The Gravity of Birds: A Novel

by Tracy Guzeman

  * * *

  Finch drove Stephen home after dinner and insisted on walking him to the door of his apartment, concerned about the possibility of concussion. The application of frozen peas had only partially slowed the swelling of Stephen’s face, and his enthusiastic response to the discovery of the pictures came out in lisped half sentences. In spite of Stephen’s own findings, for once Finch found the majority of praise being sent in his direction.

  “You wa genis, Finsh,” Stephen slurred as he slumped into a chair. While Lydia had opted for the equivalent of a cold compress, Kevin had administered several doses of brandy, and it was readily apparent which measure was having the greater impact. Finch covered Stephen with a blanket he’d retrieved from the bedroom floor, and slipped a sofa pillow behind his head. Stephen blinked at the photo he held in his hand, the picture of Natalie and the child. His eyelids fluttered. “Angwy,” he said, pointing at Natalie.

  The accuracy of the word startled him, and Finch remembered what had made him ill the first time he saw the painting: his certainty that Thomas had slept with Natalie, despite her age, and that it had meant something far different to her than it had to him. It was evident in her eyes, in the set of her mouth, in her posture and the position of her fingers on Thomas’s shoulder. Mine.

  Yet it was Alice who was the mother of Thomas’s child. Finch eased the photo from Stephen’s hand. He looked at it again, at Natalie’s cold face, her controlled expression, and wondered if she had somehow found a way to punish them both.

  TWELVE

  Alice woke up on the couch that had last accommodated Frankie, bent and stiff as a rusted piece of wire. A weak winter sun illuminated the room. For hours last night she’d stared at the papers spread across the table, searching for some explanation that would let her weave this new information into the fabric of her past. Finally she’d given up, making a nest of her arms and burying her head there, too tired to care about the paper clips leaving indentations on her cheek. She gave in to the undertow of memory, letting it drag her down into a dark and dreamless oblivion.

  Phinneaus’s olive-colored jacket covered the upper half of her body, and she burrowed into it, wanting only to hide awhile longer, her nose against the corduroy collar, smelling the bay of his shaving cream.

  He was sitting in a chair on the other side of the room, watching her.

  “What time is it?”

  “You lost the morning, I’m afraid. It’s coming up on one o’clock.”

  “Have you been here all night?” Without waiting for an answer she said, “You didn’t need to stay, Phinneaus. I’m all right.”

  “I know you are.”

  “Is there coffee?”

  “Hardly the breakfast or lunch of champions, but yes, coffee and pills, comin’ right up. Maybe some eggs?”

  Eggs. She grimaced as her stomach flipped. The apprehension she’d experienced last night had returned as soon as she opened her eyes, and her gut felt full of it. The thought of food was not appealing.

  “Humor me,” he said, in response to the face she made. He got out of the chair and walked over to the sofa, his halting gait so familiar she felt it in her own bones. He pushed the hair away from her face with a quick swipe of his thumb before heading to the kitchen, calling for Saisee.

  She’d fallen in love with the choreography of his upper body, what remained of a soldier’s grace: the ease with which he claimed a buddy, draping an arm across Frankie’s shoulder; the effortless swivel of his neck when he heard something behind him; the fluid bend of his elbow. She marveled at the dance of his fingers when he shuffled a deck of cards or pulled the silk from an ear of corn. The speed with which he shouldered his pheasant gun, in one swift, unbroken movement. Phinneaus be nimble, Phinneaus be quick.

  She reached for the back of the sofa and pulled herself up into a sitting position, groaning as she slipped her arms into the sleeves of his jacket. How long did it take to become a gracious person? One who could accept help and give thanks without being resentful of it? She thought of Frankie, struggling through his schoolwork, wrestling with the onset of early adolescence, trying to come to terms with the fact his mother was in prison and had never shown the slightest interest in hearing from him, or finding out anything about him.

