She shakes her head, then bends down to the ground. When she stands back up, she’s cradling a small bird in her hands. I flinch. The bird’s feathers are twisted—some pulled out to the stem—and coated with blood. Its head hangs limply against Penny’s fingers, an oozing gash in its throat. The bird’s membrane moves slowly and horizontally across its eye like it’s blinking, and the needle-thin beak appears to chatter.
“He’s a sandpiper.” Penny holds the bird close to her chest, her chin tucked to her collarbone, staring down at it. “I don’t know how it got over here.” She strokes the bird’s brown speckled wing. Tears dribble off the tip of her nose. “A cat must have gotten it. Or maybe a fox…or a lawn mower.” Penny chokes. “I don’t know what to do.” She sobs.
I try, but I don’t think I feel as badly for the bird as I do for Penny, who seems almost broken over a tiny animal that has never loved her back, not even for a day. “We could take it to a vet?” I suggest because I want to add something.
But we both stare at the bird. It’s opening its beak methodically now, staring into nothing. The breaths are labored, wings still.
“It’s in pain,” she whispers. “It’s in so much pain.” Penny gasps for air between silent sobs, and again, it’s her pain that I feel, her pain that I want to go away.
This girl with her bangles and her quirky braids and inner confidence is completely flattened out in the face of the bleeding bird.
Penny’s eyes seem to plead with me. “I texted Will,” she says, voice still quiet. “He’s not responding.”
I close my eyes because my throat has started to get all tight the way it did when I used to have asthma. “I could…” Then I shake my head furiously. “No, I’m sorry, I was just thinking out loud and—”
She looks at me, eyes bright and intense. “Please, Lake?”
The bird is pressed against her and Penny is crying, crying, crying. “It’s in pain,” she says.
I don’t even know what to do, not for sure, but I reach out for the bird and scoop it from Penny’s breast. There’s a spot of blood on her crested sweater vest. “All right,” I say. “I guess I can.”
I have never been a person that scares easily. I remind myself of that as I feel the barely there weight of the dying bird in my hands. I lay it gently on the ground. Penny turns away, dropping her head into her hands. My pulse slows. There’s nothing in my head. Loud silence. As I take the heel of my shoe, balance my weight, pause to focus and aim for what I know has to work—must work—on the first try. Then I bring my heel down hard and fast and without hesitation on the bird’s head, where at once it stills underneath my foot.
The sound comes rushing back into my skull. I’m dizzy to the point of nausea, but Penny buries her face in my shoulder and hugs me. Will shows up as if out of thin air, though I imagine it was actually from the hallway.
He sees me. He looks down at the ground. Frowns and nods. He wraps his hand around Penny’s back and then another grips the back of my neck, giving it a gentle squeeze. And eventually the roaring in my head slips down into my heart, where it turns into something much warmer and simpler and good.
When I wake up, my sheets are doused with cold sweat and my heart is pounding against my ribcage. The last thing I remember is falling. My eyes are peeled wide open, but I’m not seeing anything in the real world. I’m still hovering somewhere amid the in-between.
And then I’m remembering the dream. It had started with a crash or—no—maybe the crash had come in the middle, after Matt had begun climbing the tree. I thought it had started with the crash, with the crunch of metal and blood, but now that I’m awake and breathing again, I’m getting my orders mixed up. I can see a hazy Matt, scaling the tree—tan arms, blond hair—but when he falls, it’s not to the ground, but into a raging gray sea. And then the blood returns. From the car crash.
I pry myself from the soaking mattress and kick the blankets off my legs. There’s nothing more boring than hearing about another person’s dream, but I have this insatiable urge to tell someone the whole sequence of events, as though by telling, it might relinquish its weird hold on me.
Then I realize the person who I’d tell—Penny—is dead. And here I am, fully awake and queasy. The start of the fourth day since the accident.
I crawl out of bed. My neck’s still sore from the crash. The bone beneath my cast throbs and the skin itches. I try sliding a fingernail under the plaster, but can’t reach the spot, so I work on ignoring it, the same way I’m working to ignore the ragged hole in my chest where my heart used to be and the growing sense of dread.
Without bothering to check the mirror, I slip on the pair of flip-flops stowed beneath my bed and tread through the quiet downstairs hallway. I don’t know exactly why, but before I know it, I’m outside in the glaring sun where the sweat on my back dries almost instantly. None of the neighbors are outside to bear witness to my embarrassing pajama attire. My drawstring pants are baggy in the backside and have Santa-clad pigs on them.
I shuffle down the driveway to stand beneath the oak tree in our yard and do something I’ve never done before. I stand directly underneath it and stare up into the branches. When Matt fell, I thought that my dad swore he’d have it chopped down, but now I can’t remember if I had been the one who asked him to do that. Or maybe it was my mother. I’m not sure.
The branches’ leaves are brown at the edges where they’ve been baked in the summer heat. I trace the limbs sprouting from the trunk and look for the stub of the one Matt fell from. All these years, I thought I remembered exactly where it was. But it’s not my memory. I wasn’t there.
I walk up to the base of the trunk. The first real branch, one that would hold the weight of a person, is a few feet above my fingertips, which are stretched over my head. Matt was only a couple of inches taller than me at the time of the accident. Wasn’t he? And I’ve grown since then. I frown and remember that the tree too must have grown. It seems like an awful lot for a tree to grow in a few years, though. In the messy tangle of twigs, there are several shoots of baby leaves and branches sprouting from the trunk. But none looked as I imagined the remnants of the terrible broken branch would.
I stare down at my toes, at the worn grass carpet at my feet, and try to imagine Matt lying in it. A prickle works its way up the length of my spine, notch by notch.
I look up at the house and see a subtle brush of movement in one of the first-story windows and feel someone there, watching me, behind the sheen of the glass. Perturbed and unsatisfied, I turn my shoulders away and trudge through the oppressive heat back to the house.
Inside, the air-conditioning smells mildew-y as it blows through the vents. I retreat to my room, feeling dazed, probably the end result of days of crying that have turned me into an emotional prune. I am no closer to choosing between Penny and Will, except that yesterday I felt that I’d have to choose Will and then today I’m furious with myself for not giving Penny a fair shot.