The Bird Sisters (15 page)

Hinge: A five-letter word for a movable joint used to fasten two things together
.

“I’d like to know who makes these things up,” she’d said to Milly that morning.

Milly said the key to the answers, more than the clues, was the arrangement of the squares. “You have to think like the puzzle maker to know how everything fits together.”

“I don’t want anything to do with a person whose thoughts fit into neat little squares.”

Milly took the crossword puzzle from Twiss. “A five-letter word for a musical instrument typically found in churches?
Organ.
”

“I’d have gotten it if you’d have said Beetle,” Twiss said.

“How can you still call her that?” Milly said.

“How can she still be alive? She’s got to be on her ninth life by now. Tenth, if you count the time she fell in the tub.”

“Poor Henry,” Milly said.

“Yes, poor Henry,” Twiss said. “He had to see her naked. Who wants to see an old body?”

“You’ve seen me naked, too,” Milly said.

Which was true. When Milly got her hip replaced with a titanium one, the nurse had made her wear a cotton gown without ties. The hospital in Madison was supposed to be better than the one in Sauk, although neither of them was convinced.

“Go home,” Milly had said after her surgery, which didn’t go as smoothly as planned. Her heart rate had dipped down so low that the doctors warmed up a defibrillator and shocked her twice to keep her going. When Milly’s heart had stabilized, she was transferred to a room that overlooked a playground. Children came and went all day, jumping on the bright yellow slide and hanging from the swings, laughing in the delicious way only children are capable of.

“They’ll shock me if my heart gets out of line again,” Milly said.

Twiss was sitting on the edge of Milly’s bed, giving her the first of many pedicures in the weeks to come. She’d never painted her own nails, and her lack of skill was reflected in the uneven globs of pale pink polish that adorned each of Milly’s toenails.

“Really,”
Milly said. “Stop fussing. I’ll be fine. Go home.”

Twiss blew on Milly’s toenails one by one. “I am home.”

What an unsatisfactory little word! Now that she was old, Twiss understood why people her age stopped speaking and started sitting on porches. Language failed to describe the simplest of phenomena; a fine sunset, for example, was more than fine. There were no words, or Twiss couldn’t find them anymore, for the way the colors made her feel. She’d say to Milly, “It’s an especially pretty one tonight,” when she meant that it reminded her of other sunsets, and years, and people who had nothing to do with sunsets: pinks and reds and blues.

“It is,” Milly would say. Or she might add a word like “lovely” or “otherworldly” and then Twiss would know that Milly, too, was thinking about something else entirely as they passed a glass of iced tea back and forth and gazed at the changing colors of the sky.

hen Twiss was a girl, language was language as a sunset was a sunset. There was no need or time to give either much thought once a word came across her lips or the sky emptied of color for the night. Words were vehicles that got her where she wanted to go. She didn’t pick them for their nuances. She picked them for their shock value.

“Father Stone’s a pigheaded bigot!” she’d said to Mrs. Bettle, Bett, and her mother the night Milly made kidney beans and, for the first time in her life, made everyone suffer. “If anyone should
ferme sa bouche
, it’s him!”

“C’est vrai!”
her mother said that evening on the porch, on one of the rare occasions she and Twiss were getting along.

That night, Mr. Peterson and his doctor arrived in a shiny black car, which seemed like the kind of car a king would drive. In the early evening light, the fender shone more brightly than the silver serving platter her mother polished every week, though she never used it.

Bett had gone upstairs complaining of a stomachache, but it was Bett whom Mr. Peterson and the doctor wanted to see. The doctor fingered the stethoscope around his neck. Mr. Peterson fingered a tiny ring that would no more fit his fingers than it would a woman’s.

“I can’t abide a child being sick,” Mr. Peterson said. “Where’s the little girl?”

“She’s
eighteen
,” Twiss said to him.

“You must be younger than that,” Mr. Peterson said, smiling lightly.

“Twiss is fourteen,” her mother said.

“That’s an unusual name,” Mr. Peterson said.

“A nurse named me,” Twiss said, smirking.

Her mother showed him and the doctor up to the bedroom Bett was sharing with her and Milly for the summer. Her mother kept picking up stray items as they went along—Twiss’s Sunday dress, which Twiss had thrown on the stairs the moment they got back from church, her Sunday shoes, and the blue ribbon she’d been forced to wear in her hair. Mrs. Bettle, who was still tipsy from the brandy, attempted to level the crooked pictures on the wall and knocked over a glass paperweight that crashed to the floor, but didn’t break.

If Twiss had been the one to drop the paperweight, she would have had to stay in her room until she’d pieced it back together or come up with the money to buy a new one, but her mother ignored Mrs. Bettle. She explained to Mr. Peterson and the doctor that Bett had come down from the North and was staying with them for the summer, which led to her admitting that they couldn’t afford a doctor’s visit, but she knew Bett needed one.

“My sister Gertrude didn’t send her down with any money,” she said. “Her husband’s out of work right now. They live in the bush.”

“No, they live in Deadwater,” Twiss said.

“Deadwater is the bush,” her mother said.

“I lost a child once because I was poor,” Mr. Peterson said. “I won’t lose another.”

He smelled like bay rum, which Twiss’s father used to wear when he still worked at the golf course. The scent was the only link Twiss could detect between the two men, other than their link of boss and employee. Mr. Peterson was taller than her father, and broader in the shoulders, but it wasn’t just his body that took up the majority of the hallway; it was his unwavering resolve, as well as his finely tailored suit, which Twiss wasn’t positive stemmed from having so much money, but suspected was the case.

