Copyright © Rebecca Higgins, 2020
Iguana Books
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise (except brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of the author or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Editor: Deanna Janovski
Cover design: David Jang
Cover photo: David Clode
Issued in print and electronic formats.
978-1-77180-389-2 (paperback). 978-1-77180-387-8 (epub). 978-1-77180-388-5 (Kindle).
This is the first electronic edition of The Colours of Birds.
for my parents and their parents
Stoplight
It was not a good omen when we killed a guy on the way to the wedding. Not on purpose, of course. One minute, Lu was pouring champagne for me, and Carmen was leaning back taking a photo of us, and the next minute we slammed into something, hard. The driver started yelling—“Fuck! Fuck!”—and there was champagne all over my dress. Carmen’s face was grey. One of Steve’s sisters was saying, “What happened? What the hell happened?” and another one of them was trying to get out, but the door was stuck or locked or something. Lu’s hand was bleeding.
“Oh God, this can’t get on your dress!” she said, wrapping her hand in her bridesmaid dress. Now that’s friendship, I thought later.
I felt really weird, like I was going to choke on my heartbeat. My hairline started itching really badly, and my lips felt thick. The driver radioed his dispatch. We heard him say, voice quivering, “I think I hit something.” The radio crackled. He replaced the radio and got out of the car, telling us to stay inside.
We did, but he left the driver-side door open, so we could hear everything anyway, even if we couldn’t see it.
“Oh, fuck. Oh. Oh no. Sir? Sir?” And then we heard him calling 911 on his cellphone, saying, “I think this guy’s dead,” and as it turned out, he was.
He’d run out fast into the road, against the light, and the driver couldn’t stop in time, poor guy. Both of them, poor guys. There was something wrong with the dead one, like he was drunk or high or maybe there was something mixed up about his brain. We never did find out exactly what because the limo company dealt with whatever happened after.
Some of the girls got out to look while we waited for the police. I think Carmen was helping to direct traffic in the meantime. She’s very responsible. Lu stayed with me, and I didn’t argue when she said I shouldn’t get out and look. I didn’t want to see the guy anyway, because for the rest of my life, whenever I thought of my wedding day, I’d remember that: a sprawled person in dirty, torn clothes with limbs bent backwards and his face raw and ripped apart, lying on top of a dark stain in the middle of the street. Thing is, I do always think of that whenever I think of my wedding day, and I didn’t even see it. It’s actually been worse not seeing it. I should check with Carmen and see what he really looked like because I’m sure it’s not as bad as the bloodbath I’ve got in my head.
A few of Steve’s sisters came back to the car, and they were all crying.
“It’s horrible. You should see for yourself,” one of them said, the one that likes me the least.
Lu’s bleeding hand was still in her dress, but her other hand was holding mine. “We’re staying inside,” she said firmly.
Steve’s parents had rented one of those enormous Hummer limo things that we would usually make fun of, but because Steve has so many sisters and they all needed to be in the wedding party, we didn’t have much of a choice. Our people wouldn’t fit in a regular limo. If it were up to me, we would have just taken cabs there, or maybe borrowed a few cars, but Steve’s mother had her fingerprints all over this thing from the beginning, probably even before Steve proposed.
On the way to the wedding, it was only the girls and the driver in the gigantic vehicle. We’d meet everybody else at the church, and after the ceremony part, the boys would get in and we’d all drive to the reception together. I had suggested we just all go together in the first place, but Steve’s mother started freaking out about what bad luck it was for the bride and groom to go to the church together. I’m pretty sure killing someone on the way to your wedding is also bad luck, but Steve’s mother wasn’t there for me to ask.
Somebody called Steve, and probably his mother, to say we were going to be late because we couldn’t leave before giving statements to the police. We probably all said versions of the same thing, so I don’t know why they had to interview all of us girls individually. I felt for the driver, though. He was pacing around, smoking cigarette after cigarette, talking into his cellphone. I noticed when he hung up from one of the calls that his hands were shaking. He was having a worse day than I was.
They sent another limo to come and get us, this time a reasonably sized one because there were no other Hummer limos left. They’d have to take us in two trips to the reception. But this was not the greatest upset of the day. You’d think so, the way Steve’s mother reacted when we finally made it to the church.
“This is awful. This limo is way too small, and everybody’s going to be kept waiting afterwards. I just wanted everything to go smoothly today!” she said, fluttering her hands like she was about to take flight, which would have been nice.
“It’s not the worst thing that could happen. Just ask the guy we left on the road back there,” said Carmen. She’s gutsy, but she was also not looking down the barrel of being this woman’s daughter-in-law.
Steve’s mother frowned and shook her head and said, “Well of course not, I feel for that poor man; what a terrible thing,” but it was too little too late for sure.
I love Carmen. She’s never afraid to say what she thinks. Sometimes I wish I’d married her.
