The Empty Birdcage

I was twenty-eight and three months into my job at the Alpine Archive Lodge, which meant I had finally gotten good at pretending I knew what I was doing at the front desk. The lodge sits halfway up a mountain in Switzerland, in a town so small the bus driver waves at everyone by name, and in the winter the snow piles up against the windows until the reading room glows like a lantern. My job was mostly greeting visiting scholars, refilling the coffee machine, and keeping track of which wooden crates had arrived for the big collection move that Stephen, the owner, had been planning for two years. I liked the quiet. I had built the quiet on purpose, actually, after a breakup that had left me sort of hollowed out, and I had gotten comfortable in it, the way you get comfortable in an old coat with a torn pocket.

So when the front door banged open that Monday morning and a blast of cold air came in along with the blast of cold air's owner, I looked up with my usual polite smile already in place, coffee cup halfway to my mouth. And then I nearly dropped the cup. I did drop the smile.

"Hi, Jillian," Hamish said, standing there in a big orange work jacket with snow in his dark hair, looking exactly like himself and nothing like a memory at the same time.

I can't really explain what that felt like, but honestly the closest thing is when you step on a stair that isn't where your foot expected it to be. My stomach dropped about four inches and then caught itself. Hamish was thirty-one now, and he had filled out in the shoulders since the last time I'd seen him, and he had a new scar over one eyebrow that I immediately wanted to ask about and immediately decided I would die before asking about.

"Hamish," I said, very evenly, I thought. "What are you doing here?"

"Working, I guess." He held up a laminated work order like it was a hall pass. "Stephen hired my company to move the stone collection. The big pieces, out of the basement and up to the new wing. I'm the crane operator."

"Of course you are." I set the coffee down before I actually did drop it. "Out of every crane operator in Europe, Stephen hired you."

"I didn't know you were here, if that helps. The contract just said Alpine Archive Lodge. I saw your name on the staff page online last night and I almost called Stephen to pull out." He paused, and snow dripped off his sleeve onto the doormat. "I didn't, though. I figured that would be the coward's version."

"Well, congratulations on picking the brave version where you show up unannounced at my workplace."

"I knocked," he said, which was so exactly him that I had to look away for a second.

Here is the history, quickly, because you need it. Hamish and I dated for two years, from when I was twenty-four to when I was twenty-six, back when we both lived in the same city and I thought things were solid. Then a job came up for him overseas, a crane position on some enormous infrastructure project, good money, and he took it without really discussing it with me first. He said afterward that he had assumed I'd come with him, which was not a thing he had ever once said out loud before the plane was nearly booked. I said some things. He said some things. We ended it in a train station, which felt appropriately dramatic at the time and feels embarrassing now. That had been about a year and a half ago, and I had done a lot of brisk walking and journaling about it, and I had told my friend Amara, the archive director, that I was completely over it at least six times, some of which had even been true.

"Jill," he said now, quieter. "You look good."

"I look like someone who just saw a ghost in an orange jacket," I said. "Stephen is in his office. Let me get this over with properly."

I buzzed Stephen, who came out wiping his hands on a rag, and the two of them talked crane capacities and load paths and weather windows while I stood there refilling the coffee machine with the focus of a bomb technician. Stephen was fifty-five, a local historian who had bought and converted the lodge thirty years ago, and he had the cheerful oblivion of a man who had never in his life sensed tension between two people. He clapped Hamish on the shoulder twice and said the storm holding off until Wednesday would be a gift, and then he turned to me and said, "Jillian, take Hamish down to the storage room so he can see the pieces he's wrangling, would you?"

"Sure," I said, in a voice I hoped sounded like a coworker and not like a hostage.

* * *

The storage room is down a stone staircase at the back of the lodge, and it's my favorite room in the building when I'm in a good mood and my least favorite when I'm not, because it holds everything nobody has catalogued yet. There were nine stone pieces down there, carved capitals and a broken fountain and one enormous basalt head of some alpine saint that weighed as much as a small car, all of it crated but still mostly visible, dust sheets folded back. Hamish walked the room with his hands in his pockets, doing the thing where he assessed weight by looking, and I watched him do it and hated that I still found it watchable.

"This saint here," he said, tapping a gloved knuckle against the crate, "that's the tricky one. Narrow door on the new wing stairwell, if I remember the plans."

"You've seen the plans?"

"I read them last night. Couldn't sleep much." He said it lightly but he didn't look at me when he said it. "Anyway, rigging through that stairwell, we'll need to come at it from the window side. I'll figure it out."

"We have a window?" I asked. "I've worked here three months and I did not know we had a window in the new wing stairwell."

"Small one, up high. Good view of the mountains." He grinned at me for the first time since the door, the old grin, and it was unfair, it was genuinely unfair, how fast it worked on me. "You always did hate not knowing a building. Remember that flat in the city, you mapped every stair before the second week?"

"I remember you never once mapped anything," I said. "You just trusted things to be where you left them."

"And look how that went," he said, and the grin went away, and we stood in the dusty quiet for a second.

That was when I saw the birdcage.

It was up on a high shelf at the back of the room, a big Victorian wire thing with a domed top and a little wooden perch, tarnished to the color of old silver, and empty, obviously, no bird having been kept in an archive storage room in living memory. I had noticed it my first week and meant to ask about it and then never had.

"Okay, that's new to me," Hamish said, following my eyes. "Was there a bird in the archive?"

