The Bird Sisters

by Rebecca Rasmussen

  Milly opened the box Asa placed in her hand. Inside was a silver ring filigreed with vines and dotted with tiny diamonds. There it was—everything she hadn’t written in a diary this summer, but everything she’d wanted anyway. The silver shone in the light like a lure.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said to Asa.

  “Since you brought me the owl cookies I haven’t been able to mow a straight line,” Asa said. “I was supposed to ask your father first, but I couldn’t wait any longer. I thought I’d see you at the fair, but my father asked me to go with him to Illinois for the weekend. He had business there. I heard you won a goat, though.”

  “Hoo-Hoo,” Milly said. “He’s harassing the chickens right now.”

  Asa looked toward the woods and smiled. “I’m sure they’re excited to have someone besides your sister doing that for a change. How is Twiss?”

  The moment Asa mentioned Twiss, Milly’s sense of her future with him, her entitlement to it, blew away from her like wind.

  Promise that you won’t leave until I’m old enough to leave too.

  Twiss was only fourteen years old, and her mother and her father were in the middle of a war that couldn’t possibly have a winner: Her mother was intent on not letting her father into her bedroom, and her father was intent on not leaving the floor in front of her door.

  Margaret, Margaret, said her father. Open this door.

  He used to call us his darlings, said her mother.

  I hate you both! said Twiss, who’d never been skilled at being a peacekeeper. Even now, Milly heard the crash of Hammer in the barn.

  “What did you say?” Milly asked Asa, thinking that leaving any of them behind would be like leaving people in the middle of a fire.

  “I guess I asked if you would marry me,” Asa said, blushing.

  Milly imagined the baby struggling in her dark womb water, kicking her tiny feet, trying her best to stay afloat. If fish could drown in floods, then couldn’t babies drown inside of unloved mothers, cousins cast aside?

  Bett had once asked Milly what it felt like to almost die the day the three of them went to the river to swim out to their sandbar and bathe in the afternoon sun. The day when halfway to the sandbar, Milly felt a tug on her leg and was pulled down.

  Consequence, she’d said that night, because she couldn’t explain the feeling of water forcing its way inside of her. She figured that any consequence Bett could dream up for her would be better than being filled up with the equivalent of all that was dark and frightening in the world, all that was the opposite of the self she knew, of goodness and light.

  After Bett and Twiss had laid her out on the sand and the water had come out of her lungs, and they’d informed her that she was not in fact dead, Bett had wiped the blood off Milly’s legs and smoothed the hair away from her face.

  “You owe me your life, you know.”

  Milly thought of Bett’s blue dress and the SS Forest and the spotless film of Bett’s lungs draped over a lightbulb like a lamp shade in the kitchen. She thought of how fond Mr. Peterson was of her cousin and how he’d lost a child of his own. A daughter with hair as red as apples.

  Milly imagined Bett standing on a pedestal in the bridal shop, turning round and round to admire her new crystal shoes in the mirrors: a kind of life she’d never known before, and after all that had happened, would likely never know again.

  Then she imagined Asa walking into the shop with grass stuck to his hair and clothes, looking up at Bett for a moment, more than a moment, and smiling.

  Milly handed the box back to him. “I can’t accept this.”

  “Why not?” he said, pressing his lips against her ankle as if she were merely teasing him.

  “Because—,” Milly said, closing her eyes.

  “Because why?” Asa said, growing serious. Instead of kissing her ankle, he latched on to the hem of her dress as if he knew she was about to run away.

  Milly visualized a pair of tiny pink feet and a tiny yet buoyant pink heart, which gave her the strength to say what, without them, she never could have said.

  “Because—,” she said, opening her eyes.

  My darling. My darling. My darling.

  See through me—

  Run after me—

  Don’t let me go.

  “I don’t love you.”

