The Bird Sisters (7 page)

“Wait for me there,” Twiss’s father said, which Twiss took to mean
I’ll be right behind you
since Twiss was such a fast runner.

Another flash of lightning. Another howl of wind.

“Run!” her father said, though it was he who started running, and not toward the stream. He took Persy, but left the rest of the clubs in the bag at Twiss’s feet.

“It’s the shot of a lifetime!” he yelled. “The shot of a lifetime!”

Twiss stayed where she was. The rain came before the lightning and the thunder, soaking her until her clothes stuck to her like a second skin. The wind sent the dandelion behind her ear flying toward the stream, but Twiss was too alarmed to follow it.

“Clark?” she said, after her father disappeared down the fairway.

Lightning! Thunder!

Whirrrrrrrr, whir. Whirrrrrrrr, whir
.

“Mom!” she screamed.

Right then, Twiss knew she should have loved her mother more for being right about the weather, but that would have meant loving her father less for being wrong about it. So with each snarl of thunder and each flash of lightning, each realization that her father wasn’t coming back for her, she stuck to the safety of hating her mother, even though her mother would never leave her alone in the middle of a storm. Because her mother would never leave her alone.

“Milly,” Twiss finally cried, since she didn’t have to make a choice about loving or hating her. There wasn’t a person in the world as worthy of love as her sister.

Though she’d never said so, Twiss knew Milly played halfhearted games of golf on her behalf. “Graceless,” she’d overheard her father say to her mother one night about Milly’s swing, which was perfectly graceful when she and Twiss were alone. “A mule could have played a more elegant round of golf than our elder daughter.”

“So she had a bad day,” her mother had said to him. “Even you’ve had a few of those.”

“I’d jump off a bridge if I ever played like that.”

In the end, when Twiss couldn’t will herself to move or will her father to come back to her, it was Rollie who scooped her up as if she were a feather and ran with her all the way back to the maintenance shed, where they waited out the storm, which whirled things around plenty but never produced a tornado. Even after the sky cleared and the sun came out and a rainbow arched over the river, she wouldn’t let go of Rollie.

“You’re safe, Button,” he kept saying. “You’re safe now.”

But Twiss didn’t feel safe. None of her tricks had kept her from crying or brought her father back to her. As far as he knew, she was still crouching on the bank of the stream next to her baby dragon, whose gift couldn’t protect her. Twiss realized just how much she’d counted on the history books being right; nowhere in the pages she’d read did Clark ever leave Lewis behind. The
and
always linked them together.

After her father returned, wild-eyed and windblown, Twiss ran to him, but not as quickly as she could have. It was as if he had inadvertently told her something essential about himself, a secret she would have to keep forever: You can’t count on me.

illy put down
The Curious Book of Birds
in order to pick herself up. She glanced at the bariatric walker—an affront to both her decorative tastes and her relatively small size—which was sitting in the corner of the room collecting old linens and scraps of fabric. She used to mend clothing for half the town of Spring Green when she could still sew without making a mistake. Despite her recent inabilities, she was working on a layette for a woman who lived by the river. The woman, a girl, didn’t have a mother to sew one for her.

Not that people in Spring Green sewed much anymore; when they needed something, they went to the department stores in Madison. Milly had only been to a department store once, after her doctor recommended knee braces to treat her hip pain.

“But it’s my hip that hurts,” she’d said.

“Treating just the hip’s like baking a cake without flour. You wouldn’t do that, would you?” the doctor said.

Well, yes
, she thought.
I would
.

But she and Twiss drove to the department store anyway and paid an astronomical price for what amounted to Ace bandages. And the walker, which could accommodate persons up to one thousand pounds. The salesman claimed that purchasing a bariatric was like getting two walkers for the price of one; plus, he’d said when they’d looked doubtful, it was the only walker left in stock. While they were there they also bought an electric mixer, which ended up in the attic because the sound of it made the chickens (and Milly) anxious.

Milly put
The Curious Book of Birds
back in its place on the shelf. She finished dusting the bookshelves and the hutch, twirling the duster around corners and spines until she saw a slight reflection of herself in the varnished wood. She didn’t quite know when what had happened to her body had happened to her body. The sagging skin beneath her knees told one story. The liver spots on her hands told another. Though she’d never been the type of woman to fawn over her reflection, she wished she’d have taken a moment to appreciate her youth while she was still youthful. The one hip had already gone out, and the other was beginning to creak. One day, it would snap altogether and she’d have a body full of titanium, but nothing to propel her forward. And her chin! The pull of gravity had turned what was once one into two. The chins worked against each other like cresting waves.

Crash
, they went.