"No. It's a leftover from a former curator. Stacy, her name was. She had a canary she brought to work, years ago, back when Stephen first opened. When she retired she took the bird and left the cage, and Stephen's sentimental, so it stayed." I shrugged. "I don't know, I kind of like it. An empty birdcage is sort of a good object. It's a cage that decided to be a sculpture."

Hamish looked at it for a while, longer than a wire cage deserved.

"That's a very you sentence," he said finally. "A cage that decided to be a sculpture."

"You don't have to make fun of it."

"I'm not making fun of it." He took his gloves off, one finger at a time, which I remembered him doing a hundred times at a hundred job sites. "I think it's the truest thing in the room. Everything else down here got taken out of its context and boxed. The cage just stayed what it is, minus the part that could fly away."

I didn't have anything to say to that, which annoyed me, because it felt like the conversation had stopped being about the cage without telling me it had stopped being about the cage. Upstairs a door closed, and we both heard Stephen's footsteps cross the reading room, and the ordinary sounds of the lodge came back in around us like water filling a hole.

"We should go over the load path for the saint," I said, businesslike, grabbing a clipboard that had nothing relevant on it. "I'll show you the new wing."

"Sure," Hamish said. "Lead the way."

And so I led the way, past the shelf, past the empty cage, both of us very carefully not saying anything about birds or flying away or anything else that might actually matter.

* * *

We got through the morning without any disasters, which is more than I expected, honestly. Hamish spent most of it out in the yard measuring the crane's reach against the side of the building and shouting things up at his one crew member, a quiet giant named Al who said maybe six words all day. I tracked crates on my clipboard and drank too much coffee and only looked out the window at Hamish eleven or twelve times, which I counted as a personal victory.

At noon Stephen rang the little bell in the reading room, which is how he announces lunch, because of course a man who has run a lodge for thirty years has a bell for it. "Soup's on," he called out. "Even for the muscle, though the muscle will have to forgive the absence of meat. It's Monday."

"We're vegetarians on Mondays?" Hamish asked me as we filed into the kitchen.

"We're whatever Stephen cooked," I said. "It's easier that way."

The soup was a lentil thing with too much cumin, and the five of us sat around the long kitchen table while the windows went white with cloud outside. Al ate three bowls and said one of his six words. Stephen talked about the provenance of the basalt head for a while, and then Amara started talking about the lunar new year dinner, which is an event the lodge does every year for the town, and she caught me not listening and pounced on it.

"You're not listening," she said, pointing her spoon at me.

"I'm resting my ears."

"You're helping me this week, by the way. With the dinner. I'm announcing it now in front of witnesses so you can't say no."

"Amara," I started.

"There'll be lanterns, and Stephen's cousin is coming down from Bern with the good dumplings, and I need someone to run the sign-up sheet and decorate the reading room without making it look like a craft fair exploded." She looked at me with the exact expression she uses when a scholar tries to argue with her about a catalogue date. "Please. You're the only person in this building who can fold a paper lantern properly."

"Amara, the collection move is happening this week. The crane is literally outside the window."

"Which is why I need you inside, away from all that," she said, sweet as anything. "Think of it as a safety measure."

Stephen chuckled into his soup. Al said nothing, wisely. And under the table my phone sat silent in my pocket, and outside the window Hamish's crane stood against the gray sky like something I'd have to walk past every day until Thursday, and I thought, fine, yes, anything, please give me a project that has nothing to do with him.

"Fine," I said. "I'll do the lanterns. But if the reading room ends up looking like a craft fair exploded, that's on you."

"Thank you," Amara said, and squeezed my arm under the table, and gave me a look that said she had noticed exactly why I'd said yes and was choosing to be kind about it.

* * *

After lunch Hamish caught me in the hallway by the coat rack, and I knew he'd been waiting for a chance because he had his gloves off again and that particular way of standing, squared up and uncomfortable, like a man at a door he isn't sure he's invited through.

"Got a minute?" he asked.

"I've got lanterns to plan, apparently."

"Two minutes." He glanced toward the kitchen, where Stephen and Amara were still clearing bowls. "Out on the terrace? It's not raining yet."

The terrace runs along the south face of the lodge, all stone flags and a low wall, with the whole valley dropped below it. We stood at the wall with maybe a yard of air between us, which was either too much or not nearly enough, and the clouds were stacking up over the far peaks in that heavy way that means the storm is thinking about coming early.

"So," he said.

"So."

"I've been rehearsing this in the truck since last night and it sounded better in the truck." He rubbed his thumb along the top of the wall, back and forth. "The way I left. At the station. I didn't do it right, Jillian. I'd known about the job for weeks and I never said a word to you, and then I just stood there and made it your problem to react to. That was cowardly. I'm sorry."

"You're sorry," I said.

"I'm sorry," he said again, steady, and I will give him this, he didn't look away. "You deserved a conversation. You deserved to be part of the decision. Instead you got a platform announcement and my bag already packed."

The wind came up the valley and pushed my hair across my face and I was grateful for the excuse to fix it, to have something to do with my hands.

"Okay," I said finally. "Thank you for saying that."

"That's it? Thank you?"

"What do you want, Hamish? Do you want me to yell? Do you want me to say it broke me, because you were there for the part where it did, and then I spent a year and a half putting it back together, and I'm not doing the yelling in a coat rack hallway at one in the afternoon." I kept my voice level, which took