BIRDIES QUESTION
Birdie corners me at the cottage on a Thursday night, two weeks before my exam, with a directness that reminds me, again, of a mother who left before either of us was old enough to get her particular brand of bluntness from anywhere but genetics.
The days leading up to that Thursday had been quietly building toward something, I realize looking back.
Birdie had been unusually quiet at dinner three nights running, pushing food around her plate instead of eating it, answering my questions about school in clipped, distracted sentences that weren't like her at all.
I'd noticed. I hadn't pushed, telling myself she needed space to process her own grief in her own time, the same grace I'd have wanted extended to me at nineteen.
I understand now, in hindsight, that what I read as space was actually her working up the nerve for exactly this conversation, rehearsing it, probably, the same careful way I rehearse a burden calculation before I trust it enough to act on.
I've been dreading this exact conversation since the day I got back, aware on some level that Birdie's patience, however deep it runs, was never going to be infinite, and that a nineteen-year-old who's already lost two parents and an uncle has earned the right to ask hard questions of the one person left who might still leave her too.
"I need to know if you're staying," she says, planting herself in the kitchen doorway like she's blocking my exit, though I'm just sitting at the table with a mug of tea and no plans to go anywhere.
"After the thirty days. After the exam. I need to actually know, Wren, not the careful maybe you've been giving Nan and the maybe-er version you've been giving me. "
"Birdie."
"No, I mean it." Her voice wavers, and I see, underneath the bravado, how young nineteen actually is, how much she's been carrying alone in a house that's held two funerals and one abandonment in her short life already.
"I lost Mom. I lost Hollis. If you go back to Butte after this, I lose the only family I've got left living in this house, and I need to know if that's coming, because I'd rather brace for it now than get blindsided in thirty days. "
I set my tea down, motion for her to sit, and she does, dropping into the chair across from me with the particular collapse of someone who's been holding herself rigid for longer than she should have had to.
The kitchen clock ticks its familiar stutter behind us, and outside the window, the lake's gone the deep charcoal color it takes on right before full dark, the last of the day's light fading fast the way it does this far into autumn.
I study her for a moment before either of us speaks again, cataloguing all the ways nineteen has and hasn't caught up to her yet.
She's got Hollis's stubborn set to her jaw and our mother's quick, restless hands, and some third thing that's entirely her own, a kind of steadiness I don't remember having at her age, forged, I suspect, by two people leaving before she was old enough to brace for it properly.
She shouldn't have had to develop that steadiness this young.
I think that every time I look at her, and I think it again now, watching her fold her hands together on the table like she's about to negotiate a contract instead of talk to her sister.
"I don't have a full answer yet," I say, honestly.
"But I can tell you what I know. I know I'm not going back to Butte to stay.
That life was never permanent, it was just far enough away to be bearable for a while.
I know Hollis built something here worth protecting, sixty-two jobs and a company that shouldn't get sold out from under this town just because Dutch Rourke wants an easier bottom line.
And I know I'm not going to leave you alone in this house, Birdie.
Whatever else happens, whatever I decide about anything else, that part isn't up for debate. "
Her eyes fill, and she wipes at them fast, embarrassed. "You're not just saying that because I'm crying at you."
"I'm saying it because it's true, and because you crying at me just happens to be good timing for me finally saying it out loud.
" I reach across the table, take her hand.
"I've been so busy trying to figure out what I want that I forgot to just tell you what I already know for certain. That was wrong of me. I'm sorry."
"What about Micah?" she asks, quieter now, some of the fight gone out of her.
I take a moment before answering, turning the question over the way I'd turn over an unfamiliar rock formation, looking for the fracture lines before I commit to anything.
"Can I tell you something," I say, "that I haven't told anyone, not even Nan?"
"Always."
"I keep thinking about the fact that loving him the first time didn't feel dangerous while it was happening.
It felt like the safest thing I'd ever done, right up until the exact moment it wasn't. And I don't know how to trust my own read on safety anymore, Birdie.
That's the actual fear. It's not really about whether he's changed, or whether Talia matters, or any of the specific facts of it.
It's that I don't know if I can trust myself to see the next fracture coming before it takes the whole wall down again. "
Birdie considers this with a gravity that surprises me, nineteen years old and somehow already understanding something it took me a decade longer to articulate.
"Maybe you're not supposed to trust yourself to see it coming," she says slowly.
"Maybe you're just supposed to trust yourself to survive it, if it does.
You did, you know. Survive it. You built a whole life in Montana out of nothing.
That has to count for something, doesn't it? Even if the life didn't include him."
I don't have an answer for that. But something in it lodges in my chest and stays there, working its way slowly into shape over the following days, the way a seam works its way through rock, patient, invisible, until suddenly it isn't. "Everybody in town's talking.
Somebody saw you two at the Anchor Inn."
"Everybody in this town needs a hobby that isn't my love life."
"Wren."
"I don't know about Micah," I say, and it's the most honest answer I've given anyone, including myself, since I stepped off that breakwater two weeks ago.
Birdie watches me say it with the particular patience of someone who's learned not to push too hard against a door that's already cracked open on its own, content, for now, to let the crack widen at whatever pace it needs to.
"I know I still care about him. I know what he did still sits in my chest like a stone I haven't figured out how to carry or set down.
I know I'm scared that choosing him again means choosing to be the kind of person who lets herself get hurt that badly twice.
I don't have it sorted out yet, Birdie. I'm sorry I don't have a cleaner answer for you. "
"That's okay." She squeezes my hand.
The kitchen feels warmer than it did five minutes ago, or maybe that's just the particular effect of finally saying hard things out loud instead of carrying them alone, the way a held breath makes a room feel colder than it actually is.
"I just needed to know you weren't going to disappear on me the way everybody else has.
The rest of it, you can take as long as you need to figure out. "
We sit together a while longer, and eventually Birdie pulls out her laptop to show me a college brochure she's been agonizing over, a program two hours south that would keep her close enough to visit easily but far enough to build something of her own, and I let myself get absorbed in the ordinary business of being her sister for the rest of the evening, grateful for a problem that doesn't involve granite or grief or a man whose hands I still can't stop thinking about.
We sit together a while longer, the two of us, tea going cold, the lake audible through the window in the dark, and something settles between us that's been unsettled since I first pulled into the driveway with a truck full of grief and no plan.
I'm staying. Whatever else remains uncertain, that much, at least, is finally, solidly true.