Chapter 38 #2
“I can’t help the way I am,” she says, wounded. “I didn’t ask to be like this. If I could be like you, I would.”
My mouth twists. “Like what? Like a man who makes his girlfriend cry while he’s trying to explain how the rest of the world sees her? Birdie, you know you don’t want to be like me.”
She lifts her hand, frustrated. “You know what I mean. You aren’t afraid to talk to people or have them look at you.
You were able to walk into a room full of rich and influential people and convince them to do what you wanted.
And it’s not just confidence, Ry. It’s the way you smile and listen and joke.
It’s the way you make people feel. You can make something good happen simply because of how you are. ”
I drop my fingers from her chin, but only so I can stroke along the neckline of her dress, trying to soothe myself with the feeling of her soft skin, with the delicate curves of her collarbone.
“How I am isn’t real,” I tell her. “And the people downstairs aren’t real, and certainly not our little pantomime tonight either.
It’s all just a big game of pretend. I pretend to be charming so they can pretend to care so we can all pretend to feel good about ourselves. ”
Birdie’s eyebrows knit together. “You really think that? They were hanging off your every word. The first one seemed on the verge of calling an emergency meeting just so she could vote on it that very minute. Even if you were pretending, they weren’t.”
I don’t point out again that Birdie’s observation skills are imperfect in social situations. But I do meet her eyes as I stroke up and over the pulse at the side of her throat. “Just because they don’t know they’re pretending doesn’t change the fact that they are.”
“But why do you think that? Why are you so convinced that everyone is lying?”
I let my hand fall away from her neck, and I move away from her, scrubbing my hand over my face. I don’t want to be having this conversation, I don’t want to be doing anything other than kissing her, but it’s my own jealousy that got me here, my own bitterness. Fuck.
“To clarify, I don’t think everyone is lying,” I say, slumping back against one of the finials and letting the back of my head rest against the stone. “I think they’re pretending, and for what it’s worth, I don’t think every single person pretends. I don’t think you do. But most people.”
I watch her through hooded eyelids as she weighs coming closer. Smart of her in the mood I’m in.
But she does come closer, my valiant girl.
“Is it because you pretend?” she asks. “That’s why you think most other people pretend too?”
“No. I noticed the pretending before I ever learned to do it myself.”
“And when was that?” She’s stopped just out of reach, completely still except for the wind grasping at the skirt of her gown and the loose curls around her face and shoulders.
The shifting pink and purple light, the limestone cladding, the city, the city—and Birdie like a siren standing amid it all.
This is why I chose architecture and why I keep choosing it.
Despite bosses who feel threatened by any flickering of conscience, despite the numbing work of designing yet more five-over-ones or skinny infill houses, only architecture can give me a moment like this one.
Only a structure, a construction of human hands.
My own Babel, lit by neon and graced with my own ruby-haired punishment from God.
All that to say that he can keep his creation of lights and waters and every tree that is pleasant to sight and good for food.
I’ll take Birdie in a black dress on a rooftop any day of the week.
I keep my eyes on her, on the man-made art of her up in the air as lights wink around us, while I give her the honest answer to her question. “I was nine,” I finally say. “I was nine when I realized almost everything was fake—or that it wasn’t real in the way I thought things were real before.”
Birdie doesn’t reply, but she steps a little closer. Maybe to hear me better over the wind and the traffic and the faint pulse of music from an open-air concert happening a few blocks away. Which is good. I don’t know if I can shout to be heard when I’m telling her about the day my sister died.
“There was a storm. It was already a day that didn’t feel real, everything lit in that uncanny storm light, barely light at all.
It might as well have been the three hours of darkness before Jesus died, it was that dark.
The rain came and went, but it was torrential when it came, and the lightning—it wouldn’t stop.
There was darkness and then all at once, a light so bright that you’d wonder if God was splitting the world in half.
My parents had taken Aiden and me out to eat, and I remember we’d just gotten our ice cream when Dad’s cell phone rang.
