I nod. I’m not sure I trust my voice right now.
“I’m sorry this is all happening to you.”
His eyes are so beautiful I have to look away.
“If you ever want to talk about it…”
I stare at the floor.
“I mean it. Clio and Cassi call me all the time. You can, too.”
“Really?”
He nods. “That’s what family’s for.” And when he gets off the couch to hug me, it feels so warm and safe I want to stay here forever.
“Thanks,” I say.
“You’re welcome, kiddo,” he says.
Kiddo. Again. Only this time, the dagger through my heart feels more like a butter knife.
Walking to the T, he asks if I care what sex the baby is.
“Not really,” I say.
“You’re not hoping for a girl?”
“Are you kidding? I have enough sisters already.”
Then I realize what I said. I just called them my sisters. I am completely losing my mind.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Birdie won’t let go. The minute I walked through the door, he grabbed me and started hugging, and now I can’t move.
“You’re cutting off my circulation,” I say.
But he just squeezes harder. “Don’t do that again.”
“What?”
“Run off like that. You scared me.”
“I wasn’t even gone a whole day,” I say.
“You scared me.”
His voice is serious, and his voice is never serious, so I know he means it.
I tell him I won’t do it again.
“Okay,” he says.
He finally lets go, and we just stand there, neither of us talking. The silence makes my skin itch. I can’t stand it.
“Hey. My sister the runaway.”
Here is Mackey, holding a sandwich. Peanut butter, I can smell it. There are little orange gobs in the corners of his mouth.
“I didn’t run away,” I say. “I was just at the train station. Thinking about running away.”
“Mmf.”
Birdie says, “The important thing is she’s home now.”
My brother, overwhelmed with concern for his little sister, grunts and takes another bite.
Well, here we are, the three of us, standing in the front hall. Me, Mackey, and Birdie. The Linneys.
“So,” I say, “Al. Where’s your family?”
He says they’re out.
“All of them?”
“Yup. It’s just us chickens.”
“Wow. Al. I can’t believe they left you alone with us.”
He tells me to give the Al thing a rest; he’s still Birdie. “No matter what anyone calls me, I’m still your dad. I haven’t changed.”
I try not to roll my eyes, but my mouth has a mind of its own. “You can’t be serious.”
“What?” Birdie says.
“Everything about you has changed. You’re a different person. You have contacts now. You wear Weejuns.”
Birdie looks confused. “Weejuns?”
“Your shoes,” I say. “They’re name-brand.”
“Oh.” He shrugs. “I don’t know. Eleni bought them for me. They’re remarkably comfortable. Here.” He slips off a loafer. “Try one.”
I ignore this and go on to talk about his lack of a beard, and his newfound love of spanakopita. “And since when do you like golf? Yesterday you were wearing a P.G.A. shirt.”
To Mackey I say, “Right?”
He shrugs. “I didn’t notice.”
Birdie just looks bewildered. “A what shirt?”
Then I remember the four-course meal he cooked a few nights ago, and I get mad all over again. I say, “Imagine how you would feel, if I started doing things I’d never done before, with somebody else’s dad.”
I realize how stupid this sounds, but I keep going.
“And I made you go live at his house. And sleep in a room that smells like strawberry musk, with roommates who fight all the time. And eat hummus! And go to a school full of snotty girls in headbands!”
Mackey starts laughing, then choking on his sandwich.
I am torn between telling him to shut up and telling him to watch out, someone in this house knows the Heimlich.
“Ev,” Birdie says. He leans in and kisses the top of my head. “Ev. Ev.”
I try to duck away from him, but he won’t let me. “C’mere,” he says.
He scruffs his chin against my scalp, and I am quiet for a minute.
Then I say, “You never even asked us.”
Birdie keeps on scruffing. “Hmm?”
“You just told us you were getting married. You didn’t even ask first. You just went ahead and did it.”
Mackey lets out a big peanut-butter burp.
“My feelings exactly,” I say.
Birdie pulls back and looks at me. “We talked about it.” Then, he looks at Mackey. “We talked about it. Remember the lobster?”
Mackey nods. “Good stuff.”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s when you told us you were getting married. You didn’t ask. You told.”
Birdie looks confused, which is confusing in itself. “I thought you liked Eleni. On Visiting Day you said she was great.”
I did?
“That’s not the point,” I say.
Birdie shakes his head. “I said if you weren’t okay with it, you should…” He hesitates. “Neither of you said anything. I thought…”
“You thought what?” I say. “You thought we were happy about it?”
“I thought I was doing something good. For all of us.”
I stare at him.
“I finally met someone…I finally met someone I knew would be a good mother. And a good partner.”
I look at Mackey, but he’s looking at the floor, kicking at something with his toe.
“It took me…” Birdie stops to clear his throat. “It took me a long time to find Eleni.”
What, was she lost in the woods, living in a hut made from birch bark, surviving on nothing but mushrooms and berries? The question is on my tongue, but I make myself swallow it. Now is not the time for humor.
Birdie takes a breath. “It took me a long time to fall in love again. I guess I just wanted our life together to start right away.”
“Oh,” I say. “Uh-huh.”
“Because life is too short.”
