The Bird House A Novel

September 15, 1968

tea and toast

shower



I WAS WAITING UP FOR Theo, that’s what I told myself. His flight wasn’t due in for hours, but I held out the possibility, the hope, that he’d be back earlier. Surely he wouldn’t forget, no matter where he was. The body tells you these things, doesn’t it?

My body spent the day with little Tom, but I knew better than to ask too much of it. Not today. I felt loose and small and impermanent. My bones were like a honeycomb. The slightest movement in the wrong direction, a lunge, a reach, or even a gust of wind, could make me crumble. I stayed inside and did as little as possible. I lay on the sofa while Tom stacked blocks in his playpen. I slept when he napped, I ate the jarred toddler apricots he didn’t finish. I babied myself until I was capable of less and less, no language, no motorskilled momentum. The only difference between me and my son was that he smiled and I didn’t wear diapers.

Still, this was fine, given the circumstances, was it not? I told myself it was because of the anniversary, and nothing else. It’s just this day. I was ready, and ready to tell Theo I was ready, if only he would walk in the door and sit down next to me, and look at me the way he had in college. That’s all, Theo. That’s all I want.

I fell asleep at eleven with a book across my chest, and hours later my head lifted off the sofa. I heard, distinctly, steps on the porch. I sat up and smoothed my robe, waiting for the jingle of keys, the open door, the cool rush of evening air followed by blue tie, dark suit. They didn’t come.

I went to the window and caught a corner of him, like a snapshot taken at the last second. His flannel slacks and blue blazer, the easy gait of an athlete, not a scholar, not a businessman. Not an architect.

The bouquet on my porch was simple: purple pansies in a mason jar. They were packed in, velvety ears overlapping, bits of earth still clinging, against all watery odds, to the bottom of the stems. They were so beautiful and unexpected I stared at them as if I expected something magical—sea horse or mermaid—to swim between the green stalks. Where does a man collect pansies in the middle of the night? Had he torn them from a window box along the way? Had he taken them from his own small garden, overgrown, in need of tilling, the only thing still blooming in his postage-stamp backyard?

The water in the jar was cold. I stood on my porch and held it against my left cheek, the one that had been pressed hotly against the pillow on the sofa. There was no note, and no need for one. Peter remembered, remembered this awful day when I turned my back and lost my daughter. He remembered, and Theo forgot.

It had been months since I’d heard from Peter. After everything that had happened, it was as if there wasn’t room for us to maneuver anymore. We didn’t discuss it, but we both knew there was no place to go; no place that could contain our weariness. Once, at noon, he’d shown up without calling, and sat in his car until I noticed he was there. When I arrived at the passenger door, he held out a cheeseburger wrapped in wax paper. His tears hit the coated paper and rolled off to one side, onto my hand. I opened my mouth to say something, I don’t know what, and he said, Don’t, Ann. There’s nothing you need to say. And then he drove away.

As I turned to go back inside, Betsy’s light went off in her kitchen. Through her window I thought I saw a shape in the darkness, a thick shadow, as if someone was standing in the dark, drinking water, about to go up. Or watching. Watching and worrying. I blinked, and then I didn’t see it anymore.

I went to my bedroom and put the pansies on the nightstand. I crawled into bed and reached beneath my pillow for the photo. My fingers scuttled across the cotton, searching for the familiar curled edges, hitting nothing but cold thread. I threw the pillow, pulled the mattress, yanked the bed away from the wall. I saw only baseboard, electrical cord, dust. Beneath the bed sat a lone dark sock.

“No!” I cried beneath my hands, repeating the word as I circled to Theo’s side. Suddenly I lifted his pillow, and there she was. Emma on her first birthday in front of her cake. Solemn straight hair, eyes like silty ocean water. Not smiling, but with the possibility of a smile. She was not unhappy, I told myself. She was not.

I took the photo back to my pillow, and fell asleep with the pansies bending over me. They would be long wilted, half dead, before I had the idea again: that it had been a year, and it was time to try for another baby. But the notion proved fleeting, and capable of passing in and out of me like what it was: not a desire, solid and impossible to ignore, but a wish, wispy and as temporary as smoke.





July 10, 2010



I took the photo to Betsy’s and snapped it down on her coffee table next to a gaggle of remotes. She asked if it was me, and I said no. She pulled on her reading glasses and surveyed it more closely.

“Well, she could be your sister.”

“She could be indeed,” I replied, and told her about the love letter and Ellie’s internet search.

