Bird Song (Grace Series)

by S. L. Naeole

  “Since the day she came home from the hospital.”

  Graham nodded his head, his expression becoming hard, his eyes cold, and turned away, walking with me inside of the house. Stacy followed, as did Lark, who closed the door behind us, unable to look at Graham again after his response to her answer.

  Wordlessly, I walked upstairs to my room and began to collect my things to take a shower. I left sodden, muddy footprints all over the carpet as I did so, but I really didn’t care. I headed to the bathroom, passing a worried Stacy, and closed the door behind me.

  I removed the dress and undergarments, making great ceremony of ripping the corset off from the front, popping each little hook and eye, before tossing it to the ground.

  I stared at myself in the mirror and watched as I slowly crumpled inward, all barriers gone, all inhibitions disintegrated into nothing as I finally allowed myself to cave into the hole that now made up who I was.

  I felt my tears, hot and unrelenting, fall down my face and splash onto my chest, my belly, my legs. I stared at myself as my eyes and nose grew redder with each passing moment, unable to handle the constant tide of tears and everything that coincides with them. I saw my lips begin to tremble and flutter as the once silent sobs started to grow in intensity, the sounds resembling those of a wounded animal.

  I ignored the knocks and the calls of concern that came through the door, and when my body began to shake, the spasms of each painful acknowledgement of the betrayal that Robert had dealt me, only then did I wrap my arms around myself, a pitiful effort to keep that last vestige of restraint in place.

  I stood there for what felt like too long and yet not long enough. My eyes had grown grotesquely puffy by the time I finally headed into the shower to wash the muck out of my hair and body.

  I remained in the shower only long enough to soap up and rinse off. I dressed quickly and opened the bathroom door to see three anxious pairs of eyes waiting on the other side.

  They said nothing as I walked into my bedroom and closed the door behind me. I could hear them crowd around my door, silently contemplating whether to open it or leave me alone.

  I threw my dress into the hamper beside my dresser and glanced up at the mirror that was raised above it. Stuck to the side were photos—images of happier moments—or simply blissfully ignorant moments of Robert and I.

  I reached up to remove them, the movement slow thanks to the pain in my arm. When my mirror was clear of any reminders, I walked over to the closet and pulled out the shoe box that held the sandals Robert had bought for me to wear to Hannah’s wedding. I removed them and placed the photos beneath the tissue paper. I replaced the shoes and topped it with the lid.

  Sighing, I walked over to the trashcan beside the nightstand next to my bed and placed the box in there. I continued to make these small trips until the small receptacle was overflowing with items that had been given to me by or reminded me of Robert.

  “This is going to be hard enough with you still in my head,” I whispered. “I don’t need to see these things, too.”

  I crawled onto my bed and placed my head against my pillow, feeling the tears begin anew as I stared through the dark windows, imagining a pair of silver eyes staring through at me, sadness and remorse saturating each glimmering iris. I shook my head at the image. “It’s too late,” I mouthed, and then pressed a closed fist to my lips, stifling another sob.

  When my eyelids finally fell from the weight of exhaustion and sleep, they did not do so before my mind tricked me into seeing those eyes once more, this time the silver replaced by golden rings.

  EPILOGUE: ALBUM

  I woke up the next morning in a fog, feeling strangely weightless as the scent of flowers drilled through my nostrils. I opened my eyes to see my room turned into a sea of bright yellow as every single inch was covered by a pot of lilies. Note cards stuck out of them like little white flags, each one bearing the same two-word phrase: forgive me.

  I asked Graham and Stacy to help me remove them, telling them to take them wherever they wanted to, as long as they were nowhere near the house. For the next two days, I woke up to the same cloying aroma of the bright pink and white flowers and each time, Graham and Stacy silently carried each pot outside into awaiting cars. Finally, on the fourth day, I simply asked them to move the pots outside.

