Lauren Groff - Delicate Edible Birds - And Other Stories

Alone together, Bettina’s warmth pushes Jaime’s breath from her. The hotel without the woman feels empty and a little sad.

At last, Bettina says, Sit down, and she lowers herself on one of the overstuffed settees. Jaime traces the lilies in the fabric with her hand, feeling as raw and tender as a newborn. Bettina says, You know, Jaime, you remind me of myself.

Jaime is shaky and says nothing.

Bettina says, That’s not a compliment, strictly. I mean that I look at you, Jaime, and see a girl chased by herself. Like me.

A silence: Jaime tries hard to understand. If you want, I can tell you my story now, says Bettina. How I got here, of all places I mean, she says, and Jaime nods.

Bettina’s story is stark, has a strange ring to it. Childhood in the country, doting parents, bicycles and gardens and brothers and cousins and tennis and Pimm’s; her aunt paying for public school; blazers and experiments in the dormitories under lights-out. A-levels, Oxbridge. Balls and visits in London; boys and cigarettes. She was beautiful. A wild girl.

One summer, home from school, she drank too much at a bonfire outside her grandparents’ estate. She woke with the wild music playing somewhere, her face pressed into the dirt, a mouth full of cinders.

She could have just waited it out, until the boy heaved off her, and then walked home, taken a shower. But she found a broken bottle under her hand, and without thinking speared it up. And then his weight was a different weight, and there was a hot wetness spreading down her back, a darkness pooling on the ground. The boy was dead. The bottle in his eye.

Bettina panicked, ran back to her grandparents’, stole cash from their safe, showered, and left. She bought a ticket to India, but in the terminal crept onto a plane to America. There she changed her body, name, hair color, age, became a nanny. She met Jason at Niagara and after one drunken night they awoke married.

She could have run away again, but she was too tired. He left the military, took her to Sharon Springs, his hometown, where they bought the hotel, in foreclosure, with his savings, a grand place almost rotted to its studs. Nobody looking for her could ever find her in this cold, dim town that smelled of sulfur.

I believed it, Bettina says, bitterness in her voice. I believed in the American dream.

Bettina’s eyes are closed, lashes moving against her cheeks like wings. In the empty silence afterward, there is a strange metallic ring.

It sounds fake to Jaime. She cannot breathe. She has listened to it all, love flying from her like scales from a fish. Bettina is too composed, her story too composed. Something bad did happen to Bettina, clearly: she probably is from England, probably was chased away. But whatever happened was not what she just told Jaime. And the story feels like one so often told it has the warp of fairy tale to it. Worse, she suspects Bettina has come to believe it herself. Jaime can’t look at Bettina, now, for pity.

So, Bettina says, to the scrape of Jason outside, the parlor cold and damp. There are goose bumps on Jaime’s arms. We can do two things now. One, you stay in town, in our little arrangement. Or, two, you know what you know about me and can’t forgive me for it. Go home and be a good girl and go back to school and become who you were before. You tell me what you want to do.

For a moment, Jaime becomes Bettina, sees her long days of work, her nights beside snoring Jason; she can feel Bettina’s boredom heavy as a rock in her own torso. Jaime understands with this that all she’d ever been to Bettina was a plaything to stave off the tedium, the kiss only a promise, a way to keep Jaime around.

In this light, Jaime’s freedom is vast and wondrous. She is young, unfixed where she is. She can, she understands, do whatever she wants. She wants to laugh with surprise.

I think I’ll go home, she says. A watery beam of light from the window slides like a cat across Jaime’s legs and up the wall. The fast-falling night darkens the window. Jason comes into the kitchen, still whistling.

Bette? he calls, sounding lost. Bette? Somewhere in the hotel a draft plays a corner like a tin whistle.

Bettina sighs and says, We’re in the parlor, darling.

Jason comes in, bringing with him the smell of his sweat and the crisp outdoors. Oh, he says, relieved. But he says, Oh, again, when he sees Jaime, hunched over, face twisted, and the word is saturated with guilt. He thinks Jaime has told on him. Poor Jason, who had joined the military to become something better, who married Bettina in an act of aspiration, but who in the end found himself only the man he was always meant to be: hick, redneck, country boy.

Bettina stands and walks to the door: the windows in their panes tremble with her steps. Wonderful news, darling, she says. Jaime feels she has grown enough here with us that she can face the world. We’re letting our little chick fly. Isn’t that spectacular, darling? Her face is creamily reflected in the dark window.

Spectacular, says Jason, his voice confused. He straightens himself up into a military stance: he does this when uncertain. Jaime finds him newly endearing.

Our little girl, says Bettina, leading her husband out the door, and Jaime feels a heavy relief. Our little girl, says Bettina, is ready to grow up.

LILY IS SICK. She and Sammy are on the veranda in the cold March wind, watching the scattered clouds move, the shadows slide over the spots of sunlight in the park. Sammy has taken books from her dead grandfather’s locked cabinet and is tossing them over the edge. She throws one now and it flutters in midair and whips its pages around. It comes to a stop on the neighbor’s patio a few stories down, beside another book. The books riffle their pages at one another, communicating alarm.

Lily has no heart to stop Sammy. She is shaking, and even by breathing slowly she cannot control the wave that hovers above her, threatening to crash down. In the apartment, the grandmother had rasped at her father: Howard, you are irresponsible, so stupid, what do you think you were doing in Key West with that trash, I wouldn’t have blamed Tabitha if she had murdered you, and is now breathing air from her machine, cigarette trembling in her hands.

Lily’s parents aren’t dead. Worse. They had abandoned her without a second thought.

They don’t love her. She sees her mother as her mother had been the morning she disappeared, her sharp, elegant face drawn at the breakfast table, her coffee untouched, her cigarette spinning blue smoke into the air. Lily knew better than to approach her when she was like this. There were some times when her mother was brilliant, laughing, fiery with life; but she was unpredictable, and when she was working she was more likely to look at Lily as if she were a stranger. They were still looking for her mother, but it was her soft and kind father’s abandonment that made the panic rise up again.

Lily sees the mother bird dart back over the sky, flutter down. She moves over to the planter, peers inside. The baby chicks are fatter today than even yesterday, and the mother ignores Lily by now. She spits brown-pink pap into her babies’ gullets. Winkyn, Blinkyn, and Nod swallow and open their mouths again and again until the mother bird, emptied, flies off. The babies peep hungrily for more.

Sammy reaches down, but Lily says, No, in such a strange voice that Sammy backs away, sucking her finger and looking at Lily with her froggy eyes. And it is Lily who reaches down into the nest and cradles Winkyn in her palm. She knows this is bad, that the mama bird won’t touch him because he smells of Lily. She brings him up close to her eye. The chick must think she’s an enormous mother bird because he opens his beak extrawide. He chirps one sweet chirp.