Blackbird House (19 page)

“I told you, leave,” my brother said.
 
“Get your grades up.
 
Apply to college.
 
Just get out of there.”

From my neighbor’s window I could see Brownie standing in our field.

“Thanks,” I said to Kalkin.
 
I was a sour apple.
 
I was a bitter pill.
 
“Many, many thanks for all your consideration.
 
You’re just as selfish as they are.”

My father with India, Kalkin with Los Angeles, what was the difference?

It was all about them.
 
Their lives.
 
Their dreams.

My brother was killed on the 105 Freeway two weeks after we spoke. He’d bought a Mustang covertible.
 
It was dusk and he was driving carefully, which figured, but that wasn’t enough.
 
Someone two lanes over was drunk, and that was the end of my brother.
 
We didn’t even know until the next day.
 
No one could call us; we didn’t have a phone. Josephine Brooks came over after she got the call from a friend of Kal’s in LA.
 
Miss Brooks was wearing all black, and she looked like a cloud moving across the sky.
 
She knocked at our door, even though it was never latched.
 
Everyone knew my parents didn’t believe in locks and keys.

When I saw the look on my mother’s face I knew what had happened.
 
I knew right away that we had somehow managed to lose him.
 
My heart broke, then and there.

I didn’t wait for my father, who was out in the summer kitchen, repairing the roof with old newspapers and tar.
 
I ran over to Nancy Lanahan’s and I threw myself into Mrs.
 
Lanahan’s arms.
 
My brother was the only person I had loved in this world.
 
I never got to tell him, but I think he knew.
 
All the same, my love was like an anchor, too heavy to bear.
 
He was probably running away from me, too.
 
I stayed at the Lanahans’ house all that week.
 
Nancy took pity on me, forgave me my earlier trespasses, and cried right along with me.
 
She stopped eating and lost all that weight she’d gained when my brother moved away.
 
I guess her parents were used to girls who had nervous breakdowns, who were easily unwound by grief.
 
They even took me to see Nancy’s psychiatrist once, but the doctor had nothing worthwhile to offer me.
 
In time, grief dissipates.
 
That’s all he told me.
 
What did that mean?
 
Did it disappear, like a cloud, or did it rain down and saturate everything, every minute, every day, every detail in your life?
 
It wasn’t a good enough answer.
 
I couldn’t stop thinking Kalkin’s name.
 
If I had told my father that, he would tell me some nonsense about how Kal’s name was now my mantra, my personal path to enlightenment.

Risha actually came looking for me at the end of the week.
 
He seemed even more ridiculous than usual standing in the Lanahans’ living room.
 
Risha was tall and he had to crouch.
 
He blinked in the light.
 
The TV was on, and my father seemed distracted by its wavering picture.
 
He’d been in battle, my mother had once let that slip; he’d had to do terrible things.
 
But I couldn’t imagine Risha killing anyone.
 
I couldn’t imagine him moving through the real world, not then and not now.
 
When he spoke to the Lana-hans, he repeated himself; he seemed foggy and he blew his nose on an old handkerchief.
 
Even his voice didn’t sound the same.
 
Not to my ears.
 
Nancy’s father shook Risha’s hand and told him he was sorry to hear about my brother, a boy who had so much promise.
 
My father looked confused.
 
He made a weird sound in his throat.

I was lying on the floor, on the nice wool carpet, gold, like a field of mustard.
 
I turned my head away If I pretended I was asleep, maybe my father would believe it.
 
He was easily convinced of things.
 
He’d always told Kalkin and me that he had seen the ghost of a sailor in the woods on several occasions.
 
I’ll bet he does, Kal had laughed, if I smoked as much pot as he did, I’d be seeing that sailor, too.
 
But in fact Josephine Brooks had told me the very same thing.
 
There had indeed been a sailor who had built our house, she’d said, and he’d been lost at sea.

How fitting, I’d thought.
 
My father was equally lost.
 
He had dropped through a hole in the universe at some point, and had been dragging us along with him ever since.
 
Now he was standing in the Lanahans’ living room, still wanting to pull me down.
 
I thought about drowning and what that might feel like.
 
I thought of the color blue and the rush of the cold tide, of arms and legs that were paralyzed by the ll sheer weight of the water.
 
So I pretended I was asleep.
 
Mrs.
 
Lanahan promised to tell me that my father had come for me.
 
She would relay the message that my mother was worried.
 
I had already missed the service they’d had for my brother out in the woods, where they’d sprinkled his ashes, sent from Los Angeles, with us now forevermore.
 
That was something I couldn’t forgive; I would have saved some of his remains in a pouch I kept with me at all times.
 
I would have carried him away from here.

I think the Lanahans knew that night that I wasn’t leaving.
 
They were kind, decent people; perhaps their hearts bled for me as well.
 
I was pathetic, I suppose, but I made certain to be useful around the house, cleaning the kitchen, shoveling snow, praying they wouldn’t see me for who I really was and ask me to leave.
 
I stayed until the end of that year, until graduation.
 
I counted to a hundred whenever I passed by the farm.
 
I didn’t look at the house or the field.
 
I could no longer tell the difference between my father chanting and the sound of the wind.
 
Soon enough, Nancy fell in love with her bio lab partner, but I didn’t hope for anything like love.
 
I got good grades instead, and, following Kal’s suggestion, I applied to Columbia, where I was given a scholarship.

I went home once, to inform my parents that I would be moving to New York.
 
No one had told me, but Brownie had died in my absence.
 