  Surprisingly enough, while Dad and Janice were away on their honeymoon at a destination spa in Rockbridge—another gift from Ameila—Stacy and Graham somehow managed to be around each other without starting a single argument. Lark, somehow sensing that her presence reminded me far too much of Robert, kept at a distance. Her relationship with Graham had taken a sudden u-turn after he discovered that she had known nearly as long as Robert had that Sam had tried to kill me, and so she never came into the house again after that first night.

  I tried to get Graham to understand her reason for doing so, but he couldn’t accept it. He was loyal to a fault, I realized, and the guilt that I bore from knowing that he was preventing himself from being happy simply because he didn’t want to betray me too was difficult to stomach. Stacy kept her opinion on the subject to herself, even from me, though I was certain she’d had several discussions about it with Lark during the moments she wasn’t with me.

  The bruising on my arm which had angered Graham and shocked Lark and Stacy had vanished that first morning—I didn’t bother pretending that I didn’t know how. I just didn’t think about it at all.

  It was during one of the rare moments when I was alone—Stacy was at a Doctor’s appointment while Graham was attending his first day waiting tables at the diner near the mall after quitting his job at the theater—that I decided to finally go up into the attic to grab some of the things for the baby that Janice had written down.

  I took a flashlight with me, as well as a spare bulb in case the light up there wasn’t working. I pulled down the ladder in the upstairs hallway and climbed up into the dusty space, covering my nose with my hand as I did so. I pulled on the chain attached to the overhead lamp and nodded knowingly as the familiar crackle of a broken filament sounded. I slowly unscrewed the bulb and replaced it with the fresh one, applauding myself as the numerous boxes and sheet covered objects were illuminated in the bright, faux-daylight glow.

  “Now then, which one contains all of my baby stuff?” I asked out loud.

  I placed the flashlight near the edge of the opening and began to walk around, inspecting the dusty boxes with careful eyes, reading each label in the smooth, graceful strokes of my mother’s hand, and the brisk, short strokes that belonged to my father.

  I soon made out the outline of a crib—or at least, parts of a crib—beneath a grayish-pink sheet and lifted the dusty cloth off of it as gently as possible. The cloud of dust was minimal, and the light sufficient enough for me to see that the sheet had been covering the four sides that made up the basic frame of what had once been my crib. I ran my fingers down the smooth curves of the white wooden rails, trying to see if I could ever remember being behind them. I couldn’t, of course, but it felt good to try to remember something pleasant.

  I pulled the rails out from its hiding spot and maneuvered them to the ladder. I began climbing down, bringing each one down with me, one-by-one. When all four were out of the attic, I dragged them into the bedroom that would soon be Matthew’s. Janice had been busy painting the walls several different colors—each wall was a pale, pastel shade of blue, yellow, green, and orange—and arranging matching patchwork curtains against the lone window that mirrored my own facing out into the street.

  I repeated this trip several times with more items and boxes I discovered and could move on my own, making sure to uncover the items that I couldn’t so that they could be moved later without having to do any re-searching. When I was done, I finally sat down in Matthew’s room to go through a box that had been labeled “Grace” in my mother’s handwriting.

  The tape gave way quite easily, and I pulled out several tissue wrapped pieces of clothing, including
a bonnet and a dress that I could only have guessed was what they used to bring me home in. I carefully rewrapped them and placed them to the side as I pulled out several more objects that appeared to have been stored as I exited infancy and entered toddlerhood. There was even a pacifier that looked so mangled, I wasn’t sure if it had belonged to me or some mystery dog my parents might have owned before I was old enough to remember.

  A metal rattle that felt far too heavy for any baby to carry was resting in a box, along with a lock of dark brown hair tied together with a pale green ribbon.

  “I hope there was some left on my head when this was taken off,” I groaned.

  Another package of tissue revealed what I assumed was a traditional Korean dress that I would have worn on my first birthday. I had seen pictures of it somewhere around the house, though Dad had long since packed most of the photos of my childhood away.

