The Bird Sisters

by Rebecca Rasmussen

  Bett dropped the tiny knit sock on the floor.

  “The reason doesn’t matter,” Milly said. “It’s done now.”

  “I don’t understand,” Bett whispered. She was pale now, but the blue vein on her neck pulsed, betraying her quickening heartbeat.

  “You don’t have to,” Milly said. “You have that luxury.”

  She turned away, so Bett wouldn’t see the tears forming in the corners of her eyes or her effort to delay her sobs by placing a hand across her pale throat. In a softer voice, she said, “Please just go out to the garden and take care of him. Please just—”

  Milly squeezed her voice box and then released it.

  “I don’t have it in me to ask you again.”

  “But he’s yours,” Bett said.

  “No,” Milly said, the taste of salt, of loss, on her lips. “He’s yours now.”

  That day, Milly stood by the open window watching beneath the cover of the curtain as her cousin walked out to the garden. When she saw Asa get up off of his knees and brush the dirt from his trousers and Bett put her hand on his shoulder, Milly’s legs buckled and she fell to the floor.

  Twiss would have run out and pushed her way between the two of them. She would have said I take it all back! But Milly stayed on the floor in the heart of the kitchen, listening to the murmurs of Bett and Asa in the garden, and the shouts of her mother and father upstairs, and the pounds of Twiss and Hammer in the barn. She stayed because she couldn’t leave and because she couldn’t go, and even though there was no real hope left, she reached for the tiny pink sock beneath the kitchen table and that’s what she hoped for.

  When the cuckoo clock struck nine and the mosquitoes and moths were on the downside of flinging themselves against the screened door and the birds had stopped chirping and the sunlight had turned to moonlight, starlight, Milly got up from the floor and did the only thing she could think to do. She turned on the lights, opened one of the cupboards, and brought down a bar of baking chocolate and a sack of sugar, which she dipped her fingers into.

  The taste of the fine crystal granules, the sparkle of them in the light, would always, did always, the whole of her life, remind her of the words she’d said to Asa in place of the ones she’d wanted to say to him.

  I love you, she thought then, and every time thereafter that sugar was on her tongue.

  She didn’t want to know the significant details of Asa and Bett’s courtship—the moment Asa realized he could be happy, or at least not miserable, with someone other than her. She wondered, though, about the small ones; had the ring fit onto Bett’s finger or did it have to be adjusted? Did Asa’s heart thump when he was with Bett? Did hers? Did she wear that blue dress, those crystal shoes? Did she spin round and round with Mr. Peterson’s approval? Did she think of them as often as they thought of her?

  As for the child growing inside of Bett, Milly didn’t know; people didn’t speak of such things, although they may have whispered. But not for long since Asa was Mr. Peterson’s boy—his having so much money would have made the whole thing matter less.

  Did Asa know? Did he care?

  Milly had lived most of her life not knowing the answer to that.

  Bulked together, her questions made her wonder how deep her and Asa’s love could have been for either of them to give the other one up, but she guessed that if attachments could be formed in an afternoon, then detachments could also be formed in that frame of time.

  Often, when Avery was running by on Saturday morning, Milly would feel an overwhelming urge to follow her, although she couldn’t explain why. There was something about the silhouette of Avery against the rolling green hills and the curve of the blue sky, Avery’s flaxen ponytail swaying in time with her legs and her legs propelling her toward the wide-open road ahead that made Milly want to run after her, to say Take me with you.

  She saw Asa once, in the general store, after all of his children were grown and a few of his grandchildren, too. He was buying a package of framing nails and a tin of black licorice.

  “Say hello to Bett for me,” the clerk said. “I miss her stories.”

  “She’s visiting her mother in Butterfield,” Asa said.

  Milly was already behind Asa in line when she realized it was him. Although his hair had grayed and his shoulders had stooped, and time had played out in all the usual ways with the rest of him, the hairs on the back of his neck were still fine. They were still blond.

  He still tripped over his words, too, which made Milly ache. She was praying that the clerk wouldn’t say hello to her until he was gone.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Milly,” the clerk said. “Your soaps are in. The women from the Sewing Society have been eying them all day. I had to swat one of their hands for you. One of them said she’d been to Provence. They won’t let my wife become a member. They say we live too far in the country. I saved a soap for her, if that’s OK. My wife, I mean. Jinny.”

  “Of course,” Milly said, and started for the door.

  “What’s wrong?” the clerk said. “Aren’t you feeling well?”

  “I’m a little dizzy,” Milly said.

  “I’ll walk you out,” the clerk said.

  Asa turned around and met her eyes. “I’ll walk her.”

