTED.

KEEP OUT—they were helpful to her in carrying on. Bit of Branagh in her that way.

Just a few miles from Branagh's location, another ring echoed in the most orderly of all the

places Branagh was calling. Army-barracks precision and an insatiable demand for order ruled

Norah's home. Any caller, not just Branagh, must be prepared to justify interference with the

routines at this control centre. Branagh depended on Norah's goodwill. She could manage this.

Branagh's notices took less than a half hour and, by tone alone, forbade discussion. It was a

relief to her that she could deliver all but one as one-way announcements. She placed demands

on no one to come. Her expectation was merely a goodbye salute. Not only about what lay ahead

but also about present circumstances, she had no more to say. Branagh delivered her goodbye

with a simple: "All my love."

She may have confounded every one of them with this, certainly Teagan. She'd never

pbeen so tender before, so empty of conditions with her affection. Teagan wept when she heard

these three words. Perhaps this was when the unknowing seized every one of them, and not later,

as some thought, when the flurry of calls ensued about whether to go and when to go and why to

go or why not to go and with whom to go and for how long to go and really, was there any need

to go and then, round and round the same circle of useless questions. That was indecision.

What overwhelmed all of them after those first phone calls was much more profound: how

to be with this exit, a part of the disappearing but neither slowing nor hastening it, learning how

to care without condescension. “Unknowing” was the name of their state, even though they all

thought they were so damned smart and none of them would publicly admit to a moment of

uncertainty about what should happen. This state being their common burden, Sarah had thought

it might become a bond.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Commented [JM7]: The scene beast is hungry.

Commented [JM8]: Great depiction here.

Commented [JM9]: ??


Branagh's words—that "all my love"—had this been there all along? An embrace she had

never felt? Teagan remembered gardening at Branagh's, digging in while ice still skimmed the

ground after a May snowstorm. "What am I doing here?" she had cried into the wind, and it

howled it back to her. She had travelled a few thousand miles to help and been met without

welcome. Fifty years old, still returning, still making room for that shard of possibility that she

might find affection in her mother's embrace, still coming with every tool she could pack, still

hoping for usefulness in the absence of love. There she was, chiselling ice off beds, determined

to weed while she could, ignoring the current storm forecast.

Branagh watched from the kitchen window. "I don't know why she comes. I don't know

why I let her in the door." She saw Angus in her. He could be equally stubborn, relying also on

outdoor work for his refuge. Slam the door and stomp outside. Pretend you hadn't been part of

the muck-flinging indoors. Leave it to the wife, the mother, to clean up. "Well, to hell with

Teagan. She can learn I have a mind of my own also." When the time came, she would tell them

all that.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Blue-eyed Branagh was a whiz at heaving herself out of her nest and flying the whole river

valley and then over three, four, five mountain ranges in one go, just to get to a decent perch for

those few rest days that a year held. She had travelled thousands and thousands of miles in her

pursuit of fresh sights and reprieve. She had nowhere left that she wanted to go.

Branagh lay still now within walls, strangers’ footfalls audible nearby, a rare blue-eyed

raven. A raven now as silvery as the place where Teagan had just been. One at a time, visitors

arrived by that hallway to see her.

Though born an ocean and continent away, Branagh had been here long enough to learn

this grassland well. Small when she arrived, she had nonetheless brought all the old stories,

tucked under her wing before she had left. Now she was a full-size bird, though shrinking again.

She had not lost all of her gleam. She wasn't old enough to simply topple off her perch and fall

dead, just like that, but she was nearing a century of wily ways, beady-eyed oversight, fierce

skraaaas from her beak and tough bird scrabbles.

Commented [JM10]: Strong emotional resonance and concrete clarity in this paragraph.

Commented [JM11]: I want to be grounded in time and

space here. I feel disoriented, not quite sure where we are

and when this is.


Branagh was old enough, too, to remember the places where the grass grew so tall that it

hid the nesting meadowlarks and a person would have to lie still enough so that the rustling

stems spoke first and only then the birds would sing. Now, caged on this familiar grassland,

Branagh moved as little as possible. Though the outside aperture of her cage was sealed, a Spirit

Bird had entered the space to be with her. She could see it clearly and could hear the low hum of

its song.

