The Bird Sisters (25 page)

After Twiss finished reading Father Rice’s letter at the mailbox, she walked back down the driveway with the rest of the mail tucked under her arm and Father Rice’s letter tucked into the pocket of her coveralls. Although his stone story seemed sad to her upon the first reading and maybe a little miraculous, too, for now Twiss focused on the fact that he’d told it to her and no one else rather than on its meaning. She also focused on the
You are not going to hell
part. And the
You are a wonderful young woman!
part. It was nice to be called wonderful by an adult instead of awful, terrible, deficient, sadistic, selfish, greedy—yikes! that list was getting long. Twiss’s favorite of the unfavorites was contrary (just for the sake of it!).

She kicked at the gravel in front of her, smiling at the reddish dust that clung to her shoes and coveralls, at the anthills between her feet and the slivery spiderwebs in the switchgrass on either side of the driveway. She’d been so distracted with Bett in the house and her father in the barn and Father Rice in one-third of a room in Illinois that she’d missed the slow accumulation of summer this year; she hadn’t noticed the leafy stalks of rhubarb or the toothy cotton plants that had sprouted up in the alfalfa fields on the other side of the road. Or the bright orange tiger lilies, which grew everywhere in the country despite their being unwild.

The beginning of August was Twiss’s favorite part of the summer; the world seemed the most alive and full to her then
—the most everything
. Even the earth smelled earthier somehow. Twiss loved the days just before the world started to turn inward again, to shrivel and brown. In the past, she’d take long walks around the property, memorizing the overgrown look of the land and the garden, the grass and the trees, the black upturns of field soil, so that in winter she’d have the promise of summer inside of her, the melting, the growth.

Twiss flipped through the stack of mail beneath her arm. When she noticed the brown letter addressed to her cousin, she gave up memorizing the look of twisting vines. The envelope, which Bett had waited for all summer, was worn badly at the top as if it had been opened and closed many times before the final sealing; it said Deadwater without saying it at all.

Twiss ran into the house.

“Bett!” she called. “Your letter finally came!”

Bett was scrubbing down the linoleum in the kitchen, which Twiss’s mother had asked her to do (forgetting about Bett’s new nails—but Bett said,
It’s all right
, when Twiss’s mother remembered on her way out the door). She and Milly went to the general store to see if they could extend their credit line with another basket of Milly’s sugar cookies until next week when their father received his paycheck from the dairy, which was even smaller than when he’d worked at the golf course and which Twiss’s mother had trouble making work.

When Twiss gave Bett the letter, Bett said, “It’s from Deadwater.”

“That’s good, right?” Twiss said.

Bett got up off her hands and knees. “If it were still June or July maybe. I’ve written my parents a letter every week since I’ve been here. This is the first one I’ve gotten back. The postman must feel sorry for me.”

Bett took the letter upstairs with her and didn’t come back down.

Twiss finished scrubbing the linoleum and then waxed it, too, because the silence in the house felt the same as it did the night she returned from the golf course, when she’d tossed her pillow at Milly and Milly had tossed it back and Twiss had fallen asleep thinking about the lonely look of the flag pin in the seventeenth hole. After Twiss was done with the kitchen floor, she moved on to the floor in the living room. The letter from Deadwater was a strong reminder that in a month Bett was going to go back there, a truth Twiss couldn’t scrub or wax away. In a fit of sadness and something else she couldn’t quite identify, she took Bett’s hip boots from the closet and hid them deep in the cellar where light didn’t reach. She couldn’t imagine spending almost a whole year without Bett. She just couldn’t.

The morning dragged on and on, with Twiss watching the cuckoo clock and waiting for Bett to spring forth. She didn’t want to go up there without being invited, but at noon, after attempting to write a letter to Father Rice—
Dear Father Rice, Why did you tell
me
that story and no one else? What is a Continental Divide?
—she went up to her bedroom anyway.

“It’s me,” she said to Bett, pressing her face against the door. “Can I come in?”

“All right,” Bett said.

When Twiss walked into the room, she found Bett sitting on her bed instead of on the SS
Forest
. “I feel braver over here,” Bett said.

Twiss sat down beside her cousin. When she saw the wet spots on her pine needle pillow and on Bett’s cheeks, she said, “What’s wrong?”

Bett touched the worn part of the letter. “Why did your mom marry your dad?”

“I’m not really sure,” Twiss said. “She says for love, but she never says anything else.”

“Didn’t your dad used to be an amazing golfer?”

“He still is,” Twiss said.

Bett smiled faintly. “My dad can catch a trout with his bare hands.”

Twiss looked toward the window and the barn, her father. Ever since he took her to the course after it had closed, she’d lost the feeling of him watching over her and Milly, which made her wonder if he’d been watching over them at all.

Bett let go of the letter. “My mom says she married my dad because he fried his own eggs in the morning. She says she’s divorcing him for the same reason.”

“Your mom and dad are getting a divorce?” Twiss said.

“I knew it since she sent me down here. I just didn’t know it officially.”

All at once, Bett pulled Twiss to her. “I’m going to be all alone.”

