Suicide's Girlfriend (23 page)

In the shade of the carport, while Joyce Burton and Candace waited for Maryvonne, Joyce Burton played her copy of Maryvonne's cock-atiel tape and told Candace the details of her capture of the bird now squawking in her car. “They say you're not supposed to be timid at all, so as soon as the bird started eating the millet, I threw a blanket on it and
pounced.”

“I'm impressed,” Candace said.

Joyce bowed, laughed, then went to the trunk of her little car and opened it and pulled two bottles of beer from a cooler there. “These are warm—more leftovers from the picnic—but you want one? Pretend we're British or something?”

Candace shook her head. It occurred to her that she might get closer to Joyce Burton by explaining that, actually, because of her father, she was afraid of drinking any sort of alcohol, period; instead, she said, “In a way, don't you think it's sort of sad these birds can be tricked so easily? I mean, it's great a lost bird will come down to the tape, but it seems sort of pathetic.” She meant to go on to tell Joyce Burton that the term “stool pigeon” originated from the practice of
tying a bird to a stool so that its calls might lure others of its kind into a net, but, over by the raised trunk of her car, Joyce Burton now appeared to be laughing—crying?—no, laughing, so Candace said, “Do you think it was smart for me to tell Maryvonne where I live? I mean, Carson would have a fit.”

“Carson?”
Joyce Burton made wide eyes.

Candace nodded. “He's a worrywart.”

“How funny! I guess it makes sense, though, since he likes to take care of people and all.” Joyce Burton smiled at Candace. “Everybody at school loves Carson, you know. Ricky practically idolized him. He would have liked to
be
Carson! You know those awful shirts Carson wears? Rick had started wearing those!”

Joyce Burton laughed, but Candace was not sure that meant that she should laugh. “Carson really liked Rick, too,” she said.

Joyce Burton nodded. “That meant a lot to him. Once, last fall, I know they had a good talk and it helped Rick . . . for a while, anyway.” She turned the ring on her index finger back and forth. The ring was so large and elaborate that bending the finger it adorned would have been an impossibility. “A lot of people liked Ricky because they thought he was crazy. You know: the wild man. I loved him for other reasons.” Joyce Burton held the ring-studded hand out before herself and gave it a hard stare. “You know what he did?” she asked.

For a moment, Candace did not understand that Joyce Burton referred to Rick Haynes's suicide. She assumed that the question was rhetorical, and that Joyce Burton meant to offer an example of what had made her love Rick Haynes; but Joyce Burton continued, “He was really, really drunk. I mean, even though he talked about killing himself a lot, believe me, he'd be so fucking embarrassed if he knew he actually did it.”

With a scrape, Mrs. Yelland from across the street dragged her green recycling bin to the curb. In case the old lady looked their way, Candace raised her hand to wave, then, lips trembling, she said, “I've thought about doing it, Joyce. Before I met Carson, I figured thinking about killing yourself was, like, a sign of mental health. Well, not mental
health
, maybe, but it showed a person had taken a realistic look at life. I know this sounds crazy, but
now
one of the main reasons I think about killing myself is because life's so short!” She gave a stuttering laugh, then tried to meet Joyce Burton's eyes to see if she had gone too far. When Joyce Burton did not look up from turning the rings on her fingers this way and that, Candace hurried on, “Because life's so short, I can't stand that, see? And . . . with Carson. I know I should change some things between us, but then I think, suppose I did. What if he didn't love me then, or I didn't love him either?”

Joyce Burton smiled at Carson's wife and nodded. Ever since Rick's suicide, people had been telling Joyce their disaster stories; not just stories of suicides, but—as if they intuitively understood the thin line between suicide and accident—a story of a little kid who drank drain cleaner, a stepbrother who died grabbing a rainspout electrified by faulty wiring. Car wrecks, drownings, sudden infant death syndrome, betrayal. Afterward, the storytellers sat back and waited. They seemed to expect Joyce to be wiser than she had been just a week ago. Of course, they were concerned about Joyce, and they missed Ricky, but they also seemed to believe that Joyce was a grand searchlight that could illuminate all the nooks and crannies of their troubled pasts. What was that all about? Maybe, during their own troubles, people had not been able to see the outlines well enough? Or maybe they were
missing
their troubles now? They wanted to go back and visit the sites of disaster? Feel something rock their bones?

Though this conversation with Carson's wife was a little different from her conversations with the others, Joyce believed that Carson's wife, too, had a story she wanted to tell.

But Joyce was wrong.

All that Candace had just then was a question that she knew Joyce Burton could not answer: Which was better, to be the one who goes or the one who stays behind?

An oddity: the taped cockatiel calls suddenly becoming a lush old ballad, already well under way, and offering up its own plaint of terrible longing, nostalgia.

Joyce Burton laughed. “I screwed up, there. I'd made my grandma a tape of old Nat King Cole—you know who he was?—and I didn't label it, and, well, I've been kind of fucked up lately, and somehow I copied Maryvonne's tape over the first thirty minutes of Nat King Cole.”

“This has to be such a hard time for you,” Candace said. She laid a shy hand on Joyce Burton's shoulder, then added, “I
can't
imagine.” She knew from years of reading “Dear Abby” that you were not to say, “I
can
imagine,” and she wanted to say the right thing, to offer sympathy without becoming the Emotion Hog, the Big Bore. Hard, she bit her lip. Dug the nails of her free hand into her palm.

