Birds and Birthdays

by Christopher Barzak

  “Sorry,” I said, as he stalked down the driveway. But all he did was flick me the back of his hand.

  As summer wore on, Hester spent more and more time outside, in the back yard. My parents installed a small above-ground swimming pool, and Hester would lounge on the deck with her feet curling into the blue water. I swam along the floor of the pool and watched the shadows from the light above rippling along the bottom. I watched Hester’s toes flick back and forth above me. Tiny roots grew between her toes, like potato tubers. They soaked up the water, and Hester soaked up the sunlight like a plant photosynthesizing.

  Hester was now at least eight feet tall, a giantess by all standards, and she continued to grow without pause. One day, my father hired a lumber company to bring us a truck full of lumber, and over the course of a few days, he fenced in our front and back yards. The fence stood twelve feet tall, a virtual fortress. “There are too many people in our business,” he grumbled, looking up sheepishly at Hester, then back to the work at hand. Hester winced each time the hammer met the nail, but she never said anything. Eventually, she looked down at her feet and walked back to the house, back to her bedroom, ducking her head under each doorframe.

  Not much later, the first of the geese arrived. It was a large bird, sleek and sidling up to everyone’s legs, but especially Hester’s. Soon only Hester’s. It followed her around like a zealot. If someone raised a voice to Hester (which I often did in argument, even if she was over eight feet tall) the goose would flap its wings threateningly, hiss and puff up its feathers. I called the bird names like Brunhilda and Marta. I called it the Viking Bird, the Assassin, the Bodyguard. And eventually Hester asked me to, “Please desist in offending the poor creature. It doesn’t have a name like we do, Stephen.”

  “I was joking,” I told her, and she said, “I’m not.” The discussion began and ended with Hester folding her arms across her chest in warning.

  “Ice Queen,” I muttered as I walked away.

  “I heard that,” she shouted. “Do not think your willfulness goes unrecorded!”

  I stopped short, shaking my head in disbelief. Finally I said, “Are you protesting something, Hester? Because if you’re protesting something, why don’t you just say so, and protest, instead of acting all weird?”

  Hester winced. I raised my eyebrows and waited. She didn’t say anything, so I turned and left her there, wincing.

  In our town, every street had five lampposts lining it. There was a town square with a gas station, a grocery store, and a Super-Mart, which came three years ago, set itself up like an overnight circus, and began selling everything from household cleaners to underwear. We no longer traveled into the city for art supplies, books, birdseed, or to have our automobile’s oil changed. It was a self-sufficient community. Children attended three schools: one for elementary students, one for the middle grades, and the last for high school. We were raised to be good, decent people, who knew what it was to be practical, what real work was, and how to one day raise our own children with these same values.

  If our town had ever had any failing, the flaw was in our environment. Within a span of three years, most of our trees had been cut down. Dutch Elm disease invaded, infested, and because of this, shade in the summer was a commodity. We had few birds, since birds and trees go together, but occasionally we’d see them pass overhead. The last refuge for our trees was the town park, a mile wide and long, where the birds enjoyed a small pond and a cannon used in World War II. Also, a small memorial wall engraved with the names of all the men from our town who died in one of the wars stood in the shade of our remaining elms.

  But all that began to change.

  One morning, I woke up angry from a dream of eight-feet-tall geese that nipped at my ankles. When I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, I realized it was the fern brushing its lacy leaves against my feet. The fern had been growing beside the foot of my bed for nearly a month, coming up between the floorboards. I’d tried to remove it, pulling it up by its roots, but it only grew back within a few days, a persistent reminder that things were not right in the world. Ferns should not be growing in bedrooms, unless they are potted. Vines should not grow over mailboxes, unless the mailbox is in a jungle outpost. Tiger lilies should not grow in place of a girl’s eyelashes. There are rules in this world. I told the fern this myself, but it pretended not to know what I was talking about.