You’d think that this would have made me stop and think about what I was about to do. I had plenty of time to change my mind in between the accident and standing at the front of the church beside Steve. I could have backed out any time between those two moments. But the momentum of the thing kept propelling me forward. Lu knew me better than anybody except Carmen, and when it was just us in the limo, her bloody hand in the poufy dress Steve’s mother had chosen, she said quietly: “If you don’t want to do this today, we don’t have to. We can get out of it.”
I looked at her, and her eyes were so soft and kind I knew that if I backed out she’d love me just the same as she did right now. But the momentum seemed an impossible obstacle. I couldn’t see a way out. Everyone was expecting us. Late, now, but expecting us. Steve and his mother would be furious. My parents would probably be pissed too. I have always hated disappointing people. It’s a problem. One time with an ex-boyfriend, I pretended I liked oatmeal for an entire year, choking it down every morning so I wouldn’t hurt his feelings. So here was Lu—and a dead guy in the street—telling me it was okay to walk away, but I still couldn’t do it. Though in retrospect, the huge whoosh of joy I felt when I considered it, just for a second, should have been a sign.
A few years after we killed the guy/got married, I walked into the kitchen, and Steve and his mother were sitting at the table. They stopped talking when I walked in, which wasn’t unusual, so I ignored them and headed over to the fridge. The photos on the fridge were gone, and instead there was a clipping, neatly cut out of a magazine, taped near the handle. It was faded, and the paper was yellowing, but I could still see it clearly: a white plastic thing that looked like a small humidifier, with speech bu
bbles coming out of it: “No wonder you’re getting fat!” “Stop eating, you pig!” The product description next to the photo read: “Talking refrigerator to keep your wife slim and you happy.” Steve and his mother burst out laughing. “Wish we could still get those!” Steve said, or maybe it was his mother. I left the room but not before grabbing the chips on top of the fridge. No way was I going to give them the satisfaction.
By then something had shifted a bit in me. I still cared about disappointing people who were outside of our marriage, but I didn’t give a shit about disappointing Steve and his mother. I sort of relished it. It was the one thing about us that came easy.
I didn’t want kids and Steve did. To this day, I’m still not sure if I didn’t want to have kids at all, or I didn’t want kids with Steve. Either way, this caused a huge fight.
“You never thought to mention this before?” Steve said, his face blotching an ugly red.
I got out of bed to distance myself from that face.
“I thought we already talked about it,” I lied. Of course we hadn’t talked about it. It was the oatmeal all over again but this time with my uterus.
“This is what normal people do. Get married. Have kids.” Steve was trying to keep his voice steady, I could tell, but his face was getting blotchier by the second.
I didn’t say anything and stayed near the door, fiddling with stuff on the dresser—a pot of night cream, the lighter I used for candles and my secret cigarettes. Steve sighed.
“Think about it a little bit more, maybe, okay, honey? You don’t want to regret it when you’re older. Maybe you’ll change your mind.”
“Maybe,” I said.
I didn’t change my mind, but I got pregnant anyway.
I put my foot down when Steve wanted to name the baby after his mother.
“No way,” I said, lips and teeth in a tight line.
Steve saw my face, and maybe he figured this was one he’d better let me win. He’d won the war, after all. Our baby was in his arms, there in the hospital. And I loved her when she was born and afterwards, of course I did. She was gorgeous, too, black hair and blue eyes, looking up at us all fresh and new and open, completely undisappointed.
“I’m naming her Carmen,” I said, and Steve let me have that one.
In those early years, sometimes I’d take Little Carmen over to Big Carmen’s house, and watching them together made my heart fall out. Carmen was so good with my daughter, crouching down and talking to her face to face, asking her about her favourite animal in a human tone of voice instead of that horrible baby-talk Steve’s mother used with her. When the Carmens leaned their heads together over a book, I imagined a different life, where I’d be pulling open the door of a nonjudgemental fridge to make us dinner, and the girls would be laughing together in the other room, and the guy on the road wasn’t dead, and Steve’s mother was nowhere, and it was just the Carmens and me.
Sensitive
Olive is fed up with her sensitive plant. The guy in the store said give it lots of light. So Olive’s got Mim (short for mimosa pudica) in the sunniest part of the apartment and still the plant seems unhappy. The guy in the store said all you need to do is water it once a week (probably just trying to make the sale, Olive thinks later, but unfortunately not at the time). She brought Mim home on Friday, and by Monday the soil was already dry and Mim was not looking well. Olive gave her a drink and hoped for the best. Water seemed to perk Mim up temporarily, but a day later she was drooping again, and now most of the leaves are shrivelled up and dry, while some of them close to the soil look yellow, like their little livers are jaundiced. Maybe Mim drank too much too fast and is hungover.
In the week since she brought her home, Olive has given the sensitive plant everything she was supposed to. There is absolutely no reason for Mim to be this moody. Olive’s pissed that she’s not more resilient. This is not the metaphor she hoped it would be.
