Lauren Groff - Delicate Edible Birds - And Other Stories

Lily feels like she’s swimming. She can’t breathe. Sammy stands over her, staring down with a dirty finger in her mouth. Lily clutches a silk skirt and lifts it to her face, over her nose and down, three times.

Your mother, whispers Sammy, murdered your father. She grins a terrible grin.

Maria finds Lily hours later, folded into a ball beneath her grandmother’s dresses, wet, mute. The girl won’t speak through her bath, won’t eat the soup. And so, when she puts Lily to bed, Maria curls up beside her and breathes with her until Lily sleeps in her own small nest of pillows. She is careful to stay on the corner of the bed so that when Lily wakes in the night, Maria will not have rolled over and crushed Lily’s imaginary friend.

PARADISE, THE PARROT in the lobby on his brass hoop, Donna’s pale to tan, blonde to white. Their breakfasts of fruit, melon and papaya and pineapple.

This, Howard says to the girl over the coffee, watching her in the breeze in her kimono; this is the best gynecological conference I’ve ever been to in my life.

She snorts. Real diamonds, his gift, glow in her ears. Aren’t you glad I made us stay? she says, her voice still rough after all her painstaking finesse. What if we just didn’t go back? she says.

Yes, he says, but with the word there swims up a small unease. His wife, banging pots in the kitchen, coming up with her sloppy dinners to go back more quickly to her imagined worlds. He was supposed to have returned three days ago: he left messages with the answering service when he knew his wife would be out of the house, making excuses: they asked him to stay to address a medical school class, then the plane broke down and he had to stay overnight.

What would happen if he just remained here, soaking his flesh in the sun like lobster in butter, Donna beside him? Every day, this lascivious sun. He’d buy a yacht and sail it from island to island. Even in the midst of his fantasy, though, he knows he’d think of Lily, his pale, intense girl, and guilt would chase him. It would catch him, no matter where he was.

On the wind now there’s a trace, a hint of sound: Shostakovich, moderato. Someone in the kitchens, listening to a grainy radio. The mournful piano, unsuited to this thoughtless place, brings him back to the gray grandeur of New York, and he closes his eyes. He must get back, he knows. It makes him terribly sad. There’s his mother, sick in her bed, suffocating in broad air. His daughter, who breaks his heart. His wife. He listens to the movement of the music, the waves, the seabirds, until it is all smothered under the gardener’s electric hedgetrimmer.

Donna is looking at him, rubbing her hand on his knee. She says, What? a little crossly. He looks at her, the music heavy in his stomach: he opens his mouth. Howie doesn’t know what he’s going to say, only that it may be unpleasant. Donna’s lips purse, her pretty face suddenly waspish. And he hesitates just long enough for the phone to ring in the room behind him. He stands and answers it.

As he listens to that old, familiar voice on the line, he watches Donna on the balcony, drenched with light, her hair shifting in the wind like seaweed. The words at the end of the line put an urgency into his limbs. And a grief as clean as relief comes into his heart.

THE WOMAN CREEPS DOWN the curved stairwell in her bare feet, her heart bumping hard against her ribs. It is cold downstairs. Only her room has been heated nice and toasty; the rest of the hotel is frigid. There are voices, but in all this immensity, it is hard to tell where they are from.

Stink of the springs’ sulfur, heavy from one open window. Transistor music, some country song cloyed with longing. She sees the gardener scraping the wrought-iron gate, the black chips falling into the mud, his pink ears bobbing to the beat. She slides through the rooms like an eel in the deep.

But the way the light hits the glass of the antique windows makes her stop: that slick ripple is much like water. That pond rises again in her mind. And she sees it now, more clearly than ever, the car up to its steering wheel in the mud, ice like broken glass, windshield a broken cobweb. Blood everywhere, from when she opened the door, caught her leg on a sharp branch. She wrapped her husband’s shirt, ripped from the dry-cleaning hanger in the backseat, against her wound. The rain was hard as needles on her scalp.

Now she touches her leg and it burns warmly. Did she do something terrible by that pond? She feels that she did, though she doesn’t know what.

Ha, crows the old woman in her head: but the woman goes swiftly through the house now, trying to find the kitchen, the voices, the girl.

Now she emerges into the kitchen. Grocery bags tumbleweed on the floor. Pile of fruit on the table, a melon split and dripping. And there, in front of the sink, standing before the window that looked into the dim stretch of the street, the fat woman holds the girl’s face in her hands. The girl weeps. The fat woman gives her a long kiss on the mouth.

Not motherly, indeed, chuckles the old voice in the woman’s head. When the girl backs away, her face looks slapped and childlike.

In her mind, another voice, a different voice, one that sounds like her own, says, Lily. It sounds like grieving. She doesn’t know a Lily, she doesn’t think. The pang in her chest says otherwise.

But she doesn’t have time to examine it, for beyond the bodies of the woman and the girl, down the hill, come cars like birds gliding to water. Two are black and white, their lights discreetly off. The last a green Jaguar, sleek.

She watches these cars pass all the abandoned hotels. They park in the street before the window. The police emerge. From the last car there comes a bronzed, thin man, his handsome face set in wrinkles of worry. She is certain she knows him. Her hands float toward her mouth, hover in the air there. They write wildly in the air as she watches him.

Oh, she says, and the two other women spring apart. They turn to her, then follow her look out the window, see the police cars, the third man. The gardener drops his tools and bounds toward them, grinning madly, already talking.

Oh, dear, says the woman, joining the other two at the window. She feels a broad smile spreading across her face. As the four men move together toward the door of the hotel, she gives a happy laugh. And just before the men enter, the woman says, watching the bronzed man with his thin hair, Oh, I believe my doctor is here.

YEARS LATER, WHEN JAIME THINKS of this day, she will only remember the kiss. Not the subtle sighing recognition when the police reveal that the woman is famous, a writer whose books even Jaime has read, whose picture she had seen many times on dust jackets. Nor that Jason ratted the woman out and her husband came and took her away. She will remember Bettina, enormous and beautiful, pressing her lips on Jaime’s own in the silvery light of the day. The kiss is what she will see every time she sees the writer’s name, every time she sees one of her books on a girlfriend’s shelf. She will remember the kiss when she finally finds the woman’s novel in a quarter bargain bin. It had been an instant best seller: everyone loves a scandal. Only when she reads the book will she learn of the woman’s amnesia, of the marriage certificate she ripped up and sent in flutters into the midnight water, the wedding band she sent skipping into the dark. She will learn of the troubled daughter, look up pictures of that lost girl, and feel a surge of sympathy, a strange recognition. But when she finishes the book and fingers the title, Sudden Pond, Jaime will forget all that she knew about Tabitha and only remember the kiss in the window, and a darkness will fill her and slow the world.

ON THAT DAY, as the three of them stand in the window, watching the woman carried off, Bettina squeezes Jaime’s hand under the cover of drapery. The last icicle in the window melts a ratatatat on the screen. Jaime feels ill. Jason is laughing, counting the reward money in his head. When the cars are gone, he goes back outside to the wrought-iron fence and chips at it again, whistling intricate contrapuntal melodies to the music on his transistor.