The Anatomy of Wings (21 page)

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VERYONE TRIED TO FORGET WHAT MUM HAD DONE IN THE KITCHEN.
Uncle Paavo was whistling as he sat down at the table for Beth's fourteenth birthday. He was the happiest anyone had ever seen him. He'd even brought a small packet of barbecue-flavored Samboys to lunch. In the pocket of his starched shirt there was a gold pen as though he might have to suddenly write something down. His very white skin had a bluish tinge. He had combed his thin hair down with water and his collar was still wet.

“Good on you, Par-voh,” said Dad, shaking his hand.

“Here is the spirit of the Lutheran,” said Nanna under her breath.

Mum made everyone stand in the kitchen in front of the radio at quarter to five. She'd put a special message over the radio for the birthday girl. The song they played was “Mickey.” We stood at attention to
listen to it. Mum raised a warning finger at Danielle when she moved.

“Wasn't that lovely?” said Mum when it had finished. She had her hair curled and her Frostiest Taupe lipstick on.

“Do you like that song, Beth?” asked Aunty Cheryl. “We hoped you did.”

“It's all right,” said Beth, “I suppose.”

Danielle had begged for the party without her Milwaukee back brace. Nanna turned her attention to her once the table was laid with all the food.

“Your back will never mend without this brace,” she said.

“Mum,” said Danielle.

“Leave her alone,” said Mum.

“I will pray for your spine,” said Nanna.

“How annoying,” Danielle said.

“Shhhh,” said Aunty Cheryl, “just let her do it and it will be over and done with.”

“Our Father,” she said. “On this the birthday of our beloved Elizabeth let us pray for Danielle's backbone. That if it is your will on this day it shall straighten and mend. Amen.”

“Amen,” said Beth.

“Why'd you say that?” said Danielle.

“I just said amen,” said Beth.

“You were being a smart-arse.”

“Please,” said Mum.

“She was,” said Kylie. “I saw it.”

“No law against saying amen,” said Beth.

“Amen,” said Nanna.

“Elizabeth,” said Dad. “Give it a rest.”

He didn't look at Beth when he said it but stared at the wall. Since Beth was expelled he never looked at her. He avoided her. Even when he passed her in the hall, when he'd woken up to go to night shift, he didn't say anything. He just looked at the floor.

Beth was enrolled in Our Lady's Secondary College for the next semester, which made Nanna very happy. Our Lady's had smaller classes and very strict rules and no Miranda Bell and no boys. Nanna was so happy when she found out that she danced in our kitchen while Mum stood resting against the bench with her arms folded across her chest.

“If there was a Presbyterian school I would have sent her to that,” said Mum. “I have terrible memories of that place. I would have sent her anywhere but there. A Hindu school, a Methodist school, a Lutheran school. I just want a girls’ school.”

“Yes,” said Nanna. “Yes. I know. But here she will go into Our Lady's every day and you will see, you will see, Jean, that it will change her heart.”

If Catholic girls’ school didn't work Beth was going to boarding school.

“You must promise me you won't gloat,” said Mum to Nanna.

“I will not be a goat,” said Nanna.

“Everything is bad enough as it is.”

Beth attended the party like she was a stranger. She looked bored. She yawned. The mascara was smudged around her eyes. Mum hadn't wanted any of Beth's friends to come. She had said let's just keep it simple.

It was Nanna who noticed that my voice was gone. Not when the cake came out and I could only mime “Happy Birthday,” but after. Danielle had been strapped back into her brace and was crying on her bed because she didn't want to be a cripple. Beth had gone outside to lie on the trampoline. Everyone else was sitting in the living room waiting for the end of the party.

Nanna asked me to sing her a song. I said I was too busy, I had stuff to do.

“Stuff to do?” said Nanna. “Don't be silly, sing me a song.”

“Sing us a song,” said Uncle Paavo. “The one I like is ‘Morning Has Broken.’ ”

“Come on, darling,” said Mum.

