Page 68 of Other Birds
I was ten and Lucy was sixteen when he died. Our next-door neighbor went off his meds and got naked on his lawn one night and he shot my father when he confronted him. In the autopsy notes, which I later requested and put in one of my boxes, the medical examinerheld up my father’s heart for all to see and said, “Will you look at this? A heart like a twenty-year-old!” He would also later say to me, when I tracked him down to put more notes in my boxes, that he remembered he could almost feel the heart beat in his hands, just faintly, as if my indomitable father was still fighting death.
I lost that report, all of Lucy’s arrest records, and dozens of old policies I’d taken out and let expire, when my kitchen flooded several years ago. Frasier took the ruined boxes and threw them away somewhere other than the Dellawisp dumpster. He wouldn’t tell me where.
After my father’s funeral, there was no controlling Lucy. And that’s saying something, given how unpredictable she’d been before. It was like onlyshegot to react to losing him. Typical. She stayed out all night, getting high. She was arrested eleven times for possession, public intoxication, and solicitation, both on the island and off. She went to the ER almost every weekend with made-up maladies and tales of accidents, all as a con for prescriptions. Mom and I eventually stopped showing up, coats over our pajamas, when the hospital called. Lucy then went in and out of rehab so frequently you’d think there was a sale. Mom finally had enough and changed the locks on the doors. I loved that. When Lucy would pound on the door, Mom would just stare at the wall, but I would yell at her to go away, thatwedidn’t need her. I wanted her to know how it felt, all that time she spent with our father behind closed bedroom doors, leaving me out.
It was just me and Mom for a long time and I clung to her, as much as she would let me. She was never a particularly lovey person. I remember her staring at walls a lot while fights went on around her, not doing a thing about them. After high school, I could have gone off to college with scholarships. But the real world scared me and all I wanted to do was stay at home with my paper collection. That’s why I started taking classes at the island tech extension. I had to dosomething that looked productive or I was afraid Mom would make me leave.
And that’s when I met Duncan, and every good thing I’d ever wanted to happen finally did.
As I waited for the city bus to take me home, Duncan—beautiful, in his forties, with eyes the color of pool water—would talk to me. He told me he was living in a halfway house and that he’d been clean for over a year. He said he was finally getting his life together, going to school and working part-time at the Quick as a Wink gas station on the coastal highway. As the days passed I found myself looking forward to our bus-stop time. I was flattered by his willingness to tell me so many personal things about himself, even though I was fairly certain he didn’t even know my name for at least half the semester. When it came time for him to leave the halfway house, Duncan asked me if I had a room to rent. I knew exactly what he’d been doing all this time, chatting me up. He saw me as someone sheltered and easy to manipulate. But by that point I didn’t care. I was already in love with him. I took him home to meet Mom, and she liked that Duncan could fix the leaky sink and have a wildly imaginative meal on the table when she got home from work. She rented out Lucy’s old room to him, and we lived in perfect contentment together for a whole year.
Immediately after moving in, Duncan started coming into my room every night to sit at the foot of my bed and talk to me about classes, sometimes reading to me his favorite passages fromSweet Mallowwhile rubbing my feet through my blanket. He would go a little higher each night and I would lie motionless, every muscle contracted from the intimacy of it. I was eighteen and I felt like I was finally being completely rewritten.
But of course it didn’t last. I had one year with him, one wonderful year of someone wanting only me, then Lucy ruined everything whenshe got kicked out of rehab again for trying to break into the prescription cabinet.
In a fit of goodwill, because Duncan had made our lives easier in many ways, Mom let her move back into our house and sleep on the couch since Duncan was now in her old room. Ihatedit. I was scared of the way she looked at Duncan, of the way she could make him laugh when they shared worldly stories. She was beautiful and captivating, but he didn’t know the real her. He didn’t know what a sinister magician she was.
Lucy and I fought like we were kids again. I told her she was damaged and useless and I wished she would just go away because we didn’t want her there. She told me I had no life, that only ugly girls still lived at home, weird girls that no one liked. I told her that wasn’t true. Mom had never kickedmeout. And I had Duncan—who did she have? I realize now I never should have said that. She couldn’t stand to see me happy. And just to punish me, Lucy seduced Duncan with both her body and her addiction. She won, even though it meant we all lost.
