I hadn’t yet decided if or how I was going to tell Dad about the bird, but as we were walking back to the car after the funeral, I stumbled over a crack that had made the sidewalk hideously uneven.
That silly childhood rhyme sang its way into my head:
Don’t step on the crack or you’ll break your mother’s back.
My brain snagged on the words. I blinked and fell half on the grass and half on the edge of the sidewalk. Dad helped me back up. There was a greenish spot on my knee, and it brought on a longing for the past, for a simpler time, when grass stains were among my biggest worries.
“What’s that?” said Dad, and at first I thought he was asking about the stain. But no, he was pointing at a long, slender spot of red a few feet away from me.
In my fall, the feather had made its way out of my dress pocket. It uncurled on the sidewalk like some kind of challenge.
I swiped it off the ground and shoved it back in my pocket.
Dad asked about it, of course. And I couldn’t lie. Not when it had to do with my mother.
“It’s from Mom,” I tried to explain as we got in the car. “She came to see me.”
Dad was silent for a few beats, his hands white-knuckling the steering wheel. I saw the millisecond in which his face twisted with grief. His expression was loud as a roar, though outside of us there was only the sound of the car rolling over pavement. The muted noise of the pedals shifting beneath his feet as he braked.
“She came to see you,” he echoed. The concern was obvious in his voice.
“She came as—she turned into—” I swallowed. Now that they were on the tip of my tongue, the words had the taste of something ridiculous. “She’s a bird now. Huge and red. And beautiful. She landed on the porch the other night.”
At Mill Road, he turned left, and I understood that he was taking us home the long way, dragging out this conversation. I was trapped.
“What’s the significance of her being a bird?” he said after a long stretch of nothing, and I knew in that moment that he didn’t believe me, and there was nothing I could do or say that would change his mind.
I didn’t answer, and he sighed through his nose very quietly. I heard it clear as anything. I turned my face out the window, my thumb stroking the vane of the feather.
He drummed the steering wheel a few times with the pads of his fingers, as he often did when he was thinking. “What does red mean to you?” he tried again, and it sounded almost textbook, like some technique he’d learned from Dr. O’Brien.
“I didn’t make the bird up, Dad. It’s real. I saw her. That was Mom.”
The rain came then; we had turned directly into the path of the storm. The water drummed loudly, slanting into us and cutting straight down the image of my face mirrored in the window, slicing me apart again and again.
“I’m trying to understand, Leigh,” said Dad as he pulled the car into our driveway. He didn’t push the button to open the garage door. He didn’t shift the car into park. We sat there, idling, and the little tremors from the engine were starting to make me feel sick.
“Okay,” I said. I thought I would give him a shot. If he was making a real effort, so would I. If he wanted to talk this out, fine. I just needed him to try, for one second, to believe me.
I watched his fingers tap-tap-tapping against the steering wheel as he searched for the right words. He closed his eyes for a beat.
“I also wish… I could see your mother again. More than anything.”
“Right,” I said, and my mind went blank, like a computer screen shutting down. I clicked my seat belt loose, threw open the door, made my way out of the car.
The rain clung to me as I dug through my bag for my key to the house. It was a warm rain, and it looked gray as it came down from the sky. I imagined it to be liquid armor, shaping itself to my body where it made contact. Shielding me from everything.
Caro didn’t believe me, either. I tried to tell her after we’d both changed out of our funeral clothes and made our way to Fudge Shack. We sat on the high stools, a slice of Rocky Road untouched on my square of wax paper. She sucked up mouthfuls of her chocolate milk shake and swallowed slowly, letting me finish. She was being all quiet in that way she has of disagreeing. There in the patient nod of her chin and the glassiness of her eyes I could see I was losing her with each new word that came out of my mouth.
I reached the point where I couldn’t stand to look at her face any longer. Instead, my eyes drifted up to the bit of blue dye in her super short hair. It had faded to a color like broken sea glass. She’d had strands of blue since we met freshman year, and this was the greenest she’d ever let them get.
When I was done, she said, “I’m worried about you.”
I dug a finger into my fudge, then pulled away again, staring hard at the indent.
“I know you’re not clicking with Dr. O’Brien,” she said. “But maybe it would be worth… trying someone else?”
I shrugged. “I’ll think about it.”
But I could tell she knew I was just saying that to get her to stop talking that way.
I made a show of checking the time on my phone and offered my hollow apology as I gathered up my fudge and slid off the stool, headed toward whatever imaginary thing it was that I was late for.
Later, I felt guilty. Wasn’t Caro only trying to help?
But how could anyone really help me if they didn’t believe me?
What I wanted was to talk to Axel about my mother, to skip a hundred days ahead of that kiss, try to wipe it from his memory and mine. I wanted to tell him about the bird. I sat on the sofa with my wanting, turning a charcoal stick between my hands—around and around and around—until my fingers were soot black and everything I touched ended up smeared and burnt.
Would Axel believe me? I wanted to think yes. But honestly, I had no idea.
After I didn’t answer my cell, he called the house phone, just once. Nobody answered. He didn’t leave a message.
We’d rarely ever gone so long without seeing each other. Not when I had the stomach bug, immediately followed by the regular flu, immediately followed by an upper respiratory infection—he came over anyway, braving the toxic air from my lungs to sit on the sofa beside me and paint. Not even when Dad made me go to Mardenn, that god-awful hellhole of a summer camp. I was so miserable that Axel rode the bus all the way up to help me sneak out and get back home.
He would never cut me off. This I knew. This was all on me.
To think about it was to twist the arrow between my ribs. So I let myself be swallowed by thoughts of the bird, my questions spiraling, like where is the bird now? What does she want?
I tried to draw her in my sketchbook, but I couldn’t get the wings right.
6
The mother-shaped hole became a cutout of the blackest black. Something I could only see around. If I tried to look directly at it, I saw emptiness.
I had to fight that emptiness, that absence of color. I looked in the other direction, toward white, which is made up of all the other colors of the visible spectrum. White was a solution, or at least the smallest of Band-Aids. In the empty hours the morning after the funeral, I drove to the hardware store, winging through an obscure route to avoid being seen by anyone in the neighborhood who would recognize first the car and then my face. The need for white paint burned so hard I didn’t think twice about driving unlicensed.
I did one coat on the walls of my bedroom—the paint was thin; the bright tangerine my mother and I rolled on years ago turned a sickly shade of Creamsicle—and was making my way toward the bathroom when Dad came out of his office.
He looked at the paint bucket by my legs, smears of white already staining my jeans, and said, “Leigh, come on.”