  Suddenly I heard Hester’s geese in the backyard and her voice ringing out for them to fall in behind her. When I looked out my window, I saw her back turning the street corner with a line of ten geese following. I decided to follow as well.

  They didn’t go far — to the park, only a few blocks away from our place. There the geese wandered aimlessly, seeming without true purpose, just like real geese. I watched Hester slip into the pond and begin washing her face, her hair. The pond could have held twenty children, but Hester filled the whole thing. It looked like a water hole with her inside it. I was going to call out to tell her she shouldn’t be out alone like this, that there were still crazies around who would rather see her disappear than take a bath in this pond, but I stopped when I saw her rise from the water, look furtively from side to side, and step into the little grove of trees near the pond.

  I followed in secret, casting my own furtive looks over my shoulder. I felt like a spy, capturing enemy information. What’s going on in that head of yours, Hester? I wondered. Besides a tree growing, that is.

  I came down on the other side of the trees, in case Hester had placed one of the geese by the pond as a lookout. She was hiding something — that much was obvious. Luckily, the park was well groomed. “Managed,” is how the groundskeepers referred to it, so there was no underbrush to rattle through, which might have alerted Hester. There were well-trod dirt trails and little flower gardens between trees, everything patterned like an English garden. I ducked from tree to tree, my back pressed against the bark so Hester wouldn’t see me. I felt invigorated by my own cleverness. I was primal and silent — I thought maybe I should try hunting. And then, all at once, I came upon Hester kneeling down in what appeared to be an “unmanaged” section of the grove.

  Here were brambles and thorny bushes, vines creeping up the sides of trees that grew wild with branches; there were ferns and wild flowers growing along the forest floor — and it did seem like a forest, not a park at all. There were even rings of mushrooms. I was waiting to see a fairy arrive. Hester knelt down on a patch of moss near the base of a large weeping willow. The weeping willow that grew out of her head swayed above her and the weeping willow that grew in the grove swayed along with it, but there was no wind. Hester picked something up from the mushroom ring in her pale white hands, and as I snuck closer to see what it was, a branch broke beneath my feet. I had grown too comfortable sneaking through the managed sections of the park, clear of debris and noisy branches. My dreams of big game hunting evaporated as suddenly as I’d dreamed them.

  Hester’s eyes snapped open. She lifted her head and looked at me as if I were one of the crazy people who left death threats on our answering machine. “Stephen!” she shouted in surprise, staggering up from her kneeling position. The fear in her eyes reminded me of a deer caught in headlights, even though I hadn’t seen a deer in our town for at least five years. I thought she was going to run, but she didn’t. “What are you doing here?” she asked instead.

  “I’m sorry, Hester” I said. “I was going to call out, but then you came inside here. What is this place? What are you doing here?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said, her face firm. “It’s a secret, so don’t tell anyone you saw me here. Not even Mom and Dad.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Do you seriously think I’m going to leave here, say nothing, and not try to find out what it is you’re hiding?”

  “I’m not hiding anything,” she said. “I’m protecting something. There’s a difference.”

  “Sometimes you have to hide something to protect it,” I said. “Come on, Hester. You can t
rust me. I won’t tell anyone. Promise.”

  At that moment she peered down into her cupped hands at whatever she was holding. Then she opened her hands a little and lowered them so I could see.

  She was holding a grayish colored egg. It was about the size of a football, but in Hester’s hands, it appeared to be the size of a chicken egg. Blue spots polka-dotted its surface. “An Easter egg?” I asked, which was the first thought that came to me.

  Hester nodded. “Yes. But not how you’re thinking.”

  “What then?”

  “It’s not an Easter egg, really,” said Hester. “Just sort of. It’s bringing something back to us. Something dead is coming back again.”

  I reached out to stroke the egg, but Hester pulled her hands back as soon as I made a move toward it. “No!” she shouted. “You can’t touch it, Stephen. No one but I can touch it.”

