Chapter 42
BIRDIE
The farm is noisy when I get there, the trees around the creek and our hill swaying with the wind, gusts that blow and blow, sending cut green hay from a nearby field skittering around my ankles. Whenever the wind dies down, the trees are disheveled and messy.
A storm is on the way.
That’s what my grandma would have said, squinting out the kitchen window at the pale leaf bellies.
My dad would have been out in the fields—he had a cell phone, but he was terrible at remembering to take it with him—and my grandfather would have to drive out to him if he wanted to talk.
He’d take one of the pickups that occasionally sprouted in the barnyard like rust-eaten toadstools.
Sometimes I’d go with him and then climb into the tractor while Dad and Grandpa kicked at the dirt with the toes of their boots and squinted up at the sky.
They’d take off their ball caps and scratch at their heads, and they’d dither about spraying a field before the rain came.
They’d chew over whether they should call the neighbor with the baler and tell him they’d lay down the hay next week instead.
I stand outside my truck a moment and close my eyes.
If I can’t see anything, if I can’t see the barely standing farmhouse and the overgrown drive down to my empty childhood home, if I can’t see that there’s no light on in the barn and no more toadstool pickup trucks, then I can almost imagine I’m there.
I’m just a girl on a farm with sidewalk chalk under her fingernails and a healing poison ivy rash on her legs.
God was everywhere. My mother was happy. Busy still played with me.
And when the storm would finally reach us, our grandparents would come down to the hill house with a basket of flashlights, and Dad would charge Busy and me with watching the barn cats, who’d been carried in with resigned, tame-when-it’s-convenient expressions.
The adults would have the news on, and if the power went out, someone would get the radio.
What would all those adults who loved me—who doted on me and rubbed calamine lotion on my poison ivy spots and carried me inside when the twisters came—think of me now if they could see me? If God decided they should have a look at what I’ve become so they could plead and intercede for me?
What would they think if they could see me blown and hail-hammered in a storm of my own making?
I open my eyes, noticing distantly that they’re wet, that my face is wet.
I’m crying then—that’s probably good. Seven years ago, it took watching the creek rise up to swallow my home while my cheek burned from Busy’s hand and my soul burned from everything that happened at Evelyn.
Like those bodies they find in bogs that have been poisoned, strangled, and drowned, three deaths for one person.
That’s what it took to crack open the numbness.
Although I still feel numb—like someone else is crying and I just happen to be nearby.
Bell didn’t cry at all when I told him I wanted to leave, but I think I might have preferred it. He stared at me like I’d buried a dagger in his ribs, his chest moving jerkily, his throat working.
“I’d like—” He took a breath. “I’d like to talk about this.”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” I replied, which was a lie, a cliché I’d heard somewhere on TV or something, because there was so much talk about.
I shook my head at my own words—I didn’t want to be a liar, even reflexively.
“That’s not true. What I mean is that there’s nothing I’m ready to talk about right now. ”
I started moving toward the studio—the battered leather bag I’d used since college was in there, my sort of purse with my keys and wallet inside.
I had clothes at the farm, so I didn’t need to pack, and while it would hurt to leave Lilith here, she was much better off in a warehouse full of toys than she would be inside the farmhouse, where there were too many holes and gaps for a kitten to slip through, and into a world of hawks and coyotes.
He followed me silently, and when I stopped at the studio door to grab my bag, I saw that his silence wasn’t because he didn’t have anything to say.
He was fighting not to charm me, not to cajole me and use all the smiling, purring weapons that worked so well on me.
He was fighting the other side of him too, the side only I seemed to know, the Ryan Bell who would pin me to the floor and fuck the leaving right out of me if he let himself.
His eyes burned and his hands were flexed at his sides, his jaw tensed.
“I want to beg you not to go,” he said. His voice trembled. All of him was trembling. “I want to beg you to talk to me. I want to drag you to bed and get inside you and beg so hard, Birdie.”
His wanting me—it always felt like a spear of fire into my belly, like thorns around my heart, brutally arousing and undoubtedly fatal, and I was forever weak to it, but never more so than in that moment. I stopped moving and looked at him, then sucked in a deep breath.
