The Bird Sisters (31 page)

We shall have chicken noodle soup for dinner!
she thought.
Oh, yes! We shall! We shall—

If Twiss lets us
.

Me?
Twiss thought, and she discovered beneath the cool, clean water at the bottom of an even cleaner bathtub what she’d always known. There were no river people living cheerfully at the bottom of the river, eating trout sandwiches and
shalling
each other every two seconds.

The police had found the bodies, white and bloated, tangled in a beaver dam a mile from where they had gone under. In the space of a few afternoon minutes, an entire family had died. A little girl, with thick brown braids down to her waist, whom she had known.

The entire town had turned out for the funeral. Before and after the service, they lingered around the font, signing the cross on their bodies with holy water and then re-signing it, all the while waiting for an assurance, based on the details, that this couldn’t happen to them. Milly and Twiss and their mother and father had lingered, too, and for too long. The sight of the white and yellow field daisies blanketing the little girl’s coffin had worked its way into Twiss’s memory. That had been the girl with the braids’ name—Daisy.

Twiss opened her eyes under the water and saw the procession to the cemetery, the groups of men in black suits carrying the coffins as if they were carrying the whole river, the whole town. And then she saw her father, walking in front of her, just out of reach.

Twiss burst up from beneath the clear, cool bathwater.

“Help!” she gurgled. “I don’t want to drown!”

Adele hadn’t gone downstairs like she’d said she was going to. Instead, she’d taken one of the wooden chairs from the dining room table and set it down next to the bathroom door as if she’d expected such an outcome out of an activity as tame as an evening soak.

“I’m here,” Adele said, opening the door.

“What is it?” Rollie called.

“She’s had a scare, that’s all,” Adele called back.

Adele was a short and round woman, almost exactly Mrs. Bettle’s size, though Twiss wouldn’t have used the word “ottoman” to describe her. Adele didn’t look strong, but she lifted Twiss out of the tub and swaddled her with the pink towels as if she weighed no more than a wet leaf. “You’re safe now,” she said, stroking Twiss’s cheeks.

Adele instructed Rollie to get one of her nightgowns from their bedroom, which he handed through the door with his eyes closed.

“I see nothing,” he said, squinching up his eyes further. “Nothing at all.”

After Adele adjusted the nightgown to fit Twiss better, she led Twiss into the small square bedroom situated beside their own. The paper on the walls depicted row after row of tiny yellow ducks. It wasn’t until Adele dabbed salve on her arms and legs and drew the covers up to her chin and Rollie kissed her forehead and the two of the stood at the door that Twiss realized the room had been meant for a child.

“Do you think I could have a piece of paper and a pencil?” Twiss said.

“Of course,” Adele said, hurrying out of the room and hurrying back into it with the requested materials. “Sometimes it helps me to write out my thoughts, too.”

“Thank you,” Twiss said.

“You don’t need to thank us, Button,” Rollie said.

Adele took his hand. “Having you here makes home feel more like home.”

The next morning, after Adele had made Twiss tree-shaped pancakes drizzled with syrup and gave her a dress to go home in—
I’ve got two leftover from when I was young
, she said.
One has lace on it and one doesn’t
—Rollie drove Twiss across the river and back out to the country. When they got there, though, everyone was already gone.

“Where do you suppose they’re at?” Rollie said.

“The fair,” Twiss said, relieved to see the empty driveway. Although she’d been gone only a single night and a small part of a day, the house and the barn looked different to her now, as if overnight either her vision had sharpened or she’d grown up.

“It looks like it’s been beaten up.”

“What does?” Rollie said.

“The barn,” Twiss said. “The house.”

“The house needs a new roof,” Rollie said. “If that’s what you mean.”

“I guess that’s what I mean,” she said, even though what she really meant was
It looks like it might tip over
. From the driveway, Twiss saw Kingsley dragging himself around the perimeter of the pond. When she felt an urge to kick a tin can in his path to see if he would eat it or not, she knew she hadn’t grown up that much.

“Should we pack up your tonic?” Rollie said. “It’s already nine o’clock.”

On the way from his house to hers, Twiss had told Rollie about her tonic, as well as its primary and secondary purposes: to raise money and to bring happiness to all of the unhappy people in Spring Green, or at least those who went to the fair.

“The money’s for Father Rice,” Twiss said.

“And you’re sure he wants to come home?”

“I can’t think why he wouldn’t,” Twiss said.

Rollie helped Twiss load the tonic into the back of the car. Though he’d offered to carry the tonic to her stand, when they got to the fair, Twiss said she wanted to carry it herself.

“I think I’ve got a dolly in here,” Rollie said. “I don’t want you pulling a muscle.”

The two of them got out of the car and stood at the back of it for a few minutes, each of them picking at their fingernails, the dust on the hood of the car, their clothes.

Rollie deserved to know what had made her run—Twiss knew that. But she also knew she couldn’t say what she felt about Bett or the strangeness of Bett and her father playing golf in the barn. In the light of day, Twiss didn’t know what she’d really seen anyway.

“Adele wanted me to tell you you’re welcome at the house any time,” Rollie said. “I haven’t seen her this happy since I came home with the pine saplings last spring.”

“Tell her I promise to stop by,” Twiss said.

“She bought those towels years ago. Last night was the first they’ve been used.”

“They were really soft,” Twiss said.

“She liked you using them,” Rollie said. “I did too.”

Twiss thought of the wallpaper in the room Adele had led her to last night and wrapped her arms around Rollie’s waist. She squeezed him the way she used to squeeze her father whenever he’d gotten a hole in one.

“If I hadn’t been born already,” she said to Rollie, “I’d have liked to be your child.”

Rollie reached into his pocket and pulled out a gleaming quarter, which he placed in Twiss’s palm. “Go on now, Button. Sell your tonic. Make us proud.”

