Chapter 11 Bird #2
It’s 8:58 according to my clock radio. The phone echoes through the house, from the landline in the kitchen to the cordless muffled under the covers of Olivia’s bed, where she’s brushing her hair and has her face caked in an expensive skin treatment I have a feeling she shoplifted from the mall.
“Hello?” Olivia answers, then coos, that saccharine whispery fake voice she loves to use. “Hey, babe.” Her smile cracks the clay mask, forming a pair of parentheses enclosing her mouth, making her look like her mom.
I hear Daniel’s voice downstairs answer, “Rubens residence.” He always answers the phone like that, and every time I’m left wondering if he knows what he’s saying or not.
This was something that drove Charlie crazy when he still lived here.
Because me and Charlie aren’t Rubens. He always thought Daniel did it on purpose.
But I don’t think so. He’s not like that.
I don’t think he has a malicious cell in his body—all his recessive meanness genes were passed on to Olivia. He’s just oblivious.
“I got it,” she yells, covering the mouthpiece with her hand. Then into the receiver: “Dad, I got it, god. It’s for me, hang up.”
His bumbling, “Oh, okay. Sorry, honey. Jeez,” echoes in stereo through the phone and up the stairs.
“Ugh, sorry, babe. Yeah. No. Nothing really, just thinking about you.”
“Liv?” I whisper. “If Charlie calls, I need to talk to him.”
She darts her eyes at me, widening then narrowing them.
“Okay?” I say, louder. “Liv, okay?”
“That’s just Birdie,” Liv says, pulling the phone away from her face to add, “Seriously. Can you, like, leave?”
“This is my room too, Liv.”
She stares me down for a moment and then redirects her attention to the phone. “Garrett, can you hold on? I’m getting another call.” She clicks over and says, cheerful as ever, “Hell-o-oo? Oh hey, Charlie.”
“I need to talk to him,” I tell her.
“Yeah, she’s right here, but I’m on the other line. Can she call you back?”
“I need to talk to him!” I repeat, louder.
“Okay, cool,” she says, completely ignoring me. “Yeah, okay. You too. Bye.”
“Liv, that was important!”
“Oh my god, chill. You can call him when I’m off the phone. Yeah, I’m back, babe. No, it’s just Birdie freaking out—over nothing—as usual.” She looks at me, smirking while I hear Mouth Breather’s dumbass deep jock voice saying something indecipherable. Then she laughs.
“Fine,” I say, and grab my notebook.
Downstairs one of the twins is standing up in the playpen in the center of the living room, happily screaming, while the other is rolling around, unhappily screaming.
“Who’s on the phone?” Mom says to no one in particular, sitting at the computer with her back to me. “I’m trying to get online,” she yells. “Birdie?”
“Mom, I’m right here.”
She turns around and looks at me. “Oh, sorry. Is Liv on the phone?”
“Who else would be?”
“Bailey’s teacher insists on emailing the parents. So ridiculous. It’s third grade, not med school,” she mutters, turning back to the screen. “Will you tell her to get off the phone?”
“I already tried. She wouldn’t get off a minute ago for Charlie, and I really needed to talk to him,” I accidentally say.
“Why do you really need to talk to your brother?” she asks, spinning in the office chair to face me again. “Something going on?”
“No,” I lie. “No, I just—no, it’s just, I haven’t t-talked to him since his semester started. And he said he might call tonight, that’s all.”
“Oh,” she says, nodding like that makes sense. “Hey, sweetheart, can you do me a favor and get the twins ready for bed while I try to get online here? Please,” she adds, trying her best to give me a smile even if it doesn’t quite reach her exhausted eyes.
The twins were an accident—a “happy” accident, Mom and Daniel like to say.
Meaning, they weren’t planning on having two babies in their forties, just when they thought life was slowing down, with Bailey starting school and Charlie going off to college.
But, as they said when they told us Mom was pregnant, with twins no less, “Life had other plans.”
It’s dark outside by the time I finish putting them to bed, after only three bedtime stories.
I try to call Charlie back, but it’s just a phone in the middle of the hallway that’s shared by everyone on his floor.
Some guy answers and when I ask for Charlie, he says, “Yeah, baby, I’ll get Charlie.
But first, you have to tell me what you’re wearing. ”
“I’m his sister.”
“You’re not my sister,” he snorts. “Your voice sounds hot. Come on, tell me. What color are your panties? You even wearing panties?”
“Can you just get him, please?”
