Delicate Edible Birds (22 page)

 

THE DAY BEGINS:
the woman rises from the bed, climbs into her chair. But even in the sulfurous draft she can't concentrate a whit. The exact matte of the road mud holds no draw for her. She is restless, restless.

Her fingers fly off her lap and scrabble about. Her thigh-wound has made her skin taut and pulsing. It burns and leaks a clear fluid through her denim skirt. Worse, that voice has begun to speak in sentences and has not left her head. It is a stern old woman's voice that barks out names in staccato: Donna, she says, Tabitha, Miriam Dubonnet-Quince. Howard.

Now the old woman says, Sudden Pond, with a crow's
caw of a laugh. The woman feels ill. She tries to ignore the old woman (she knows somehow the old woman's fat, shrewd, a brusque old bat). She tries to think of other things. The water beneath the town, beneficial, beginning to melt: the veins in the ground, thick with ice, the sulfur, salt, magnesium water pressing up urgently against the ice. But there is something in this she doesn't like either. It reminds her of something very unpleasant.

The woman curls into her chair, presses her hands against her ears. She doesn't hear the door when it opens.

But rising to her, the scent of breakfast, lifesaving coffee, and she looks around for the girl. She finds tears of gratitude, of love, in her eyes. She loves the girl for something the girl reminds her of. She doesn't want to examine exactly what it is.

But instead of the girl, it's the large woman, the dark one with the British accent (the old woman in her spits out,
Surrey
, distastefully—how would she know?). The British woman is the wife of the gardener, he who chips ice from the walks—they own the hotel; she cooks the meals. The man is a Labrador retriever, earnest and stupid and simple. The woman is more difficult, secretive, and far too young to be the punk's mother.

She wills the British woman to finish her cleaning and leave, but the woman isn't cleaning at all. She's watching her, lovely porcelain face on a swollen body. Laura Ashley cabbage roses, poofy sleeves, ridiculous. Stillness of a cat.

Where's the punk? says the woman, nervous. I like her, she says.

Sorry, says the large woman. Jaime isn't well today. She leans forward and does a curious thing. She takes the woman's hands in her own and presses them.

For a long while, for the time it takes for the dawn to dip the highest chimneytop in gold, she holds her guest's hands. They stare at each other. Then the British woman says, The day you came. Do you remember it?

Despite herself, the woman does now. She sees a three-quarter moon, raw; headlights; her whole skin chafed and wet. She shudders and pushes it out of her head.

I walked down the hill to the village, she says. It was dark. My shoes were wet. Your windows were the only ones lit and I knocked.

And before? says the British woman.

Before, says the woman. The road at the top of the hollow and the truck driver. He stopped for gas. The truck smelled unpleasant, and she got out and began to walk. She doesn't say this. She shakes her head and says, No.

All right, says the British woman. She cocks her lovely head. Listen. I don't know what happened. The less I know the better. But this afternoon, my husband and I are going to Richfield Springs for groceries and we can take you. There's a coach, at three, to Boston.

Something in her voice when she says: Boston's a large, large town. Easy to begin anew.

The woman is not sure what the other is trying to tell her. Oh, she says. No, thank you. I like this very much, and she gestures at the town, her window, the stark little room.

The British woman looks at her, then sighs and stands. Very well, she says, and turns to make the bed. When she leaves, she leaves the television on to some show. A black-haired woman with a pistol stands over a woman who looks just like her, bleeding on the ground. The music dramatic and bright. Under it, the old lady in her head speaks up. Well, now, she says grimly. I sure don't believe that fat Brit is all she seems to be.

Hush, you, says the woman, agitated to standing. She turns off the television. The voice in her head goes silent.

The woman circles the room, feeling like a caged finch, picks up the musty books on the nightstand, puts them down again. Nothing is right anymore. There is no solace in the dead street, the dead town. She pauses before the television, but to invite such noise will make it hard to be quiet again.

After hours of pacing, she goes to the door. She has a vague idea that if she can find the girl she can talk to her. Jaime, the British woman had called her. The girl who reminds her of someone she doesn't want to remember, though she thinks it may be necessary that she remember now.

