by Lauren Groff
On the wind now there’s a trace, a hint of sound: Shostakovich, moderato. Someone in the kitchens, listening to a grainy radio. The mournful piano, unsuited to this thoughtless place, brings him back to the gray grandeur of New York, and he closes his eyes. He must get back, he knows. It makes him terribly sad. There’s his mother, sick in her bed, suffocating in broad air. His daughter, who breaks his heart. His wife. He listens to the movement of the music, the waves, the seabirds, until it is all smothered under the gardener’s electric hedgetrimmer.
Donna is looking at him, rubbing her hand on his knee. She says, What? a little crossly. He looks at her, the music heavy in his stomach: he opens his mouth. Howie doesn’t know what he’s going to say, only that it may be unpleasant. Donna’s lips purse, her pretty face suddenly waspish. And he hesitates just long enough for the phone to ring in the room behind him. He stands and answers it.
As he listens to that old, familiar voice on the line, he watches Donna on the balcony, drenched with light, her hair shifting in the wind like seaweed. The words at the end of the line put an urgency into his limbs. And a grief as clean as relief comes into his heart.
THE WOMAN CREEPS DOWN the curved stairwell in her bare feet, her heart bumping hard against her ribs. It is cold downstairs. Only her room has been heated nice and toasty; the rest of the hotel is frigid. There are voices, but in all this immensity, it is hard to tell where they are from.
Stink of the springs’ sulfur, heavy from one open window. Transistor music, some country song cloyed with longing. She sees the gardener scraping the wrought-iron gate, the black chips falling into the mud, his pink ears bobbing to the beat. She slides through the rooms like an eel in the deep.
But the way the light hits the glass of the antique windows makes her stop: that slick ripple is much like water. That pond rises again in her mind. And she sees it now, more clearly than ever, the car up to its steering wheel in the mud, ice like broken glass, windshield a broken cobweb. Blood everywhere, from when she opened the door, caught her leg on a sharp branch. She wrapped her husband’s shirt, ripped from the dry-cleaning hanger in the backseat, against her wound. The rain was hard as needles on her scalp.
Now she touches her leg and it burns warmly. Did she do something terrible by that pond? She feels that she did, though she doesn’t know what.
Ha, crows the old woman in her head: but the woman goes swiftly through the house now, trying to find the kitchen, the voices, the girl.
Now she emerges into the kitchen. Grocery bags tumbleweed on the floor. Pile of fruit on the table, a melon split and dripping. And there, in front of the sink, standing before the window that looked into the dim stretch of the street, the fat woman holds the girl’s face in her hands. The girl weeps. The fat woman gives her a long kiss on the mouth.
Not motherly, indeed, chuckles the old voice in the woman’s head. When the girl backs away, her face looks slapped and childlike.
In her mind, another voice, a different voice, one that sounds like her own, says, Lily. It sounds like grieving. She doesn’t know a Lily, she doesn’t think. The pang in her chest says otherwise.
But she doesn’t have time to examine it, for beyond the bodies of the woman and the girl, down the hill, come cars like birds gliding to water. Two are black and white, their lights discreetly off. The last a green Jaguar, sleek.
She watches these cars pass all the abandoned hotels. They park in the street before the window. The police emerge. From the last car there comes a bronzed, thin man, his handsome face set in wrinkles of worry. She is certain she knows him. Her hands float toward her mouth, hover in the air there. They write wildly in the air as she watches him.
Oh, she says, and the two other women spring apart. They turn to her, then follow her look out the window, see the police cars, the third man. The gardener drops his tools and bounds toward them, grinning madly, already talking.
Oh, dear, says the woman, joining the other two at the window. She feels a broad smile spreading across her face. As the four men move together toward the door of the hotel, she gives a happy laugh. And just before the men enter, the woman says, watching the bronzed man with his thin hair, Oh, I believe my doctor is here.
