The Bird Sisters (32 page)

Bett’s pregnant. I’m responsible
.

sn’t this inconvenient?
Milly thought from her box-chair in the attic, although inconvenient wasn’t the right word for what she was: stuck—in the past, in the present, on a cardboard box designed to hold book weight, not human weight with all of its unruly waves of flesh, its sprawl of limbs and tendons. If only she’d taken Twiss’s suggestion of each wearing plastic whistles around their necks, Milly could have whistled for help.

“This is what you made me leave the barn for?” Twiss would have said.

Twiss had gone out for ice cream one day and had come back with two old-fashioned butterscotch sundaes and two bright orange whistles that said HOME OF THE KICKIN’ ORANGE DREAM CONE and were as blinding as the saloon signs at night.

Sometime in their sixties, the world had reached the Age of Neon.

“What happened to handing out a spoon?” Milly had said.

“Don’t say it,” Twiss had said. “I’ll throw up all over you.”

“We’re old.”

“You’re right. We should just curl up and die.”

“Why is it always youth or death with you?” Milly said, although she knew what her sister meant—age had become something you had to constantly think about and plan against, as if age were a storm and the still-working parts of her body shutters.

At this point in her life, Milly supposed there should be no more attic trips for her. Perhaps no more trips in general. Climbing stairs, as well as climbing in and out of the car, was getting to be too defeating. Lately, when she and Twiss went on their Sunday drives, Milly would stay in the car while Twiss walked down to the river or up a hill or across a narrow footbridge with weeds sprouting up between the woods slats. Milly had stopped wanting to get out to see again what she’d seen the previous Sunday and the Sunday before that.

She felt a little like the red crop trucks they saw when they were out on their drives, the ones hauling loads of hay or wheat or corn, sputtering along the roads like invalids, waiting to get to wherever their drivers were steering them and be unburdened until the next farm acre was picked clean by a group of school-age kids calculating what new thing they could buy with their paychecks—kids who were overjoyed by the extraordinary price of farm machinery that might have done their jobs for them if not for the fact of the drought, which yielded stunted crops that weren’t worth what they used to be worth.

Cynicism. There. Bett would have been proud.

When the time came, Twiss might have to wheel her onto the porch. Forget the Age of Neon or the Age of Scorn; the Age of Exhaustion ruled now. How could Milly be expected to traipse across fields and up hills and down to rivers, past broken-down houses that used to be fine once upon a time, when a freshly whitewashed porch and honeysuckle twirling up the railings were all most people could hope for? How could she be expected to possess the desire when she lacked the simple ability to hoist herself up from a moldy box in the attic?

What was she doing up there anyway?

Oh yes, the bird book, which was also old and yellowed and brittle at the spine. The best Milly could do was set the book on the musty floorboards and wait for her legs to come back to life again or for Twiss to come back inside, which Twiss wouldn’t do until the last possible moment because she said she couldn’t breathe with plaster and horsehair surrounding her on all sides. Milly looked at the book and at the darkened attic, which was the only place besides the river that still had water left in it. When she saw a box with Bett’s name scrawled across its side in red marker, she thought
I’d have won this consequence
, remembering the time Bett dared Twiss to stand a full minute in the attic and say the words “Bloody Mary” three times.

“Bloody Mary,” Milly said now, knowing that it was a game, but also knowing that she wouldn’t say it three times in a row. She’d lived this long without seeing the bloodied head of a woman popping out of the woodwork. Why did she need to see one now?

“At least I would have won the attic part,” she said, as if Bett were hovering over her bed again, trying to force her to do whatever would appall her sensibilities the most.

The summer Bett stayed with them, Bett taped the IOU to Milly’s headboard, obscuring the fleur-de-lis carved into the wood, so that Milly never forgot what she owed.

“Take it down already,” Twiss said at the end of the summer.

“But I signed my name,” Milly said.

“It was a stupid game,” Twiss said. “One you didn’t even want to play.”

Was that all?
Milly thought.

Playing Truth or Consequences with Bett had seemed like playing life or death. Other girls their age painted their nails or wrote the last names of the boys they wanted to marry in their diaries. Other girls spent long summer nights projecting if the boy of their dreams would get down on one knee or on two. They spent hours teasing out the details of their future proposals. Would he promise a country home on a pleasant hill overlooking the river? Or would it be a modern-looking house in town? Would he slide the ring on her finger for her or allow his sweetheart to do it herself? While other girls planned their future weddings down to the kinds of cakes they thought they might like to serve, Bett had Twiss running around without her underwear on, hanging from trees in the moonlight, invoking spirits who took joy in menacing young girls. She had Milly giving up her secrets only so she could make fun of them.