  “Thank you, Miss Alice, for trying. Phinneaus says I’m a work in progress,” he’d said the other day, earnest and patient, even though she’d been short with him after reviewing the same story problem for the fifth time—trains coming at each other from opposite directions, one carrying oranges, the other carrying pineapples, an ambrosial disaster in the making. Maybe that’s what I am, too, she thought. A work in progress.

  Phinneaus came back into the room carrying a tray and set it on the coffee table. He poured coffee into her mug, one of a set of six bone china pieces with a chintz pattern he’d found at the flea market. He’d wrapped the handle of each of them with a piece of inner tube to act as a sort of cushion. Seeing the cup always lifted her spirits, the combination of materials so idiosyncratic, a veneer of sophistication coupled with the reality of limitation. He fixed her coffee the way she liked it: one healthy pinch of sugar and so much milk he often shook his head before handing it to her, snorting, why bother? Over the years they’d learned each other’s habits slowly, carefully, with moves as cautious as hunters’, taking care to camouflage their concern. She knew he preferred to sit with his right leg to the fireplace. Ever the scrounger, he would scan the For Sale column in the local paper before any other section. He was respectful with the prey he shot, his fingers lingering admiringly on the feathers of a turkey or a nutria pelt. And he was an intent and neutral listener; she was never quite sure what he was thinking until he spoke.

  “I take you for granted,” she said.

  “You do at that.”

  It alarmed her, hearing him agree so easily. “But I don’t mean to.”

  “Alice, if this is because of Natalie . . .” He stopped, and she watched him consider the right words to use. “I’m not going anywhere. I mean, Frankie and I, we’re still here.”

  She took measure of that. Frankie and I. He had allowed them both the safety net of a third party, even if that third party was an eight-year-old boy.

  “You’re the last one standing, Phinneaus. You’ve known me longer than anyone else now, except for Saisee, and you know me better than she does.”

  “Not quite longer than anyone else.”

  Thomas. The moment she’d seen the negative she’d felt him beside her, an old ghost, a shadow stuck to her skin. She couldn’t shake him off. She heard his dry laugh ring in her head, felt his breath on the small of her back. She shivered, and it was the trace of his fingers as they trailed over her mouth, his words whispered against the skin at the base of her neck, the taste of brandy resurrected in her throat, her eyes burning from the strength of it. Phinneaus had handed her the strip of negatives and not asked a single question, and in turn, she hadn’t volunteered a single answer. Had she imagined the quickly hidden look of disappointment that washed over his face? No. It was a look she’d never seen from him before, and one she’d now have to try to forget.

  Thomas was a lifetime ago. She’d kept her memories of him and the cabin separate from everything that came after, and convinced herself it was a kindness that he never knew, that she’d never been able to bring herself to seek him out and tell him. What had become of him, she didn’t know. It was Phinneaus who’d thrown her the rope and pulled her out of grief; Phinneaus who’d coaxed her into another life, one guarded step at a time; Phinneaus who’d made her feel her contributions, however small she counted them, were of value. And it was Phinneaus who sat across from her now, staring down at the carpet, the rise and fall of his shoulders so slight she knew he was half-holding his breath, waiting for her to tell him.

  “I don’t know him, Phinneaus. Not anymore. Not since we came here.”

  “It’s not my business.”

  He said it too quickly, too casually, and if he
meant for it to hurt her, it did. She rolled the mug back and forth in her hands, letting the heat slowly thaw them out until she could bend her fingers a little. I can’t do it, she thought. I don’t want to have to go back and remember all of it, not even for you. He shifted in the chair, and as if he had disappeared, Alice suddenly saw what it would be like without him, his absence a greater weight than Natalie’s and her parents’ combined. The panic that gripped her was unbearable, and she wanted to tell him it was his business, his more than anyone else’s.

  “I haven’t thanked you yet.”

  “I’m happy to pour you a cup of coffee anytime, Alice.”

