Pigeon in the Canaries Read online

  Contents

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  Pigeon in the Canaries

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

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  Pigeon in the Canaries

  K. A. Keener

  Escape Hatch Series

  Vol. 1

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2021 K. A. Keener

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions contact: www.EscapeHatchSeries.com.

  Chapter One

  Three months had passed since Thalia’s grandmother died from the coronavirus while visiting Galaxidi, in her homeland of Greece. Thalia spent those months isolated in the rooms that she and her grandmother, her Ya-ya, had once shared. The day started at the wobbly table in the breakfast nook; Thalia rested her gaze on the curve of the silver legs bowing out, the shiny metal dimmed with grease and spots of rust. She had stopped even bothering to make toast and simply smeared peanut butter and strawberry jam on neat, soft, chemically bleached squares of bread. She always made one pot of coffee and put it straight into the fridge to reheat and drink for a few days before making a new pot.

  Every few weeks, she had food delivered from a local store in Astoria. Most of the neighborhood grocery stores in New York had begun making deliveries during the lockdown. That afternoon, a bicyclist pulled a trailer loaded with grocery sacks to her porch, dropped the sacks at her door, rang the doorbell and slipped away; she clicked a button on her phone app to give him a tip, waited until he was well up the block, and then cautiously ventured out to carry them in.

  She hadn’t spoken to anyone directly in six weeks.

  After putting away the groceries, she heard the doorbell ring again and let out a long sigh as she placed her paperback thriller upside down, open on the table. The water-warped pages of the crime fiction series popped it up into a small tent, and she placed a heavier book against the spine. She thought that perhaps the store had forgotten one of her bags and was bringing it to her now. She dragged herself to the door, not so much afraid of catching the virus as simply exhausted, since Ya-ya’s death, by even the most simple of interactions: the apologies, the explanations, the expectations of her response. It was the reason she had stopped leaving the house entirely. Everyone had known her Ya-ya, had loved her. For a month after her death, Thalia had nurtured the thought that Ya-ya’s ghost was tending the front bushes, clearing falling leaves from the stones. Then, at 6 a.m. one morning, she caught one of Ya-ya’s church lady friends out there in a large sunhat, trimming the hydrangeas, dusting the little concrete statue of the Virgin Mary.

  At the door, instead of the delivery boy speaking to her in broken English, she found Mr. Drakos, her grandmother’s lawyer. She had last seen him soon after Ya-ya’s death. His wiry, gray-and-black hair was barely contained by a heavy application of gel. As if in defiance of this attempt at control, nose hairs spread liberally out of each nostril, reaching for the lower half of his face, which was masked in the strongest of papery filters, N95 embossed on the side. He wore a dark suit, as he always did, but his shirt had been opened at the collar to reveal more wiry hairs and a crisp white undershirt.

  “Thalia, I’m sorry for dropping in like this. I tried to call first,” Mr. Drakos began. She apologized, saying her phone was broken, but really, she had just stopped charging it entirely. “I need to speak with you about some paperwork for the house. I can come back at another time.” He looked down, his eye catching on her light green shirt; she dabbed at the smeared peanut butter stain with her fingers.

  “No, it’s okay. We should meet out here, in the open air. Let me just get my mask.” She gestured towards the chairs squeezed together on the closet-sized porch. “Can I get you some … water or … coffee?” She thought of the dark rings encrusted on her coffee pot in the fridge. Luckily, he refused the offer. She met him outside after donning a fresh shirt and a cotton mask printed with a flower pattern.

  “I’m coming by because I took care of your ya-ya’s taxes each year. This year, because of the virus, there was no need to talk about it in April. The government gave everyone an extension. But now we need to file her taxes, and I thought I could also do yours, since they will be closely linked.” He took out a light-brown, paper accordion file from his bag. Ya-ya had left Thalia the house and a large emergency fund, which Thalia hadn’t known she possessed.

  Apparently, the survivor’s pension she received from the city after the death of her husband—he had been a train operator—had been enough for her to live on and put aside some money each month. Mr. Drakos passed Thalia some papers with figures on them that she didn’t really understand.

  “I know it is a bit of a foreign language,“ Mr. Drakos continued, “but, the gist is that the taxes on the house can easily be paid from the emergency fund for last year. But the year after may be a problem.”

  Thalia looked at the numbers with Mr. Drakos. She quickly calculated in her head how much money she was making working part-time online as a travel agent, booking excursions and packages, living off little incentives and commission from previous clients of Horizon Destinations. Horizon Destinations collapsed during COVID; the agency had shut the doors to its storefront operation in Manhattan’s financial district after thirty years. She knew the money she was bringing in wasn’t enough.

  “I don’t make enough to pay this much. Are you telling me I have to sell the house?” Thalia asked, her eyes stinging.

  “There are several options. I could help you. It is a big house,” he said as he gestured at the two-floor, semi-detached brick house behind them. “Three bedrooms, right? One and a half baths?”

  She nodded, her eyes downcast.

