A Field Guide to Leaving

The guide was her mother’s idea of a joke, or her mother’s idea of a will — with her mother the two had never been separable. It arrived three weeks after the funeral, forwarded by a lawyer with a cover letter of magnificent unhelpfulness, a slim hand-bound notebook titled in her mother’s draftsman lettering: A Field Guide to Leaving. First Edition. For Cass.

Inside, in the format of the bird guides her mother had carried for sixty years, were entries.

The Common Goodbye (valediction vulgaris). Abundant. Found at doorways, gates, and the ends of phone calls. Plumage unremarkable. Call: a short, repeated well—anyway. Often mistaken for the Final Goodbye by inexperienced observers; the experienced know the difference is not audible in the field and is only confirmed later, by absence.

Cass read it standing up in the kitchen, coat still on.

The Irish Exit (fuga hibernica). Secretive, crepuscular. Departs gatherings without ceremony, leaving a warm chair and a half-finished drink as field sign. Best located by its silence. Not, despite the name, native to Ireland; native everywhere there are parties and people who love them only mostly.

Her mother had thrown exactly such exits her whole life — from parties, from marriages, from two careers and one country — and Cass had spent years as the one left holding the warm chair, explaining to rooms. She turned the pages. The Cold Shoulder. The Slow Fade (“distinguish from true migration by the absence of return in spring”). The Stormoff, with a note on juvenile plumage. It was funny and then it wasn’t and then it was again, which had also been her mother in every particular.

The last entry was unfinished. The lettering was shakier there.

The Long Leaving (discessus longus). Rare; observed at most once per lifetime, at close range. A large, slow species, often mistaken in its early stages for ordinary tiredness. Approach is permitted. The bird will allow it — this is the only species in this guide that wants to be watched. Range: one bed, one window, the visible half of one sycamore. Call: softer each week. Field marks: the hands. Watch the hands.

Behavior: contrary to popular accounts, does not fly. Walks. Takes nothing. Looks back —

The entry stopped. Below it, in pencil, in a hand so faint Cass had to take it to the window: finish this one yourself, kiddo. I never got a good look.

She bought a notebook the same size the next morning. It took her four years and two false starts, and the entry she finally wrote was short, the way the true ones always were in her mother’s guides — the rare birds got two lines, her mother used to say, because nobody who’s really seen one needs convincing.

The Long Leaving (cont.). Looks back once. Is gone before the looking ends. Survivors report the species is not extinct in the heart, where a breeding population persists indefinitely. Listen at doorways, at the ends of phone calls, at the window by the sycamore: well — anyway.

Status: protected.