“You’ve barely left the house in a month,” he says.
“It rained all last week.”
“You never see anyone.”
“People are overrated. You say that all the time.”
“I saw you on the roof again,” Chief states, his tone hardening.
“You named me Wren. You shouldn’t be surprised that I act like a bird.”
“I actually wanted to name you Joan.”
“Only a person whose gesture is ‘hands on the hips’ would name someone Joan.”
“Come on, Wren.”
“You can call me Joan if you want to. Will that make you feel better?”
“No, I like you as Wren. And this isn’t about me.” Chief takes a sip of his beer. The sip turns into a gulp that turns into a burp. He pounds his chest, trying to unclog himself, but we both know it’s not that easy.
On Wheel of Fortune, contestant Rita solves the prize puzzle: “Meet me at the swimming pool!” Both Chief and I get distracted as Pat tells Rita she’s won an all-inclusive cruise to the Dominican Republic.
“I was right. She won a trip someplace warm.” I point at the TV. “Would you ever want to go on a cruise?”
“No,” Chief says in his always practical voice. “I have no desire to be locked on a vessel in the middle of the ocean with hundreds of strangers. You’re guaranteed to get food poisoning or the mumps.”
“If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?”
“Stop trying to distract me, Wren.”
“I’m not,” I say, even though I totally am. My stomach churns with the unease felt right before you know something is about to push you over the edge. Chief is nudging me toward a cliff.
“You’re alone too much,” he says.
“Teenagers are allowed to be alone. And I have Olga.”
“Come on,” Chief says. “A dog would be more interactive than Olga.”
“Then let’s get a dog. I’m fine with that.” Olga is the woman who stays at our house overnight when Chief works the graveyard shift. Her job sounds easy. She just needs to sleep and keep us safe, but even Olga messes up.
“I think you should go live with your aunt Betsy in Utah.”
Reality check—Aunt Betsy has five children. We spent Christmas in Utah three years ago, and I still wake up with nightmares of her kids’ earsplitting cries. It’s like being shell-shocked.
“She’s a good mom,” Chief says. “You’d have more people around. It would be a better life.”
“A better life?”
“You would have a life.”
“I have a life.”
“Do you?”
I don’t know why Chief has decided to do this today of all days. Maybe he saw someone battered and bullied last night and it’s still in his system. Those things have to pass through us, like oxygen, circulating in the veins, touching each extremity until the body knows it everywhere. Only then can the memory be exhaled.
“You don’t think she’s coming home,” I state.
“I didn’t say that.”
He didn’t have to. I focus my attention on the television as Rita celebrates solving another toss-up puzzle.
Chief takes a long gulp of his beer, and then his body heaves a much-needed sigh. “It’s been a month.”
As if I don’t know that. As if I don’t wear the days wrapped around my neck, each one heavier and heavier.
“Wren,” Chief says.
“Don’t say it.”
She might never come back. Those are the words Chief is about to utter.
I ask again, “What’s my gesture, Chief?”
Neither of us will look at each other. All focus is on the TV.
“I don’t like this game,” he says. “Let’s stick with puzzles we can solve.”
Chief finishes his beer and places the empty can on the table. Rita makes it to the bonus round, and Chief and I resume yelling at the TV. There’s no more talk of Utah. It’s so much easier to watch other people win or lose.
Rita has ten seconds to solve the final puzzle. We watch intently.
With one second left, she exclaims, “Polar opposites!”
She wins a car.
I bring Chief another beer, and we settle back into our comfortable nook of morning detachment. It might be more like a ravine, like a place Chief and I are stuck in, but there’s comfort in knowing there’s no way out. We can’t leave, so we make a home in the dark, sit back, and watch Wheel of Fortune. It wasn’t always like this, but there’s a vacant room in our house. The old footprints Lizzie left on the carpet no longer exist. The echo of leaving lives here now, cavernous and cold. Chief and I have taken up residency in the emptiness, waiting for the light to come back to us.
Some of us are just better at pretending life is all right.
“I think there’s something going on at the house next door,” Chief says. “Just be aware.”
“OK, Chief.”
He knows I’m blowing off his warning. It’s a habit I’m guessing most kids raised by police officers have. Some days I’m pretty sure Chief believes nothing is safe.
“I’ll keep an eye out,” I add, which relaxes him a little.
“What about you?” he asks. “If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go, Wren?”
“Nowhere,” I say. “I want to stay right here.”
3
HOPE THROUGH THE TREES
I painted Lizzie a forest on her walls. She said it was the only way she could sleep. Lizzie has always been restless.
“My feet just want to wander, Songbird. Even at night. Even in the dark. Why would God give us legs if she didn’t want us to ramble?”
Lizzie never stopped. She was a rolling stone, just like our mom. We all knew it, even from an early age. She never pretended to be any different. That’s why Chief wasn’t surprised when she left.
But me . . . I had to do something to help stop her leaving. It may have been selfish and hopeless in the end, but no matter how many times people leave me, I still beg them to stay, even if I’m just grasping at the wind.
It started as one tree, with emerald leaves and walnut branches, but there’s loneliness in one, and I couldn’t have Lizzie lonely. She needed more.