“I want that too,” I admitted.
“Then why leave?” He stepped closer, different emotions flickering through him like light through a cut gem.
Hurt. Lust. Anger. Longing. “Is it the forgery? The NDA? The videos? I’ll repent of anything you like, darling.
I’ll lash myself bloody like a medieval saint.
I’ll crawl until my hands and knees leave red smears as I go. Only let me. Please let me.”
I knew he believed it. He’d believe it right until he pulled those half-signed NDAs out of the lockbox and handed them to me. And I knew I would believe it too, of course I would, because who wouldn’t want to believe it? Who wouldn’t want to delude themselves for him?
“I can’t,” I whispered, looking away. I couldn’t handle looking at him right now, not while he was burning like a fallen star.
“You were the one who told me: Everyone is just playing a part. It’s all make-believe.
You’ll get sick of me, and a part of you already knows it, that this was never meant to last. And I thought…
I thought I could bear it, but I don’t think I can.
So please, if you still believe you love me, then honor what you said you’d do that very first day in the barn and let me go. ”
He still trembled. He still burned. And I knew he was keeping something roaring and inhuman trapped inside his chest and that it was taking everything he had not to let it out.
I wasn’t afraid of it. He wouldn’t hurt me physically, at least not beyond what I liked anyway. No, instead he’d just convince me to hurt myself over and over again, every single day, lacerating myself with love while I waited for the inevitable.
“You were right about love too. It is a crucifixion. I’m nailed to my love for you, and I nailed myself there, and I’ll have to hang there while you forsake me anyway.”
“I won’t forsake you—that’s not possible. Birdie, please,” he said hoarsely, but I couldn’t be there a moment longer. I couldn’t stay for the serpent to coax me into another bite.
I left the warehouse, the city—him.
And I drove back to a place that hadn’t been a home since I was sixteen.
That night, I open the windows in my room and lie in bed, listening to the wind bluster and bellow outside, tickling at the trees before puffing up and wrenching at them instead.
The farmhouse creaks and pops, already swollen with the humidity gathering up before the storm, the screen door on the barn side of the house rattling in its cheap metal frame.
I can’t sleep, and it’s not the noise, or at least not the noise of the window and the wood.
It’s the noise inside me, the high, keening note of grief that I refuse to feel.
It’s the empty space next to me in bed. It’s the empty space in my chest. It’s the untouched block of wood still in Bell’s warehouse; it’s the unanswered text I sent Busy; it’s the to-do list for taking up my old life that rattles in my mind like that screen door downstairs.
It’s the loneliness that waits—waits for me. It waited for my mother too, I think, an absence that began to feel like a presence, a thing that began to feel undying and infinite. It would last your whole life. It would wait for you anywhere.
I spent the summer being cuddled to sleep, being followed around, pouted at, and petted. I spent dinners surrounded by shouting and casually affectionate kids, listening to the Bell brothers tease each other relentlessly, showing Caro how to draw hands and then feet and then eyes.
I spent the summer un-lonely, and if there had been a part of me that thought maybe I could store it up, all the touches and warmth and quiet happiness at frozen waffles or sunlight pooling in a wicked dimple—weeks of plenty to feed me through years of famine—that part dies now in the creaking, sighing night.
There was never enough plenty to store up for this. The loneliness waits anyway, the very last crop to be grown on Cooper land.
I get the call about Busy at ten in the morning, which is only a few hours after I finally manage to fall asleep, but I’m immediately wide-awake, digging for clean clothes in the back of my closet and finding an old toothbrush.
I’m on the road in ten minutes, and in forty, I’m at the inpatient facility, leaving my bag in a cubby and signing a paper log.
I’m brought to the common area, which is a good sign, but I’m still panicking, twisting my hands as I wait on a love seat made of blue vinyl.
The TV is playing one of the shows I’ve been watching with Bell—a medical drama with hyper-competent and world-weary doctors.
I watched the most recent episode with his fingers inside me, idly stroking and stretching me until I was sopping wet.
I look down at my lap, my cheeks burning with the memory while a commiserate emptiness gapes in my chest.