The Call

It was still dark when the sound woke me. Before my alarm. Before sunrise.

I sleep with those little orange foam earplugs and a fan going all night. Between the two, I usually don’t hear much.

But I heard this.

Coming from the backyard.

It wasn’t far away. It was close and loud, calling over and over.

I pulled out an earplug.

There it was again.

I sat up and woke my husband.

“Do you hear that?”

He did.

And then I remembered.

The phone call the night before. I had been expecting it. I was in New Jersey. My family was a thousand miles away in Alabama, at the hospital with my baby sister.

She was nine years younger than me. My mother always said she was the sweetest of her three girls and the most affectionate. 

During those last few months, she was in and out of the hospital. One day her longtime boyfriend asked her if there was anything she still wanted to do that she hadn't done yet. She said yes: get married. So in August, they had a small wedding right there in her room. She wore a little veil while sitting up in her bed, my mother on one side holding her hand, and him standing on the other, holding her other hand as they said their vows.

A few weeks later, I flew to Alabama to see her. She was home then, spending most of her time in a recliner, where she often slept at night.

It was Labor Day weekend, and it was almost like a party. So many people were visiting her that day. She had lost her voice by then and would drift off to sleep while aunts, uncles, and cousins sat nearby. She could still smile, though, and she laughed without making a sound. Earlier that day, we were all joking and telling stories, and I had to tell the one about the time she was six and asked my boyfriend and me through the screen door, "Are y'all gonna sex?" Then she giggled and ran away.

But that afternoon had turned quiet by the time I sat beside her, holding both of her hands and squeezing them. My mother sat on the other side of her. She hadn't left all day.

When it was time for me to leave, I hugged her and told her I loved her. She mouthed it back to me. I could almost hear her sweet voice.

I fought back tears as I walked out. This isn’t the last time I’ll see her, I told myself.

We’d known for months that she didn’t have much time left. You keep doing ordinary things because there’s nothing else to do. You make dinner. Go to work. Feed the cat. And every time your phone rings, you think this is it. 

Except you never want it to be.

Around ten, while we were watching the news, the call came. My sister had died.

My husband held me. I remember saying, “She’s gone,” and the words didn't sound real to me.

I remember Oliver trotting down the steps into the sunroom with us and sitting on the back of the couch.  

We kept watching TV. I washed my face and brushed my teeth before bed, like any other night.

I was almost angry about that. Everything just kept going.

Eventually I went to bed. There was nothing else I could do. I couldn’t get in the car and drive to Alabama in the middle of the night. I couldn’t undo what had happened.

I put in my earplugs, turned on the fan, lay down next to my husband, and somehow fell asleep.

A few hours later, the owl woke me.

I got out of bed and walked to the back of the house by the dining room. I don’t remember deciding to do it. 

I opened the sliding glass door.

The October air was cold. Somewhere down the slope in the yard, in trees I couldn’t see, the owl called again.

Oliver followed me there and sniffed the cool air. I picked him up. 

He was almost eighteen, my little tuxedo cat. Thinner. Sleepier. Slower.

I carried him outside and held him against my chest, cradling him in my arms.

I hadn’t put on shoes. The wood was cold under my bare feet, but I didn’t go back for them. 

The yard was completely dark. None of the squirrels, birds, or other little things that were usually out there during the day. Just the owl calling from somewhere in the trees.

And me, standing barefoot on the deck with my old cat in my arms.

My sister had been alive the day before.

That was the part I couldn’t seem to understand. I knew she was dead. But a few hours earlier she had still been here, and now she wasn’t.

If I’d been there, I could have been in that hospital room. I could have held her hand again. Instead, I had been a thousand miles away when she died.

The owl kept calling.

I felt calm.

I stood there holding Oliver and listened.

I know an owl is just an owl. It was probably sitting in a tree doing exactly what owls do in the hours before sunrise. 

But it had gotten through my earplugs.

Through the fan.

I don’t know how long Oliver and I stayed out there. Long enough for my feet to go numb. Long enough for him to jump down from my arms.

The sky behind the trees was beginning to lighten.

Maybe grief makes us find meaning in coincidences. 

But some part of me wondered if she was telling me goodbye and letting me know she was okay.

I'd never been awakened by an owl before. And I've never heard one outside our house like that since. 

And for the first time since the phone rang, I was calm.

I don’t know if the owl meant anything.

But I want to think it did.