The Bird Sisters (36 page)

“I always admired your father,” he’d said, handing over the first of the crisp white checks that would arrive on the last day of each month until the house was officially theirs. Both Twiss and Milly hated those checks, their consolation prize.

“His mistake shouldn’t be your consequence,” Mr. Peterson said.

Was it?

Wasn’t it?

Their hearts had broken so long ago now that the injuries done to them felt like an old scar on most days, in that no matter how much time had passed or how much a scar faded, and even though it may have no longer hurt the way it once did, the disrupted layers of skin on the surface never quite regained their former levels of functioning.

Twiss had fallen down many more times in her life than Milly had, but it was Milly’s skin that was delicate as paper and was so easily marred. Even then, Twiss knew she’d stay with her sister in Wisconsin despite wanting to see Machu Picchu and the Continental Divide. She’d grow up with Milly and grow old with her, and then one day, if time had any kindness, she’d die with her. Leaving Milly alone would’ve been like leaving an injured bird in the middle of a road.

The day of her father’s funeral, Twiss went to the golf course. She walked along the stream, half expecting her father to jump out from behind the brush at the stream’s edge and declare all that had happened to be a joke.

And then, like in the old days, “Let’s you and me play a round of golf, champ.”

Except that he didn’t jump out of his coffin, that great mahogany and silver contraption that Mr. Peterson had arranged for him to spend his eternal life in. He didn’t shrug off the fancy three-piece Italian suit that Mr. Sprye donated to the cause, because he said the suit had brought him bad luck and luck was of no consequence to a dead man; since purchasing it, Mr. Sprye had fallen off his tractor, burned his hand on the stove, and narrowly survived an infection that had threatened to take his left foot. He wore his old, dirt-stained coveralls to the funeral, his old forlorn expression from when he didn’t have anything to harvest.

That day, he gave a speech about men who try to take what doesn’t belong to them and held out his blistered hand as evidence.

“I don’t know why the Lord forgives only some of us,” he said. “Why others are bound to their misdeeds as plants are bound to the earth.”

“Finally,”
Father Stone said, “somebody has been reading their Bible!”

Twiss kept walking along the stream until she found Persy, mangled but shining brightly beneath the cool, clear water. The lovely persimmon wood had buckled inward on the side it had landed on and outward on the side that was facing up.

“There was a tornado,” she said, gently lifting Persy out of the water.

And in a way, there was, although the last time the four of them—Milly, Twiss, their mother, and their father—had gone out to the storm cellar, Milly was fourteen and Twiss was twelve. Their mother had a keen sense for when and where tornadoes would touch down, and although she couldn’t stop them, she would herd her family into the storm cellar like cattle into a barn. While the three of them huddled together on the wooden bench below ground, Twiss’s father would be standing on the top stair reluctant to come down.

“Once upon a time!” her mother would yell up to him.

“It’s just a little wind, Maisie!” he would yell down. “Girls, you’re going to be all right.”

The day that a tornado actually touched down in their own little purple meadow, Twiss’s father ran down the stairs before her mother had a chance to pick up the book of fairy tales or even clutch it to her chest. The doors rattled and the oil lamp swayed and her father held the three of them with one arm and cradled the book with the other. Even after the tornado whirled back up into the clouds and on to another humble plot of land, he read—all the way through—until he got to the words, “And they lived happily ever after.”

For weeks after the storm, he stayed home instead of going to the golf course. When Twiss’s mother asked him why, he said, “I thought I was going to lose you.”

And then one Sunday, just as the purple meadow flowers had grown back and the soil had settled back into the earth, her father, too, had settled back into his afternoon routine.

“I thought I might go hit a few balls today,” he said. “Just a round, maybe two.”

“I’ve got you now,” Twiss said, cradling Persy in her arms the afternoon of the funeral.

She didn’t walk by the maintenance shed that day or by the clubhouse or even by the pro shop on her way home. She didn’t pretend that the sand moguls along the way were mountains that needed to be climbed in order to be crossed.

When she got home, she took Persy to the barn and performed a kind of surgery, a twisting of metal and reforging of shape, until he was as restored as he’d ever be. The evening had arrived and the mourners had left. Twiss dropped a golf ball onto the ground and stood at the threshold of the barn, squaring her shoulders in the fading light.