  27

  hen Milly rang the cowbell for supper, Twiss was surprised by the sound of the bell and also by her enormous thirst, which had grown and grown and grown as if she’d been stuffing cotton balls into her mouth, like hours, one after another. Had an entire day already passed? Only a day? The clocks on the wall told you one thing. The clocks in your mind told you another. Twiss circled the barn until she was back at the place she’d started. The goldfinch was still in her pocket, as was her trail of footprints in the layer of sand.

  Her mother was right. The goldfinch and the woman who’d run over it this morning had merely ignited her anger; her mother’s age-old blindness had made it flare. For a woman who claimed she’d lost all of her hope the day Twiss was born, her mother seemed to have plenty of it left on the day she took a ride in the biplane while Twiss’s father waved her on. If it had been Twiss, she’d have questioned her father’s sudden reattachment to her.

  She’d have said, “You can’t just decide when you want to love me and when you don’t. What have you done, Joseph?”

  Because her father was never that happy without achieving a hole in one or buying a new silk shirt or receiving a compliment from the wealthiest member of the course, who’d offered to set up a life insurance plan but like his swing didn’t follow through. Her father was never that happy when left entirely on his own, with no one to give him the validation he required to keep drawing in breath and letting it out again.

  In a way, Bett was like all of the other luxuries her father brought home for himself over the years. There were the golf accoutrements and the marbled steaks, and there was Bett, who, like all the other trinkets, their family couldn’t afford to keep but couldn’t afford to get rid of, either. Despite what her father had done, Twiss missed those holes in ones. She missed the gleam of her father’s teeth when he realized what he’d achieved.

  “I’m counting holes in ones,” he’d say. I’m counting what I’m worth.

  On good days, Twiss would be able to think of her father without thinking about his hands on the light green dress, the sheer material that graced Bett’s shoulders.

  I miss you, she’d say to herself, because unlike her mother, her father never visited her out of kindness or scorn. He never said anything about a heavenly golf course or an even more heavenly pro shop, which left his legs wobbly whenever he entered it.

  He never said anything at all.

  I miss you, too, she’d say to herself on the bad days.

  Twiss took a last look around the barn before she turned off the utility light and left it for the lilac bushes beyond and the scrap of shade their twist of branches offered in the early evening light. There were still a few good sprigs left, which Twiss clipped for Milly, who said the tiny flowers brought good fortune.

  “At least the white ones do,” Milly had said. “I don’t know about the purple ones.”

  “So luck then?” Twiss had said.

  “No, good fortune.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Chance versus fate.”

  “You mean choices versus decisions.”

  “They’re pretty,” Milly had said, sighing deeply. “I guess that’s all I mean.”

  Twiss had never quite been able to leave Milly—and what she’d sacrificed—alone. After a lifetime together, she still didn’t understand why her sister had declined Asa’s proposal and sent Bett out to the garden in her place. Or maybe Twiss understood why, but couldn’t forgive Milly for offering her future to Bett or forgive Bett for accepting it with only a trace of shame.

  For Milly,

  Because.

  The day the bird book arrived, Twiss stood at the e
nd of the driveway for over an hour, deciding whether or not to destroy the package or take it in to Milly. The return address made her want to set it on fire or hack at it with a knife—Mrs. Asa Peterson, penned so proudly in black fountain ink. Here is your life—was your life.

  It was easy to hate Bett on Milly’s behalf, to make up words Bett didn’t actually write on the pale blue paper, but it was harder to justify hating her on her own behalf. No future had been taken from Twiss and no package had arrived in its place.

  Except that it had.

  All the nights they’d sat on each other’s beds, and all the secrets they’d shared, added up to something between friendship and love. Twiss never forgot the feeling of Bett’s lips pressed against her own, the lone kiss of her life, how she’d expected to feel nothing and felt everything. Unlike Milly, Bett wasn’t beautiful, nor was she graceful or even particularly smart, but when she was in a room Twiss had wanted to be in that room too.

  After all, Bett had grrr.

