The Bird Sisters (11 page)

“We shall go for a walk,” the younger girl would declare.

“And then we shall bake a cake!” the older one would add.

There were a lot of
shalls
in the river family’s dialect.
Ice cream
, they’d say, when they were on the verge of negativity.
Moon pies
.

Twiss didn’t share her exact imaginings with Bett (or Milly)—the outward part of her knew they were silly, but the inward part insisted they weren’t. She decided to tell Bett the basics: that four people had drowned in the river.

“People are always drowning,” Bett said. “Do you know how many people went under and didn’t come back up when my town flooded? Deadwater wasn’t always called Deadwater. It used to be Two Rivers. Before hydroelectric power came up north, when I was twelve.”

Bett said that was before the government men in charge of constructing the dam got control of the water, when the lakes were still rivers and converged just above the town, careening like enemies. One day in late spring, after a week of torrential rain, the temporary dam broke and flooded everything within a twenty-mile radius. People crawled out of their windows and lived on top of their houses. They ate whatever happened to float by.

“My family was lucky,” Bett said. “A jar of beef jerky got stuck in our gutter one morning. Another family got a rocking chair.”

“Did they eat it?” Twiss said.

“Well, they didn’t rock in it.”

Bett said most people took what they could and left. Bett’s family and a handful of others stayed on. Bett said her father wasn’t the type of person to leave a place just because it was underwater. After the water withdrew, they became unincorporated, which Bett said was another way of saying officially irrelevant. She said, “You’re lucky to live where you do.”

Which Twiss did feel lucky about. She didn’t know how she could do without pine needles and black soil on a daily basis. And those were just two of the things that worked to complete her. Her overall feeling about Wisconsin had less to do with the obviously pleasant things about the state: the picturesque apple orchards in the fall, the spotted cows grazing on hillsides in the summer, and the lazy river oxbows that turned into skating rinks in the winter. She was one of the few people who loved Wisconsin for the mosquitoes and the blackflies, the leeches and the water snakes, the scent of manure rising on a still day.

Other people, namely Father Stone, the new priest, didn’t see it that way. Father Stone had come from Illinois, which he said (and often) was more civilized than its northern neighbor. Whenever he came out from behind the pulpit, he brought along his cross as if to ward off people. Twiss missed Father Rice. And even though Father Stone had read Father Rice’s postcard out loud to make a point about the nature of sin, the words had made Twiss smile.

To the faithful folks at Lilly chapel
, Father Rice had written from the Baja Peninsula.
I’ve had my first margarita today. Oh, the frosted glass! Ah, the salt! If only limes grew in Spring Green … Yours, Father Rice
.

After the first postcard, Father Rice sent a letter, this one from the south side of Chicago. According to Father Stone, who summarized the letter at the end of mass one day, Father Rice had lost all of the Sunday school money, as well as one of his legs, in Mexico. Father Stone said they had to decide if they wanted to raise the money to bring Father Rice back to Spring Green for his convalescence. Doing so, he said, would probably be the Christian thing to do, but he also said, “If one offers up his body to sin, he deserves to get stung by it.”

“But he lost his leg!” Twiss had said, to which Father Stone had said, “A lost leg doesn’t take away the sins of the rest of the body, my child.”

“I’m not your child,” Twiss said.

She spent a lot of time wondering which leg Father Rice had lost, in addition to the always-pressing activity of wondering how he’d lost it. Twiss decided she’d let go of her left leg before her right one. When she was bored, she dragged it around like a cripple.

“That’s not funny,” Milly would say. “He probably can’t walk the normal way.”

But even she would eventually start laughing.

Bett didn’t find Twiss as funny as other people did. It was as if she knew the outcome of whatever high jinks Twiss had begun before Twiss knew it. Twiss was always trying to come up with more daring ways to get Bett to notice her. Usually she went around trying to impress people merely for the sake of impressing them; with Bett, her motives were not altogether clear to her. To start, Bett was the only person she knew who wasn’t afraid of something. Twiss’s father was afraid of snakes. Her mother was afraid of the check-book. Milly was afraid of being afraid. Even Twiss admitted a fear, however minor, from time to time. At the moment, she possessed a fear of earwigs. She’d also had a sinister feeling about crab apples lately.

One day when the three of them went to the river, Twiss came up with a way to test Bett by pretending to drown on their way to the sandbar. She wanted to see if Bett would save her and what it would feel like if she did.

When the three of them were halfway to the sandbar, swimming in their usual configuration (Bett in front, Milly in the middle, and Twiss trying her best to keep up in the back), Twiss started flailing more than usual, inhaled as much air as she could, and slipped beneath the surface. Twiss knew Milly would try to rescue her immediately, and had compensated by putting as much distance as she could between herself and Milly before she went under. “Help!” she gurgled on her way down.

Twiss was in the middle of congratulating herself when Bett grabbed hold of her waist and pulled her up to the surface. Twiss didn’t even have a chance to run out of breath.

“I thought you knew how to swim,” Bett said.

“I do,” Twiss said, and started swimming toward the sandbar again.

Bett couldn’t see that she was smiling.

Milly was still under the water. They didn’t know it then, but her bathing suit was caught on something that was dragging her toward the bottom of the river. When she tried to call for help, she swallowed a mouthful of brown water. Bett and Twiss made it all the way to the sandbar before they realized she wasn’t with them.

“Where’s Miss Prim?” Bett said, wringing out her hair and tucking it behind her ears.

A sand crane circled over the middle of the river. The air smelled of fish.

“Your
sister
,” Bett said.

“Maybe she got her monthly,” Twiss said.

