The Bird Sisters (17 page)

illy set the bird book on the coverlet in her mother’s room—she didn’t know why she kept dragging it all over the house this morning other than its weight made her feel steadier.

Twiss was no longer in the meadow, but when Milly was changing the linens in their bedroom, her sister had been standing there, looking as bewildered as the black swan they’d nursed back to health last year. Lately, Twiss would stand whole hours in the thigh-high grass and stare at the barn as if it had been the one to hurt her when they were girls. A part of Milly wanted to go to her sister, but rescuing Twiss would have been the same as condemning her.

With a little brass key she wore on a chain around her neck, Milly opened her mother’s jewelry box, which contained her mother’s plain silver wedding band and a pair of equally plain silver earrings. Since her mother had come from a family of jewelers, the contents of the box seemed paltrier than they would have been otherwise; when Milly and Twiss were young, their mother told them stories about her and Aunt Gertrude playing catch with a ruby.

So it was a little bit sad that the jewelry box was made of oak when all the nice ones from that era were made of African ebony. Milly lifted the tray out of the jewelry box and set it on the dressing table. A dusty and time-yellowed letter, folded in half, was pinned to the plush red velvet lining the box. As if she were a child again, Milly looked toward the light of the window and the dark of the door before she pulled the sewing pin out of the velvet and opened the letter, which in her lifetime she’d opened at least hundred times.

In it, she looked for what she always looked for: the beginning of the end, which was the only reason she could come up with to explain why her mother had kept this letter and none of the others she’d received in her life.

Beyond the windows and the twists of this year’s drought-stricken trumpet vines, the birds chirped and the insects hummed and time tick-tocked by.
To my (formerly speaking, that is) lovely little country chapel and all of the people who have graced its pews over the years, as well as those who grace them now:
At this point, you must surely know that I’m no longer who you thought I was. I’m no longer who I thought I was, if that is any consolation to you good people. The trouble here is Faith, which I lost temporarily, along with my leg and several other unmentionables (which, unlike my Faith, though it has altered, are not likely to return to me any time soon). I’m writing another letter to ask for your forgiveness, which still may be more than you can offer me and more than I deserve
.
Enclosed is a small, but important, part of what I’ve taken from you: the first installment of the money necessary to build a new Sunday school room for the children of Lilly chapel as was planned by the Ladies’ Sewing Society, money which I’ve worked honestly in the paper mills to procure and will continue to work honestly to procure until I have settled my debt
.
All day, I am stationed beside a man named Beardsley
,
who lost his hands as a result of his goodwill and bravery. They have us working in what they call the invalid sector; a host of us here have lost limbs or are stricken by some other mysterious illness or disease. Last year, there was afire in the north mill, a great blazing beast, which some said resembled the devil himself. Beardsley rescued three poor tubercular souls who had lost consciousness from exposure to the billows of black smoke that poured into the room where they were sifting pulp
.
I wish I could say that I had lost my leg in such an honorable way, but alas, I cannot. Perhaps that is why my leg pains me so on this lonely night, in this lonely room, and in this lonely city where the stars never make themselves visible long enough to close your eyes and wish on
.

Yours sincerely
,

illy’s mother took Father Rice’s letter out of the Sewing Society’s vault (a picnic basket that sat on the top of a bookshelf in their meeting room) during the emergency hedge maze meeting, a mere day after the sparkler debacle meeting on the fifth of July. Her mother said she’d latched on to the first thing her hand touched; the other members were deep into conversation about the hedge maze proposed for the outside of the town hall—
Uniformity is the essence of Civilization!
they said—but as her mother had learned, they were never too invested in philanthropy to notice a button missing on her coat or her hand in a picnic basket.

“It was like having an alarm in my purse,” she said. “I kept waiting for it to go off.”

She read Father Rice’s letter aloud to Milly, Twiss, and Bett in their bedroom, although nowhere in Father Rice’s words, or between them, did blasphemy resound. The cheerful margaritas in Mexico had made way for the black liquor mills in Chicago. Milly couldn’t help but wonder whether the paper he’d written the letter on came from the mill he sifted pulp in all day. Though she knew nothing about Chicago, she visualized smokestacks and soot, a slate-colored lake, bowls of porridge thick as dough.

“I’d like to know where the money went,” Twiss said.

“I can’t very well ask, now can I?” their mother said.

“Who’s the envelope addressed to?” Bett said.

“Father Stone,” their mother said.

“Then that’s who took it,” Bett said from her bed.

Bett was supposed to rest as many hours of the day as was possible. There was to be no heavy lifting, no laundry washing, and absolutely no gallivanting around the countryside.

Twiss asked if Bett was allowed to skulk around it.

“Let’s try to stay away from anything that ends with
ing
, shall we?” her mother said, slipping Father Rice’s letter into her apron pocket. “I’ll be downstairs getting lunch started.”

“We shall,” Twiss said, with just the right amount of smartness for her mother to know she was being smart, but not enough to elicit punishment from her.

