Lauren Groff - Delicate Edible Birds - And Other Stories

No religion, no school, no good Jamina. It had been a relief, in its way. At first she thought she missed the boy. Now she can’t remember his face.

She’d wanted for a long time to tell Bettina about the boy, but if she was right to suspect that Bettina read her journal, the woman already knows. The commercials come on and Bettina moves off to make another aluminum pan of popcorn. Jaime follows her into the kitchen, where it smells of the coffee cake for tomorrow’s breakfast, cooling on the stove. She wants to confess, to come clean, but she can’t tell on Jason, and though she’d like to, she can’t make herself talk of the boy in the park. Instead she tells about the woman upstairs, what she’d found that morning when she was cleaning.

In her purse? Jaime says. When she was in the shower? I found a man’s button-up shirt. And it was all bloody. Like totally bloody.

Bettina stops shaking the popcorn over the burner. Her face has paled. A bloody shirt? she says, glancing at the ceiling.

That’s what I found, says Jaime. You think she murdered someone or something?

Bettina turns off the stove and sits at the table. I think, she says. Doesn’t matter what I think. She leans forward and Jaime is swimming in those violet, black-fringed eyes. Jaime, promise me, she says, don’t tell anyone else.

Jaime flushes, resentful. Duh, she says, then Hepburn’s bell-like voice chimes from the other room, and Jaime returns to the movie, feeling as if she’d just escaped something.

In the morning, when Jason comes inside, smelling of whiskey, Jaime is arranging the cake on the guest’s tray. Bettina is by the stove. Jason grins at them, settles heavily into a chair. His back is straight. He runs his hand tiredly through his grizzled hair.

Drinking, Jason? says Bettina calmly. Already or still?

Jason sighs. You don’t know, he says, his tongue slightly thick. You don’t know about what’s happening around here.

Bettina goes still. What don’t we know? she says in her softest voice.

Be quiet for a minute, I’ll tell you, says Jason. So we’re at the Springs last night playing pool, he says, the boys and me, when in comes Arnie.

Arnie snowplow or Arnie cop? says Bettina.

Arnie cop, says Jason. Anyways, Arnie says, Looks like we got us a missing person down in Roseboom, going to drag the pond, make sure nobody’s in it. He said to wait till morning, but we got carried away, got into our trucks, went up there to see what we could do. And get this, there’s this car halfway in the water, this Mercedes all filled with water. So Pete shines his light in, sees the seats, and they’re all covered with dark splotches. And he rubs his hand on it, and then says, Fuck! — here, Jason looks at Jaime and says, Pardon the French, then continues — Pete drops the flashlight and jumps back. It’s blood. A lot of blood. And so we wait out in the truck and luckily someone brought whiskey and just when it gets dawn we drag the lake. But not good enough, I guess, cause we didn’t find a body or anything.

He looks at the women, pauses for drama. Pretty clear, he says, slowly, somebody was murdered there.

Murdered? says Jaime, and looks at Bettina with alarm, but Bettina is calmly placing a poached egg on the tray for the woman upstairs.

Huh, she says. Any idea whose car it is?

Muckamucks from the city. Some kind of doctor and his wife. They think there was a hitchhiker or something, killed them both. Is there any coffee?

Bettina pours the coffee into Jason’s mug and looks at Jaime. Take the food up, Jamie, before it gets cold, she says.

Jaime weighs the woman upstairs and her bloody shirt against Jason, so bleary, his great paws around his mug, ears cold-reddened, making him seem almost childlike. At least she understands the danger that is Jason’s, a little.

Bettina? she says, helpless. I can’t.

Bettina’s mouth knots into a silken bow. She says, All right. Go on and do the dishes, then. She heaves the tray upstairs.

IT HAS BEEN THREE DAYS: Lily hasn’t been to school. She’s sure this is illegal, but Sammy said that if Lily told, her grandmother was probably too rich to go to jail and Maria would have to go instead. At night, Lily dreamed of Maria in jail and woke up in a puddle. She’ll never tell, not even if she was out for the rest of the year, not even if she was out for ten years and couldn’t go to college and get a good education and would never be a veterinarian, and would end up poor like Maria.

She feels the wildness rise in her again, tries to push it back. When she was just three, she would have such terrible attacks that she scratched her own cheeks until they bled. She remembers her parents talking, her mother’s slow drawl, her father’s clipped voice — Is it our fault? he said. Did we do this to her? God, I’ll never forgive myself if that’s the case; and Lily’s mother gave a small, tough laugh and said, For heaven’s sake, listen to yourself. Of course we did. We’re both neurotic as hell. In a softer voice her mother, who was never soft, said: Lil will grow out of it.

This is what Lily tells herself when she fears she will never be normal, when she feels the anxiety lurking in the corners of the room: I’ll grow out of it. And when she says it, to herself, she says it in her mother’s broken-glass voice.

Lily is on the couch between Maria and Sammy. Maria is watching her show and Sammy is itching for mischief. She’s been naughty all morning, spilling the milk, knocking over the grandmother’s oxygen tank, eating all the cookies from the jar. But Lily won’t let Sammy be bad right now: she has to keep Sammy in check. It’s exhausting.

On the screen a very beautiful woman with huge shoulders is walking across a wood-paneled office, a grin on her red lips. What’s going on? says Lily.

Maria says, without turning her eyes from the television, Oh, it is incredible! This woman is not this woman, but her evil twin. Everyone thinks she is she, but, no, she has her sister tied up in a basement. She is trying to steal her sister’s fortune and man. Maria pats Lily’s face, her hand smelling of the fennel she’d turned into soup for lunch.

Lily’s father knows stories about evil twins: he spends hours at night telling Lily stories, mostly fairy tales. Her grandmother has explained to Lily that her parents are lost. Now, as the show jitters on, she imagines her father out in the forest, barefoot in the snow, only frozen berries to feed him. Somewhere in a sleigh in the cold, her mother sits all dressed in white, her beautiful face icy, enchanted by bad magic into a snow queen.

With that, the great wave looms above Lily, threatening, keeping her from breathing.

Sammy has turned her froggy face toward Lily, is poking her in the side with a sticky finger. Together, the wave and the poke are enough to make Lily wail.

Into Lily’s hair, Maria says, Oh, hush-hush. When Lily won’t hush, Maria says, So you want to be a veterinarian? To doctor the animals?

Lily, crying hard, nods, and Maria stands and carries Lily through the French doors onto the veranda. It is freezing out there, the stripped trees in the park below bowing, the street noises billowing up to meet them. Maria puts her finger on her lips, and Lily tries hard to press her sobs into her chest. Maria carries her over to an enormous empty planter, where in the summer there sits a topiary in the shape of a swan.

They look down, and Lily gasps. There, blue with cold, peep three chicks, songbirds, opening their cocktail-straw throats to Lily, pleading for warmth and worm mash. They strain toward Lily, shivering with effort.

The world around Lily halts. In this moment, there is no Maria holding her, no grandmother smelling of sickness, no parents lost in the woods, no Sammy. Lily has stepped out of herself. It feels good. There is a rift inside her and on the far side of the rift, there are only the chicks, creatures so much weaker than even Lily that the girl feels herself filled with a kind of light, calm and blue; a light full of forgetting.