Chapter 44
BELL
She wants to check on someone named Paxico not far up the road, and we find a cantankerous old man who’s just climbed out of his basement to find his house completely intact but one of his outbuildings ripped open like a can of sardines.
The building oozes metal—tools, auto parts, bits of what look like very specialized machines—and I see an entire engine block deposited in the culvert running alongside the road.
After a while, Paxico chases us off, reminding Birdie that he has a generator and grousing about the time it will take him to catalog everything for the insurance claim, and I take it from Birdie’s demeanor that his complaining is a good sign and the reason she feels comfortable leaving him.
We continue home.
The tornado apparently fell apart at the edge of the city, tumbling into nothing while the storm itself went on to harass the towns flecked eastward along the Missouri. Only twenty miles of tornado path, all told, but twenty miles of scarring, flinging damage.
We skirt around power lines and edge around tossed cars. It looks like everyone’s dressers and garages were tipped upside down and shaken out. Broken wood is everywhere; wet leaves and dirt are stuck to the road signs that haven’t been ripped out and flung sideways.
Kansas City itself is only wet and littered with debris, mostly sticks and leaves, with some loose branches and trash cans and bicycles dotting the road. The warehouse is completely untouched, save for an upside-down charcoal grill on the sidewalk outside. Birdie and I barely look at it.
I lead Birdie straight into the shower, and she lets me, not even protesting when I turn it on while we’re still fully dressed.
I strip off our wet clothes and begin washing her from head to toe.
When I finish with her hair, she holds out her hand, and it takes me a minute to realize she’s asking for the sponge.
I hand it to her, and she starts washing me in return.
Silently, this all happens, and it’s the only way it could have because our ears still whine from the tornado, because we just lived through something meant to kill us and that she wanted to kill her, because she left me and left me for some good reasons.
And now we’re naked together, and there’s no way words alone can hold all that in one place, especially right now.
She washes my hair too, working at my scalp with her strong sculptor’s fingers, rinsing, conditioning, and rinsing again. When she finishes, she steps forward and presses a soft, wet kiss to my collarbone.
“Birdie,” I murmur, barely hearing myself with my fucked-up ears and the hiss of the shower.
She lifts her eyes, and for the millionth time in my life, I am humbled and worshipful at the sight. At how big and soft her eyes are, with so many shades of blue, with so much light pouring out of them. A little haunted, a little saintly, eyes that see things the rest of us can’t.
And then…then I am grateful. Because I see loneliness and I see shock, but I also see anger and longing and just plain sadness. Whatever emptiness came over her isn’t lashing her to itself; it isn’t rooted inside.
I’m looking at a very sad girl who hasn’t been happy in so long that happiness itself petrifies her. A girl whose ability to hope is so thoroughly driven from her life that she can only think of it as a lie and love as a mirage.
A girl so cold that it hurts her to warm up. And I warmed her up too fast maybe, shocked her system and gave her something like thermal burns. Tissue damage. Chilblains of the soul.
We dry off, brush our teeth, and feed Lilith. And then the three of us climb into bed.
It isn’t yet six in the evening, but there’s no question. It’s bedtime.
I drag her against my chest, where she tucks her head, and stroke her back until she falls asleep. And it isn’t until her breathing goes steady and even and deep that I let myself—for the first time since my mother died—cry.
I wake in the middle of the night. We’re in mostly the same position, except Lilith is curled up by my head on the pillow, purring louder than the tornado, but I know immediately that Birdie is awake.
“If this isn’t okay, you can tell me,” I say.
This being together in bed, naked, like a couple would be, like we were before she left.
“It’s okay,” she says into the darkness. And then softly, “I’m tired of fighting the pretend. If this isn’t real, then I’ll play make-believe for as long as you’ll let me. I want to be here.”
My heart is full of glass shards. It takes me a long time to get the words out.
“It’s not make-believe, Birdie,” I whisper.
But she’s already asleep again.
The next morning is…administrative.
We go to an early Mass and sit in the back, Birdie staring at the rose window behind the altar, her shoulders hunched.
We get home and Birdie speaks with her sister, speaks with her boss at the gas station.
Thanks to me and my illegal trust-starting, the farm property is insured, which should help cover the debris removal at the very least. Claims are filed for the trucks.
I feed her frozen waffles on the couch while Lilith sleeps in her lap, and while she’s eating, I sit on the coffee table facing her.
“Why, Birdie?”
She doesn’t pretend not to know what I’m asking about, doesn’t evade or stall. But she takes her time answering, as she usually does, her eyes on her plate.
“There’s nothing but loneliness waiting for me.
And exhaustion. And I knew that leaving you meant more exhaustion because you wouldn’t fund Busy’s trust past the time I stayed, but the dread of waiting for you to end things…
I didn’t think I could survive it. Even if it meant I had to go back to my life before.
