Winter Sparrow (8 page)

“I’m here. I’ve always been here,” Joshua said. “We can deal with this together, but you won’t let me help. You won’t even touch me.”

“It’s never been like this before. It’s never been this hard. But my mind is sick.”

“Stop saying that. It’s okay. It
will be
okay! I love you.”

“You think that fixes anything?”

“Every creative mind gets overwhelmed sometimes. Writers get writer’s block. Teachers get bored. You think it’s easy for me to carry everything? My firm? This house? You?”

She glared at him.

“I didn’t mean that.”

“Why’d you say it?”

He sighed. “Mary, it happens to everyone.”

“Since when does a painter forget how to paint?” she asked, turning toward a rose to smell it and remind her senses of its sweetness.

“You haven’t forgotten how to paint. I don’t believe that, not for a second. Creativity comes and goes. It’s a cycle. You just have to work through it, baby. It’ll come back.”

“You have this insipid notion that everything will always just work out or get better. Well, it was better, for a moment, a very brief moment.” Her mind flashed images of summers past. “But it came to an end. It’s getting cold.”

“Don’t say that, my love.”

“The leaves are turning,” she continued, ignoring him. “The roads are damp with the rain. The flowers…bloom for the minute. But they will wither and die as well, and this garden will be empty.”

“But it will be beautiful again. You know that. This is life, the circle of all things,” Joshua said, raising her chin. “Why do you let this trouble you?”

Her eyes looked ghostly pale; her cheeks felt pushed in; a fever spread across her forehead. This gate, this perimeter, was a cell.

“Come inside with me,” he pleaded.

“I can’t handle that wretched smell. Not today.”

“How long will you stay out here? How much longer can we stand to be apart like this? If we see each other at all during the day, you’re distant. When you’re alone, you’re silent. Why do you push me away like this? I’m your husband.”

“I know,” she said, saddened. She knew she was supposed to love him, but it wasn’t love that surged through her veins at this moment. Not love.

“Will you stay out here for the rest of the afternoon, then? I want to talk. I want to fix this. We can.”

Mary pretended that she could feel a baby moving inside her. She had to protect it. She had to get it away from this confinement, this relentless drowning. “I’d like to go for a drive. Clear my mind. I should be back soon.”

JOSHUA COULD SAY NO MORE
with his words. He could do no more with his hands. He could wish no more with his heart.

Mary pressed her lips against his, and when she did, he felt a piece of him slip out. With a slow exhale, he searched his pockets for the keys to the car and gave them to her. Then she walked out of the garden.

Why did she distance herself from him? Why was she so afraid to tell him what lingered in her thoughts? He’d understand. He’d comfort her. He wanted to.

We’re made to love, baby. Just come back to me
.

Joshua’s chest sank as she made her way toward the front of the mansion, through the brick walkway he had recently laid on the east side, and around to the porch which only needed a fresh coat of paint before it was finished.  He hadn’t intended for the mansion to take so long to be completed. He worked as hard and as quickly as he could to prepare a masterpiece for her. Was this uncreative force also plaguing him, slowing him down?

Mary’s Pathfinder revved to life seconds later. “I love you,” he whispered. He had work to finish inside. It was time to leave the garden and return. But something crawled across his untied boot just then. It moved slowly, as if with purpose and cunning. Joshua glanced down to find a black snake with spots along its back. The long creature’s tongue tasted the air around his garden and draped its leathered skin along Joshua’s ankle before dropping its belly once more to the ground.

Joshua knelt and stared into the snake’s beady eyes. A union of white and red. His rough hands, beaten with blisters and poly, and tempered with the scent of his wife, reached into his rear pants pocket. His hand quickly emerged with a utility knife. He looked once upon the rose at the center of the garden bed, already beginning to wilt now that Mary’s presence had gone, and then he turned toward the slithering, stained serpent and, with his thumb, pushed out the blade. In one swift motion, Joshua slid his fingers beneath the serpent’s neck to hold it. With his other hand, he cut the creature in half.

HEARING JAMIE’S VOICE ON THE
other end of the phone didn’t calm Mary’s sporadic nerves the way she wanted it to. But she hoped the familiar sound of it was a start.

“You sound sick, Mary,” Jamie said.

“I’m not right, Sis,” Mary answered, slurring her words. “I’m not all right.”

“What happened? Did you and Joshua get into it again?”

A hush slipped in.

“I knew it. I knew it would eventually happen. You seem to fight a lot. We hardly ever hear from you anymore. How long’s it been?”

“I don’t know.”

“I know you don’t want to hear this, but what did you really expect? You uprooted your whole life for this guy. Does he know how fast he forced you to just change everything? What an overly ambitious—”

“It’s not him,” Mary shot back. “At least, I don’t think it is.”

