A Lily in the Light(20)
“Maybe it means something,” Cerise whispered, but Andre wasn’t listening. He knotted his hands into fists, squeezing hard and fast, before throwing one through the wall. The picture frames shook. Plaster scattered over the carpet. Cerise strangled back a sob.
The door slammed shut. The candle flame jumped. Nick flashed across the room. The door slammed behind him, too, leaving Esme alone with her mother, Madeline, and a gaping hole where the wall used to be a smooth, boring beige.
The phone rang in Cerise and Andre’s bedroom. It rang and rang, and soon it would be picked up by the thing that looked like an answering machine but wasn’t, and everything would be recorded alongside their real answering machine. Hello, you’ve reached the Bellerose family. Please leave a message after the tone. A garbled voice left a message Esme couldn’t hear. Outside, the 7 train rumbled to a stop. The clock ticked. Cerise picked up the half-finished list of names and held it in her lap.
Madeline was very still, staring at the lines on her hands. A love line. A life line. How many times had they traced those lines and made up stories for each other? You’ll have three husbands. You’ll live to be one hundred.
“They let her see where she is,” Madeline whispered, rubbing her thumb over her palm where her life line would be. She looked like she’d been kicked under the ribs, crushed. “That’s not good.”
“What do you mean?” Esme asked. Slowly, the unfairness settled in. You couldn’t just take someone who didn’t belong to you. Esme thought of the tan car Lily had seen. You couldn’t just pluck someone out of their real life and drop them into another one like a doll in a dollhouse. What kind of person would do that?
Les Sylphides. Swan Lake. There was almost always an evil something pulling strings so people would see the wrong thing. Was that what Annette was?
She hadn’t seen it right. Not all of it. That day in the park, Lily had been running because Nick had said there was a ghost in the slide. He’d slid halfway down and held himself inside the tube, banging on the plastic and screaming that he was being eaten alive, and Lily had bolted. The birthday cake picture fluttered on the door. Why wasn’t Nick in it? Why wasn’t Nick in any of Lily’s pictures?
It was too much. Esme felt like the last dead leaf on a tree, afraid the wind would blow too hard and knock her into a gutter. She held the seat of her chair until her fingers ached, pretending it was the barre at the studio. In only a minute, the music would start, and Amelia’s voice would follow. Her body would do what it was supposed to do, and she wouldn’t have time to think about tiny rainbows on Lily’s fingers or a tree with a tree house or her father throwing holes through walls.
“Come on,” Cerise said, gathering herself and brushing away the wet spots on her cheeks. “We have work to do.”
Chapter Five
On Sunday just before dawn, a flock of crows landed on the street. They covered the phone wires, walked on parked cars, perched on side view mirrors, and covered the stoops, sipping from icy puddles and scratching through garbage scraps. The air was flapping, heavy with the sound of bird wings. Esme wondered if Anna Pavlova’s backyard with its pond full of swans would’ve felt like this and decided it wouldn’t have. Swans were too graceful to be noisy.
“You have a message.” Madeline shook Esme’s shoulder. She hadn’t heard her sister’s bare feet on the carpet and wondered if she’d been asleep, if the crows were a dream, but she looked out the window, and they were still there.
“There’s a bunch of crows outside,” Esme said. Maybe Madeline knew how to interpret them, but she was pacing, freshly showered, the only one who’d kept to an almost-normal schedule, and didn’t bother looking out the window.
“You have a message,” Madeline said again. A notebook was balanced on her arm, the same way she did when she studied and paced. “I’m a kinesthetic learner,” she’d explained, but it was an annoying habit. The crows were weighing down the telephone wire. It sagged. How many birds would it take before the line snapped and the birds scattered? It wouldn’t matter then if they’d kept the line free or not. It already felt like it didn’t matter considering no one important had called. Do you remember, she wanted to ask Lily, all those numbers we practiced—our address, your phone number, your tricky zip code—and how to spell your name, first and last, in case you were ever lost? Maybe the birds had a message for her like Birdman’s pigeons.
“Esme?” Madeline tapped the pen on the notebook. The plastic clicked against the spiral wires, shattering the snow globe world outside the window, where people had left things on the street: balloons, open Bibles, stuffed animals.
“Stop it.” Esme snatched the pen from Madeline’s hand and threw it across the room. It hit the wall and left a blue streak.
“Asshole,” Madeline hissed. “Don’t even try to ask me who it was later.” Madeline stomped back to their bedroom and slammed the door. Esme pulled the blanket tighter and leaned her head against the window. It was cold. Her breath fogged the glass. She drew a little L and wiped it away. Lily would have thought the birds were special.
Cerise had covered the hole in the wall with a black plastic bag and relit the candles. The room smelled like black licorice again. She missed the grapefruit candle Amelia had in the studio. That was a friendly candle, unlike this one. Bundled shapes left things on the sidewalk below. Who are you? Esme wondered, but she was most curious about the person who hung prisms and built a tree house in a red tree, whatever that meant, assuming it was true and that it meant anything at all.