The Bird Sisters (30 page)

The two of them went up, up, up to a place in the sky where Milly could see the whole of the town fair as well as the town. Milly saw the crowd of people flocking to Twiss’s empty stand and Mrs. Bettle reaching into Henry’s cage. She saw Dr. Greene and Mrs. Collier walking along, and Mr. Stewart trailing behind like their child. She saw other people’s parents, but not her own. It wasn’t until Milly saw Bett, standing by herself in her blue dress and even bluer-looking shoes, which were sparkling in the early evening light, holding what looked like a stone in her hand, that Milly questioned her eyes. From this vantage point, it looked like Bett was standing beside the river, an impossibility made possible by height.

Just after the Ferris wheel reached its pinnacle, there was a great downward jolt, and the stone in her cousin’s hand changed into what it really was: a golf ball, which cast a glow white and peculiar against the blue of her shoes and dress, the blue of the evening light. Only then did Milly see what Twiss would have seen if she wasn’t busy defending her jars of happiness: that everything below her and Hoo-Hoo was too good to be true and, like the Ferris wheel, would eventually have to come down.

ury that bird already!” said the Scornful God voice, whose timbre had begun to sound remarkably similar to her mother’s and was just as grating on Twiss’s nerves as it was sixty years ago. “Have you gone mad, child?”

“I’m not a child,” Twiss said, although she wondered if such a statement could ever really be true. She’d grown in age, yes, and in body, surely, but inside, Twiss felt the same way she had when she was a girl, only she could no longer take off running in any direction, which made her feel freedomless—the worst kind of
less
.

Twiss put the goldfinch back into her front pocket and buttoned the pocket shut. Before she heard the Scornful God voice, the mother voice, she’d planned on walking to the gladiola bed in the backyard. Now she stayed by the water pump out of spite.

“What does the bird have to do with it?” said the voice. “It’s me you’re mad at. You never did like me much. You think I’m a Parisian snob.”

“You’re not Parisian,” Twiss said. “You’re dead.”

“You only liked me when I left you alone.”

“You might try doing that now,” Twiss said.

“You’re the one who keeps dredging me up.”

There was a pause in the conversation.

“What are you waiting for?” the voice said. “He’s dead, Theresa Wis. We all are.”

So many years had passed since someone had called her by her full name that it took Twiss a moment to remember that the name belonged to her: Theresa, after the nurse’s dead mother, and Wis, because the first thing Twiss tried to do as a newborn baby just out of the womb was eat a clump of black Wisconsin dirt, which her father, when he’d finally come to the hospital from wherever he really was, had placed in her tiny hand.

“I don’t know anymore,” Twiss said to her mother.

She began to walk away from the water pump hoping for a reason to turn around again, although she couldn’t pinpoint what that reason might be, or should be, only that hearing her real name had done something to her equilibrium.

“Wait a minute,” her mother said. “I have something to ask you.”

“What?” Twiss said, wondering if this would be the moment her mother finally made sense of history for her: the sharp decline of their family, the giving in and the giving up.

“When you come will you bring along some of that dark chocolate I used to like? They only have milk chocolate here. I always wince when I bite into it. Wincing, in my understanding, isn’t supposed to occur in the afterlife.”

“I’ll pack up the Eiffel Tower, too,” Twiss said.

“No need,” her mother said. “We’ve got one just like it.”

Twiss continued walking so as to escape her nonexistent yet persistent mother. Even when she reached the front door of the barn, she could still hear her mother talking about the price of binoculars in heaven, as well as the price of
pain au chocolat
.

“The currency’s doled out the same way as it was in life,” she said. “I suppose Father Stone wasn’t that far off the mark. He joined us a few years ago, in case you didn’t know. The last member of the Sewing Society, too. Up here, she looks just like a goat.”

Twiss opened the barn door and quickly sealed herself inside. Although she’d destroyed all other evidence of the rectangular space ever being occupied by her father’s miniature back nine, there was still a fine layer of sand on top of the dirt floor, which Twiss had swept out of the barn countless times and which had come back over the threshold in dune force just as often. Even though the barn no longer belonged to her father, and the sand had been reduced to a blend of finely divided rock and benign mineral particles, each day that she entered the barn through the utility door, and just before she began to launch balls out of it toward the chicken coop and the pond, she picked up the broom and swept. Twiss had always been a literalist of the most basic sort; if you could see it, then it was probably still there.

The image of Bett and her father was in the sand, in the wood, in the little square window, which she’d caulked shut after her father’s funeral. The image was burned to the inside of her eyelids, so that even now when she closed her eyes, she saw the two of them standing between the seventeenth and the eighteenth hole, beneath a single dim yellow bulb.

fter she saw her father and Bett together in the barn sharing what should have belonged to her, the night before the town fair, Twiss started running. When she reached the end of the driveway, she saw that she had three choices: to go left, right, or home. Up the hill was Father Stone and down the driveway was home. Twiss went left, all the way down Fox Hollow Road, across the river, past the golf course, and into town. The farther away from the barn that she got, the stronger her legs felt and the stronger, too, her resolve to keep going.

