The Bird House A Novel - By Kelly Simmons Page 0,50
woven basket, I had no idea whose it was. I remembered the leather pencil cup, but not this. She opened the lid and we both expected, and hoped for, something else. I expected paper clips. She probably hoped for coins, buried treasure.
She pulled out two rubber ducks, one larger than the other. The fan swept across my back, calves, ankles, oscillating so hard that I went cold. The Coke fizzed in my throat, threatening, and I held my hand over my mouth.
“Are these my dad’s?”
I closed my eyes slowly and willed myself to nod. If I didn’t open my eyes, maybe I wouldn’t see any more, or say any more. Maybe I wouldn’t have to lie to the child I didn’t ever want to lie to.
“A mama and a baby duck,” she said.
“Yes,” I whispered and swallowed. “Put those away now, Ellie,” I said. “They’re very fragile.”
“Okay,” she said uncertainly.
“Are you sure there aren’t any blueprints?”
“Well, there’s a bunch of tubes.”
“Take those out instead, why don’t you?”
I heard the rustling and I opened my eyes. But I still saw the bright yellow of those floating ducks and the way their blue eyes had faded, peeled off beneath not Tom’s fingers but Emma’s, Emma of the tangled hair and tantrums, the child who never looked like a child unless she was asleep. At her funeral, that’s what struck me most—that she looked peaceful and sweet, almost elegant in death. A way she had so rarely presented herself to me in life. It was graceful, almost, to say good-bye to her in that state. I stood over her coffin and thought she had never looked so happy. But when I heard a man say, “She’s at peace now,” over my shoulder, I whirled around as if prepared to pounce. My father stood in front of me, with Theo just behind him, looking sheepish.
“Will you excuse me? I think I’m going to be ill,” I said, and ran outside. Predictably, my father followed me, not Theo.
He waited in the parking lot, fifty feet away, and watched as I tucked my feet beneath me and sat at the edge of the wooded lot, picking tufts of grass out of the ground and throwing them.
He stepped toward me; I heard his heavy feet on the gravel.
“Don’t come any closer,” I said.
“Ann, I can’t imagine what you’re going through—”
“No, you can’t.”
“I just wanted to say—”
“That you’re sorry?”
“Well, yes.”
I turned and shook the last pieces of grass off my black skirt. “Daddy,” I said slowly, “I hope you’re sorry for the rest of your life.”
There was more I could have said, and might have, if I hadn’t seen Betsy appear outside the funeral parlor door. If she had stepped outside a minute earlier, she might have stopped me from going as far as I did.
My father turned to see where I was looking. Emboldened, knowing there was a witness, he walked up to me and took an envelope out of his breast pocket.
“Whatever that is, I don’t want it.”
“Annie,” he said, his face contorting as he tried to stop the tears. “What do I have to do for you to forgive me? Please, just read this.”
The envelope’s paper was thick and starchy, and when his tears dropped on it, they looked as big as raindrops.
I took the envelope without a word, and when I got home, cracked it open just far enough to recognize the loops of his familiar handwriting, then threw it away.
That was the last time I saw him. When he died five years later, I didn’t go to his funeral. His new wife, Bitte, sent me the small check from his estate, and I put it in an account for Tom. I didn’t even send her a condolence card.
“Grandma, are you okay?” Ellie asked, and I said yes, clearing my throat. I waited a few seconds, swallowing, then said why don’t we go downstairs and make something out of those blueprints?
As we sat at the dining room table and made book jackets for her textbooks, she stopped suddenly and looked up.
“I found something strange in my house yesterday, too. And not in the attic, either.”