FICTION: Sorting the After

I’d almost given up hope when the scarlets came.

They descended on the Indian almond tree outside my cabina with a cacophony of squawks and screeches, their weight shaking the branches so hard that tiny fruits and yellowing blooms went aflutter. At first I didn’t understand what was happening, so to find out, I moved faster than I’d moved in days. The large windows facing the almond tree hadn’t held my interest since Jamie disappeared but that’s exactly where I went now, staring with breathless wonder at the bright primary colors of feathers peeking out at me from between the leaves.

“Maybe not macaws,” he’d said to me when we were still in San Jose, trying to decide which rafting tour we’d take. “But Pejibaye has toucans and oropendolas. They’re worth seeing, too, right?”

“Just promise me we’ll have time for Manuel Antonio,” I had grumbled back at him. “Or at least Arenal. Plenty of rivers there you could drown in.”

It seemed like a stupid argument now, one I wished I could take back. Jamie had laughed at me, shrugged it off in the good-natured way he always did, and of course I ultimately gave in. Pejibaye it was, and for the first week, I hadn’t regretted it. Our cabina sat on the edge of a thousand acres of secondary rainforest, off the beaten path for most tourists and so close to the river that the music made by its current became the soundtrack of our lovemaking every night.

Now, I stared at the scarlet macaws in all of their glorious impossibility, wondering if I was hallucinating them or if the other guests and searchers saw them, too. It wasn’t that macaws couldn’t live in that area of Costa Rica, but that poachers had decimated their numbers in years past and they had never been re-introduced. The spectacle they created in the almond tree was loud and raucous and apparently for my benefit alone, because none of the people gathered on the banks of the river below seemed to be aware of them.

I grabbed my camera and slipped my feet into Jamie’s Billabongs, which I found still waiting by the door for him to return. Outside, the birds put on a show, twirling on the branches and cracking into the hard fruit with gusto, using their toes like fingers to position each bite. They showed no fear of me, some resting on branches so low that their magnificent red tails were barely out of my reach, gazing at me with eyes such a pale shade of yellow that they seemed white. I counted six birds and supposed there might be another two or three in the uppermost branches that I could not see.

The vividness of their colors, the sheer size of them—I had seen macaws in captivity before, but this transcended any interaction I’d ever had. For a few minutes, as my camera shutter clicked and whirred, I forgot that my husband was gone, that the cold, violent waters of the Pejibaye had swept him away from me as I ran along the riverbank screaming his name. I forgot about the search party organizing for the third day in a row, the unskilled Red Cross volunteers and the rafting tour guides recruited for their expertise. For that moment in time, I was lost in the beauty of the birds, whole again, at peace with the world and safe in my own skin.

Then, triggered by something I didn’t see or hear, the whole flock startled away from the tree and lifted into the air, scattering bits of almond and woody seed husk as they went. They circled wide, almost as far as the river before passing overhead toward the deepest part of the rainforest. Trailing behind them, longer than their bodies, their tails became colorful living streamers that seemed too vivid to be real. The moment felt jurassic, like I was watching creatures in their right habitat but in the wrong time. Their calls floated above the sound of the river even after the macaws had disappeared from view, but soon the sounds faded until I was alone again under the almond tree, staring up at an empty sky with an even emptier heart.

“Excuse me.”

I blinked, reeling my thoughts back from the cosmos. Someone was speaking to me.

“Excuse me—so sorry. Ma'am? I'm told you're the wife?”

I turned to look at the person talking. A man, Tico, with accented but precise English. He wore heavy clothing, vest and pants with reflective strips, snakeproof boots. His shirt bore the Cruz Roja emblem on each sleeve.

I nodded. At least I intended to. It felt like my head was floating off my shoulders so I couldn’t be sure. Good idea to actually say something, so I cleared my throat. “Yes.”

“We have news,” he said. “Can you come with me to the staging area? We need your help with an item of clothing—maybe you can identify it.”

“Did you see the birds?” I pointed upward, toward the canopy of the almond tree. “The macaws. They were just here.”

The man’s forehead creased. Lines beside his mouth deepened. Such displeasure over a simple question about birds.

“No.” He shook his head. “I didn’t.”