“I’ll be damned,” she said softly. Her eyes moved from the photo to my face. She looked at me for a long time, as if memorizing my features. “The resemblance is uncanny.”

“I know.” I sighed. “It’s rather mind blowing.”

“So your father may not be your real father?”

“It’s beginning to look that way.”

“What are you going to do? Are you going to write to her?”

“I already have. Last night.”

“I take it you haven’t heard back?”

“No. I’m a little worried that she’ll burst into her father’s room at the nursing home and give him a heart attack.”

“Did you think about contacting him first?”

“I did, but he’s ancient. It didn’t seem fair. I thought I’d start with the daughter. Then maybe take a road trip to Connecticut. Maybe Ellie will come along.”

“I could drive.”

“I’d like that.”

“And… you and Ellie really just found all this out?”

“What? Yes, I just told you—”

“So you haven’t been keeping this from me, too, for all these years?”

“Whatever do you—”

“Your bird-house boyfriend,” she said. “Peter, wasn’t it?”

“You knew?”

“I guessed.”

My shoulders fell; I slumped a little beneath the missingworld weight. “It was a long time ago.”

“I know. And you were ashamed.”

I looked over her head, through the window, into our green backyards.

“No I wasn’t.”

Her laugh rang loud and true, and I joined in. We laughed until tears spilled from our eyes.

“Oh, Ann, when I get back from the chiropractor’s we’re going to open that bottle of cabernet I’ve been saving, and we’re going to talk about your father and your mother’s lovers and this Peter person.”

“Or we could just meet him for a drink,” I said as she walked me to the door. Her eyes widened as I told her about running into him at the Potting Shed, and she shook her head.

“Well, you’ve had quite a summer.”

“What can I say,” I said. “A person can climb only so many trees.”

Later that afternoon, I went to the pizzeria and ordered a pie that was half pepperoni, half plain. That was what the man in front of me ordered, the one with the little boy. It sounded right. I sat on a cracked red stool watching them cook it, sliding it with a wooden paddle, wishing I’d picked up Ellie first so she could watch, too.

How many years has it been since I bought a whole pizza pie? Pizzerias were the provenance of young people. The worse a place smelled, the more they liked it. I thought of the soda fountains Ellie and I had visited, the bar and grills, the grease, the beer. Tinsley tried to keep Ellie clean, on the straight and narrow. It was my job, my honor, to get her dirty.

That’s why, when I picked her up and she held the pie on her lap, warming it on the way back to my house, the planned activity was filling the window boxes. Two days earlier, we’d chosen the flowers at the garden shop—purple and silver. Purple was Ellie’s favorite color. We selected globe thistle, coneflower, and lavender. I threw in some dusty miller for contrast. I sent her home with a small hydrangea plant for Tinsley—a peace offering? A suggestion that she tend to her own garden? Neither. I’d won, after all.

After that business of Tom interrogating me about my “eyesight” and my driving abilities I’d done what I had to do; I’d set Tinsley straight. I went over to her house when Ellie was at day camp and knocked on the door.

She looked agitated, afraid to open it.

“Open up, Tinsley,” I sighed. “Or I’ll have you arrested for impersonating a reporter.”

We sat in the living room and she fidgeted, made small circles with her lower jaw.

“Look,” I said, “I didn’t follow you that day. We stumbled upon you while we were out. But I’ll have you know that I covered for you. I told your daughter that plenty of people kiss each other good-bye and it means nothing. Nothing. And that could have been the end of it if you hadn’t utterly lost your mind.”

“Ann, I—”

I held up my hand. “I have no intention of using that photo. Unless you try to take another child away from me. And then I can’t promise what I’ll do.”

She looked up at the sky and licked her lips. She looked tired suddenly. Older.

“It’s over,” she said. “With Zach.”

“Good,” I said. “Then I’m sure you’ll have no problem with my seeing Ellie twice a month, minimum, at least until the paternity tests come back.”

“Ann!”

“Zach’s wife seems nice,” I added. “I’d love to get to know her better.”

And so it was declared. We had our own constitution now, our little family, built on a solid foundation of lies, secrets, regrets, and debts. But even dark underpinnings can support something solid and light, can they not? Tom mentioned last week that he had taken Tinsley out dancing. Dancing, on a Tuesday night! I could imagine him pulling the dish towel out of her hand, turning off the computer, setting aside the mail, insisting. Doing a little two-step in the kitchen hall, the one I’d taught him, and knew would come in handy some day.

