Flight Patterns

by Karen White

  There was something else, too, though—something I couldn’t quite identify. I walked slowly, placing both feet on the same step before moving on to the next. I paused on the bottom stair, my hand on the newel post as my fingernail worried the nick in the wood on the edge.

  Lost. Yes, that was it. Birdie had looked lost, confused. Not the blank, absent stare I was used to, but an active grieving for something she couldn’t find. But why? I stood in the dark, smelling the salt air of the bay, and decided that the list was far too long for me to examine right then.

  I gathered up the photographs, then let myself out the back door. I had planned to go directly to my car, but new light was beginning to tingle the bottom edge of the sky, pulling me forward to the dock that had been my refuge for most of my childhood—and the scene of the infamous retaliatory sunbathing. Its sun-bleached boards led out into the water, like a finger pointing to my destination on the map.

  A brown heron sluiced through the cascading colors of the clouds, and it seemed as if an old friend were welcoming me home. I stared at the brightening light until my eyes watered, thinking of Maisy’s grief and Birdie’s loss, of promises made and promises kept, all of it amplified by the passage of years in the same way a storm begins with a single drop of rain.

  I didn’t want to stay any more than Maisy wanted me to. I wanted to go back to New Orleans and lose myself in the objects of dead people and forget who I was. Who I’d been. But I couldn’t. Not yet. I told myself it was because of Grandpa and Birdie that I needed to stay. Yet a part of me knew that it was because Maisy wanted me to leave as if nothing had changed—as if nothing were actually capable of changing—that made me dig in my heels. There was Becky, too, of course. I’d learned nothing in my thirty-five years if I’d thought I could just come back for a short while and then leave, as if I could shuck a bucketful of oysters without getting calluses.

  I turned my back on the approaching light and headed to my car, my thoughts battling between wondering how long I could stay, and how soon I could leave.

  chapter 12

  The bee’s brain is oval in shape and only about the size of a sesame seed, yet the bee has remarkable capacities for learning and remembering things. It is able to make complex calculations on distance traveled and to recall where it’s going and where it’s already been.

  —NED BLOODWORTH’S BEEKEEPER’S JOURNAL

  Birdie

  Since Daddy broke that teacup and saucer, there’s more light flooding through the darkness inside me, forcing me to see and to hear. To remember. It’s like the sound of shattering china broke something loose in me, too. There’s a part of me that’s glad, but there’s the other part of me, just as big, that wants to retreat into the darkness again, to step in front of the curtain and resume my role. It’s safer there. Because sometimes when I think of myself stepping off the stage, I have the strange urge to scream and scream and scream. There’s something there that scares me. Something I don’t want to see.

  While I was lying in bed trying to sleep, I heard Maisy and Georgia shouting, and I was back to the time before, before my final breaking point, to the time when they were teenagers and hated each other with the same ferocity with which they loved each other. My mama hadn’t been able to give me siblings, so I had no reference, but I’d always thought their fighting was my fault, that it was because I was a bad mother. All I’d ever wanted to be was a good mother. The best mother. But I always managed to fail more than I succeeded. I tried to console myself that everything I’d done had been done out of love, but watching the wreckage of my daughters’ lives was like facing Saint Peter at the gates of heaven and being held accountable for all my sins.

  I opened my door, needing to find Becky. It had been her cries as a baby that first allowed the light to flicker inside my mind. I’d been the one to hear her first nighttime sobs before her parents knew she was awake. I’d picked her up and her cries stopped, and she looked at me with eyes that were just like mine. Even then Becky had worn a serious expression, as if she could see into my head and it all made sense to her. As if she shared my memories of a long-ago afternoon with the smell of bread and sun and honey and all that happened afterward.

  Maybe she did. Maybe it was possible to inherit traits that went beyond the color of eyes or the ability to sing in perfect pitch. I knew then that we had a special connection, that we could communicate without the need for words, and that I had found an ally.