YEARS LATER, WHEN JAIME THINKS of this day, she will only remember the kiss. Not the subtle sighing recognition when the police reveal that the woman is famous, a writer whose books even Jaime has read, whose picture she had seen many times on dust jackets. Nor that Jason ratted the woman out and her husband came and took her away. She will remember Bettina, enormous and beautiful, pressing her lips on Jaime’s own in the silvery light of the day. The kiss is what she will see every time she sees the writer’s name, every time she sees one of her books on a girlfriend’s shelf. She will remember the kiss when she finally finds the woman’s novel in a quarter bargain bin. It had been an instant best seller: everyone loves a scandal. Only when she reads the book will she learn of the woman’s amnesia, of the marriage certificate she ripped up and sent in flutters into the midnight water, the wedding band she sent skipping into the dark. She will learn of the troubled daughter, look up pictures of that lost girl, and feel a surge of sympathy, a strange recognition. But when she finishes the book and fingers the title, Sudden Pond, Jaime will forget all that she knew about Tabitha and only remember the kiss in the window, and a darkness will fill her and slow the world.
ON THAT DAY, as the three of them stand in the window, watching the woman carried off, Bettina squeezes Jaime’s hand under the cover of drapery. The last icicle in the window melts a ratatatat on the screen. Jaime feels ill. Jason is laughing, counting the reward money in his head. When the cars are gone, he goes back outside to the wrought-iron fence and chips at it again, whistling intricate contrapuntal melodies to the music on his transistor.
Alone together, Bettina’s warmth pushes Jaime’s breath from her. The hotel without the woman feels empty and a little sad.
At last, Bettina says, Sit down, and she lowers herself on one of the overstuffed settees. Jaime traces the lilies in the fabric with her hand, feeling as raw and tender as a newborn. Bettina says, You know, Jaime, you remind me of myself.
Jaime is shaky and says nothing.
Bettina says, That’s not a compliment, strictly. I mean that I look at you, Jaime, and see a girl chased by herself. Like me.
A silence: Jaime tries hard to understand. If you want, I can tell you my story now, says Bettina. How I got here, of all places I mean, she says, and Jaime nods.
Bettina’s story is stark, has a strange ring to it. Childhood in the country, doting parents, bicycles and gardens and brothers and cousins and tennis and Pimm’s; her aunt paying for public school; blazers and experiments in the dormitories under lights-out. A-levels, Oxbridge. Balls and visits in London; boys and cigarettes. She was beautiful. A wild girl.
One summer, home from school, she drank too much at a bonfire outside her grandparents’ estate. She woke with the wild music playing somewhere, her face pressed into the dirt, a mouth full of cinders.
She could have just waited it out, until the boy heaved off her, and then walked home, taken a shower. But she found a broken bottle under her hand, and without thinking speared it up. And then his weight was a different weight, and there was a hot wetness spreading down her back, a darkness pooling on the ground. The boy was dead. The bottle in his eye.
Bettina panicked, ran back to her grandparents’, stole cash from their safe, showered, and left. She bought a ticket to India, but in the terminal crept onto a plane to America. There she changed her body, name, hair color, age, became a nanny. She met Jason at Niagara and after one drunken night they awoke married.
She could have run away again, but she was too tired. He left the military, took her to Sharon Springs, his hometown, where they bought the hotel, in foreclosure, with his savings, a grand place almost rotted to its studs. Nobody looking for her could ever find her in this cold, dim town that smelled of sulfur.
I believed it, Bettina says,
bitterness in her voice. I believed in the American dream.
Bettina’s eyes are closed, lashes moving against her cheeks like wings. In the empty silence afterward, there is a strange metallic ring.
It sounds fake to Jaime. She cannot breathe. She has listened to it all, love flying from her like scales from a fish. Bettina is too composed, her story too composed. Something bad did happen to Bettina, clearly: she probably is from England, probably was chased away. But whatever happened was not what she just told Jaime. And the story feels like one so often told it has the warp of fairy tale to it. Worse, she suspects Bettina has come to believe it herself. Jaime can’t look at Bettina, now, for pity.
So, Bettina says, to the scrape of Jason outside, the parlor cold and damp. There are goose bumps on Jaime’s arms. We can do two things now. One, you stay in town, in our little arrangement. Or, two, you know what you know about me and can’t forgive me for it. Go home and be a good girl and go back to school and become who you were before. You tell me what you want to do.
For a moment, Jaime becomes Bettina, sees her long days of work, her nights beside snoring Jason; she can feel Bettina’s boredom heavy as a rock in her own torso. Jaime understands with this that all she’d ever been to Bettina was a plaything to stave off the tedium, the kiss only a promise, a way to keep Jaime around.