 

EARLY AFTERNOON AND
the hotel is empty, save for Jaime and the woman upstairs. Though Jaime is in her little brown bed, her nest, listening to the foggy pop music on her clock
radio, she feels as if she's tied to the woman with an invisible tether. She wonders what she had felt when she murdered her husband, the moment the knife entered his flesh. Jaime closes her eyes and thinks that she probably felt nothing. That she watched herself from the outside, and it was a wonderful relief.

In the past, when Bettina and Jason were both gone Jaime would wander the forbidden depths of the hotel. On the third floor, the begrimed windows and furniture hulked under blankets like beasts asleep. Pigeons entered through a broken pane, and when she came into the room the birds would rise and swirl about her in a confetti of down. There she'd found a box of old letters in the servants' quarters, misspelled, stained, banal, infinitely tender. Jaime would go into Bettina and Jason's suite, three rooms in ivory and pink, smelling of Bettina's flowers, Jason's things kenneled in their own closet. She loves to pick through Jason's nightstand, his careful cache of treasures: the hunting knife in the handmade sheath that stinks of summer camp, the misspelled list in his adolescent hand:
Things I Will Do Before I Die
(number three,
Be a Brigideer General;
number nine,
Be a Millionaire
), the photographs of a younger Jason and a stunning, thin Bettina laughing, at Niagara. She runs her hands over Bettina's floral dresses, searches through her lingerie.

In her journal she writes a loopy
Bettina
. It's not enough to write the name; it is all she has.

Since that February night during an ice storm, when Jaime and Bettina stood in the kitchen rolling out dough for
mincemeat pies, and the lights went out, and Bettina laughed and lit great conflagrations of candles in the room and in the flickering light Bettina glowed, Jaime had felt bubble within her a certain new helplessness. At that moment, she understood why she'd been happy these past few months. She'd understood, finally, a small piece of herself.

Good girls wear wigs and long skirts and marry men their parents choose and become mothers. Good girls don't dream the way Jaime dreams about other women. With that bright pulse, she'd found a better way to escape her parents. She had felt powerful in the kitchen that night.

It was not impossible that Bettina knew. She read Jaime's journal, after all, kept Jaime on a leash she'd tug from time to time to make sure that Jaime was attentive. Still, if what Jaime wrote about Jason bothered Bettina, she had yet to show it.

That morning, after Bettina went upstairs with the tray, Jaime's face grew hot in the steam from the dishes and Jason sat at the table, watching her. Jaime, Jaime, Jaime, he said when she put the last dish in the rack. C'mere. I won't bite.

Nah, she said. I'm okay here.

Fine, he said, standing. Then I'll go over there. He was still a little wobbly from the whiskey, and Jaime stepped easily around the table to put it between them.

Jason laughed, leaned his fists on the table. Oh, Jaime, he said. You don't fool me for a minute.

A sea rush in her ears. I don't? she said, wondering what he meant. She strained to hear upstairs, and relaxed when she heard a door close, Bettina's heavy tread on the stairs.

Jason heard, too, and his smile fell off his face. Nope, he said. You and my wife are hiding that woman upstairs, aren't you? I'm not as stupid as I look. Soon as I heard about the people in the car, I thought of that woman. He sighed, sat down. He looked suddenly old.

Jaime, he said, Bettina's a complicated lady, you know. She's got her own reasons for what she does. I just don't want you getting mixed up in something you don't understand.

Jaime made a sound as if she'd been hit in the sternum, though it came out sounding like a laugh. And then there was Bettina in the door, frowning, with the empty tray.

Jason stretched, smiling. We should go into town now, he said. Ready, Bette?

In a jiff, she said. Jaime, you'll hold down the fort?

Sure, said Jaime, though she wasn't sure, at all. In a minute, they were in the car, gone.

They have been away for hours when she hears Jason's truck coming to a stop before the hotel. She weighs Jason against Bettina and finds him lacking. The doors slam, the kitchen door opens, the rustle of bags on the counter. Jaime waits until she hears Jason crunch over the gravel outside, heading to his workshop, and then she's in the kitchen, where Bettina has sliced open a melon and is eating a juicy crescent at the window.

Bettina laughs, guiltily. Couldn't help myself, she says. Then puts the sweet fruit before Jaime's lips for her to bite.