  She seemed to fear the night, as if she, too, felt herself pursued by something she couldn’t see or hear. As if whatever it was waited in the corners of her room, waiting until night fell to pounce. As Becky grew older, her newfound voice grounded me to this world I wanted to flit away from. She babbled nonsensical vowels and consonants that I would string together in a lullaby until she would fall asleep again. I’d hear Maisy tell people that Becky had slept through the night since birth, and that always made me smile to myself at our little secret.

  When Becky graduated from her crib and into a real bed, she’d often not wait for me to come to her, but would crawl into my bed so we could lie awake together and wait for the darkest part of the night to pass before she returned to her own bed. Those visits didn’t happen much anymore, her need for sleep surpassing my need to be consoled.

  At least until the day of Georgia’s phone call. Like a small shift in the wind thousands of miles away that signals the start of hurricane season, that one ring of the telephone shifted the air around us. Lifted the antennae of the bees in unseen static. Maisy practically shimmered with it, and Daddy’s shoulders softened as if someone had just lifted off a backpack full of rocks. I looked at him, really looked at him, and saw us both as we truly were: two old people carrying secrets, like a bee carries pollen back to the hive to become honey.

  My Georgia was coming home. Maisy would have her ally back, even though I knew she didn’t think of it that way. And the light flickered in my head, the sense that we were near the end suffocating me. I’d wake from a fitful sleep feeling that I was supposed to do something. That I needed to find something.

  But when I opened the door to my room looking for Becky, I saw Georgia standing at the top of the stairs, the sound of Maisy’s slamming door reverberating like a shout. And I saw my daughter clearly, the beautiful, damaged woman I’d created. The years away had been good for her. She had a confidence and fierce independence that were uniquely hers but would have been lost if she’d remained, and I was glad for the turmoil of that last year here. Her eyes met mine and I knew she wanted to speak to me, would expect an answer. I would have, too, but I had a flash of memory of Georgia in my closet, pulling something out. Showing it to me.

  I closed my door, wanting the dark to swallow me again. Instead I watched as dawn bled through the closed curtains, a yellow finger of light pointing across the room. I approached my closet, pulled open the door, and smelled the scent of Chanel No. 5 that saturated all my clothing. I liked that, liked how everyone could recognize me by that scent. That anybody standing in my closet would know that all these beautiful clothes and shoes belonged to me. Or the me I wanted them to know.

  I shut my eyes, remembering that day again: a younger Georgia looking at me with guilty eyes, knowing she’d been caught sneaking clothes from my closet. She held something in her hands, something that made the curtain in the back of my mind quiver, allowing sporadic spears of light to pierce the dark. I’d felt sick to my stomach, and I’d had to look away. I wasn’t strong enough to see it, to face what it meant. And I still wasn’t. Because I remembered being sent away right afterward and I couldn’t survive that again. I needed to be here, with Maisy and Georgia. I’d need their help when I was ready. But not yet.

  I knelt on the floor at the back of the large walk-in closet, staring at the pile of discarded shoes and handbags, belts and scarves and the accoutrements of a life that I didn’t remember living. A life that always seemed to have belonged to someone
else. I began to pull things out of the pile: a shoe, a vintage Keds women’s sneaker, a pair of yellow patent-leather sandals, a leather purse with fringe. A ruffled half slip. I reached past an old suitcase, then slid out a wide black leather belt. A boot. When I reached my hand in again I touched the soft leather of an old suede purse, vaguely remembering hiding it a long time ago, knowing no one would look inside it if it was ever found. Pressing my palm flat I felt something hard against the suede, felt the rounded shape of the object inside. Carefully I slid the purse out from its hiding place and held it in my lap. My eyes fluttered shut, trying to block out the flickering light.

  A ringing began in my ears, until I realized it wasn’t ringing. It was the remembered sound of buzzing bees, of the female workers falling to the ground and writhing in their death throes of twitches and the small, ineffective flap of gossamer wings.

