The Bird Sisters (16 page)

That day on the course, after he’d missed several easy shots that even Twiss could have made (well, at least Milly could have made them), she averted her eyes.

“I don’t understand,” he kept saying.

Twiss didn’t understand either. Even though he squared up for the shots the way he always had, the ball didn’t go where it usually went. By the seventeenth hole, he’d lost his swing and his temper. When his ball landed between two of the moguls, he threw his club so high in the air that Twiss thought it might never come down.

“Golf was the only thing I was good at,” he said, when the club, his beloved Persy, finally landed in the stream and sank to the bottom.

Twiss understood then that it was his singular vision that had made him such a skilled golfer, the way he lived and breathed in terms of it. She also understood that without it, he would be regular, which neither Twiss nor her father was ready to accept.

“Maybe Rollie changed the moguls while you were in the hospital,” she said.

“Of course!” her father said.

He grew cheerful. “Changes are supposed to be cleared through me. No one else has the authority. I’m still the only one who’s ever played a perfect game around here.”

Of course Rollie hadn’t changed anything—they both knew that—but the idea that he might have instilled in them a kind of hope that what had been lost could be recovered.

When her father turned off the headlights and began to motor over the course illegally, whatever hope Twiss had been maintaining dissolved once again. She slumped down low in her seat. “We could get in trouble,” she said to her father.

“You sound like Milly,” her father said.

They drove over the neatly clipped grass, the rhythmic dips and rises of earth that had been constructed to make the course more challenging.

“Do you feel that?” her father said. “Every two seconds. Unless it’s just rained. Then it’s three.” He inhaled and exhaled deeply.
“God, I’ve missed this—”

Before her father drove off the bridge, he was working on a design for the eighteenth hole. The Grand Finale, he called it, and he had left intricate sketches all over the house. Hole by hole, he wanted to create a course that would attract players from around the world. He imagined the expensive gifts he’d be given for having the nerve to design such a beautiful—here, he meant difficult and ingenious—course.

“Moisture collects in the dips,” her father said, motioning to the patches of fog the headlights illuminated when he turned them on. “They have their own weather patterns.”

Twiss knew the weather didn’t work quite like that, but she’d forgotten the exact words her textbook used to describe where rain came from and she didn’t want to discourage her father, who parked the car next to the seventeenth hole, which had no flag pin in it since the course was closed for the evening. There was something sad about the way that empty hole shone in the orange headlights that a golf ball wouldn’t fix. Inside the car, the air smelled of freshly cut grass and the fertilizer Rollie used to ensure no brown spots appeared in August. Even in drought years, the greens glowed like emeralds.

“I love her,” Twiss’s father said. “Just so you know.”

He took a tape measure from the glove box and got out of the car. Why, then, had he moved into the barn? Why did he send the notes he sent? The last one, which he’d addressed to Twiss’s mother, had said,
Because I don’t love you!

Twiss sat in the car until her father opened her door.

“Hold this end,” he said, handing her the tape measure.

Twiss did what she was told, but hoped Rollie would discover them. This time, though, she didn’t crave cold cream-soda fizz on her tongue. She craved the presence of someone who understood the importance of golf to her father, and who understood the importance of her father to her. Rollie had a way of putting things. If he saw them on the course, he might say, “Go home, Joseph. Button should be in bed by now. She needs her sleep.”

“I am home,” her father might say.

Rollie might pat her head like he used to when she was little.

He might say, “You only think you’re home.”

But Rollie neither appeared out of the shadows cast by the pine trees at the edge of the course nor told her father what he would not have wanted to hear. The maintenance shed was dark, save for the moon, which illuminated the wavery old window glass and the mowing equipment stored just beyond.

“I’m tired,” Twiss told her father. “I should be in bed by now. I need my sleep.”

A long piece of white measuring tape connected them. The sweat on Twiss’s neck had dried, and her clothes no longer stuck to her skin. For the first time all summer, and even though the temperature hadn’t changed, she had goose bumps.

“I’m cold,” she added.

“Put one of my shirts on,” her father said. “There’s one in the car.”

Twiss set her end of the tape measure on the ground and went back to the car for her father’s shirt, which she found crumpled in the backseat. The shirt was made of slate blue silk, soft as the down pillow stuffing she’d replaced with pine needles the moment her mother had relented. Though it fit her father perfectly, the ends of it hung to Twiss’s knees. On her, the shirt resembled the smocks her art teacher made them wear so their clothes would stay clean.

“My art teacher says I have talent,” Twiss told her father, thinking of her last piece. Although she usually preferred to draw gory things like bloody axes and pus balls, for the last project of the quarter her teacher had asked them to draw a picture of what happiness felt like. Twiss drew a flock of all different kinds of birds—red, blue, gray, green—taking flight from the top branches of an old-growth pine tree. When her teacher asked her to explain the drawing, Twiss said to her happiness felt like freedom. Sadness felt like the opposite.

