Ribbon and Rook

Bradley J. Collins

The thread of a remembrance, through my feeble hands, escapes. What remains is a bright pink ribbon snugged around my forefinger. Tied with a bow. Meant to stay put.

Written on the ribbon’s curls are the initials LMB in black. Ink stains the fabric and has leached into the wafer-thin ridges of my skin. A date in small, neat handwriting, mine, I think, follows. May 1, 2025.

Checking the calendar, I see the words – Lauren’s Dance Recital on May 1. My granddaughter. The ribbon is meant to remind me. Of how I love her. How could I forget? Yet, I have and will again. The last time she visited, a week or maybe a month ago, little Lauren asked me to watch her perform. How she smiled when I said I would go. The image of her gap-toothed grin remains imprinted somewhere deep, as yet untouched by the blight devouring my memory. Think hard. Scratch the date into a safe place. Bar the doors and keep out the screeching things that eat and eat.

My phone chimes with an unpleasant alert, and all thoughts of my granddaughter drift away. Sand tossed to the wind. The alert continues, pestering me with its dings, until I relent and open a security system app that tells me the temperature in my greenhouse is plummeting.

I remember roses. Planting them. Growing them. The pride in the work. Hands in the dirt.

**

Standing outside now as cold blooms through the soles of my shoes. House slippers, I see as I look down. Worn so often to shuffle in aimless circles around my estate, the slippers have sprung holes in the bottoms, through which the snow invades. Why didn’t I put on boots? Why did I wander from the warm orange glow of my home?

Anxious seconds pass. My heart like a hummingbird’s thrash. Behind me, a house. Two stories. Red brick. The back door is open. A voice on the wind, a whisper at most, sings into my ear that I live here, that I raised two daughters on this street. Joan and Adeline. This is good. I can still recall the important things when I need to.

Pain. Old and yet fresh as thorns pressed against flesh. My husband left me for a younger woman. In this very yard, I saw them kissing under the oak tree’s limbs like two lovestruck teens. John’s new wife – Sheila? Shelly? Sharee? – probably does not wander in her backyard in only a terry cloth robe. She with the pert, dewy skin. She with the red, ruby lips and wondrous curves. No doubt he absconded from our marriage to escape having to see the gray undulations I see in the mirror each morning. So much sagging.

Is my age why he left me?

**

Inside, the air is warm and moist. The greenhouse. Though why I thought his trip important, I can only guess.

A black bird nestles in the heat trapped between my palms as if the space was made for him. A cradle. I expect him to revolt and peck my thumbs until he can squirm free. Gleaming eyes in a squat, round head, looking up. No fear in the blackness.

Beak like coal near the tiny feathers adorning his face and then mottled at the arching end. It curves downward, the beak. Half a frown, a crooked spear.

This social creature, one of a flock of hundreds, is now trapped alone in a glass box. Wings flap. I’ve held the rook too long. All creatures born with wings must long to fly.

Retaking the morning air, I step into a snowbank, then delve further, finding old tracks half-covered by new drifts of glittering white. My threadbare house shoes are no match for the black ice.

I slip. Lose my hold. Watch the rook fly free. I see the pink ribbon fluttering from its claw. Too late to snatch it back.

I forgot to hold onto the one thing meant to help me remember.

**

Sitting on my back porch, sipping tea with a new pink ribbon tied tight around my forefinger, I watch as the rook alights on the concrete. From his beak, a bottle cap drops. A gift.

“For me?”

“Squawk.”

Perhaps he seeks an exchange. Or has he come to pay a debt? What does he think he owes me?

I lean forward to pick up the bottle cap and find it is cold to the touch. On the top is an elk, head tilted back, with a full moon and darkened sky in the background. Impressionistic. It’s a beer cap from Lamoine Valley Brewery, south of Springfield. Somewhere on the lake, I think.

“Thank you,” I say with a polite bow.

“Squawk.”

This might be the longest conversation I’ve had in weeks. At least since Joan and Adeline last visited.

The rook soars away. Toward the sun, his feathers are drawn, and in the fragile dawn light, they seem almost part of the sky.

Today counts as a good day because I can remember the calendar and what it means. Four more weeks until Lauren’s recital. I can make it.

**

From my palm, I scrape a hunk of uncooked steak and feed it to the bird. The fog in my mind has cleared enough for me to know I named the greenhouse rook after James Caan. At the time, I recalled he, the actor, not the bird, starred in Thief, the Michael Mann film about a diamond heist. Rooks are wondrous thieves, after all.

Mr. Caan greedily inhales his feast. He has brought me a shard of glass, emerald green. In exchange, I serve him a lump of meat.

Gone as soon as he arrived, my friend, the rook, leaves me alone in the backyard to contemplate all I’ve lost and the degradations yet to come. I’m better dressed for the cold, wearing a winter coat, gloves, proper boots, and a University of Illinois sweatshirt older than my daughters. I met John in a creative writing class. He wrote me a poem about the sorrow of watching his father’s corn fields turn to dust, and I pledged my heart to his at the end of our first date. Young love. A lifetime ago. So distant now, it seems to have happened to someone else. I don’t mind forgetting that he left me, but I’d like to hold onto the rest.

Joan and Adeline visited today. We discussed my granddaughter, Lauren, who has been practicing night and day for her upcoming recital. Joan seemed less worried about me this time. A relief to us both that I could talk in complete sentences.