All her working days, Branagh had made peace with flying the public transit corridors in

the city, the same routes day after day, year after year. But she prized the escapes when she could

make them. Her flights deep into the woods. The returns to open prairie. At twenty-seven, riding

the rails to Vancouver; at sixty-seven the flight to Athens, carrying only what she could stuff into

the tiny giveaway shoulder bag from Wardair. The "$300 to Ride for a Year" Greyhound trips

first to Yosemite and then to bluegrass country in Kentucky, into truck stop diners in Idaho and

south to the skipping stone islets of the Florida Keys, from dripping Pacific rainforest to the fiery

autumn foliage of Cape Breton. The long trip to the isle of her birth, entailing cobblestone treks

from one cousin's parlour to another. The afternoon hush of crisscrossing ski trails on mountain

sides. The weekly hikes, once Old Age Security cheques had replaced pay envelopes. Now

Branagh rested willingly, giving strength to presence instead of escape.

Nothing in this pen came close to the beauty that the others saw in Branagh. At one time,

people had even called her an exotic bird. You couldn't call this place exotic. At the window, the

curtains hung limply, their dull gold no pretense at sunshine. Worn green counters, battered

metal cabinets on creaking wheels, yellowed linoleum floors, thin towels, cheap trays, chipped

arborite: everything scrubbed, nothing pretty. There was no delicate porcelain bowl for the tiny,

welcome slivers of ice. It was impossible, in this place, to set even one chair suitably for

comfort. The only flowers in the place looked garish. Other attempts at beauty were stuck with

push pins into decaying cork. Trite dominated. If only the place breathed “Rise up,” not “used

up.” Yet from here Branagh would go.

It was winter and the days were short, the nights were long. Sometimes, one of the visitors

stayed longer than the others and into the night and they would listen together to the hum in the

room.

None of her visitors could really read her, even if Branagh stayed still and the visitor

watched for a long, long time. She was practiced at hiding her power, like all Trickster Birds.

Commented [JM12]: But what/where is this place?

Commented [JM13]: The writing here is absolutely

beautiful, but I would feel more relaxed into enjoying it if

knew by simple and plain name where she is. Is she in the

hospital? A hospice? An old age home?

Commented [JM14]: Who are these visitors?

Commented [JM15]: I wonder if this pattern of metaphor

and imagery shouldn't be introduced at the very start of the

story - otherwise it felt like the story shifted into a realm of

almost magical realism that I didn't feel prepared or set up

for. It would also lend the pattern a cohesiveness.


What belonged to her stayed hidden. She soon stopped twisting on the platform where they had

placed her, appearing to some as a docile bird now. From where she lay, Branagh could see a

little sky beyond the glass. The sill cut from view the land she knew well. She looked at other

things, closer things. Her blue-eyed gaze revealed the storms that periodically blew through her,

and they mirrored also the radiant light that follows storms, but her face showed little else. She

was composed without being slack. All those shiny bits she had once collected: she still had

many to drop and leave in others' safekeeping, but she left her trail while others were not

looking. Let them do the hard work of spotting them; she'd done hers.

The room smelled. When visitors arrived, they imagined the smell might come from her.

She was offended when she heard them say as much. When she was bathed and repositioned, it

was clear she could not be blamed. When Teagan came in, she could smell it too: eau de

disinfectant mixed with the smell of a neighbour's shit and stagnant flower water.

Food arrived for Branagh. Unlike the room, the food had no smell. She refused it, smiling,

but not because it had no smell. Teagan heard her give thanks for all the offers of what she did

not want. Branagh tugged the edge of her bedcover without the strength to pull it taut now, to

straighten things once and for all. Her legs, now useless, hurt. They’d once been the object of

many compliments, like those intensely blue eyes. She had been known for her constant motion,

her legs and her wings reliable before this. Now it was an orderly who moved fast around her. He

sponged the bed frame, the picture ledge, the metal cabinet with its ill-fitting drawer. Another

mopped the floor. “You needn’t do that for me,” Branagh said with a smile, "I'll not stay long."

