The Bird Sisters (2 page)

Her wristwatch began to beep, softly at first, then louder and louder. She smacked it against her leg, which changed the cadence of the beeping but didn’t stop it. Before she could turn it off, her middle boy came in and took a yellow pill out of her purse.

“Seizures,” the mother said, after he swallowed the pill and went back to the porch. “He’s had them since he was a baby. The other ones have food allergies. I can’t make anything without one of them puffing up.
Rice puffs
make them puff up.”

“That must be difficult,” Milly said.

“It is when you have a husband like mine.”

When Milly didn’t say anything, the mother added, “He sells carpeting. The kind that’s been doused with toxic chemicals.”

Milly glanced at the green linoleum, the slick of wax beneath the table.

“Depending on what part of the country he’s in, I wish for a disaster that corresponds to that region. If he’s in California, I think about earthquakes. In Florida, it’s hurricanes. In Colorado, it’s avalanches. Great cascading, obliterating avalanches.”

The mother put her hand on her hip. “You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I used to be a runner. I set a national record once.”

“You don’t run anymore?” Milly said.

“I don’t do a lot of things anymore,” the mother said.

Usually, visitors would eat a biscuit and talk about the price of gasoline or the corn coming up in the fields along the river.
It isn’t as sweet as it used to be
, they’d say, when what they meant was
I’m almost used to being unhappy
.

“I know exactly what you mean,” Milly said, looking out the window at the patch of earth where the garden used to be. “I used to grow everything—tomatoes, squash, zucchini, peppers, lovely little potatoes. Fingerlings, I think they were called.”

Before the mother had a chance to say anything, the little girl ran into the room.

“Slow down,” the mother said. “I can’t understand you.”

The mother sighed deeply, as if she’d expected this outcome from the very beginning. Rather than causing her sadness, the events of the morning seemed merely to have exhausted her. “Remember what I said about heaven, Molly?”

“But it can’t fly,” the girl said.

Milly placed her hand on the girl’s curls. Their softness and the scattering of freckles at the girl’s neckline, the sudden camaraderie she felt with the mother, opened up something inside her that hadn’t been opened in a long time. She was lured to the feeling the way other people were lured to trespass on property that was not their own.

“I’m not sure about heaven,” Milly said to the mother while she stroked the girl’s hair. “I used to believe heaven was a place in the clouds and God was a nice old man who sat on top of the highest, fluffiest one. Then one day our priest, Father Rice, announced that God either didn’t exist or He didn’t care. It wasn’t what he said—that was the same as learning Santa Claus wasn’t real. It’s what happened after that made me believe he may have been right.”

The little girl’s mouth dropped open, and a high-pitched mewling, not altogether different from the sound calves made when they were separated from their mothers, came streaming across her lips. Then came the glassy eyes and the sniffling.

“Santa died too?”
she said.

The mother lifted the girl onto her hip as if Milly had become dangerous.

After that, everything happened so quickly that an apology, let alone a gesture of apology, was impossible for Milly to achieve.

The mother called to her other children to stop jumping and get into the car. Before she buckled the four of them in and drove off, she looked at Milly with an equal mix of fierceness and pity. “You just made my day ten times harder,” she said.

And then, “Only a person without children would say something like that.”

Twiss came into the kitchen a few minutes later carrying the goldfinch, which she’d wrapped in one of their mother’s embroidered handkerchiefs. Whenever birds died in their care, they buried them in the gladiola bed out back.

“Where did everyone go?” Twiss said.

“The children were late for school,” Milly said, picking up her tea and then setting it down again on the kitchen table.

She was still trying to understand what had happened. It must have been all that talk about natural disasters, a disastrous marriage. In reaction to the woman, and the toxic fumes she imagined rising from the floors in the woman’s house, the pessimist had broken out of its shackles. Heaven? The topic was too tempting.

What she couldn’t stop thinking about was the way the mother had looked at her and how that look, more than her words, had exposed the fact that Milly had never had children, a fact that usually didn’t bother her, because she had the birds to fall back on when she invited people into their home. Most visitors were too busy worrying about karmic retributions (were there any?) for running over a bird on their way to work to notice that she’d never experienced the pain of childbirth, the pleasure of loving someone more than she loved herself.

The luxury
, Milly thought when Twiss set the goldfinch on the table. She stroked his neck the same way she’d stroked the girl’s, although instead of curls, she felt broken bones. “That woman didn’t think a goldfinch merited a kink in her schedule,” she said to Twiss.

“Then we can only hope someone runs over her one day,” Twiss said.

“Is death always your solution?”

“At least my dead people go to heaven,” Twiss said.

Milly sat down at the table with the empty teacups, the napkins she’d folded the moment she saw the car coming up the driveway. “I don’t know what got into me.”

“Three-quarters of a century’s a long time to live like a saint.”

“I’m not a saint,” Milly said.

Twiss patted her shoulder. “Not anymore.”

While the two sisters finished their pieces of toast, the goldfinch sat on the table between them, shrouded in the last of their mother’s handkerchiefs. The bottom dresser drawer in her bedroom was now officially empty, and neither sister knew whether to be happy or unhappy about it, although each had known for some time that their bird-saving days were coming to a close. They hadn’t been able to save the last four birds brought to them—a wren, a bluebird, a cardinal, and a lovely little mourning dove they’d both adored.