The field looked empty, even though it was late spring and the wild sweet peas were rampant.
 
When you stood in the driveway all you saw was green and purple.
 
There was a haze over everything, as though this were already the past.
 
I thought about my brother and how all he’d wanted was to get away and now he was here forever.
 
I thought about hearts that bled and my mother when she was a girl in New York, standing in front of her closet, not seeing anything that was worthwhile.

My parents already knew about my scholarship.
 
There had been a notice in the local paper, along with a photograph, so my mother wasn’t surprised that I’d cut my hair.
 
No one was wearing wild, long hair anymore, except for my parents.
 
My mother hugged me at the door, and I admit that I stood there, frozen for a moment, before I came in for a cup of tea.
 
My father had finished the floor, and our woodstove had been reinstalled, but the plumbing was worse than ever.
 
My mother had to carry buckets from the pond and boil the mucky water on the woodstove.
 
The tea she made for us tasted like mint and silt.
 
It was undrinkable.
 
As for my father, he was nowhere to be seen.
 
I thought he was probably avoiding me, but that didn’t matter.
 
Don’t tell me he finally got off his ass and went to India, I said.
 
It was supposed to be a joke, but my mother slapped me.
 
I lurched backward, stunned.
 
My mother didn’t believe in corporal punishment, or in discipline, or even in anger.

Don’t you dare disrespect your father, she said.
 
She, who wept at the death of lambs, who didn’t partake of the modern world, who’d never been anything or anyone I wanted her to be.
 
You have no idea of who your father is, or what he went through.
 
Don’t think you have the right to judge him.

We were done with each other, that much was clear.
 
We were total strangers and had been all along.
 
I didn’t understand Risha, and I certainly didn’t understand my mother.
 
What on earth could have made her stay with him for so long?
 
Even a heart as big and foolish as hers couldn’t bleed for this long, could it?
 
I had planned to go up to my room, but I didn’t want anything that had belonged to me when I lived here.
 
I smelled apples from the wood floor.
 
I took the bus to Boston, then got on the train.
 
It was easy.
 
You just paid your money and they gave you a ticket.
 
It was so easy, it almost felt wrong.

In spite of the way I left, something from home stayed with me.
 
Sometimes in New York City I’d smell apples.
 
An olfactory hallucination, imaginary, but disconcerting all the same.
 
I’d see homeless men on the street and think they were my father, come to track me down.
 
He never did.
 
He didn’t believe in things like that.
 
He believed every person had his own path, and that it was our journey in this lifetime to discover the meaning of our own destiny.

My father was out in the field where he had scattered my brother’s ashes when he died.
 
He liked to be with my brother, my mother told me later; he missed Kalkin terribly.
 
He cried worse than ever at night.
 
My father was only sixty, too young to be so ill, but my mother told me he did not fear death, not even at the end.
 
It was cancer and he hadn’t a chance, but every day he sat in the field and watched the sun rise.
 
He still didn’t believe in hospitals, and in his case it wouldn’t have helped.
 
So he waited.
 
He sat in one place for so long the goldfinches took him for a stone and perched on his shoulders.
 
The cold did not bother him, nor did his pain.
 
He swore he saw the sailor who had built our house, the one who had disappeared out on the ocean.
 
There were waves in the field where Padma and Brownie had lived, and my father could smell the sea, only a mile away.
 
He counted blackbirds until they became stars to his eyes.
 
He said my name was the most beautiful word in the universe, and that was why he had called me Maya, but I had never really heard the word.

After my mother told me these things, I went out past the summer kitchen, where my brother and I had been born.
 
I’d worked during my summers in New York, and I had enough saved to take my father to India.
 
I could buy the plane tickets tomorrow on my credit card, for myself and my mother.
 
We could have brought his ashes there.
 
But my mother had laughed at that suggestion.
 
India was just something he talked about.
 
My mother had already spread my father’s ashes in the field where the sweet peas and milkweed grew.
 
She did it even though her heart bled for him; she held up whole handfuls of bone one windy day, her love given up to the universe, her gratitude outweighing her sorrow.

Standing in that field, I realized that I was lost, and that my path, if I had one, was completely unknown to me.
 
The house looked small, so tiny I might have held it in the palm of my hand.
 
I had gone in a circle, trying to escape myself.
 
There were the sweet peas that had bloomed in my childhood.
 
There was the milkweed that drifted into the sky whenever the wind came in from the sea.
 
I said the word “forever.” There was nothing to stop me.
 
If I said it over and over again, I might come to believe it.

THE PEAR TREE

THEY WERE ONLY SUMMER PEOPLE.
 
SO NO

one paid them the least bit of attention.
 
Ten years after Louis

Stanley and his wife, Meg, had bought and restored the old Adams-Cooper farm, they were still thought of as strangers, asked for ID whenever they picked up packages at the post office, charged full price at the fish market even when buying cod or halibut at the end of the day.
 
The blond woman who doted on her son, that’s all the wife was, and the obnoxious husband was simply the fellow who fired Billy Griffon halfway through the renovation, before bringing in a team of carpenters from Rhode Island.
 
No one invited the Stanleys to clam suppers or library fund-raisers.
 
The family lived in Boston, after all, that was their home, and this town was only where they spent July and August, nothing more.
 
Why would anyone bother to get to know them?
 
Doing so would be like inviting the red-winged blackbirds in for supper, like fishing eels out of the bay in order to converse, like asking a red fox into the barn to spend the night.
 
Different species, entirely.
 
Best left to their own devices.