He stopped coming into my room at night. Then he started missing classes, using work as an excuse. Eventually he and Lucy would disappear together for days at a time. They would come back high, though they would claim not to be. Addicts always think they’re as good at manipulating when they’re high as when they’retryingto get high. They fed off each other for nearly half a year. Mom checked out and let it happen, as she always did when things got hard. She didn’t do anything, just like when my father was alive. It got so bad that Lucy stole a prescription pad from a doctor’s office and she and Duncan went on a reckless tour of pharmacies, trying to fill forged prescriptions until they were finally caught.
I never blamed Duncan. I never thought that it was ever anyone’sfault but Lucy’s. I tried to tell him that, how I understood. When they went to prison, I wrote to Duncan all the time. He never wrote back, not even when I told him about Oliver, which my mom had made mepromisenot to do. He was the wrench in her perfect plan.
Because, you see, Duncan was the only one besides me and my mom and Lucy who knew that Oliver wasn’t actually mine.
It was Lucy who had gotten pregnant, not me.
You thought you knew my whole story, didn’t you? Everyone does.
After they were arrested, Mom paid Lucy’s bail and let her come home while she awaited sentencing. I was livid. Why didn’t she pay Duncan’s bail? He was stuck there! That’s when they told me Lucy was going to have Duncan’s baby. Lucy had been ignoring it, denying it, but time was running out. And, here’s the kicker, they neededmyhelp. Even though she was pretty far along, she wasn’t sure exactly, Lucy wasn’t showing in a way anyone could really tell because the baby was so small and Lucy was so curvy. It would get complicated, they said, if people found out. She was going to have to serve time, that much was clear. And when that happened, the baby could go into foster care, it could be taken away fromus,unlesswedid something. And that something was to let Lucy pretend she was me when she had the baby. It would be easy, they said, because I was still on Mom’s insurance. Then my name would go on the birth certificate and the authorities wouldn’t get involved. The baby would be all ours.
All Mom’s, more like.
I didn’t understand all the subterfuge. Lucy didn’t care anything about the baby. I knew the only reason she told Mom about it was to manipulate her into paying bail. I was sure she would pop it out and then take off and never be seen again in order to avoid going to prison. There was no reason they had to involve me, but of course they didbecause they didn’t care.I was surprised as anyone when Lucy stayed,then when she actually showed up to serve her sentence a month after Oliver was born.
But Lucy didn’t do well in prison, in part because Mom never sent her photos or letters about Oliver like she’d promised. Early in her incarceration, Lucy got into fights with other inmates. Then she tried to break out with a guard who had fallen in love with her. They were caught five minutes later when they’d pulled to the side of the road to have sex. She told everyone that the only reason she’d done it was because she wanted to see her baby. No one believed her because no one knew the truth about Oliver. They all thought she was crazy.
Duncan was released much sooner than Lucy. Away from her, he was just fine. I knew he would be. And I knew he would come back to me when he got out. I would give him a place to stay—Mom couldn’t stop it because of what I knew—I’d give himeverything,just like before.
But three days after he was paroled, he died of an overdose. He was found by an early-morning jogger on Wildman Beach, lying in the sand, facing the rising sun. There was evidence a woman had been with him—some long strands of hair, a cheap golden hoop earring, a used condom—but no one could ever find her. I hate that woman, whoever she is. He should have come to me, not to her. He was cremated and his ashes sent to his elderly mother in Boca. I didn’t even know he’d had an elderly mother in Boca.
Camille keeps saying that we never know the deep-down reasons people do the things they do, so we need to be gentle with each other. We need to forgive. She says I need to let go of all of this. I wish she would stop bothering me. That other ghost here at the Dellawisp doesn’t try to give me unwanted advice.
I asked Camille whyshedoesn’t let go.
She says she wants to, but Mac is the one holding on to her.
I told her that’s what I want, too, for someone to love me so much they can’t let go of me.
She says it’s about the love you give, not the love you get.
But the way I see it, it’s not really love if you’re not loved back.
It’s just something you make up.
And if no one ever reads my diaries, then no one will ever understand and finally love me.
And all I’ll ever be is something I made up.
