The Gravity of Birds: A Novel

by Tracy Guzeman

  “Any particular reason you were asking about my sister?”

  “I’m wondering if I hated Natalie.”

  He drew another x, in the top middle square, then put the pencil down and slid his hand over hers. “I imagine you did.”

  “I thought maybe, after she died, I could change it into something else. Maybe just feel sorry for her. But I can’t.”

  “Give it time. You might end up surprising yourself.”

  * * *

  Frankie had fallen asleep on the couch, his body all long limbs and angles, the curve of his belly spilling out from where his shirt rode up above his waist, his face slack with the ease of slumber. Phinneaus set out stacks of papers in neat piles, having agreed with Alice there was nothing to be gained by delaying any assessment of her obligations, as he referred to them.

  “It sounds better than debts.”

  “It’s meant to.”

  She thumbed through the largest piles. The one closest to toppling over was the pile with all of her “explanation of benefits” paperwork; the others were invoices from doctors’ offices and insurance companies.

  “What’s in here?” she asked, peering into a large cardboard box filmed with dust.

  “Don’t know. Saisee brought it down from your sister’s room. Said she found it in the closet.” He paused, and she sensed he was looking for the right words. “It might seem too soon, after only a couple of weeks, but it will have to get done at some point. It’s a spare room now, and you might need it.”

  She smiled at him. “What would I need it for? You think the view’s better from the second story?”

  Phinneaus cleared his throat. “You might need it for a boarder.”

  He looked up to see if she was going to object, and even though the thought of having a stranger in the house, in her house, made her uneasy, she kept her tone light, realizing her options were limited.

  “So now you and Saisee are conspiring against me?”

  “I could take you upstairs if you want to do it yourself, but Saisee thought it’d be easier if she brought things down. You know, do a little bit at a time. She started cleaning up in Natalie’s bedroom so you could see what you wanted to hold on to. What you wanted to sell.”

  “What I might want to burn?”

  “You’re taking this better than I expected.”

  “I don’t have much choice but to be practical, do I?”

  If she could choose, would she have designed a life without Natalie in it? To tell Phinneaus they had never been close would negate their whole childhood, a time when they took turns licking the backs of S & H Green Stamps and pasting them into the stamp book; when Natalie pulled Alice’s head toward hers and worked their long hair into one joint braid, saying, Now we’ll go everywhere together. Those occasions when she pushed Alice’s tormentors to the sidewalk with hard shoves, her face a picture of controlled fury; when she took the blame for Alice’s small failures: the stolen gum, the broken vase, the school yard spat, going head to head with their father, matching the punishments he doled out with her own willful indifference. Why had that changed? What had she done?

  At some point in their adolescence a magnetic force developed between them, running barely below the surface. Polar emotions of anger and love, of loyalty and jealousy, were volleyed back and forth. Natalie knew better than anyone how to hurt her. Alice had assumed her arthritis was to blame, with its twin shackles of money and attention—the attention the disease required from her parents when they’d still been alive; the money that bound Natalie to her after they’d died. Her sister’s way of being in the world, of pulling people close only to cut them loose with a calculated cruelty, unraveled whatever ties the two of them had once had. They had lived their older lives like strangers from different shipwrecks, washed up on the same island, without the benefit of a common language. But now Natalie was gone, it was not only absence Alice felt but an incompleteness; like with a phantom limb, she was tormented by something no longer there. Frankie was half-right to talk about haunts. The older sister who had been her protector, her defender, was the one still haunting Alice’s memory, the one who refused to relinquish her grasp on Alice’s heart.

  Phinneaus hunched over his legal pad, moving obligations from one side of the table to the other while she rummaged through boxes from Natalie’s room. She was shaken to see her sister’s broad, familiar script on the first piece of paper she pulled out, some sort of legal document from a property management company, Steele and Greene.

  “What’s this, do you suppose?”

  He held it up under the light, his lips moving as he read the document, then he scowled and read it again.

  “Alice, didn’t you say you and Natalie sold the house in Connecticut?”

  Without warning she was propelled back thirty-five years, at a speed that left her struggling to breathe. She could hear pellets of hail exploding on the roof and smell the sulfurous remains of lightning strikes. The wind roared around her like an animal, shrieking and moaning and clawing to get in. She felt a deep, striking pain low in her back that almost doubled her over.

  “We did sell it. Right after the hurricane. Natalie said there was structural damage to the foundation from the flooding and that we couldn’t afford to do the renovation work. We listed it for sale ‘as is.’ The real estate agent found a buyer right away. A young couple.” With a baby, she thought, but did not say the words out loud.

  “This looks like an agreement between the Kessler Trust and Steele and Greene, a property management company. They’re acting as rental agents for a property owned by the trust. A residential property at 700 Stonehope Way in Woodridge, Connecticut.”

  “That can’t be right. That’s our old address. The house we sold. Maybe the real estate agent worked for Steele and Greene?”

  “You don’t remember signing anything?”

