The Bird Sisters (35 page)

One night, he drank a bottle of their mother’s perfume, a wedding gift she’d made last almost twenty years, fell down the stairs, and broke his neck. The undertaker said he’d never worked on a dead man who smelled as good.

“It’s French,” Twiss had said, of the perfume. “Millot’s Crêpe de Chine.”

She’d tried it on in the moments after her mother died, dabbing her wrists the way her mother used to. To Twiss, the scent (the bottle promised Italian bergamot, neroli, basil, Egyptian jasmine, and fresh aldehydes) was as complicated as her mother; the list of ingredients individualized what otherwise blended together. She didn’t know why she’d put it on when she could have been doing more useful things. Her mother was still on the bed, with one arm dangling off where she’d tried to reach out to Twiss and Twiss had moved away from her.

“Just because you’re sick doesn’t mean you get to love me,” Twiss had said.

She’d turned toward the window, toward the view of the garden and the barn, the folds of green fanning out and away from the house. She thought of her father, who was still sitting outside the door, foolishly hoping that the old adage
too little, too late
didn’t apply to him, believing that it shouldn’t. She thought about how she’d chosen him year after year, confusing intentions with outcomes, enthusiasm with self-interest. Her last conversation with her mother gripped her like a root, still, all because she couldn’t have it with her father.

“Did I ever tell you I baked a heart-shaped loaf of bread?” her mother said.

“I hate bread,” Twiss said. “I hate hearts even more.”

Twiss had always believed that on her mother’s deathbed, her true feelings for her mother would finally show themselves, as if for the whole of her life they’d simply been obscured by a sheet, albeit a black one. She’d counted on the words “I love you” rolling off her tongue as easily as the words “I hate you” did. She wasn’t prepared for the smell of urine and sweat—the giving up or the giving in, which made her want to slap her mother’s face.

Wake up!
she wanted to say.
We’ve all lost something
.

“Do you remember that program I used to listen to?” her mother said. “
A Day in the Life of …
It always bothered me that they never did one on a housewife.”

“People don’t want to hear about that,” Twiss said. “They want to hear about driving tundra buggies over crevasses in the Arctic Circle. They want to hear about watching the northern lights with polar bears.”

“I knew you remembered that day!” her mother said.

“I’m not an idiot,” Twiss said.

“I rode in that airplane,” her mother said. “They could have done a
Day in the Life of …
about that. That’s not particularly ordinary.”

“Well, it isn’t extraordinary,” Twiss said.

“How would you know?” her mother said. “You haven’t flown over your life.”

Her mother looked up at the ceiling, as if it were a window. “It didn’t look how I thought it would. It looked so much better.”

Her mother said the pilot of the biplane had gotten them into the air, bounding skyward, before she had a chance to change her mind out loud, which she’d planned on doing despite winning the kidney bean contest and Twiss’s father waving her on.

“Unhappiness on the ground is one thing,” she said to Twiss. “You can close a door on it. You can draw a shade. I was afraid of what might happen in the air.”

What her mother said she remembered most vividly was the moment the river came into view and how the higher they climbed, the more it looked like a sheet of blue ice. From the air, she said, she couldn’t believe that anyone had ever drowned at the current’s hand. She said she couldn’t believe the river had swallowed so many people’s futures and spit out alternate ones in the space of a few minutes on peaceful Sunday afternoons.

“I have a theory about why your father can’t play golf,” she said.

“He hurt his hip,” Twiss said.

“He has a conscience.”

After that, the plane bounced over cool drifts into steadier air. When the pilot steered away from the river, the site of the Accident, her mother saw the old forestry road leading into Spring Green, which skirted the golf course and the town.

“Before you and Milly were born,” her mother said, “a couple about our age stopped in to get directions one day. They were up from Madison, out on a Sunday drive, and had gotten turned around on the country roads. Your father wanted to be helpful. While I fixed lemonade, he drew a detailed map. He told them that once they got across the river, they’d be able to smell freshly cut grass. They’d be able to see perfectly aligned moguls.”

“So?” Twiss said.

“He drew a map of the golf course,” her mother said.

Twiss glanced at the bedroom door.

“The course looked more perfect from the air than it does from the ground,” her mother said. “Golf balls dotted the green like pearls. I was sorry for your father.”

When the pilot asked where she lived, Twiss’s mother told him. Before he turned back for the field beside the town fair, the pilot flew her over their home: the house, the pond, the meadow, and the barn, the sight of which her mother said reminded her of the little matchstick houses she used to build when she was a girl. She said they were always flawless until she left them outside overnight and rain began to fall.

Just before the plane tilted up and away from the house, and the engines roared, she saw the garden and the clothesline, the bird feeder, which she’d filled with the last of her sugar cubes and a cup of warm water, and her floral aprons swaying in the breeze.

“I was sorry for me, too,” she said. “Neither of us was given what we were promised.”

