Brynn and I used to sit side by side on the gym floor during PE, trading a single wad of gum between us. I chewed a lined pattern one way and she chewed a lined pattern the other until we made a shape like a Triscuit. She wrote Brian’s name and I chewed her gum, concentrating on her fingers, which cupped my ankle while she wrote. The last time she did it, I saw her write an uppercase M and felt my heart stutter. I took the marker from her hand. No more, I told her. Draw on your own shoes.
The closer I got to the bird, the stranger it looked. Its neck was wrenched next to a tree root. One of its wings was bent nearly backward. When it heard me come around the side of the bench, its neck canted even farther until it was staring at me upside down.
Kneeling in the wet soil, I reached a careful hand toward it. Definitely a heron; a big one, pure white with a rowdy orange beak that opened wide on its hinge. It let loose a prolonged hiss. The wing that wasn’t bent was braced behind its arrowed body. I noticed one of its yellow feet was turned completely around, likely broken.
Bring me a towel, I yelled. Hurry.
When Milo came back, he was carrying one of our good guest towels. They were shell pink with embroidery stitched around the edge; the kind that never dried your hands, just moved the water around.
You idiot. Mom’s going to flip out.
He’d brought Brynn with him. She knelt beside me in the dirt, smelling like the raspberry body spray that she’d been dousing herself with all summer; a half-empty bottle she’d found in a drawer at the Y.
Poor baby. What do we do with it?
I’m gonna wrap him up, then we’ll take him up to the tree house.
Then what?
Nurse him back to health, I said. Fix him up.
Brynn raised an eyebrow. She’d gotten very good at that. She was also good at smirking from only one corner of her mouth, and tipping her head in a direction that made her ponytail whisper down her shoulder. She made me feel that I had no idea what I was doing with my body, that every part of hers was under control. Milo always watched her, too, with a creepy look in his eyes. When he got that way, I’d pinch him until he looked normal again. She was mine to like, mine to look at. But we were his only friends, really, no other girls around for him to ogle. As long as he kept his comments to himself, he could think whatever he liked.
Make a distraction, like flap your arms or something. I flipped the towel out in front of me, like a matador. Then I’ll grab him.
Milo leaned over from the other side and shook his butter jar in the bird’s face. The heron reared back and I brought the towel in, wrapping it around the thin body, picking it up firmly, like I would a wet dog from a bathtub. It struggled a little, but the effort seemed to drain it. The bird went limp almost immediately.
Our processional led down the dirt track that ran through the heart of the cemetery: me carrying the bird, Brynn clomping along in her platform flip-flops, and Milo, who always came last, no matter where we were or what we were doing.
I climbed the ladder one-handed, pressing the bird against my chest, swaddled like an infant. The tree house was mostly made from plywood—all four sides and the roof—with planks haphazardly nailed together for the floor. It sat fifteen feet up in the oak, and its porch was a good space to cop a breeze.
Scoot over, Brynn said, coming up behind me and knocking into the back of my knees. I didn’t really want to go inside. Earlier one of the biggest roaches I’d ever seen had been crawling on the ceiling. Those ones sometimes flew. I wedged myself next to the railing while Milo climbed up last. He still had his jar, shaking it around his head.
Can you stop? I asked. And where’s mine?
He pointed down at the graveyard and laughed.
Let’s just go in. Brynn poked a finger under the edge of the towel and flipped it up to reveal the heron’s curled neck, ruffled with tiny white feathers. It looked sleepy and sweet, bundled up like it had caught a chill.
Wait a second, I said. Let me check inside first.
Jessa’s too freaked out about roaches. Milo pushed his foot into the doorway, halfway on the porch and halfway inside. She’s scared of a bug that’s like a fraction of her size.
Come on. Brynn grabbed his elbow. Just kill it, Milo.
There was understanding in Brynn’s eyes when she looked at me. I really was only a girl to her; one who would be scared of a roach, while my brother, who couldn’t even scrape out the insides of a raccoon pelt without turning green, was the one who’d always be turned to for help. Of the two of us, he was the one who was squeamish. I stayed up late with him when he had a nightmare and got scared of imaginary monsters hiding under the clothes hamper. He was the one who cried over sad movies and let our mother comfort him when he hurt himself. I was the strong one, but because I was a girl, that’s all Brynn saw. Milo, scaredy-cat of the highest order, would always be the knight.
I can do it. I pushed forward but Milo pressed a hand against my shoulder, setting me back on my heels.
Let me get it, you hate them.
I’m not scared. I don’t care.
We struggled as I tried to shove forward and Milo kept pushing me back. Brynn was wedged between us, her hands coming up to bat at both our faces.
Stop it, she yelled. You’re both stupid.
There was one last shove from Milo, whose arms were significantly longer than my own. I fell back into the railing and heard it crack, the sound like ice dumped into a glass of warm water. Then the bird and I pitched over the side.
We landed hard in some fallen oak branches. I lay there kicking up leaves, trying to get back the breath I’d knocked out of myself. I turned my cheek into the dirt and listened to the blood rushing hard in my ears, waiting for the world to right itself again.
Someone turned me over. Brynn was crying, and then she screamed. Milo pulled the bird from my arms. The towel was stained with dirt and something darker. I had landed on the heron with my full weight. Its head hung slack from the opening at the top; blood and a thick, viscous fluid dripped from its open beak.
They set my broken arm in a cloth sling. The bone in my shoulder had broken so high they couldn’t put a cast on it. The pain medicine made me too sleepy to walk or talk much. I was glad for it; I didn’t want to think about the bird anymore, the way that it had looked when Milo held it up above my head, bloody as an aborted baby.
That night in my room I woke from a nightmare, shoulder throbbing, crying for my mother. She held my head in her lap as I sobbed, stroking my sweaty hair away from my face. She cleaned the snot from my nose with the sleeve of her nightgown and covered us both with her long hair, a curtain that smelled of sleep and the yeasty-lemon aroma of her skin.
Her hands stroked cool on my cheeks and under my eyes. You didn’t mean to kill it. It was already hurting. Sometimes we just can’t make things better.
And I knew she was right, but a small, black part of me had seen how beautifully the bird’s feathers glistened in the sunshine and wished I could make it stay with me, always. So I cried for that: the fact that I was the kind of person who’d wish death on a creature just so I could make it my own.
4
I trained Bastien up front and got him acquainted with the merchandise. It was strange to instruct an employee on things I’d known since before I had braces. I’d grown up playing with cattle skulls and freeze-dried mice, casually digging my hands into bowls of shark teeth because I liked the sharp feel of them between my fingers.