Had I imagined the whole thing? The bright feathers? The screeches? Breathless, I scrolled backward through the most recent pictures on my camera, careful not to go too far and see a memory that would take me to my knees. Did proof exist of what had just happened? Or had I suffered some kind of break, a byproduct of three nights with no sleep?

No. The photos confirmed that the birds had been real. I had not lost my mind, at least not yet.

“Ma’am?”

I shut my camera off again. “Yes. I’ll come with you.”

I followed him to a makeshift parking area near the river, where four-wheel-drive vehicles lined the path to a sandy launching ramp. They all had roof racks, some empty and some still loaded with kayaks and inflatable rafts. Closer to the water a family played in the shoals, one toddler up to her knees in the current. It broke hard around her tiny legs, strong enough to carry a grown man away from me but somehow content to leave her standing.

“I need a new profile pic,” Jamie had said, straddling a gush of white water that frothed between two large boulders protruding from the edge of the river. “Zoom in a little.”

No problem. He was right. It would be a great shot of him.

Part of me registered surprise that he wanted a photo for social media. Jamie wasn’t exactly a social media connoisseur. He rarely posted anything but memes and would go weeks without checking Instagram notifications. Safe to assume that his excitement had nothing to do with Facebook. It was the place itself, the energy we could feel in the earth, that brought him alive. We’d both mentioned it, how we could feel a charge here that we’d felt nowhere else, how the fast, clear water seemed to clear our chakras and reset the balance of our souls.

Behind Jamie, water coursing from high in the mountains seemed dark and hell bent to crush everything in its path. Massive boulders the size of military tanks slowed its momentum, creating a stretch of the Pejibaye that was almost tame in comparison. That’s where we were holding this impromptu photo shoot. He’d waded out past the shoals, where the water came nearly to his hips, then climbed a pile of rocks to stand atop them and spread his arms like the king of the world.

With the palm of one hand, he smacked the neon rainbow lettering that glowed on his black T-shirt. “Pura Vida!”

“I think somebody put a little rum in your tamarindo juice this morning.” I tried to keep a straight face. Seeing him goofy like this made me want to laugh until I couldn’t breathe.

“Nah!” He shouted over the roar of the current. “Just high on life. See if you can frame up the forest behind me. The canopy—the tops of those strangler figs.”

“Ten-four,” I acknowledged.

“What?”

“Okay!”

He said something I couldn’t understand. I could barely hear him over the roar of the water.

Or whatever it was. What was that sound? Surely not just the river. Was it getting louder? I stopped focusing on Jamie’s face and stared upstream. Had the churning white current been pounding the rocks at that height all along? Had the water been quite so murky? It looked almost muddy now. Brownish. Enough so that I might have to do a color correction in Photoshop.

“I think you should come back this way.” I raised my voice to project over the noise that sounded like an approaching train. “Get off those rocks.”

“What?”

“Get off those—”

His foot slipped. No shoes, no traction, bare soles on wet rock. He caught himself with his hands, one leg braced against the second rock, the other knee bent as he tried to regain his balance.

I shrieked. “Jamie! Be careful!”

Keep your eye on the current. Always.

The voice of our rafting guide from five days before.

You never know what’s headed downstream. Might be a snake that fell off a tree branch, or a log, or a wall of water from a flash flood miles away in the mountains that you didn’t know was happening.

Again, I screamed Jamie’s name. He didn’t acknowledge that he’d heard. He reached up, fingers scrabbling for a drier hold on the rocks. But the water surged higher than ever, splashing over his waist.

Inside my head, I argued with the rafting guide. But that’s for white water safety! Not for splashing around in the shallows outside your cabina!

Jamie had always been a strong swimmer. He was athletic, fit. Most likely, what would happen in a few seconds is that he’d lose his grip on the rocks, get rolled around a bit over the shoals, and come up sputtering. No big deal. Pura vida.

But I didn’t factor the tree trunk dislodged by the rising water, worn smooth from years of force exerted by the current, roots no longer supple and ropy but dried to irregular spikes protruding from one end of the stump. It bobbed in the current like a weightless buoy, traveling so fast that I couldn’t draw a breath to scream before it launched over the rocks Jamie clung to and carried him with it as it tumbled and rolled in the floodwaters.

“Jamie!” I threw my camera into the nearest clump of wild cane and ran toward the shoals. What could I do? Fish him out when the river washed him past me?

