Birds of a Lesser Paradise

by Megan Mayhew Bergman

  Her mother had been reluctant to hand her a mirror in the days that followed.

  I want to see, Lila said.

  A few days will make all the difference, her mother said, falsely cheerful, turning away to riffle aimlessly in her overnight bag.

  Give me a mirror, Lila said, gripping her mother’s arm.

  And what Lila saw she did not accept, not at first. The sight of her blue and inflated face took her breath away and terrified her, the suture creeping across her mouth like a strange vine. The swelling and bruising hid a reality, she knew. She tried to demolish the hope that crept up, the banal optimism that promised she could return to life as a pretty girl. The fresh injury was obvious, but in time it would heal and then the scarring would beg the question: What happened to you?

  Though he waited in the hospital for three days, Lila would not let Clay into the room after the accident. He was a firefighter and carpenter who made custom cabinets from reclaimed wood. Lila liked the way he told stories and the breakfasts he made on the weekends—French toast and scrambled eggs he got from the farm down the road from the firehouse. They’d known each other in high school and gotten reacquainted when Lila came back home after veterinary school—her mother had given him Lila’s number in the wine aisle of the grocery store.

  Tell him he can go, she scribbled, handing a notepad to her mother in the hospital room. He’s not obligated to stick around.

  He wants to see you, her mother had said, taking her hand.

  I don’t want to be seen, Lila wrote.

  You’re due to be married, Lila’s mom said. In four weeks.

  Days later, despite her mother’s and Clay’s protests, Lila canceled the reservation at their reception site, called off the caterer and the florist. Someone else could have the peonies and white roses, she thought.

  Clay had called constantly, and while she would talk to him, she would not permit him to see her. Eventually he resorted to waiting in his truck outside of her parents’ house until she finally let him see her face, two weeks after the accident, when the stitches had come out and the initial swelling was down.

  Please, he said, taking her arm in her parents’ living room. This doesn’t matter.

  It matters to me, she’d said, turning away. I’m not the person you fell in love with.

  He’d spent the past months trying to convince her that nothing had changed. But she worried he was softhearted and sympathetic, not sincerely attracted to her. She’d figured he would end things after she put the wedding on hold, but he hadn’t.

  We can take it slow, Clay had said. I don’t mind waiting.

  Recently, he’d grown more impatient, lamenting the minimal physical contact Lila permitted.

  I just want to be close to you again, he’d said a few days before requesting the dinner date.

  I know I owe you that, she’d said. And it’s not that I don’t want it. I just can’t do it; I can’t stand the thought of not being beautiful to you.

  You are—

  Don’t say something you don’t mean, she said.

  Lila had practiced faces in the mirror for months after the accident. How to stand at an angle. How to show her best side in a photograph. How her mouth looked when she talked, took a drink. She began wearing nice slacks and lost weight. She blew her hair straight in the mornings.

  But still she felt she was wasting time. Even with expensive makeup she could not cover the scars above her mouth. The more time she spent on her appearance, the more frustrated she felt. Why invest time in something so damaged?

  Clay constantly reassured her that she was beautiful, but she didn’t believe him. Wouldn’t it just be easier to start from scratch? she thought. Begin again with someone who’d never seen her before the accident? Then there would be no doubt about the attraction; it was the doubt she hated.

  Once you’d been a pretty girl, Lila thought, you had to drag around your clubfooted vanity for the rest of your life, watch it wane and suffer. She remembered the way men had looked at her in the past, and knew they would never do so the same way again. She’d had male professors who had—she was almost sure of it—inflated her grades in veterinary school. The cashier at the country store used to give her free coffee in the morning, wave her through the line with a wink. He still waved her through, but she suspected his generosity now came from pity.

  She’d never obsessed over her looks; she’d never had to. She was naturally pretty and had never worn much makeup or watched what she ate or taken a long time to get ready. But now that her face was altered, she felt she was walking through life relying on a different set of tools. She’d have to depend on her smarts, she thought, her own resourcefulness. She’d always been good at her job, but now she worked longer and harder. Part of her had always assumed she’d live a life in a partnership, with a dual income to fall back on; now, even with Clay insisting things were fine, she began to calculate the savings she’d need to buy a house and reach retirement on her own. Her self-confidence was as crippled as her face.

