The Bird Sisters (23 page)

Each Saturday morning, after she passed the driveway, Avery would pick up speed in order to crest the upcoming hills. Sometimes she ran with a yellow music player and matching headphones, but most of the time, she ran without them.

“Something comes in and something goes out,” Avery had added in the interview, as if she’d been playing at being coy but couldn’t really play when it came to running. “I’d keep running forever if my legs would let me.”

“Tell me about the routes you run in Spring Green,” the reporter had said.

“My favorite is my Saturday route,” Avery said. “There’s this little purple meadow I pass on my way up into the hills. When I was little, my grandpa used to say it was enchanted. He said if you walked through it, you’d never be the same person again.”

“Where did he hear that story?” the reporter asked.

“I guess he used to know the people who lived in that house,” Avery said.

“The bird sisters?” the reporter said.

“All I know is, when I pass that meadow, suddenly I can run faster,” Avery said.

“Are you superstitious?”

“I visualize the meadow during all of my races, if that’s what you mean.”

“Have you ever walked through it?”

“I believe in it too much,” Avery said.

“Can you be more specific?” the reporter asked.

“No,” Avery said.

he meadow did possess a kind of magic, at least on the day Milly and Asa had walked through it together, both nervous, shy and young, and grateful for the owl-shaped cookies Milly had baked that morning (inspired by the barn owl that had sung in the oak tree and in her dreams all night), which provided an entrée into what she’d come to think of as the conversation of her life, a conversation unremarkable in every way but one: She’d had it with Asa.

Mr. Peterson had taken Bett to the doctor’s office to get her lungs X-rayed; Twiss was off in the woods, searching for ingredients to put into her happiness tonic; her mother was canning the vegetables she’d harvested from the garden that morning so they would be able to have milk-braised wax beans in the winter. Her father was in the barn.

For once, Milly was left alone enough with Asa for her feelings to materialize into something more tangible than salt on her lips.

“The owls are my favorite,” Asa said, as they walked the perimeter of the meadow. Asa had just parked the tractor in the middle of it when Milly came out with the plate of cookies and a glass of iced tea garnished with a mint leaf she’d plucked from the garden when her mother wasn’t looking. The mint was supposed to be for a special jelly her mother planned on making for the following Christmas supper. By then, she said, they might be able to afford the roast of lamb it traditionally went with. By then, everything sad and black might be buried under a thick layer of fresh white snow. Her mother was hoping for an early blizzard that would go down in the history books.
Forty feet of snow in September! Some say a miracle! (Others can’t find the front doors to their houses. Still others can’t find their houses at all.)

“I like that they have pecans for beaks,” Asa said about Milly’s cookies. To get the pecans, Milly had had to barter with the clerk at the general store. A small batch of her sugar cookies—his favorite—for a small bag of pecans, which seemed fair enough.

“The only thing I ever made was mud pie,” Asa said.

“Mud pie’s delicious,” Milly said, more cheerfully than she meant. “But it’s basically just chocolate pudding,” she added to compensate.

“I mean with real mud,” Asa said. He covered his mouth the moment he began to trip over his words. In school, Asa had worked with a woman every day on his speech. Now that he had graduated, he simply worked. “M’s are hard for me. If you can’t understand—”

Milly thought of what Bett or Twiss would have said—
m-m-mean m-m-mud m-m-mouth
—and drew Asa’s hand away from his face and into her own. “I understand you perfectly.”

They walked that way, hand in hand, until Twiss darted out of the woods, jumped up and down yelling “hoo-hoo” on a bed of pine needles for a straight minute, and darted back into the woods again. Even though Twiss had disappeared, they could hear her laughing.

“I’m sorry,” Milly said. She was suddenly conscious of how sweaty her hand was. Girls weren’t supposed to sweat, let alone sweat on a boy they liked. “My sister has to be the center of attention or she’ll die.”

“Jumping out of the woods is like a survival mechanism then,” Asa said.

“Now she’ll live another five minutes,” Milly said, smiling at him.

The two of them continued circling the meadow, and the mower, but didn’t leave it for the pond or the woods or even the spotted monarch butterfly that flitted back and forth between the two. Above them was a patch of blue, blue sky. Below them a series of snake holes, which Milly stepped carefully around since the snakes they belonged to had already laid the first of the season’s leathery-shelled eggs and the snakes were as long as she was. She didn’t want Asa to know that she shared her father’s fear of them, or that once, when Twiss put a garter snake in her bed, she’d sprained her ankle trying to get away from it.

Asa pointed to Twiss, who was hanging from the branch of a pine tree. “Has it been five minutes already? Your sister’s persistent.”

“Even when she’s not doing something,” Milly said, “she’s doing something.”

“I don’t have a sister,” Asa said. “I mean I used to, but she died when I was four. My mother did too. Before we came to Wisconsin.”

“Do you remember them?” Milly said, thinking of the story Bett had told her.

“Sometimes I think I do,” Asa said, scratching his cheek as if he didn’t know what else to do with his free hand. “But then I realize they’re my father’s memories, not mine. It’s sort of like losing something you never knew you had, but always knew you wanted. All I know is my sister used to call me
Afa
because she couldn’t pronounce
s
’s. She’d stick her tongue out at me if I wouldn’t pick her up. Her hair was red as an apple—like your cousin’s.”