It’s impossible to know everything about someone else’s life, but I know enough now, and Ellie knows almost as much. I hadn’t told her about “blackmailing” Tinsley of course; nor had I mentioned that I was thinking about a trip to Jay Stephens’s, or that I’d written to his daughter. I stared at that email a long time before I hit send, making sure every word was just so. “I have something you and your father might like to have back,” I’d begun, and then fretted she might think I meant the ring, not the letters. I wasn’t ready to give that up. And I think, if Jay’s daughter knew the history, my mother’s and mine, she’d see that only a few of us deserved to wear that ring. The infidelity ring, I’ve taken to calling it as I slip it on my finger each morning.

Ellie was wearing dungaree shorts and a tank top, her hair held back by a plaid headband. We ate the pizza and went on the patio to work. I put my rings in a dish on the umbrella table and asked Ellie to remind me to put them on again. I need as much reminding these days as possible.

We did not use gloves. I loved the feel of fresh potting soil on my hands. It was different from any earth I’d touched—lighter, and fluffy, as if it had never been mud or matter, anything other than what it was. That’s what I liked about it, I suppose. It held no history, no artifacts. Nothing heavy buried inside.

I showed her how to tap the plants out of the black plastic boxes, how to separate them without tearing them. That was the hardest part. I could tell by the way she watched that she’d never done it before. I didn’t embarrass her by asking. Tinsley wasn’t a gardener. She called someone to do things, summoned a truck, allowed a small army to descend on her lawn and buzz about until things were finished. Living that way, she saw only ruined and fixed, ugly and beautiful, not the small imperfections, the slow decay. Not the in-between that makes up most of anyone’s life.

I thought of Peter’s life, as I do occasionally, as the bird house swings above my head. Much of his life has been steady decay. The wife who never got better. The marriage he couldn’t leave and couldn’t tend. His body, once so slim and elegant, his face that filled out and stretched too far. We all change. My memory, heavy and dark with its burdens, has grown weak in places. I feel it about to snap occasionally, forgetting things. But only unimportant things. Not what matters.

I still live in the same house, with beautiful window boxes that I do myself. I still collect photos in albums, pictures I’ve taken of Tom and Ellie. My child, my grandchild. The test from the lawyer had proved what I’d known all along. She was Tom’s, and Tom was mine. I can picture the connection now, the links of our chromosomes dark and coppery, solid as a chain. But oh, you should have seen the look on the lawyer’s face yesterday when I said I might soon need help on another small matter—the DNA of Jay Stephens! His eyebrows rose, his eyes widened. I could hear what he was thinking—that we were the randiest lot imaginable!

“Grandma?” Ellie called. “It looks like we’re out of potting soil.”

I motioned to the edge of the stone wall. “Just dig up a little of the dirt over there. It’s a little sandy on top, so go a few inches down.”

The plants Ellie had tamped down were still loose, so I pressed them harder, squeezing the soil with both hands, circling the plant as if I was making a pie.

“Whoa!” Ellie cried, and I turned.

She held it in the flat of her hand, and I walked over to look, thinking it was a caterpillar or a worm. Instead of soft edges, the warmth of something alive, I saw a cold, rusty edge.

“What is it?”

“I think… it’s a key!”

We peeled off the dirt together. “It’s probably an old house key we kept under the flower pot,” I said and smiled.

But as Ellie rinsed it under the hose, I could see I was wrong. The number, 2657, was etched in the top.

“It’s either a post-office box key, or a safe-deposit key,” I said softly. “From a bank.”

“Whose is it?” she cried. “From what bank?”

“It’s probably mine,” I said, and even though I couldn’t remember, I knew damn well it was a lie. A soft lie, I told myself. A gentle one. It didn’t count.

“Maybe it’s Grandpa Theo’s,” she said excitedly, and I said maybe, maybe.

“We have to go to all the banks!” she cried. “One by one until we find it.”

I breathed out audibly and looked at her, my precious girl. She held the verdigris watering can in one muddy hand. A streak of dirt fell across one cheek. I felt the odd push/pull of being family—that she was mine and yet wholly separate, her own self.

“Maybe next week, Emma,” I said softly.

“Ellie,” she said.

“What?”

“My name is Ellie, not Emma, Grandma.”

I blinked. “Of course it is,” I said and smiled. “That’s what I said.” I spoke breezily, avoiding her eyes, brushing dirt off my pants, off the low wall.

She hesitated a moment after I finished speaking, and I didn’t dare look at her. I didn’t want to see doubt or judgment in her young eyes.

Finally she spoke. “Could it be… my daddy’s key, maybe? From when he was a little boy?”