Another delivery arrived for Branagh: fresh ice in a plastic maroon tumbler. Teagan dipped

a spoon to collect a single chip no bigger than the nail of her pinkie finger.

"It's heaven to me,” Branagh said, her lips smacking over the ice, one of four very small

chips she allowed herself daily. She held the liquid in her mouth for the longest time, shutting

her eyes as if, by not seeing her surroundings, she could make them less arid. When Teagan bent

to stroke Branagh, she found that Branagh herself smelled a bit dry, like the prairie in August

and the oak leaves in early November. Branagh whispered that she loved living in a place of

distinct seasons.

Branagh was turned on her side now, bone stacked on bone, five cushions around her so

she couldn't flop, nothing inside her to soften the stack. On the rocky island where she had been

born, they say that when you are ready to die, you can just turn sideways into the light and

Commented [JM16]: So much energy in how you refine a

description, how you make it more precise in this way

Commented [JM17]: So her children are there now?

Commented [JM18]: Good, a clear picture and clear

labelling of the surroundings, the orderly.


disappear. Some days the light around Branagh and Teagan was so bright that it hushed

everything, but still she did not disappear. Branagh knew, by the number of times that her

visitors stepped into the hallway to call one airline or another, that days had turned into weeks.

Branagh did not know who lay in the room's other bed, but she knew everyone else

standing or sitting. The one on the other bed never spoke to Branagh, and Branagh never called

out to her. It was no time for words. The space they shared was anonymous and deeply familiar.

The conversations between the others who stood or sat by Branagh—conversations that

happened later when they could be out of her earshot; short, tense conversations about being

here, now, with Branagh—were mostly exchanges about clocks and food and shifts and parking.

Indecision resurged between the others, but Branagh was immune to it.

The clock in Branagh's room was by the door, also out of her view. She had always, before,

minded the time. Here, she could not even hear the clock tick. None of her visitors could either,

even though every other sound was amplified. The door was always just the slightest bit ajar so

that it could be pushed open with little sound and, at the same time, hallway noise could be kept

to a murmur and the odd clang. At night, some of the other birds caged here managed to slip out

of their pens and into the hallway. That was the only time there was a real racket.

Teagan's mother was five foot two, two inches shorter than she had once been and seven

inches shorter than Teagan, though in the bed she looked no longer than the four foot ten of her

own mother. That little war bride, the only Grand that Teagan had ever known, favoured the

scent of lavender stems, the oldest of the smells here now. Grand was here for both of them.

Teagan figured she had something to do with the light too.

Branagh had been to seven or eight countries and seen many beautiful things. Nothing was

beautiful in the tangibles of this room, not even the florist’s best offering. Branagh treated it all

as though it was as fine as anything she had seen elsewhere. Branagh never moved about in that

room, so maybe it helped that her inspections weren't too close. The room held no place for

others' trappings, so that everything brought into the space lay in a heap on a counter by the toilet

door. Candles were not allowed in that room, or so the ones in charge said. It was, and it was not,

a place for the sacred. It was crammed, yet empty.

A card arrived. “I wonder if I am supposed to stay,” Branagh asked, after absorbing its

message. She wasn't alone in wondering that. Meal trays kept arriving for her, three times daily

even after Branagh had refused all meals for forty days and no visitor had eaten anything from

Commented [JM19]: This section is very powerful in its

concrete details and beautiful description.

Commented [JM20]: This feels too vague. If she knows

who they are, can I not know too. I want to experience this

story in my flesh and in my heart, and I need to be grounded

in a clear depiction of the surroundings in order to do that -

otherwise I am too busy filtering the descriptions through the

cognitive part of my mind which is responsible for taking the

steps needed to make sense of abstract notions.

Commented [JM21]: This line works very well - take note

of that. It works well because it's anchored to very clear sensory details in the paragraph. So we understand it is a

metaphor and more than that, it is a metaphor which

enhances our perception of the concrete details.

