The Bird Sisters

by Rebecca Rasmussen

  This time, she stayed silent.

  “I can’t wait to go up there,” Twiss said, not understanding that the home Bett had left wouldn’t be the home she returned to. “I’m going to canoe until my arms are like paddles.”

  “I’ll have a different kind of countdown going then,” her mother said.

  “We don’t canoe for fun,” Bett said.

  I’m sorry, Twiss mouthed to Bett, but Bett ignored her.

  “What if I don’t come back?” Twiss said to her mother.

  “Just make sure to send my real daughter back,” her mother said. She turned to the next page in the book. “Isn’t it interesting how they bundle their haystacks in Europe?”

  Twiss got up from her chair.

  “I hate the impressionists!” she said, dragging Milly off the porch. “Moan-nay. Man-nay. Fan-nay. They make me want to draw pictures of the guillotine.”

  “What are we doing?” Milly said, hopping on one foot until she’d pulled her muck boot onto the other and then hopping on that foot until both feet were clad in rubber.

  “Finding a secret,” Twiss said.

  She dragged Milly along through the backyard, past the site of their unfinished tree house, until they were in the woods and Milly didn’t need to be dragged anymore.

  “I need to finish designing my cake,” Milly said, but she kept walking anyway.

  “You’ll win whatever you make,” Twiss said.

  “This one has to be special,” Milly said.

  Twiss thought of the tractor drawings, of Asa and Milly pressed together in the meadow, of Bett’s parents, and she stopped walking. “You have to promise me something as my sister.”

  “What?” Milly said, running into her back.

  “That you won’t leave until I’m old enough to leave, too.”

  “I thought you were going to pitch a tent in my backyard,” Milly said.

  “What if you don’t have a backyard?” Twiss said.

  “Then we’ll have to put you up in the trees,” Milly said.

  “With a hatch, so I can see the stars?”

  “Aren’t we supposed to be finding a secret ingredient for your tonic?” Milly said.

  “I did something,” Twiss said, turning around. “I don’t know if it’s good or bad.”

  She told Milly about her father’s note and about giving it to Kingsley, and then about her forgery and their mother’s response to it. Twiss was expecting Milly to say that she’d have to apologize and bear whatever punishment their parents bestowed on her.

  “That was one of the nicest things you’ve ever done,” Milly said. “Dishonest, but nice.”

  “I did it for him,” Twiss said.

  Milly picked a wood chip out of Twiss’s hair. “You’re allowed to love her, too.”

  The two of them didn’t find a secret ingredient for Twiss’s tonic that day, even though they walked all the way to the river and back up through the fields and the woods. Somewhere along the way, Twiss had stopped worrying about the secret ingredient for her tonic and started to think about what might come of her note, her mother’s wiggling toes, the belief in love.

  20

  lthough Milly and Twiss spent most Augusts in Spring Green sitting on the porch with cold washcloths wrapped around their necks to keep off the heat, this year they spent the month getting ready for the fair. In an unusual show of generosity, their mother gave them fewer chores to complete and more time to tinker with their cake and tonic recipes. She’d even offered input, as did Mrs. Bettle, Mrs. Collier, Dr. Greene, and Mr. Stewart. In four weeks, the house accommodated as much traffic as it usually did in a year.

  On the night before the fair, Mrs. Bettle decided Henry should run through a final dress rehearsal of “Ave Maria” in front of a crowd, since he was used to just performing for her. She’d brought along a cuttlebone in case he needed to be coaxed.

  “I understand completely,” Dr. Greene and the others said.

  Bett had gone for a walk because she said she needed to be alone—since her mother’s letter had arrived, she needed to be alone a lot. Twiss’s father was in the barn.

  Henry turned out to be quite a showman. When he finished singing, he bowed. Mrs. Bettle had sewn a tiny top hat for him.

  “Oh, Henry!” she said. “You’ve made me so proud!”

  “You’ve made me so loud,” Henry said.