“That's not like you, chickadee,” said Dad when I stood in front of them all and shook my head slowly from side to side.

“Shut up,” I finally said. “All of you.”

I went out onto the front patio and sat on the steps. I didn't have the strength to break anything. I
had a song inside me. It was the pointy edge of a “Gypsy Rover” pressing into my heart. I sat very still and panted.

“What is going on?” said Nanna.

She came onto the steps beside me and her lightweight tracksuit made a rustling noise when she sat down. She opened her handbag. I heard the zip. I kept my eyes screwed shut. She handed me a handkerchief.

“I'm not crying,” I said.

“Yes you are,” said Nanna.

“No, I'm not.”

She took one of my unprotected hands and put it in her Hand Press.

“Where has your singing gone?” she asked.

“How would I know?”

“Is it stuck in here,” she said, and one of her crooked bony fingers touched my chest.

“Yes,” I said.

“My dear,” she said, and she let go of my hand, and I didn't have to tell her everything if I didn't want to.

“It hurts,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “Do not fear. It is not forever. I know these things.”

When the sun started heading down at the end of that day I went and sat beside Beth on the trampoline.

She had her fingers double-crossed and laid across her eyes.

“What are you doing?” I asked, although I'd seen her do it before when she lay on her bed.

“Listening,” she said.

“Listening to what?”

“To everything.”

The sun, sides bulging, squashed itself between two hills. It sent up a flare of golden light. The sky, patterned with a million tiny clouds like fish scales, was illuminated.

I lay down beside her and put my hand on her arm.

“Tell me,” I said.

Inside Mum and Aunty Cheryl did the dishes. I could hear them talking and laughing together at the sink. Earlier Nanna's news that my voice was missing had barely caused a ripple because it was just the type of thing she would make up.

“She's just having a bad day,” Mum said.

“Too much birthday cake,” said Dad, and he poked me in the stomach. He plucked me from the ground and threw me over his shoulder and turned me around and around.

Beth, with her double-crossed fingers, didn't tell me anything. She just lay very still. The bulging sun disappeared. A cloud of cockatoos passed over toward the creek. I didn't know how she could lie so still for so long. I fidgeted beside her.

“I'm going to tell Mum,” I said.

“Tell her what?” she asked. She removed her double-crossed fingers from her eyes and opened them. She looked at me.

“Something terrible is going to happen, you know,” she said when I didn't answer. “I can feel it.”

“To who?”

“To all of us.”

“I'm really telling now,” I said.

I thought the terrible thing would be everyone, a whole carful of us, careening off a high cliff into the ocean. Or all of us being in a boat like the
Titanic
and sinking. Or all of us being in a seaplane flying over the Gulf and crashing into the water to be eaten by crocodiles. All of my possible terrible things involved cars and boats and planes and accidents.

I got off the trampoline because I was sick of her and all the trouble she caused and how she always ruined everything.

I went up the back stairs and slammed the screen door open and shut.

“Beth says something terrible is going to happen to all of us,” I told Aunty Cheryl and Mum.

Mum stopped washing dishes. Aunty Cheryl stood with the tea towel in one hand and a wineglass in the other. Their faces shone beneath the electric lightbulb without a shade. They still had their paper birthday hats on.

Mum opened the sliding window and called out to Beth.

“Why did you say that, Beth?” she called out. “Come inside right now.”

Beth turned on her side so she was facing away from the window.

“I'm talking to you,” shouted Mum.

Aunty Cheryl shook her head and turned back to the drying rack.

“You've scared Jennifer,” shouted Mum. “And on your birthday too, when we've all been so nice to you.”

None of my possible imagined terrible things involved anything as simple as the girl who fell.

