32
illy knew what people thought: that they were just the weird old sisters who rescued birds, just like the crossing guard was the man with no teeth and the house on Oak Street was haunted and the river bottom was home to people who were missing their limbs and their eyes. That was the way with small towns, and there was something comforting about that.
Milly set the table on the porch and rang the cowbell for supper.
A few minutes later, Twiss came walking across the field of prairie onions and bluestems, a bouquet of lilacs in her hands.
“What’s all this?” she said, when she reached the porch.
“Supper,” Milly said, smiling.
Twiss handed her the lilacs. “I’ll get the vase.”
“I’ll get it,” Milly said, noticing the goldfinch peeking out of her sister’s front pocket, which Twiss had forgotten to bury in the gladiola bed.
After supper, Milly would urge Twiss into the bathtub like her mother used to do when Twiss was little and had wet her bed. Her mother would exchange the wet linens for dry ones while Twiss blew soap bubbles around the bathroom, pretending they were bullets and she was a cowboy. Wetting her bed was the one form of losing control Twiss had ever been sensitive about as a child, and their mother had gone to great lengths to spare her embarrassment.
While Twiss soaked this evening, Milly would take the goldfinch out back with all of the other birds that had been lost. She’d say a few words or she wouldn’t; if not, the birds that weren’t yet lost would gather in the branches of nearby trees and on the slanting eaves of the house and on the red sugar feeder meant for hummingbirds, but that also attracted every other kind of bird to its nectar, and do her trilling for her.
“Tell me about your day,” she said to Twiss.
“Well,” Twiss said. “Snapper ate another one of my balls, and the Raouls weren’t too pleased to see me either. Mostly, I just wandered around, though.”
Milly went inside to get the vase. She filled it with water and arranged the lilacs, which smelled more wonderful than any perfume she could have bought. From the screen door, she watched her sister take off her muck boots and set them on the stairs in the same impatient way she had all her life. Her hands were shaking again, but otherwise she seemed all right.
“What did you do today?” Twiss said.
“A little of this,” Milly said. “A little of that.”
Before the two sat down to supper, they sat together first on the peeling brown porch steps, Milly with her feet placed firmly on the bottom step and Twiss with her feet splayed out on the crumble of loose dirt below it, a glass of iced tea between them. Beyond the porch and their feet were the rolling hills, the county and country, and the winding Wisconsin River, which gained and lost strength, narrowed and widened, rose and fell, all the way down to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, the confluence of river and ocean.
Twiss picked up the glass, drank the tea down halfway, and held the glass out to Milly. “I’ve been so thirsty today,” she said, wiping the corners of her mouth with her sleeve and her forehead with the back of her hand.
Milly glanced at the sky, which, although it was still clear and high above them now, would eventually bring gray and rain because that was the nature of weather patterns.
The nature of nature.
“Me too,” Milly said and took the glass from her sister.
Acknowledgments
he Bird Sisters could not have been written without the support of my wonderful husband, Hans, and my lovely daughter, Ava; to them, I am eternally grateful for letting me sneak off at strange hours to write this novel and then listening to me fret about it for more months than any of us can (or wants to) count. My dear mother, father, stepmother, and four brothers have also supported me passionately along the way, even when the novel was still a distant dream of mine. To my dedicated teachers at Penn State and at the University of Massachusetts, I must say thank you, especially to Charlotte Holmes, who taught me how to write bravely and beautifully. Her writing was and continues to be a strong model for my own. Without her, I don’t think this book would have become this book. There are others, of course, to thank. The incomparable Margot Livesey, Noy Holland, Sam Michel, and Tony Giardina. My best gal and talented writer and teacher, Dani Blackman, has put up with my writing and me for many years now; she’s talked me down from more than one metaphorical ledge. Dani is magical, essential, and wise; I am truly blessed to know her. My gifted and incredibly kind agent, Michelle Brower, believed in The Bird Sisters from the very beginning and worked extremely hard to get the book into the right hands during a time when hands weren’t flying up left and right for first fiction. Those hands ended up belonging to Kate Kennedy at Crown Publishers, who has been absolutely lovely to me, both as a friend and an editor. I envy myself for getting the chance to work with this savvy wonder woman! To the rest of the team at Crown, thank you with all my heart. From copyediting to design to publicity, I have been continually amazed by the attention devoted to this author and her bird sisters.
About the Author
ebecca Rasmussen’s stories have appeared in Triquarterly and Mid-American Review magazines, and she has been a finalist in both Narrative magazine’s 30 Below contest for writers under the age of thirty and in Glimmer Train’s Family Matters contest. This is her first novel. She lives in St. Louis with her husband and daughter and teaches at Fontbonne University.
Visit her at www.thebirdsisters.com.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Acknowledgments
About the Author
The Bird Sisters Page 26