  After the performance, Milly sliced up the last of her experimental cakes, a round vanilla cake she thought she might use to make the wheels of tractor, but decided against when she figured out how to make more realistic wheels by using a Bundt pan.

  “Where’s the real one?” Mrs. Collier said.

  “I want it to be a surprise,” Milly said.

  “We’re under strict orders not to go down to the cellar,” their mother said. “But I don’t need to see it to know she’ll win. She’s made eight cakes to get to this one. No one else will have worked that hard or gone through that much flour.”

  “Seven,” Milly said.

  “I’m sure it will be wonderful,” Mr. Stewart said.

  “Father Rice will certainly be pleased,” Dr. Greene said. “All this for him.”

  “Has anyone heard from him?” Mrs. Bettle said.

  “I have!” Twiss said proudly. “We write letters to each other.”

  After the last piece of cake was eaten and everyone left, Milly went back to the cellar to examine her cake. Twiss stayed on the ground floor with her mother, who was cleaning up in the kitchen, humming “Ave Maria” as she wiped up the counters.

  “He was surprisingly good,” she said. “For a parrot.”

  “Parrots are smart,” Twiss said. “Or didn’t you know?”

  Her mother stopped wiping off the counters in order to wipe off her hands. “I would be sad if you ran away, by the way,” she said to Twiss. “Who would I have to scold?”

  “I guess Milly would have to take up the slack,” Twiss said.

  “That might be asking too much of her,” her mother said.

  She handed Twiss a note to give to her father, which made Twiss think It’s about time!, since she’d delivered her forged note nearly a month before. This one was written on pink paper with yellow roses hand-stenciled in the corners. Her mother opened up one of the cupboards and took down a piece of cake she’d hidden between a bag of rice and a box of cornmeal. “He always liked vanilla,” she said and went back to the counters.

  “Vanilla makes me want to throw up,” Twiss said, but she took the note and the piece of cake out the front door. Although she had no intention of offering this note to Kingsley (her mother’s looping handwriting was impossible to duplicate) or reading it, she was tempted by the words For Joe, which graced the front of it prettily.

  No, no, no, she told herself. I will not be a glutton for punishment.

  To distract herself, Twiss thought about Henry’s stupid little top hat and then Mrs. Bettle’s rear end. She thought of her tonic, which was sitting up in the bathtub, still foaming like the mouth of a rabid animal from all the baking soda she’d added. She’d put most of it in the Mason jars, and, as the name promised, it was purplish even if it wasn’t all the other things she was planning on promising people. When thinking about her tonic didn’t work, Twiss did the only thing she could think of to prevent herself from opening her mother’s note; she set the note and the piece of cake on the water pump platform and climbed up into the nearest lilac bush to create a distraction: the barn window.

  Should she look or shouldn’t she? She was looking already.

  The barn was dark except for the yellow light in the hayloft, which illuminated the loft and the dusty space directly below it. Twiss dropped the sprig of lilac she’d plucked from the branch when she saw the troughs of sand where the troughs of water used to be. The wall between the troughs, which had never been used to water horses or cattle as they were intended, had been knocked down and the equipment pushed into a corner and covered with a green tarp, on top of which sat a mi
lk bucket and a triangular flag. On the opposite side of the barn, four evenly spaced moguls made of sand occupied the space where the extra bags of feed for the chicken used to be.

  Twiss knew what her father had built. She’d watched him play the eighteenth hole countless times in the years he’d worked at the Spring Green course, as well as the last time he’d played it, when his ball landed in a fairway divot and Persy landed in the stream.

  Her father walked into the light and out again.

  “Dad!” she said, even though a pane of glass and a shadow were between them.

  She’d never loved him or believed in him as much as she did just then—he was going to be the golf pro again! He hadn’t given up on himself or on them. Maybe he was close to rebecoming what he’d been and recovering what he’d lost; maybe that was the reason Twiss hadn’t felt him watching over her or Milly lately.

  “Dad!” she said again. “I’m coming!”

