“You finish off that wine?”
“Course we did.” I reached in behind him and took out the plastic bag of withering apples. I waited until my mother left to get a clean tablecloth and chucked the whole mess of them into the garbage.
“Good riddance,” Milo said, gnawing a hunk of cheese. “Those are awful.”
STRIX VARIA—BARRED OWL
One last, good memory:
We caught a baby owl that kept jumping from its nest. The mother had built it into the eaves at the back of our house, a small, cramped space stuffed with pine needles and bits of bark.
They’re called leapers when they keep jumping. My father cradled the fluffy lump to his chest. Damn thing has too much energy. Doesn’t know he’s nocturnal.
After we’d called animal control, he and I sat in the backyard with the bird secreted in an Igloo cooler between us. We drank Arnold Palmers, heavy on the lemonade. I gave the owl baby little bits of grasshoppers I’d killed, a recent blight on the pink and white azalea bushes. The bird gulped legs, a head, meaty bits of a fatty torso.
Let’s call him Oscar. That’s a good name for an owl. I stroked its round head with a fingertip. The head was the size of a golf ball and very soft.
You shouldn’t name wild animals. They’re not pets. My father frowned and put the lid on the cooler, leaving just enough room for the baby to breathe.
Mites appeared once animal control took the bird. Everything itched: tiny, barely visible dots that crawled into my eyes and hair, tickling the insides of my ears until I thought I’d go crazy trying not to scratch at myself.
My mother had to scrub down everything. She made us strip out on the porch before letting us back inside the house. She boiled our clothes in a vat on the stove, wouldn’t even consider putting them into the washing machine. I stood in the backyard, shivering in my underpants.
Milo watched from the safety of the house, pressing his mouth against the sliding glass door and blowing wet air. His tongue left behind heart-shaped spots. When Milo wasn’t looking, our dad smacked a hand against the glass. It scared Milo so badly he fell backward and landed on his ass in the middle of the living room rug.
It was so funny I thought I’d never stop laughing.
14
I went to the mall to buy a new shirt because I didn’t want to look like myself when I saw Lucinda.
I picked my way along the edges of the first store I recognized as I watched more experienced shoppers navigate the aisles, hangers dangling from fingertips, purses stuffed beneath their arms or shoved up onto their shoulders. Two girls near the back tried on tops over their clothes. One pocketed a silvery nail polish. She had bleached hair with dark roots and a fuck you expression that reminded me so much of Brynn. She caught my eye, staring hard until I turned away, embarrassed. The shirt I picked was blue and long-sleeved. It wasn’t on sale and I refused to try it on in the dressing room. I went home and left it in a bag on the floor.
The storefront had been converted and the gallery was complete. That morning, my mother had been moving her finished pieces from the shop next door, directing the movers up into the recently renovated display space. New lighting had been installed. The cases had been cleaned out, the dead cat removed and buried beneath a patch of weeds in the back lot. I had finished the piece I’d been working on and was fiddling with it, posing the birds in different displays. Finding minute problems that I could hover over and pick at, opening up again and again like tiny scabs.
“You need to talk to Lucinda,” my mother had said, packing up the last of her stuff into a cardboard box. She reminded me of a kid finally leaving for college. None of her children had gone away to school.
“I know. I’ll do it.”
“When? Today?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Today,” she’d said, and swept out of the room. The tail end of her dress had brushed a dust ball from the corner. I’d picked it up and stuffed it in the trash.
And then I’d gone home and realized I had nothing nice to wear. Hence the new shirt. I had bought it and afterward felt stupid as hell about it. I hadn’t seen or heard from Lucinda in months. There was no reason to think that anything would happen, and I didn’t expect it to; but I couldn’t stand the thought of seeing her in something old and gross. So I put on the shirt and I brushed out my braid. I let my hair fall around my face and back, a protective curtain. A swath of me to protect myself from the world.
The street where she lived wasn’t far from my parents’ home. My mother gave me the address. It was a quiet residential area, set against a slip of woods near the lake. It was a condominium complex I recognized from high school. We’d gone to a party at one of them and Brynn had blacked out in the bathroom after drinking too much gin. Milo had to carry her out to the car.
Lucinda’s condo was number four. I knocked, looking at the clean brick exterior, marred only by the spiderwebs plugging up the corners of the door. I wasn’t sure if she’d be home. I hadn’t wanted to try calling, nervous that if I heard her voice beforehand, I’d chicken out of driving over. So I waited. I hoped for a second that she wouldn’t be there, but realized I’d only have to come back again, which seemed even worse.
It opened quicker than I wanted. She wore a bathrobe, a pink terry-cloth thing that looked like it was from Victoria’s Secret. I’d brought a Publix bag with me, and the stuff inside banged against my waist.
“Hey,” I said stupidly, after we’d stared at each other for several long, awkward moments. “Can I talk to you?”
“Give me a minute.” She shut the door in my face.
A minute turned into fifteen. I contemplated knocking again, or sitting down on the curb, but worried one of her neighbors would think I was a Jehovah’s Witness or selling magazines. So I just stood there like an idiot, hands stuffed into my back pockets.
Something crawled across my neck. I leaned forward and scrubbed wildly at my hair and screeched. My elbow knocked into the door and pushed it open a few inches. Once I was sure there wasn’t a spider crawling into my cleavage, I went inside.
Lucinda sat at the kitchen counter. Her hair was piled on top of her head and one bare leg dangled through the slit in her robe. I sat down next to her in one of the tall chairs. My legs hung gracelessly and banged against the counter in front of me. They were stools for tall people.
“You look like a scared kid,” she said. She was drinking whiskey out of a short glass. One giant square of ice sat in the middle of it, like a frozen island.
“Do you have a mold to make those?”
“Is that what you came here to talk about? Ice?”
A clock over the mantel ticked loudly. Its golden arms swung back and forth inside its body. There was a shelf against the far wall that held a lot of sculptures. The posters from her office were hanging at either side of the living room.
“I don’t know how to start,” I said. “I’m bad at this.”
“That’s something.” Finishing the drink, she got up for another. “You want one?”
“No, that’s okay.”
“Have a drink.” She poured a couple of inches into her own glass, then brought it back over to the counter and slid it in front of me. I looked down at the liquid, swirling over the giant ice cube.