Chapter 12
Dinner was a stark contrast to the meal that preceded it.
Instead of every Bird in town reaching over one another in the packed dining room, only the immediate family and the twins sat around the table.
Patty insisted that despite appearances, they didn’t spend every meal together—even a close family had its limits—but this was a special occasion.
Ruby and Charles whipped up some salmon with roasted potatoes and the rest of Patty’s mostly untouched salad from lunch, and the six familial strangers sat down to eat in the last winks of sunlight.
After dinner, they stayed around the table and talked about nothing in particular, which Nora found both infuriating and a relief.
She could feel the million and one questions she had about her father, about this place, about the family she never knew existed pressing hard against her throat, fighting to get out.
But at the same time, the ease with which this meaningless, carefree conversation rolled reminded her of coming home from some after-school program or other to a table full of hearty foods that were mindlessly devoured while Dad cracked a joke or Mom told a story about something especially nonsensical that happened at work that day.
There was something comforting about conversations without an agenda, which seemed to be the only genre of conversation she ever had at work, where each person involved had an end goal.
This was just talk for the sake of lingering a little longer in each other’s company. The only agenda here was simply to be.
After a while, Charles got up and started to clear the table.
“Let me help.” Nora rose from her seat and grabbed Charlie’s plate, making sure to keep the knife pointing outward and as far away from her as possible as she stacked the dishes on top of her own.
She’d once had a case involving a steak knife, a post-meal cleanup, and a man’s unsuspecting abdomen that she’d never forgotten.
Charles, unlike his namesake nephew, was only too happy to take on the role of dishwasher, tossing a blue gingham towel to Nora for drying. They found a rhythm and carried on in silence for a while before Nora decided to take a stab at small talk.
“It seems nice out here,” she tried. And while it was true, it was also all she could think of to say. This man who shared her smile and knew her father’s deepest secrets was a stranger to her. For all she knew, the most they had in common was genetics.
“I’m partial to it,” Charles said, flashing Nora’s smile back at her. “Might be a bit too slow-paced for you kids though.”
“I like slow-paced,” said Nora. “It’s safer that way.”
“Oh, if safe is what you’re after, you can’t get much safer than Virgo Bay.”
The words slipped through Nora like a warm sip of tea, and for that moment she gave herself permission to agree with them.
It seemed true enough in a way. S.C.Y.T.H.E.
would certainly struggle to find the twins all the way out here, which made for one less thing to worry about.
Now most of Nora’s boundless worry could be comfortably concentrated on keeping her brother alive.
In its own strange way, that came as something of a relief.
“Safe is good,” she said.
“Your dad would argue with that,” Charles replied on a chuckle. “That kid was always a little daredevil. Fearless.”
“Just like Charlie,” said Nora, trying to keep the hint of resentment from her voice.
She’d always longed to see her parents reflected back in her, but from what little she’d known of them, they simply weren’t—not in the way they lived on in her brother.
Sure, she’d once dreamed of being an architect like Martin Bird, but her reasons for it couldn’t have been more different, her character less similar, even her stature and the way she carried herself so far removed from the people who’d created her.
“Ironic that he should carry my name,” said Charles. “When you seem to be the one carrying my nature.”
This caught Nora off guard, and for a brief, wild moment she wondered if Charles had somehow read her thoughts. “Really?”
Charles nodded. “I see a lot of myself in you, Nora. You seem to see the world the way I do, which is quite something to find in someone I never thought I’d get the chance to meet. I’m very glad you’re here.”
Nora forced her eyes to the counter to hide the tears forming at their base.
After her parents and Bubbie died and she and Charlie grew apart, she had never expected to feel anything close to “family” again.
But as she and Charles stood there in the kitchen of her grandparents’ house, their synchronized washing and drying an effortless dance, a lost but familiar warmth fell over her that brought a smile to her lips.
“I am too,” she said, and then, almost in spite of herself: “How come Dad never told us about you guys?”
