Megan Bergman - Birds of a Lesser Paradise - Stories

Sandhill Prison had been many things. The Tuberculosis Sanitarium for Negroes. The Mary Hobgood Training Center. Now it was a low-security prison with a working farm. The administration was thinking of closing the farm and selling the land and had called Lila in to evaluate the health of the livestock. Lila checked her notepad: seventy jersey cows, five pigs, and one horse.

We don’t need any bleeding hearts, the warden had said. Just a real good evaluation of health. In other words, how many of these things can we sell?

Lila slammed her truck door shut and walked to the farmhouse. She knew the farm well; she’d been called out for cattle vaccinations and difficult births over the years. She looked backward, nervous. Prisoners who worked the farm roamed the land freely. She could see a handful in their orange jumpsuits raking through the compost pile in the distance.

Hey, Doc, the warden said, sticking out his hand. He wore pressed khakis and a short-sleeved button-up.

She hated the way people looked at her face, like they were sorry.

The wolf hybrid had taken most of her upper lip. He’d roused from his anesthetic haze earlier than expected as Lila was pulling quills from his muzzle. It had not hurt at first; the shock had delayed the pain. It was two in the morning and she was the only one in the surgical suite. She remembered blood on the mounted telephone as she dialed for help.

After a year of plastic surgeries, two seams remained where grafts had been placed underneath her nose. A cosmetic surgeon had tattooed a rose-colored line where the edge of her upper lip once appeared.

You were so beautiful, her mother had said in the hospital, giving Lila milk through a straw that leaned against the corner of her broken mouth.

Her mother had been reluctant to hand her a mirror in the days that followed.

I want to see, Lila said.

A few days will make all the difference, her mother said, falsely cheerful, turning away to riffle aimlessly in her overnight bag.

Give me a mirror, Lila said, gripping her mother’s arm.

And what Lila saw she did not accept, not at first. The sight of her blue and inflated face took her breath away and terrified her, the suture creeping across her mouth like a strange vine. The swelling and bruising hid a reality, she knew. She tried to demolish the hope that crept up, the banal optimism that promised she could return to life as a pretty girl. The fresh injury was obvious, but in time it would heal and then the scarring would beg the question: What happened to you?

Though he waited in the hospital for three days, Lila would not let Clay into the room after the accident. He was a firefighter and carpenter who made custom cabinets from reclaimed wood. Lila liked the way he told stories and the breakfasts he made on the weekends — French toast and scrambled eggs he got from the farm down the road from the firehouse. They’d known each other in high school and gotten reacquainted when Lila came back home after veterinary school — her mother had given him Lila’s number in the wine aisle of the grocery store.

Tell him he can go, she scribbled, handing a notepad to her mother in the hospital room. He’s not obligated to stick around.

He wants to see you, her mother had said, taking her hand.

I don’t want to be seen, Lila wrote.

You’re due to be married, Lila’s mom said. In four weeks.

Days later, despite her mother’s and Clay’s protests, Lila canceled the reservation at their reception site, called off the caterer and the florist. Someone else could have the peonies and white roses, she thought.

Clay had called constantly, and while she would talk to him, she would not permit him to see her. Eventually he resorted to waiting in his truck outside of her parents’ house until she finally let him see her face, two weeks after the accident, when the stitches had come out and the initial swelling was down.

Please, he said, taking her arm in her parents’ living room. This doesn’t matter.

It matters to me, she’d said, turning away. I’m not the person you fell in love with.

He’d spent the past months trying to convince her that nothing had changed. But she worried he was softhearted and sympathetic, not sincerely attracted to her. She’d figured he would end things after she put the wedding on hold, but he hadn’t.

We can take it slow, Clay had said. I don’t mind waiting.

Recently, he’d grown more impatient, lamenting the minimal physical contact Lila permitted.

I just want to be close to you again, he’d said a few days before requesting the dinner date.

I know I owe you that, she’d said. And it’s not that I don’t want it. I just can’t do it; I can’t stand the thought of not being beautiful to you.

You are—

Don’t say something you don’t mean, she said.

Lila had practiced faces in the mirror for months after the accident. How to stand at an angle. How to show her best side in a photograph. How her mouth looked when she talked, took a drink. She began wearing nice slacks and lost weight. She blew her hair straight in the mornings.

But still she felt she was wasting time. Even with expensive makeup she could not cover the scars above her mouth. The more time she spent on her appearance, the more frustrated she felt. Why invest time in something so damaged?

Clay constantly reassured her that she was beautiful, but she didn’t believe him. Wouldn’t it just be easier to start from scratch? she thought. Begin again with someone who’d never seen her before the accident? Then there would be no doubt about the attraction; it was the doubt she hated.

Once you’d been a pretty girl, Lila thought, you had to drag around your clubfooted vanity for the rest of your life, watch it wane and suffer. She remembered the way men had looked at her in the past, and knew they would never do so the same way again. She’d had male professors who had — she was almost sure of it — inflated her grades in veterinary school. The cashier at the country store used to give her free coffee in the morning, wave her through the line with a wink. He still waved her through, but she suspected his generosity now came from pity.

She’d never obsessed over her looks; she’d never had to. She was naturally pretty and had never worn much makeup or watched what she ate or taken a long time to get ready. But now that her face was altered, she felt she was walking through life relying on a different set of tools. She’d have to depend on her smarts, she thought, her own resourcefulness. She’d always been good at her job, but now she worked longer and harder. Part of her had always assumed she’d live a life in a partnership, with a dual income to fall back on; now, even with Clay insisting things were fine, she began to calculate the savings she’d need to buy a house and reach retirement on her own. Her self-confidence was as crippled as her face.

Since the attack, Lila had made one rule: Don’t get close to anything .

There was a day in the airport she remembered. She’d seen two young girls standing behind a deaf woman and her mother. The deaf woman had a twitch. The girls made garish, frantic signs at each other and jerked their shoulders to their ears behind the woman’s back. At the time, she’d done nothing. Now Lila wanted to go back to that day and grab the girls by their collars. But every time she pictured bringing her face close to theirs, her imagination stopped cold.

I worry the inmates are enjoying themselves, the warden said, leading Lila to the barn.

This is prison, he said. Not 4-H club. The board of directors felt a working farm would be part of rehabilitation — get these guys ready for the working world. But it’s a money pit. Too easy on the prisoners, too much free time.