He keeps on going, but I am still recovering from the triple punch to my stomach. Fall-uh! In-uh! Love-uh!
“You never know when something is going to happen that will alter its course irreparably.”
I look at Mackey, but he is still toeing the floor.
“It’s not that I wasn’t thinking about how you two would be affected,” Birdie continues. “I was.”
He looks from me to Mackey and back again. “I’m sorry,” he says. His voice is low. “I’m sorry I didn’t consult you first. You kids are the most important people in my life.”
It kills me to ask it, but I have to. “More important than the baby?”
“Yes,” Birdie says. He doesn’t even hesitate. “More important than the baby.”
Mackey looks up, finally. His face says he’s as surprised as me.
“Why?” I ask, for both of us.
“Because,” Birdie says, “I loved you first.”
Upstairs, alone in my room, I can’t stop thinking about what Birdie said. I lie on my storage-drawer bed, staring up at the lofts he built for the sweater twins. It’s quiet in here for the first time in history, and the quiet is peaceful. A person could actually relax for once. But it’s weird, too.
Stella?
Nothing.
I pick up a book and try to read, but that doesn’t work, so I borrow some red nail polish and start painting my toes, which I have never done before, and it is a very messy and mildly distracting task, and then it’s over. Only one thing left to do now, and that is analyze some more.
Because I loved you first.
Ther
e are so many ways he could have meant that. Maybe he was just trying to make me and Mackey feel better about the baby, but I don’t think so. I think he was saying something more. More about our mom and how much he loved her. More about where Eleni fits into the whole picture. It’s all so mixed up and complicated, and part of me does feel better, but another part feels worse. And I have no idea how to sort through it all.
In loving memory of Clam Moon-Muffin Linney.
This is what it says, on the front of the folded piece of paper someone just shoved under my door.
Then, on the inside:
Dear friends, Please join us for an evening of solemn reflection and heartfelt tributes to Clam M. Linney, the dog we loved so well. Also, refreshments.
“What the hell is this?” I say to Birdie, waving the paper in his face. It took me a while to find him. He was smart to hide. But not smart enough to shut the pantry door.
“Are you responsible for this?” I say. “How did they know about Moon-Muffin?”
(I was four when we got Clam. Birdie let Mackey pick the first name, and I got to pick the middle name. I was four.)
Birdie turns to me, his hand in a box of crackers. “Hey, Ev.” Crumbs spray everywhere. “You got the invitation? Good.”
“Not good,” I say. “They’re not having a funeral for our dog. Anyway, you don’t send invitations to funerals.”
He puts the box on the shelf, then turns to me.
This wasn’t his idea, he says. It was Phoebe’s. Apparently, she organized the whole thing, it starts at six, and all I need to do is show up.
“Phoebe didn’t even know Clam,” I say. “None of them did. I mean, come on. Eleni made him sleep in the yard, which is probably why he died anyway. From neglect.”
“Thalia’s allergic to pet dander,” he says. “And I doubt neglect had anything to do with it. Clam was old. In dog years, he was sixty-three.”
When I don’t respond, Birdie tells me to be gracious. Everyone has been working hard to give Clam a nice send-off.
“That’s what they’re out doing?” I say. “Planning a funeral for a dog they hardly knew?”
“Yup.”
He reaches into his pocket. It’s toothpick time.
“Are you kidding me?” I say.
“Nope.”
“God.”
I stare at my father, while he finishes removing every last molecule of food from his teeth.
“Anyway,” he says, turning to me, “what makes you think they’re doing this for Clam?”
The funeral is held in the backyard. You can barely recognize the place. There are origami birds perched on every surface, and where there aren’t birds there are strands of Christmas lights, and where there aren’t Christmas lights there are miniature dog bones and Beggin’ Strips hanging from fishing line.
It is a scene so ridiculous that my first instinct is to crack up. But then Phoebe appears, and she’s wearing a black floppy hat with a veil, and her orange Gartos-Linney Utopian Experiment T-shirt, and that urge is squashed flat. There is nothing funny about her outfit.
Phoebe hands me yet another folded piece of paper. On the front is a brown crayon dog—or what I assume was meant to be a dog but looks more like a bear with balloon hands. She leads me to a semicircle of lawn chairs in the middle of the yard and gestures to one with a big yellow stain on it—maybe lemonade, maybe pee.
I sit.
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
She’s whispering, even though we’re the only ones here.
Now she’s patting my arm. “Clam is in a better place. They never run out of bones there, you know.”
I don’t want to smile, I really don’t. But I can’t help it. I hold up the program and say, “Did you draw this?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Nice.”
Phoebe hands me a pack of mini tissues and takes off.
I wait.
After a while, music starts playing. A voice yells, “Is that loud enough?”
I look up and there’s Cleanser Boy, leaning out the third-floor window, holding a speaker. I yell back, “Yeah!”
“Sorry in advance for the music selection! Phoebe’s orders!”
I close my eyes and listen—and it’s surprisingly uplifting, actually, to have a bunch of orphans tell me how hard-knock their life is.
Finally, everyone starts filing out of the house. They are lined up smallest to tallest—Von Trapp style—which might be cute, if they were wearing the matching window-drape outfits, but no. It’s the matching GLUE shirts.
