A crow dive-bombed and slapped the woman in front of Megan with its wing. It was nesting season in Vancouver’s Gastown, and Megan’s sympathies lay with the crow. The woman had done nothing but bitch about the restaurant’s no-reservation policy in a choked screech for fifteen minutes. What were a few minutes after months of lockdown and isolation? And really, those beige-and-brown plaid pants had to be pyjama bottoms. A global pandemic was no reason to let yourself go.
Megan hadn’t come for greasy tacos or happy hour. She’d come alone to collect a few good memories of her husband, and she wouldn’t be satisfied until she got their regular table on the patio off Blood Alley.
The crow landed on a dumpster and cawed, hopped, and shook its wings, eyes fixed on Megan’s pendant, forged from her husband’s ashes at his request. She imagined the bird ripping off the necklace and stealing it away to its nest. But where? That vine-choked fire escape? Or maybe the dusty tree behind all that condo construction? Gentrification could kill a neighbourhood but not the crows. They could raise their young anywhere. Why had she insisted on waiting for ideal conditions?
The line moved, and Megan stepped onto the patio. She scanned the crowd and spotted a single empty chair, at her table. But across from it sat the crow man. On her walks, she’d see him standing in alleys feeding and petting his crow or simply staring up at the stars. When he passed by her restaurant, her staff, particularly the women, gossiped and speculated. A dishwasher who claimed to know him said he was an architect who’d fashioned some kind of do-it-yourself purgatory to atone for the death of his wife and child. Megan didn’t care how he got into hell. She wanted to know how to get herself out.
The server took her name and predicted a ninety-minute wait. She didn’t have ninety minutes. Dinner service started in one hour, and she couldn’t ask her overworked staff to cover for her.
She strode across the patio and asked the crow man if she could join him.
He dipped a finger into his water glass and scooped out a fruit fly. On top of his head, he wore three pairs of sunglasses—men’s Maui Jims, women’s Chanels, and a child’s pair with pink plastic hearts. Her reflection blinked back at her in sextuplet.
Maybe he hadn’t heard her. Megan cleared her throat. “May I join you?”
He glanced at the empty chair as if seeking permission from some phantom occupant and wiped his finger on a napkin covered with sketches of buildings.
“Be my guest.”
She tucked her bag under her seat. Sturdy aluminum. What happened to the Acapulco chairs? On her first date with Alex, after her third margarita, he’d pried her from her chair’s ass-pinching rungs, and she’d screamed with laughter.
Things were looking up. She hadn’t had a good memory of her husband since February 2021. Maybe her friend Dawn had been right: they were simply two women trapped in a bitter brine who needed a bit of sweetness to balance themselves out.
She sat. “I’m Megan.”
“Hello, Megan.” He crumpled the napkin.
She’d made a mistake. How could she think about Alex while sitting across from this man? Her husband had been fine-boned and fair-skinned from working vampire hours. The crow man had forearms longer than her torso and skin caramelized by the sun. Outside of his chef whites, Alex wore jeans and vintage rock T-shirts to show off his tattoos, scars, and pared-down fingertips. The crow man wore a long-sleeved button-up. And he was younger than she’d thought, maybe late thirties, and more attractive.
His gaze dropped to her breasts.
She looked down. She’d been fondling her pendant. She let go of the necklace and closed her eyes to make the man disappear. A child’s trick, she knew, but it had got her through her marriage. She heard seagulls, floatplanes, twentysomethings day drinking, and the uneasy groove of Gerry Rafferty’s “Right Down the Line,” one of Alex’s favourites. On their last date, they played twenty questions to the song . . .
Jackhammering jerked her from her reverie.
The man opened his mouth and cawed.
A crow cooed back from the fire escape.
To hide her astonishment, Megan flagged down a server with a Rip Van Winkle beard. She couldn’t imagine any scenario, pandemic or not, where she’d let her staff have facial hair long enough to tuck into their tops. She ordered a fish taco and a white wine she could no longer afford.
“Tacos go better with beer,” the crow man said.
She felt the rumble of his voice in her thighs. “That’s what my husband used to say.”
He glanced at her wedding ring. “Right, your man in white. Where’d he go?”
A pinch of sarcasm? He’d likely seen her and Alex walking to and from work before lockdown. But what had he seen her husband doing the nights she went home alone? She touched the stone in her pendant and imagined her husband in his chef whites gripping the bridge’s rail—letting go.