She put a hand on her hip like she’d seen girls do in school when they wanted a boy to notice them, but let it fall to her side just as quickly because Bett wasn’t a boy and because Twiss wasn’t the type of person to fawn over boys or girls.

Also, because Bett had frowned.

Twiss scanned the surface of the river. When she saw the branches from a fallen willow reaching up out of the water like fingers, she said, “I don’t know” more seriously, and dropped the milkweed thistle she was twirling in her hand.

Twiss and Bett walked to the edge of the sandbar. They began calling for Milly in a leisurely way at first. Neither of them wanted to appear to be gullible if Milly were playing a trick on them. They expected Milly to pop out of the water just like they had a few minutes before, especially since she was the best swimmer out of the three of them. When Milly didn’t answer them, they became more certain of themselves.

“Milly!” they said. “Mmmmiiiilllleeee!”

When Milly still didn’t answer, Bett jumped into the water.

Twiss didn’t move. She was so stunned by the possibility that something bad was happening to Milly that, for the first time in her life, she couldn’t move. The idea of Milly drowning in the river made Twiss think of an angel falling from the sky; Milly had two pink birthmarks the size of dimes on her back, which always made Twiss think of wings.

“Aren’t you coming?” Bett said from the middle of the river.

When Twiss didn’t answer her, she yelled, “She’s your
sister
!”

Bett didn’t have any siblings because she said her father had preserved what was dead for too long to be able to create life. When Bett was younger and had begged for one, her father gave her a marmot he’d stuffed for a man from Wyoming.

“This is your brother, Christopher,” he’d said, placing the marmot on Bett’s pillow one night. “He doesn’t talk much, so you’ll have to pick up the slack there.”

“You can love pretty much anything,” Bett had told Twiss.

Usually, Twiss’s body would tell her what to do, and her mind would trail along behind her like a loyal farm dog. Her instincts would bring light and speed to whatever was dark and slow, so that her body could navigate the terrain that unfolded in front of her. This time, her thoughts kept edging out her instincts. There was the word “sister,” and there was Milly.

Without Milly, her father’s
No, I will nots!
and her mother’s
Yes, you wills!
would seem hopeless instead of hopeful (Milly said that exclamation points meant they still cared). That was one of the benefits of having such a positive sister; together, they made one regular person.

By the time Bett finally grabbed hold of Milly and pulled her to the surface, Twiss couldn’t hear herself saying Milly’s name, which made her wonder if she’d been saying it at all.

Bett had draped Milly across her back like a shawl.

That’s when Twiss remembered Bett’s asthma and her mother’s threat to make Twiss breathe out of a straw for a week if she played a part in rousing it. Something about visualizing her mother allowed Twiss’s body to take over once again. She pictured her mother with a hand on her hip, shaking her head.
Stop doing whatever you’re doing! Don’t, don’t, don’t
, which made Twiss want to do, do, do. As if by magic, her feet carried into the river. She followed Bett’s instructions and grabbed hold of Milly’s arms. Together, they dragged her onto the sandbar.

“What happened to her?” Twiss said, after they’d laid her out on the warm sand.

Milly’s bathing suit was torn. Her legs were scratched raw.

“She isn’t breathing,” Bett said.

Bett put her mouth over Milly’s—the way people did in the movies, except that no orchestral music swelled in the background and no stars fell from the sky. There was only the occasional low rattle from the sand crane perched on the beaver dam downriver and the unadorned expanse of blue above.

Bett exhaled until a swampy breath leaped back at her, and Milly opened her lovely green eyes. In a croaky voice, quite unlike her usual melodious one, Milly said, “Am I dead?”

“That depends,” Bett said. “Did you see a white light?”

“I saw you,” Milly said.

That night, the three of them sat in their bedroom in the quiet way they’d sat on the sandbar that afternoon while Milly got her breath and bearings back, which she was still doing and Twiss was still watching her do. Bett was sitting cross-legged on the rollaway cot between the beds combing out her tangled hair.

“Two sisters in one day,” she said. “I should get a medal. One of those Bronze Stars.”

“Those are for valor,” Twiss said.

“I know,” Bett said, glancing at Milly, who’d pulled a thick wool blanket up to her chin, despite the fact that the evening air was so humid the walls were sweating. The buck’s head was also sweating; tiny yellow drops gathered like dew at his brow line.

Milly wasn’t sick, but she wasn’t well, either. Even though Bett had pulled her from the river hours ago, she was still shaking. Her scratches had turned bright red, then purple, then black where the blood had dried. Twiss had dabbed them first with salve, then with the sprigs of cooling witch hazel she’d found at the edge of the woods.

I’m sorry
, her fingers said, but they wouldn’t say what for.

“Truth,” Bett said to Milly. She tore a knot out of her hair with her comb and placed it on the pillow beside her. “What did it feel like to almost die?”

“Consequence,” Milly said in a voice still not quite her own.

“You just came back from the dead,” Bett said. “Are you sure?”

“It’s a game,” Twiss said. “You don’t have to play.”

“The
dead
,” Bett said.

“Consequence,” Milly said again, this time with more certainty.

Bett set down her comb. “You’re going to regret saying that.”

illy and Twiss still occupied their childhood bedroom. They still slept in their old twin beds, the ones with fleurs-de-lis carved into the headboards, Milly with a plywood board under her mattress and Twiss without. When their parents died, they’d entertained the idea of separating, but neither of them had wanted to sleep on the bed their parents had once shared or the one they didn’t. Besides, Milly had thought, there were worse things than sharing a room with Twiss, even if she did thrash around like a wild woman.