Milly had come out onto the porch and was calling for Twiss to come inside.

“Everyone’s gone,” her sister said. “Even Mrs. Bettle. Parrots get lonely, you know.”

For all that had happened since the postman dropped Bett at the end of the driveway and all that had happened since their cousin had left their house for the first and the last time, Twiss believed that when she swung Persy the ball would soar clear across the meadow and even more clearly over the pond, and reach the pine trees behind the house.

It would be the shot of her lifetime.

But when the ball hit the roof of the henhouse instead of the trunk of a tree, when it bounced down the shingles with the vigor of a tennis ball, managing to heroically defy the laws of physics in order to break one of the square windows below, Twiss was relieved rather than disappointed because her lack of skill made her feel exactly like herself again.

She ran to retrieve the ball, leaping over every unmowed blade of grass in her way and trampling down every other mowed one. Just before she opened the door to the coop and bent down to step inside the stooped half-house, she looked back at Milly, who was waving to her from the porch steps with one hand and taking off her apron with the other.

“Come inside!” Milly called.

Amid the wild cluck of first-generation Raouls, of pale under-feathers floating up to the ceiling like ashes and falling back down to the ground like snow, Twiss waved back at her sister, smiling the only smile she knew how to smile, lifting her legs the only way she knew how to lift them, one after another. She thought about her mother and her father, the
I love you’s
and
I don’ts
. The
I will’s
and
I will not’s
. She thought about Bett and her Deadwater stories, the tiny flash of green in her brown eyes.

Out of everyone, Milly was the only one who’d ever played a miserable round of golf on her behalf or told her she was worth a million pine needle pillows or spooned her when she was cold. She was the only one who scooped her up when she tumbled to the ground all those years ago, and she was the only one who saw Twiss fly to the moon.

“I’ll be right in,” Twiss called back, and thought
We don’t need anyone but us
.

ife and death—what paltry words, what tarnished bookends, what unjust summation for drawing in a breath one moment and failing to release it the next.

At the first feeling of feeling, Milly got up from her box-chair, from the damp and the dust that shrouded history the way history shrouded life. She took a last look around the attic before she descended the stairs. She gave a little good-bye, a good night, to all of the treasures from her youth—her drawings, Twiss’s notebooks, the model airplane that had come together piecemeal and had come apart in the same way—which were just that: treasures at the bottom of an ancient sea at the top of a clapboard house.

I won’t.

We won’t.

If you have a bad dream, you can sleep in my bedroom
.

Then I hope I have a bad dream.

Ten bad dreams.

Good night, Mother (in unison)!

It was a foolish and destructive game, Milly knew, but she played it anyway, out of happiness and sadness, the long hours of the afternoon. Her imagination was limited to her recollections of her own mother pulling the covers up to their chins and pulling them down over their feet, so that the western bandit who lived in the closet and the snake that lived beneath Milly’s bed would have no milky young flesh to latch on to.

“Good night, children,” her mother would say after a story.

“But I’m not tired!” Twiss would say, indignantly throwing off her covers.

“Be patient, my whirligig,” her mother would say, gently pulling them back up to Twiss’s chin. “One day, you’ll be tired. You both will be.”

Milly stepped down each of the attic stairs with the same gracelessness with which she’d climbed them, clinging to the wooden banister with one hand and feeling her way through the dark and onto the second-floor landing with the other.

Good night, children
, she thought as she shut the door.

The moment their mother pulled their own door shut, Twiss would throw her covers off again. “I don’t care what she says! I’m still not tired yet!”

And then to Milly, “Are you?”

“I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since you were born,” Milly would say.

Twiss would jump off her bed and onto Milly’s.

She’d say, “You can sleep when you’re dead!”

While she was still relatively mobile, Milly went down to the cellar in search of supper. She didn’t feel like eating toast and butter tonight or a hard-boiled egg, but she didn’t know if she wanted to eat what had been preserved in the cellar years ago now either.

Amid the neat rows of Mason jars were pickled eggs and pickled beets and tomato sauce, whose age the
Guinness Book of World
Records
would have been eager to document. In her youth, preservation had been securely linked to boiling and cooling the common Mason jar. Now most people bought whatever they craved at the grocery store, walking away with enough plastic to strangle an entire family of geese, of uncertain but curious goslings.