  “What about roommates?”

  “During COVID?”

  “I know it’s complicated, but people are figuring out ways to do this. At the church, there is a woman who is a broker. She could help you arrange it …” He slipped his papers back into the accordion file. “You don’t have to decide now. For now, let’s just file the taxes. I just need your W2s.”

  Once Mr. Drakos left and Thalia was back in the parlor, she sank into the indented couch cushions and let herself cry a bit. The room was just as Ya-ya had left it—aging sweets in individual plastic wrappers in an etched-crystal candy bowl, a print of the blues and stark white walls of the Greek coast inside a cheap plastic gold frame.

  The next day, she mustered the energy to shower and pull back the curtains of each room in the house. Dust motes fell in the sunlight streaming in, their soft, invisible rain of neglect gathering on each surface. The walls of Ya-ya’s bedroom reflected back a light daffodil yellow. The dust was visible on the shiny wood veneer of the dresser, on the matching headboard and the nightstand. Thalia opened the accordion door to Ya-ya’s closet, the squeaking of the door’s track reverberating in the empty space. The smell registered first: a sort of gardenia and rose blend that escaped as the me
tal hangers scraped across their rod. Inside hung Ya-ya’s dresses, zipped and buttoned, the embellishments tied into bows at the neck, as if the clothes themselves had caught the same magical thinking Thalia had fallen victim to in the first few days after Ya-ya’s death. For a week after Thalia had received the news, she kept the house tidy. As she made the bed, washed the dishes, took out the trash, she considered how Ya-ya would find everything once she returned. How it would please her.

  When COVID hit their neighborhood in Queens, after Ya-ya lost her best friend, Despina, she had wanted to see her birthplace again. She had not visited since she emigrated in her early twenties. Thalia felt guilty now for not trying more fiercely to talk her out of the trip, but as it turned out, Ya-ya had already launched the plan before telling Thalia about it. Ya-ya enjoyed just one week in her homeland before she was admitted to the hospital, and then only one more week before her death. For a while, it was easy to believe that she was simply on a trip, because that was exactly the truth. But the date of her return passed, and then there was the paperwork, the will, a small memorial with the ladies from the church in the park. With each step, it became clearer that Ya-ya would not return.

  Ya-ya had taken care of Thalia since she was twelve. Her mother had passed away in a car wreck. Her father had never been around, not even for birthdays or holidays. Since Thalia and her mother were already living with Ya-ya, there was no question that Thalia would simply continue living with her grandmother. Of course, there must have been some sort of paperwork of guardianship, but outside of the law, Ya-ya had really been raising Thalia for years. Her mother worked constantly as a nurse at a hospital on Long Island. When Thalia thought of her, she always pictured her in the muted jewel tones of scrubs.

  Her cousins in Galaxidi mailed Ya-ya’s jewelry—a simple wedding ring and gold crucifix necklace—and her passport. When she opened the box on the porch, seeing the foreign stamps, some part of her—maybe the part that was still the little girl whose mother had died when she was twelve, the girl that Ya-ya had raised—hoped that the package was from Ya-ya, that there had been some mistake and that she was alive. After she opened the package, she slept day and night for a few days.

  Now, Thalia removed a few of Ya-ya’s dresses from the closet, letting the metal hangers clink as they released their polyester prints and elastic waistbands. She began folding them and stacking them on the bedspread. She told herself that she was just organizing, putting things in storage. Once she had towers of dresses neatly folded across the bedspread, she began cleaning out the fridge. She filled several large black trashcans with condiments, moldy food, expired pantry items. Once this was at the curb, she noticed in front of a nearby house a stack of cardboard boxes that had been put out for recycling. She brought these in and filled them with the dresses. She wiped the inside of the fridge with cleaner. Then momentum took hold, and she cleaned the entire kitchen. Everything smelled faintly of artificial lemon.

  She heard the tinkling of the neighborhood ice cream truck driving by, and her stomach tightened its focus. Grabbing a ten-dollar bill from a jar by the door, she went out to the street and walked to the ice cream truck, now idling on the corner near a park. A few bikes were lying discarded, thrown on their sides on the sidewalk, and their owners—some nine- or ten-year old boys—were pooling quarters together. She bought them all cones, and they were delighted. One asked her name, and they sang out her name and their thank-yous as they rode off one-handed on their bikes. A layer of grief lifted temporarily; she felt it along her skin, a lifting of heaviness like a wind against the dampness of her lower back.

  Within a week, the woman who brokered apartments visited Thalia and sent over several young men from the church to help her clean out two rooms in the house. She had decided to put all of the boxes into the basement, carefully labelling them “Ya-ya’s bedroom” or “Mom’s bedroom,” unable to throw them out or store them anonymously as boxes without labels, without a future plan.

  Thalia allowed herself one box of both of their things, which she put in the corner of her own closet: a scarf with yellow flowers that had been worn by her mother before her days of double-shifts at the hospital, a green headscarf with an edge of embroidered red vines that belonged to Ya-ya, and Ya-ya’s Bible, the leather cracked and the gold embossing wearing off the edges of its thin, onion-skin pages.

