Blackbird House (17 page)

There were pine trees and holly around the far side of the pond, and that’s where they went.
 
They had to drag him along over the frozen weeds.
 
They put stones in his pockets, heavy black stones, the kind Jamie and Hank liked best for their slingshots.
 
Rosalyn took off the work boots she’d been wearing and filled them with stones as well, then put the boots on her husband, laced them and carefully tied a knot, then a double-knot.

“Your feet will freeze on the way back,” Jamie whispered.

She didn’t seem to care.
 
She closed her eyes, and when she opened them they were still slits.
 
The snow was making things quieter all the time.
 
They pulled him into the pond and watched him sink.
 
There was a gulping noise at first, then there was nothing.
 
Only the quiet.

“You go home,” Rosalyn said to Jamie.
 
“Go on.
 
Your mother will be worried.”

He hated to leave her like that, barefoot, bleeding.

She leaned over and kissed him, on the lips, in gratitude.

Jamie Farrell ran the rest of the way, his hot breath rattling against his ribs.
 
His boots and pants legs were wet and mucky.
 
There was pond water in his boots, fetid, cold stuff.
 
He was shivering and couldn’t stop.
 
Worst of all, his mother was waiting for him.

“What took you so long?”
 
Grace demanded.
 
“It’s after eight.
 
You missed your TV show.”
 
Then, looking at him carefully, “Where’s the shovel?”

“I forgot it.”
 
Jamie turned back to the door.
 
“I’m sorry.
 
I’ll go get it if you want.”

His mother stopped him.
 
She looked at him harder still.
 
“I’ll go. You do your homework and get ready for bed.”

“I can get the shovel in the morning,” Jamie offered, an edge of panic inside him.
 
But Grace was already getting her coat.
 
She had stepped into her warm black boots.
 
After she left, Jamie went up to the bedroom he shared with his brother.
 
It was as though he’d just walked out of a dream and here he was, melting in the overheated second floor of his family’s house.
 
He thought of all the wounded people there were in this world, people he’d never even know, and he felt helpless.

“What if I was an accessory to murder?”
 
he asked Hank, who was already in bed, more than half asleep as he gazed at his history book.

“What if you were the biggest moron that ever lived?”
 
Hank shot back, a question for which there was no answer, at least not on this night.

It was nearly midnight by the time Grace came home.
 
The snow was tapering off, and she brushed the flakes from her coat and stomped on the welcome mat to dislodge the ice from her boots.
 
Usually, Jim didn’t get back till dawn, but tonight he’d come home earlier.
 
The storm wasn’t as bad as the meteorologists had predicted.
 
His men could take care of the rest of the cleanup.

“Where were you?
 
The boys are in bed, and when you weren’t here, I didn’t know what to think.”

But that wasn’t true.
 
For a moment, what he’d thought was that she’d left him.
 
Just disappeared into that other life she seemed to be thinking about sometimes.
 
They stared at each other now, their breath hot.
 
Outside, the drifts leaned against the house; winter here stayed a long time.

“I went over and heated up the tomato soup for Rosalyn.”

“Did you?”

Grace sat down at the table.
 
Everyone had known what was going on, and no one had done a damn thing about it.

“Hal up and left.
 
No money, no warning, nothing.
 
She thinks he may have re-enlisted.”

Jim was looking out the window; two deer had just now wandered into

their field.
 
He hoped the snow wasn’t deep enough to prevent them from

unearthing the last withered sweet peas, thought to be delicious by

anything wild.
 
“I guess it’s none of our business,” he said.
 
From

this distance, the winter berries almost looked tropical, the fruit of

another place entirely

“So you say.”

Grace Farrell still had snow in her hair, but it would melt when they got into bed, and she’d never even know it had been there.
 
When she thought back to this night, she wouldn’t even remember it had been snowing, she’d only remember the look on her husband’s face, the concentration she loved, the man she could turn to, even on a night as cold as this.

INDIA

MY MOTHER TOLD ME THAT THE BLACK

birds were singing on the day they found the house.
 
You could hear them from the road.
 
It was a wave of sound, black and blue and sweet.
 
Like a bruise that was healing, nothing but peace and harmony.
 
That was how my parents knew they had reached their destination.
 
It was a November day at the very end of nineteen sixty-nine; the earth and sky were gray, and my parents were at the very tip of the world, or so it seemed.

My father had been born John Adams-Cooper, but he called himself Risha, which was Hindu for those whose birthdays fall under the sign of the bull.
 
When we were teenagers, my brother and I used to say it was actually the sign for bullshit.
 
All the same, my father had a dumb-animal acceptance of things, good or bad, and if that made him a bull, so be it.
 
He had studied with a yogi in Cambridge, but was still suffering from exhaustion and post-traumatic stress.
 
He had decided that cities were bad for humanity, so my parents had taken to the road and kept moving, from Vermont, to New Hampshire, to the far reaches of the Cape, where at last those blackbirds stopped them cold.
 
It was an omen, my mother was certain of it.
 
Twenty-four blackbirds in a row on the roof of the house, one for every hour of every day.
 
One of the birds appeared to be white, and surely that must be a sign of good fortune to come.
 
My father had just inherited some money from the aunt who’d raised him, an unexpected windfall.
 
The house was destiny, my mother told me; the path that was meant to be.

Of course, anyone with the least bit of sense would have been instantly aware that this ramshackle farm was no one’s shining path.
 