Although Twiss had seen Milly and her mother cry plenty of times, and although she’d cried a few times herself, seeing tears roll down Bett’s cheeks frightened her.

“No, you’re not,” she said to Bett.

Twiss stroked her cousin’s hair as softly as her calloused fingers could. Bett’s skin smelled of slightly soured milk and starch, which might have been off-putting to other people but wasn’t to Twiss. With her cheek, Twiss grazed her cousin’s shoulder and neck and the little blue vein that pulsed between them.

“Everything’s going to be all right,” she said as gently as she could.

Bett pulled back from Twiss a little. She looked at her a long while before she traced the freckles along the bridge of Twiss’s nose with her index finger.

“You’ve got the Big Dipper on your face.”

“I do?” Twiss said.

“I almost believe you,” Bett said, her hands on her stomach. Quickly, before Twiss even knew what was happening, she pressed her lips against Twiss,’s which were chapped and a little bit sunburned.

The two girls kept their eyes open and on each other; it was then that Twiss noticed the tiny dashes of green in her cousin’s brown eyes, which reminded her of crocuses peeking out from the earth uncertainly in April, the first evidence of spring.
You are someone worth
looking at
, Twiss thought. She didn’t realize she was being kissed until the kiss was over.

“If you were a boy,” Bett said, “I’d marry you right now.”

Twiss touched her lips with the tips of her fingers, wondering about the tingling sensation at the corners of her mouth, the leaping of her heart against her ribs.

Bett drew her fingers to her lips too. “Promise me you won’t tell anyone about my parents. You’re the only one I can stand knowing the truth.”

After that, the two of them went back downstairs as if nothing had happened.

Twiss wasn’t sure what
had
happened, only that she felt strangely happy, floaty even, when earlier she’d felt grumpy. Milly and her mother came back from town, and Bett helped them prepare a meatless lunch—
Thank the Lord!
she said in a voice as happy as anyone else’s.

Twiss went out to the barn to ask her father for advice about her tonic. The fact of Bett’s lips pressed against her own made Twiss forget about what Bett had told her, the same way she’d forgotten about Father Rice and his stone.

Selfish
, she’d later think of her response and wish she’d done more to assure Bett that everything really was going to be all right. Maybe then it would have been.

As it was, Twiss skipped all the way to the barn. Dr. Greene and Mrs. Collier, both long without a spouse (although for not much longer as fate would have it), were supposed to be bringing over a bag of medicinal roots as well as a few cases of Mrs. Collier’s Mason jars that afternoon. Mrs. Collier said she had better things to do than make jam now that Dr. Greene had taught her how to drive. She’d taught him how to knit.

“You have to be careful,” Dr. Greene had said when Twiss told him she’d been thinking about using rhubarb leaves. “You don’t want to accidentally poison the entire town.”

“I guess not,” Twiss had said.

Mr. Stewart, Milly’s science teacher, had also offered advice. He’d brought over a glass beaker and a pair of safety glasses from the laboratory at school, as well as a sheet of paper filled up with equations.

“Maybe you should show that to Milly,” Twiss had said. “She got an F because she wouldn’t dissect a sheep’s eye. I’d get an F even though I would.”

“It was a brain,” Mr. Stewart said.

“See?” Twiss said.

Mr. Stewart folded his equations and put them back into the pocket of his pants. “Your sister may be the only one who doesn’t think I’m irrelevant.”

“Milly doesn’t think anyone’s irrelevant,” Twiss said.

Twiss knocked on the barn door.

“Dad?” she said, just as her father came to it with Rust-O-Lonia in his hand. His arms were covered with sand and sweat. A wood chip was stuck to his cheek.

“Bett says I have to put something secret in my tonic,” Twiss told him, which Bett had told her when she’d passed by the bathroom and saw Twiss dumping baking soda into the tub—
People won’t want to pay for what they can mix up themselves. You’ve got to give them the impression of exclusivity, like, “If you don’t buy this, you won’t have a shot at happiness.”

“I’m making something too,” Twiss’s father said.

Now was the time to ask what he’d been doing in the barn, but Twiss couldn’t. “Bett said people like secrets even though they say they don’t,” she said instead.

“How old is your cousin?”

“Eighteen,” Twiss said.

“I’d have thought she was older than that,” her father said.

“Why?” Twiss said.

“For everything she understands.”

“Like what?” Twiss said, thinking
Bett’s mine!

“She’s a really good listener,” her father said.

“I haven’t noticed,” Twiss said, thinking
You’re mine!

Twiss was about to tell her father that Bett had broken whatever confidence they had and told her and Milly the story of Jester almost drowning in the river, when it occurred to Twiss that that might have been his aim. But why?

“When it’s finished,” her father said, looking at Rust-O-Lonia and then over his shoulder at whatever he was making in the barn, “everything will be wonderful again.”

Even though Twiss could have pushed past him and discovered what was going to make everything wonderful again, she didn’t want to have to take what wasn’t hers; she wanted to be invited in. That her father had invited Bett into the barn made Twiss wild with jealousy, although she was confused about who she was jealous of.