  “No, of course not. I wouldn’t have signed away our house. I never wanted to leave it in the first place.”

  Phinneaus rummaged through the box, pulling out more papers. “There’s a signed lease agreement here. Alice, your old house, it wasn’t sold. It’s a rental property. Natalie must have been receiving rent checks from the management company.”

  “But she said we had to leave. And there’s never been any money . . .”

  Memories she’d tried to tamp down came back in jagged, broken pieces. The bluish-green wallpaper in the foyer that felt like silk when she trailed her fingertips along it, pretending it was the surface of a lake; the sound of the doorbell, one note mysteriously missing from its chime; the creak beneath the third step leading to the second floor; her grandmother’s piano, left to her mother on the condition she play it once a day; the furnace-like heat and low ceilings of the attic, the heavy air colored with the scent of mothballs and yellowing paper and the cry of a small bird piercing the dark, brilliant and fierce, close to her ear, then fading.

  “Alice, I’m not sure about any of this. Let me look through these other papers first.”

  That time immediately following the storm was all darkness and confusion to her, punctuated with shame that she’d been so weak, that she’d let herself drift away from the pain so easily, that she’d wholeheartedly embraced the drugs and the stupor that followed, wanting nothing more than to be dead to the world.

  “I don’t understand. She wanted us out of that house. Why?”

  “I’ll just have another look . . . make sure I’ve got this straight. Why don’t you bring us some tea?”

  She walked to the kitchen to fill the kettle, swatting at memories as they rose up around her, uncertain of where she was. Which hallway? Which kitchen? By the time she came back with the tea, Phinneaus had emptied the box. He’d moved all the other paperwork onto the floor; the table was covered with papers from the box that had been in Natalie’s closet. There were checkbook registers and deposit slips, ledgers with dates on the covers, newspaper clippings, a bundle of letters, some postcards, a book.

  “Maybe we shou
ld forget about all this for tonight. Tackle it in the morning. What do you say?” There was just enough concern in his voice to be noticeable, not enough to be intrusive.

  She shook her head. “You go on, Phinneaus, and get Frankie to bed. I’m fine, really. But I don’t think I can sleep.”

  He reached for a checkbook register from the pile nearest him and tore a clean sheet of paper from a legal pad. “Sleep’s overrated. Besides, bed, sofa, I don’t think it makes much difference when you’re his age.” He started turning through the pages of the register, periodically writing down numbers.

  She loved the sound of his voice, only there was never enough of it. The sweet drawl of his words floated toward her on a river of honey. If she was braver she would have pulled him to her, taken his words into her mouth, swallowing them down like a balm for everything wrong in the world. Instead she picked up the book, a softcover copy of Franny and Zooey, and thumbed through it. She stopped to read the notes in the margins, Natalie’s fat, loopy cursive barely contained in the narrow white space: Franny’s book—does Salinger mean for green to symbolize innocence? and Where is the spiritual conflict between F. and Z.?, then stopped when the book opened to a page where a postcard and two glassine envelopes containing negatives had been stuffed close to the spine.

  The postcard was of a painting: a red sports car driving in front of an American flag, with the word “Corvette” printed in large black letters across a white border. The image was ghosted with webs of white where it had been bent and creased. There was no postage attached to the back, just a date, March 22, and a few sentences written in chunky, boyish letters: We can go away—maybe California? I’ve always wanted to surf. (Kidding, babe.) Give me a couple of days. Tell me where to meet you. There was no signature, and Alice turned the postcard over and back again. Who had Natalie intended to meet?

  She took the glassine envelopes from the book and pulled out a strip of negatives from the first, holding it to the light. A flat history in tones of burnt orange. There were only four exposures on the strip, and even though there was no date, after looking at the first image Alice could guess when the pictures must have been taken: in 1963, early in the summer, before they’d made their yearly trip to the lake.

  Natalie was wearing a shift with a deep square neckline and braided straps tied at the shoulders, a dress that had been a present for her seventeenth birthday, in October. Alice remembered how Natalie had preened when she put it on, the royal blue making her skin glow like it had been dusted with nacre. Their mother had waited until the dress showed up on the out-of-season sale rack before buying it, and Natalie complained she’d have to wait at least eight months before it would be warm enough again for her to wear it. But here she was, the summer after that birthday, her blond hair pulled forward to curl over her shoulders, her hands resting defiantly on her hips, the look on her face undecipherable.

  The setting was unfamiliar: a pond surrounded by tall clumps of grass and half-submerged rocks, a split rail fence behind, a leafy backdrop of shade trees. Natalie had been gone the first three weeks in July that summer, sent off to visit friends of their parents who were showing her around Smith, tempting her with a taste of college life. Maybe the sudden push to ensure Natalie went to college meant her parents had found the postcard? Alice vaguely recalled how tense things had been just before Natalie left—the score of slammed doors, the raised voices accompanying every meal. She also remembered, with a stitch of guilt, how relieved she’d been once Natalie left and the house settled back into its steady, quiet routine.