Twiss had gotten over whatever was bothering her about Bett (the root of which was no doubt jealousy and a pinch of something else Milly couldn’t put a name to), and they were back to dreaming up ways to cause trouble, even if that trouble was limited to the confines of Bett’s new bed. In addition to paying for the doctor’s visit, Mr. Peterson had sent over a proper bed for Bett, which took up half of the room and looked like a ship with all of its freshly varnished wood. Bett called it the SS
Forest
.

Milly disliked the bed for its blatant waste of tree life, but liked it because it had come from Asa’s home, which Milly had never been inside of but imagined was full of furniture with clawed feet, waiting to be softened with swatches of lace.

According to Bett, who said Mr. Peterson had told her his story the night he brought the doctor to examine her, Asa’s mother had died on the passage from Germany to America, and his little sister had died shortly after. Both had come down with scarlet fever, which had blinded them before it made their hearts stop beating. To ease her transition to darkness on the ship, Bett said Mr. Peterson traded his wife’s shawl for a pair of reading glasses that belonged to an Albanian-German immigrant, who gave the shawl to his wife to relieve her of the heartbreak of having to leave yet another place against her will. The rest of the voyage, whenever Mr. Peterson took a turn around the steerage deck and saw the shawl, he’d think his wife was feeling better and had come up to join him. He’d wind his way through the masses of people, the crying children, the wash buckets filled with barnacles. Whenever he’d reach the shawl, the Albanian woman would clutch it with the same force she clutched her children when they leaned over the railing to look at the water.
Mine
, she’d say in a language he couldn’t understand, but understood completely.

Ava was his wife’s name. Arielle, his daughter’s. The glasses did nothing for them.

“I guess they liked A’s,” Bett said. “Mr. Peterson’s first name is Aubrey.”

“That sounds like an old professor’s name,” Twiss said, starting to laugh.

“Aubrey’s a fine name,” Milly said.

“Of course you think so,” Bett said.

“His wife and child died,” Milly said. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“We wouldn’t even know his name if it wasn’t for you,” Bett said.

“No, we
w-w-wouldn’t
,” Twiss said.

“There was blood on your handkerchief,” Milly said.

“From shaving my legs, dummy,” Bett said.

Before Milly could put together the question forming in her mind—
If you’re not really sick, then why are you pretending to be?
—she heard the clock downstairs, followed by the sound of her mother’s footsteps on the stairs and jingle of the plate on the tray she was carrying. At the end of his visit, Mr. Peterson’s doctor wrote out a complicated list of dietary recommendations for Bett, which included meat, meat, and meat, and also plenty of butter and cream. He said she was lacking animal proteins, what Bett called
grrr
. Now instead of washing and ironing all morning, their mother spent that time preparing meals—
A carnivore’s delight!
Twiss said—for Bett. She’d fry ground beef, bake it, or boil it until it was hard and gray.

“Look!” Twiss said on boiled meat days. “A brain!”

Milly was now in charge of the washing and Twiss was in charge of the ironing, which meant that all of their sheets were clean, and either badly burned or wrinkled. Twiss was supposed to dust the buck’s head, too, because it was making Milly congested. Lately, she’d sneeze so much that everyone stopped taking the time to bless her.

“Time for meat!” their mother said, when she entered their room.

When Bett saw the lump of meat on the tray, which Milly’s mother had garnished with a scoop of equally lumpy gravy, she said, “I’m starting to look like a biscuit.”

“Meatballs are for lunch,” their mother said. What she didn’t say was what all of that meat was costing her. Only Milly knew that she’d traded her mother’s antique crystal brooch for a week of roasts and her gold promise ring for the promise of more.

Twiss swiped a finger full of brown gravy from Bett’s plate, and their mother smacked her hand. “Food isn’t your deficiency,” she said. “How is it I have one daughter who can only think about herself and one who never does? You two are going to end up old and alone.”

“What’s so bad about that?” Twiss said, licking her finger. “Besides, I’m not even thinking about myself right now. I’m thinking about Father Rice. I don’t understand how his address could be 6 1/3 Steele Street. Does that mean it’s one-third of a house or one-third of a room?”

“What are you thinking about?” their mother said to Milly.

“I’m thinking about him too,” Milly said, although she was really thinking about Asa and the loneliness he must have felt growing up without his mother and his sister, and also how much she wanted to take him in her arms and comfort him. The last time he’d mowed their property, she’d made him butter cookies and seen the tiny blond hairs at the back of his neck stand up and the drops of sweat trickle down and she’d felt faint, in the best possible way.

“I liked it better when he wrote about margaritas and lime juice,” Twiss said. “He didn’t sound like himself at all in that letter. He sounds so—”

“Helpless,” Milly said.

“His life doesn’t sound that terrible to me,” Bett said, which made everyone look at her. “At least he has a job and a room, or one-third of a room, he can go back to at night. He even has a friend. That’s more than anyone has in Deadwater. Since they dammed the rivers, there aren’t any fish to fish for. The lakes are all algae. If you put your hand in the water, it’ll come out green.”

“Father Rice has a
stump
for a leg,” Twiss said. “His friend doesn’t have
hands.
”

“Everybody loses something,” Bett said.

Their mother looked out the window at the barn. “That’s true.”