You’re old
, they said.

So be it
, Milly thought.

She pulled the drapes shut to keep out the heat and then drew a line through the task on her chore list. She looked over the way she spelled out each step like her mother used to because Twiss would feign ignorance that what was washed also needed to be dried.

MILLY’S CHORE LISTDust bookshelves and hutch

Dust and close drapes

Change bed linens

Wash bed linens

Dry bed linens

More dusting?

Supper?

The list struck her as both amusing and a little sad, and Milly wasn’t eager to obey it this morning. She was drawn once again to the bird book as if it were a live thing, a wing beat of breath on an otherwise breathless day, which deserved her care—pleaded for it—more than some dusty old linens, worn-out threads. This time, Milly read about the different kinds of nests birds built, how some were well wrought and some carelessly fastened to branches. The smartest birds built their nests high up in the trees. Some birds, namely the wood pigeon, the clumsiest architect of all, began building their nests but never finished them.

hat was the way the tree house went in the weeks leading up to Cousin Bettie’s visit. By the end of May and the beginning of the trumpet vines and wisteria, the honeysuckle and hummingbirds, Milly and Twiss had collected enough scrap lumber to build the foundation. They’d checked out a book from the library that taught them about basic woodworking, but Twiss didn’t want to wait until they could afford to buy the materials they needed. She said they’d be dead before that happened. What was one more floor that leaned?

Together, they dragged the planks to the backyard. Twiss found two hammers in the attic. She didn’t bother to wipe away the toadstool on the handles or the rust on the heads. She named her hammer Rust-O-Lonia and went to work. Milly called hers Hammer. After she washed the toadstool off him
(It’s poisonous
, she told Twiss, but Twiss said,
Not if you don’t eat it)
, she tapped at the nails as if she were asking them for permission.

“Pretend the nail’s something you don’t like,” Twiss instructed.

“You don’t like snakes,” she added when Milly didn’t say anything.

“But I don’t want to hammer them,” Milly said.

“Cousin Bettie better be less of a humanitarian,” Twiss said.

“Do you even know what that means?”

“It means we need a third person to finish the tree house.”

Since they’d found out she was coming, Milly and Twiss had been making predictions about their cousin. They’d met her only once, and “met” wasn’t the quite right word since Milly was two and Twiss was still a baby. Cousin Bettie was four then. According to their mother, they got along beautifully. Twiss was hoping for another her. Milly didn’t know what to hope for, but figured their cousin would probably be wearing a bracelet with little charms in the shapes of horseshoes and tennis rackets like the other girls in Spring Green.

“Or worse,” Twiss said. “A dress.”

“
I
wear dresses,” Milly said.

“But you don’t act like you do.”

At night, they’d talk until the shadow of their mother’s feet appeared under the door, which meant
Not another word
. Their mother let their whispering go on longer than usual because she was eager to have another pair of hands around the house for the summer; a pair, she told Twiss, that wasn’t as lazy as hers.

Mine?
Twiss said, pretending to be outraged.

Their mother planned on repairing the damage living on a farm had done to her. She said that wives deserved a little mindless time and mothers deserved much, much more. Her sister, Gertrude, was sending their cousin with the understanding that if the three of them got on well together, Milly and Twiss would go up north next summer to help out.
If
was their mother’s way of saying
when
. Each morning, she crossed a day off the calendar with a black X.

The day before Cousin Bettie arrived, Twiss flipped ahead three hundred sixty-five days to a Wednesday in early June, the day their mother decided they would depart for Aunt Gertrude’s house in Deadwater, a day that would have been unremarkable if it weren’t for the smiling sun their mother had drawn in the square with a yellow crayon.

Milly’s father didn’t notice the bath salts or the calendar.

After the Accident, which had taken on the weight of a proper noun somewhere between his coming home from the hospital and the appearance of the June bugs, he spent his time in the barn when he wasn’t working. He’d even started sleeping up in the hayloft because he said their mother’s snoring woke him, though a thick plaster wall separated their bedrooms and she didn’t snore. Their parents had always kept separate bedrooms, but they hadn’t always slept separately. When Milly and Twiss were little, their father had used his bedroom to store golf equipment, but would sleep in their mother’s room. One day, though, for no reason the girls understood, a mattress appeared on the floor in their father’s room and he started sleeping on it, now and then at first, then more and more regularly. Milly and Twiss would still occasionally catch him sneaking out of their mother’s bedroom in the morning, which would hearten them. Other times, they’d find him asleep on his bed in all of his clothes, and their mother’s eyes would be puffy, which would still hearten them because their parents were trying to work out whatever ugly thing had come between them.