The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [73]
In the heart of the woods, the buzz of insects grew quieter, muffled by the waxy green of the leaves. Bean paused to hear the symphony above them. Cordy, staring at the tip of her stick bouncing along the bushes, nearly bowled her over. “What?”
“The birds. I never hear birds like this in New York.” Oddly, she’d gotten used to it. When she was little, she would wake up and lie in bed, listening to the conversations of the wrens outside, the flutter of angry wings as the blue jays strutted into each other’s territory. We had built a house for robins in the yard, and Bean remembered being lifted up, leaving the sharp, thick grass beneath her feet and pushing up the top of the birdhouse to see two tiny eggs, deep as Mexican turquoise, resting in the nest inside. They had seemed impossibly bright inside the darkness of the box, and Bean had been filled with an ache to touch them, but when she had reached her hand inside, our mother had pulled her away. Not until the birds had been born and shrieked in hungry, wet-feathered anger every day did our mother pull the shells from the nest, presenting them to us in the palm of her hand like a precious gift. Bean had put them on her dresser, stroking them gently every night, memorizing the delicate variations in color until she knew the fragments better than she knew her own face.
“When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding,” Cordy sang, somewhat tunelessly, which couldn’t be helped, for, lack of musical talent aside, the music for Shakespeare’s songs had long fallen by the wayside, though our father was always interested in contemporary efforts to reconstruct the tunes.
Ahead on the path, Rose had stopped and was waiting, a hand resting imperiously on her hip. “We’re going to be late,” she said.
Bean was still staring up, sightless, like those baby robins in the nest. The shadows of the sunlight slipping between the trees cast a spiderweb on her face. She turned to look at Rose, but her eyes held no recognition, only a vacant freeze.
“I got fired,” she said.
No one said anything, but Cordy stopped poking at the ground with the stick, and Rose’s hand dropped off her hip.
“They fired me.”
“What did you do?” Rose asked, and then wished she could take back the question. It sounded sharp. Whose tongue outvenoms all the worms of Nile. But Bean didn’t seem to notice.
Keeping it inside had been easier. Her stomach had held a heavy, leaden ache she knew to be the weight of the secret, but it was easily reduced to a dull roar, muffled into submission with the simple distractions of daydreams and job-hunting. Speaking it aloud made it impossible for her to ignore. Running from New York had given her distance, made it seem like someone else’s life, someone else’s disaster, but to say it here, in these woods?
“What simple thief brags of his own attaint?” Bean asked. We stood still. We waited. Finally, she turned again to Rose, and her eyes looked clear and direct this time, bright with tears. “I fucked up,” she said. “I stole. From my job. I stole money. I stole so much fucking money.”
Her shoulders shook as she began to cry, pained, keening wails, ululations of grief and shame. Mascara ran thick trails down her cheeks, wiping away the subtle glow of health that makeup had put there, leaving dark shadows beneath her eyes and pale lines along her mouth, pulled down and aching in grief.
Cordy moved first, dropping her stick and pulling Bean into her arms, her fingernails, still stained with blueberry juice, stroking quietly along our sister’s back, tracking the lines of the fabric. Rose came forward tentatively, questions on her lips, but Cordy shook her head, and when Bean dropped her forehead to Cordy’s shoulder, Rose reached out, delicate, as though to touch a feral cat, and stroked Bean’s hair softly.
She told us, then, the whole story. Yes, she’d been naïve, not understanding fully how much it would cost to live in New York. But that wasn’t what had made her do it. It was everything Bean needed to play her part effectively: the shoes, the clothes, the makeup, the drinks at