Chapter 8
BIRDIE
The rain poured.
My car bravely fought back as I drove from Kaitlyn’s with almost everything I’d had at her house, apart from the furniture, to the place where I grew up.
I parked in front of the hill house, the dark, low-slung nightmare that I’d avoided for months. The farmhouse up the hill wasn’t watertight or vermin free, and the water and electricity were turned off for it anyway, so I had no choice. It had to be here.
I turned off the car, grabbed a T-shirt to sleep in and my rosary, and trudged to the front door.
The same cheap oak cabinets and laminate countertops from my childhood greeted me, the same beige carpet and thrice-passed-down couch.
I didn’t bother going back to the bedrooms. I flipped the light switch for the hallway, changed into the T-shirt right there in the middle of the living room, and lay down on the couch.
I covered myself with a dusty throw and rolled onto my side so I could use my arm as a pillow.
My rosary was in my free hand. The hill house was a simple rectangle—an open kitchen and living room at one end, bedrooms and bathrooms off a long hallway at the other.
From the couch on one end, I could see down the hallway, through the open door of my parents’ bedroom to the far wall of the house, buried in the earth as it was.
No matter how many lamps my mother had bought at Goodwill, no matter how bright the bulbs my dad brought back from the hardware store, the house never felt like anything other than a cave, and it was the shadows in her old room I stared at as I lay motionless and wet-haired on the couch.
The bleary lights of the hallway only made the shadows darker somehow.
I tried not to believe in ghosts. Talk of ghosts had been relegated to the same place in my family as talk of Ouija boards, tarot cards, and crystals: witchcraft.
When I got to college, I began to see a certain arbitrariness to this: cleansing a house with sage was pagan, but cleansing a church with incense was licit; burying a crystal in your backyard was New Agey and dangerous, but burying a Saint Christopher’s medal was condoned or encouraged; trying to speak to the dead was obviously a heretical activity…
unless the Church called them a saint, and sometimes they didn’t even have to call them that.
My grandmother had a picture of Padre Pio in her house with fresh flowers underneath it long before he was canonized.
My own job was giving belief a face, bringing the dead to life in a sense, and the way I felt God, his grace, the spirit of the Holy Mother and the saints as I worked…
well, it made it hard to write off everything else, I supposed.
But I still tried not to believe in ghosts.
It wasn’t because I was trying to be a good Catholic; it wasn’t because I wanted to think of myself as rational. It was because if I believed in them, then I would know for sure that this house had one, and it was easier to pretend I was alone.
It took me a long time to fall asleep, to stop staring through the harsh yellow lights of the hallway to the darkness beyond while my lips silently, endlessly, worked through the prayers of the rosary.
I woke up disoriented and clammy. It was midmorning, with almost no light coming in from the living room windows because of the ongoing rain, and it was the kind of humid that made it hard to tell if I was hot or cold.
I’d slept so badly that it felt like I hadn’t slept at all, jolting awake to watch the hall, slipping uneasily into dreams of Bell and pomegranate seeds and wreaths of vapor from Kaitlyn’s vape pen circling me until I was surrounded by a choking fog.
I spent the hour after I woke up ferrying things in from my car, taking a shower, and refusing to think about…about…
About pomegranate seeds brought to my lips. About his mouth on my neck. His fingers between my legs. The heart-pounding tide of the orgasm and the drowned feeling I had afterward.
It was impossible to separate the pleasure from the strange, exhilarating fear I’d felt with him, and now it was impossible to separate both from the suffering. The crushing loneliness on the horizon like a wall cloud in a green sky.
I’d lost my position at Evelyn—that was a foregone conclusion.
I’d lost the friendly faces in the Fine Arts Department.
I’d lost my best friend. Whether I’d lost my vocation altogether, I didn’t know.
Evelyn would be required to make a report; that report would be furnished to an ombudsman and the Central and Southern Province of the Jesuits.
I was reasonably certain it would be given to the diocese as well.
Whether it would travel further was anyone’s guess.
No crime had been committed, and as much as it mattered at Evelyn, it was a fairly low-impact scandal.
But if it did travel further, if it made its way into the parishes, into diocesan gossip…
You didn’t buy sacred art from sinners. If the artist was tainted, how could the art be pure? How could it inspire devotion when it was made with unclean hands?
The despair I felt at that far exceeded the fear I felt at no longer having a paycheck from Evelyn. If I couldn’t carve anymore…if my entire life became only coffee tables and bookshelves…
No. No, I could always carve. Whether I made money from carving was a different matter and a less important one. I could always carve for myself and for God; no one could stop that.
But there would be less time for art, that was certain. Whatever job I found after this, it wouldn’t come with a stipend and a free studio and the freedom of my hours to devote myself entirely to the work.
For a single moment, I thought about the pomegranate broken on the floor, ruby red and glistening, but I stopped myself. If I thought about all of it together, I would cry. If I thought about any single part of it for too long, I would also cry.
I could only think about what I needed to do next.
My studio at Evelyn, that would need to be sorted.
The tools were mine, but the supplies weren’t.
The Madonna would need to be delivered to its final home, and I believed Evelyn would let me keep the in-progress carvings, so long as they kept the three untouched blocks of basswood, which were purchased with the residency budget.
I didn’t care about the three new blocks, but the block from the tree that fell on the farm, my block, the block that was supposed to be an angel… I did care about that.
I’d need a forklift and a truck to get that potential angel and the other partially finished statues back to the farm.
I called Paxico, who answered like I knew he would, and who was surly, like I knew he would be.