Charles stopped washing for a moment, adjusting his glasses with a sudsy, rubber-gloved hand.
“That’s a tricky question to answer. Hard to say.
Martin was different than the rest of us, in a way.
He always wanted more, though why is still beyond me.
I guess we weren’t enough for him, so maybe he figured we wouldn’t be enough for you kids either.
Or maybe he just wanted a clean slate. We didn’t even know about him and your mom until after the wedding. ”
“That doesn’t sound like Dad,” said Nora. “I can’t imagine him wanting to shut anyone out.”
“Well, people change. Not that any of that matters now. I’m sure he had his reasons, and none of us held it against him. We knew he was off to live a very different life and that he would find his way to what he wanted, whatever it took. And here you both are. I’d say he did a very good job of it.”
Nora allowed another small grin. “I just wish I’d known about you all.”
“Likewise, my dear.”
“You mean you didn’t know about Charlie and me?”
“Well, we only ever got the barest hints of information up here. Martin wrote us letters, mostly. We did receive word when the two of you were born. I still remember learning I had a nephew named after me. And we heard a bit here and there about your milestones. But I know he had to move you kids around a bit for work, and then after he…well, I had no way of knowing where you’d ended up.
So many times on my supply runs, I’d thought how pleasant it would be to drop in for a visit, to watch the only little ones in the family growing up, but you could have been anywhere in the world by then as far as I knew.
To think you were only a ferry ride away all this time. ”
Nora smeared the last water droplets out of a glass and placed it gently in the drying rack. Not for the first time since they’d arrived in Virgo Bay, she felt a flare of anger at her father. All this time she’d seen him as this infallible man who’d been stolen from her, but he stole from her too.
“That would have been nice,” was all she could think to say.
“Ah well, the past belongs in the past,” said Charles. “There’s no changing it now. The only thing we can do from here is decide what the future looks like. And I hope mine looks like a proper chance to get to know my niece and nephew.”
“I’d like that,” said Nora. She’d never had an uncle before.
Her mom had been an only child, and for her whole life she thought her father was too.
But her school friends had uncles and aunts, and though a few were not the best examples of the role, they had, for the most part, always seemed like a second, more lenient set of parents.
In high school her friend Sarah Levinson’s aunt had bought them cocktails in a can to celebrate the end of the school year.
Nora hadn’t drunk hers, of course, because even at that young age she knew that far too many bad things could happen when alcohol was involved.
But the gesture had always stuck out to her as something that would technically qualify as “cool,” in a dictionary definition sense, and that was something few adults could be, according to her teenage sensibilities.
Teachers and parents were old and boring, but aunts and uncles got to be cool, and Nora was being offered the chance to experience that dynamic for the first time.
Granted, she could now legally purchase her own booze, and the uncle in question was wearing a stuffy argyle sweater-vest, but who was she to turn her nose up at the opportunity to have this new species of relative in her life?
They exchanged another identical smile, and for the first time Nora couldn’t help but see her father in Charles’s expression.
Despite the lack of shared features, the warmth and the way one eye crinkled more than the other when he smiled were exact duplicates.
Even if she was currently mad at her dead dad, Nora couldn’t help but breathe in the similarities.
As the day slipped away and night glided into its place, the varied age demographics came fully into play.
Charles was the first to leave. Apparently, he had the farthest to walk, his house an exhausting fifteen-minute journey away, which he emphasized twice.
Nora suffocated the urge to make a joke about the Jewish people wandering the desert for forty years without this much kvetching.
These were her non-Jewish relatives, she reminded herself; they might not be as used to comedy.
Ruby and Richard were next to depart, preceded by a duet of yawning in C minor.
Patty seemed bent on lingering awhile after her parents went off to bed, determined to continue braving her role as host against any tiredness that may have crept in.
But eventually she too succumbed to the epidemic, her eyes already heavy with sleep as she shuffled out the door at Nora’s insistence.
That left only the twins, who made their way down to the basement to get settled.