“Anything is possible,” I said for perhaps the thousandth time in my life. Most times when people say this, they don’t mean it. This time, I did. Hadn’t I learned that above all? That everything you believe could be wrong? That there are more chambers to the human heart than you could ever imagine? Who knew how much more we would find if we kept looking, Ellie and I.

“Maybe it’s your daddy’s key,” she continued innocently.

I put down my trowel and turned away. My chin puckered like a toddler’s. My daddy. How many times had he tried to tell me? How many times had he tried to explain? And Aunt Caro, always walking the tightrope between honoring her sister’s secrets, and guiding me toward the truth. Inviting him in, including him. I knew now much of what must have been in my father’s letter that day: it had been about my mother and Jay Stephens and my birth. How long it had taken for him to find out. It had likely explained more about the money, the bad investments. The whole picture, not my warped little corner of it. He wasn’t without blame, of course. But he was not the thief or adulterer I’d painted him to be. I’d made a critical mistake: I’d continued to look at the adult world through my childhood eyes.

I wiped my tears with my sleeve, feigned a sneeze, then a cough. Gather yourself, Ann.

“Grandma? I’m sorry,” Ellie said.

“No, no, it’s—”

“I forget sometimes. I forget that your daddy and mommy are dead.”

I smiled and reached back to squeeze her dusty hand. Dear girl. Dear, dear girl. Soon she would learn that “dead” is a word that keeps changing its meaning. I know now, more than ever, that nothing is ever really gone. When I walk through my house, or lie alone in my bed, I can still feel the foundation shifting. All of the stories in the attic sway above me, stirring the night air. When I breathe, I take in all of their darkness and light.

Ellie and I stood back and admired our work, how the colors popped against the white of the house, how the charcoal shutters on the first floor looked at home with the silvery accents.

“It’s a pretty house,” Ellie said, as if reading my mind.

I smiled. It was always that. Theo and I had made sure it was always, always that.

“Ellie,” I said suddenly, “marry the fun one.”

“What?”

“If you ever have to choose between a man who’s serious and a man who’s fun, choose the fun one. Promise me.”

“Oh… kay.”

“Now let’s put the hose away, shall we?”

She pulled the hose toward her, winding it round an iron frog mounted against the house. It sang slightly as it moved through the wet grass.

“Grandma,” she said solemnly, “is my daddy the fun one?”

“Of course he is,” I said dramatically. “And you know why he is?” I leaned in close to whisper. “Because he was raised on Coca-Cola and root beer floats!”

We both laughed. She wiped her hands on her dungarees, surveying her muddy knees. She leaned against the new-timber frame beams of the deck above, and picked up one leg to brush the caked bits off.

“I think I need a bath.” She giggled.

I looked her up and down. You don’t lie to a girl like Ellie. I cleared my throat slowly. “Yes,” I said, “indeed you do.”

Upstairs I tested the running water in the crook of my elbow before I plugged the drain. I handed her a thick white towel, a fresh bar of soap, and went into my bedroom to wait. She shut the door and I felt the old panic rise in my throat. I willed myself to just sit; just stay put. I heard the water running for a long time, then her contented humming mixed with a splash or two. It sounded like beach, not baptism, but I knew when the door opened again; the room would be different. Her energy, her life force, would be there.

A few seconds of silence went by and I knocked on the door.

“Ellie, are you okay in there?”

“Yes, Grandma,” she said. “I’m fine.”





Acknowledgments



Special thanks always to the incredibly wise Dorian Karchmar, and to Sarah Walsh, Laura Stern, and especially the smart and decisive Sarah Branham, who stepped in to save the day. To the entire Atria team, from copyediting to sales to promotion to publicity, my eternal gratitude for every little thing you continue to do. Thanks to Adam Shear, Carla Spataro, and Marc Schuster for their early insights, and to my wildly supportive family and friends, especially Sue Redmond, Shirin Danishmend, Carrie Majors, and Joey and TC Scornavacchi. A huge debt is owed to The Liars Club: Gregory Frost, Jonathan Maberry, Dennis Tafoya, Jon McGoran, Marie Lamba, Leslie Banks, Sara Shepard, Merry Jones, Solomon Jones, Ed Pettit, Keith Strunk, and Don Lafferty, all of whom provided advice, cheerleading, and French fries at important junctures.

And a special shout-out to the thousands of book club readers I have met since my first novel debuted. You provided a wealth of encouragement on The Bird House. Thanks particularly to Lauren Sullivan, for mentioning the family ring, and to Mary Kay Gaver for helping me to “think like a shrink.”