All together, she ran five and a half miles before she got to the brown house with the dark green shutters—the ones with the pinecone cutouts—at the end of Forestry Lane and stopped. Only when she arrived did she realize where she’d been running to all along.

On either side of the stone walkway was a row of red pine saplings, which shook in the breeze as if they were cold. The street was aptly named; the saplings were the only real trees on the whole lane. The rest, mostly old-growth maples and oaks, had been cut down during the last century to build the town of Spring Green.

As if they’d been worried and waiting for her, just after Twiss stepped up onto the porch but before she’d had a chance to catch her breath or to steady herself enough to extend her index finger to ring the bell, Rollie and his wife came to the front door. Twiss was bent over the porch banister, holding the muscle stitch that had formed in her side.

“Good Lord, child,” Rollie’s wife, Adele, said. “Are you hurt?”

“Are those tears or sweat?” Rollie said, hurrying to her as if she might collapse.

But before Twiss could say she didn’t know, Adele reached for Twiss’s hand and pulled her gently inside the entranceway and into the dining room. She and Rollie had been getting ready to eat supper together. Placed on a yellow gingham tablecloth with an oak tree embroidered in the center of it were two green bowls and two glasses of cold milk. The house smelled of chicken and celery and freshly baked bread.

“You must be starved,” Adele said and sat Twiss down in her spot.

Twiss wasn’t hungry, but the sight of the food on the table, as well as the house itself, comforted her as it always had when she visited as a girl. On several occasions, Rollie and Adele had invited her over for supper after school (unlike her father, Rollie saved his money, which meant there was enough of everything for Adele to make supper and dessert each night of the week). Twiss had never been farther into the house than the dining room or the kitchen, but she was so fond of its appearance that she’d nicknamed it the Tree House because it was brown and green, and because all over the house were bowls filled with pinecones and fall leaves and placards that said things like TREES, TREES! WONDERFUL TREES! or HOME IS WHERE A TREE IS! THEY TOO HAVE HEARTS! in different shades of green.

The irony of Rollie spending nearly every day of his life keeping grass trimmed to a quarter-inch height on a treeless golf course had never occurred to her until now.

“What happened?” Rollie said, examining Twiss from across the table. “Your eyes are all red and swollen. Your arms and legs are cut up.”

“Let her eat,” Adele said, drawing her finger to her lips like Twiss’s mother sometimes did. Adele ladled out a bowl’s worth of chicken noodle soup and cut off a thick piece of bread from the loaf and buttered it. Then she went into the kitchen and came back with a bowl of raspberries and a yellow sponge cake.

“I had a feeling someone was coming,” she said. “I never make sponge cake.”

“I
love
your sponge cake,” Rollie said.

“I know you do, dear,” Adele said, placing her hand on his shoulder. “It’s just that we usually have tea and fruit in the summer. Whatever doesn’t make the kitchen hot.”

After supper, Adele took Twiss to the bathroom upstairs so she could wash up. At home, Twiss would have protested, but here, on this night, she didn’t. The scratches on her arms and legs from the lilac bush were bright red and throbbing as if she’d been stung. Adele laid out two pink towels for Twiss and a matching pink robe.

“I know pink’s not your favorite color,” Adele said. “I would have come up with something else if I’d known you were coming.”

Twiss ran her fingers along the satin piping around the collar. No one had ever laid out towels and a robe for her before. The only reason anyone had ever taken notice when she went into the bathroom was that she took longer than everybody else, and there was only one bathtub in the house.
You’re slower than the slowest slow
, her mother would say. After Twiss had taken a bath, her mother would get on her hands and knees and scrub the tub out before she’d get in. She said that if she didn’t clean it beforehand it would be like taking a bath in the pond.

“I don’t hate pink as much as everyone thinks,” Twiss said to Adele.

After Adele filled the bath with cool water, she tucked a strand of loose hair behind Twiss’s ear. “I’ll be right downstairs. We both will. If you need anything.”

From inside the bathroom, as Twiss peeled her sweat-soaked clothes off onto the floor and stepped into the tub, she could hear Adele and Rollie talking at the top of the stairs.

“Don’t you think it’s a bit unusual for a girl to run five miles at night all by herself? I have a mind to go over there and sort this out while she’s in the bath.”

“You’ll do no such sorting.”

“If he struck her, I’ll wallop him out of Spring Green.”

“You’re too old for fistfights.”

“Well,
something
must have happened.”

“She’ll tell us if she wants us to know.”

“They don’t deserve her.”

“She’s Button,” Adele said. “I know.”

Taking a bath in Rollie and Adele’s house after seeing her father and Bett in the barn and running the five and a half miles into town (she didn’t want to correct Rollie, but the last half mile had been the hardest both because her cramp had gotten worse and because she’d been able to see Rollie’s house by then) should have felt more unsettling than it did. The fact was that she’d finally gotten exactly what she’d always wanted: to see what it would be like to have different parents, a different family, and a different, barnless home.

Twiss dipped below the surface of the water, pretending the bathtub was the river and the foam created from the lavender bar of soap Adele had placed on the edge of the tub brown river foam. She kept her eyes closed and pictured what she always pictured when she was looking for reassurance: the river family in their watery river home.