  A soft, sage and lavender chenille blanket, folded into eighths rested over an album that lay at the bottom of the box. It was an unusually large album, judging by the cover, and I had to tilt the box on its side just to pry it loose from its tight wedging. Once I had it in my lap, I began to examine it, admiring the deep, textured grain in the black leather cover. The pattern was unusual, and reminded me of a heavy snake skin.

  I lifted the cover to read the inscription on the inside.

  “How priceless is your unfailing love! Both high and low among men find refuge in the shadow of your wings.”

  The writing was the same flowing script that I knew to be my mothers, and I couldn’t help but trace each letter with my fingers, trying to imagine her sitting with this book in her lap, writing these words down as she prepared for my arrival. I felt the twinges of anger and resentment start to build up within me when I stopped for a second to recognize that she wasn’t here to explain to me why she had chosen what she had written, what its meaning was, its significance to her…to me.

  As with the album that Graham had purchased for Dad and Janice, this one had a thick sheet of vellum between each page, and I lifted the yellowed, translucent page to reveal an aged photograph of several strangely-garbed women seated around a black, rectangular table just a foot off the ground. Their dark hair was pulled back in tight knots, their faces—what I could see of them anyway—were very serene.

  One of them wore a sly smile beneath a swatch of lost pigment, everything but her smile gone forever. Beneath the image my mother had written several names, including one that read “Great-Great-Grandma Ahn Bi”. I immediately adopted the woman with the missing face, save for the smile as my great-great-grandmother. That was the type of smile I would have loved to have inherited—spectacular all on its own, needing no other ornament—even the rest of a face—to enhance its beauty.

  I turned the page to see another aged image, this time of several men seated around a bar. They varied in ages, though none appeared older than my father. Their names were listed beneath each of them, but only one bore any particular title: “Great-Uncle Llehmai”.

  He appeared the most prominent one in the group, his strong, handsome face standing out the most clearly. His hair was dark, but not the darkest. His face was handsome, his mouth lifted only on one side as if he knew that was all he needed. He did not look Korean, but he wore the same style of clothes that the other men in the photos did.

  “Maybe he was adopted.”

  I continued to flip through several pages, stopping at each one to inspect and admire the various vintage photographs of individuals given labels ranging from “Aunt This” and “Cousin That”, the faces all so similar looking, varying only by slight degrees in height or slant of the cheekbones, tilt of the smile. I could see myself in the faces of these family members, just as I could see myself in Dad’s face, and I felt comforted somehow, seeing that my family ties extended beyond just my mother, even if only through some old photographs.

  I got to the last two pages in the album and frowned. The second to the last page contained an image of me as a young girl, wearing a dress that I didn’t recognize, holding the hand of someone I did.

  My eyes were raised up, instead of looking towards the camera. I was smiling, happy, my gaze focused on the person whose hand gripped mine nearly as tightly as I was gripping theirs. Though the photo was in black and white, I could see that my dress was probably green—mom liked to dress me in green for some reason—and my hair was pulled back with two clips that looked like they were made out of feathers, topped with flowers. I was missing teeth, and my gap-toothed grin only accentuated the deep dimple in my cheek.

  I turned my attention away from the image of me to the one of the individual who was staring back into the camera. Her smile was incredibly bright, as though it were creating its own flash. In her eyes I could see hints of my own, and in her hair she wore matching clips, looking ridiculous but not caring as she beamed for whomever it was taking the picture.

  Her dress looked to be of the same shade of green as my own, but hers was cut to flaunt the figure that I was somehow not blessed with. I laughed as I realized that our feet were both bare, our toes pointed towards each other, despite the obvious appearance of snow on the ground. Without her shoes on, I could tell that mom was a fairly short woman, my head coming up to her chest quite easily, despite my youth.

  Beneath the image was a caption written in mom’s clean penmanship: “Grace and I at Mother-Daughter day, February 7th”.