Commented [JM22]: You are an absolute wordsmith of

the highest order, truly. However. you have a tendency to use

this type of more abstract and generalized phrasing to

describe things. I suggest you experiment with highlighting

these type of phrases and replacing them with very concrete

and specific details. e.g. name the flowers. Otherwise we are

one step removed from the sensory details which actually

trigger the limbic system of our brain, which is responsible

for creating bodily responses to emotions (sweaty palms,

etc.) and which can be triggered by tapping into our sensory

response to sensory narrative details. Consider even omitted

"tangibles". Just: Nothing was beautiful in this room, not

even the bouquet of __ and ___.

Commented [JM23]: What was the message?

Commented [JM24]: Is she on an intentional hunger

strike?


the trays she left untouched. At night the curtains were not drawn. The moon shone in.

Sometimes, the moon shone like a sun, with two rainbow spheres around it: a moondog, they call

that. That was as close to pretty that it got in that room. Beside the heap left near the door to the

toilet were small accumulations of evidence that others had started seeking nourishment

elsewhere.

A photograph of Branagh's mate was on the far shelf, between Branagh and the clock. He

had disappeared a long time before. Seventeen more days passed: these were the ice chip days,

the days of no liquid as well as no food. Branagh of the black moods lived on light now.

Every time any of those who had been called came into the room, they could see that the

visitor's chair had been moved, no one favouring the same position as the others. There were

only three things that remained constant in Branagh's room. No one fiddled with what was on the

bed-tray table as Branagh lay waiting: the small square clump of flowers, the tumbler of ice

chips with spoon, the card with the familiar script of the friend of seventy-plus years.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

None of them had ever fallen completely out of touch, though family reunions at Christmas

or any other time had never been a tradition. Better to keep some distance and savour the

traditions that did persist: the round cardboard tubes that earlier held Glenlivet and later came

filled with Branagh's perfect shortbread, reliably delivered before the 24th by Canada Post; the

Christmas morning greetings by phone which could, if necessary, always be terminated with the

announcement that breakfast was ready to be served at one's own table; the rum-soaked fruit-

laden cakes that Teagan had never personally favoured until Norah taught her how to enjoy them

by slathering slices with butter on both sides and frying them to a crisp, then spooning the warm

sticky centres down with vanilla Haagen-Daas. Teagan had slowly gestated a fondness,

unexpected by all the others, for many of Branagh's ways.

Teagan and Branagh had engaged in civil war for decades and never even contemplated a

treaty till Teagan was past fifty. Their eventual peacemaking occurred out of the others’ sight. At

the hospital they were together under the eyes of Teagan’s brothers and sisters, and the others

still expected spit to fly between Branagh and Teagan. When it didn't, the fresh air unsettled the

siblings.


Teagan encountered Norah first, as the siblings had arrived one or two at a time. She saw

the sag in her shoulders despite the new cashmere tunic, and the nervous dart in her eyes, that

instinctive readiness to see where trouble would land next. She gave Norah a quick hug, firm and

close, deliberately defying Norah's preference for symbolic A-frame contact.

"Oh, my pet," Norah swooped down to the level of the chair that Teagan was pushing,

"look at you." She smoothed Branagh's hair, ever so slowly, ever so lightly. She tucked the

afghan snug around Branagh's bare legs and spent a few more minutes in squat position. Bit of a

change from Old Bat, Sarah noticed.

Norah's daughter glanced at the three of them, worry in her eyes as she looked at Branagh

first and then at the sisters, but Mia, her own youngest, sidled up to Branagh and reached out her

tiny hand, smiling ear to ear, leaning forward as if to pet her Great Grand was just exactly the

thing to do.

Norah straightened, a shadow flickering across her face. Aedan walked in right after that

and suffocated Norah in a bear hug. "You're doing great."

"Mum!," he hollered, laughing. "I brought you Andre Rieu! Wanna dance?" and he gave

Branagh's chair a twirl. Those blue eyes sparkled.

Teagan turned to Norah. "Do you want to see the social worker together? I can do that with

you," Teagan asked quietly. Branagh's decision, made when she was capable of returning to her

own apartment and had, moreover, proven her capacity time and time again, had triggered a

procedural avalanche. Branagh had dared declare her choice in a hospital, where asking about

Jell-O preferences was more common than "Life, Ma’am, or death?” and she'd stuck to it, no

matter how nice they all were to her. That was classic Branagh. Once decided, she would

sometimes retreat from her position. But never in public.