It had been on the market for five years, the family house of the doctor in town, sold when he moved his family to a larger place in the village.
 
It appealed to none of the locals.
 
People said it was haunted.
 
Boys threw stones at the windows; girls vowed that if you had the nerve to walk past the big old pear tree, then turn around twice, the man you were destined to marry would appear on the road.

The place was a wreck, that much was certain, not that my parents noticed.
 
The heater had been torn out.
 
The roof was leaking.
 
The plumbing ceased to function whenever the temperature went below freezing, so that the outhouse was still utilized, even though you could freeze your bum in a matter of minutes.
 
All the same, no one could dissuade my mother, who had once been Naomi Shapiro of Great Neck, Long Island, but who had become someone else completely.
 
She was a woman who saw what she wanted to see: Therefore, it was love that had drawn them to the house where my brother and I grew up.
 
It was fortune, perfection, nothing less than bliss.

My mother often got things backward; I knew that early on.
 
She made irrevocable mistakes, such as going to Boston one weekend when she was a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Vassar and meeting my father on the Common and falling in love when it was the last thing in the world she should have done.
 
It was crazy, the act of a foolish, impressionable girl.
 
If Naomi had really understood omens she would have recognized these signs: My father was thirty-five when she met him, far too old for her, much too damaged.
 
He’d served in Vietnam and hadn’t held a job since his return to Massachusetts.
 
Was this her destiny?
 
Naomi Shapiro read tarot cards.
 
Did she not see exactly what the future would bring?

All the same, my father had a beautiful face, with strong features my mother mistook for inner strength.
 
She didn’t know until they spent the night together that he cried himself to sleep.
 
He had such terrible nightmares that he ground his teeth until the enamel cracked.
 
But after that first night, embracing each other on the floor of an apartment belonging to someone they barely knew, it was probably too late to walk away.
 
The more wounded my father was, the more tightly my mother was tied to him.
 
If she’d been wiser or older or simply more experienced, she would have known that any man who professes his love for you half an hour after he meets you is a man who has his feet planted squarely in his dreams.
 
In my father’s case, all of those dreams were nightmares, nothing anyone should be destined to share, no future to wish for, no destiny to desire.

My mother was also mistaken about those blackbirds that were perched along the roof of our house.
 
They were bad luck, not good.
 
Everyone knows a white blackbird is nothing more than a ghost, a shadow of what it ought to be.
 
And that line of birds didn’t signify twenty-four hours, but twenty-four years, for that was how long my parents were married.
 
My brother, Kalkin, and I, one year apart, were both born in the summer kitchen, a shed with a dirt floor at the rear of the property.
 
My parents didn’t believe in hospitals; they believed in meditation and in the natural order of things.
 
My father had remained a devotee of the Maharishi and of Krishna consciousness; therefore, simplicity was the path.
 
My father was convinced that babies in India came into this world easily, while the mothers focused on a single bead of sweat; too much fuss was made here in the U.S. But my brother, Kalkin, was always difficult; even before he was born, he didn’t abide by my father’s plans.
 
Kalkin had to be turned and persuaded to leave the womb.
 
Fortunately our neighbor, Josephine Brooks, came to check in on my mother, and Miss Brooks ran back to her house to phone Dr.
 
Farrell.
 
The doctor, having grown up in this same house, was most likely shocked by its current state when he came to deliver my brother, after Kal refused to be born naturally.
 
Dr.
 
Farrell returned the following year, for safety’s sake, surely as an afterthought, for me.

For years Kal and I went to the shed, stunned that we’d been born there.
 
Was it possible, in this day and age?
 
Was it even legal to do such a thing?
 
We watched TV at Nancy Lanahan’s house whenever we had the chance.
 
We knew children were supposed to be born in clean hospital rooms with nurses hovering over the laboring mothers and medical equipment available in case of emergency.
 
We knew our parents were not like other people.
 
Every day, in every way, they proved this to us.
 
We had simple longings, Kalkin and I, for store-bought white bread, for ironed clothes and boxes of chocolates, the kind my mother said would rot a person’s teeth and make him hyperactive.

My father had no job; his idea of work was to cut down the tall grass in our field at the end of the summer, then store the hay in the shed where we’d been born.
 
My mother now kept two sheep there, for their wool.
 
She supported us with her weavings intricate, beautiful things but it wasn’t enough.
 
We were poor, although that wasn’t the problem: it was how prideful our parents were about our lowly circumstances, as though our lack of possessions made us better somehow.
 
We were superior beings because we used the woodstove to heat the downstairs in winter, and piled up blankets on our beds so we wouldn’t freeze during the night.
 
We ate rice and beans at the end of every month.
 
We wore our clothes until they all but disintegrated, and even then my mother, who had grown up with a closet full of clothes I would have coveted, cashmere and leather and lace, sewed gingham patches on our jeans, which my brother ripped off the minute he left the house.

Fuck this, he would say.
 
Kalkin seemed harder with every year, as

though he had a shell around him, one nothing could penetrate.
 
The

cold no longer affected him.
 
He never wore a winter coat.
 
He refused

to bother with a hat or an umbrella.
 
He was invincible, that was

Kalkin, and he would manage to outwit our parents someday.
 
The holes

in his clothes only clarified matters he was too good for the life we

were living.
 
He had been misplaced somehow, left on a doorstep, born