Once, when Twiss was six years old, she was walking through the woods and came upon a cardinal with only one wing. Though she’d seen plenty of injured animals in her life, none made Twiss sadder than that bird, that loss of flight. She’d run to the house to make a wing for it, which she fashioned out of red construction paper, but by the time she returned it had died.

“I thought you wanted to be a champion golfer,” her father said.

“I do,” Twiss said, when she meant
I used to
. Ever since her father had taken the job with Mr. Peterson and had stopped playing golf, she realized golf wasn’t what she’d loved.

“Art could be a backup,” she said.

“You can’t have a backup if you want to be a champion,” her father said, motioning for her to pick up the measuring tape again. “What does the tape say?”

“Thirteen feet, two and a half inches.”

“Excellent!” her father said.

In his excitement, he let go of his end of the tape. Before Twiss could let go of her end, the tape snaked its way back to her, hissing as it entered the metal casing. The end of it snapped at her fingers like teeth and drew blood the same way.

Twiss and her father were mostly quiet on the drive home, Twiss sucking blood from the cuts on her fingers and her father glancing at the measuring tape the way he’d once glanced at Persy on her mother’s birthday all those years ago.

“Why didn’t you let go?” her father said.

Though the car was warm, and her skin sticky again, Twiss didn’t take off her father’s shirt. “I tried to,” she said, holding her fingers away from the material so she wouldn’t bleed on it. As they went over the bridge and the river, Twiss stuck her fingers out the window. On the black water, the moon looked like a giant silver coin.

“The older you get, the more like your sister you become,” her father said. “Milly’s incapable of seeing what’s in front of her.”

“I’m the one who needs glasses,” Twiss said.

“You have my eyes,” her father said.

When they arrived home, her father parked the car in front of the barn. The car had been cleaned and repaired after the Accident, but the engine still made mysterious noises after it was shut off and it still smelled like fish even though the last of them had been removed.

Twiss and her father got out of the car.

“I was just joking about Milly,” her father said, opening the door to the barn.

Twiss had heard more jokes after the Accident than she’d heard her whole life, except that the post-Accident jokes weren’t really jokes. None of them was funny.

“You could come in for a while,” Twiss said, but her father had already said good night.

Or I could
, she thought as she walked across the grass to the front door.

Inside the house, her mother was listening to opera music on the radio and putting dishes away in the cupboards. The woman on the radio was singing in a language Twiss couldn’t understand but made her think of the color red.

When Twiss tried to slip past the kitchen to the stairway, her mother whipped around and ended up dropping a plate in the process. Twiss expected her mother to scold her for being sneaky. Instead, her mother knelt on the floor and began picking up pieces of the plate, which was the last of the ones from her childhood, and placing them in her apron. She cut her finger on one of the shards of porcelain.

“Mr. Peterson said he’d only take a penny to help Bett,” she said, wrapping her apron around her finger. “I don’t know how we’ll ever repay him.”

“We have plenty of pennies,” Twiss said.

“We’ll be shack people,” she said. “Maybe we already are.”

“My stomach hurts,” Twiss said.

“Mine does too,” her mother said. She emptied her apron into the trash bin and went back to putting dishes in the cupboard. “Your sister forgot to soak the beans.”

“He took me to the golf course,” Twiss said, wanting to tell her mother about the trip but also knowing she wouldn’t because she felt responsible for protecting her father.

“I figured that’s why you were gone so long,” her mother said. “He can’t let it go.”

Twiss looked around the kitchen, wondering if her mother had ever felt about it the way her father felt about the golf course. Being a woman in Spring Green, and probably anywhere in the world, seemed so unfair to Twiss sometimes—that was the having to compare a golf course to a kitchen, a golf club to a soup ladle, which to her knowledge her mother had never held like it was the love of her life.

“Well, good night,” she said to her mother, turning for the door.

“Good night,” her mother said.

Upstairs, Milly and Bett were already in their beds. Bett was snoring lightly, inhaling in the language of pigs. Her feet dangled over the edge of her cot. Milly was as silent as the buck’s head on the wall above her bed, whose blue eyes glowed when the moonlight caught them. Bett’s father had run out of brown glass eyes when he was preserving it and had used a pair of eyes meant for wolves instead. Bett had helped pick them out. She said the object of taxidermy was to make the specimen look as lifelike as possible, and though bucks didn’t have blue eyes, she felt they captured a quality of their spirits that people didn’t often think about.

Twiss climbed into her bed without changing into her pajamas. She wondered what had happened with the doctor and Mr. Peterson, what was ailing Bett besides the dust and the damp, and the beans in her stomach.

Twiss tossed her pillow onto Milly’s bed, and Milly tossed it back.

Usually, Twiss would have made Milly tell her everything that had happened, what, exactly, she’d said to Asa in the field and her father at the barn, and why. In return, she would have told Milly about the measuring tape and her fingers, her father and the moonlight on the river. The look of the seventeenth hole without its flag pin.

That night, she and Milly lay in their beds without speaking, Milly in her less lovely nightgown and Twiss in her father’s silk golf shirt. Their silence, the absoluteness of it, announced the damage long before the future did.