After Life by Rhian Ellis Page B

sight, seeing but un-seeable.
    She was fifteen, in the middle of failing her first year of high school, when she found the peacock. She’d been sent home after lunch for hurling her sandwich at the lunch monitor and was wandering through the neighborhoods near the river. She was sitting in an alley on a broken wooden chair when she heard what she thought was a baby crying, a peculiar, sorrowful kind of cry. There, in a cardboard box behind a tobacco shop, she found the peacock. Its tail was raggedy and sparse, as if someone had plucked almost all the feathers out. It was dirty, too, but still beautiful, its body gleaming like something made of a strange blue metal. It didn’t move when my mother picked up the box. It didn’t move or make another sound all the way home.
    She snuck into her brother Geoffrey’s bedroom and looked up peacocks in his encyclopedia, and found out that it could eat seeds and corn and bugs. It would have to look for bugs on its own, but she found a bag of birdseed in the back shed, and she sprinkled a handful around the peacock’s box. It pecked at it. My mother crouched down next to the box and watched it, close enough to see the tiny seedlike nostrils in its beak and the ring of bird skin around each of its small black eyes.
    The peacock lived in their yard for nearly a year. They named it Hector. Every morning it cried for its seeds and corn, and every evening it cried from loneliness until my mother came out and sat with it, under its perch in the cucumber tree. It wasn’t satisfied with anyone else, and half the time it would chase Geoffrey right back into the house. This was enough to make my mother like the bird a great deal. But it also gave her dreams. From almost the first night the peacock lived with them, my mother began having wonderful, vivid, sometimes even prophetic, dreams.
    Once she dreamed she got an A on a math test, for the first time ever, and then she did. Another time she dreamed that a boy named Ralph LaRoux would ask her to a dance—a miracle if there ever was one—and that happened, too. Most of the time, though, she dreamed about Wilson. There was Wilson riding the rails, wearing a greasy wool hat and a moth-eaten beard; there was Wilson working as a lumberjack in Canada, eating pancakes outside a log cabin. She even dreamed of him sleeping with a woman, once. Each of these visions—because she was sure they were more than dreams, now—had a feeling in them, too. It was a feeling of rightness. She wasn’t sure how else to describe it. It was a feeling that the visions were coming to her to reassure her, to announce to her that Wilson was fine and that life was moving forward as it should. My mother, who read obsessively, began to wonder if she was a witch. She’d read that witches sometimes had familiars in the shape of birds, usually crows or owls or something, but why not a peacock?
    Eventually Hector’s tail feathers grew back, and then one morning he was gone. My mother felt sure he had struck out on his own, maybe to search for a peahen, or perhaps just to Experience Life. It wasn’t until she was grown up that it occurred to her he might have been stolen. At the time she just thought, Ah, Hector’s moved on, and that was that. Because by then she’d saved up her allowance and bought a Ouija board, and though her visions became less frequent after Hector left, that sense of rightness never left her. She realized she could know some things.
    My mother began in honesty, and ended in fraud; I began in fraud, and ended in something at least close to truthfulness.

    By the end of that week, the forensics specialists and archaeologists, working together, had discovered a few facts about the body at the construction site. I followed the story in the Wallamee Evening Observer and watched the evening news. So did my mother.
    It was a male, they said, between twenty and twenty-eight years old, and most likely Caucasian. He had been buried for more than three years