The birds came six months after I quit drinking, one by one, tentative as children emerging from their rooms after their parents have had a fight. First, the bluebird that took the hollow gourd Jason hung in the pear tree. It wove a dense circle of hay from the cow fields, laid two sets of eggs between April and June. Then the nervous sparrow that carried moss from the swampy woods to the lantern above our front stoop, and shat on the concrete walk all spring. We opened the door to let the dog out, and the bird swooped from the light where—it took us a while to notice—she was nesting four babies, and when we tried to peer inside the nest we stepped bare feet into the whorled white of new life.

Summer began the same way we stopped counting days. The way we stopped creeping through the house, not touching, as we glided between rooms in our separate spheres of healing. We found a comfortable meal routine, inched again into each other at night in front of the television. The wisteria bloomed crazily for two weeks. Then the honeysuckle's painkilling perfume. Then the magnolias, lolling cumbersome heads in nests of waxy leaves. But still, there were the nights I dreamt of drunkenness, the bottle slick in my hand, the burn in my throat. I woke with my nightgown clinging to cold, sticky skin, head pounding from a locked jaw. The panic fluttered like a canary in my chest, as I slid a hand to Jason's side of the bed, feeling for his warmth with my eyes closed. If he was there, I could open them.

In July, wings beat inside the house. An echo in the living room like a book left out on the porch, pages flipping in a storm headed south from Birmingham. The dog and cat took vigil at the fireplace. Jason got the flashlight, opened the back door in case whatever was inside flew out into the room. We were almost us again, almost certain we knew what would and wouldn't come into our home. Jason lay on the floor and pointed the beam into the chimney. He refuses secrets in the walls of his house. We heard something scramble up the brick, fleeing discovery, just as I covered my head with my hands, pushed my face into a pillow. I expected a bat, like I always do.