The Bird Sisters

by Rebecca Rasmussen

  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.”

  26

  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.

  “I want you to write a letter to my sister,” her mother said before Milly could set down the carafe of water she was holding. That morning’s Gazette had stressed the importance of hydration; water, the writer said, was the only element essential to human life, which made Milly want to write a strongly worded letter to the editor: You’ve obviously never been in love.

  “Aunt Gertrude?” Milly said.

  Her mother had drawn the shades, which gave the effect of twilight even though just beyond the windows the sun was shining brightly without a single discouraging cloud in the sky. The bedroom smelled of sweat and urine.

  Milly moved to open a window. “What should I say?”

  “I don’t want fresh air!” her mother snapped.

  And then in a softer tone, “You’re good at finding les mots judicieux.”

  “Judicieux?” Milly said.

  “Words that cover up how you really feel,” her mother said.

  Milly sat on the edge of the bed as if anchored by a thread. Although her mother hadn’t escaped the sphere of Twiss’s wrath—If she’d been a better wife, maybe this wouldn’t have happened—she’d escaped Milly’s. Milly had always been able to see through her mother’s hard edges, the repetition of certain phrases year after year, to the core of her desires. She could see that like most people in the world, her mother just wanted to be loved.

  Whenever her mother had been particularly unhappy in the past, she’d tell the story of how she and her aunt had given up their inheritances and married for love.

  “We weren’t given what we were promised,” she’d say.

  “What were you promised?” Milly would say.

  “I don’t remember anymore.”

  “I could help you,” Milly said once, when she was a little girl.

  She’d explained about the game she and Twiss played whenever they lost track of their thoughts. One of them would say a word and the other would have to say everything they associated with that word until they remembered what they’d been thinking about.

  “It’s not that kind of forgetting,” her
mother had said.

  “Dad,” Milly had said anyway.

  “That’s your word,” she’d added, when her mother didn’t say anything. “You’re supposed to think of another one that goes with it.”

  Her mother had looked up from the wash bucket. “Regret.”

  This was years before Milly’s father sequestered himself in the barn, when he still played golf like a pro. Still, it was this moment that Milly remembered more than others: her mother bent over the kitchen floor on her hands and knees, with a cloth in one hand and a scouring pad in the other, the end of her braid trailing in the wash bucket. Before she’d said her word, she’d looked at Milly with a softness she rarely allowed anyone to see.

  “My sister’s smarter than I am,” her mother said now, knowing every sad detail about Milly’s father and Bett. She tucked a wool blanket beneath her chin. “She always was.”

  “Didn’t you earn all A’s in high school?” Milly said, even though she knew what her mother meant. Although Milly was the one who earned perfect grades term after term, Twiss was the one with all of the creativity and the daring. Milly may have known how to balance both ends of Mr. Stewart’s chemistry equations without making a mistake, but Twiss was the one who possessed the heart to be a real scientist.

  “Gertie finally left him,” Milly’s mother said, picking at the wool. “Bett’s father.”

  “Where did she go?” Milly said.

  “Home,” her mother said after a while. “I had a letter from Butterfield just before all this happened. To think I spent hours trying to come up with the right way to tell Bett, to spare her grief, damage, while she and your father were doing what they were doing in the barn. Some things just make you want to curl up and die, don’t they?”

  Milly thought of the man from Bett’s story, who’d collapsed while trying to cross the bog and ended up decomposing in a closet, while Bird Daddy lived happily in his place.

  “My father went to get Gertie,” her mother added. “All she had to do was write a letter. It’s been eighteen years—you’d think it would have taken more than that.”

  “Do you want me to write a letter to him too?” Milly said.

  “I’m too old to go home now,” her mother said. She looked toward the windows as if she could see past the thick shades all the way to Butterfield. “He had big hopes for us.”

  Her mother turned on her side. “I guess we all did.”

  Milly went downstairs to find the address book and the roll of stamps. Was this an occasion for the good stationery or for a note card or a piece of scrap paper? Milly saw the appropriateness of all three.

  Even though her mother had barricaded herself in her room and her father had glued himself to the foot of her door, and neither of them would eat a scrap of food, it didn’t yet occur to Milly that everything wouldn’t eventually be all right again. She thought of what Father Rice had once said about miracles, but parents resuming the role of being parents didn’t seem like the same thing as a chicken laying an egg twice in one day.

  What happens tomorrow?

  The moment Milly sat down at the kitchen table, Bett wandered into the room. Not only had Twiss disowned her, their father and mother wouldn’t acknowledge the fact of her physical presence in the house either. Overnight, Bett’s status had changed from beloved to despised. She looked stricken, as if she might collapse. No longer was she wearing the blue dress Mr. Peterson had bought her; she was wearing one of her own dresses, which had disintegrated in the wash bucket, but which she’d mended solidly enough to put on. The gray material was not fine, or flattering against her skin.