In elementary school, during a lesson on Galileo, they’d learned that objects fall at the same speed regardless of their weight. After Alex’s funeral, she’d walked to the Lion’s Gate Bridge and dropped his highball glass over the edge. She’d needed to know how much time he’d had to weigh his decision. One Mississippi . . . two Mississippi . . . three Mississippi . . . four.
The server delivered the man’s order: two chicken tacos on a tin plate. The man pinched off a piece of meat and cawed.
The crow swooped across the patio and landed on the man’s shoulder. It opened its beak, and a white button landed on the table.
“You can’t feed it here,” she hissed.
“Do you see anyone complaining? I’m what people like you like to call local colour.”
The crow snatched the chicken and disappeared into the tree. A seagull screamed and something green and slimy hit Megan’s chest. She surged to her feet, and water spilled over the rim of the man’s glass.
He steadied the table. “It’s just bird shit.”
She gasped and barrelled toward the restaurant’s entrance.
“The Ladies’ is the one with the taco on it!” The man’s laugh sounded like a clogged sink.
She latched the door and removed her blouse. Tap water washed the shit away but not the stain. She’d bought the top during her honeymoon in Paris, one month after a fellow server had warned her about Alex. Tomcat, the woman said. Jealous cat, Megan thought. Megan still had it all wrong. She couldn’t control her memories of Alex any more than she’d controlled him.
When she returned to the table, the man apologized for laughing.
She glugged her wine—six ounces, four Mississippis—and set down her glass. “What’s your name?”
He wheeled the button along the table. “Names don’t matter.”
“What does?”
“Your husband. I haven’t seen him around.”
“What’s with the sunglasses?”
He let go of the button and touched a pink plastic heart. His mouth opened, but no sound came out.
He wouldn’t, maybe couldn’t, tell her. And what could she say? That her dead husband still came to her in fevered dreams, through a hatch in the restaurant’s ceiling, wrapped in kelp and dripping seawater, and she followed him to rooms she hadn’t known existed, rooms for butchering, baking, and pasta making, cavernous lounges, sweat-soaked gyms, saunas, and below all that, rooms where he kept his women and his preserves—plums, peaches, pickles—packed tight in glass jars.
She grabbed her bag. “I made a mistake. I’ll get the bill. Give my tacos to your bird.”
At fifteen minutes to closing time, Megan gave up on trying to balance columns and turning red to black. She reread her bartender’s text. Your date’s here.
Dawn had promised to pop by to raise a toast and get toasted. Megan toed her heels off under her desk and bolted upstairs. But the crow man, not Dawn, sat at the end of the bar. He held a glass at eye level as Kelly spieled about carving the ball, Japanese-style, from a block of ice.
“Can you give us a moment?” Megan said.
Kelly tossed her towel over her shoulder and winked.
“I don’t know what your game is, but saying you’re my date to get a free drink—”
He pulled a wad of cash from his pants pocket and flipped a bill onto the bar. “For my tacos.” Five more bills followed. “For the bourbon. Have a nice evening.”
“Wait—”
He left but his scent lingered, reminding Megan of her childhood—of dark, damp days when the hermit next door burned leaves, newspapers, and coffee grounds in a barrel, smoking her and her mom out of their trailer like honeybees.
Kelly’s towel slapped the bar. “There’s over a hundred bucks of untouched Pappy in that glass. If you don’t drink it, I will.”
“He said he was my date?”
“No, I was just messing with you.”
Three bourbons later, Megan untangled herself from Dawn’s sloppy hug and watched her friend shamble down Carrall’s moonlit cobblestones. They’d raised their glasses—“Here’s to finding new men and our old selves!”—and each time Megan’s lips touched her glass, she’d thought of the crow man looking at her through crystal, amber, and ice.
On her way home, she paused at the entrance to Blood Alley. The man stood by the tree staring up at the sky. Looking for his crow? Or waiting for her? He saw her but headed in the opposite direction. She imagined following him into the dark, the police pulling her body from a dumpster come morning. It would be one solution to her financial problems. She chased after him. “Wait!”
He stopped.
Her tongue felt too thick for her mouth. “Why’d you really come . . . to the restaurant?”
“Like you, I made a mistake,” he said. He touched her sleeve. “Come. It’s late. I’ll walk you home.”
Young people and tourists still packed the patios along Water Street. Taxis prowled. She jogged to keep up, grateful she’d swapped her heels for sneakers.
“Where’s your crow?” she asked.
“Probably with her mate, where she belongs.”
Did he think he was taking her home, to her husband? She should be offended, but the bourbon had gone to work.
He stopped at her door. He knew her haunts just like she knew his. She rooted for her keys and unlocked the door. He watched her, hands stuffed in his pants pockets. She pictured him rolling her body into a rug, dumping the rug into the harbour. She closed her eyes and counted to four.
