Chapter 69 The Old Instinct
BIRDIE started packing a bag on a Sunday for no reason I was willing to say out loud, and I need to be honest with you about how completely sane it felt the entire time I was doing it.
It doesn’t announce itself as fleeing. That’s the trick of the thing, the reason it’s worked on me my whole life.
It announces itself as tidying. As being sensible.
As a person simply liking to be prepared.
I found myself reaching up to the closet shelf for the good duffel — the real one, the one with a whole career’s worth of muscle memory built into the balance of its straps and the run of its zippers — and I told myself I was only going to see what still fit.
Only going to have it ready. Just in case.
I put in the Bronze Star that I had, after three years, finally taken out of the sock drawer, because a person doesn’t leave a medal in a drawer of a place she might be leaving.
I put in the one photo of my old team that I own.
I stood in the middle of my own paid-off half of a two-flat, in the town I loved, that was safe now, that I had personally helped make safe, and I packed a bag like the building was on fire, and the fire was that people had seen me.
Because they had. All of them, now. That was the part I somehow hadn’t planned for.
Danger, it turns out, I can do. Danger I was apparently built for, God help me — flat and quiet and certain, the noise gone, the hands still. What I could not do, what had my heart going like I was standing over live ordnance in my own kitchen, was the casserole.
Fran brought a casserole. Fran, who had called me “hon” for three years in the specific tone you use for a stray you feed but don’t quite trust with the good dishes, came to my door holding a casserole in both hands and looked at me with a new thing in her face, and it was kind, and it was warm, and it landed on me like a summons.
Pastor Dave shook my hand outside the store and held it a beat too long and told me, low and sincere, that the town owed me a debt.
A woman I had sold a box of wood screws to back in April stopped me on the sidewalk to point me out to her son.
“This is her,” she said to the kid. “This is the one your daddy told you about.” And the boy looked up at me with the round-eyed thing children do at people who have turned out to be Real, and I smiled and said something jumpy and my hands were sweating clean through the paper bag.
Even Marcy had changed, and Marcy was the last holdout, my best friend and the town’s central gossip exchange, who had spent three years narrating my helplessness with pure delighted affection — the wasp story, the mailbox story, the time I needed a pep talk to jump a car battery.
She’d cornered me at the store the day after it all came out, and for once in her motor-mouthed life she’d had nothing to say.
She’d just looked at me, hurt and amazed in equal measure, and said, “You let me think — all this time, you let me tell everybody —” and then stopped, because she’d worked out mid-sentence why, worked out that the woman who apologizes to doors doesn’t get handed anybody’s life, and her eyes had filled, and she’d hugged me hard and whispered, “Okay. Okay. But you’re telling me the real stories now,” which was Marcy’s whole heart in one demand.
I’d said okay. I’d meant it. And then I’d gone home and started, three days later, quietly reaching for the duffel, because being known by Marcy Petit is a bright and total thing and I did not, it turned out, have the calluses for it yet.
They knew now. Not all of it. Not Ellis, not the leg, not the exact geometry of what my hands can do in the dark. But the shape of it. Birdie Vance is not who we thought. Birdie Vance is somebody you can hand the fuse to.