5. Scarlett
SCARLETT
THE CARDINALS
They whisper when I’m not in the same room.
They plan. Conspire. Plot.
For five torturously long days after I arrive at my brother’s house, they chatter and waste their damn time, since we have absolutely no clue who left that note at my door, my neighbor hasn’t called to tell me another has arrived, and, well… the world is still spinning, just like it always has.
“They say red cardinals represent love and vitality.” Nova wanders along the edges of her property alongside me, her shoulder bumping mine with every second or third step we take.
As I glance up from the frozen grass beneath my feet, I follow her lifted chin toward a family of bright red birds taking turns shooting from the branches of a tall tree to a small berry bush fighting for its life in the winter cold.
“They also represent tenacity. Devotion. Bravery.” She peeks across with a smile.
“Hope. After my mom and dad died, I’d come out and sit on my back porch for hours at a time.
Sometimes nothing happened. Nothing except the tears I didn’t want my brother to see.
” She wraps her arm around mine, cinching us close together.
“Other times, cardinals would visit. The females are usually a muted brown. Not as vibrant. But the males are always so bright. The red is like…” She considers for a beat, then settles on, “Fire. Back then, I was angry. Confused. Why even give me parents if they were gonna die so young, ya know? Why bring me and my brother into this world, if every day was gonna hurt as much as it did?”
“Losing your parents must’ve been really awful.” I think of my parents, still alive, still healthy and happy and together. Then I think of my brother… he finally found his cardinal mate. “Life can really suck sometimes.”
Snickering, she drops her head forward and nods. “Yep. Different sucks, different hells. For a long time, I wondered why the universe was picking on me. I wasn’t a bad person. I never hurt anybody. I didn’t deserve that craziness.”
“No, you didn—”
“But growing older meant gaining a little more perspective. It meant wisdom. The universe wasn’t picking on me.
The universe picks on everybody. That bastard is brutal,” she laughs inwardly.
“It’s mean and unrelenting. And then, usually, more bad shit happens.
Turns out our misfortunes aren’t finite. They keep on coming.”
“That’s a cheery thought.”
“The hits didn’t stop coming,” she explains.
“We simply became stronger. More resilient. More capable of carrying such heavy loads.” She tightens her grip on my arm, dragging me in until we walk hip-to-hip.
“Cardinals are not supposed to be migratory birds. They find their homes and stay put for the long haul. It’s like a promise from nature, a stability we should be able to rely on.
But so many times over the years, I noticed our cardinals came and went.
In the months immediately after my parents’ death, I searched for them.
I wanted that hope. That reminder of resilience and love.
But nature laughed in my face instead. Turns out, our cardinals had somewhere else they wanted to be.
So I sat in my grief and cried for more than just my parents.
I cried over my loss of innocence. My loss of hope. ”
She brings me to a stop at a long line of trees at the edge of her yard, the branches almost bare, and on the other side, an old house not too dissimilar to Nova’s.
“Life sucks when bad shit happens. But life sucks more when we give up hoping for better.” Tugging me around on a fast spin, we face her house and catch the frenzied scramble of two men pretending they weren’t watching us walk.
“The cardinals came back. Eventually.” She tilts her head a little to the side, meeting my eyes with her green stare.
“Hope had been restored. For a little while, at least.”
“They left again?”
“Mmm. I remember seeing a bright red cardinal in the trees the morning my brother died. It was so beautiful, his little chest puffed wide. The markings on his face were so bold, and the way he zoomed through the sky made me ridiculously happy. For a few minutes, anyway. But then my brother died, and…” She presses her hand to her aching chest. “My hope was gone again.”
“My brother told me about the car accident. Not all the details,” I clarify on a rasp.
“But he said how you got hurt. I suppose the relationship you had with your brother reminded Linc of ours. He always calls, even when he’s working.
Always checking up on me. But for a little while there, back in September, his calls came more often.
I knew something was bothering him, and eventually, he admitted he’d met someone special, someone beautiful and kind and sweet and way too innocent for this world. ”
“He says the nicest things about me… to other people.”
I snicker. “He said this wonderful, sweet, beautiful woman had been in a car accident. That you had stitches all over. Some in your neck.” I inch forward and peek at the scars left from the accident that wasn’t an accident at all. “He said your neck wound scared him most of all.”
“I was in so much pain when we first met. Physically,” she confesses with a crackling voice. “But mostly in my soul. The day I buried my brother, I searched the cemetery desperately. I wanted to see one of those damn cardinals. I needed to see a cardinal.”
“Did you?”
She shakes her head, sorrow floating in the air just as pronounced as the cold. “No. But I saw Lincoln.”