  Father Rice was the only one who ever knew Twiss’s true feelings. On the night Twiss slept at Rollie and Adele’s house, she’d written him a letter.

  Dear Father Rice,

  I wanted to tell you that you were wrong about me—I’m not brave at all. I ran away from someone when I should have stood still.

  I love her, my cousin.

  Please tell me what I should do.

  Please tell me something.

  Please come home.

  Twiss

  In the end, Twiss took Bett’s package in to Milly because Bett had held Twiss’s face in her hands that day on the bed and said, “If you were a boy, I’d marry you.”

  I’d have married you, too, Twiss had often thought.

  Asa didn’t escape Twiss’s disappointment either. He was a coward in the garden that day, which made Twiss wonder how worthy of Milly he really was.

  “I don’t believe you,” Twiss would have said, if she’d been him. “You didn’t make anyone else a tractor cake. You didn’t make anyone else owl cookies either.”

  If she’d wanted to get married like Milly, she would have shoved that ring onto her fattest finger so it wouldn’t come off unless someone either cut it or wrestled it off her. She’d have made Asa drive her to the golf course right then so that Father Stone could marry them, and the golf pro and his silver flask of whiskey could witness the union. Hang Bett. She’d have done something on her own behalf. She’d have looked after her interests better.

  Milly was different. Up in the attic were boxes full of drawings of her future family from when they were young. There was rambunctious Jacob, and there was lovely, if a little different, Molly Blue. In most of the pictures, there was also a husband, tall and pencil-line thin, standing proudly beside his children even though he never had a name.

  Milly’s children were growing toadstools, while Bett’s children were growing children of their own. That Bett and Asa lived less than five miles away, on Mr. Peterson’s old farmstead by the river, had never stopped bothering Twiss. She still wouldn’t drive that way into town.

  “You don’t have to do this on my behalf,” Milly had said once, when they were out on a Sunday drive. Sometimes, the two of them would travel down to Cave of the Mounds or the state park for the afternoon. Either attraction required crossing the river.

  They’d just turned onto the county bridge, which still didn’t have guardrails despite how many people had driven off it over the years, sometimes on purpose and sometimes by accident. Most were pulled up too late or not at all.

  Milly gripped the door handle like she always did when they went over the river. “Half a century is an awfully long time to spite someone.”

  “Spite is too gentle a word for why I drive the other way,” Twiss said to Milly, when what she meant was You can’t always explain why you love the people you love.

  28

  ll in the same year, after Bett had married Asa and given birth to her first child, both of Twiss’s parents died. Her mother went first, technically by way of a fever although Milly believed by a broken heart, which Twiss believed was the same as surrender. Her father followed less than three months later. He’d lost his equilibrium by then and would roam the house in search of whichever of their mother’s possessions he could get his hands on.

  One night, he drank a bottle of their mother’s perfume, a wedding gift she’d made last almost twenty years, fell down the stairs, and broke his neck. The undertaker said he’d never worked on a dead man who smelled as good.

  “It’s French,” Twiss had said, of the perfume. “Millot’s Crêpe de Chine.”

  She’d tried it on in the moments after her mother died, dabbing her wrists the way her mother used to. To Twiss, the scent (the bottle promised Italian bergamot, neroli, basil, Egyptian jasmine, and fresh aldehydes) was as complicated as her mother; the list of ingredients individualized what otherwise blended together. She didn’t know why she’d put it on when she could have been doing more useful things. Her mother was still on the bed, with one arm dangling off where she’d tried to reach out to Twiss and Twiss had moved away from her.

  “Just because you’re sick doesn’t mean you get to love me,” Twiss had said.

  She’d turned toward the window, toward the view of the garden and the barn, the folds of green fanning out and away from the house. She thought of her father, who was still sitting outside the door, foolishly hoping that the old adage too little, too late didn’t apply to him, believing that it shouldn’t. She thought about how she’d chosen him year after year, confusing intentions with outcomes, enthusiasm with self-interest. Her last conversation with her mother gripped her like a root, still, all because she couldn’t have it with her father.