Norah recited her list for Teagan. "How am I ever going to manage a ten o'clock? I have to

be at my own doctor's then."

"Go wherever you need to. I'll be here. You can count on that."

It was the "I'll be here" that Norah took as declaration of war. She hated Aedan's breezy

fly-pasts and these unannounced and interminable visits of Teagan. Branagh was more than

enough to handle without either of them.

Commented [JM25]: ?? Who is Sarah?

Commented [JM26]: Great description of possible

motivation


Teagan saw the tightening—Norah's quick reach for her purse and then the way she pulled

the shoulder strap much closer to her neck than her arm; her suddenly ramrod posture—oh, no,

nothing could slip, Norah could manage. Teagan gave her knees a silent message to soften.

Branagh had earlier spoken of Norah out of the blue. "She'll do whatever she wants. Leave

her alone. It's time she learned to manage on her own." Teagan let the words land. She had taken

the advice, even if Branagh never had.

In her weeks of sitting with Branagh—the weeks of preparation for this stage, when she

had waited every morning for Branagh's call and she listened to Branagh talk about little things

and big things and sometimes the two of them just sat and listened together to the empty space

between them and didn't say a word—Teagan had learned not to offer. She'd neglected to

consider the consequences of doing this with anyone but Branagh.

All of them had come with offerings, actually. It was not like Christmas when phone

consultations preceded any planned arrivals, overlaps were avoided, alignments in deliveries

were sought. Overlaps were now so frequent, and so fraught with the coiled-spring tension of

unspoken feeling, that the Nursing Coordinator intervened. "Some of you will have to go." No

one moved, though all chins dropped to imply acquiescence. "There can be no hovering here."

After that, the two who had arrived as a pair and immediately set up sentinel posts on either

side of Branagh stayed as a pair. The others took shifts as singles. There would be no rotation at

night: only Teagan had stamina for those hours; the others jumped to the pub before she could

even contemplate recruiting reinforcements.

This stayed a time of non-negotiation: not only for Branagh, but for each of them who had

travelled through memory, angst and into the future to get to this place. Reasons to not come had

been as abundantly strewn as those impermeably staining berries of Mountain Ash that used to

litter the paving by Branagh's old nest. ("Why would anybody place such a messy species right

on the pathway?" Teagan had wondered.)

Branagh accepted all that they brought her. Every promise, every excuse, every gift. Only

to offers of food did she say a resolute no. She wondered aloud, from time to time, what might

occur next—maybe nothing? But apart from this curiosity, she kept silent. She'd given up

skraaa'ing about anything.

What the others began to see was that they hadn't arrived for a just-in-time ending. They

were instead at a show of indiscernible length. It was Branagh's one-woman show—the first

Commented [JM27]: The scene beast is hungry once

again.


production she could control in its entirety, the first death she could experience by choice—and

the marquee announced it clearly. RESOLVE was its name. Branagh had made her decision and

she wasn't altering it. She made it clear that she hadn't needed any of them to come, though her

pride had surged when they did.

The others had come to her willingly, yet impatience, consternation and determination still

wrapped their gifts. Determination for what? was a bit of the confusion. Several variations of

how the end should go were imagined, tabled and contested. Branagh did not speak her thoughts.

In the spells when Branagh relinquished her opportunity to gaze on each of them separately

and closed her eyes, other arrivals occurred. She greeted each memory just as she had welcomed

each of them: with a straightforward gaze. She had sworn to every daughter that she had no such

gift as “woman’s intuition” or any other reflective capacity, but equanimity had somehow seeped

into her tissues by some sort of reverse osmosis when she had thought all along, that it was

stoicism that she was trying to embody.