  The broker set up the appointments, and Thalia showed several women the room and the shared bath. Each was just moving out on her own for the first time. They had graduated from schools in the suburbs and were looking for an adventure in the city, even if most of the city was still shut down. It hadn’t been long since Thalia had been the same position, moving out of her house to share an apartment with her high school friends, Maddy and Sam. It was a two-bedroom place split three ways, until the lockdown began and everyone broke the lease to return to their childhood homes.

  The broker explained that because the market was depressed, what Thalia could charge was about twenty percent less than what she could expect to get in even a year’s time. Even still, the money from the tenants would be enough to pay the taxes and fix small things as they became broken. Thalia hired an electrician to rewire some outlets that had stopped working. A contractor replaced some broken tiles. Thalia repainted much of the house on her own. She bought new chairs for the tiny porch and a new kitchen table. The two blond women who moved in, Sara and Barbara, seemed so young to Thalia that she had to stop herself from warning them about walking alone at night. Though they hadn’t known each other before, they bonded instantly and kept their distance from Thalia, whose grief made her seem a decade older instead of the two years older she actually was.

  Sara kept trimming her bangs over the sink in their shared bath, and Thalia found small, reddish blond hairs everywhere—in her toothbrush, among her cotton balls, on her towels—even after washing and drying them. Barbara was learning to play the guitar at a rate that seemed especially slow to Thalia. She would take a week to work only on one note, strumming only that one chord … over and over.

  Still, having other people in the house was good for Thalia. She put aside her giant crime novels and began her neighborhood walks again. She kept up the front garden on her own and visited the neighbors that Ya-ya had looked in on before she left for Greece. Everything felt sustainable. Not perfect, but manageable.

  Until, one month later, Sara tested positive for COVID. First, she lost her sense of smell, and a day later she was in bed, sleeping most of the day. It wasn’t until the third day, when she felt well enough to walk to the outdoor tent set up in the park to get tested, that they knew for sure it was COVID. Thalia and Barbara began to sanitize the bathroom before and after each use. Thalia wore a face shield and a mask when she checked up on Sara and kept all of the windows of the house open.

  Even so, Barbara caught it next. Thalia began sanitizing the doorknobs of the house and spending most of her time on the front porch. She did online searches for whether researchers had discovered a genetic predisposition to catching COVID; since Ya-ya died from it, could she? No one had any answers for her. She told herself that Ya-ya had been old. She checked lists of co-morbidities and found that she didn’t have any. She was safe, she told herself as she swept up Sara’s hair and threw out Barbara’s expiring groceries. She stopped visiting the elderly neighbors.

  Once Barbara and Sara recovered, they decided to return to their parents’ homes in the suburbs. Launching their New York life had been a failed experiment. They apologized and said they would understand if Thalia kept their deposits, but Thalia decided to give them their money back and wished them both luck. Thalia’s broker sent more roommates for her to meet, but each time she found some excuse: this one smoked, but said she didn’t—Thalia could smell it; another she could tell was part of the party scene that continued in the East Village despite the restrictions; another worked in a hospital, and even during the interview Thalia had wanted to distance herself from potential contagion.

 
She called Mr. Drakos over to the house.

  “I want to sell,” she said once they had settled down on the porch.

  That was all it took. The real estate agent hired people to clear out the rest of Ya-ya’s things and drive everything off to be placed in a storage unit. A woman in hip red glasses came in to stage the house, bringing with her bottles of ocean-scented room spray and a list of recommendations for painters and contractors. Once two weeks had passed, only Thalia’s room still had any personal items in it, and it felt as though her room had magically been placed overnight into another house.

  The house sold in three days with an all-cash offer five percent over the asking price. She had three weeks to move out. The figures listed on the paperwork were staggeringly outside of Thalia’s experience. The surplus over the asking price alone was enough to cover the small home improvements she’d done since Ya-ya’s death and the storage space for four years. When she walked around the neighborhood, she saw her neighbors’ houses in a new light. Hiding in the joints of the walls and the stripple ceilings was so much money and, therefore, so much freedom, so many choices, she felt giddy with it, and a bit scared. She didn’t know where she was going. She had an invitation to visit Maddy and Sam, who had moved in with Maddy’s aunt in Poughkeepsie, about an hour and a half to the north.

  One week after she signed all of the paperwork, she was on a conference call with Toula, her boss from Horizon Destinations. They were adding a new partnership, a new list of venues to their online offerings: the Canary Islands, off the coast of Spain. Perfect weather year-round, beaches, mountains, modern medical care. A vaccine had been approved, medical workers were already receiving their first dose and Spain was opening its borders to those who tested negative or held a complete vaccination card. The idea of someplace called the Canary Islands sounded to Thalia like a make-believe space, a Hollywood fiction, haunted and perfect for a long establishing shot in the trailer.