Chapter 38 #4
“There was so much I didn’t understand about doctors and insurance, and we could barely afford her meds as it was, and it seemed like losing Dad was the kind of thing Mom couldn’t ever stop wobbling from.
And the wobbles got bigger and bigger, and it was no longer just mania and depression but delusions too, paranoia constantly, voices sometimes.
And then Busy ran away, and it was just me trying to take care of her and what was left of the farm while I finished high school, and it wasn’t enough.
I wasn’t enough. By the end, I couldn’t…
” Birdie takes a very deep breath in my arms, like she’s trying to pull clean air into the very seat of her soul.
“I couldn’t bring her back from the places she went in her mind.
I couldn’t convince her not to listen to the voices she heard in the house.
She stopped remembering that my grandparents had loved her, that she’d been happy on the farm once.
And then the summer after my high school graduation, I came home from a job detasseling corn, and she wasn’t home.
She hadn’t left the house in months at that point, plus I had the only working car… but she wasn’t home.”
Birdie stops.
Like she can’t make herself speak the next part of the story aloud.
I can spare her this at least, even if I couldn’t protect her from it when it mattered most. “I read the article from the local paper. The pond was on the farm. They ruled it an accidental drowning.”
“The pond was where Dad proposed,” Birdie says softly. “He built a trellis there for her, and a wooden swing. He planted cardinal flowers and asters on the banks, and he’d bring home bouquets of them in the summer, tied together with twine.”
And that’s all she says about the pond.
“I didn’t become like you,” she says after she’s gathered her thoughts.
“But it was impossible to hope the same as the other people my age, impossible to dream the same. It was like I had to pay a cost for the strength to get through everything terrible that had happened, and the cost I paid was seeing the world the way I used to. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child. When I was sixteen, I had no choice but to put childish things away. I had to burn a part of myself alive to fuel what it took to get Mom and me through those two years after Dad’s death.
And it wasn’t until I graduated from college when I realized that I’d burned something I’d wanted to keep. Something soft and—and—”
I can feel that she’s crying against my chest again, and I can’t hold her any tighter than I am already, but I want to. I want to hold her so tightly that we have to breathe together, like one body, one flesh.
“It’s so hard to forgive God for that,” she breathes.
Her shoulders are shaking. “And sometimes I think, How ridiculous. You can forgive him for Grandma and Grandpa, for Dad and for Mom, but not for what it cost to make it through? But there was a Birdie who died too, and there’s no heaven for her, no resurrection of the body or the spirit.
She’s just gone, and the person left behind is flattened and lesser, and there will never be a way to see that old Birdie again.
Not even in paradise, much less here on earth. ”
I stroke her hair away from her face and then reluctantly loosen my other arm.
She doesn’t loosen her grip, though, clinging to me like she’s a shipwreck survivor and I’m the wreckage keeping her above the waves.
“The Birdie she left behind is exquisite. The Birdie she left behind has my whole heart.”
That does make her let go enough to look up at me.
She doesn’t speak.
“I’ll never know exactly what God demanded from you, but I can say that the person you became isn’t flattened, isn’t lesser, because that person is you.
Curious and intense and unafraid of darkness because there’s a part of you that’s made of light.
God still talks to you, but that’s not what makes you fascinating.
No, I think God still talks to you because you’re fascinating, Birdie.
Because you’re able to make suffering look as resplendent as love and make love feel as necessary as air. ”
And fuck it, I wasn’t going to tell her this for months and months; I was going to wait until we were closer to the end, when I’d be sure I had her heart cradled in my palms, but I can’t hold on to the words anymore. They’re curling out of me like smoke from a censer, hallowed and thick.
“I love you, Birdie Cooper,” I say, and Birdie’s lovely lips part in stunned disbelief.
“I love you like I’m being crucified with it.
And you don’t have to say anything, and I don’t expect you to say it back to me, certainly not tonight.
But I need you to know that this lesser version of you is the version that has made a devil out of me, seven years ago and also now, and I am haunted by every part of you, captivated and devoted. I love you. I love you.”
She doesn’t say it back. But she pushes herself into my arms and kisses me with a gorgeous, desperate kiss that tastes like tears and champagne and the city at night, high up among the lights, wearing secrets and black satin.
I take her home and fuck her after that, once in the ass, and then I bring her into the shower and fuck her pussy while I have her pinned against the tiled wall. And the whole time, I’m free to tell her the single most essential truth:
I love her.
I love her so fucking much.
And three weeks later, I come downstairs to the desk in my home office and find a small piece of wood about six inches long and three inches tall resting atop my keyboard.
In looping script, set among finely chiseled pomegranate halves with spilling seeds and trumpet-shaped blossoms, are carved three fateful words.
Who needs a rosary when you can trace those words with your fingers over and over again?
Who needs prayer when the three most important words in the world are indelibly etched onto your heart?
I love you.
She loves me.