  Since the attack, Lila had made one rule: Don’t get close to anything.

  There was a day in the airport she remembered. She’d seen two young girls standing behind a deaf woman and her mother. The deaf woman had a twitch. The girls made garish, frantic signs at each other and jerked their shoulders to their ears behind the woman’s back. At the time, she’d done nothing. Now Lila wanted to go back to that day and grab the girls by their collars. But every time she pictured bringing her face close to theirs, her imagination stopped cold.

  I worry the inmates are enjoying themselves, the warden said, leading Lila to the barn.

  This is prison, he said. Not 4-H club. The board of directors felt a working farm would be part of rehabilitation—get these guys ready for the working world. But it’s a money pit. Too easy on the prisoners, too much free time.

  Lila had a stethoscope around her neck and a canvas bag slung over her shoulder. It was filled with calipers, vaccines, palpation sleeves, dewormers, euthanasia solution, lube. She kept a penlight clipped to her pants pocket.

  Twenty-two hundred and fifty gallons of milk a week, an inmate in the entrance of the barn said, loosening the twine around a bale of hay.

  This is Rom, the administrator said, holding his hand out as if he were showing her through a door. Been with us for years.

  Romulus Candle, the inmate said, sticking out his hand. His skin was calloused and he had a long, white beard, which he’d braided down to his sternum. His eyebrows were wild and curled. Lila could see the pores in his nose when she shook his hand.

  Seven hundred and fifty gallons of yogurt, he continued, pointing at a pressurized silver vat.

  Then he opened a stall door and pressed his face to the cheek of a chestnut-colored horse.

  Ah, Debra, he said, breathing her in.

  Rom took his pointer finger and ran it underneath the horse’s lip and across the gum line.

  She likes this, he said, and Lila could tell that he was right. The mare flared her lips, then nosed Rom’s shoulder.

  Rom will show you the place, the warden said. Take as long as you need—I’ll go over the results with you later.

  He disappeared. Lila could see dust falling in the strips of light that shone between the barn siding. She could smell the slightly sweet aroma of hay.

  We gotta get this place making money, Rom said, turning to Lila, his voice suddenly desperate. We can’t shut it down. We can’t sell.

  Ever think of suggesting an in-house butchering operation? Lila asked.

  What kind of people do you think we are? Romulus said, raising his eyebrows.

  Lila ignored him and began making notes; later she’d have to calculate average milk production ratios, average age of livestock, levels of concentrate in the feed.

  Let’s have a look at the jerseys, she said, striking out of the barn and walking toward the cattle grazing in a small pasture.

  When I get out of here, Romulus said, I’m going to start a busines
s. You see, Raeford’s just crawling with kudzu. Every place that’s not a place, as far as I’m concerned, is crawling with kudzu.

  Pick it up, Lila said, waving at Romulus to keep pace with her. The ground was dry and hard under her work boots. They approached a series of old outbuildings next to the pasture.

  What I’m going to do is this, Romulus said, as he jogged to catch up with her. I’m going to start a kudzu clearing service. Cows’ll eat kudzu faster than anything. And I’ll have a pack of border collies that’ll keep ’em in line and off the road.

  Crazy, she thought.

  Lila could see the sweet, empty eyes of the jerseys huddling near the trough. Hair curled over their foreheads like small toupees. Their ears hung to the side, clipped with yellow plastic tags. She would kick their teats, test for mastitis and infection, examine the piles of feces on the ground, but she had a feeling none of this data would matter in the end. Soon they’d be three hundred pounds of boneless meat apiece.

  Suddenly Romulus grabbed her arm. His fingernails were long and pinched her skin. Her pulse quickened and she felt for the pocketknife she kept in her pants pocket.

  I need to show you something, he said, shoving her into a shed.

