The Bird House A Novel - By Kelly Simmons Page 0,46

cancer and not fall to the ground weeping. I called Betsy, then Theo, and to his credit, he didn’t mention meetings or clients, and said to tell Betsy he’d be back on the next train.

Outside my mother’s room, Aunt Caro stood in the corridor, looking intently at something on the wall. When I got closer I saw it was a watercolor of a cardinal in a tree.

“I guess you knew she loved birds.”

I nodded. “That’s why she wouldn’t let me have a cat.”

“She asked for this portrait to be moved here. It used to be near the nurses’ station.” She picked it up off the wall. “She’s already gone,” she said softly.

“Oh, no,” I sobbed.

She put down the painting and held me tightly. The gesture was kind and loving, but it only served to make me aware that she wasn’t my mother. No one holds you like your mother. No one ever will.

The door to the room was open an inch; I could see only a bedpost and a strip of wallpaper.

“Was she alone? I mean when—”

“The nurse claims she was with her.”

“Claims?” It was just like Aunt Caro to kick up a little trouble.

“I think they say that to make people feel better. I think it’s in the nursing home manual.” She sighed and looped an arm around my shoulder, releasing a puff of Chanel No. 5 mixed with hair spray.

“Do you remember those exquisite bird houses Frank made for her?”

“Please, Aunt Caro. I don’t want to—”

“She loved all beautiful things, which was her undoing.”

I squeezed her hand. Why is it that everyone labels something one loves as one’s undoing, when it’s only illness, betrayal, death, or divorce that truly undoes anything?

“My father was her undoing,” I said.

“Dear, dear Ann,” she sighed.

I went inside. The pink roses I’d brought earlier in the week were still fragrant at her bedside. Some of them were wilted, gone soft at the stem, and their petals littered the tabletop. But if I could still smell them, I hoped she could, too.

“Oh, Mom,” I whimpered, and a bolt of pain shot through my right side. It connected us, that pain, like a string of Christmas lights, an electric current. It went through us both, from my breast to hers, past her mattress, the floor, into the earth. My cancer was gone, but hers came back. She could have lived three more months or three more years, they’d told us. Nobody thought it might be three weeks.

When I brushed my lips across her cheek, she didn’t smell like herself, she smelled like the room, like roses. That was death, I thought; you became something else altogether, an envelope that held parts of other people, what they remembered of you, what they wished you were.

An hour later, when I stepped out of the lobby, grateful for air, my father was like a bear in the parking lot. My breath caught in my throat at the sight of his brown suit, his broad back, leaning against a burgundy Cadillac. No cigar, but when I got closer I smelled one in his pocket.

“It’s too late,” I said, and he turned around. His car was new and gleaming, recently polished. His suit, with its wide lapels and even wider tie, looked completely of the moment, which angered me. My mother had worn her sister’s handme-downs for years.

“Well, I tried,” he said.

“Where do you live that you arrived here so quickly?”

He opened his mouth and I held up a hand. “Don’t answer,” I said. “I don’t really want to know.”

“How are the children?”

“How are your grandchildren, you mean? They’re fine. They’re just dandy,” I said tartly.

“I don’t know why,” he sighed, “after all these years, you persist in believing only your mother’s version of the events.”

“Looked pretty black and white to me.”

“Did it ever occur to you that she—”

“That she what, Dad? That she was responsible? That she, I don’t know, cheated on you down at the club because you were a bastard and she was lonely? Yes, that occurred to me. But it’s not true. And even if it was, nothing gives you license to do what you did. Nothing. The woman is dead. And now I don’t have any parents.”

I turned away, taking long, half-running steps toward my car.

“Annie! Ann-o!”

“Don’t,” I said, whirling toward him. “Don’t ever call me that.”

“Let me explain. Now that you’re grown, perhaps—”

“Caro shouldn’t have called you,” I said. He was still standing in the parking lot, hands on his hips—like a fat, petulant