Maybe the stress of moving was too much for Mim. When Olive found her in the store, she wasn’t going home straight away, so the guy put the plant in a white plastic bag and said it would be fine. Olive took her new plant to the movies. The theatre was otherwise empty, so the plant got a seat to herself. Olive pulled the plastic down so Mim could breathe better. She put her purse beside her so the seat wouldn’t snap shut and crush Mim.
The movie was very stressful to watch, about a coup in an unnamed country in Latin America where suddenly everybody is trying to kill all white Americans for reasons not properly explained. It was quite racist, and Olive was embarrassed that she chose this for Mim’s first movie. Being from Latin America originally herself, Mim would hate this simplistic, xenophobic portrayal of her home. But Olive had already paid, so they kept watching.
Olive looked over at Mim a few times. Her leaves were still closed, as they had been since she’d chosen the plant, but it was night, so maybe she was sleeping rather than closing her eyes against the violence, as Olive was doing enough to make her consider walking out. But it might upset Mim more to move her again so quickly. At one point, Olive left Mim to go to the bathroom during a particularly terrifying scene where the main guy was throwing his children from one roof to another. When she got back, the children were safe and Mim hadn’t moved.
Olive doesn’t watch the news because it makes her feel very stressed out. Sometimes at work somebody will say something about a storm or corporate takeover or stock plunge or plane crash. Olive just shakes her head and mirrors whatever the other person’s face is doing. If it’s a disaster of some kind (which it almost always is, which is why Olive doesn’t watch the news), she murmurs something like “It’s so awful” and extracts herself quickly. It is popular practice to be informed. Olive chooses not to be, but she doesn’t want to get into a conversation about how important it is to know what’s going on in the world. One of those conversations can be almost as stressful as watching the news in the first place.
The chestnut tree in front of the building has leaf blotch. It’s a disease it gets every year about this time, and it is very upsetting. It doesn’t kill the tree or permanently damage it, but every August the leaves start browning. It’s depressing, like slicing open an avocado and finding it rotten inside. Brown when you’re expecting green. If you just stared at that tree all day you’d think it was the end of October or something, and Olive hates anything that hastens the winter.
Maybe Mim’s mood is low because of the leaf blotch. At this time of year, Olive usually keeps the blinds shut more often than not so she doesn’t have to look at the ugly tree. But Mim needs the sunlight, so Olive keeps the blinds open and tries not to spend too much time looking out the window.
When she checks on her on Saturday morning, Mim doesn’t seem too bad, considering. What’s left of her is green and open, leaning towards the light. Olive’s irritation withers and drops. She wells up a little. Mim is tougher than she looks.
Dead leaves are lying on the saucer and some have dropped onto the ground. Olive collects them and clears them away. Mim does not need to be standing in her own death.
Harriet calls.
“Can we come by today? I need adult company.”
“Okay,” Olive says and tells herself it will be.
“Around noon?”
Olive starts to panic and pace. What will she feed them? What does Jake eat or not eat? It must be her turn to say something. She gathers up some words and is trying to put them in an order that will make sense to Harriet, when her sister sighs and says: “It’s fine. We’ll eat first and come at two. That okay?”
“Okay,” Olive says quickly and hangs up before things change.
Olive finds children unsettling. She loves Jake, sort of, because he’s her nephew, but he’s exhausting to be around. How Harriet manages it is a mystery, but Harriet has always been more even-keel than Olive. When they were kids, their dad took them through a car wash. In the car of course, but Olive was absolutely terrified, sticking her tiny fingers up to the seam where the glass met the frame t
o make sure no water was coming in. Harriet was reading a comic book during the ordeal. By the time they got through the car wash, Olive’s face was as wet as the car and her chest felt like it was full of stones. Harriet looked over at her and sighed, then tapped their dad on the shoulder.
“Olive’s upset, Dad,” she said, and the next time they went through the car wash, Olive got out and stood by the hose that fills tires with air. Harriet stayed in the car and read a comic book.
Harriet doesn’t read comic books anymore, and she sighs more than she used to. She’s not so skinny these days, and there’s grey in her hair, but otherwise she hasn’t changed much. She’s the calm one. Olive finds this very annoying sometimes, but she generally doesn’t say so. Jake, on the other hand, is not that calm. He runs a lot and seems to fall over without bumping into anything, and he makes a lot of noise. He seems to enjoy banging things. Olive looks around the room and wonders what he’s going to do with himself when they visit. She digs out a deck of cards and some gum and hopes that will be enough.
When they arrive, Harriet hugs her with one arm, Jake in the other.
“I’ve got some gum and cards for Jake,” Olive says.
Harriet looks at her strangely. “Jake’s two, Olive. He can’t have gum.”
“Oh, of course, I forgot,” Olive lies. Two year olds can’t have gum?
Harriet and Jake follow her into the living room, and everybody sits down. Jake only stays sitting for half a second, though, before he slips off the couch and starts kicking the legs of it and then stomping on the floor. He’s laughing. It seems fun for him. It is not fun for Olive. Her body scrunches up against the noise. Harriet sighs.
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