“Was he wearing red?”
She bursts out laughing, white fog racing ahead of us and pushing the grief away.
“No. He wasn’t wearing red. Still, he showed up that day and, evidently,” she shrugs, “changed my life. He became my beacon of hope for a little while there. He became everything I needed, and plugged the holes I no longer could. A few days after we met, I was taking my lunch break in the park in town. Lincoln and I spoke on the phone while I ate, and as I sat in the shade to hide from the blistering summer sun, a cardinal family played in the branches of the tree above. A bright red daddy cardinal and a slightly duller red mommy cardinal. They shared a meal. And most importantly,” she giggles. “They didn’t poop on my head.”
“Lucky.”
She snorts. “Right. I was worried. But those birds gave me hope. Speaking to your brother, even knowing he was in town with less-than-honorable intentions, gave me hope. The cardinals left again shortly after that, but then again, so did we. Tank took me to Richard’s home, and Lincoln followed.
I didn’t really expect to survive my visit.
In fact, I hoped I wouldn’t. I wanted to fly with the pretty birds.
I wanted to see where our cardinals went when they weren’t here.
I wanted to see my family again, and I wanted the universe to stop picking on me.
” She draws a fortifying breath, filling her lungs until her chest expands.
“But then Lincoln arrived, and I realized I needed him to live more than I needed myself to die. He spoke of you so much,” she murmurs, a beautiful smile cutting across her face.
“Oh my gosh, Lincoln Castro loves his baby sister. If he died that day, I was terrified you’d be next, and if you loved your brother even half as much as I loved mine, I knew it was my job, my responsibility, to do whatever it took to save his little sister from feeling the pain I felt. ”
“You traded eternity with your family, flying amongst the clouds, free of the pain and suffering here on Earth for… me?”
She smiles toward the house now that Linc has settled on the porch, his elbows perched on the railing, and his eyes locked determinedly on us.
“I was rewarded with an eternity with him. I get to love him, and be loved by him. I get to hold him close and go wherever he goes, so if the universe picks on me again, insisting on the cruelty it’s so fond of, then whatever happens, it’ll happen while I’m by his side.
Either we live together forever, or we fly together.
Forever.” She points off to the eastern side of her home, the side where her driveway wraps around the house, and Sebastion walks a track into the snow.
His hands sit deep in his pockets, and his eyes scan the entire property in constant protective sweeps.
Above him, a fiery red cardinal swoops through the sky, playful despite the cold. Frolicking, much to the amusement of a duller, darker bird who waits on the edge of the gutter.
“The cardinals came back last week,” she murmurs whimsically. “I stood right where Lincoln stands now, looked out at my yard, and there they were, singing in the trees and injecting me with enough hope to keep me going just a little longer.”
Lincoln’s eyes sizzle with worry and desire. Fear and forevers. They come to me and darken with all the things that scare him. But then they go to Nova and change. They brighten and dance.
“I saw those singing cardinals just a single minute before you walked into my life,” Nova adds in a whisper.
Pulling me to a stop fifteen feet from the porch, she comes around and searches my eyes.
“I already loved you, because the man who spoke of you loves you. But then the cardinals sang for you, too. They vouched for you. They promised that my life would be richer with you in it. More importantly, they promised hope.”
“You’re gonna make me cry.” I swipe my stinging eyes. “I’m really overwhelmed right now, and you’re being so sweet and perfect. It isn’t helping.”
She snickers. “Whatever is happening, whoever left that note for you…” She drags her thumbs across my cheeks. “They won’t win. The cardinals promised. Your biggest issue now isn’t the asshole attempting to spook you.”
“You don’t think so?”
She scoffs. “Nah. It’s dealing with Lincoln’s overbearing ways. It’s hearing whatever he has to say, and sorting through the noise to find the nuggets of helpful information. And Tank.”
“Tank?” My heart thuds painfully in my chest as I twist and hesitantly peek over my shoulder. “He’s gonna be a problem for me?”
“He’s a problem for everybody. If he doesn’t like a person, he makes damn sure they know about it. And if he does like a person…” She whistles under her breath, shaking her head in my peripherals. “There’s a reason I call him my pet rock.”
Curious, I bring my focus back around. “A pet rock?”
“Mm. He’s big, he’s in my house, he lacks basically any redeemable qualities, and yet, I think I’d be a little sad if I lost him.
” She looks past me to the man I know stares right back.
I feel his gaze warming the tip of my spine.
“I think he considers himself irredeemable, too. Just a machine, a mass-produced soldier pushed into warfare.”
“You don’t think that’s true?”
She wrinkles her nose, grinning up at the bird playing high above his head. “The cardinals say otherwise.”