Twiss opened the drapes as well as the windows, inhaling the fresh air until she could breathe without smelling urine. A hummingbird was perched on the sill.

“Shut those, will you?” her mother said. “I’m cold.”

She unfolded the last of the wool blankets in the house and struggled to place it over her chest. When Twiss didn’t move, her mother said, “I feel like I’m a million years old.”

“Only fossils are that old,” Twiss said, watching the hummingbird watch her.

“Then that’s what I am,” her mother said.

“You’re demented,” Twiss said.

“We’re so much more alike than you think.”

Twiss stared out the window, trying to gauge whether or not she would be badly hurt if she jumped onto the ground. When, after estimating the drop-off, she wasn’t willing to risk a broken leg or a broken arm, she pushed the window as far up as it would go and the hummingbird flew away.

“I’ve always known you couldn’t belong to anyone but me,” her mother said. “In the hospital, you latched on to your father’s fingers and wouldn’t let go, as if you knew something about him you couldn’t have known. You wouldn’t even let me nurse you unless he was there. I thought you’d starve for all the golf lessons he gave that summer.”

Twiss turned so that she faced her mother, who’d taken up the ends of the wool blanket and was rocking it back and forth in her arms as if an infant were swaddled inside.

May you sleep well tonight, Miss Theresa Wis
.

Mama loves you ever so much and sends sweetest dreams to you
.

“I’d rather die than be like you,” Twiss said, thinking
I love you
.

Her mother looked up from the blanket and smiled. “I love you, too, Twiss.”

A moment later, she was dead, and Twiss was putting on her perfume, dabbing at first, and then slathering. The only ingredients she could pick out were the bergamot and the basil, the overwhelming and the everyday.

omewhere between youth and old age, it occurred to Twiss that loving someone and forgiving them were two very different things. She forgave her mother for their similarities, which she understood had caused most of their differences. She forgave her mother for that peculiar downsloping smile they shared, the ability to pick and nitpick, and for the blindness that had prevented her from going out to the barn before what was going on in the barn came to her, but Twiss loved her father too much to know how to either condemn or forgive him. All she’d ever been able to do was run away from him.

Whenever Twiss was in doubt of her love, she went back to the accident, and the days just after the fisherman pulled her father from the Wisconsin River and onto dry land again, before the event had taken on the weight of a proper noun. When she needed it most, Twiss found assurance in the details that her father had shared with her mother and Milly and her from his hospital bed, as well as the details he’d shared with just her after Milly and her mother had gone down to the cafeteria.

Twiss remembered being glad they were gone. She remembered nestling closer to her father on the metal hospital bed, smiling because she didn’t have to share him with anyone else.

“What happened after the car landed in the water?” she said.

“Have you ever skated on ice that was too thin?” her father said.

“I only skate on that kind of ice,” Twiss said.

Her father stroked the ends of her sticky hair. “I forgot who I was talking to.”

Her father said that for a moment, the car had balanced on top of it before the tension broke and it plunged beneath the surface into dark water.

“It’s strange,” he said. “The feeling you have just before the bottom drops out on you.”

“Like being scared?” Twiss said.

“Like being able to have everything you’ve always wanted at the same time.”

When the car began to sink, her father’s instinct was to stay still.

“Why?” Twiss asked.

“You can’t explain instincts,” her father said.

The car sank farther and farther down until the light dwindled then vanished altogether. The windows, which her father had rolled down at the golf course on account of the heat and the black vinyl seats, allowed the cold water to flood in and the river debris to flow freely through the car.

“I saw something when I was down there,” her father said. “A family.”

“The family who drowned?” Twiss said.

“No,” her father said. “Your mother and Milly and you.”

“What were we doing?” Twiss said.

“Living without me,” her father said.

“Did we say anything to you?” Twiss said.

“Your mother smiled. She took the sundaes from the passenger seat and said, ‘We’ve been waiting a very long time for you to come home.’ ”

After her father’s funeral, which wasn’t as crowded as they’d expected (none of their father’s old golfing acquaintances showed up), Twiss went to the golf course and Milly went back to the house to serve the finger-sized ham sandwiches that Mrs. Bettle had brought over—apparently multibite foods weren’t appropriate for a funeral—and to field questions lingering on people’s minds and comments lingering on their tongues.

Before the funeral, one of the women from the Sewing Society had brought over a dense fruitcake, which Twiss had launched into the woods like a baseball after the woman had started back down the driveway toward her home.

“I don’t even know who some of these people are,” Twiss had said.

Mrs. Collier and Dr. Greene had offered to take Milly and Twiss in; on their last driving excursion, they had eloped. Mr. Stewart had offered to help, too, although he said it probably wouldn’t look right to have two young girls living with him, a bachelor, in town.

“We can take care of ourselves,” Twiss had said.

Which was only partially true. While they could physically take care of themselves—they’d been doing that for a long time now—they needed to accept Mr. Peterson’s offer to pay the mortgage and the taxes on the house to make the statement fully true.