  He wasn’t going to make it easy for her. Well, fine. She could be just as stubborn. “I meant for staying with me last night.”

  He shrugged. “Finding out about the house and Natalie, having to go through her things. It seemed like a lot to take in all at once. I thought it might be better if you weren’t alone.” He rubbed his hands back and forth over his knees, something he did, she’d learned, when weighing his options. “She hasn’t been gone long, Alice. Maybe none of this has sunk in for you yet, I don’t know. But I’m worried about what will happen when it does.”

  The feelings of tenderness she’d felt for him only a moment ago were replaced by anger. “I don’t seem sad enough, is that what you mean? Would you feel better if I dressed in black? Is it ghoulish I’m not flailing on the floor or tearing my clothes? That I don’t need a sedative or a tonic? That’s what people around here think, isn’t it?”

  The veins stood out on his neck, and he clenched his jaw, clearly annoyed with her. He stood up and paced back and forth across the living room. “I don’t know which part of that question makes me want to throttle you more. The fact that when you can’t deal with your own feelings, it’s easier for you to put them off on someone else—or in this case, on an entire town—or that after thirty-five years you’re still determined to make yourself an outsider, living on your own little island. Give us some credit, Alice. We may not meet your standards of refinement around here, as you so delicately put it, but I imagine we know well enough that people grieve in their own ways. If you’d for once stop worrying about what everyone else thinks and let yourself get close to someone, you might be surprised to find folks understand. You’re not the only person in this world who got handed a life different than the one they expected.”

  “Is that what you think? I’m feeling sorry for myself? You know that’s not true.” They’d never really been angry with each other, and now the feeling was so palpable she could see it flaming between them, a rising red-hot wall. She stuck her chin out. “I am close to people. I’m close to Saisee. I’m close to Frankie.” She looked through the window at the cheerless yard, the outside world frozen and still, even the birds perched on branches motionless, as if carved from ice. What would I do without you, Phinneaus?

  “I’m close to you.”

  “Are you?” He turned away from her and said quietly, “Damn you, Alice. When are you going to stop pretending we have all the time in the world?”

  It was an honest question. She longed to go backward, to start the day over from the moment she’d opened her eyes. But now they’d said things that made that impossible. She cradled the mug against her chest. He didn’t say anything more, but moved over to the couch and sat next to her. She could feel the heat coming off of him, the wash of it stretching toward her, and without intending to, she rested her head on his shoulder, feeling the welcome scratch of his shirt against her cheek, something sharp and real. Would he stay if he knew she was capable of hatred? That sometimes she felt so full of resentment, there wasn’t room for anything else? Would he ever want to talk to her again, or would he take Frankie and go, leaving her more alone than she’d been when she first came here?

  “Hold your hand up.” He gently took her hand in his and held it in front of them. “Like this. Bend your wrist and point your fingers and your thumb upward. Now hold it this way for five seconds. Does it hurt?”

  She shook her head, wincing, but kept her hand up.

  “Now who’s lying? That’s good enough. We’ll do it again later.”

  When she looked at him, he only said, “You haven’t been keeping up with your exercises. You know you have to do these every day if you can.”

  “I like having the occasional day without being reminded of everything I can’t do. Besides, physical therapists don’t grow on trees.”

  “You’ve had several of those occasional days in a row now, seems to me.”

  They were talking around each other, clinging to the safe territory so familiar to both of them: her illness, the lack of finances that forced them to make do. But he hadn’t let go of her hand, and in return, Alice sensed something more was required: an admission or confession showing she trusted him, even with her worst self.

  “I’m afraid what you’ll think of me.”

  He whispered into her hair. “You already know what I think of you.” His voice so tender it made her ache. “I saw well enough how she treated you, and I should have stopped it. She kept you worried about money, scared about your disease. I watched her pick the words to beat you down same as I picked up a weapon to fight with. But I don’t think she knew who she’d be without you.”