“Paint me a forest, Songbird,” Lizzie said. “A place we can hide. Wouldn’t that be great?”
Chief let me do it, because it drove Chief crazy that Lizzie was the worst sleeper. He’d tell stories about her as a child—how she never napped, how she only ever slept four hours at night, how she had night terrors, how when she came out of the womb, she looked around at the doctors and nurses—and even at our mom—and focused really hard, which is odd for a baby, because usually they’re born all googly eyed. But not Lizzie. She was observant. She knew she had arrived, and she was ready to start living.
“From the beginning she wanted more,” Chief said.
When I asked Chief what I was like as a baby, he said I was a relief. I was so boring it was nice.
“You slept. You ate. If I left the room and came back, you stayed in exactly the place I left you. At times I’d forget you were even there.” Then he pointed at Lizzie. “But that one. She drove me crazy. She would disappear on me the moment I turned my back.”
That’s how Lizzie broke her leg when she was little. Chief went to take a quick shower, leaving Lizzie and me in front of an episode of Sesame Street, and the next thing he knew, Lizzie was at the bottom of the basement stairs, her leg twisted up and the bone popping out. But me . . . I was still sitting on the couch exactly where Chief had left me. At least, that’s what he says. I was too little to remember.
But I could tell that a part of Chief liked that Lizzie made him work so hard. If he had wanted a desk job, he’d be an accountant.
Chief said Lizzie was searching for love from the second she drew her first breath. The moment our mom left and love disappeared, Lizzie was determined to find it again. Once she caught a glimpse of what the world could offer, Lizzie w
anted it.
So I painted the trees. And after the trees, I made flowers. And after the flowers, I added butterflies and grass and a moon and clouds until the entire universe was painted on Lizzie’s walls, and she could wander the earth at night, searching for love, and fall asleep under the stars.
But no matter how many trees I painted, I was still afraid she’d leave me.
Chief knew Lizzie wouldn’t find what she was looking for in the forest I created, but I couldn’t paint our mom on the walls. I don’t even know what she looks like.
“Wren, where do you think she is today?” Lizzie asked me once as she stood on her hands upside down in her room. It looked like she was swinging from one of my trees, her knees bent and wrapped around a branch, her brown hair falling toward the floor like a waterfall.
“I don’t care,” I said, sitting with my knees pulled into my chest.
“Your black hair matches the night sky,” Lizzie said. “And your green eyes match my trees. You’re all around me, Songbird.”
She was buttering me up. Lizzie knew I loved when she talked in colors. She’s the only person I’ve told about my ability to see auras. I’m weird enough as it is, but Lizzie never made me feel that way.
“Come on, just play along,” she said. “You’re good at this.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Maybe she’s a chalk artist in Paris.”
“I’m not doing this.” I tried to make myself into a tiny ball.
“Don’t hold your wings in so tightly. How are you ever going to fly?” Lizzie asked.
But I didn’t want to fly. I wanted to stay exactly where I was, with Lizzie.
“How about working for UNICEF, vaccinating children all over the world?” Lizzie’s voice was strained from the pressure of being upside down. That’s the thing with handstands—a person can’t stay like that forever. There’s something poetic about only being able to dance on the sunrise and float on the moon for a small time. Poetic some days, depressing others.
“Come down from that tree,” I said. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”
“Not until you play along, Songbird.”
“But she can’t administer vaccines. No medical skills and she hates blood.”
“Running a communist boot camp somewhere in Poland, with Stalin’s great-granddaughter, whose name is Anastasia, and wearing one of those big furry hats.”
“Wherever Mom is, it isn’t here!” In my anger, the tiny ball I was attempting to be cracked, and I exploded all over Lizzie’s floor, flopping onto my back and spreading out like a dead jellyfish.
Lizzie just stayed upside down. She would risk brain damage to make me happy. “Songbird,” she said calmly, “it doesn’t hurt to pretend. You can either have tentacles as arms, or wings. You decide.”
The world could be anything when I was with Lizzie. She pulled the stars down from the sky and held them in her hands.
I sat up, my arms lighter and dangling at my side.
“OK,” I said. “Singer in a vaudeville-style show somewhere in Croatia, where she plays a life-sized marionette with painted red cheeks and sings a song called ‘Some Strings Are Meant to Be Broken.’”
Lizzie set her feet down and grinned widely. When all the blood left her face, she looked even more radiant. “And dances in point-shoes,” she said.
“It’s the best number in the show.”
We lay down and gazed up at the universe I’d painted on her ceiling.
“She has a cat named Greta Garbo that drinks champagne instead of milk,” Lizzie said.
“And she signs autographs every night.” I felt like we were floating on clouds instead of lying on old carpet. Possibility can make you weightless.
“It’s no wonder Mom can’t be here with us,” Lizzie said. “What would the show do without her?”
“And Greta Garbo? Cats can’t open champagne bottles by themselves.”
“Mom can’t come home. It wouldn’t be fair. The show and Greta Garbo depend on her. They need her.” Then Lizzie whispered, “See, I told you it wouldn’t hurt. Isn’t life better when it feels extraordinary, Songbird?”
I wish extraordinary lasted, but it never does.