  Twiss was on her way down the lilac bush and was ready to burst or plow or smash through the barn door and jump straight into her father’s arms like she did when she was a little girl, when she looked at the window again and saw Bett.

  She and Twiss’s father were standing between the second and third of her father’s handmade moguls, looking toward the troughs of sand. Her father had his hand on Bett’s shoulders, as if he were squaring her for a shot. Bett’s cheeks were flushed, and the top button of her dress, the light green one Twiss’s mother had given her, was undone.

  “Dad?” Twiss said.

  And then, beginning to lose her hold, “Bett?”

  Twiss fell the rest of the way out of the lilac bush, and though the branches scraped her skin and she hit the ground hard, she hurried to the barn door, which she ripped open.

  “Dad!” she yelled, and he turned.

  Her father looked surprised and a little bit scared, which told Twiss she was right to have interrupted.

  Bett dropped the golf club on the dirt. When she bent to pick it up, the little blue vein pulsed on her forehead.

  “Twiss,” she said in the same voice she’d said, You’ve got the Big Dipper on your face.

  Twiss realized then that a new kind of love—different from the sisterly or fatherly kind or even the motherly kind—was what she’d felt when Bett’s lips were pressed against hers the morning Aunt Gertrude’s letter arrived. She knew because she was jealous of her father.

  “Why didn’t you tell me what you were working on?” Twiss said to him.

  Her father’s face said I’m sorry.

  “He couldn’t,” Bett said, coming toward her. “We—”

  Twiss backed away from the barn. She started running because the rush of her feelings frightened her and she didn’t know how to untangle them. On her way to the driveway, she passed the water pump, the piece of vanilla cake, and the pretty pink note.

  Dear Joe,

  I would be honored to go to the fair with you.

  Love, Maisie

  21

  illy went into her father’s old room, the prebarn, postmatrimonial spartan square. All that was left was a mattress with a head-shaped stain, a creaky box spring, and a skyscraper of dust sprouting ambitiously from each corner. After their parents died, they’d set the buck’s head on their father’s mattress—temporarily, they agreed—and shut the door.

  Three years later, when they reopened it, the mattress was stained yellow and the skin and fur on the buck’s head had peeled back, revealing the bones that had held it together in life and now in death, white and brittle as chalk. A pair of sensible sisters would have taken the buck out to the woods and let the animals take what they would and let the elements take care of the rest. Milly and Twiss hauled it up to the attic.

  Twiss had wanted to send the buck’s head to Bett, and Milly had had to work hard to convince her to leave Bett alone.

  “Can’t we at least send her its eyes?” Twiss had said. “We don’t even have to write a return address on the envelope. The eyes speak for themselves.”

  Milly had put a mental hand on her hip because, even then, she was tired of lifting up her real one. “How would you like to receive a pair of wolf eyes in the mail?”

  “I’d like it just fine,” Twiss had said.

  “Go ahead then,” Milly had said, but Twiss never did.

  Milly went back into their mother’s room to retrieve the bird book, which Twiss was outraged Milly had kept all of these years. Twiss was always threatening to burn it, but she said the act of burning it would lend it more credence than it deserved—which was really just Twiss’s way of saying, You deserve more than a lousy book about birds. We both do.

  Milly took the bird book up to the attic, although she had to rest on each step before she climbed the next one, her hip was so sore. If she’d purchased a more reasonable walker, she might have actually used it up where it was dark and no one would see her.

  “What’s the difference if people see you?” she could hear Twiss saying.

  That was another interesting aspect of living with the same person for all your life; after fifty or sixty years, you didn’t even have to be in the same room to have a conversation anymore. “I’m allowed to have a pinch of vanity, aren’t I?” Milly said.

  “You don’t measure vanity like salt,” Twiss said.

  Milly turned on the light with one hand and clung to the banister with the other. She hadn’t been up in the attic since she’d had to show a repairman where the roof was leaking. That day, she’d stopped at the top of the stairs and pointed at the bucket full of brownish water overflowing onto the floorboards in the corner.