Now she found herself with her father, who had gone before she turned eight, and all the

babies who had come and gone before she turned thirty, the best friend who left before Branagh

turned forty, the husband also long gone, and all the friends but the one whose card stood on the

tray table at the foot of her bed. She let herself feel all of it: all the earlier disappearances, all the

road trip memories, the old fights, the bright and glistening bits too, the arias learned by heart,

the remnants of every decade. Some of it caused a little nausea but she rode that out by having a

nurse crank up the head of her bed. "Look at me," she told Teagan on one of her daughter’s

overnight vigils. "I carry on." Teagan nodded, breathing this in. "That's what I do. Whatever

comes, I carry on."

She could, still, but she wouldn't. That was the only thing she decided and cleaved to, in

this time of so many comings and goings.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

"But that is going to become water." They were fighting about the ice. The pair thought

Teagan needed an explanation—though shouldn't it be obvious?—that Branagh's sucking would

warm the chips, inevitably, and the chips would lose their innocence then. Death, desired, would

be delayed. This was an unacceptable outcome.

Commented [JM28]: It's absolutely starving, this scene

beast.

Commented [JM29]: Beautiful paragraph that reveals so much.


Branagh was rationing her chips. Each was as slim as the smallest of her fingernails and,

Teagan estimated, no more than three quarters of an inch long. Branagh limited herself to four

per day. She was worried, too, about the impact. That was why she had asked for the private

consultation with the head nurse.

Having always been advised "Get a second opinion," Branagh asked her doctor, too. She

trusted about thirty percent of whatever he told her, so she found various ways to present her

question and then she lined up all his answers and did the calculation. She then asked a Licensed

Practical Nurse, the one who was Norah's friend. She chose her because Corinne had admitted

that her reason for bringing the food trays was "I'll lose my job if I don't"—but Corinne had also

said that she had watched her own mother die in this way and she had confessed to Branagh that

she, Corinne, wouldn't want to linger either. Branagh figured she was a reliable third choice and

gave Corinne's response a little more weight than the doctor's.

So Branagh kept having the ice, however her visitors might react, and all but one in their

anger agreed that it must have been Teagan who suggested the ice to Branagh in the first place.

"That would be just like Teagan," Aedan muttered, "always has to be in charge."

A couple of days later the hissed accusations against Teagan got so loud the Nursing

Coordinator called a family conference. She said it was because they were hovering again and

the doctor said in the conference that he would be listening to no one except Branagh and

effectively silenced the bunch. Then he asked, only because he had to with the N.C. sitting right

there beside him and it was the only way to ensure this stayed his conference and not hers, "Are

there any questions?"

"Wouldn't it be cruel," Teagan asked, "to deny her the ice? Isn't it a comfort?"

After that, no one except the nurses talked to Teagan. No one talked about ice again either.

Aedan and Sybil changed their flights. Aedan was loud when he announced that he would

lose a new client if he stayed beyond the new date. "I bet she'll die on Tuesday night. She always

wanted to make all of us happy. She won't want any of us to miss our flights now. I bet she'll pull

that off."

"You think so?" asked Norah. "Then we could have the service on Thursday morning. I'll

book the hall today."

"I'm going to miss you all." Sybil smiled at Norah. Aedan threw his arm around her when

he saw her lip quivering. None of them looked at Teagan.

Commented [JM30]: Good. A scene. Very illuminating

and lively.


Norah soon hissed at Teagan, "I hope she sleeps through all this. I hope she doesn't know

what's going on here. I hope she has heard nothing." Branagh had said to Teagan, "I want to be

awake. That's all I want." To Norah, Teagan said nothing. She tried to hide her wince.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

In the room with Branagh, Teagan sniffed. The smell was almost gone now. The orderlies

must have scrubbed everything again.

She listened. She couldn't see the Spirit Bird that Branagh had spoken of but she could feel

the occupied space where it was standing. It was just behind her, to the left, and she felt an

electrostatic charge in the air whenever she stepped too close. She could see where Branagh was

looking and she knew by the way that Branagh's eyebrows lifted and the extra white showed

around her blue irises that it was big. Way bigger than Branagh. She could feel that too. She

pulled her chair a little closer to the chrome rails on Branagh's perch so that she wasn't

infringing, and then she turned around to look but all she could see was the clock.

She looked back at Branagh, whose head was cocked in the pillow, her eyes ever so

slightly hooded now. She must be hearing the song again. Teagan tried but she could not hear it.