Once again, I am dressed wrong, but that doesn’t explain the feeling in my stomach. The mad-sad-could-barf-any-second-now combo. I know my face is turning red, but it’s not the crush-blush. It has nothing to do with Linus, even though here he is, in line with the rest of them, smiling at me.
I smile back, barely.
The last one out of the house is Mackey because he’s tallest, and on top of the GLUE shirt he’s wearing…what the hell is he wearing? Some sort of a fluorescent patchwork-quilt cape, tied around his neck in a big bow, with fringe hanging off it and—
Ah.
The Dreamcoat.
Of course.
Because we wouldn’t want this dog funeral to be missing anything obvious.
Birdie takes the seat next to me. “Hi, Ev,” he whispers.
I whisper, “Are you kidding me with this?”
Now Phoebe is standing in the middle of the semicircle, her hand raised for silence.
Everyone gets quiet, but Annie keeps right on singing. Her voice is clear, her outlook sunny. She thinks she’s gonna like it here.
No, Annie! Run! Back to the orphanage! You’re not gonna like it here, trust me! They’re freak shows!
Then someone cuts the music, and Phoebe peers out at us from under her veil. “Dearly beloved,” she begins. The way six-year-old funeral directors always do.
She says things about Clam that could fit any dog. What nice soft ears he had, and how he always gave her hand a big lick when she came outside. Then she tells us that her whole life she’d been asking, “Can we please get a dog?” And the answer was always “No, we can get a goldfish.” But the goldfish were constantly jumping out of the bowl or eating each other.
“Finally,” Phoebe says, “the Linneys came, and my dog wish finally, finally, finally came true! Finally!” She pauses. “Even though he died, too.” Another pause. “May he rest in peace.”
Then she bows and everyone claps, which doesn’t seem like normal funeral behavior to me. But then, there is nothing normal about these people.
“Bravo!” Birdie yells out. “Bravissimo!”
Next up, Thalia.
In her flowy skirt, with her flowy hair, bare feet, and still the single eyebrow, she reads a poem that sounds like it came straight from English class. According to my program it is “The Road Less Traveled” by Robert Frost. The whole time she’s reading about roads and woods and traveling, I am thinking, What does this have to do with anything? Anyone who knew Clam can tell you he was not much for the woods. He was an ocean dog.
Also according to my program, Cleanser Boy is in charge of lighting and sound, the sweater twins are the decorations committee, Betty Boop cooked (of course), and Birdie made the casket for the deceased.
I look around. Casket? What casket?
“Clam,” Thalia says to the air, “wherever you are, whatever road you have taken, may it always be paved with dog biscuits.”
Has anything more ridiculous ever been said? No, it has not.
And yet, here comes the applause again.
Birdie leans over and whispers, “How’re you holding up?”
I’m about to say something sarcastic, but now Phoebe is grabbing his hand. “Al. Come on. You need to dig the hole.”
“I need to dig the hole,” he tells me, getting up.
Fine. Whatever. Go dig your hole.
This is Eleni’s cue to slide into my father’s seat and pretend to be my mother. She
pats my knee. She pats, she pats, while I grit my teeth, grit my teeth. Finally, she stands up and you can see that she is bigger already. The fabric of her GLUE shirt is stretched tight across her middle.
“I know this isn’t on the program,” she says, “but I’d like to read something.”
I can’t stop staring at her stomach.
“I wasn’t going to do this,” she says.
I think, So why are you?
“This isn’t easy for me because…” Big throat clear. “Well, I haven’t read this poem in almost thirty years.”
Yikes. You are wayyy too old to be having a baby.
This is what I’m thinking when she says what she says next.
“The last time I read it was at my mother’s funeral.”
The words fly around in my head, even though I don’t want them to. At my mother’s funeral. At my mother’s funeral.
I feel my stomach flip over. I don’t want to think about mothers right now. This is not about mothers; this is about dogs. This is about Clam.
I look around for Birdie and spot him in the corner of the yard, holding a shovel. He’s not digging, though, he’s leaning on it. His eyes are right on Eleni.
“’Remember.’ By Christina Georgina Rossetti.”
The yard is completely silent, except for her. She doesn’t look at any paper. She has the whole thing memorized.
“Remember me,” she says, looking around at everyone.
I stare at the grass and think, Shut up.
“When I am gone away.”
Shut. Up.
“When you can no more hold me by the hand, Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.”
Shutupshutupshutupshutup.
Her voice gets lower and lower, but she keeps going. And by the time she gets to telling us we should “forget and smile” instead of “remember and be sad,” something has taken over my good sense and I am crying. Not quiet, pretty tears, either. The big, loud, ugly kind.
And no matter how hard I try, I can’t stop. Not even when Linus comes over to hug me.
And when Birdie lowers the wooden box he made into the hole he dug, and they all toss dirt and origami birds and dog treats on top, and Mackey lays down a rock for a grave marker, I let everyone think I’m crying because of Clam.
It’s two in the morning, and I can’t sleep. I have to know. I have to talk to Birdie right now, but of course he’s in bed with Eleni.
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