Where was he? I couldn’t even see him.

There! In the eddy below the rocks, face down, mop of brown hair floating around his head. Was that blood? Oh dear lord, yes—staining the frothy white water pink. Could I reach him in time? I waded toward him, barely able to stay on my feet as the powerful current turned the gentle shoals into violent, raging whitewater.

“Please! Swim!”

But he didn’t. He swirled in the eddy just long enough for me to get within arm’s reach. I grabbed a handful of black T-shirt and pulled as hard as I could. The water pulled back. And Jamie’s body ripped away from me, tumbling like a flaccid, dead fish over the rocks separating him from the main current of the river.

“Jamieee!” The scream that tore from me hurt my throat, hurt my heart. Hurt my lungs as I spent all the air they’d collected on a single syllable of his name. And I was running—I didn’t start running or decide to run—I just understood that my feet were pounding along the sand bank that lined the river, leaping rocks and tree roots that stood in my way, propelling me forward with an all-consuming urgency to get ahead of him. Maybe I could try one more time to snag him out of the water as the current swept him past.

But I wasn’t fast enough. Or agile enough. Or strong enough. I watched the dark, submerged shape that was my husband pass over another ledge of rock and disappear in the surging water below.

I stood now on the same riverbank, watching water drift quietly over the same ledge of rock that had taken my husband beyond my line of sight those days ago. Today there had been no rain in the mountains, no wall of murky brown headwater purged from altitudes I would never ascend. The Pejibaye flowed within its banks, as clear and sparkling as the first day we’d seen it. How deceptive. How foolish of us to trust it.

The Red Cross volunteer who’d found me under the almond tree offered something in an outstretched hand. I took it by reflex, barely glancing down to see what I held.

“Do you recognize this?” he asked.

I unfolded the damp fabric and looked at it. The words “Pura Vida” stretched in a neon rainbow across the width of an XL T-shirt, the same shirt Jamie had slipped over his head three days ago before we picked our way down to the river. I ran my finger along the ragged cut that split it from top to bottom on one side and along the length of one short sleeve. What? He’d been wearing this shirt when he went over the rocks and disappeared. I could still see the dark blotch it made just underneath the surface of the water, so I knew it hadn’t been torn away or shredded by the driftwood that hit him.

“Why is…oh.” My words trailed off as understanding dawned. Someone had cut the shirt off him because it couldn’t be removed any other way. “Oh my God.”

The Red Cross worker cleared his throat. “We found remains in the hydroplant lake a few kilometers from here. The Pejibaye empties into it. This shirt was on the body. Do you recognize it?”

It was unmistakeable. I couldn’t deny the truth, to myself or anyone else. I nodded, but the gesture felt numb, hollow. A final betrayal of my hope, the end of me as a married woman, and inescapable new reality that Jamie as I’d known him no longer existed. His body had been wasted by the river—the arms that embraced me, the blue eyes I knew so well. Gone, destroyed while wearing the shirt I held in my hands.

I gave it back to the Red Cross worker. “I don’t know what to do now.”

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “The authorities will come by to speak with you.”

Likely all the clarity I’d get for now.

I heard them before I saw them, the scarlets on their way back from the rainforest, soaring high above us with their screeching calls and answers. The Red Cross worker looked up as I did, shielding his eyes from the sun. I finally spotted them gliding over the canopy of strangler figs at the edge of the forest, only silhouettes from where we stood, their bright colors lost in glare. But those tails were unmistakable, fluttering out behind them like streamers from a Chinese kite.

“Dios mío.” His jaw fell slack. “I have never seen the guacamayo in our village.”

“Jamie sent them,” I whispered. “He sent them for me.”

The Red Cross worker nodded. “We believe such things here. He is looking out for you, this Jamie.”

We watched until the macaws had gone, and somehow I sensed that this time, they would not be back. They weren’t supernatural, weren’t peculiar manifestations of something my mind or even Jamie’s spirit had conjured. They were very real birds, deviating from their usual territory as oracles of hope. Life continues. Love is eternal. Thoughtfulness never dies. Thank you, Jamie, for this marvelous gift. I headed back to the cabina to process the photos, pack up our before, and start sorting through my after.

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This original short story appeared first on Vocal at the following link: https://vocal.media/fiction/sorting-the-after

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