Because if I brought it home, I’d have to tell everyone what I’d done.
Have them see me for what and who I truly was.
Admit that my mother was right after all: I was a kid not worth loving. I was a terrible, worse-than-useless child with something dark and poisonous inside me. Maybe she really should have drowned me at birth.
I carried the bird, wrapped in my sweatshirt, to the well.
I held it there a second, over the opening that looked like a great dark mouth.
I felt the blue jay fluttering desperately in my hands, its tiny bird heart racing.
I dropped it down.
Watched it fall.
I turned away, hurried off, thinking that maybe I’d be able to forget about it. To not hear its pitiful, desperate cries. But the rounded walls of the well just amplified it.
Eee-eee-eee, it cried after me as I ran through the woods, away from that old well, tripping on roots, branches scratching my face.
Eee-eee-eee.
It was the most terrible thing I’d ever done.
Even now, all these years later, I found myself back at that well in my nightmares, listening to the bird screech.
I knew it was long gone, its bones turned to dust, but I could hear it still.
And now the sound was coming from my mother’s room.
“Eee-eee-eee,”she cried, a perfect imitation.
But how could she have possibly known?
FOURTEEN
WHO’S GOING TO BRINGme to rehearsal at the opera house this weekend?” Olivia asked.
“I don’t know yet, sweetie. It’s only Tuesday. The weekend feels like a long way off right now.” My head ached. I was feeling raw and tired, completely used up, and it was only six p.m.
“But it’snot,” she said. “Not really. And whoever goes can sit and watch the dress rehearsal. Don’t you want to see me in my mouse costume?”
“I think I’d rather be surprised when we’re there on opening night,” I said.
Olivia made a pouty face, shoved a bite of pancake into her mouth.
“The mouse costumes are the same every year anyway,” Izzy said. “The same ones I wore way back when I was a level one.”
Olivia’s eyes got huge. “You were a mouse?”
“Of course. All level ones start out as mice.”
Olivia stared at her sister, mystified, unable to believe that way back before Olivia was even born, Izzy had been a mouse.
We were sitting around the table having breakfast for dinner, as I’d promised Olivia this morning: gingerbread pancakes, bacon, and fruit salad. This morning felt like a million years ago. I stabbed a grape and it jumped away from my fork.
“Are you all going to be able to come on opening night?” Olivia asked.
“Of course we’ll all be there,” Mark said.
