Bird jam. Listen to the dawn chorus. To calls, whistles, trills, cackles, coos, chattering, and twittering.

Omens are everywhere. Birds are everywhere. Love is somewhere.

Anxious to lift a corner on the veil of the future, we are attracted to omens and birds. In the days of the Romans, a bird appearing at a person’s right indicated fortune. A bird to the left … well, you guessed it … avoid it.

The blog seemed a lesser thing to Iris. Did anyone care? And who the hell out there was ever going to read it? Yet the blinking cursor was alive on the white template. It could link anywhere. Connect to perfect strangers, even. By such a thin thread she could connect with the world beyond Clare, she thought. She’d set up a Wordpress site and she owned the domain IrisBowen@wordpress.com. She could hyperlink between the two blogs now and felt a little pleased with herself. When she missed Rose and Luke the most, she could blog. The blog could be her dialogue … with somebody. Anybody. She looked out down the slope of the garden toward the trees. She watched the sudden flight of a blue tit heading for the cherry blossoms. Then she typed:

A bird flying to you is a benediction. Grab it before it flies away.

After uploading the poppy photos (the sketch she’d attempted was laying, half-finished, beside the telephone), and writing step-by-step instructions and posting, Iris went outside. Suddenly she wanted to hear the cuckoo. She walked eastward along the front of the house, along the border that was stippled with wild columbine, and turned right to face the valley. Nothing.

“Where are you?” she asked toward the treetops.

Listening for the first call of the cuckoo was a thing she and Luke used to do. In the brightening of spring they’d keep track, year on year, who would hear him first. (Luke, fourteen. Iris, eleven.) The cuckoo comes in April. She walked backward in case her left ear should catch him. Then she stopped and faced east. No sound. He sings his song in May. Sing, cuckoo.

She called: Goo-ko, goo-ko, willed him to fly up from the valley and sing across the top of the spruce forest.

Goo-ko, goo-ko …

Nothing.

All she could hear was Tommy Ryan’s van from half a kilometer away as it stopped and started to deliver post into neighbors’ boxes along the road. Still wearing her nightdress and one of Luke’s shirts, her hair undone, Iris hid behind the hedge. Tommy was a kind man but she was in no humor to speak with him. He played cards most nights in Nolan’s pub since his own wife had died suddenly of a heart attack at fifty-two. Now when he saw Iris he seemed to look at her like she was wearing some dark mantilla of sadness that he felt somehow obliged to take away. She wanted to say, “I’m fine. Thanks, Tommy. Really. Don’t worry. And stop looking at me that way.”

As he stepped from his van, leaving the door open, she could hear the noon Angelus ringing on the radio. He opened the box and dropped in her post. Out of nowhere, Cicero, her black cat, appeared at her bare feet and started mewing. She mimed to him to shush, but Cicero paid no attention to mimes and mewed louder and Tommy called “Sibby, Sibby” outside the hedge. (Why all cats in the west of Ireland were called Sibby, she never understood.) He might have come to the gate to see then, but Iris plucked the cat up into her arms and held him tight.

“Sibby, Sibby?”

When Tommy’s van passed away back down the road, Iris slipped through the gap in the hedge. Between the electricity bill and a copy of Gardens Illustrated was a letter from the Breast Clinic. She opened it and read:

A client’s path through the symptomatic breast clinic is tailored to the individual and may not require anything more than a clinical review (especially in younger women). The medical history will be discussed and the client will be given the opportunity to ask questions regarding their symptoms and future management. A small number of clients require a biopsy. This is a minor procedure where tissue is removed from the breast using a needle under local anaesthetic. Most women experience little or no discomfort with this procedure. The center is equipped to perform a biopsy during the client’s initial assessment, although occasionally biopsies are performed at a later date to facilitate accurate guidance with the mammogram. The tissue is then examined under the microscope. Most clients who have a biopsy do not have breast cancer.

It is very important that you confirm your appointment: Friday, 12 June, 10:30. Dr. Denise Browne.

She folded the letter into its envelope and put it in her back pocket and walked up the path, unable to deny it was real. This distortion thing. Swallows reveled in and out of the barn, ignoring her, and Cicero made little cackling noises. The tip of his tail shivered. The appointment was at the end of the week.

“What? Don’t look at me like that,” she said. But he did. Expectant. She turned to face again the trees. The female cuckoo would be encamped high up, somewhere out there, biding her time, awaiting her moment. This was the time of year she’d drop her egg into the nest with the meadow pipit and, in the way of nature, the meadow pip mother would raise the baby cuckoo as her own. But where was the cuckoo’s mate? Iris wanted to hear him. It was absurd, but she did. No sound came from the sky except a wind noising in the spruce. She made it across to the stone steps at the top of the garden and sat down, clutched her knees. She rocked back and forth. Tears streamed down her face.

*   *   *

Iris had decided not to disturb Tess’s weekend. But on Monday when she rang, Tess hadn’t answered, so Iris had left a voice mail: “Guess what? I have a distortion. Ring me.”

Now Iris sat in a iron garden chair with a bottle of red wine and a tumbler at the round table under the porch. She sat out in the falling night air with the garden perched on the edge of explosion of more poppies, lupines, and geraniums. A swelling greenness turned the new growth of the boxwood hedge neon, even in the darkness. The swagged layers of Mt. Fuji, the Japanese cherry, had reminded Luke, she remembered, of the bustle gowns in Femmes au Jardin by Monet, with its branches billowing in the wind. Cicero composed himself in a clef shape across the table and played with the pieces of cheese Iris fed him.

“One for you and one for me.”

Evening began to fall. She finished the wine and went inside and lay down on the couch.

*   *   *

A few hours later Tess woke her.

“Good evening, pet,” she said, raising her eyebrows and looking at the blue Wellies still on Iris’s feet. “A little self-medicating?”

“Never hurt anyone,” Iris said somewhat sheepishly, sitting up and feeling at once a sharp ache at the base of her neck, under her left shoulder, and yes, there, dead center of her spine. “What are you doing here?”

“Got a missed call from you earlier. You sounded funny, so I thought I’d pop over.”

“Oh, right. Sorry. I must have fallen asleep. What time is it?”

“Ten.” Tess picked up the bottle on the floor. “Californian. Yum.” She smiled. “But mind yourself. Okay?”

“Yes, Dr. Tess, Medicine Woman.”

“Iris?”

“Okay. Yes. I hear you.” Iris kicked off her boots and rose crookedly from the couch. Her head was sore. The blue of the summer night sky was finally yielding to darkness.

“Tea, I think, before you tell me exactly what the doctor said.”

In the kitchen, Tess switched on the light and Iris put the kettle on. “Poppies are fab,” Tess said, looking at them and, without lifting her eyes: “So the doctor said they found—”

“A distortion.” Iris looked at her for a long moment. “What is … an ‘architectural distortion’?”