“Only if you say ‘please’ again.”
I don’t know why I do, but I do. And then he starts moaning and faking sex noises.
I can hear a bunch of guys laughing and hooting in the background as I hang up.
For a second I think about dialing back, and if that same stupid frat boy answers again, maybe I’d just tell him what he wants to hear.
Not the truth. Which is that I’m wearing plain old purple cotton underwear and a sports bra under my plaid shorts, complete with a holey Counting Crows T-shirt from that concert Charlie took me to two summers ago.
No, you’re not doing that, I tell myself.
I don’t care how badly I need to talk to my brother; I have to retain some degree of self-respect.
I sit at the kitchen table, notebook open in front of me.
Quiet envelops me for the first time all weekend long.
I take the pencil from behind my ear and write:
Ode to a Frat Boy
Then I erase it and write over it:
Ode to Crying Toddlers
I erase that, too.
Ode to My Wicked Stepsister
No, if she ever saw that, I’d feel too guilty. Not that she cares about hurting me, but I guess I still care about her feelings.
Ode to Mismatched Bra and Panties, I try. Stupid.
God, I can’t think about writing right now. I close my pencil in the binding. Because what if Charlie found something on Dad?
We have to keep our research secret, because Mom would shut it down immediately.
She never talks about what happened or why he left.
She never talks about why she won’t talk about him.
I was six. Old enough to remember the way things used to be when he was here.
I don’t remember everything, but I remember enough.
I remember music. I remember the way he’d take me and Charlie roller-skating and to play softball at the park.
I remember him cooking a lot. He’d let me stand on a chair and help.
I remember the way he never treated me like I was a little kid.
He treated me like I had a brain, like the things I thought mattered.
Mom used to say I learned to read from the hours I spent with him, listening to his old records from the sixties and seventies, following along with the lyrics on the sleeves.
His record collection, along with the boxy turntable that’s probably older than me, is one of the few things he left behind.
It’s nice to think it was for me, but it’s just as likely that he left so quickly he couldn’t take everything with him.
I started buying some of my favorites on CD, though I don’t usually tell people that more often than not I’d rather be listening to Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell than anyone from today. It’s not something I share with people my own age. I was surprised Jessa didn’t make fun of my Janis Ian.
I catch myself smiling at the thought of Jessa. I have such an urge to call her right now. I have a feeling she’d be awake. I could look up her number in the phone book, but that might be overstepping the parameters of our pseudo-friendship.
I flip the cover of my notebook open for the millionth time.
The picture of me and Silas and Kat stares back at me.
I look at the time on the stove; it’s after ten now.
Only seven on the West Coast, where both Silas and Kat live.
I know weekend and evening rates for long-distance calls are less; I don’t know how much less, but maybe I could sneak a call in without it racking up our phone bill too much.
Silas wrote his number in the back of my notebook at some point in the last days of the workshop, with the note: in case you change your mind.
I don’t think I’ve changed my mind about anything. But still… I want to talk to him. It’s that lonely/alone thing again, coming back with a vengeance.
I pick up the receiver on our old rotary phone affixed to the kitchen wall, notebook open to the back cover.
The crank and zip and roll of each digit, one number at a time, has my heart racing.
Until I reach the last number, and the ringing starts up.
Once. Twice. Three times. I’m going to hang up. Four—
“Hello?” a familiar voice says through the light static.
“Silas?” I ask.
“No, hold on,” the voice says.
“Oh. Sorry, I—” I apparently have forgotten how to make a phone call.
“Si!” the voice yells. “Phone!” I remember Silas saying at some point that he had an older brother. Must be him. I hear some rustling on the line, then, “Here he is.” Something muffled, then I distinctly hear the word “girl.”
More static, then, finally, “Hello?”
“Hi, um, it—it’s me,” I say, then realize he probably won’t know who me is. “Bird,” I add. “Nardino. From the—”
“Jesus, Bird, I think I remember who you are,” he says, but not in a harsh way.
“Oh,” I mutter. “Right. Sorry, I just didn’t want to assume…” But I trail off, not knowing what to say to him now that I have him on the line.
“Unfortunately, you’re not so easy to forget,” he says, and coming from anyone else it would feel like a guilt trip, but not from him. From him, it feels like a kindness. A kindness I’m not sure I deserve. “So… I wasn’t expecting you to call,” he continues, thankfully filling the silence.
“Yeah, I wasn’t either,” I tell him.