Winter Sparrow (9 page)

Mary’s heart drummed. The question stole her away from this moment, took her back so many years. She became that little girl again, anxious, afraid to be content in any one place. She scratched her dream of escape into a wooden frame, carving out the future she wished for herself.

Her hands began to hurt. Her fingers turned numb from the pressure of the paperclip pressing into her skin and the bed frame. “I’ll grow wings,” she muttered.

“I don’t know why you can’t just be happy,” Jamie said. “Go paint or something.”

“It isn’t that simple.”

“Yes, it is. Find what you want and do it.”

“What if I can’t be happy? I’m scared. I don’t know if I love him anymore. If I ever loved him.”

“As if. He’s still got his looks, and you’re living in a mansion. How hard can it be? If you’re not happy, you can at least pretend to be.”

“It’s an unfinished mansion,” Mary said under her breath.

“Things could be a lot worse.”

“What if I don’t know how to be happy, Sis?”

“Is this about what happened in high school? I thought you eventually got counseling for that. Look, you’ve really got to get over your past, Mary. It’s behind you. That’s why they call it the past. Maybe it’s like you told me, Joshua’s good to you, or he’s trying like a saint to make you happy.”

“I should be happy. But there’s this gaping question, this emptiness inside me I can’t fill. I can’t remember the last time I painted. I’ve lost it.”

“I thought I lost ‘it’ the first few years I was married. Trust me, you haven’t. Put it to you like this, if you could leave him, get out of the marriage free and clear, would you do it? Is that what you really want?”

Mary waited for an answer to come and deliver her. She wanted to loosen these rational chains. If she closed her eyes, bit down hard enough, screamed at the top of her cluttered lungs, maybe she’d have an answer. Maybe the bones in her back would shift, the stiff spine turning to clay. If she absorbed every breath and gripped the wheel like it was life itself and dreamed again, the feathers and cartilage might take shape next to her vertebrae and become the wings she had imagined for so long. She’d fly away from the country and the rains and drift into eternity.

“Mary…Mary…”

No reply.

Mary was lost in the gray of the clouds. The night was cloth around her changing skin. She was glowing, a fiery, rusted red. Behind her she glimpsed wings. They looked as though they’d tear the more they spread, the higher they carried her toward the moonlight.

But it wasn’t real. It never was.

“Mary. Just think about it before you make a rash decision,” Jamie said. “I know you. Have you skipped the pills?”

Mary quickly looked down at the orange bottle. “Why do you always jump right to that? I’m not an idiot!”
I took ’em, Sis. You’d be real proud.

“Sorry. Relax, okay? You don’t need to freak out just to feel alive. You and Joshua had a fight. It happens. Go back to the mansion. Take it from someone who’s been there…You can learn to be content with him.”

Silence again. And then Mary said, “He let me go.”

“He gave you your space,” her sister corrected. “But it doesn’t mean he doesn’t want you to come back. You called me, and I let you and your imagination have some fun. Now it’s time to do what you’re supposed to and play good wife.”

“But I’m not good, Little Sis. I’ve got my spots, like any sparrow. I think I need to fly.”

“Mary, you’re not making any sense.” Concern stumbled into Jamie’s voice. “Are you drunk or something? Where are you? I can come to you.”

“You’re my little sister. I’m supposed to take care of
you
, right?” Mary whispered. “I love you.”

“You don’t get to say that. Not now! You’re not acting like yourself. Where are you?”

“I am acting like me, actually. This is…the real me.” Mary wrapped her lips around the open orange bottle and swallowed the remaining pills. “Love. It’s such a funny, pretty word. That’s how we’re different, you…and I. I was never good at playing the part. I said the word, but I still don’t know what it means. Maybe I just can’t do it. I can’t get better. Maybe I shouldn’t be a mother.”

Mary’s ear rang from her sister screaming Robert’s name in a panic. “Miscarriages happen. For heaven’s sake, stop crucifying yourself for something you had no control over.”

“Is Dad there, Jamie? Tell him I love him. Kiss Mom for me.”

“Dad’s dead. Are you crazy? Tell me where you are now! Listen to me. If you get into an accident, I’m not burying you. I won’t play this masochistic game again. I love you. I indulged you. But if you wreck this, I won’t shed my tears, I swear. Go back to the mansion! Do you hear me! Go back!”

“You never believed in me and Joshua. Never. I can’t keep hurting him, Sis. I can’t keep hurting—”

Mary could feel the cell phone slipping from her grip. She was warm, her hands clammy and shaking as the drug spread inside her. Each blink was a desperate one. There was a black blur in front of her SUV, far off in the distance. The road was about to bend, and the visage came closer. She hadn’t been checking the speedometer. She didn’t much care.

The figure blended into the evening with the mist and fog. A flicker of moonlight reached down from the sky as the image appeared to split in two. Mary squinted, her eyes tense like a pulse. She could see someone walking on the side of the road. She imagined herself pulling over and asking the man to dance under the moon. The rain would provide such a soothing rhythm.

