The Room Where Geese Fly

The moment before it happened, she was driving to the airport, dreaming of her first vacation alone.  Wearing a seat belt was not on her mind.  But that is why Anna Noelle was thrown from the car.

She doesn’t remember it.  The world of her past blurs beginning last Tuesday, three days before, and greys as it recedes toward the present.  A white room, a white gown, a white memory.

The first time she heard them was the morning she awoke, about three days after. They were calling to each other from somewhere beyond the white walls of her world.  Loud honking at first, and honking in reply, then a cacophony of honking and syncopated honking in sounds that rose up slowly over her head, and grew distant, and faint, as they entered the sky.

After they flew, it was silent.  A whir, a hum, and then, dead quiet.  No one arrived for days.  The only voices she heard from the outside world were the calls of the geese, flying south for the winter.

Thirty years ago, she was supposed to have been mated for life.  She was a dancer on the stage in New York, and he was a young musician.  When she moved, he played, and when he played, she moved.  They were the rhythm of swans together, long evenings in candlelight spent too soon, gone south for a long, long winter.

She remembers the night she met him.  She was standing in line to get tickets, and he was standing behind her.  She sensed something, and she turned to see what it was.  His broad clean smile was already hers.  He had stood there waiting for her to turn.  It was as if he knew she would.

She turned her head slightly toward the window, but it was painful. Something had been inserted into her shoulder, and it did not yet allow such movement.  But she turned far enough to see the greyish-brown forms gliding slowly across the pond beneath the bare trees.

And she wondered, is she like the trees that lose their leaves in winter so that new ones can grow in spring?  Or is she now like the trees that have lost their roots to the decay of years, whose leaves fly away and never come home?

And it was then, as her hopelessness hung on this thought, about to fall off for the winter, that she saw him, standing at the edge of the pond.

He was not the same man, but he was the same man.  He had greyed and grown slightly heavy, but it was him she saw. When he turned to pick up his paper from the bench, she remembered him turning and bending in embrace to enfold her pirouette. He was all she had ever wanted, and there he was, just outside, just out of reach.

The day they had first danced together, she told him she never wanted him to leave. He promised her his love, and when she looked into his eyes, she saw it.  There was an eternity spent in that moment, out on the ice of a pond in upstate New York, that moment when she saw all of him, and he held all of her.  That moment was to have been the beginning of always.

And here he was, thirty years later, there on the edge of the pond, standing still, as if he had never even moved, as the pond began to freeze around him. He lifted his head and stared into the sky.  Perhaps he was following the geese.  

She wondered if perhaps he was thinking of her.  She closed her eyes, and imagined his kiss on her lips.  She awoke hours later.  The sky was dark, and the park encircling the pond was empty.

“I don’t care if it’s against the policy”, she heard the nurse say, just beyond the curtain of her bed.  “He’s got to stay here for the night-- there’s no other room.  We’ll do an assessment at 4 a.m.  If he’s stable by then, we’ll move him.”  

She heard some shuffling and arranging of equipment.  And then it was quiet.

She felt her breath grow hurried, and her heart rate quickened.  There was a man in her room, on the other side of the curtain.  She listened and listened, but didn’t hear a sound.  She looked outside her window again.  The park was empty, covered with ice.  It was almost midnight.

Had he slipped and fallen?  How long had he stood there?  Who found him?  Was he conscious?  Did he know she was there?

She vowed to stay awake, but fell asleep again.  Her shoulder began to throb, and it woke her.  It was now three a.m.  Still silent.

Silent for forty-five minutes.  No movement. No rustling.  Quiet.  She could hear herself breathing.  Just fifteen more minutes.

It was the geese who woke her at eight a.m.  There were hundreds of them honking all at once to each other, all across the frozen surface of the pond.  Something had happened.  They flapped their wings in anticipation.  They honked and counter-honked.  Then they rose up in hundreds all at once, all together, some unseen force propelling them into the sky.  They lifted up their wings above the top edge of her window, until all she could hear was their honking, gliding in pairs across her ceiling, until they reached the other side, by the door, and were silent, and gone.

Then she noticed it.  It was leaning against her water glass on the table beside her bed.  It was a small square of paper, just three inches on each side.

There were words written on it that said, “I will love you always.”

Tears rolled down her cheeks.  She started to sob in fits of breath, syncopated like geese.  She was laughing and crying.  The puff of her breath blew the small square of paper face down on the table, and exposed its other side.

There was writing there, too.

It was his phone number.