  “Did I ever tell you I baked a heart-shaped loaf of bread?” her mother said.

  “I hate bread,” Twiss said. “I hate hearts even more.”

  Twiss had always believed that on her mother’s deathbed, her true feelings for her mother would finally show themselves, as if for the whole of her life they’d simply been obscured by a sheet, albeit a black one. She’d counted on the words “I love you” rolling off her tongue as easily as the words “I hate you” did. She wasn’t prepared for the smell of urine and sweat—the giving up or the giving in, which made her want to slap her mother’s face.

  Wake up! she wanted to say. We’ve all lost something.

  “Do you remember that program I used to listen to?” her mother said. “A Day in the Life of … It always bothered me that they never did one on a housewife.”

  “People don’t want to hear about that,” Twiss said. “They want to hear about driving tundra buggies over crevasses in the Arctic Circle. They want to hear about watching the northern lights with polar bears.”

  “I knew you remembered that day!” her mother said.

  “I’m not an idiot,” Twiss said.

  “I rode in that airplane,” her mother said. “They could have done a Day in the Life of … about that. That’s not particularly ordinary.”

  “Well, it isn’t extraordinary,” Twiss said.

  “How would you know?” her mother said. “You haven’t flown over your life.”

  Her mother looked up at the ceiling, as if it were a window. “It didn’t look how I thought it would. It looked so much better.”

  Her mother said the pilot of the biplane had gotten them into the air, bounding skyward, before she had a chance to change her mind out loud, which she’d planned on doing despite winning the kidney bean contest and Twiss’s father waving her on.

  “Unhappiness on the ground is one thing,” she said to Twiss. “You can close a door on it. You can draw a shade. I was afraid of what might happen in the air.”

  What her mother said she remembered most vividly was the moment the river came into view and how the higher they climbed, the more it looked like a sheet of blue ice. From the air, she said, she couldn’t believe that anyone had ever drowned at the current’s hand. She said she couldn’t believe t
he river had swallowed so many people’s futures and spit out alternate ones in the space of a few minutes on peaceful Sunday afternoons.

  “I have a theory about why your father can’t play golf,” she said.

  “He hurt his hip,” Twiss said.

  “He has a conscience.”

  After that, the plane bounced over cool drifts into steadier air. When the pilot steered away from the river, the site of the Accident, her mother saw the old forestry road leading into Spring Green, which skirted the golf course and the town.

  “Before you and Milly were born,” her mother said, “a couple about our age stopped in to get directions one day. They were up from Madison, out on a Sunday drive, and had gotten turned around on the country roads. Your father wanted to be helpful. While I fixed lemonade, he drew a detailed map. He told them that once they got across the river, they’d be able to smell freshly cut grass. They’d be able to see perfectly aligned moguls.”

  “So?” Twiss said.

  “He drew a map of the golf course,” her mother said.

  Twiss glanced at the bedroom door.

  “The course looked more perfect from the air than it does from the ground,” her mother said. “Golf balls dotted the green like pearls. I was sorry for your father.”

  When the pilot asked where she lived, Twiss’s mother told him. Before he turned back for the field beside the town fair, the pilot flew her over their home: the house, the pond, the meadow, and the barn, the sight of which her mother said reminded her of the little matchstick houses she used to build when she was a girl. She said they were always flawless until she left them outside overnight and rain began to fall.

  Just before the plane tilted up and away from the house, and the engines roared, she saw the garden and the clothesline, the bird feeder, which she’d filled with the last of her sugar cubes and a cup of warm water, and her floral aprons swaying in the breeze.

  “I was sorry for me, too,” she said. “Neither of us was given what we were promised.”

  Twiss opened the drapes as well as the windows, inhaling the fresh air until she could breathe without smelling urine. A hummingbird was perched on the sill.