  Her fingernails were jagged from biting them. Her feet were bare.

  “Please let me sit here,” she said to Milly.

  Milly didn’t want to be mean to Bett, but she didn’t want to be nice to her either. Though what happened wasn’t Bett’s fault—because it wasn’t Bett’s fault—she was the easiest one to blame. She thought of every mean thing Bett had ever said to her, as well as every mean thing she had done, to fuel an emotion that was unnatural to her.

  “Do what you want,” she said to Bett.

  The two of them sat in silence for over an hour, Milly writing words on the back of her chore list and scratching them out, and Bett looking out the window as if the view might harm her. In the distance, and although it wasn’t Sunday, church bells chimed.

  “Since I got here I knew home wasn’t going to be home anymore,” Bett said abruptly, as though Milly had asked her to justify herself, and maybe she had by being silent. “I shouldn’t have gone near the barn, but I couldn’t stay away from it. He told me things about you all, as a family, what everything had been like before. I told him things too.”

  Milly put down her pen. “You knew your parents were getting divorced?”

  Bett looked as fragile as she had the day she arrived, despite having a clean bill of health instead of a pair of weak lungs and boots with cardboard soles.

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s why my mother sent me down here.”

  Milly thought of the ground bees and how miraculous it really was that not a single one of them had stung her cousin even though she’d thrust her hands straight into their home.

  Once Bett started to cry, Milly couldn’t hold on to her anger anymore. She reached into her dress pocket and handed Bett a handkerchief with her initials embroidered at the corner.

  “I wasn’t born in a canoe,” Bett said, her eyes regaining the puffiness they’d finally lost. “I’ll probably have to give birth in one, though.”

  Milly thought of the baby growing in her cousin’s stomach. Just before her mother had shut herself in her bedroom, she’d said, I may as well be dead if that baby breathes life.

  “Maybe it won’t be as bad as a canoe,” Milly said.

  “I keep trying to think like you,” Bett said, rubbing her stomach as if the baby were whimpering in its watery world instead of Bett in the dry, late summer one. “You’re the only one who’s ever brushed out my hair. Why were so nice to me when I was so mean to you?”

  “You’re my cousin,” Milly said. “Besides, that’s what people are supposed to do.”

  Bett smiled a little. “You would have made it in Deadwater.”

  “Thanks,” Milly said. “I still don’t think I want to go there.”

  From the folds of her dress, Bett pulled out a pair of knitted pink infant socks and set them on the table. “A woman at the fair gave them to me.”

  “How did she know?” Milly said.

  “I guess it showed on my face.”

  Just then, someone knocked on the screen door, and Milly stood up to answer it. Mrs. Bettle had a way of dropping by at the worst possible moments. She’d probably want to talk about Henry and the fair, how ungrateful people in Spring Green were. What kind of miracle were they looking for? They booed him. Henry has hurt feelings, you know. Or it might be Dr. Greene and Mrs. Collier, stopping by to see if anyone wanted to take a drive with them and have a sew.

  “I’ve already picked out names,” Bett said.

  Before Milly stepped onto the front porch to send the visitor away—no disturbances, her father had warned from his place in the hallway—she turned back to Bett.

  “What are they?” she said.

  Bett looked up from the pair of tiny pink socks. “There’s really only one.

  “Arabella,” she said, touching her pale cheek. “Bella, for short.”

  Asa had come to talk to Milly’s father but settled on a walk when Milly told him that her father wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t come down. The two moved up through the meadow, around to the pond, and back down to the vegetable garden again, which because of the differences in heat today, felt like entering and exiting three separate ecosystems. Hot, hotter, and hottest. Asa wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand, but instead of wiping his hand on his shirt like he usually did when he was mowing, he let his hand air-dry as if there was a sudden disjoint between his instincts and the we
ather.

  Walking the property with Asa felt like swimming with a life preserver. As if for the last four days Milly had held her breath to stay afloat, she exhaled all that was stale and inhaled the fresher, less complicated scent of meadow flowers and soil.

  I missed you, she thought, but said, “I’m sorry I don’t have cookies for you today.”

  She was remembering the days earlier in the summer when what kind of cookie would win Asa’s heart had occupied her mind each time it rained and how complicated the process of elimination had seemed. “I would have made some if I’d known you were coming.”

  She latched on to the leaf of a tomato plant, remembering also when the fruit was still hard and green and full of potential. Now most of the tomatoes had turned red or orange and had either been pecked to pulp by the birds or had burst under the sharp glare of the sun.

  “I don’t even have lemonade,” Milly said.

  “Actually, I have something for you,” Asa said.

  He reached into the leather saddlebag he’d slung across his shoulder and knelt in the garden, even though he was wearing good trousers and a good shirt. He’d fixed his hair differently too. Instead of mowing, he looked like he was about to go to church.

  “It belonged to my great-grandmother Kathryn,” he said.