In this light, Jaime’s freedom is vast and wondrous. She is young, unfixed where she is. She can, she understands, do whatever she wants. She wants to laugh with surprise.
I think I’ll go home, she says. A watery beam of light from the window slides like a cat across Jaime’s legs and up the wall. The fast-falling night darkens the window. Jason comes into the kitchen, still whistling.
Bette? he calls, sounding lost. Bette? Somewhere in the hotel a draft plays a corner like a tin whistle.
Bettina sighs and says, We’re in the parlor, darling.
Jason comes in, bringing with him the smell of his sweat and the crisp outdoors. Oh, he says, relieved. But he says, Oh, again, when he sees Jaime, hunched over, face twisted, and the word is saturated with guilt. He thinks Jaime has told on him. Poor Jason, who had joined the military to become something better, who married Bettina in an act of aspiration, but who in the end found himself only the man he was always meant to be: hick, redneck, country boy.
Bettina stands and walks to the door: the windows in their panes tremble with her steps. Wonderful news, darling, she says. Jaime feels she has grown enough here with us that she can face the world. We’re letting our little chick fly. Isn’t that spectacular, darling? Her face is creamily reflected in the dark window.
Spectacular, says Jason, his voice confused. He straightens himself up into a military stance: he does this when uncertain. Jaime finds him newly endearing.
Our little girl, says Bettina, leading her husband out the door, and Jaime feels a heavy relief. Our little girl, says Bettina, is ready to grow up.
LILY IS SICK. She and Sammy are on the veranda in the cold March wind, watching the scattered clouds move, the shadows slide over the spots of sunlight in the park. Sammy has taken books from her dead grandfather’s locked cabinet and is tossing them over the edge. She throws one now and it flutters in midair and whips its pages around. It comes to a stop on the neighbor’s patio a few stories down, beside another book. The books riffle their pages at one another, communicating alarm.
Lily has no heart to stop Sammy. She is shaking, and even by breathing slowly she cannot control the wave that hovers above her, threatening to crash down. In the apartment, the grandmother had rasped at her father: Howard, you are irresponsible, so stupid, what do you think you were doing in Key West with that trash, I wouldn’t have blamed Tabitha if she had murdered you, and is now breathing air from her machine, cigarette trembling in her hands.
Lily’s parents aren’t dead. Worse. They had abandoned her without a second thought.
They don’t love her. She sees her mother as her mother had been the morning she disappeared, her sharp, elegant face drawn at the breakfast table, her coffee untouched, her cigarette spinning blue smoke into the air. Lily knew better than to approach her when she was like this. There were some times when her mother was brilliant, laughing, fiery with life; but she was unpredictable, and when she was working she was more likely to look at Lily as if she were a stranger. They were still looking for her mother, but it was her soft and kind father’s abandonment that made the panic rise up again.
Lily sees the mother bird dart back over the sky, flutter down. She moves over to the planter, peers inside. The baby chicks are fatter today than even yesterday, and the mother ignores Lily by now. She spits brown-pink pap into her babies’ gullets. Winkyn, Blinkyn, and Nod swallow and open their mouths again and again until the mother bird, emptied, flies off. The babies peep hungrily for more.
Sammy reaches down, but Lily says, No, in such a strange voice that Sammy backs away, sucking her finger and looking at Lily with her froggy eyes. And it is Lily who reaches down into the nest and cradles Winkyn in her palm. She knows this is bad, that the mama bird won’t touch him because he smells of Lily. She brings him up close to her eye. The chick must think she’s an enormous mother bird because he opens his beak extrawide. He chirps one sweet chirp.
Lily takes him to the railing and throws him.
Winkyn’s little body hurtling through space, falling like a clump of dirt, landing with a thud next to one of the books. For a moment, it feels good to be bad. The wave hanging over her lifts away for a moment.
She turns around, her heart drilling in her chest. There, behind the window, is Maria, watching her. Paper towel in one hand, spray bottle in the other, face stricken. Lily thinks, It’s not my fault, but Maria slides open the door and at first says nothing. The wind rises and blows her dark hair from her forehead. Then she says in a deep voice: They have found your mother, child. She closes the door and moves off.
