49. Crow #2
I met Goldie first, which feels silly to claim as a win, but it’s true.
It was the first year of primary school, and we were five, so I only have a hazy memory of it, but I was over by the books at the back of the classroom after Mum and Dad had dropped me off, and the one I wanted was on a particularly high shelf, half out, half in its place.
Goldie, a vision with her bright curls and red cheeks, told me her name and then told me how to solve my problem: simply run into the bookshelf to topple the book over.
I looked at her, puzzled, and she decided to demonstrate.
She ran headfirst into the shelf, and sure enough, the whole bookshelf wobbled, and the book I wanted (plus some collateral damage) fell to the floor.
“Told you,” she said, pleased with herself. “You have to run straight at things if you want them.”
“Doesn’t your head hurt?” I asked.
“A little. But it was worth it!”
Wren and Starling became our friends shortly afterward, and then of course there was Cuckoo. Expanding our four into a five felt so natural when it came to her.
“Sorry,” Cuckoo says quietly. “I think about her so much. I think about what we did. If we hadn’t . . . If I hadn’t forced you all into helping me with Hugo, into killing a man . . .”
She pauses, and we wait for her, none of us wanting to be the one to fill that silence.
“Would she still be alive?” she asks. “Would Goldie still be here?”
I get it, the ruminating, the running endless scenarios around the brain.
The what-ifs that plague the mind, that can send someone into despair.
I have done them myself. I have questioned the same things.
But it is only hearing Cuckoo say it out loud, in a small, scared, un-Cuckoo voice, that pushes me to an answer I never thought I’d say.
“It doesn’t matter.” I reach over and place my hand on her knee. “We cannot change the past, whatever we might wish for. We did what we did, and Goldie died. We all participated in that summer. We all killed Hugo, and that includes Goldie.”
“She wouldn’t want you to hold on to that forever,” Starling murmurs. “You can’t hold on to that forever. It’s not just you. It’s all of us. It’s her too.”
“It was an accident,” I tell her. “A horrible, terrible accident. It had nothing to do with Hugo. She wanted him dead just as we did.”
“I put the stuff in the house,” Cuckoo says.
For a moment I don’t understand what she means. “You did what?”
“The gnome.” Wren gasps. “You glued it back together? How?”
The gnome in Bishop’s House. I remember Wren’s terror about it. And there were the other things too—the vodka and the cigarettes and that newspaper article. In the chaos of everything that followed, I had forgotten about them, pushed them to the back of my mind.
“It was a different gnome,” Cuckoo says. “I smashed it myself and glued it. I just wanted it to look—creepy, I guess. I hadn’t realized you’d destroyed your own.”
“And everything else?” Starling says. “That was you too?”
Cuckoo hangs her head. “Yeah, that was me. I wanted to . . . Us being back together again, I wanted something that would keep us together. I missed us. I didn’t expect .
. . everything that happened afterward. It was about being us again.
Spurring us into action. I don’t know. Keeping us together for longer. ”
I should be furious with her, but the anger doesn’t come. After everything, it doesn’t feel worth it anymore.
“It’s okay,” I say quietly.
“I’m sorry for scaring you all,” Cuckoo says. “It’s always me, isn’t it? I’m a screwup. A mess.”
“You’re neither of those things,” Starling says. “You’re Cuckoo, and Goldie loved you for it. And we love you too.”
“Goldie was so happy that night,” Wren says. “The night she died. Do you remember? She was so, so happy.”
Goldie. Goldie, Goldie, Goldie. Our Goldfinch.
“She was the best of us,” Cuckoo says.
Yes.
Cuckoo takes a deep breath. “It’s time to carry on, isn’t it? Move forward.”
“I have your permission then?” Wren whispers. She is tearing up, one hand clasped at her throat. “I can really go to Japan?”
“Our permission?” Cuckoo shakes her head. “Oh, Wren. You don’t need that. We’ll support you whatever you do. You’ve booked the plane, you’ve got a job. You’re doing it!”
“Goldie won’t mind if I leave her?”
“You’re not leaving her,” I say. “None of us are leaving her. That’s the thing—she’s with us wherever we are.”
Goldie, who I have been trying so hard to ignore and pretend not to see, gives me a wave and a wink all the way over in the children’s playground.
She’s on the swings, giddy with joy. She waits for me to finally acknowledge her, and when I smile and nod, she gives me a look I can’t describe, some kind of satisfaction mixed with victory, and she vanishes.
I think she might be gone for good. Out there, anyway. I press a hand to my chest.
“And you guys won’t mind that I’m leaving you?” Wren mumbles.
“You’re not leaving us either,” Cuckoo replies. “We could be on separate continents, we could have relationships and children and jobs and drama and happiness and everything in between, and you’re still the ones I’m going to phone at midnight if there’s a problem.”
“Just not another body, please.” Starling grins.
There is a finality to this, a sense of things ending.
We are not the girls we were when we met under this oak tree with no idea of what lay ahead.
We are not even the women who came together to return to Bishop’s House.
We are new, and part of it is scary, but mostly it is exhilarating.
The shackles of everything have been released, and we aren’t going to be haunted anymore.
There is nothing to escape from. We haven’t been kind, we have been downright monstrous at times, but just as the world continues to march brutally on, so must we.
We might be going our separate ways, but we will always love each other.
“What will we do?” Cuckoo says. “Who will we become?”
I hold out my pinkie finger. “Promise to find out?”
Cuckoo links hers with mine. Starling and Wren do the same.
Everything is going to be fine.
The sublime has left us, and we are left with the beautiful.
“Promise.”