There was a surfeit of pillows in the room now. She put a couple on the second chair, pulled her

boots off and put her feet up. She would stay the night.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

"It is going to happen soon now." Teagan thought she should alert the nurses. She had been

touching Branagh’s forearm, that underspot that was always silky warm. This afternoon, Teagan

had found it cool to her fingertips. Soon the coolness would travel the whole length of Branagh's

arms and up, up, up into those startling blue eyes and then up farther into the hidden spot under

the spiky tufts on the very crown of her bony head, and Branagh would be gone.

"Oh, that's not going to happen." The nurses dismissed even the reappearance of the Spirit

Bird in Branagh's room, and Branagh's cry that she was ready to ride out on its back. "We hear

hallucinations all the time," they insisted.


But this wasn't all the time. This was Branagh's time. Teagan stroked Branagh once more

and left her to rest, then drove hours through the snow to reach a place where she too could rest.

She had planned to stay with Branagh through this night, too, but one of the brothers had arrived

unexpectedly and announced that it was his shift now. When the phone rang a few hours later

and her sister cried that it was all over and she'd never been called in time and she had asked to

be called when it was time and she'd wanted to be the very last one to stroke her—she'd been

sure she would be—Teagan listened. "Yes," she said.

She drove the snow-packed road once more, no lights on it but hers and the moon's.

Another two hours across the snow, back to that place with the doors that never close, back to the

place where Branagh had been shipped after she had decided to say farewell to her home. The

moon hung low in the sky and there were rings of colour all around it that night.

The others carried on as Teagan drove, arriving first in that place where Branagh had last

been alive and stripping it as fast as they could of anything that they could call Branagh's. When

Teagan arrived, they were huddled together for warmth in the sun room, impatient to carry on

further but also too tired to show any gladness that their flight plans needn't be changed. She

asked to borrow the CD player again and the eldest of them took it out of her Bay shopping bag

and passed it to her with a frown. She pleaded for a candle from the nurses' station and the nurses

said they would find her one. Disbelieving, she watched them search, long enough so that she

knew the untruth of her sister’s words: “A candle would never be allowed here.” She knew that

the nurses would have brought her matches, too, if the kitchen staff had not already discarded all

the stumps of all the emergency candles. So she let a sliver of hallway light serve as a substitute

and she shredded the last of the posy over Branagh's still body and when they heard the music,

her sisters and brothers came in too. They didn't make a peep about the petals.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Teagan had nursed a dream since adolescence, its details more vivid with every fight she

and Branagh had. She'd imagined actual reunions—siblings as friends, how novel—once

Branagh was dead and there was a cessation of orders to keep on hanging on to one another. She

had been pasting candid snapshots in a private scrapbook in preparation: celebrations of Sybil's

Commented [JM31]: Very good.

Commented [JM32]: I find I don't have any appreciation

for these fights because I never really got the details of them or even the full demonstration of one.

Commented [JM33R32]: It's one of those "take my word

for it" statements in a narrative.


patience and Aedan's humour and Norah's kindness. But lately she had been too busy re-gluing

snaps in her book about Branagh to give this any attention.

As Branagh was turning sideways into the light, her family dissolved, too. Like everything

else in the world, it re-formed, but it was different after Branagh flew away. Her flight was like a

strong, hard yank on a mobile, a yank that tore that one string clean off the balsa crossbars,

leaving all the other hanging bits swinging wildly, the constellation suddenly out of balance,

nothing but air where once a distinctive bird had been.

It took Teagan quite a time to learn how to walk untethered from all the other birds. She

wobbled a lot at first. She wasn't used to the weightlessness of it. She tested her strength by

hanging onto the mobile while attempting new knots or new counterweights, to no avail. With a

little practice, she learned to walk with the string just trailing. Commented [JM34]: I almost feel as though Teagan's

yearning here is being introduced (with this degree of surface

clarity anyhow) at the very end of the story. This yearning

would have been a strong thread throughout.

return to sender - sarahseleckywritingschool.com€¦story draft 1 -- by sylvia holland page 2 had...

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