Twiss’s mother knocked on the bedroom door, a courtesy she didn’t usually grant any of them. When Bett told her to come in, she swung the door open wide enough so that Mr. Peterson and the doctor could fit through at the same time.

Though Twiss was standing behind Mrs. Bettle, who was standing behind her mother, she was still able to see Bett curled up on the cot, coughing into one of the handkerchiefs her mother had given her. Bett was wearing the nightgown Milly had lent her when hers disintegrated in the wash bucket the day before. Whatever color Bett’s face lacked, the tiny purple lilacs, which trailed from the bodice of Milly’s nightgown down to the hem, made up for. In the dim light of the bedroom, Twiss couldn’t see the red half-moons beneath Bett’s eyes or the puffiness in Bett’s face, the wonderful sprawling veins she’d seen at the supper table. In this light, her cousin looked syrupy sweet. Pretty even, which disappointed Twiss since beauty wasn’t the beauty of her cousin; ever since Bett had stuck her hands into the sandpile and the ground bees had swarmed all around her, Twiss had had trouble describing what was, although she knew one thing for certain: anyone else would have been stung.

Mr. Peterson went to Bett’s side. Once Bett granted him permission he stroked her forehead. “I’ve brought my personal doctor,” he said to her. “He wields his stethoscope like a magic wand. May he have a look at you, my dear?”

“It’s my stomach,” Bett said, casting her covers aside and uncurling herself. “It feels too full or too empty, I don’t know which.”

“We’ll fix that,” Mr. Peterson said.

“My lungs are bad, too,” Bett said. “They won’t let me do anything I want to do.”

Which was news to Twiss. So far, Bett’s lungs had allowed her to go swimming and stick her hands into a giant beehive and drag Milly from the river as if she were as light as a dime.

The doctor came forth and placed his stethoscope over the lilacs at the back of Bett’s nightgown. After that, he motioned to everyone except Mr. Peterson to exit the room.

“In the interest of privacy,” he said, which no one in their house had ever benefited from. He opened his medical kit and laid out several instruments that Twiss didn’t recognize on the night table beside the cot. One of them looked like a shoehorn.

Mr. Peterson and the doctor stayed an hour with Bett before the door opened and they emerged from the bedroom. Twiss’s mother had made Twiss and Mrs. Bettle go downstairs with her, so that they didn’t seem like they were trying to listen in.

“Why won’t you let me put a glass to the door?” Twiss said.

“Because fourteen’s too old for that,” her mother said. “What I’m wondering is how Mr. Peterson knew Bett was sick. Could people be talking about it?” She glanced at the chair that Milly usually sat in, as if its emptiness had answered her question before she’d finished asking it. “That boy better marry her if we’re to endure this.”

Mrs. Bettle yawned.

“Go tell your father to take Mrs. Bettle home,” Twiss’s mother said.

“But I’ll miss
everything
,” Twiss said.

“Then you better hurry,” her mother said.

When Twiss heard the bedroom door open, she ran to the barn as fast as she could. Milly and her father were sitting on two tree stumps outside of it.

“That was smart what you did today in the meadow,” her father said to Milly, which made Milly blush and then blush all over again.

“I did it for her,” Milly said. “Not for myself.”

“Everything we do is for ourselves,” their father said. “That doesn’t take away the goodness of the act, though. I’m sure Asa didn’t mind the attention at all.”

“Mom wants you to take Mrs. Bettle home!” Twiss said, because she was sick of hearing about Asa. “Mr. Peterson’s here with his doctor. They’re listening to Bett’s lungs.”

“We saw Mr. Peterson drive up,” Milly said.

“Then why didn’t you come?” Twiss said.

Before Milly could answer, their father stood up. “I’ll drive Mrs. Bettle home on one condition,” he said to Twiss. “That you come with me.”

“What about Milly?” Twiss said.

“She needs her rest.”

“I’m the one who’s had to listen to the Beetle all night!” Twiss said.

“Then twenty more minutes won’t hurt you,” her father said.

Even though their parents no longer spoke to each other, they had a similar way of speaking when they wanted Twiss to do something she didn’t want to do. She didn’t know if all parents spoke this way or if, despite their current (and forever?) dislike for each other, her mother and father’s linguistic habits had rubbed off on each other.

“You sound like her,” Twiss said.

“That’s because I didn’t say what you wanted to hear,” her father said, brushing pie crumbs from his pants. “We’ll be home before you could sprint to the front door.”

But they weren’t.

After they dropped Mrs. Bettle off, her father drove into town. When Twiss asked where they were going, he said, “I want to see something.”

Twiss hadn’t been back to the golf course since just after the Accident, when her father had played his first round of golf back like an amateur. After that dismal round, he didn’t invite her along again and she didn’t ask to go with him. Twiss had felt a kind of embarrassment for him that she couldn’t explain then, but understood now as they entered the course by way of the maintenance road when they used to drive through the front gates like everyone else.

People had always looked up to her father when he was playing golf—they asked him for advice about the game and looked him in the eye when they shook his hand; at those times, it didn’t matter that the members had more money than he would ever have, because he knew how do something that they didn’t know how to do. Twiss had always held her head as high as her father’s.
That’s my dad!
she’d think, when people stopped their own games to admire his.