“Nothing like a good hot beer.” Joyce Burton's mouth moved this way and that. Maybe she would begin to cry now? And then Candace could cry with her?

No. Joyce Burton inserted her forearm under her strange black hair and lifted it, cooling her neck. She said, “When my grandpa was still alive, we used to go out to this steak house where they had a jukebox with oldies on it, and we'd always put Nat King Cole on the jukebox—this song, ‘Stardust'—and my grandparents would dance, and everybody would watch them. I thought they were these great dancers just because they loved each other, but last week, when my parents were here for Ricky's funeral, my mom was talking about how my grandpa used to come home for lunch everyday, so he and my grandma could practice their steps.” Joyce Burton made a face and sighed as if she found the story depressing.

“Well,” said Candace in what she hoped was an encouraging—but not
smarmy
—sort of voice, “but that's nice, too.”

“Maybe,” Joyce Burton said, then pointed one of her ring-heavy hands to the street. There, a teal-colored van approached; then the van was skidding to a stop in front of the carport. “Here's Maryvonne,”
Joyce Burton said and, a moment later, a tall and willowy young woman in a white waitress uniform emerged from the van and rushed their way, birdcage rattling in her hand. “Hey, Maryvonne,” Joyce Burton called, and held up her two bottles of beer, one of them now almost empty.

Candace could not put this Maryvonne together with the woman from the telephone until the voice of Maryvonne issued from the newcomer's mouth: “So, where's the bird? You Candace?”

Candace nodded, though Maryvonne was already at the window of Joyce Burton's car, looking in. “Oh, shit! That's not my bird!” she cried, then turned her head to another angle. “That bird's all puffed up and ugly!”

Joyce Burton laughed—a toot sounded across the mouth of her beer bottle—but Candace whispered, “Don't say that, Maryvonne. It's upset. Birds get puffy like that when they're upset.”

Maryvonne rolled her eyes as she took a warm beer from Joyce Burton. “I don't know about your bird, Candy, but mine's little and pretty.”

Candy
. Had Maryvonne picked that up from Joyce Burton? Candace stared down the street to the point where the curbs gave way and the pale road and the gravel front yards blended one into the other. “I should call the Humane Society,” she said. “Since that family might have taken the wrong bird—one of our birds—I should let the Humane Society know about this one. In case that family calls back.”

“Hold your horses,” said Maryvonne, “we're not calling anybody yet,” and she slid herself and her cage into the backseat of Joyce Burton's car.

The distressed cockatiel flew, squawking, from driver's window to front passenger's window, while Maryvonne sat in the back of the car, drinking her bottle of warm beer. When the bird finally decided to cling to the driver's window, Maryvonne cracked open the window closest to herself and whispered to Candace and Joyce, “So what do you guys think? You think it could be my bird?”

“But wasn't your bird's back all white, too?” Candace asked.

Maryvonne rubbed at her eyes. “Is that what I told you?” she said around a large yawn.

Joyce Burton fetched a second bottle of beer for Maryvonne and fitted it and a bottle opener through the cracked window. “Have another beer while we give some thought to the matter,” she said with a laugh.

“So, bird.” Maryvonne leaned forward and rested her chin on the carseat. “Are you my bird or what?”

Then, halfway through the second beer—Joyce Burton had just finished her tale of the bird's capture—Maryvonne declared, “I thought I'd never see the little bugger again! How can I thank you, Joyce?”

Joyce Burton, too, had finished a second beer by then. She put the sombrero back on her head—“Nogales” spelled out across the crown in frayed neon green yarn. Joyce Burton danced around in a circle for Maryvonne and made yipping noises. Maryvonne laughed. Candace laughed but only to appear part of the group. In the midst of the other women's chumminess, Candace felt irremediably sober, and a little anxious. That grateful look on Maryvonne's face suggested to Candace that Maryvonne might, at any minute, blurt something to Joyce Burton about the fact that Candace had told her of Rick Haynes's suicide. Also, Candace longed to appear decisive, capable of action, and so she put her hand on the car door and said, “Scoot over, Maryvonne.”

Maryvonne did as she was told. Then Candace slid into Joyce Burton's car and, with an efficiency that astonished even herself, caught up the pied cockatiel and inserted it in Maryvonne's cage.

She told herself that she was glad when the pair finally left. “Idiots,” she muttered. Think of the poor person to whom the bird truly belonged! And poor Rick Haynes, now subject to Joyce Burton's interpretation of his death! When she reentered the house, she yanked
from beneath its refrigerator magnet the sheet of paper that held Maryvonne's telephone numbers and she threw it in the trash.

Off and on, throughout the rest of the day, while she walked about the neighborhood, crying “Phoul, here Phoul,” she sent a mental message to Carson:
Call me
. While she worked in her studio—trying to remove from her painting what appeared to be angry thunderclouds in the sky above the pool—
Call me.

That night, from the carriage lantern's golden halo of light:
Call me.

Sometimes, Candace did believe that she might, actually, have some sort of powers, be a kind of witch; still, she jerked in the director's chair when the telephone began to ring inside the house.

The caller, however, was not Carson, but a young man who said, “I think I've got your bird. It came down to me while I was mountain-biking. Up by Sabino?”

“What about the tail feathers?” Candace asked. She did not want to get her hopes up. “Does it have some reddish paint on the tail feathers?”