  My hand trembled as I held the purse and the hard object inside of it, recalling the broken teacup and saucer, and bloodstains on a pink skirt. They were connected somehow, and in my fragmented mind I knew how. But I kept the answer in the dark corners, and all I knew was that I couldn’t let it escape.

  I crossed the room to my large chest of drawers and opened the wide bottom drawer, empty candy wrappers littering the top like bread crumbs. I pushed them aside, then lifted the old christening gown that both my daughters had worn, and placed the purse beneath it in the back corner of the drawer before sliding it closed.

  I thought I heard the sound of a door downstairs closing, and I peered out the turret window toward the bay. Georgia walked down the dock with her shoulders back, her face turned toward the sun as she stopped at the end and watched as a large brown bird flew past, searching for its breakfast beneath the water.

  She was so achingly beautiful. I’d been mistaken in believing that because she looked like me she would be like me. But the harder I tried to force her into a mold, the harder she fought. I was proud of her for that, for all the pushing against me. It had made her stronger. I wondered when she’d realize that.

  Georgia turned around and headed back down the dock, her face troubled. As a baby she’d had that expression, as if even then she’d known that what she wanted was in direct opposition to what I did.

  Good. I needed her to be strong. The light in my head was fanning over larger spaces, showing me the parts I’d kept hidden. I was torn between suffocating and taking deep gulps of air. I knew it wouldn’t be long now, but Georgia was home. I just hoped she’d find her peace with Maisy, because they would need each other. The oncoming wave would swallow all of us, and only the strong would find their footing in the shifting sand.

  I crawled back into bed and let the darkness settle over me again, praying that it would stay with me so that I wouldn’t remember what I’d just done. Memories pressed against me, trying to nudge away the black. Memories of something else I’d seen in the closet that was still there, waiting to be discovered. Something that reminded me of a long-forgotten person. Of a smile. A song. I closed my eyes to get them to stop, a name I’d not uttered in years slipping from my lips.

  chapter 13

  “He is not worthy of the honey-comb,

  That shuns the hives because the bees have stings.”

  William Shakespeare

  —NED BLOODWORTH’S BEEKEEPER’S JOURNAL

  Maisy

  After a few pointless hours of trying to sleep while the morning light prodded at her eyelids, Maisy finally climbed from her bed and made her way downstairs. She paused on the threshold of the dining room, relieved to find Georgia gone. She was about to turn toward the kitchen to start the coffee when she spotted the bonnet on the ground where she’d let it fall, and suddenly the memories were there, pointed and sharp, as if there had not been years between to buffer the pain.

  There are things a mother always remembers. The smell of a small, downy-covered head. The feel of skin so soft it doesn’t seem real. The cry of your baby that you can recognize out of a nursery of screaming infants. Those things remain tethered to the heart long after the child is gone.

  Becky wanted a sister so badly, almost as much as Maisy wanted to give her one. She’d told her daughter about Lilyanna, gone two years before Becky, who was born when Maisy was still in college, came into the world. Maisy and Lyle married young, but Maisy hadn’t wanted to wait to start having children, and after two miscarriages she’d become pregnant with Lilyanna.

  Becky had listened with her serious face, and then, after a brief moment, had asked whether that was all the babies Maisy was ever going to have. Maisy had lied, saying she wasn’t sure, unable to tell Becky that the doctors had told Maisy she was through having babies.

  The grief and blame over Lilyanna had wedged itself into her marriage, a small windshield chip that could become a wide crack with any stress. It had taken years for the crack to become a break, but by then it was too late to repair it.

  Maisy picked up the bonnet and carefully folded it before tucking it way back in the china cabinet. She hadn’t even made it out of the dining room when a knock sounded on the front door. She wasn’t wearing makeup and still had on the boxers and T-shirt she’d slept in. She winced, thinking it might be Lyle bringing Becky back, then remembered it was Saturday and Becky would still be in bed.