Paxico—no one knew why he was called that, since he was from Tonganoxie like everyone else—said he’d make some calls and get back to me, but I could use his pickup to get my bed frame and dresser from Kaitlyn’s in the meantime, which I did, not wanting to miss the chance to finish moving out while she wasn’t home.
I didn’t think I could bear her looking at me with that hard, judgmental look of hers again.
So it wasn’t force. He just talked you into having sex with him.
I would have been angry if I weren’t still so stunned by all of it—by every part of yesterday but so much by the immediate renunciation of her faith in me, in my honesty.
In my efforts to be a good person. Twenty-nine years of telling the truth, of chastity, of living like a church mouse… it weighed nothing on the scales.
I hadn’t scratched and bitten him; I hadn’t screamed. Worse, I didn’t know how I felt about it, which to her must have meant that I didn’t feel anything bad.
I wasn’t oblivious, I knew what Kaitlyn was like. I knew she could be sanctimonious. I knew she was ambitious. I knew that between the two qualities flowered an ugly pragmatism. There was always a pious justification for doing what served her best at any given moment.
I just thought…I just thought she’d try a little harder to listen. I thought she was bound to me by the same deep, sisterlike loyalty that bound me to her.
My bed frame and dresser I could partially disassemble and move myself, although I bruised my shin horribly wrestling the dresser up the wobbly aluminum ramp to the truck bed.
I managed to fight my mattress into the truck as well, and winded and limping, I went back into the house to leave the house keys on the kitchen table I had made her, next to a check for the full month’s rent.
She’d ask for it anyway, and it would hurt to be asked, asked not only after she kicked me out but facilitated my being fired, and I couldn’t risk any more hurt right now.
I’d somehow managed not to break down, not to let this crush me into a gasping paralysis, and by some miracle, I hadn’t yet cried.
I needed to keep it that way until I got everything the way it needed to be and got a new job. Then I would give myself a day, or maybe two, to cry.
At the farm, I managed to drag everything off the truck and into the hill house.
I shoved my furniture into the hallway and drove the truck back to Paxico’s.
He was waiting on the porch on a rocking chair, cigarette in one hand, a cheap beer in the other, watching the world through the sheet of rain coming off the overhang of his porch.
Paxico was my parents’ age, but time seemed to have stopped for him and him alone.
He was the same kind of grizzled old-timer that he’d been when I was little, and he’d probably be the same for the next thirty years too.
He also lived on the remnants of an old farm, but in the absence of farming, outbuildings had sprung up around the house, prefabricated and in various states of being filled with junk.
Paxico was a mechanic who worked on everything—cars and Kenworths and farm equipment—and as such, he knew every farmer, trucker, and townie with a predilection for picking up an old vehicle that seemed like a bargain at the time.
So he was able to inform me that the rain had delayed some work up in McLouth, and Jim Holsinger could rent me his forklift and truck for cheap, since he was getting paid during the delay anyway.
But it had to be tomorrow—the rain was supposed to stop after that, and he’d need the forklift for the job then.
“You want a beer?” Paxico asked. It was the closest he would come to asking if I was okay. It was also the closest anyone had come in the last twenty-four hours to asking it, so I had to duck my head so he wouldn’t see my chin tremble.
“I’m good,” I told him softly and then thanked him for his help and drove the quarter mile down the road to the narrow gravel lane that marked the turn-in for the Cooper farm. I tried not to look at the faded For Sale sign hammered into the tall grass near the mailbox.
It was too much to think about just then.
There was no food at the hill house, and paying Kaitlyn rent and paying for Jim Holsinger’s forklift meant that a real trip to the grocery store was out of the question.
I’d brought back the few things I’d had stashed at Kaitlyn’s house—rice, cereal bars, instant potatoes, and peanut butter—and I’d make do until I delivered the Madonna statue.
Once I got my tools back to the farm, I could set up the barn as a studio again and try to take more furniture commissions until I got a day job.
Even when my art was in demand, I’d needed the residency and its stipend to live away from the farm and take care of Busy when she needed it.
And now I couldn’t plan on my work being in demand any longer, which made a new job nonnegotiable.
My résumé really only lent itself to teaching, but it wasn’t like Evelyn would give me a reference, and what place would want to touch an adjunct who got caught having sex with a student?
No, teaching was out. It would have to be something else.
My phone rang as afternoon bore rainily into the evening.
An unfamiliar number. Fear spiked, even as the tired habit of responsibility had me answering.
For the last two years in high school, after my father died, the household had been run entirely by me.
My mother wasn’t well enough to do things like answer the phone, and Busy was…
well, she was Busy. There had never been a world where any of us hoped Busy would be dependable.
“Hello?”
“Is this Birdie Cooper?”
I could hear rain on their end of the line too.
“This is she,” I said warily.
“This is Mel Charboneau down at the lake. Do you remember me?”
I did, actually, although only barely. A friendly woman my mother’s age who liked baking and trying to coax plants out of the rocky soil of the Ozarks.
Her small bungalow predated the creation of the lake in the 1930s and sat on the steep hill above the property my grandparents had bought for themselves in the 1970s.
A small, worn trailer sat on our property, slowly collapsing.
That trailer and the rocky hillside underneath it was the inheritance that Busy was trying to sell.
“I remember you,” I said. “Is everything okay? There aren’t any issues with the rain or anything?”
“No, it’s not the rain,” she said. She sounded awkward and apologetic, and a heavy dread began rolling toward me. “It’s your sister.”