As the vehicle pulled her closer, the road bending more now, she gained some clarity. The man wore a trench coat and had on a black hat. Some of his long hair seemed to drip down his face, soaked from the rain. The only thing she could see perfectly were his eyes, a hint of red caught in each white orb. She knew it now, for certain. He was the figure who had stared at her from the road when she and Joshua came to the mansion for the first time. The man cloaked in black and fog.

In an attempt to avoid a collision, Mary cut the wheel hard to the left. The tires skidded across the velvet road. Traction slipped. The brakes gave out, sending her Pathfinder spinning into the guardrail. The metal from the hood of her vehicle ground against the metal of the railing, rust upon rust. 

The screams from her sister on the other end of the still-connected phone call grew louder and more serious as the driver’s side window exploded. Glass showered her jacket, and the door tore open, Mary’s body hanging out. Frantic, she searched the road for drivers, for anyone. It was desolate and silent. The figure she’d almost clipped was nowhere. The rain, a violent fleet of arrows, cut into her hands and neck as her knuckles began to give way.

Her sister’s pleas echoed from the floorboards now. Sooner or later, the rain would spill in and end the connection for her by corrupting the signal.

“Joshua,” she cried, the cold of the night dragging across terrified eyes. She couldn’t hold on for long. With a blood-curdling scream, Mary felt a tremor come over her hands. A very real fear invaded her chest, and her heart pounded. Her fingers began to slide until eventually she lost her grip and fell.

THE STAIN THAT COATED THE
floor reminded Joshua of the brown residue he had seen on his teeth this morning. It was a cool-looking color on a floor, but it made him scowl at his reflection. One of the consequences of falling asleep late and waking up early in desperate need of too many cups of coffee.

Words like
gorgeous
and
breathtaking
should have been echoing off the walls, but they weren’t. He’d sanded and re-sanded the floors, only to coat them thickly with a fresh brown layer. The entire process had been cathartic in a way, at least up until now. Joshua’s hands, manicured with gook and dust and oils, were supposed to convince him that his labors weren’t in vain.

But that’s what this was, wasn’t it? Vanity. After all, what newlywed couple needed a home so extravagant? What man in his right mind would be willing to invest his sweat, time, and soul into such a fractured existence?

“It isn’t supposed to be this way,” he muttered, wiping the edges of the floor. Joshua noticed a few sections in the wood where the grooves didn’t sit as right as he wanted them to or a spot where he missed spreading the coffee-colored stain across the cuts and lines. Mary would notice; artists rarely missed such an imperfect thing.

Joshua wanted his bride here with him, now. He wanted Mary to call out his mistake. The thought of her not returning twisted his insides, and he hated it. But still there was a slow current of hope—a whisper within a dream that maybe he was capable of another beautiful mistake.

A soft, acoustic tune hummed in the background, but the guitar strings and the imitation drum score didn’t reroute his burdened thoughts.

The room was almost finished.

Several more hours evaporated, like he knew the pungent smells of the mansion floors would, in time. But when? Joshua’s concerted efforts of avoiding short glances at the clock across the banquet room weren’t totally working. It was a demonic creature anyhow, as he saw it, always stealing precious breath away from the living.

He pulled open the fridge, which had nothing but old lunch meat and bad cheese in it and frowned, forcing the door immediately shut. Joshua checked his cell phone next. No messages. No missed calls.

Don’t call her. Just wait.

But there was something different in her eyes. Something gone.

She’ll come back.

What if…?

Joshua couldn’t afford to deal in
what ifs
. Not now. He ran his fingers through his hair and breathed an exhausted sigh. Then he grabbed his keys and raced out to his car and into the storm.

MARY’S NECK HAD CRACKED IN
various spots. She couldn’t move it right. Her head throbbed. Her mind was drowning. Her eyes drank in the rain. Pink blood soaked into her white shirt. Her vision splintered as she blinked to find focus.

The night felt trapped all around her. No,
she
was trapped.

After struggling to breathe, Mary regained feeling in her face but nowhere else. Muscles still tense, bones adjusted. She hoped that if she could move her knuckles or twitch a leg, she might be able to rise out of this ditch and crawl back to the road. But as she gazed up the steep hill, she lost all ambition to move. Her eyes took in the sight of the stalled Pathfinder, its body warped by the violent collision with the guardrail. She heard the metal creak back and forth, the entire vehicle wavering on the edge of this nameless cliff, as if waiting to decide if it should let go so it could crush her completely.

She cursed under her breath. This backwards country road should never have been designated for travel, what, with all the twists and unexpected turns. And tonight, the bad weather.

But the weather was not to blame for her fall. Nor was it the slick traction that had victimized her tires. Nor was it Little Sis aching to convince her that walking out wouldn’t give her the hollow shape of happiness she desperately needed.

“It’s you,” Mary quietly confessed.