If These Wings Could Fly - Kyrie McCauley Page 0,38
release a dove—but the dove, unable to find land to rest on, returns quickly. The second bird they send is a swallow. Again, with no land to rest on or fresh water to drink on the wide, endless sea, the swallow returns. Finally, they send the crow, who flies off toward the horizon, the third bird entrusted to find land. She does not come back.
Maybe Amelia wasn’t lost to an endless sea. Maybe, like the crow, she found dry land, and decided to stay where she felt safe.
Maybe surviving can be fearless, too.
Auburn, Pennsylvania
October 13
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Chapter Twenty-Five
THIS HOUSE IS UNBROKEN THE WAY a healed bone is.
Something was bent at an unnatural angle, pushed too far, until it snapped, or shattered. But then it got better again.
When I was eight, we had a snow day. Mom was waitressing by then, and the diner didn’t close, so she went in, hugely pregnant with Juniper. Dad slept in, his body tired from long hours all weekend spent trying to get a roof job done before the snow arrived. I made breakfast for Campbell and myself, and we were watching cartoons when he finally came downstairs. The trash was overflowing in the kitchen. We didn’t take it out—I don’t know that I even could have lifted it—but when he saw it, he got so angry, and he threw it across the floor, spilling it everywhere. Then he grabbed a cabinet door we’d left open, slamming it back the wrong way so that it tore off the hinges, the crack so loud it felt like it broke inside of me. I grabbed Cammy and we ran to my room, hiding in the closet.
Mom found us there in the late afternoon.
When we came downstairs, the trash was still everywhere, and he was asleep on the couch. But the cabinet door wasn’t broken. I tried to explain to Mom, in confused, urgent whispers, that the wood had cracked right at the hinges. But it was intact, like it had never broken. I decided I must have seen it wrong. That it had just been the noise of the cabinet hitting the wall. But I know Campbell saw it, too, because when Mom went to change her clothes, Cammy leaned in close and whispered, “It was magic.”
It was two years before the next explosion like that. There used to be so much time in between them. He’s always sorry. He says it won’t happen again.
I know now that the last is never true. It will happen again. And he probably does love us, but it’s never been enough to make him stop. Instead, it makes it worse—his love for us. And ours for him. It makes it impossible to leave.
It took me a while to remember the cabinet door, and the way doubt had erased what I saw. I forgot until it started happening again, and more frequently. The house always repairing the things he breaks.
The house doesn’t make sense, but neither does the way he splinters into something unrecognizable when he’s mad. It’s incredible what you learn to accept when so few things make sense, and Campbell and I learned to observe it in silence. To note the patched walls and fixed frames, and then fold that strangeness into a soft corner of our minds, where it could be ignored.
Chapter Twenty-Six
LIAM STARTS DRIVING ME TO SCHOOL. Every morning, he parks his Ford at the end of Frederick Street—across from the mailboxes that are now always covered in crows. He waits there while I walk my sisters up and make sure they get onto the bus okay. If the habit seems odd or unnecessary to him, he doesn’t say anything.
Within a few weeks, it feels like we’ve been doing this forever.
Liam couldn’t know it, but his consistency might be my favorite quality of his. I let myself look forward to Liam, and that anticipation starts to replace my fear of the crawl space at night. I fall asleep easier. It’s just a fifteen-minute ride to school every morning, but it’s a good fifteen minutes.
These drives aren’t like our first date. We haven’t even kissed again. We just talk, and laugh, and trade favorite songs.
On the second Friday of morning drives together, we have an exam in lit class.
“G’morning,” he says, yawning. He’s exhausted, thanks to football.
“Morning,” I say, and pass him the extra tumbler I brought. “Mine is coffee, but I noticed you never drink it, so yours is hot chocolate. Hope that’s okay. Or we can trade?”