Page 41 of Little Bird
Now I laugh. “Tickling you isn’t physical violence, girl. I thought you lived in New York City. Surely you know what real violence looks like.”
“Oh, that’s it,” she mutters.
She pushes me over so I’m on my back and dives onto me, digging her fingers into my ribs in exactly the way I can’t stand, and now it’s my turn to shout with surprise. I squirm, trying to get away from her fingers, but she’s got me pinned now, her legs somehow wound around mine, and I don’t want to hurt her by pushing her too hard.
I also don’t like being tickled, though, and I manage to get my legs out from under hers and turn her on her own back. She’s breathing hard and giggling now, and she looks so like the girl I used to know that for a moment I can’t remember how much time has even passed. It feels like we’re fifteen again, careless in the mountain’s summer as we whisper in the night, trying not to wake our parents.
The feeling flees the moment she stops laughing and grows serious, though.
“Tell me,” she says again. “Why do you hide in your closet every night?”
And this time, I do. I lay down next to her, my head on her chest, and start saying all the things I’ve never said to anyone. Because it suddenly seems so, so stupid to have kept them to myself all these years when she was right there, waiting to help me hold my pain on nights when I couldn’t stand to hold it by myself.
“She’s not my mother,” I say quietly. “And neither was Helen, but she at least tried. And she had you, which made it so much easier. But then you left so suddenly, and I felt like my whole world had collapsed. Like I had finally found someone to keep me grounded and then she abandoned me the first chance she got.”
“I didn’t abandon you,” she says quietly, stroking my hair. “And I bet a part of you knew that. But I’m guessing that didn’t matter, did it?”
Did I say this girl knew me better than anyone ever had?
Because she does.
“It didn’t,” I murmur. “All I could see was someone else I loved leaving me.”
“Like your mother did.” It’s not a question but there’s an opening there for me to tell her the rest of the story, if I want to.
I do.
“I know she didn’t leave me on purpose, either,” I start. “She didn’t want to go. And it was an accident. She was shopping in town, right before Christmas. She’d taken the truck. But it was snowing so hard that year, and she got stuck in a snowbank on the way home. She called here to ask for help. My father was going to go get her in the four-wheeler, and I begged him to take me. He didn’t want to, but I thought I was grown-up enough to help, and I loved my mother desperately. If she was stuck, I wanted to save her.”
“Always playing the hero.”
There’s a smile in her voice, but it’s a sad one, and I nod.
“I thought I could help. But when we got there, she was stuck up against the side of the cliff, in the worst possible place. The road was narrow there and it was a steep drop on the other side. She’d slid into the cliff on the only safe side, but it would have been so easy for her to have gone the other way. I was young, but I knew it was fate that she was even still alive. Only she was stuck, and we couldn’t get the door of the truck open to get her out. There was too much snow, and it was coming down so hard. My father decided to tow the truck out of the drift using the four-wheeler. He thought it was the only way to get her to safety. But then...”
I pause, almost incapable of finishing. I’ve never told this story to anyone else, though I think about it almost every night. It colors my nightmares and follows me like a shadow during the day, always there in my mind.
Always haunting me.
Taryn used to save me from those nightmares if I called for her. And now, for the first time, I wonder if I can use her to clean the memories out of my head entirely.
“It didn’t work,” I say simply. “We got the truck tied to the four-wheeler and started pulling, but there was a large crack, and then an avalanche. The snow hit the truck and jerked it toward the drop, and my father hit the gas of the four-wheeler, trying to fight it. But the action had thrown me out of the four-wheeler and onto the ground, and the snow hit me too, and... And...”
“And your father saved you,” she says quietly. “But you lost your mother.”
I gulp and close my eyes, the tears rolling down my cheeks at the memory of the night. The icy cold of the snow, the darkness around me, the roar of snow moving faster than it should. The absolute terror and confusion.
My mother’s screams for us to get out of the way and get to safety.
I turn my face back into Taryn’s lap, trying to keep the emotions at bay, and let her finish the story for me. Because she already knows. I don’t understand how she does, but she already hears the ending.
“He saved you, but he blamed you for the fact that he couldn’t save your mother. Even though that little four-wheeler was going to lose that battle anyhow. And even though you were only ten, and he shouldn’t have taken you out there. Then he brought home a new woman with a little girl, and against all odds, we made a family and you started to feel safe again.”
I can’t speak, but just nod against her chest, my heart swelling against her gentle voice and even gentler fingers.
“And then we left, and you decided that everyone you love leaves you eventually, and it’s therefore not safe to love. And I’m guessing your father turned himself off the day we disappeared, and left you alone.”
My heart shatters into a million pieces at the simple statement, and I sob loudly. I don’t mean to. I mean to keep it sealed away inside, the same way I always have. But hearing her say it so clearly, hearing the truth spoken in a way I’ve never really defined, is so much that I can’t hold it all. It’s like lightning in my hand.