  The photos must have been taken at the house of her parents’ friends, Alice decided, her eyes moving from one frame to the next. But it was the last frame that caught her attention, and as the negative strip fell to her lap she put her hands up to her mouth, a sickness swirling in her gut.

  Natalie, turned sideways in that same dress, was circling her belly with her hands, one above, the other below, pulling the fabric of her dress taut over the small dome of her belly. And even in that two-dimensional world of several lifetimes ago, Alice suddenly understood exactly when it was that Natalie had changed, and why.

  “Alice?”

  Phinneaus had left his chair and was standing behind her. His hands rested lightly on her shoulders.

  “I didn’t know,” she said.

  “What didn’t you know?”

  She handed him the strip of negatives and the postcard. He put on his glasses and looked at the images without saying anything, then read the postcard and set it down on the table. His hands went back to her shoulders, and she could feel the cool steadiness of them through the thin fabric of her shirt.

  “She had the baby?”

  “No.” Alice shook her head, her own sadness swimming back to her, reaching for her with needy, grasping fingers. “She was only gone for three weeks. I thought she was visiting friends. That’s what they told me.”

  “Your parents?”

  “Yes.”

  She’d never understood why Natalie had consigned her to the ranks of the enemy that summer. The change in her sister had been sharp, definite; it was as though something had discovered the plane of weakness in their family and cleaved them in two, splitting Natalie off from the rest of them. But now Alice realized it wasn’t something that had chipped her sister away. It was the beginning of someone. She looked at the date on the postcard again. Late March. Natalie must have been about four and a half months pregnant. Her horror deepened as she recalled the tentative flutters that had teased her own belly; the increasing sensation of breathlessness whenever she’d climbed the stairs.

  The knowledge that her parents could have forced her sister to do such a thing unraveled her bond with them, a connection she’d always thought unassailable. In little more than a moment, they’d taken on the masks of monsters; their expressions of care and worry replaced by something stern and immobile. She felt herself drifting through the darkness of space, away from them and toward the cold place where Natalie must be, wanting only to apologize, to comfort and console, to take back words she’d uttered, unknowing, that would have trumped, time and again, any step toward reconciliation. There had been no one for Natalie to confide in, no one to take her side. And then Alice remembered Thomas’s words of caution, his veiled remarks about her parents: They were far from saints, Alice. They made some very serious mistakes. Of all people, Natalie had chosen to confide in him. To her shame and regret, the familiar ache of jealousy deadened her bones. Thomas had been her confessor as well, and it was painfully obvious just how insignificant and childish her secrets had been when weighed against Natalie’s.

  “Alice.” Phinneaus had taken the negatives from the other glassine envelope and was holding a strip up to the light. There was a hushed, strangled sound to his voice. “Maybe I shouldn’t be looking at these.”

  “Is it Natalie?”

  “No.” He handed her the negatives. “It’s you.”

  * * *

  How she wished she could go to the girl in those images now, take her hand and push aside the mass of wild blond curls, whisper in her ear, Run. It’s not too late. But people never believed that what was going to happen to them would actually happen. When she was fourteen, she had not believed her body would start a war with itself. And later, she had not believed she could fiercely battle the creeping progress of her disease, yet continue to lose. Someone telling you about the future did not prepare you for it. Nothing prepared you for it.

  The Alice frozen in time, living within the confines of those few small squares of film, felt better than she had in years. The baby had fought her disease, the hormonal rush of pregnancy had cascaded through her, and for the first time she’d felt both love and respect for her body, marveling that it could simultaneously tear down and create, yet not destroy her in the process. Instead of her treacherous medications, she’d swallowed large, innocuous vitamins and gorged on milk, on icy green grapes she pulled from the freezer, on saltine crackers slathered with butter, and some
times just on butter itself, licked from the tips of her fingers.

  She’d spent hours roaming the woods near their house, avoiding Natalie for as much of the day as she could, coming in only when the air turned chill, with remnants of the forest woven into her hair, sticking to her coat, cemented to her boots. Natalie had never asked about the specifics of her pregnancy, something that made Alice both uneasy and grateful. Instead, there was an odd combination of calculating appraisals and casual indifference, as though there was some other logical explanation for clothes that no longer fit and the waddling gait she’d developed. She’d wallowed in bottomless sleep, falling into the canyon of it the moment she crawled between the sheets and waking to find her hands resting on the hard knot of her belly.

  That was the Alice who had started several letters to him, but stopped writing each one after the first paragraph, before she put to paper words that would have made a difference. She’d torn the letters into tiny pieces and carried them into the bathroom in the pocket of her robe, flushing them down the toilet, thinking it would be better to wait one more day before telling him, then another, and another. And as the days, then weeks, passed, she’d begun thinking of the baby as only hers, and whenever she wavered, she’d reminded herself of the lie he had told, the sort of life he likely led, and how ill-suited to parenthood someone with his temperament would be.