M
ARCO WENT IN LATE JULY.
The wild winds had come back again. They blew across the ranges and split apart the clouds into single wispy hairs. Our breath caught in our throats and ached. The place was at a bend in the road, a turn like the head of a question mark. The land fell away on either side and rose again into the fat rumps of two red hills. It was a place of curves: the rounded descent into the ditch, the series of hills like women bending over in a field, the two black tire tracks curling off into nothing.

Beth didn't say anything when she found out. She put the phone down and crossed her arms.

“What's wrong?” said Mum, and she tried to unfold Beth's arms and get her to lie down but Beth wouldn't be taken anywhere.

She did not want to close her eyes or she would see it: the car turning in the air, Marco flying upward
after he was ejected in a violent arc, his back bent, the pocketful of change raining from beneath him.

Beside her, Mum's mouth moved open and shut like a fish out of water.

Marco came down in scrub among the spinifex and anthills. He landed on his head, which broke his neck. The car cartwheeled past him, threw back a wash of shattered glass that glittered in the sun.

In among the glass and spinifex and anthills he lay. Behind him the car rested on its back. Someone moaned from within its dark interior. Someone said shit. The shadow of a bird that had fallen backward through the air to study the damage slid over the red scrub floor. It cast a shadow over his face. It circled.

Among all the strange confetti—the beads of glass, the copper ones and twos, the winking twenties, Redheads matchsticks, and crumpled tinnies—a silver-plated half-a-heart pendant lay shining in the sun.

Beth refused to go to his funeral. She lay on her bed for days with the blinds pulled shut. Mum, who had never met him, never liked him, and even made fun of him, now whispered about the tragedy to Aunty Cheryl on the phone. Dad didn't know what to say. He stood at Beth's door and only shook his head. Everyone tiptoed backward and forward past
the door and looked in at her sadness like it was an exhibition. A jewel inside a case.

“It won't always feel like this,” said Mum, sitting at the end of her bed.

“Yes it will,” Beth said.

“Do you want me to make you something to eat?”

“No,” Beth said.

Nanna came.

She stood at Beth's door.

She said, “What on earth will we do with you?”

Miranda arrived, tear-swollen. Mum relented and let her in. They lay on the bed together, Beth and her, side by side, crying.

At school Mrs. Bridges-Lamb had to interrupt my bird-watching again and again.

“When the youngest Miss Day has come back to earth we will proceed with our math lesson,” she said.

She had trained us already to be very quiet. Some days the only noise was the fan wobbling very slowly from the ceiling. We had learned how to open our tidy boxes very softly. We had learned how to cross our arms and wait for instruction. We had learned not to scrape our chairs. Not to chew on our pencils. Not to jump like grasshoppers when we raised our hands for answers.

But she had failed at training me not to look out the window.

I had been watching hawks wheeling over the oval from between the louvers. They weren't interesting hawks but plain hawks. Brown. Not letter wings or whistling kites. There were no wedge-tailed eagles. That was what I wanted more than anything. It would be a sign that everything would be all right. I tried not to think about Beth but she wouldn't leave my mind.

After Krakatoa exploded the sun turned green. Laika was the first dog in space. She suffocated. Millions of people were killed when the Yellow River flooded. Millions. People's shadows were frozen on walls when Hiroshima was bombed. The shadows showed people doing ordinary things like talking to a neighbor, eating breakfast, skipping rope. They sent mice into space and more dogs, monkeys too. Only some made it back safely. All the people in Pompeii probably thought there was nothing to worry about.

“Deary me,” said Mrs. O'Malley. “Take a breather for a minute.”

I took a long shuddering breath.

Mr. O'Malley walked past, humming softly under his breath.

“Mr. O'Malley, young Jennifer here knows all the disasters of the world,” said Mrs. O'Malley.

“Does she now,” said Mr. O'Malley.

Mr. and Mrs. O'Malley always had conversations without looking at each other, as though they were reading from a script, even when they were standing side by side.

“She does, Mr. O'Malley,” said Mrs. O'Malley.

“I suppose she knows all the big ones,” said Mr. O'Malley.