  The two of them walked together only a hundred yards that day, out the front door of the general store and across the street to the car, where Milly had left Twiss reading the Farmers’ Almanac and drinking a cream soda. That walk was the happiest of Milly’s life. She and Asa didn’t say anything to each other until they got to the car, which Twiss had abandoned momentarily for the hardware store. The almanac lay open on the passenger seat, and the empty bottle of soda lay on the floor.

  Milly and Asa walked along the sidewalk as if they had always done so; their pace was slower since they were old now, but it was still synchronized the way it was when they’d walked through the meadow. This time, there were no black rat snakes, no reasons to jump onto Asa’s back or for Asa to hold her.

  The whole time, Milly could see the car, the end point.

  There would be iced tea later, a quiet evening on the porch with Twiss. Perhaps talk of the new construction on the south side of town. The townspeople had voted for a town pool and a concession stand, where children could buy hot dogs and lollipops and bags of popcorn the size of drums. That was the only way that children would enter into the conversation, and Twiss would be careful to emphasize their greediness, their bratty tongues. She’d predict a pool bottom full of lollipops and old Band-Aids, fungus between fat toes.

  Stop, Milly would want to say, but she wouldn’t because her sister would only be trying to protect her from the vision of little girls in pink ruffled bathing suits and boys in blue swim trunks, their mothers scooping them up for supper, wondering if a bath would quell the scent of chlorine in their hair, if soap bubbles would be enough of a draw.

  Stop.

  And Asa did.

  Just before Milly got into the car and Twiss returned with a new hammer and drove home the long way, past the house with grass for a roof and, now, the roots of an oak tree and a family of goats, past the fields of corn and wheat, soybeans in the odd years and potatoes in the even ones, Asa squeezed her hand as tenderly as he’d pressed his lips against her ankle in the garden all of those years ago.

  “It was good to see you,” he said. “You’re as lovely as I remember.”

  “Yes,” was all Milly could make her mouth say before Asa let go of her hand.

  The next afternoon, when Twiss went out to the mailbox, she found a brown paper bag with Milly’s name on it and brought it inside.

  “It’s about time you had a secret admirer,” she said. “Aren’t you going to open it?”

  “I’ll open it later,” Milly said, meaning when you’re gone.

  After Twiss went out the barn, Milly went up to their bedroom with the brown paper bag. She looked out the window before she turned it upside down and the bars of lavender soap shaped like seashel
ls and the card shaped like a rectangle came tumbling out. Asa’s name graced the front of the card. A note graced the back.

  I know why you did it, Milly. Bella swings a golf club just like him.

  Milly sat a long time on her old twin mattress, staring at the fleur-de-lis carved into the headboard, at the life that didn’t belong to her and the life that did, before she placed the soaps beneath the velvet tray in her jewelry box and closed it. She never washed her hands with a single one of the seashell-shaped soaps, although from time to time, when Twiss had gone for a walk or to the barn, she’d open her jewelry box and examine her only secret.

  La joie de vivre. The scent of lavender. Forgiveness. Age-old love.

  31

  illy gathered the pickles and the beets in her arms. She turned off the light in the cellar and went upstairs to start supper. Although there was nothing particular to celebrate on this day, on the one before, and probably on the one after, once she’d made the egg salad and opened the jar of beets, Milly decided a tray of biscuits wouldn’t be too much trouble, and then it was back down to the cellar for jam. The day had been taken up by exhaustion, the dread and the fear of it, but as the sun slipped toward the horizon and night began to fall over the hills like a blue curtain, Milly began to feel less ready to fall into eternal sleep.

  She looked in the cupboards to see what else could be made into a meal. There were two cans of chicken soup, which she heated on the stove. In the refrigerator, she found a container of cottage cheese and a bag of carrots, which she peeled and trimmed the way her mother used to. She hauled out the sugar, boiled it with tea bags and water, and then iced the whole thing down. When she finally stopped herself, the kitchen table looked like a haphazard version of Thanksgiving. Even with the windows open and the fans running and the sun setting, the heat in the kitchen was intolerable.

  Milly’s urges to cook tended to come at inopportune times; either it was too hot or too cold or no one was hungry and the whole thing went to waste. That had been the way with countless meals, including the wedding cake she’d made for Bett and Asa.

  The cake, a simple buttercream creation with yellow rosettes, had incurred wrath from both her mother and father.

  “You’re determined to ruin your life just like your father’s ruined mine,” her mother had said. “It’s not as nice as Twiss thinks to wind up old and alone.”

  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.

  Bett’s getting married. What a blessing!

  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 si
tting 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.

  Rise up and fly!

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