Below, the books flap like beasts in distress. She knows that if she looks, Sammy will not be there. Sammy died when Lily threw Winkyn. Lily sits now on the flagstone veranda, feeling tiny and alone in the wind.
BEFORE THE HOMECOMING, the dark stretch of their apartment, before they find Lily a wet shivering mass on the couch, he and she, husband and wife, ride home in silence.
In the car, he squints through the rain on the windshield into the darkening day. The trees seem naked, and at a rest stop near Poughkeepsie he sees buds spangling a tree. Like nipples, he thinks at first, then grows angry, says, Ornaments, loudly, to himself. His wife is silent, clutching the purse on her lap, one thigh twice as fat as the other (at the hospital the next morning they’d whistle in awe when they uncover it). In his haste to get her home, he had wrapped it in clean bandages and carried her over the mush of the street to the car.
He drives; he thinks. Is that dull, gray woman really his wife? Can she be Tabitha, who is sarcastic, skinny, too chic, too flippant? Is his wife really the one about whom the fat British lady in her tea cake of a dress had said, Oh, but she was such a dear, really no trouble at all, quiet as a mouse, so quiet we didn’t suspect a thing. Those words rang so false he’d wanted to strike the phony British bitch in the face. In his fury, he’d paid them, thanked the officers, conferred with the psychiatrist from the local hospital, was reassured that it was probably temporary amnesia, and, at long last, left with his wife calm in his arms.
He carried her as gently as he could to the car, feeling the way they watched him in his shoulders. The punk, the hillbilly, the fat British lady: as if he were the horror show, not them. None of them had ever seen a chopstick in their lives, he was sure; none of them had ever found themselves with such yearning in their hearts like the yearning that lived in his. He longed to turn and shout at them. He did not.
In the car now he doesn’t know what to say. His wife gazes out the window dreamily, watching the landscape roll by. When it finally grows dark and begins to rain, he feels something pushing behind his eyeballs. When he brings his wrist up to wip
e his nose, he can smell the coconut of Donna’s tanning oil. Lovely girl, whom he will never see emerge from a dark room into tropical light again, her kimono flapping like wings around her. One last time he lets his eyes flush and the golden headlights of oncoming traffic blur in the windshield.
Is it wrong? he thinks. Is it so wrong to want, just for a short while, to be someone else? Even when he asks this he knows the answer, has known it all along. When his eyes clear and everything is crisp again, his wife is smiling with her strange beatific smile.
She clears her throat. You’re a very good man, she says; aren’t you? She waits, smiling at him. She puts out her hand and pats him on the knee.
No, he wants to say. You know I’m not good. I’m not good at all. But when he looks at her next, the way she smiles, the way the light from the passing cars glints in her eyes, gives him pause, and makes him, for the moment, wonder if she is actually there, deep down. If, somewhere, she—the acerbic, the writer—does mean what she is saying. If this was all intricately plotted, as elaborate as one of her own Miriam Dubonnet-Quince books, that crusty old lady curmudgeon whom he’d never liked but all his wife’s fans think brilliant. Did he, in the wash of light through the windshield, just see her inhabiting her face again, mothlike, alighting for a moment, flittering away?
He rubs his own eyes, briefly hating her. He frowns at the long, wet road in the window until it fades, a dark worm pulsing before him.
At last, slowing down for the bridge, he says, I try. She doesn’t turn toward him, but he can sense that she’s listening. The moon is a hopeful shadow behind dark clouds; the car swims through the rain, steady and true. I’m only human, he says, and I try.
Delicate Edible Birds
BECAUSE IT HAD RAINED AND THE RAIN HAD caught the black soot of the factories as they burned, Paris in the dark seemed covered by a dusky skin, almost as though it were living. The arches in the façades were the curve of a throat, the street corners elbows, and in the silence Bern could almost hear the warm thumpings of some heart deep beneath the residue of civilizations. Perhaps it had always been there, but was audible only now, in the dinless, abandoned city. As the last of the evacuees spun through the streets on their bicycles, they cast the puddles up into great wings of dark water behind them. Paris seemed docile as it awaited the Germans.