  It was the last picture that had been taken of my mother and I, one of the last things she did before she died, and I felt a need to keep this photograph with me. I gently pried it out of the metal corners that had kept it in place for over eleven years and turned it over, half-expecting to see nothing, and half-expecting to see something—anything—and feeling a sense of disappointment when all I saw on the back was the brand of photo paper used.

  I chuckled and shook my head. I took a quick look at the last page, the empty photo corners there now matching the ones on the page directly next to it. I closed the book and proceeded to fit everything back into the box when something urged me to return to the photo album.

  I again flipped through the images, the family that I had never known all welcoming me back with their familiar eyes and smiles. It felt good.

  And then I reached those final two pages once more, this time both empty.

  But also both with something written beneath the photo area in the little caption box provided for notes.

  I re-read the one my mother had written describing our mother-daughter day. The photo in my hand was proof that it had been there.

  Then my eyes glanced over to the page that I had assumed would be blank, its page free of a picture and thus, a comment.

  But a comment was there, in Mom’s handwriting, describing an image that wasn’t there…and simply couldn’t have been.

  “Grace and Maia: Mother and Daughter”

  Six words had never brought out such a non-reaction from me before as I stared dumbfounded at their implication. Had my mother done the unthinkable and began planning her grandchildren before her daughter had reached puberty? Was this some misplaced page, and there was another family member whose name was Grace somewhere in my mother’s family tree?

  I lifted the page to inspect the back, but saw that it was completely bare, no photo corners, no area for writing notes. It was a simple ending for what was a simple album.

  I placed the page back down and stared at it, trying to figure out what my mother’s intentions had been when she wrote this particular caption. Her words to me in my dream started to echo in my head, and I slammed the album shut, hoping the loud clap would be enough to snap me out of it.

  Instead, my mother’s voice grew louder and the only thing I could think to do to escape its incessant hounding was by distracting myself. I stood up and pushed aside the curtain in Matthew’s room. I could see the countless pots of lillies still sitting in the lawn, slowly withering away in the sun from the lack of care they were receiving.

  In the fresh l
ight, I quickly repacked the box of things that had been intended for me by my mother and carried it, as well as the picture I removed from the album back to my room. I placed the box on my bed and approached the mirror. The residue of tape from the pictures that I had removed was still visible on the glass, the outlines of the images clearly formed in dust against the reflection of the afternoon sun beating down in my room.

  I stuck the photo of my mother and me to the very top of the mirror, and smiled at her face, almost imagining that while the seven year-old me gazed up at her from the eleven year-old picture, she was more interested and pleased with seeing the eighteen year-old me looking back at her.

  I glanced quickly at my own reflection and sighed at what I saw. There was no way a mother would have been pleased at seeing what was reflected at me in the mirror. My skin looked waxy and gray, my eyes puffy from endless nights spent crying and days spent sitting in denial. I had bitten my lips so hard trying to keep my sobbing to a minimum so as not to disturb Graham that they were now cracked and scabbed over. I hadn’t taken a shower since coming home and it showed in my hair, which lay on my head like a tattered blanket.

  My clothes needed to be changed, but with Dad gone, laundry hadn’t been done in almost a week and I didn’t have any clean shirts left. The one that I wore hung on my body like a sack and I bit back a hysterical giggle as I saw that it was a shirt very similar in style to the one that I had worn on the day I had first met…I couldn’t even bring myself to think his name.

  I shook my head and turned towards my bed. I moved the box over and crawled onto my comforter, wrapping my arms around my poor pillow—it had taken far too much abuse this past year by way of my tears and would soon need to be put out of its misery.

  I stayed that way as the sun crossed over the sky and began to set just beyond my window. My room became a kaleidoscope of colors as the bright, white glow of daylight twisted and warped with the oranges, pinks, purples, and finally blues of dusk creeping into the still quiet of twilight.