  “I wasn’t going to hurt it!” I shouted back. “Don’t be so bossy, Hester!”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just that those are the rules. Only me, Stephen. Only I can touch it. I’m its guardian. I’m the guardian of the egg.”

  “What are you guarding it from?” I asked, and Hester looked over my shoulders, then from left to right, as if there might be unseen presences eavesdropping.

  “From them,” she said. “From the people. If anyone knew about the egg, that it was the cause of my changes and all the other changes around here, they’d destroy it. Just like they do with everything else.”

  “Why not keep it at the house then?” I suggested.

  “Because that’s the most likely place to look. If I keep the egg somewhere public, they’ll never find it. People always look where they’re not supposed to be looking. If I keep it where anyone could find it, they won’t even think to come here. Also, the egg needs a place with trees and clean water. The park is growing stronger now.”

  It was true. The park was slowly but surely being overtaken by a new growth of trees and wild flowers. A surge of underbrush and brambles grew over and between trees like the strands of a spider’s web.

  “But is this a good thing?” I asked. “How do you know the egg isn’t evil?”

  “Because I know,” said Hester. “I just know, Stephen. You’ll have to trust me.”

  Both of us had asked for trust from the other. This was something new to my relationship with my sister. We’d barely held a conversation before this one, except to argue and put each other down. Suddenly I felt like we understood each other, had jumped over the preliminary forgiveness rituals and gone straight into a deep and meaningful friendship. I wasn’t ashamed of this feeling. I wasn’t ashamed of Hester anymore either, even if she was over eight feet tall, white as a clown, and covered with vegetation. I knew to trust her, as she knew to trust the egg, and so I did that, and went home with her that morning, and said nothing to anyone about her secret.

  Hester’s growth became more problematic as each month passed. At eleven feet tall, she was quickly becoming visible to the outside world again. My father’s fence would keep her from prying eyes and cameras for only a few more weeks. Also, we had no clothes that Hester could fit into, and autumn was chilling us into a sudden December. My mother went to the Super-Mart and ordered yards and yards of a stretchy orange fabric, then sewed it into a shapeless dress for Hester. “You’ll grow into it, honey,” she said, and ran her fingers through my sister’s yellow-brown hair. Kernels of wheat clung to Hester’s shoulders. Now that the sun grew weaker, Hester’s hair fell out in shocks of dried brown wheat.

  “It’s a little flimsy,” Hester told my mother. She lifted the hem of the dress and said, “The wind will cut right through.”

  “A coat then,” my mother said, and rushed back into her sewing room.

  Several days later she emerged with a white cape made from bed sheets and lined with flannel. “I’m sorry it’s not a coat,” said my mother. “I didn’t have enough material.”

  Hester tied the cape around her neck. She looked dashing, like a superhero. She thanked my mother and didn’t complain about her makeshift clothes, nor that she had to go barefoot. She knew her changes were costing our parents a small fortune.

  Hester spent the winter inside the house, sleeping through most of it, curled up in the dining room. She seemed to be hibernating, waiting. Her breath came sparsely, but it kept on coming. Her geese flew south when the cold months arrived, and I wondered if they would return when it grew warmer, or if they would find other idols to worship come next summer.

  Sometimes my parents and I would be in the living room, watching TV, snow falling gently against the picture window, and Hester would utter something incomprehensible from the dining room. I once asked her questions while she slept, whispering into her ear, “What’s happening now?” to which Hester replied, “There are two creatures here with me. They sit in my tree and throw down apples for me to eat. I tell them to save the apples, I’m not hungry, but they keep throwing them anyway.”

  “What do they look like?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Hester. They’re in my tree. The tree growing out of my head. They’re above me. I can’t see them.”

  “Tell them I see them,” I whispered, even though I saw nothing in the tree growing out of Hester’s head. It lay across the dining room floor, brown and withered, only the trunk still looking strong and alive.