  Maisy threw open the door, then winced again as she saw James on the front porch. The man was entirely too good-looking, and she belatedly thought of the tube of lipstick Birdie always kept in the hall drawer.

  Trying to shield herself with the door, she smiled up at him. “Good morning. If you’re looking for Georgia, I’m afraid she’s not here, although I guess she’ll be back, because she left all of her china books.”

  He smiled and she saw something in his eyes she must have missed before. It wasn’t a darkness, but more of an absence of light. She knew it well, saw it when she looked at Lyle and Birdie. At her own reflection. It was the look of a person who’d survived a catastrophe but was too shell-shocked to know for sure.

  She opened the door wider. “You’re welcome to come in and go through those catalogs while you’re waiting.”

  “Are you sure you don’t mind? I can come back.”

  “Please—come in. I’ll even help you.”

  He raised his eyebrows, but she turned away to close the door. “I’ve dumped most of the china books on the dining room table, although I think Georgia probably left some on the couch in the living room. Feel free to grab them and add them to the pile. I haven’t had a chance to make coffee yet, but it’s all there in the kitchen if you’d like to help yourself. I’m going to run upstairs and change.”

  When she returned, she found James standing at the dining room window, looking out at the water and the morning sun skipping beams across the surface. A cormorant stood sentry at the end of the dock, unmoving as it searched for its prey beneath the water. There’d been a time when Maisy would have grabbed her camera and photographed the bird and anything else she’d found beautiful. But that had been before the exhaustion of motherhood and work and nursing old hurts had taken hold so that all of those things she’d once fostered had tumbled out of her and rolled out of sight.

  “It’s beautiful here,” he said, and Maisy could tell he wasn’t saying it just because this was her home. “There’s something about the water. . . .” His words faded away, and she wondered whether she’d imagined the catch in his voice.

  “Do you get to the beach often? I know you live in the city.”

  He turned to her and she saw his sad eyes again, and it was her turn to watch the cormorant. “My wife’s family has a house on the Massachusetts shore, and my wife and I would go there as often as work would let us. I sometimes wish we’d made it more of a priority.” He shrugged. “The thing with water . . .” He paused again, and she felt him move his head so that they were both focused on the serene water of the bay. “Kate—my wife—used to say that we’re all draw
n to water because that’s where we come from, in our mother’s womb. The soft, rocking movement brings us back to when we were unconditionally loved and protected. I’m not sure I agree with her.”

  “Why not?”

  “I imagine my sisters would laugh at my attempt at being philosophical, but I think it’s because I know you’re a teacher that makes me want to give you the right answer.” He took a deep breath. “I’ve always thought my attraction to water was because it offers an unending source of renewal. It’s there with each wave—with each tide. Always wiping the shore clean of all imperfections in time for the next tide.”

  Maisy faced him again, wanting to ask him what he felt he needed to be cleansed of, but she held back. There was a sorrow in him she was not prepared for, knowing she held enough burdens in her own boat and that one more would sink her.

  Instead he spoke. “Any news about your grandfather?”

  “I spoke with his doctor earlier, and I’m planning on visiting with him this afternoon. The stroke has impaired his ability to speak and walk. As soon as his doctors have him stabilized they’re going to start with his rehab while he’s still in the hospital. He’ll need a lot of rehab, and they said it could be months or even a year until he’s back to normal. But they do expect he’ll be able to come home early next week. We’ll convert his study into a bedroom for him, bring him to his rehab appointments, and then just hope for the best.”

  “How’s Becky?”

  Maisy looked up at James and saw the real concern in his eyes. Nobody had thought to ask her that, and it warmed her to him. “I’m worried about her. She’s taking it hard—like she’s already lost him. She’s very sensitive—empathetic, actually. I think that could be my mother’s influence—all that drama is bound to affect a child somehow.”