But Jaime looks at Bettina, and Bettina takes the fruit away. I have to tell you, says Jaime. I have to tell you about
something. Up rises the kiss in the dark corridor, Jason's face behind the shower curtain; Jaime feels the prickles on the back of her neck, as if she's about to lob a grenade into a marriage. It's about Jason, she says.

But Bettina is already nodding. I know, she says. He's smarter than I gave him credit for. Called the police. While we were at the store, he took off and I know he did it then.

Jaime feels dizzy, and when Bettina smiles and leans forward, her pretty mouth close to Jaime's, Jaime doesn't at first know what is happening, and only thinks fuzzily of the woman upstairs.

 

LILY IS HIDING
in her grandmother's closet. It is a palace in there, mahogany and crystal, whole walls of spike heels and furs in plastic shrouds. Lily is trying to listen into the bedroom, but Sammy is odious. She's pulled out the silk pockets from the grandmother's spring coats, spilling used tissues to the ground like shriveled mushrooms, and is now standing in a pair of red heels, shimmying on her bowed legs, her belly pulsing in and out.

Lily mouths, Stop it, Sammy!, but Sammy only chuckles and shimmies some more.

Her uncles are in the room with the grandmother, all stone-faced; her aunts are there, too, crying and patting at their cheeks with tissues. The lawyer is there, a family friend, a fat man with a big nose like a red lightbulb. Lily was standing on a chair on the cold veranda, peering at the birds, when
Sammy hissed and pointed through the glass door, and Lily saw the slow march of the relatives and the lawyer toward the grandmother's room. When she saw Maria pushing a cart full of drinks and snacks toward the door, Lily waved at the birds and their mother, who hopped in indignation on one foot. Bye, Winkyn, Blinkyn, and Nod, she said. Be good.

The lawyer is now saying something: a car found in a pond. Upstate. Howard. Blood. Missing. Tabitha.

Tabitha is Lily's mother. Howard is Lily's father.

And then the grandmother gives a curious sound, a half-shout, raspy and metallic. My Howard? she shouts.
My
Howard? Murdered?

Uncle Chan, the oldest uncle, begins to roar. Why?

A long pause. The lawyer honks into a handkerchief and folds it away. He says loud enough for Lily to hear, We're not sure. But the evidence points toward. Well, there was a manuscript on the desk, unfinished. From what we can piece together, there may have been some, er. Indiscretion. On the part of. We're running things by the credit card company, to make sure. And we're looking for Tabitha now. Or her body. We're just not sure.

Lily feels like she's swimming. She can't breathe. Sammy stands over her, staring down with a dirty finger in her mouth. Lily clutches a silk skirt and lifts it to her face, over her nose and down, three times.

Your mother, whispers Sammy, murdered your father. She grins a terrible grin.

Maria finds Lily hours later, folded into a ball beneath
her grandmother's dresses, wet, mute. The girl won't speak through her bath, won't eat the soup. And so, when she puts Lily to bed, Maria curls up beside her and breathes with her until Lily sleeps in her own small nest of pillows. She is careful to stay on the corner of the bed so that when Lily wakes in the night, Maria will not have rolled over and crushed Lily's imaginary friend.

 

PARADISE, THE PARROT
in the lobby on his brass hoop, Donna's pale to tan, blonde to white. Their breakfasts of fruit, melon and papaya and pineapple.

This, Howard says to the girl over the coffee, watching her in the breeze in her kimono; this is the best gynecological conference I've ever been to in my life.

She snorts. Real diamonds, his gift, glow in her ears. Aren't you glad I made us stay? she says, her voice still rough after all her painstaking finesse. What if we just didn't go back? she says.

Yes, he says, but with the word there swims up a small unease. His wife, banging pots in the kitchen, coming up with her sloppy dinners to go back more quickly to her imagined worlds. He was supposed to have returned three days ago: he left messages with the answering service when he knew his wife would be out of the house, making excuses: they asked him to stay to address a medical school class, then the plane broke down and he had to stay overnight.

What would happen if he just remained here, soaking his
flesh in the sun like lobster in butter, Donna beside him? Every day, this lascivious sun. He'd buy a yacht and sail it from island to island. Even in the midst of his fantasy, though, he knows he'd think of Lily, his pale, intense girl, and guilt would chase him. It would catch him, no matter where he was.