  Hester was silent for a moment. Then she finally spoke again. “They say you are lying. They say to tell you to stop meddling in their affairs. You are not the guardian of the egg! Be patient, they say. Some day you, too, may be important.”

  When winter died, and spring came to melt the snow piled in our yards and tree limbs, Hester finally awakened. My mother was cooking breakfast for my father before he left for work. She scraped eggs around in a frying pan and I stood beside her, spooning wheat flakes into my mouth. The eggs sizzled and foamed in the frying pan. My mother was telling me about a dream she’d had the night before.

  “There were all these people in it,” she said. “They all looked familiar and strange at the same time. You were in it, and so was Dad, and Mr. Jackson the school janitor — he was there too. And Ellen Darby, next door, she was trying to give me a pitchfork. We were in a forest, but our clothes were weird. Rustic. We all looked like farmers and farmers’ wives, bonnets and linen dresses. I kept shouting for you and your father to run before we had to start farming, but you wouldn’t listen. You already had a hoe in your hands.”

  Before I could laugh at my mother, a groan came from the dining room. My mother turned the heat off the eggs and we ran to the next room to find Hester pushing herself up from the floor. She was having difficulties. Her weeping willow was wedged in one corner of the dining room, and she couldn’t back up far enough to dislodge it. “Help,” she sobbed when we entered the room. “I’m stuck!”

  My father decided to take extreme measures. He went to the garage and came back with the chainsaw. Hester screamed when he pulled its cord and the chainsaw began buzzing. “I won’t hurt you!” he promised. Quickly, efficiently, he slipped the saw through several branches, and they fell to the floor in a pile of dust.

  Hester opened her eyes after he shut the saw off. “Is it over?” she asked, and my mother patted Hester’s rump and told her everything was okay. We took the patio doors off their sliding tracks, and Hester squeezed out into the sunshine. She took a deep breath, and the wheat framing her face lifted toward the warmth. “Finally,” Hester whispered, still kneeling on the back deck in the puddles of newly melted snow. “It is time,” she said. Whether she spoke to us or to some unseen audience, I couldn’t tell. But soon a dark V-shape appeared in the sky, distant but coming closer, and within moments Hester’s geese landed in our backyard, milling about, nibbling her ears, her fingers, as she stroked them.

  It wasn’t much longer before the entire town was bursting with spring again, and the rain was falling, falling, bringing up beds of forgotten flowers. The trees budded, unfurling leaves like banners in on
ly a few weeks. I saw a deer — a buck — one day on my way home from school, loping through the park, which was nearly unrecognizable. The park had grown an unruly amount of trees around its perimeter, like the wall of thorns in the Sleeping Beauty story, and no one dared enter its darkness any longer. Children told stories about witches living in the grove at its center. Before the park had become a forest, our witch stories were always set in the house of some old lady nobody liked. It was a strange phenomenon to see a story leave the comforts of our houses, our streets and cul-de-sacs, to take up residence in the new forest.

  Hester was busy. She paced the backyard, chewing her fingernails with a look of constant worry, while her geese flew in and out of the yard on what seemed to be missions. One would leave and another would land and waddle up to Hester to report its findings. Hester would kneel down and press her ear to the goose’s bill in order to hear its secret messages. New saplings rose from the wet ground all across town. They grew thick and strong, branching and rebranching over the course of a few weeks. Bushes and brambles sprang up between them. Ellen Darby found a large thicket of blueberry bushes in her backyard. She set a sign out by her driveway that said ‘Fresh Blueberries, Pick Your Own!’

  My mother told me one morning, “Don’t go to school, Stephen.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because Hester is in trouble. I drove past the town hall this morning on my way to the Super-Mart. There were a lot of people there already. They were in the parking lot with picket signs. They were shouting horrible things about Hester. They say the property value is declining, that it’s because of her. I don’t want you near that crowd, understand me?”

  I nodded and she patted the back of my head.