“What about your mother?” Milly said.

Asa glanced at the tractor. The field birds were pecking at the owl cookies Milly had left on the seat. They were bathing in the glass of iced tea. “It’s hard just having a father.”

Milly meant to reach for Asa’s hand, but she pressed her lips against his lips instead. She didn’t close her eyes like the actresses did in the movies, nor did she tilt her head or lift her foot off the ground romantically, flirtatiously. This was a practical kiss, a kiss meant to accomplish what she didn’t know how to say meaningfully:
I’m so sorry
.

The two of them stood that way, still as the grass around them—for a second? a minute? an hour? forever—before Twiss leaped down from the branch of the tree she had climbed and a snake leaped up from the hole it had burrowed into and both of them hissed and hissed.

Milly jumped onto Asa’s back, and Asa did his best to hold her there.

“It’s just a rat snake,” he said, shooing it away with one hand and holding Milly’s bare leg—her dress had twisted and shimmied up her thigh during her jump—with the other.

“They don’t bite,” he said. “Even if they do, they’re not poisonous.”

“How can you tell?” Milly said, aware of his hand on her leg, which felt practical yet impractical at the same time. If he let go, she would fall.

If he let go … 
Don’t let go
.

“His tail,” Asa said. “Look how pointy it is.”

Once the snake had gone back into its hole, Milly stopped clutching Asa’s back and let her feet touch the ground again. She could hear Twiss cackling from her place at the edge of the woods. Milly was glad that Bett was gone; there was a chance that Twiss wouldn’t tell her about the kiss and the snake, depending on how generous she was feeling that evening and what the doctor had discovered or not discovered about Bett’s lungs.

“Your heart thumped me,” Asa said, after they’d started walking again.

Milly untwisted her dress and smoothed her hair. Her leg was back to being just her leg again—functional. “Your heart thumped me, too,” she said.

Bett took much longer to come home than anyone expected, so that when Mr. Peterson finally dropped her off in front of the porch, and kissed both of her cheeks like French people did, they were certain she’d walk through the screen door bearing bad news.

“Iron lung!” Twiss kept saying.

“That’s for people who can’t breathe on their own,” Milly said.

“Iron lung!” Twiss said again anyway.

Their mother had just finished setting supper on the table and the three of them had bowed their heads to say grace, when Bett walked through the front door on her tiptoes, a brown paper package tucked under her arm. She was wearing different clothes than she’d left the house in. Her hair was different, too.

“Mr. Peterson took me to the salon,” Bett said, and set her package on the chair she usually ate her meat in. “I had my first real haircut today. My first manicure, too.” She waved her fingers in the air. “The woman said French girls paint their fingernails this way.”

“Why are you walking on your toes?” Twiss said.

“I’m practicing,” Bett said.

“For what?” Twiss said.

“They’re pretty,” their mother said about her fingernails.

“I could show you how to do it,” Bett said.

“That dress—,” Milly said.

“Is it silk?” their mother said.

Milly had seen the dress on display in one of the shopwindows in town. She’d also seen the price tag and had forced herself to keep walking.

Bett twirled around as if for the first time in her life. “Mr. Peterson thought I needed a new one. He didn’t believe me when I told him I’d never worn something new.”

“What about the old one?” their mother said.

“He bought me a pair of shoes, too.” Bett went out to the porch and came back with another brown paper package and a rectangular box. “I don’t even know how to walk in them.”

“They look like sapphires,” their mother said.

“Crystals actually,” Bett said. “They’re from London.”

“Those are—,” Twiss began.

“Magnificent,” Milly said. “I didn’t see them in the shop.”

“They were in the bridal shop,” Bett said.

“What about the old one?” their mother said again, about the dress she’d lent Bett.

“The shopkeeper wouldn’t let me bring it home,” Bett said.

“Wouldn’t
let
you?” their mother said.

Bett opened the package she’d placed on the chair and handed their mother a light green day dress with an even lighter green floret at the back.

“She sent me home with this instead.”

“For me?” their mother said, draping the dress over one of the kitchen chairs and then walking around that chair, admiring the fine fabric with her fingers, and smiling girlishly—she said she hadn’t been in such close proximity to a dress of this quality since she was sixteen—until one of her nails, which the washboard had made jagged, pulled a tiny green thread loose.

“Mr. Peterson thought you’d like it more than your other one,” Bett said.

Their mother took a step back from the dress.

“It’s from Europe,” Bett said.

“No matter how much I’d like it to be otherwise, and believe me I would,” their mother said, “when I look out the window, I see cornfields, not the Eiffel Tower and cappuccino.”

“What’s cappuccino?” Bett said.

“It’s a nice gesture,” their mother said. “I just don’t think it would fit me.”

“Hello! Dresses are boring!” Twiss said. “What’s wrong with your lungs?”

“See for yourself,” Bett said, and handed Twiss an oversized envelope.

Twiss ripped the X-ray films out of the envelope and held them up to the light, although she had no idea what she was looking at. “I don’t see anything,” she said.