  Lila’s darkest moments had occurred when she was alone after the accident. She lay in bed, her apartment quiet, the street below vacant after business hours. Her face throbbed, the healing skin itched, and the suture site burned. When she wanted to punish herself, she didn’t take her pain medication. She wanted to feel the mistake, get to know it.

  I’m ugly, she thought, and stupid.

  She split into two those nights, looking upon herself with someone else’s cruel eyes.

  She pictured her failure, the important one: the wolf-hybrid’s large body draped across the metal table, his pink tongue riddled with porcupine needles, the bright surgical light shining onto his thick coat. She thought she had time, that she’d administered enough anesthetic. But maybe she hadn’t reached the dog’s anesthetic plane, or maybe he’d metabolized the sedative differently than expected.

  Damn the extra time I took, she thought. She regretted the care with which she’d tugged the quills from the dog’s lips—the same lips that opened to reveal brutal teeth, the teeth that had torn into her face with an almost feral abandon as the dog unexpectedly came to.

  I was so casual, she thought. I didn’t protect myself.

  She’d treated the dog with tenderness. What did I expect in return? she wondered. Gratitude?

  There were no promises, no obligations between living things, she thought. Not even humans. Just raw need hidden by a game of make-believe.

  Treat yourself with compassion, her therapist had said as she packed to leave the hospital.

  But the most tangible feeling for Lila was anger, anger at herself for misjudging an animal, anger at Clay for making it hard, for constantly prodding her from the solitude in which she found safety.

  Lila’s eyes adjusted to the dark shed. Small patches of light fell on the hay. If she’d had hackles, they would have been up. Adrenaline shot from one end of her body to the other.

  Let go, she said, shaking off Romulus’s grip.

  Look, he said, gesturing to the corner of the shed.

  Lila saw a calf on the ground, a few weeks old at most. Its back end was atrophied.

  What’s this about? Lila said. She tried to convince herself she was in control. Still, she was cautious and backed farther away from Romulus.

  Rom took a handkerchief from his jumpsuit pocket and blew his nose.

  I kept her a secret, he said, nodding at the calf. I been bottle-feeding her all along.

  He got down on the ground. The calf nuzzled him.

  I need you to take this one with you when you leave today, he said, turning to Lila with pleading eyes. Please.

  In bed at night, Lila often thought of the times she’d broken someone’s heart. She’d kissed Paul Devaney in high school but didn’t let him go up her dress. She refused to dance with Rahul Kanwar at prom. In college she had given men wrong numbers when they asked her out. She’d cheated on her boyfriend in veterinary school with a swine professor.

  Until the accident, she’d always been good to Clay. He was strong and honest and they had fun together.

  She missed falling asleep on his slick chest on humid nights with the bedroom windows open. She missed canoeing the Tar River, visiting his family, eating his mother’s deep-fried cooking and receiving her handmade birthday cards in the mail. She missed hitching rides in the fire truck, sanding cabinets at two a.m. before a big order was due, drinking wine and laughing at one of Clay’s stories.

  One night he’d been telling Lila about visiting his grandmother in the trailer park and going to Myrtle Beach with his brother. Then he paused and walked across the shop floor, picked her up, and placed her on top of the cabinets they were working on. She felt the sawdust on the side of her face and in her hair as he pulled her legs open and slid her to the edge of the cabinets.

  What if we break them? she’d said, laughing.

  I trust my craftsmanship, he said. Plus, it’s worth it.

  The first night in the hospital after the accident, Lila had pictured herself lying across those cabinets again, Clay hovering over her and coming up to kiss her mangled mouth. It made her sick.

  I work hard, Romulus said. I been here years mending fences, planting soybeans. I get up and milk at five in the morning.

  Romulus pressed his forehead to the space between the calf’s eyes.

  I have to do my job, Lila said, looking away.

  I’ll pay you, he said, when I get out. I’ll make it up to you, take care of the bills, the feed. I will.

  And you get out when? Lila asked.