But then I got to the farm and the reality of life before, of life without you—” A deep breath.
“I didn’t think it could ever feel worse than it did.
But going back after falling in love with you… ”
She stops, and this time, she doesn’t finish.
I take the plate of waffles from her hands and set it on the table next to me, and then I take her hands in mine. Lilith purrs on her lap.
There are so many misunderstandings between us, and they are all my fault. But first, I want to know: “Has this ever happened before?”
She knows I’m not asking her if she’s stepped in front of a tornado before yesterday, but this time, her pause before answering seems more like true hesitation than finding the right words.
“Yes,” she finally says, not looking at me.
“When?”
Another pause. “In recent memory? The day before you came to the barn.”
It’s my turn to pause. I regret taking her hands because I don’t want her to feel how affected I am and think she’s done something wrong by telling me.
But something is rupturing in my chest, blood pumping into the cavities around my lungs, squeezing them, suffocating me slowly.
It takes everything I have to keep my hands still.
“My leg,” she says after a long moment. “I told you I couldn’t afford the hospital, and that was true, but at home, I could have done more.
To stop an infection. And I thought maybe if I didn’t, maybe if it did get infected and I did get sick, it would be God’s plan for me.
It would be okay, not like I’d hurt myself for real. ”
“Just, like, what then? Letting God hurt you instead?”
She nods, still looking down.
“We make the plans for us, Birdie,” I say, ducking so I can catch her eye.
“Do you understand? We make the plans for us. We make the rules, we make ourselves, and we make a whole new fucking world if we need to. Not God, not the Church—us, you and me. And unlike God, I mean it when I say my plans are not to harm you.”
The balls of her cheeks don’t lift, but there’s something of a smile about their shape. “You and God.”
“He’s a fake friend. He wants to forgive me? He should want me to forgive him.”
This does make her cheeks go the tiniest bit higher. “I’m sure God takes that very seriously.”
He better.
“I need to tell you the truth about something,” I say, and for this, I move so I’m sitting next to her on the couch.
Sensing a disturbance in the cuddle force, Lilith wakes up, stretches until she shudders, and then morphs herself into a long swath of cat over Birdie’s thigh, her head hanging over the side. She immediately falls back asleep.
Birdie looks at me warily but waits, and I’m grateful for her patience because this is harder than I thought it might be.
I’m generally not too worried about how I get what I want as long as I get it, and I’d planned on having this conversation in a very different context—months from now and with her so in love with me that she’d forgive a few devilish tricks.
But telling her today, after she found the lockbox, after the storm…
I feel like a dick, honestly. And I was a dick to her, the one person in the world—who isn’t a Bell or isn’t married to one—I don’t want to hurt.
“I was always going to give you money for Busy, no matter how long you stayed with me,” I tell her.
She stares. “What?”
“And the money in the trust of yours. And the truck, of course.”
She goes to speak and then stops again. Looks down at the cat in her lap. “Why make yourself seem less generous? What point did that serve?”
“It was a calculated risk, but I decided it was the easiest way. If I came into your life and tried to sweep you off your feet, tried to take away all your money woes, give you a truck and clothes and a studio, you would have been suspicious. You would have eventually pushed me away if you hadn’t outright refused me.
And if I’d offered you the money instead and said here’s a lovely trust fund for you if you’ll fuck me for a year, but it’s only for you, you can’t use it for anyone else, you would have said absolutely not and run into the farmhouse and locked the door. ”
“But if it was for Busy…” She stops herself. Sighs. “You guessed that I wouldn’t say no if it was for her.”
“I’d pieced together your penchant for martyrdom between what I saw at Evelyn and your sister’s robust paper trail. You would never help yourself, even if it means starving to death while your leg rots off. But for your sister…what wouldn’t you do for her?”
Pain flits across her face. “Nothing.”
“I didn’t mind making myself your worst thing. I never will. I only hoped I could slowly convince you that I could be your best thing too.”
“You didn’t have to go slow,” she says a little sadly. “I fell all too fast.”
I haven’t been her best thing, though. It turns out that I could keep her in clothes and trucks and basswood, and I still couldn’t help that loneliness inside her, that timid, terrified orphan.
She’d been taught to offer up her suffering and then taught nothing else after that, nothing about how to find hope and take joy. Nothing about offering up love again.
“I fell even faster,” I tell her seriously. “I promise. This has stuck around, Birdie. It’s not going anywhere. It is lifelong and irreversible.”
Her eyes are so, so sad when she looks at me, but they’re alive, and that’s enough of a start. And she leans in to kiss me, saying, “I believe you believe it. Crucified with it, you said.”
Yes, actually.
I did say that.