Sitting at the kitchen table, she held the sliver of glass as if it were as precious as a diamond. She angled it into a shaft of sunlight, tilted it back and forth, refracting rainbows onto the ceiling. She touched it to the inside of her arm. Oh, it was so tempting. She burned to write I miss my mom in her skin, to watch dark red bubbles of blood quiver and spill. Cutting had worked in the past, purged the pain like nothing else.
She had smoked weed that morning, after her father had left the house. Getting stoned had seemed like a good idea, but it had messed her up, made her feel as if she was on the outside looking in. Her mind kept flashing little nuggets of self-pity: You are the daughter of a murdered mother. You will never see your mother again. Your father would rather be with his mistress and kid than with you.
Leaving Kate’s, she had intended to come here and hang the mobile. She had made it for Matthew in June. She and her mom had gone to the Whaling City Shelter in New London. There were a lot of women and kids there, and Sam’s volunteer job was to do art projects with the kids.
Her mom’s friend Jed helped out too—he was the real deal, an itinerant artist who’d never had a day job, who was willing to do grunt work and eat at the soup kitchen to keep his freedom, to paint and live the creative life. He’d helped her and some of the younger kids do a whole series of watercolors of birds—the kind that came to the feeders her mom always filled, backyard birds that might have seemed ordinary but were incredibly beautiful.
The day Sam made Matthew’s mobile, she painted downy woodpeckers, goldfinches, cardinals, starlings, and white-breasted nuthatches on both sides of the thick watercolor paper her mom had donated to the shelter. Then she cut out the birds, glued two narrow slats of wood together at the center so they formed a cross, and strung the watercolor birds from the cross in a way that allowed them to balance and twirl.
It wasn’t exactly Alexander Calder, but she was proud of her mobile.
“Your brother is going to love this,” Jed said, holding it overhead and watching the birds move on air currents, almost as if they were flying.
“I’ll be in college by the time he’s old enough to know who I am,” Sam said.
“That’s not true. He already knows who you are,” her mother said. “He can hear your voice right now. You’re already teaching him.”
“Teaching him what?” Sam asked. Her grades had slid since the whole thing with her dad and Nicola the Gallerina, with the fact she already had a baby brother—one she never even wanted to know. Tyler.
“Teaching Matthew about birds and nature, about staying strong and getting through hard times the best you can,” her mother said.
“I wouldn’t say I’m doing great at that.”
“She said ‘the best you can,’” Jed said. “And that counts. Take it from someone who knows.”
On the way home in the car that day, Sam glanced over at her mother. They weren’t the type of mother-daughters who had deep talks. They were close but in ways that did not involve talking about problems. Except for the occasional comment, her mom kept quiet about their family mess. Questions had been building up. Sam wasn’t sure why, but having Jed be so kind made it seem okay to ask.
“Why do you stay with Dad?” Sam asked. Most kids wished their parents wouldn’t get divorced. She couldn’t say that she was crazy about the idea, but on the other hand, it troubled her that her mother would put up with her dad’s bullshit.
“We’re a family,” her mother said slowly.
“But he’s demeaning you,” Sam said. “Flaunting Nicola.”
“She’s nothing,” her mother said. “I actually feel sorry for her.”
“How can you?”
“She has to be pretty insecure to do what she did. Fall in love with someone else’s husband.”
“She had a baby so now you have to?”
“It bothers you?”
Sam shrugged.
Her mother was quiet, maybe deciding how much Sam could handle.
“Sam, I know how much we will love this boy,” her mother said. “I have you, and soon we’ll have Matthew.” She paused, glancing over, then back at the road. “When I first got married, I thought I needed someone to take care of me. Even though I was smart, educated, knew how to run a business—my family business—I had gone through a lot. With my mother, all that. You know.”
“Yeah.”
“Your dad came into my life, saw what I needed—someone who understood, who could take care of me. Fill a big hole in my life. He convinced me he could do that, and I wanted to believe him.”
“Did you ever love him?”
“Of course. So much. But things changed along the way. Just because I married him doesn’t mean I’m not enough on my own. I had stopped knowing that. It took the garbage with Nicola to really figure it out. I hope you know that about yourself, that you are perfect on your own. You have to make yourself whole—no one else can.”
“I know,” Sam said.
“Good,” her mother said.
“I’m not sure Dad believes it about you, though,” Sam said.
“That’s been the problem,” her mother had said.
Now, sitting alone in the kitchen with the piece of broken glass, Sam thought how much everything had changed. The world was upside down. She only wished her parents had gotten divorced—maybe her mother would still be alive.
And what did that mean? The thought scared her, as if she could believe her father would rather kill her mom than go through a divorce.
“He didn’t kill her,” Sam said out loud.
She counted the reasons why: she was pregnant, he loved her and Sam, he could never hurt his family that way—having an affair was one thing, but actually planning and murdering her—no way. But deep down, Sam couldn’t help thinking of what her mother had been skirting around that day driving home from the shelter. Her father hadn’t liked her getting strong.
A light breeze came through the open windows. She stared out at the garden. Without her mom to tend it, the flowers looked dry and weedy. The bird feeders were empty. The sight of those birdless feeders made Sam feel almost as bad as anything.
She started to throw the little piece of glass away, but instead she tucked it into an antique brass bowl her mother always filled with pine cones in the fall. Then she went into the garage, took the lid off the large galvanized bucket. It was full to the brim with #2 sunflower seed—the mix her mother had bought at the Audubon shop in Madison. She lugged the bucket outside, then went back into the garage for smaller pails of thistle seed, peanuts, and safflower seed. Suet could wait till winter.
The feeders were long tubes that hung from four curved arms on a decorative wrought-iron pole. A large cylindrical baffle halfway up the pole deterred raccoons and squirrels from climbing up. Across the yard, a house-shaped feeder swung from a branch in a big red oak tree. It had a flat platform that nonperching birds like cardinals could use. Sam took her time, carefully filling each feeder to the brim.
When she was finished, she went to sit on the stone wall and wait for the birds to discover their food was back. Sam’s heart expanded a little. It had been so small and tight for weeks. Looking at those empty feeders had made it shrink even more. But just then, she felt some blood flowing around her body, back into her heart. Just a little, not a lot. Filling the feeders was like bringing something back to life.