“Oh, don’t play into that scarred-little-girl mentality. Because that’s how it starts. You blame yourself for one thing, and then give it a little time, and he’ll be jumping down your back about something else. Even the littlest, stupidest things. Trust me. That’s how these things happen.”

“Not true,” her sister’s husband echoed in the background. 

“Girl to girl,” Jamie began, her tone taking on a more surreptitious nature. “Is it somebody else?”

“How can you ask me that?”

“Don’t come at me all self-righteous,” she whispered harshly into the phone. “You’ve never once thought about it?”

A long sigh from Mary’s end.

“Well, forgive me for exploring a little. Sorry, I forgot you were so pure.”

“I’m not. You’re just terrible,” Mary said between sobs. “I don’t know how you live with yourself.”

“You love me, admit it. Besides, it was just a one-time thing…that kept happening until I decided to end it.”

“And have you?”

“Mom raised us better than that. Of course.”

Mary saw right through. “You always were an expert.”

“At what?”

“Masking the truth.”

“Please, honey, I don’t mask anything. You know, sometimes I’m as see-through as a teardrop. Can’t exactly be burned at the stake because some people are just a little less intuitive, can I? Is it my fault they would rather hold onto their naïve notions of love?”

“Can your husband hear you right now?” Mary asked.

“Do you really think I’m that stupid?”

Mary couldn’t believe the haughty pitch shaping her sister’s words. There were dozens of abrupt conversations where Mary had been forced to hear how superior Jamie and her husband were as a couple. How united. But then again, it was the lies that held them together, she knew that. Having a child less than five months before the wedding had proven a heavy cross to bear and a constant inconvenience to her sister’s selfish extracurricular activities.

The night turned misty, and the roads seemed to have adopted twists and turns she didn’t recall. Mary glanced down briefly at the half-empty bottle of pills.

“I love him. I swear I love him, Sis,” she tried.

“If that’s the case, what’s got you so worked up?”

Mary brushed aside a tear with the back of her wrist. “You’ve always been there for me.”

“No one’s ever confused me for the blessed Mother Teresa, but yes, I have. Still, I gotta be honest, ever since you met Joshua, you’ve been different. And since you lost the baby—”

“Don’t!”

“I’m just saying I think it really took its toll, that’s all.”

“Am I that pathetic?” Mary asked.

“Don’t get all insecure and self-deprecating. I’m stating a fact. A clear and simple fact.”

Mary choked up.

“Listen to you. You’re sobbing like a virgin on prom night. I’m starting to wonder if maybe it wasn’t so good marrying this guy. Don’t get me wrong, he’s better than what I got. I mean, congrats and all that, but he took you away. From us, your family, your life, the city, everything you knew.”

“We were never attached to any place, you know that.”

“But like it or not, we used to be closer, you and me. I know I sort of drifted when I tied the knot, and…I just wish things could be different.” A long pause spread between them. “I guess it’s silly, really. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be putting this on you. It’s your life. Maybe I’ve just always been a little, I don’t know, jealous, before the tears and all the blah-blah-blah.”

Mary sniffled and asked, “Why?”

“What do you mean? You’re my big sister. I copied you for, like, my entire life. But eventually, I had to redefine who I was. I met Robert, got a kid, the whole American dream, as you know. It’s supposed to be beautiful, right?”

Mary could tell there was a deep sadness hidden in her sister’s words, a transparency that hadn’t been exposed in years. “I know that tone. Are you gonna file for divorce or something?” Mary couldn’t believe she was actually more concerned for Jamie’s marriage than her own.

“You kidding? Not until the fat lady sings,” her sister jokingly replied.

“Robert’s good to you. He loves you. Loves you both, more than anything.”

“Why don’t you take your own advice on this one? Look, why’d you call me? So I’d sympathize with you? Tell you your husband’s a scoundrel and you should get out while you still can? Stop living in what could’ve been. Look at
me
.”

“I don’t know what I wanted you to say,” Mary confessed, noticing the tires pulling her vehicle toward the other lane. “I suppose…I just wanted to tell you I think I screwed up everything. I let it go too far. Things are gonna change for me, and I’m scared.”

Jamie’s ears must’ve buzzed. “You can’t tell him, Mary. Don’t you dare tell him. If he finds out...Oh, now you’re just as bad as me. I can’t believe I’m hearing what I’m hearing. You bad, bad girl.” A sick kind of joy crept into her sister’s voice. Mary pictured Jamie pressing her ear more forcefully against the plastic phone and curling up on the couch as if a new mystery were about to come on.

“No,” Mary insisted. “I’m not having an affair. Oh no, I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Well, what do
you
want, Mary?”

“I want you to tell me I’m just acting stupid, like a little girl. That I’ll wake up from all of this and it’ll be better.”

“Wings never came, did they?”