  “The water will keep finding its way in,” he’d said. “I’ve seen it in these old houses before. At first, you’ll use up all your pots and pans trying to contain it. You’ll develop a system. The frying pan for the little leak, the saucepan for the medium one, and the Crock-Pot for the big one. You’ll get to thinking your system’s working fine. Well, even. Then one day you’ll wake up and your bed will be floating.”

  Although the repairman’s story didn’t frighten Milly into going down to the bank and applying for a home repair loan, it did remind her of the story Bett had told about the flood before Deadwater was called Deadwater. She’d always liked the part about the jar of beef jerky getting caught in the gutter. Milly had never wanted to go there, in part because she didn’t think she’d be able to survive what Father Stone would have called the ungodliness of such a place—if he didn’t like leeches, he certainly wouldn’t have liked murderous birds—but also because she was afraid of just how different it would be than Bett had described. People might not have had to canoe to get where they wanted to go. They might not have been hopeless and then what had happened would start to seem the way it had seemed to Twiss all along: unfair.

  Milly sat on the nearest box that would support her weight. The box was full of her mother’s old magazines, which were covered with green fuzz now. Apparently, it had been easier to carry them up two flights of stairs than to carry them to the trash on level ground.

  “I might look at them again,” Milly remembered telling Twiss. And she remembered thinking that she genuinely would, perhaps on a slow afternoon when the weather wasn’t cooperating or if she wanted to get a new idea for a blanket or a scarf, although there was a limit on how many scarves a person could make in his or her lifetime.

  “Just like I might finish my model airplane,” Twiss had said.

  “I’m still keeping them,” Milly had said. “I don’t think our mother would appreciate us throwing them out. Where do you think she got the idea for lamb au lait with root vegetables?”

  “A French insane asylum?”

  “Here,” Milly had said, holding up one of the magazines, which was an admitted stretch since no recipe to her knowledge had ever called for lamb with milk, but she felt her mother deserved credit for all that she’d tried to hold together in the midst of everything falling apart.

  “It was her own fault,” Twiss had said.
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  Milly looked around the attic, at the boxes and chests and the half-finished projects scattered across the floor as if a storm had blown them there. The air up here seemed different than it did on the floor below; it smelled of toadstool and must, and it was sweet and acrid from years of being shut up without the sift of free-flowing air. Milly shifted her weight from one buttock to the other and in the middle of this maneuver (because at her age it really was a maneuver) she saw the case of leftover Purple Prairie Tonic, which was still contained by Mrs. Collier’s Mason jars but was no longer evocative of anything in bloom. The jars were sitting on the floor below the boarded-up window as if the tiny slant of light might revive them; beyond the window the birds—finches, bluebirds, and a single upland plover—were chirping.

  “I know you don’t really think that,” Milly said.

  The sight of the Mason jars led her back to the town fair.

  She could see Twiss rearranging her jars of Purple Prairie Tonic from a simple line into a pyramid, trying to sell them with a manic energy and an equally manic twinkle in her eye. She could see her mother and father strolling along in the late light, untwining their fingers, it seemed, just so they could entwine them again. And she could see Bett.

  But of everything she saw, the motion of the Ferris wheel was the only thing Milly felt, the sailing up and the sailing back down.

  22

  he morning of the town fair, Milly fluttered around her cake, making last-minute adjustments to the decorations—tractor axles and gearshifts weren’t as easy to render out of flour and butter as she’d thought they were going to be. The axles were nearly impossible to make symmetrical, and the gearshift wouldn’t stay in the neutral position. Everyone else was working his or her hardest to distract Milly from completing this fine-tuning part of the process. Her mother was helping Mrs. Bettle subdue Henry (“It isn’t fair! I don’t want to go to the fair! I want a chocolate bar!” he kept saying, to which her mother said, “I hear you, honey; I’d like a chocolate bar too”), Bett was helping help Mrs. Bettle, and her father, by some odd miracle, had finally come out of the barn.