“Do you want to do it, or do you want me to this time?” Milly said, wondering if she had the energy or the strength of heart to dig another hole. She used to perform elaborate ceremonies for the fallen birds—she’d say prayers, sing songs, and recite poems about avian cousins that had not yet fallen, although the cruelty of the latter homage had recently occurred to her and the poetry had stopped.

“I’ll do it,” Twiss said. “Do you want me to dig a hole for you, too?”

“We’re too old for that to be funny,” Milly said.

“Are we?” Twiss said, rolling up the sleeves of her beige coveralls.

She’d gotten up from the table and was leaning against the door that led to the dining room. When they were girls, the two would stand against the molding to record their heights. The pencil marks began when Milly was six and Twiss was four, etching their way upward like rungs of a ladder. Halfway up the molding, Twiss had figured out how to make herself taller than Milly. She’d put coasters in the heels of her shoes.

“Look at that!” she’d crow. “I grew two whole inches overnight!”

The marks stopped at sixteen and fourteen, even though Milly and Twiss had continued to grow, sometimes legitimately, sometimes not.

“Look how tall I used to be,” Twiss said.

“You were never that tall,” Milly said, standing up to emphasize her point. She smoothed the front of her green housedress. After all these years, and the coming and going of the women’s liberation movement, she still wouldn’t wear slacks.

Twiss stood on her tiptoes. “I might have been.”

Milly washed the breakfast dishes and Twiss dried them. Together, as they did when they were girls, they carried their mother’s bridal tea set to the sideboard in the dining room. The poor light made the embossed finials look less regal than they did in the kitchen.

Twiss traced the rim of a teacup. “Remember what she used to say?”

Milly thought of the old lilac bush beside the barn, the little square window sealed shut behind it. “I remember.”

The two sisters lingered in front of the sideboard, as if waiting for their mother to appear and caution them, before they took up their lists and went about their chores.

Bone china is like your heart. If it breaks, it can’t be fixed
.

Since her hip replacement Milly kept mostly to the house. Whenever she sensed Twiss watching her—especially on the days she used a stepladder to dust the top of the bookshelves and the hutch—she’d make a joke to ease her sister’s concern.

“I’ll be fine,” she’d say, knocking on her hip. “I’ve got more titanium than a rocket.”

“But you don’t have a launcher.”

“Who says?”

“Gravity.”

Twiss liked to have the last word and, because this seemed a small concession, Milly allowed her to. She’d direct her attention to an empty corner of the room, as though she needed privacy to consider her sister’s remarks, when really she’d be thinking about the feel of the duster in her hand, the snow-white feathers.

“I’ll be in the barn then,” Twiss would say, and leave her to her thoughts.

This morning, as she dusted the bookshelves, the rows that mingled culinary delights with field identification and bird anatomy, Milly stopped when she came to
The Curious Book of Birds
. Out of instinct or perhaps habit (Milly knew the words by heart), she took the book off the shelf to read the inscription on the worn title page:

For Milly
,

Because
.

“Horseshit!” Twiss had called the book after she’d fished it out of the mailbox years ago, but Milly had been inclined to keep it.

“For the illustrations,” she’d said. “Not for the history.”

But history was exactly what Milly was interested in this morning: the time before she loved birds, when the wing beat of a hummingbird seemed as ordinary as the rustle of leaves, the sound of rain falling on a gravel road. Before Cousin Bettie came to visit for the summer, when Milly was sixteen and Twiss was fourteen, birds were background noise: something you heard but didn’t listen to. By the next summer, Milly could tell you which bird the
pip-pip-pip
and the
pup-up-up
belonged to, and she could tell you why.

When Milly opened the bird book, its spine cracked the way hers did when she bent over too quickly. Like her face, the pages had yellowed around the edges. They smelled sweet and sour and tingled the tips of her fingers when she touched them. The cover had buckled outward over the summers and inward over the winters, which had made peaks and valleys out of it, difficult topography. Milly turned to chapter one: a story about a woodpecker doomed by her disobedience never to quench her thirst in lakes or rivers, brooks or fountains. As punishment for her refusal to help build the water basins of the world, the Lord decided the woodpecker would spend her days pecking at dusty wood. Her voice would be heard only when a storm was approaching and her thirst would be quenched only when it arrived, and so the woodpecker spent her life forever looking at the sky, waiting for the first drops to fall.

Milly looked out the window at the blue above and Twiss below; she was sitting on the porch pulling on the same muck boots she used to pull on when she was a girl and the fields were wet, though today the fields were dry. All summer they’d waited for rain and all summer it hadn’t come. For months the fans had been stirring up dust, which clung to tabletops and lamp shades and made the house feel weighty even though the specks were weightless. Milly thought about what the house used to look like (strikingly similar to its current state), then she thought about what it could have looked like if their lives had gone one way instead of the other. The book, which had arrived more than half a century ago wrapped in blue paper, was a gift, though on a day like today it was difficult to see it that way.