Adeline is a mystery to me. Distant. Even if I wanted to know her, I could not. She plays keep away with her heart. Holding it aloft and out of reach. Very much like her father. They like to be chased. To be adored without question.

I am reading John Updike’s later works on aging and death. Such beautiful words about such terrible things. They give me comfort that though I am alone on this porch, greater minds than mine have been laid low by the long, slow decline at the end of life. I’m glad to know Mr. Updike’s words today, even if I will forget them tomorrow.

Long ago, we held barbecues here. John’s idea of fun. However, I don’t recall him ever buying the groceries or entertaining the guests. He lorded over an open flame. Beer in one hand, a cigarette in the other.

On the Fourth of July, I’d put the girls in flag-themed dresses, and John would hand them sparklers. Joan and Adeline danced around in the grass, unshod, two fireflies of mine burning bright. We had two wonderful dogs who I long to pet. Maya and Oreo. Rat terriers with sparkling eyes. How they loved to chase Joan. A giggling fit with silk-brown plaits.

We used to set up John’s movie projector and hang a white sheet from the house to use as a screen. The girls invited their friends, and John stayed with the other parents, drinking far too much and grousing about the mundane.

One night, Adeline suggested that we should all carve our initials into the bark of the oak tree. Those scars tell our story. Soon, I will not know what the initials mean or why they are there. I am so far beyond sadness and grief, beyond screaming and begging for a miracle. Because I know this moment, of memories and feeling every moment I had with my girls as though they are happening now and will happen forever, is as perfect a goodbye as anyone could get.

**

Tied around my waist is a length of rope, a tether connecting me to my front door. I must have been afraid of rambling down the street or out of my neighborhood entirely. Someone would see me. Questions would be raised. Joan would have to make the hard call.

She’ll be the one to put me in the memory care unit. I hate that she has to lock me away because she loves me the most. Adeline would gladly toss me in a ten-by-ten room, cheerily painted in blues and sundrenched yellows so one could ignore it is a prison cell.

I am desperate to delay Joan’s decision a bit longer and to hold onto my home. A few more days. A week.

I find myself outside as an alert blares on my phone. No shoes. Socks wet and half-frozen. Toes icicle cold. I have waterproof boots in the mud room sitting idle. They would love a romp.

I cannot see my door. My house is gone. Made to disappear in the drifts and frozen winds.

The rook rests on my shoulder.

“Squawk.”

“Where did you come from?”

“Squawk!”

I gave him a name. It is tantalizingly close.

Hopping through the snow ahead of me, the rook turns and, with his black eyes, seems to urge me forward. With his beak, he tugs on the length of twine I tied around my waist.

“Where are we going?’

He pulls me toward the driveway as a car pulls in.

**

Joan is rubbing my fingers. My toes. Life course back into the distant bits.

“It’s not that bad,” I promise.

“No frostbite, the doctor said. But there is something else, Mom.”

Heavy is her voice. Weighed down by what she must do next. Unsaid between us is the word. The only word that is left. A pestilence that has unspooled, growing tentacles inside my head. She can’t bring herself to say it.

“Dementia…”

Joan nods. She is too polite to scold me for wandering into the cold.

She makes me hot tea.

Outside the sliding doors, a plump rook lands and deposits a bottle cap that collects a few rays from the sun, dispersing them in ten different directions.

Joan brings me tea. “It’s time, Mom. I can’t let you live alone any longer.”

The sorrow written on her face says enough. I have done this to her and forced my daughter to make this choice. She must feel as though she has betrayed me. I grab her hand.

“After Lauren’s recital. I promise I will go.”

The pink ribbon tells me my granddaughter will dance tomorrow. I can make it.

Joan bursts into tears, and I hold her as I did so many years ago. The scent of apricot shampoo in her hair reminds me of loving her, of how it felt to keep her close and then let her go. Her wedding. Holding baby Lauren. A thousand different moments unfold between us, and I treasure every one before they crack under the pressure of my grasp and shatter like glass.

**

A beautiful woman seated next to me begins crying as the music ends. She is looking at me, not the little ballerina in a pink dress.

Instinct draws me closer to the stranger. “Is everything okay, dear?”

She offers a shaky smile. “The place you are going is quiet and clean. They have a wondrous garden. Your favorite records. Judy Garland. Etta James. We’ll come and read to you. Mom. I won’t let you go through this alone.”

“Mom? I’m … your mother?”

The woman nods.

“Joanie?”

We’re both crying now.

**

Alone, standing in the snow. In the still, bright morning glow, a howling wind sweeps across a desolate plain. Bare-limbed trees tremble in the distance. Behind me is a long, rectangular building. Beige. Nondescript. A swarm of people in navy blue scrubs are buzzing out of the front doors. Desperate looks are affixed to their unrecognizable faces. Flashlights scan the gloom. An alarm bleats. I dislike the sound intensely.

Covering my ears, I continue forward. East, toward the sunrise. The scene is unfamiliar, though I don’t know what signposts I expected to find.

A black bird lands on a nearby stump. Wings flapping. Then, perfectly still.

“Hello,” I say aloud, though I don’t know why I am talking to a rook.

Something is caught in its beak, a pretty thing, now flapping in the gentle breeze. A ribbon falls away. Drifting mounds of white cover the tender sliver of pink, and before long, it is gone, buried in the deep.

The bird flies away.

Toward the river. Toward the bluffs.

And I follow.

Bradley J. Collins is an attorney in Springfield, Illinois.