  The calf stretched its front legs and rested its nose on a pair of mud-caked hooves.

  I don’t know, Romulus said softly.

  Lila knew what would happen to the farm. The land would be sold, the animals put on the open market. Romulus’s calf would die on its own within the month.

  I have my professional credibility left, she said to herself. That is how I walk into goddamn places like this with my head held up. I can’t compromise.

  Lila left Romulus on the ground with the calf. The calf sucked at Rom’s thumb while he brushed the mud from her coat. She went outside, bent over to touch her toes, and raised her arms to the sun, exhaling loudly. She tried to calm herself, her body still electrified from Romulus forcing her into the shed. She hated looking at the calf, hated the way her profession thrust her into ethical dilemmas on a daily basis.

  This is not a difficult decision, she reminded herself. The calf is suffering.

  One of the hardest parts of her job was learning to trust her rational self, taming the compassion that had led her to become a veterinarian in the first place.

  Part of her hated the thing she was about to do, the same way part of her hated getting up in the morning, brushing her teeth and washing her face, spending time with her reflection, looking at Clay’s letters, wondering what life would be like if she’d only given the wolf-hybrid more anesthetic. But life in Raeford was like that. Washed-out. Full of regret. People in old shoes, tough jobs. Lila reached in her bag for a syringe. Everyone was sorry about things. They were sorry about the tinsel fading on the lampposts. They were sorry about the empty tables at Brodie’s downtown. They were sorry about her face. People were sorry. And they’d keep on being sorry and watching lives fall apart at close range.

  Lila walked back into the shed. Romulus peeled himself from the calf’s body, where he’d draped himself like a shroud.

  I’m sorry, she said, her voice cold and practical. We need to do what’s right for the calf. She’s in pain.

  I’m afraid I can’t let you, Romulus said.

  He stood up. He held something in his hand. Her knife.

  She felt as if someone had thrown a bucket of cold water over her head. She began to back up but was disoriented.

  Stay right t
here, he said evenly. She stopped moving. Her heart raced. She made a mental note of all the doors and windows in the shed, looked around for something she could use to defend herself.

  His black eyes studied hers. He was breathing hard, but there was a calmness about him. He was sure of himself.

  Lila imagined another scar on her face, imagined the tip of the knife cutting into her patchwork skin. Did it matter? It did. There was always more to lose.

  Romulus stepped toward her. A swath of light landed on his orange jumpsuit.

  I don’t want to fight you on this, Lila said, trying hard to project a sense of authority she did not feel. I just want to do the right thing.

  I never loved anything this way, Romulus said.

  He brought the knife in front of his body. Lila felt a surge of energy and anticipation.

  I’m serious, he said.

  Lila did not doubt him. She listened for other inmates, the sound of the warden coming back. Nothing. She’d have to reason with him; she had no choice.

  The calf looked up at them with big eyes.

  Romulus ran a hand over his hair and took a deep breath.

  Here’s what I’m going to do, Lila said evenly. I’m going to fill this syringe and leave it for you.

  No, Romulus said.

  There’s nothing else I can do here, Lila said. You have to trust me.

  Tears began to well in Romulus’s black eyes.

  She placed the syringe on an overturned milk crate.

  Put it in her neck, she said, pointing to a spot on her own.

  Romulus dropped the knife into the hay. His body sagged. He picked up the syringe.

  For a moment, Lila wondered if she should watch, make sure Romulus did the job. But she turned around and ran as fast as she could back to the farmhouse, pausing a moment to grab her bag. She decided that she wouldn’t speak of the incident, that she was tired of people worrying, feeling sorry for her.

  Lila thought of Romulus in the shed with the calf. He’ll do the right thing, she told herself. People almost always do.

  Lila pulled out of the prison gates, her body still humming with adrenaline. She didn’t have enough time to go home before meeting Clay at the wine bar in town, so she pulled the truck over on the side of the road near the old Edgerton place. The road was empty and she couldn’t see anyone around, so she got out of the car and opened the passenger-side door, which faced the tree line.