Lauren Groff - Delicate Edible Birds - And Other Stories

Hush, you, says the woman, agitated to standing. She turns off the television. The voice in her head goes silent.

The woman circles the room, feeling like a caged finch, picks up the musty books on the nightstand, puts them down again. Nothing is right anymore. There is no solace in the dead street, the dead town. She pauses before the television, but to invite such noise will make it hard to be quiet again.

After hours of pacing, she goes to the door. She has a vague idea that if she can find the girl she can talk to her. Jaime, the British woman had called her. The girl who reminds her of someone she doesn’t want to remember, though she thinks it may be necessary that she remember now.

EARLY AFTERNOON AND the hotel is empty, save for Jaime and the woman upstairs. Though Jaime is in her little brown bed, her nest, listening to the foggy pop music on her clock radio, she feels as if she’s tied to the woman with an invisible tether. She wonders what she had felt when she murdered her husband, the moment the knife entered his flesh. Jaime closes her eyes and thinks that she probably felt nothing. That she watched herself from the outside, and it was a wonderful relief.

In the past, when Bettina and Jason were both gone Jaime would wander the forbidden depths of the hotel. On the third floor, the begrimed windows and furniture hulked under blankets like beasts asleep. Pigeons entered through a broken pane, and when she came into the room the birds would rise and swirl about her in a confetti of down. There she’d found a box of old letters in the servants’ quarters, misspelled, stained, banal, infinitely tender. Jaime would go into Bettina and Jason’s suite, three rooms in ivory and pink, smelling of Bettina’s flowers, Jason’s things kenneled in their own closet. She loves to pick through Jason’s nightstand, his careful cache of treasures: the hunting knife in the handmade sheath that stinks of summer camp, the misspelled list in his adolescent hand: Things I Will Do Before I Die (number three, Be a Brigideer General; number nine, Be a Millionaire ), the photographs of a younger Jason and a stunning, thin Bettina laughing, at Niagara. She runs her hands over Bettina’s floral dresses, searches through her lingerie.

In her journal she writes a loopy Bettina . It’s not enough to write the name; it is all she has.

Since that February night during an ice storm, when Jaime and Bettina stood in the kitchen rolling out dough for mincemeat pies, and the lights went out, and Bettina laughed and lit great conflagrations of candles in the room and in the flickering light Bettina glowed, Jaime had felt bubble within her a certain new helplessness. At that moment, she understood why she’d been happy these past few months. She’d understood, finally, a small piece of herself.

Good girls wear wigs and long skirts and marry men their parents choose and become mothers. Good girls don’t dream the way Jaime dreams about other women. With that bright pulse, she’d found a better way to escape her parents. She had felt powerful in the kitchen that night.

It was not impossible that Bettina knew. She read Jaime’s journal, after all, kept Jaime on a leash she’d tug from time to time to make sure that Jaime was attentive. Still, if what Jaime wrote about Jason bothered Bettina, she had yet to show it.

That morning, after Bettina went upstairs with the tray, Jaime’s face grew hot in the steam from the dishes and Jason sat at the table, watching her. Jaime, Jaime, Jaime, he said when she put the last dish in the rack. C’mere. I won’t bite.

Nah, she said. I’m okay here.

Fine, he said, standing. Then I’ll go over there. He was still a little wobbly from the whiskey, and Jaime stepped easily around the table to put it between them.

Jason laughed, leaned his fists on the table. Oh, Jaime, he said. You don’t fool me for a minute.

A sea rush in her ears. I don’t? she said, wondering what he meant. She strained to hear upstairs, and relaxed when she heard a door close, Bettina’s heavy tread on the stairs.

Jason heard, too, and his smile fell off his face. Nope, he said. You and my wife are hiding that woman upstairs, aren’t you? I’m not as stupid as I look. Soon as I heard about the people in the car, I thought of that woman. He sighed, sat down. He looked suddenly old.

Jaime, he said, Bettina’s a complicated lady, you know. She’s got her own reasons for what she does. I just don’t want you getting mixed up in something you don’t understand.

Jaime made a sound as if she’d been hit in the sternum, though it came out sounding like a laugh. And then there was Bettina in the door, frowning, with the empty tray.

Jason stretched, smiling. We should go into town now, he said. Ready, Bette?

In a jiff, she said. Jaime, you’ll hold down the fort?

Sure, said Jaime, though she wasn’t sure, at all. In a minute, they were in the car, gone.

They have been away for hours when she hears Jason’s truck coming to a stop before the hotel. She weighs Jason against Bettina and finds him lacking. The doors slam, the kitchen door opens, the rustle of bags on the counter. Jaime waits until she hears Jason crunch over the gravel outside, heading to his workshop, and then she’s in the kitchen, where Bettina has sliced open a melon and is eating a juicy crescent at the window.

Bettina laughs, guiltily. Couldn’t help myself, she says. Then puts the sweet fruit before Jaime’s lips for her to bite.

But Jaime looks at Bettina, and Bettina takes the fruit away. I have to tell you, says Jaime. I have to tell you about something. Up rises the kiss in the dark corridor, Jason’s face behind the shower curtain; Jaime feels the prickles on the back of her neck, as if she’s about to lob a grenade into a marriage. It’s about Jason, she says.

But Bettina is already nodding. I know, she says. He’s smarter than I gave him credit for. Called the police. While we were at the store, he took off and I know he did it then.

Jaime feels dizzy, and when Bettina smiles and leans forward, her pretty mouth close to Jaime’s, Jaime doesn’t at first know what is happening, and only thinks fuzzily of the woman upstairs.

LILY IS HIDING in her grandmother’s closet. It is a palace in there, mahogany and crystal, whole walls of spike heels and furs in plastic shrouds. Lily is trying to listen into the bedroom, but Sammy is odious. She’s pulled out the silk pockets from the grandmother’s spring coats, spilling used tissues to the ground like shriveled mushrooms, and is now standing in a pair of red heels, shimmying on her bowed legs, her belly pulsing in and out.

Lily mouths, Stop it, Sammy! but Sammy only chuckles and shimmies some more.

Her uncles are in the room with the grandmother, all stone-faced; her aunts are there, too, crying and patting at their cheeks with tissues. The lawyer is there, a family friend, a fat man with a big nose like a red lightbulb. Lily was standing on a chair on the cold veranda, peering at the birds, when Sammy hissed and pointed through the glass door, and Lily saw the slow march of the relatives and the lawyer toward the grandmother’s room. When she saw Maria pushing a cart full of drinks and snacks toward the door, Lily waved at the birds and their mother, who hopped in indignation on one foot. Bye, Winkyn, Blinkyn, and Nod, she said. Be good.

The lawyer is now saying something: a car found in a pond. Upstate. Howard. Blood. Missing. Tabitha.

Tabitha is Lily’s mother. Howard is Lily’s father.

And then the grandmother gives a curious sound, a half-shout, raspy and metallic. My Howard? she shouts. My Howard? Murdered?

Uncle Chan, the oldest uncle, begins to roar. Why?

A long pause. The lawyer honks into a handkerchief and folds it away. He says loud enough for Lily to hear, We’re not sure. But the evidence points toward. Well, there was a manuscript on the desk, unfinished. From what we can piece together, there may have been some, er. Indiscretion. On the part of. We’re running things by the credit card company, to make sure. And we’re looking for Tabitha now. Or her body. We’re just not sure.