  “Natalie and I battled with each other for most of our lives, Phinneaus. It’s just the way things ended up between us. But it wasn’t the ways things started.”

  He nodded. “Go on.”

  He was asking her to shed her skin, to display the darkest part of herself. Years of misshapenness had conditioned her to people’s eroding manners. The staring no longer bothered her; she only stared back. Let them see the dropped longitudinal arch of her feet and the metatarsal drift of her toes. Let them gawk at the deformities of her hands, the swan neck of her fingers, the dinner fork of her wrists, such whimsical descriptions for her state of disrepair. All that was tolerable when she could pretend a pristine interior, unblemished by the dark spot of a nasty thought, a malignant wish.

  She looked down at her hands, the tips of his fingers loosely threaded through hers. “It’s so tempting to make everything Natalie’s fault now. But she didn’t force me to stay. After a while, it was just easier to be afraid. I got comfortable letting other people do everything for me, and then at some point, I stopped trying to figure out how to do things for myself. How could you—how could anyone—want to be with someone like that? But Natalie stayed. Natalie was always here.”

  “The devil you know?”

  “I kept hoping there was something keeping us together, that underneath it all, we still knew we could count on each other. That we loved each other. I don’t think I believe that’s true anymore. Maybe all these years just boiled everything down to jealousy and hate.”

  “There’s no law says you’re required to love your kin, Alice.”

  “All I know is, we turned into each other’s best excuse for not doing the things we were afraid of. Maybe you’re right; maybe it just hasn’t hit me yet. I only know everything feels off balance without her.”

  She whispered the rest of her words into the front of his shirt, trying to diffuse their meaning. “The odds were never in my favor to be the last one. It’s horrible to realize there’s no one left who knew you at the beginning; no one to see how you’ve turned out, good or bad.” She sensed Natalie’s presence withdraw from the room, as if her sister were collecting the small dust of herself left behind. “I’m sorry for her, Phinneaus. I’m sorry she never had what she wanted. Maybe if she had, she’d have been a different person. Maybe I’d have been a different person then, too.”

  She felt such ugliness, not physical for once, but a black hole swallowing her from the inside. “Something happened at the lake that summer, after Natalie came back. I blamed her for it, at least in part. She was always the one people paid attention to, the one everybody wanted. When I found out what she’d done, it was easy enough to hate her. But it doesn’t carry the same weight, does it, th
inking you hate someone when you’re a child? You can’t understand until you’re older what people are really capable of.”

  “So now she’s blameless?”

  Alice shook her head. “No. But at some point I realized I wouldn’t want to trade places with her, not even if it meant having her looks, her good health. No one took her seriously. Natalie was so pretty—what else did she need to do? All that attention conditioned her to a certain sort of life. She was never going to eat her lunch out of a paper bag, or take a bus, or share a walk-up with four other girls. And the terms of the trust our parents set up were very specific. There wasn’t much money, but what was there was designated for my medical care, with Natalie as trustee. It must have been their way of ensuring she wouldn’t be burdened, but only because they assumed she’d marry, and have means of her own. So we were stuck together, the two of us. I always felt like half of my life was hers, but I wonder if she didn’t feel that half my disease was hers, too; so much in her life had to be worked around me, around what I could and couldn’t do.”

  Alice sat up and wiped a hand across her face. “Then I made it worse. I had something Natalie never could. Even if only for a minute. She couldn’t forgive me for that.”

  “What do you mean?” His fingers traced careful circles on the back of her neck, under the weight of her hair. A door opened, and she slipped backward, her history racing past.

  “I was home for Christmas break my sophomore year. Natalie was engaged to someone—I don’t remember who; I’m not sure I ever met him—then suddenly she wasn’t. No one would tell me what happened. I remember being in the kitchen with my mother and seeing her standing at the sink, washing the same dish over and over, staring into the water. Eventually she said it was a misunderstanding, two people who hadn’t known what they wanted. Better forgotten.