“Tell me again what my aura is,” she said.
“Cadmium yellow.”
“The color of the sun.” Lizzie smiled.
Lizzie didn’t need me to paint daylight on her walls. She is light. I painted a nightscape instead, because she always had trouble at night. One time, I found her in her room, shaking from a nightmare, and Lizzie said she was trapped.
“Will you sing to me, Songbird?”
And so I did.
I thought if I gave her painted stars and a moon and trees she knew as well as she knew herself—a fixed night with nothing to scare her—Lizzie wouldn’t be so afraid of the dark.
“Will everyone leave me behind?” I asked that day on the floor of Lizzie’s room, when we imagined our life as extraordinary. “No one wants to remember a broken heart.”
She grabbed my hand and said, “The trees will remember you. They’re not going anywhere. You can build a nest in them, Songbird, if you want.”
Lizzie promised me the trees would stay, but she never promised that she would.
When I stand in Lizzie’s room, her walls like the dense, dark forest around Spokane, I know why Chief let me paint all of this. He knew Lizzie wanted to get lost. She wanted to disappear, even if only in her imagination, even if only when she was in her room. Chief and I hoped that if she could get lost in her own bedroom, we could keep her safe and maybe Lizzie wouldn’t go searching beyond the walls of our house.
It’s been thirty-two days since she left.
4
ANNE BOLEYN
I’m lying in the grass, thinking about how Claude Monet used only nine colors when he painted. He knew what he liked. Why clog up his life with unnecessary shades? Anyone can paint a universe with just three colors.
Monet was a genius.
I’m also pretending I can’t hear Chloe’s mom talking about me. It’s not working. Some voices demand to be heard. Her aura is tiger orange—not everyone can wear her, but everyone takes notice when she’s around.
Chloe’s mom is one of those people who constantly contradicts herself in the same breath and then blames other people for it.
I never lie, but if you’re looking to me for the truth, you won’t get it.
I promised myself I’d never say this, but since you’re asking . . .
Right now she’s saying, “I pride myself on not butting into any other family’s business, but I warned him this might happen if he didn’t get that girl under control. I told him so myself, even though I swore I never would.”
Another cop wife says, “What about the other one?”
“Wren?” Chloe’s mom says. “She’s harmless. She’ll never leave. Most of the time I forget she’s there.”
Chloe’s mom is like the tuna casserole Chief brings to the Spokane police force’s weekly softball match in Manito Park. On the outside it’s put together and presented nicely, but the inside stinks and might give you food poisoning. No one eats it, and yet we keep bringing the casserole because it’s the only potluck dish Chief knows how to make. It’s part of the routine.
That’s how I feel about Chloe’s family. They’re Chief’s six beers, the grocery list he gives me every Sunday, the uniform he wears, Wheel of Fortune every morning at eight. Chloe’s family is just a part of our routine. They’re the only dish we know how to make, and instead of looking up a new recipe, we risk food poisoning, because a new recipe is a gamble. It might be a mess. It might taste like hell. It could be a disaster, and we can’t have another one of those.
This might be why Monet used only nine colors. He knew what made him comfortable, but even Monet ditched ivory black after 1886.
I close my eyes and let the sun heat my eyelids until they burn. I think I might be able to disintegrate right here in the grass. Slowly my body will be overta
ken by blades of pine green and then swallowed by the warm chocolate brown of the earth, until I’m pulled so far from the surface, even the imprint of my body on the grass will disappear.
But before that can happen, a shadow hangs over me, cooling the air like a cloud blocking the sun, but it isn’t a passing cloud. It’s a blanketing storm.
“I didn’t think you were coming.” These are the first words Chloe has said to me in a month. In the endless bank of possibilities, this seems uncreative.
How are you holding up since the sun disappeared? Can I warm you up with friendship?
Do you need me to help rebuild your nest? I’m good at collecting sticks and feathers.
Can I hold your hand and keep you safe?
That would have been nice.
I shouldn’t be surprised. Chloe’s aura is red, candy-apple red. Covered in sweetness on the outside, tart on the inside.
She’s been extra tart since she started making out with Jay Jameson in the hallway after English class.
High school is like dating Henry VIII. You know it’s fat, with a bad case of gout, and yet you’re forced to think it’s sexy. You’re forced to hope and dream and wish that ugly, misogynistic Henry VIII might pick you to dance with while he eats a gigantic chicken thigh and exhales bad breath on you, because he’s Henry the freaking VIII and he rules the world. But the second Henry doesn’t want you anymore, you’re off to the guillotine.
Chloe is Anne Boleyn, and right now she’s sitting on a throne she doesn’t believe will crumble. Chloe thinks she rules the world. But I know how this ends. History doesn’t change.
Lizzie never liked Chloe.
“What’s her aura, Songbird?” Lizzie asked years ago, when I first told her that people have auras, but not the hippie kind that change based on mood or if the moon is in the Seventh House. Auras that cling to them, surround them, hold them together. With my black hair and green eyes, I’m a walking color palette, and so is everyone else.
When I said candy-apple red, Lizzie shook her head. “Be careful with her.”
Postcards for a Songbird Page 2