It was Tyler. He’d found Lizzy hanging in the garage. ”
Birdie’s hand has come up to her mouth, and her eyes are wide. “Ry…”
I roll my head against the stone it’s resting against, a slow shake. “It was twenty years ago, Birdie. You don’t have to try to make me feel better about it. It’s not the point of the story anyway.”
“I don’t know if I can make you feel better, but I’d at least like to let you know that I care.
” She steps closer, close enough to touch me finally, and searches out my hand to squeeze.
She’s still sweetly diffident when it comes to initiating contact, and I savor even this chaste gesture, because she started it, because she wanted it. Wanted me.
“You’re better than I deserve,” I tell her as I lace my fingers through hers.
I love her hands; they are so hers. Slight but strong.
Lightly freckled on the backs and thoroughly callused on the fingertips.
I love even the knuckle on her pinkie that won’t bend all the way—proof of her endurance, the signature of her survival.
She got herself to me, and that’s all she had to do, because I’ll take it from here, I’ll make sure she never has to endure anything other than me again.
Her worst thing. “The point of the story is that we were close enough to the house that we got home right as the police arrived, and my parents and Aiden ran straight into the garage. No one told me to wait in the car, to go into the house and sit until someone came for me…so I followed them. And Tyler was on the floor next to her, and my parents were already on their knees next to her too, and my mom was cupping her face and trying to talk to—”
I close my eyes, unable to see anything other than that day.
“I wish I could explain how not real it felt, like something from a movie, like a play where nobody quite knew their lines. The light from the storm and the smudges from where Tyler had gotten oil from the garage floor on Lizzy’s face and the way Aiden—Aiden—stood completely motionless, completely silent, the only time I ever saw him that still.
And she didn’t look real, not like Lizzy at all.
Not just because of the broken blood vessels, but it was like someone had left a wax doll of her behind.
I remember thinking at first that it was a mannequin.
A prop and not a person. I remember thinking that she must have worked really hard on it because the mannequin had her hair exactly. ”
I open my eyes to see a tear slide down Birdie’s cheek, and I catch it with our linked fingers before it gets to her jaw. I’m touched that she’s crying for Lizzy, for this decades-old tragedy that drove one brother to titanic levels of hedonism and the other two into the arms of the Church.
“The cops came in—three of them—and there was a moment when they stopped at the door to the garage, and they looked at each other. And it wasn’t the look of people making a plan or deciding who would talk first. It was the look of three people who were supposed to know what to do and didn’t.
They didn’t know what to do. They knew what they were supposed to do—render aid that wouldn’t accomplish anything—but they didn’t know how to make themselves do it.
They were supposed to help, and they knew they couldn’t, so they were as paralyzed as the rest of us.
It was only a few seconds, then they came in and moved my parents aside so they could do CPR until the paramedics arrived—but it didn’t matter. I saw enough.”
“Enough of what?” asks Birdie. Her face is wet with tears now, and I don’t want her to cry, not for this, not anymore. It’s already wrung so many tears from so many people in this town, it doesn’t need hers too.
“Of what everyone tries to forget,” I say, some of that old rage flaying the inside of my ribs.
Some of that tearing, scourging loss. “That God has forsaken us. That we are alone. That everyone is just playing a part, and the minute that part becomes inconvenient or uncomfortable, they’ll leave.
I saw that no one can help us and no one really wants to anyway.
The cops not knowing what to do. The paramedics awkwardly shuffling around while we waited for my sister’s body to be taken away.
The fake condolences from nosy neighbors.
Our parish abandoning us. Even who we were as a family…
none of it was real, not in the end. You could poke a hole in it like pushing a finger through wet papier-maché, and everything was like that.
Not just the cops and the church but friends and school and jobs and even the things I did for fun.
None of it was anything when you actually looked.
Everything was hollow and contingent. Stupid.
Everything was make-believe. And anything good that could ever happen—or ever last—only came if you made it for yourself, because you couldn’t trust God to do it for you. ”
“Oh, Ry,” Birdie says, and suddenly I’m wrapped in a hug, hair tickling my jaw, the scent of apples everywhere.