The Bird Sisters (38 page)

Her father had grabbed her leg as she walked by him in the hallway.

“You had choices,” he said. “How could you give that up?”

“The same way you gave up golf,” Milly said.

“I didn’t give up golf,” her father said. “It was taken from me.”

Twiss was the one Milly couldn’t tolerate criticism from.

“I’ll take you there,” Twiss said, and took the car keys off the hook in the kitchen. She didn’t have a license, but as with the tractor, their father had taught her how to drive the car in the meadow when she was twelve. In case of an emergency, he’d said when their mother protested.

Milly and Twiss drove the long way to the country church, up Fox Hollow Road to Coon Rock, down through the apple orchards and the hayfields, past the alfalfa field that Tom Sprye had not yet relinquished, to the dirt parking lot behind the church, where the Sewing Society ladies were standing, fanning themselves with their yellow hats, ready to pounce.

The outside of the church was decorated with garlands made of ivy and white calla lilies that shone like diamonds in the light.

“I don’t think I can go in,” Milly said.

“I don’t think I can go in either,” Twiss said.

The two of them sat in the car, staring at the church.

“You can stop it,”
Milly’s mother had told her, but she couldn’t.

“Take me away from here,” she said to Twiss.

“Where do you want to go?” Twiss said.

“Nowhere. Anywhere.”

“I know where,” Twiss said.

She backed the truck out of the parking lot and headed for the old boat launch. They drove along County C Road, past the golf course and the ice-cream stand, to the boat launch, which was empty except for a fisherman and a bucket of fish.

Twiss parked the truck and got out.

“What’s biting today?” she asked the old man, whom neither Milly nor Twiss recognized as Father Rice until they looked at him more closely.

“Rainbows,” he said, as if he’d never left Spring Green. The limp side of his trousers was the only evidence that everything wasn’t exactly as it had always been.

“Aren’t you girls supposed to be at a wedding?” he said.

Milly stepped down from the truck with the cake. “It’s over.”

“That looks delicious,” Father Rice said, eyeing the yellow rosettes of frosting longingly. “I haven’t had a piece of cake since the last wedding I presided over, when I was still—well—anyway … I never could figure out how to work the oven for anything fancier than a potato beside that potatoes were all that was usually edible in the donation box.”

“Why didn’t you write me back?” Twiss said.

Father Rice cast out a line and wedged the pole between two wood slats in the dock. “I didn’t know if I could come back here,” he said. “To this valley. This river. These people. Until Mr. Peterson showed up at my door with his son.”

“Oh,”
Twiss said, obviously disappointed—a notebook’s worth of questions sat on her night table at home and she’d only managed to ask the first, least important one.

When will everything be all right again?
was the last question in her notebook—unwittingly, Twiss had left no room for an answer.

“I didn’t know if I could be again who I was,” Father Rice said.

Milly set the cake on the dock and, even though he hadn’t asked for one, cut a piece for Father Rice. It seemed right for someone to eat the cake.

“Mr. Peterson lost a wife and a child and he’s still managing to get along,” Father Rice said, swiping at one of the yellow rosettes on the slice that had been cut for him. “I figured my losses were something I should be able to recover from.”

“I waited for your letter,” Twiss said.

“I hung yours up on the wall in my room,” Father Rice said. “I’d look at them and wonder if it was possible to go home after everything I’d done. They were my bible. My cross to kneel before and pray on. Yours was the only smiling face in the room.”

“I waited for your answer,” Twiss said.

Father Rice took two of the fish he’d caught out of the bucket beside his one working leg and strung them together with fishing line before he handed them to Twiss.

“It’s a trade,” he said. “But I’ll admit, it’s not a fair one.”

And then, sighing deeply, “Sometimes there isn’t a clear answer, Twiss. That’s the trouble with being a priest. You have to pick what you think is right.”

“What do you think is right, then?” Twiss said.

Father Rice smiled. “I don’t know. That’s why I’m just an old man with one leg now.”

Milly was kneeling at the end of the dock, with the cake by her feet. While she rinsed her hands in the water, she thought of the letter she’d written to Bett’s mother, on the good stationery after all, and the game Twiss and Bett used to make her play before they fell asleep.

“Truth?” Bett would say. “Or consequence?”

Milly had never been able to see how one could go without the other.

The letter, which at one time was over three pages, ended up being only two lines, penned in her careful script.

The last line had been what had saved Milly from the first. It was the way she had to see things. After all, who was to say that she and Asa would have been happy? She’d never spent more than an hour with him at one time. She’d never even seen his feet bare.

Milly’s parents had known each other much longer and much more intimately than that, and they were sitting on either side of a door, as if they’d forgotten how to open it.

Still
. There was the sight of Asa on the tractor, the fine golden hairs that graced the back of his neck, and the shape he made against the bright blue sky.
Still
.

Milly lifted the cake from the dock and set it on the water. She watched it float for a second or two before the current pulled it beneath the surface and carried it downstream, down to whatever was lost.

On the way home, in the hayfields between the river and the house, a starling flew into the windshield. After Twiss had swaddled it with fabric from her coveralls, Milly held it on her lap, stroking its nape and crying, lightly at first and then harder and harder.

Twiss put her hand on Milly’s knee and kept it there the rest of the way back.

It’ll be all right
, her hand seemed to say. We’ll
be all right
.