After Bett had learned of Asa’s difficulties with speech, she’d started calling him the Mongoloid Boy. One of the things Milly always regretted was that she’d never said anything more than
He’s not a mongoloid!
on Asa’s behalf because she didn’t want to have to explain what he was to her. Even Twiss lacked the courage or the drive to really go against Bett until Bett gave her good reason at the end of the summer. And then all she could do was ball up the IOU and throw it out the window.

All she could say was, “It’s over now.”

heir mother drove herself home from the fair, shut herself in her bedroom, and wedged a chair beneath the doorknob. She wouldn’t let their father see her even when he pounded ferociously on the door.

“Margaret!” he yelled over and over again, clawing the wood with his fingernails.

What had always struck Milly was that her father didn’t come to her mother’s door with professions of love or even a real apology. He came to it as if their marriage depended not on those things but on an act of aggression, submission.

Please open this door
.

For three days, Milly’s mother didn’t say a word to him or to anyone, nor did she leave her bedroom, even for a trip to the bathroom.

“She didn’t mean anything to me,” her father kept saying from his place on the hallway floor. Although Milly had brought up a tray of food for him, he, too, wouldn’t eat or drink anything. He wouldn’t move from his position on the floor.

“Why are you making him food?” Twiss said.

“He still needs to eat,” Milly said.

Twiss had taken the first of Milly’s trays, and like the IOU, had thrown it out the window, so that the only ones enjoying a meal were the rabbits that lived under the porch. Kingsley had dragged himself over from the pond, too, which would have usually drawn Twiss to him. “He doesn’t deserve to eat after what he’s done,” Twiss said.

“He’ll starve,” Milly said.

“He doesn’t even deserve that,” Twiss said.

The second tray Milly took her father after Twiss stormed out of the house with Hammer. On Twiss’s way out, Bett cornered her against the coatrack in the front hallway.

“I can’t bear you not talking to me, Twiss.”

Twiss raised Hammer up in the air, as if she might strike their cousin. “Let me go.”

“I need you,” Bett said, crying. “You promised me. You promised not to leave me all alone.”

Slowly, Twiss lowered Hammer to her side. With a look of pain and sadness and anger—a kind of vulnerability Milly never saw again—Twiss said, “Why did it have to be him?”

“You’re the only one who loves me,” Bett said, crying harder.

“I can’t,” Twiss said. She bit down hard on her lip and walked out the front door.

“For God’s sake, Margaret!” their father yelled upstairs. “She has a mole on the back of her leg. A hair grows out of it. A wretched black hair.”

When that didn’t elicit a response from Milly’s mother, he added, “She doesn’t even know what a green is.”

Milly ran up the stairs. “
Shhh
, Dad. Bett’s right downstairs.”

“I don’t care,” her father said, raising his voice. “She swings a club like a mule!”

Milly knew her father was capable of cruelty, she just didn’t know he was capable of cruelty of this caliber. If he’d known anything about women, he’d have known that denouncing one of them wouldn’t bring you closer to the other. After all, her mother would have said if she were speaking,
I’m the one who’s had to suffer for a bogey!

“
You’d
forgive me,” her father said.

“Dad,” Milly began.

“Well, wouldn’t you?”

When Milly didn’t immediately say yes, he added, “Don’t you?”

Milly stood there, wishing she were in the barn and Twiss were in the hallway because her father wouldn’t have asked this question of Twiss, and even if he did, her answer wouldn’t be as important to him as Milly’s was. Goodness had never been expected of Twiss the way it was expected of Milly. Twiss was allowed her tantrums and rages and hammering sessions in the barn—she’d always been allowed to have a reaction that was less than graceful. And because she was closer to their father than Milly was, she could say, “I’ll never forgive him!” loud enough for her father to hear because, despite a bout of nail-sharp anger, even Twiss knew that over time she’d think of all the Sundays he took her golfing and called her his little champion and she’d do just what she said she wouldn’t, what she said she couldn’t: She’d forgive him. Maybe not for everything, but for enough.

“Why did you do it?” Milly said to her father. “We could forgive all of the others, but not Bett.”

Her father leaned against her mother’s bedroom door, as if he’d accepted that it wouldn’t be opening any time soon. “She was the only one who didn’t know who I used to be. When she came into the barn, she looked exactly the way I felt. Ordinary.”

Her father slumped down even farther. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. My mother said I was born selfish. I used to make her and the others call me Champion. Once, I told her she was a bad mother because she wouldn’t use the rag money to buy me a pair of golf shoes. I hated her for being poor. I hated myself.”

“We all loved you whether or not you could play golf,” Milly said.

Her father covered his face. “I don’t. Golf was the only way in.”

On the fourth day, Milly’s mother dragged the chair away from the door. She called for Milly, who’d been shuttling from room to room opening windows and lodging kitchen utensils in the tracks of the ones that had a tendency to fall down. The day was hotter than the one before. Even though the walls, along with everything else, were sweating, her mother had taken the extra wool blankets from the closet and draped them over herself on the bed. Her father was still camped out on the hallway floor.