“Would you like to come in?” she said.
“I thought that’s what I wanted, but—”
“Come on. I owe you a drink.”
He looked up to the second storey. She’d left a light on. “Where’s your husband?”
“Gone.”
“Not good enough.”
“He’s dead. In my necklace, actually.”
She led him up to the loft. He stopped in the middle of the room, closed his eyes, and breathed, as if listening to a symphony. He crossed the room and pressed his fingertips to the window. “My name’s Jonah,” he said.
She pictured him treading water in the belly of a whale. Standing between the mountains on his left and port cranes that lurched like mechanical dinosaurs on his right, he seemed smaller somehow, more manageable. She went to the bar and uncorked Alex’s precious bourbon. One thousand . . . two thousand . . . three thousand . . . four. A generous pour by any measure. “Ice?”
“I don’t drink, actually.” His gaze ricocheted around the room and landed on the wine fridge. “But I used to like Pinots from the Russian River Valley.”
Why the Pappy Van Winkle, then? To impress her? To test himself? She poured him a water and took it to him. “Make yourself at home.”
He eyed her overstuffed white sofas and headed for the Eames lounger.
“No, not there,” she said. She’d bought the chair to encourage Alex to relax with a drink after work. During lockdown, he’d never left it, not even when she stepped up and pivoted his restaurant from fine dining to take-out and delivery. Maybe it’s okay for someone like you, he’d said, but I can’t bear it.
Jonah entered the kitchen area and stroked the countertop. “I like what you’ve done with the place. It feels like no one’s ever lived here.”
He palmed the wall beside the fridge, right where the previous owners had tracked their daughter’s age and height with pink marker.
What had the realtor said? She remembered the words tragedy and unbearable. Megan’s thoughts, like her limbs, felt heavy, as if the bourbon in her veins had turned back to corn mash. “You’ve . . . been here before?”
“You could say that. May I see the upper floor?”
As far as come-ons went, it wasn’t much, but she’d take it. At the top of the spiral staircase, she wobbled.
He set his water on her nightstand and touched the balcony door. “May I?”
She needed air. “Leave it open when you come back in.”
He gripped the rail and looked east, west, over the edge. Casing the place? Making sure there’d be no witnesses? Megan didn’t care. She counted Mississippis and removed her skirt and blouse.
He stepped back into the room and froze.
Even three-quarters to gooned, she knew his mind and hers had been on different tracks. She crossed her arms to hide her soggy bra and squeezed her eyes shut. Her head felt like it bobbed, weightless, on the stem of her neck.
“Is that what you normally wear to bed?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Put on what you’d wear if I weren’t here.”
She backed into the walk-in and pulled on her muumuu, the only piece of clothing she still owned from the time before Alex. She stepped out of the closet.
Jonah hadn’t moved. Alex would have been sprawled out, arms crossed behind his head, waiting to be serviced.
“Lay down, under the covers, back to me,” he said.
She pressed her hot face to her cold pillow and her head spun. She heard metal and plastic hit her nightstand, a zipper unzip, fabric falling like a bird flapping its wings. The covers lifted and night air kissed her neck, but Jonah’s warmth and the scent of smoke and coffee enveloped her. When her mind and body calmed, his thumb slicked a path through her tears.
The next morning, a crow landed on the balcony’s rail. It cawed, hopped, and shook its wings, eyes fixed on her nightstand.
Two pairs of sunglasses—the Chanels and the pink plastic hearts—sat beside her wedding ring and pendant. She remembered Jonah removing her necklace, slowly, gently, patiently, in the middle of night. He hadn’t been with anyone, touched anyone, for years, he’d said. I just wanted, needed, to be here one more time, he’d said.
She put her hand between her legs, and her fingers came away wet.
The crow took flight.
Megan licked her lips and tasted salt, like the day she’d turned ten and almost drowned in the Kitsilano Pool. She’d been too embarrassed to admit to Dawn—her new rich friend—that she couldn’t swim, so she’d cannonballed into the deep end and thrashed toward the light until a lifeguard scooped her up and pumped the saltwater out. On the drive home, when Dawn clutched her hand, Megan wasn’t sure if still being alive or Dawn still being her friend filled her with more joy.
She gulped water from Jonah’s glass and tip-toed downstairs.
Beside the lounger, she found a bottle of wine and a half-empty glass. She imagined Jonah sitting in her husband’s chair surrounded by good memories, and she smiled.
Lesley Erickson lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, where she edits nonfiction by day and writes fiction by night.