Blue Heron

The scent of espresso filled La Crema; mindless chatter created a melody of background noise. Steam danced off Eliza’s café aulait as she let out an audible sigh. There were only twelve other tables in the entire place.

Lucky thirteen, she thought.

She tapped the tips of her slender fingers against her keyboard, the blank screen and blinking cursor goading her. Down to the final two months of her deadline and Eliza could not bear to even start. She didn’t even know where to begin.

She tried to write from when they first met in 2011 in that dive of a bar just after she was put on academic probation; just after the meltdown.

There you were, she’d written, leaning up against the sticky bar in your suit and tie, ready to sweep me off my feet. My caramel hair waving seamlessly down my bare back.

He wasn’t wearing a suit and tie when they first met, it was jeans and a snarky t-shirt, his muscles bulging from the sleeves. She was already drunk and trying to drive home after drowning her demons in a few too many whiskey sours.

Backspace, backspace, backspace.

She tried to write about the day he died, but all she could remember was the fight and the call.

You stormed away from me, taking my heart with you without even a chance to say goodbye.

A tear formed in the corner of her chesnut-colored eye. She got distracted by a brief glimmer across the computer screen: the reflected light from the sun bouncing off her engagement ring.

Cheryl wanted her to write about him, but how could she? Eliza couldn’t even bear to type his name on a keyboard, let alone air their life together out for the world to read.

I don’t think I can do this, she thought.

Eliza threw her head back and hit the brick wall behind her harder than she’d intended.

“Shit”, she cried. It seemed like all the eyes in the room shifted to her little corner.

Sorry, she mouthed, rubbing the new lump on her head.

Eliza turned to curse at the wall that maimed her and saw the corner of a brick with a blemish in the mortar. Out of curiosity, she scratched at it with her nail and layers of mortar crumbled from the wall, creating a crevice. She inched her face closer to the hole before glancing around the café to see that all other eyes had averted from her.

The rest of the mortar around the brick was easy enough to scrape off, revealing that it could be removed.

What in the hell is this? She thought and took another look around the café. It seemed that everyone had forgotten about her outburst and carried on with their lives, so she pulled the brick out.

Eliza had no idea what she was expecting to find inside of a wall that stood in the same spot for over twenty years. She looked behind where the brick had been placed and shocker, it was completely empty.

What did you think you’d find, ‘Liza? She asked herself incredulously.

“As if there’s really going to be anything there”, she muttered and slid the brick back into its spot.

Turning her attention back to the laptop screen, Eliza let out a sigh and allowed herself another glance at her ring and to get lost in the thoughts that followed.

I miss him, she thought, I miss him.

These were the only words she could allow herself to speak when she thought of him. Sometimes, she couldn’t even bear to look at the ring on her finger, but a small part of her couldn’t stand the thought of removing it, but in this moment, it felt as though it burned her skin. She took it off and looked around for a place to put it down.

Just for a little while, she thought; just enough to let her breathe.

She chuckled spitefully when her eyes returned to the hole in the wall and she set it, gently, on a napkin inside and replaced the brick to its home.

Her trance was interrupted when her cell phone rang from the depths of her Victoria’s Secret bag. Amid the chaos of all her writing and photography gear, her phone had shimmied its way to the bottom of the bag. She searched frantically for it, but pair-by-pair, the eyes that filled the room began to wander to her once more.

The café was supposed to be a “cell-free” zone, according to the sign behind the front counter.

Eric would have loved that, she found herself thinking on numerous occasions. He always loved when people were forced to interact with one another in a raw, unfiltered way.

She followed the sound of buzzing until she felt the shape of her phone in her hand and pressed the button to answer.

“Hello?” she whispered into the speaker.

“Hello, ‘Liza? It’s Shirley.”

Shirley Grace Myer always began a conversation by introducing herself by her first name. Eliza could see her now: she was probably home, donned in exotic patterns of silk nightgowns that clung to her aging skin. A sleeping mask was more than likely still on her head and her glasses would be tangled in their elastic string.

“Yes, mother, I have caller I.D. I know when it’s you who’s calling”, Eliza grunted.

The relationship between Eliza and her mother hadn’t always been so problematic, but she couldn’t remember a time where her mother didn’t feel distant; absent, really.

