Page 20 of Other Birds
“No.” Charlotte stepped forward to take a seat on an orange crate beside her.
“I think it’s Lucy. And if it is her, then why?”
“Don’t worry about Lucy. She’s harmless.”
Zoey looked dubious. “But how do you know? How does anyone know? No one ever sees her. Oh! You’ll never guess what Frasier just told me. Lizbeth hasa son.”
“Huh. I didn’t know that.” She had trouble imagining Lizbeth as a mother, though she didn’t know why. Women who had no business being mothers had children all the time. Look at her own mother.
“Frasier said he’s not coming home.”
“Some people are happier leaving the past in the past,” Charlotte said, reaching out and pulling a box to her. She lifted the flaps and looked inside. “So hidden in all this paper is supposedly a story?”
“That’s what Frasier says. Want to go digging for treasure with me?” Zoey asked.
Charlotte hesitated. She knew, deep down, that she wasn’t going to find another place for her henna on the island.Theplace for arts was the Sugar Warehouse. The only place with a higher tourist draw was Trade Street, and its allure was primarily the sweet shops, bakeries, and restaurants occupying the old buildings where the island’s marshmallow candy was once sold. She wouldn’t have to try veryhard to get a waitstaff job, but that was a last resort. So she was going to have to look for space off the island. And if she had to leave the island for work, she might as well move to another city on the list in the diary and spare herself a commute. It was a slippery slope, all leading to one place.
Someplace that wasn’t here.
She was feeling emotionally spent, and when that happened the real her, the one who craved permanence and connections and simplybeing still,started peeking through the cracks. She hated the thought of leaving hot, sweet Mallow Island. She’d been here for over two years—longer than she’d spent anywhere since leaving the camp in Vermont—and she felt settled here, if that was indeed what this feeling was.
Just for today, she would allow herself not to think about moving again. She would sit here with her earnest young neighbor and go through boxes.
She would think about leaving tomorrow.
“Okay, I’m in,” Charlotte said, and grabbed a pair of rubber gloves and a mask.
She started out thinking that each box was going to contain something fascinating but, other than the odd trinket, it turned out to be the same old thing. Just useless paper. Nothing that looked like a Roscoe Avanger story. Zoey said every piece had to be handled in case the story was actually story ideas written on random bits of paper, but how anything one of America’s most celebrated authors wanted wound up in a box in Lizbeth Lime’s condo, Charlotte wasn’t sure. This was a place you put something you wanted to lose, not find. After a while, Charlotte would groan dramatically when she opened a box only to find decades-old flyers for yard sales and lost pets that Lizbeth had obviously ripped off telephone poles and collected.
But Zoey was fascinated with it all. She would laugh when she came across boxes of Lillian Vernon and Harriet Carter catalogs from the 1990s, or stained menus that looked like they’d been salvaged from Trade Street restaurant dumpsters. And when she found a box of Lizbeth’s diaries written in her teens and twenties, it was like she’d found a vein of gemstones. Charlotte thought it was the most interesting thing by far to be uncovered and wanted to read them, but Zoey respectfully set them aside in the box she had reserved for Lizbeth’s son, even though she said he wasn’t coming home and hadn’t asked for anything to be saved.
A few hours later, after opening the third box in a row of junk mail addressed to at least seven different past residents of the Dellawisp, most of whom had once lived in Charlotte’s condo, Charlotte shook her head and said, “I need a break. How about you?” Zoey, deeply absorbed in going through a box of restraining orders taken out on Lizbeth by the same businesses on Trade Street whose dumpsters she’d raided, didn’t respond. Charlotte nudged her. “You’ve been listening to the same song on repeat for hours.”
“Oh, sorry.” She peeled off her gloves and turned off the music, a song by the National about starting a war.
Charlotte got up and stretched, her shoulders feeling a familiar ache, one she usually felt after being hunched over for hours in marathon back-to-back henna appointments during busy summer months. “It’s late. We should have lunch.”
“Together?” Zoey said, surprised.
Charlotte laughed. “Yes, together.”
“I have some things I bought at the corner market. Do you want me to bring them down?”
“Sure.”
Zoey darted out, as if afraid Charlotte might change her mind.
While Zoey ran up to her studio, Charlotte moved their orange crates outside to Lizbeth’s patio, then turned a box upside down for a table.
She was cleaning her hands with some wipes when Zoey came back down with a shopping bag. She stopped by Charlotte’s patio and pointed to the table and chairs there. “Can we sit here?” she asked.
Charlotte had purchased the patio set at the local Goodwill when she first moved in, thinking of afternoons like this, softly fragranced with salt air and the sweet scent of the brugmansia blooms, exactly the kind of Southern coastal summers you read about in novels. She should have noticed the big clue that none of the other residents had patio furniture. She was about to shoot down Zoey’s idea, but stopped herself. “I was going to say that we can’t because Lizbeth will come out and yell at us for making noise if we sit here,” she said, walking over. “It’s going to take some time to get used to actually enjoying my patio.”
“She must have been lonely,” Zoey said as she and Charlotte sat down, “with only those boxes for company.”
“I suspect her boxes made her happier than people did.”
Zoey set a loaf of white bread, a large bag of Lay’s potato chips, and two bright pink plates on the table with ata-dagesture. Charlotte smiled at her with something that felt almost like fondness. Zoey’s short dark hair was standing up in spikes, and Charlotte wanted to reach over and smooth it down.