Twiss walked through the secondary parking lot, for those who came late or who were hauling trailers behind their tractors, and the primary parking lot, before Rollie got back in his car and drove home. Instead of following the dirt footpath to the official fair entrance, Twiss pushed the dolly through an unmowed field so she wouldn’t have to stop and explain herself to someone like the Beetle or Mrs. Collier.

When she saw Milly at the edge of the field standing in the grass with a knobby old goat, her legs carried her to her sister, the one person who could understand what couldn’t be understood. Milly had earned an A in philosophy.

“Top of the morning!” Twiss said when she got close.

I’m so glad to see you
, she thought, but ended up with, “What’s with the goat?”

“What’s with the dress?” Milly said.

Twiss ran her fingers over one of the lace sunbursts. She’d chosen it over the nonlace dress to please Adele, who like every other childless woman in Spring Green had probably always wanted to dress a little girl. The other dress was more utilitarian; it was made of dark blue crepe and looked like something one might wear to a secretarial interview.

“Isn’t it amazing?” Twiss said. “It’s like happiness can be sewn.”

Milly didn’t say anything more about the dress. She didn’t say anything at all. In one strangely graceful motion, she dropped the goat’s lead rope, leaped forward like a deer over a fence, and pushed Twiss down hard to the ground.

“You ruined everything,” she said and picked up the lead rope again.

Twiss was so surprised at finding herself twice now on the ground that she didn’t attempt to run after Milly or even wipe the dirt off the lilac bush scrapes that had reopened on her knees. She stayed still, watching the drops of blood emerge from beneath her skin and gather together like an army, until the drops became trickles and gravity pulled them over her shins, down to her ankles, all the way to her toes.

When the blood dried, Twiss got up to join the rest of the fairgoers and to set up her tonic stand. In the afternoon, after the frantic sales and the even more frantic returns when her tonic failed to miraculously heal all ailments, Twiss walked around the fair looking for Milly, who had pushed her down, true, but who would also pick her back up.

Twiss looked in all of the places she thought Milly might have been—Milly had always enjoyed the craft section of the fair, where women sold linens and blankets embellished with butterflies and ivy, tiny purple crocuses, tiny everything. When she came to a stand where a woman was selling pink and blue layettes to expecting women wealthy enough not to have to sew their own, she stopped walking.

“Have you seen my sister?” she said to the woman, wondering how babies could be that small. The knit baby socks looked like they wouldn’t even fit on her pinky toes.

“What does she look like?” the woman said.

“Long blond hair,” Twiss said. “Eyes green as leaves.”

“I saw a girl with red hair and a blue dress,” the woman said. “She kept touching the pink clothes. I had to ask her to move along since she didn’t have any money.”

“That’s Bett,” Twiss said, with the same confusion of feelings she’d felt the night before rising from somewhere deep inside her. “She’s got weak lungs. She’s probably going to die.”

Before the woman could say anything, Twiss continued searching for Milly. When she passed the stand where the woman with tea leaves had read Milly’s future last year, she paused. This year, a man selling tarnished doorknobs occupied the stand.

“How else are you going to open a door?” he said as if Twiss had asked him a question.

Twiss continued on through the fair, nearly knocking over an old woman and a child, past Mrs. Bettle’s stand, where Henry was singing “Ave Maria” to a crowd that kept saying, “What happened to the man who put nails through his tongue?”

“He’s a parrot!” Mrs. Bettle kept saying. “He’s singing the Lord’s song!”

When Twiss reached the end of the fairgrounds and the haphazardly mowed field on the opposite end of the parking lot, she didn’t find Milly, the comfort she was looking for.

She found her mother and her father.

Her mother was in the process of climbing down from a bright yellow biplane and her father was smiling just as brightly at her from the ground below. The pilot had given her mother a pair of aviation goggles to wear, which made her look like an insect.

“Twiss,” her father said when he saw her, but Twiss didn’t respond.

Her father was holding a burlap sack of kidney beans. “Your mother guessed the right amount exactly! One thousand three hundred and ninety-eight. She won a free ride.”

“You wouldn’t believe how beautiful it was!” her mother said, taking off the goggles and kissing her father several times on the cheek. “Oh, Twiss, you would have loved it. I kept thinking about you while I was up there. You should take a ride and see for yourself.”

All at once, Twiss’s father picked her mother up and spun her around and around the way he used to spin Twiss. When he finally set her down again, he smiled at her and kissed her forehead. The two looked like they did in a photograph that had been taken of them once, only there was no watermelon seed.

“This has been such a wonderful day,” her father said to her mother, drawing her to him. “And you are such a wonderful woman to have forgiven me. And it only took you a month. You’re a saint, Maisie. You really are. I didn’t think you’d be able to do it.”

“Forgiven?” her mother said.

“I found a doctor,” her father said. “I talked to Bett last night. She’s agreed to go.”

“She’s been to the doctor,” her mother said, a trace of worry spreading across her face.

“He doesn’t do that kind of procedure,” her father said. “He doesn’t believe in it.”

Her mother pushed back from her father’s embrace.

Her father turned to Twiss. “Didn’t you give her my note?”

Twiss’s eyes grew wide and her skin paled. She had been wrong—whatever this was, the sting was worse than the belt. She looked at her father, who looked at her the way he did the night he drove them onto the golf course illegally, when it no longer mattered if Rollie had altered the sand moguls or not. It was a look that hit Twiss squarely in her heart. She thought of the chill blue silk against her skin, of Lewis and Clark, warm summer days just like this one. She thought of how her father had taught her to swim and how she’d pretended to drown so that Bett would save her. And she thought of Kingsley, the turtle, who had snapped up a letter whose words, even unread, changed all their lives.