“Well, I need you to come over right this instant. I’m having a bit of an emergency, but don’t rush too quickly, I don’t want you to speed like you always do and end up mangled in a wreck or something. We’ve had enough loss for one lifetime!”

Her mother’s humor had always been a little cruel. She always found the most inappropriate times for her humor to get the best of her.

This was, in part, because she had experienced so much heartbreak herself. She never knew how to cope with the loss of Eliza’s father. Shirley spent the majority of the year after Eliza turned four in her bed, curtains drawn, the darkness in every corner her only company. On her fifth birthday, Shirley tried to throw a half-assed party for Eliza to try to make up for the year with her daughter she had lost, and then invited no one to come. She thought it would be ‘ironic’, she said.

In recent years, Eliza grew tired of her mother’s dramatics, guilt trips, and morbid ‘humor’ and tried to distance herself from them. She screened phone calls, pretended to not be home when Shirley would just ‘stop by’ unexpectedly, and referred to her by first name, only. Much to her disdain, her mother had successfully wriggled her way back into Eliza’s life.

Masochistic, sadistic bitch, Eliza thought to herself.

“What’s the emergency, Shirley?”

“Just get on over here, I need you now.”

“You can’t just demand me to jump and expect me to ask, ‘How high?’, Shirley. I’m busy right now.”

“What?” her mother laughed, incredulously, “Sitting in a coffee shop acting like any words are going to come from that spitfire mouth of yours? Have you even written anything? You know that book is due in two months, Eliza Grace, and have you even written a word? I can’t believe…”

Eliza pulled the phone away from her ear while her mother aired her disappointments; another habit she picked up in her attempts to dodge her mother’s control.

“…and seriously, why do you insist on calling me ‘Shirley’? I am your mother and I have done everything I could to-“

“Okay, okay, Shirley, I’m on my way”, she finally said and ended the call.

Mother, she thought to herself, I’m not sure I would use that term to describe you.

Eliza closed her laptop and waited for it to power down before placing it in her backpack along with her writing notebook, and her favorite pen. Her heart dipped when she was reminded of the ominous clouds that loomed overhead.

She had always hated storms. Her parents always fought the loudest on the nights they thought nature’s cries would cover their screams. She’d always resented her mother for picking fights. Her father would get home, late as usual, from the factory. Eliza had already been put to bed by her passive mother and barely a kiss on the cheek goodnight, let alone a story or consolation about the winds that raged beyond those walls. Her father, having worked nineteen hour shifts at a time, would kick off his muddy shoes at the door and try to kiss her mother on the cheek. Shirley would always push him away and ask why he was home so late, give him shit for missing dinner and how he never appreciated her. He would ask her if they could skip the fighting for one night, but it always just continued on and on while Eliza listened to the vigorous tapping of a branch against her window, howling winds and creaky trees outside her walls and screams, howling cries, and creaky floorboards within.

Eliza tried to shake the foggy memory from her mind.

Come on, ‘Liza. Grab your stuff and let’s go, she prompted herself, threw back the last foam from her latte and slipped her backpack on. She got a few steps away before she realized she’d almost forgotten.

My ring, she gasped in the silence, turned around on one foot and hurried back over to the wall. Eliza grabbed the butter knife again and pried the brick from the wall once more.

When she looked inside the same hole, in the same wall where she had just placed the ring, held the napkin that it sat on with a note that said, Finders, keepers.

Her heart stopped. She crumpled the napkin in her hand and used her fingers to search every inch of the crevice and she tried to see if maybe, she’d pried off the wrong brick? Maybe the wall isn’t as sturdy as we all think it is?

Where could it have possibly gone? she frantically asked herself over and over again. Her head began to feel light as a feather. She felt herself begin to slip before she caught herself on the chair where she sat just five minutes before.

Eliza looked down at the crumpled napkin in her hand. She took her pen from her backpack and wrote underneath the eerie message:

Is this supposed to be a game?

She stuffed it back into the hole and sealed it once again. She must have looked at the watch on her non-dominant hand twenty times in the span of two minutes, checked the wall, no new message, replaced the brick.

Come on, she begged, come on, come on, come on.

Ten excruciating minutes pass before she allows herself to check the hole once more. The café napkin had disappeared and in its place, a new one with a martini picture on one side and a name on the other.

“The Blue Crow”, she mumbled aloud.

That’s it?  She wrote back.

The next time she took out the brick, the napkin was simply, gone.

“What the-“