Over the years, they’d rescued hawks and owls and wild geese, catbirds, wrens, and herons. But no bird had ever seemed quite as beautiful as that ordinary starling.

When they got home, Milly and Twiss took it into the bathroom and set it on a nest of towels. The starling lay unconscious, its black feathers pinned against its body. Milly and Twiss sat on the cool floor watching each other and the starling, as if one or the other might tell them what they should do next, what they could do next.

All day and into the night, they sat in the bathroom waiting for something they couldn’t put a name to, while Asa and Bett said “I do,” while they drove off in a direction of their choice, to a place of their choice, for better or worse, for life.

Eventually, Milly and Twiss fell asleep, Milly with her legs tucked neatly under the rest of her and Twiss with her legs sprawled out at dramatic angles across the bathroom floor.

The starling slept too.

After several hours of absolute stillness, a leg twitched and then a wing, and Milly and Twiss opened their eyes.
Rise up
, the wounded parts seemed to say to them.

And just like that the starling was gone, out of the tub and out the front door.

illy knew what people thought: that they were just the weird old sisters who rescued birds, just like the crossing guard was the man with no teeth and the house on Oak Street was haunted and the river bottom was home to people who were missing their limbs and their eyes. That was the way with small towns, and there was something comforting about that.

Milly set the table on the porch and rang the cowbell for supper.

A few minutes later, Twiss came walking across the field of prairie onions and bluestems, a bouquet of lilacs in her hands.

“What’s all this?” she said, when she reached the porch.

“Supper,” Milly said, smiling.

Twiss handed her the lilacs. “I’ll get the vase.”

“I’ll get it,” Milly said, noticing the goldfinch peeking out of her sister’s front pocket, which Twiss had forgotten to bury in the gladiola bed.

After supper, Milly would urge Twiss into the bathtub like her mother used to do when Twiss was little and had wet her bed. Her mother would exchange the wet linens for dry ones while Twiss blew soap bubbles around the bathroom, pretending they were bullets and she was a cowboy. Wetting her bed was the one form of losing control Twiss had ever been sensitive about as a child, and their mother had gone to great lengths to spare her embarrassment.

While Twiss soaked this evening, Milly would take the goldfinch out back with all of the other birds that had been lost. She’d say a few words or she wouldn’t; if not, the birds that weren’t yet lost would gather in the branches of nearby trees and on the slanting eaves of the house and on the red sugar feeder meant for hummingbirds, but that also attracted every other kind of bird to its nectar, and do her trilling for her.

“Tell me about your day,” she said to Twiss.

“Well,” Twiss said. “Snapper ate another one of my balls, and the Raouls weren’t too pleased to see me either. Mostly, I just wandered around, though.”

Milly went inside to get the vase. She filled it with water and arranged the lilacs, which smelled more wonderful than any perfume she could have bought. From the screen door, she watched her sister take off her muck boots and set them on the stairs in the same impatient way she had all her life. Her hands were shaking again, but otherwise she seemed all right.

“What did you do today?” Twiss said.

“A little of this,” Milly said. “A little of that.”

Before the two sat down to supper, they sat together first on the peeling brown porch steps, Milly with her feet placed firmly on the bottom step and Twiss with her feet splayed out on the crumble of loose dirt below it, a glass of iced tea between them. Beyond the porch and their feet were the rolling hills, the county and country, and the winding Wisconsin River, which gained and lost strength, narrowed and widened, rose and fell, all the way down to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, the confluence of river and ocean.

Twiss picked up the glass, drank the tea down halfway, and held the glass out to Milly. “I’ve been so thirsty today,” she said, wiping the corners of her mouth with her sleeve and her forehead with the back of her hand.

Milly glanced at the sky, which, although it was still clear and high above them now, would eventually bring gray and rain because that was the nature of weather patterns.

The nature of nature.

“Me too,” Milly said and took the glass from her sister.

he Bird Sisters
could not have been written without the support of my wonderful husband, Hans, and my lovely daughter, Ava; to them, I am eternally grateful for letting me sneak off at strange hours to write this novel and then listening to me fret about it for more months than any of us can (or wants to) count. My dear mother, father, stepmother, and four brothers have also supported me passionately along the way, even when the novel was still a distant dream of mine. To my dedicated teachers at Penn State and at the University of Massachusetts, I must say thank you, especially to Charlotte Holmes, who taught me how to write bravely and beautifully. Her writing was and continues to be a strong model for my own. Without her, I don’t think this book would have become this book. There are others, of course, to thank. The incomparable Margot Livesey, Noy Holland, Sam Michel, and Tony Giardina. My best gal and talented writer and teacher, Dani Blackman, has put up with my writing and me for many years now; she’s talked me down from more than one metaphorical ledge. Dani is magical, essential, and wise; I am truly blessed to know her. My gifted and incredibly kind agent, Michelle Brower, believed in
The Bird Sisters
from the very beginning and worked extremely hard to get the book into the right hands during a time when hands weren’t flying up left and right for first fiction. Those hands ended up belonging to Kate Kennedy at Crown Publishers, who has been absolutely lovely to me, both as a friend and an editor. I envy myself for getting the chance to work with this savvy wonder woman! To the rest of the team at Crown, thank you with all my heart. From copyediting to design to publicity, I have been continually amazed by the attention devoted to this author and her bird sisters.