“Trade secret,” says the psychoanalyst.
“Jessica,” the Star Catcher says. “Tell me again why this person is here.”
“He’s my therapist,” says the Bird Woman. “Please bring him some supper.”
The door swings closed as suddenly as it opened. Footsteps echo, grow softer, and the psychoanalyst — ahem — attempts to clear his non-existent throat. “You must do something about this,” he tells the Bird Woman. “Things can’t go on like this.”
Just then she is helping the ostrich out of its parchment, pulling it out by its flightless wings, one hand tucked under its belly.
“I have a plan,” she tells the psychoanalyst, grunting. The ostrich separates from the parchment with a satisfying pop. It peers around the room, looking for a hole to bury its head in. The Bird Woman directs it to the piles of moons and stars, and it saunters over, thrusts its beak into the glowing chips of light.
“You have a plan,” the psychoanalyst curls his lip into a mock sneer. “I’m sure this will be interesting.”
The Star Catcher used to always bring the Bird Woman love tokens. Packages of exotic seeds from across the ocean. A new glass filter, through which she could direct starlight. Two lovebirds which she herself never made — they had hatched on their own, in the wild. “Like us,” he told her. “Wild,” he’d said, nuzzling her neck feathers, and she had pressed herself closer to his hands.
When the stars started to disappear, though, the Bird Woman asked him to stop taking them. “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” she said. “People are talking.”
“What do I care about people?” the Star Catcher said. “I have you, Jess. What business is it of theirs?” He had placed one hand around her neck and brought her face to his to kiss it. The Bird Woman had pushed him away.
“The stars belong to no one,” she said. “And neither do I. I choose to be with you, Ivan.” She had looked down at her feet because she couldn’t stand to see the Star Catcher when he behaved this way, which, she discovered over time, was a common occurrence.
“They belong to me,” the Star Catcher had said, his voice firm.
“You can’t take them with you,” the Bird Woman whispered.
“Where?” he had asked, as if her statement was truly a mystery.
“To the next world,” she had said.
But her answer had only made him grin.
Throughout the day, the Bird Woman rests on a nest of blankets, next to the mounds of moons and stars. She barely sleeps, though, because the Star Catcher insists on sitting next to her, cross-legged, hands folded in his lap, telling stories. His favorites to tell are from his childhood. This is nothing new to the Bird Woman. Back when they were lovers, the Star Catcher had told her stories all the time. Now that she’s back, living in his lighthouse, he’s resumed telling them as if he’d only been temporarily interrupted by her absence. They are not lovers this time around, though; they are simply inhabiting the same space together. Along with the psychoanalyst, that is.
The Bird Woman is glad the psychoanalyst is with her. Not for his advice, but because his presence means she never has to be alone with the Star Catcher. The psychoanalyst is not glad of anything, really. He sits on his shelf, rolling his eyes as the Star Catcher tells his stories, sometimes snorting.
“When I was a little boy,” the Star Catcher tells the Bird Woman, “I used to love summer best of all seasons. I would wait until the sun began to set and the fog rolled in to the island, and then the fireflies would appear, flashing their tiny green sparks in the mist, signaling back and forth to each other. They were so beautiful, the way the glow came from their own bodies. I wanted to glow like that, too. I used to try to catch them and put them in glass jars to make lanterns. I liked the feel of them in my hands, crawling on my skin. I’d set the lantern on my nightstand and watch them glowing on and off all night, until I fell asleep. In the morning, though, they were always on their backs, their legs sticking up, dead as dead can be.”
“How sad,” the Bird Woman tells him. Her eyelids flutter, heavy with sleep, but she continues listening. She’s heard the story before, among others, but the Star Catcher continually returns to this one, polishing it over and over as he tells it.
“It’s funny, though,” says the Star Catcher. “Because it became harder and harder for me to catch the fireflies. After a while, I’d try to catch them, but they’d lift into the air just before I could get hold of them. They’d be just inches above my reach, and they’d float higher and higher, until they disappeared into the night sky. That’s when I noticed the stars. That’s when I started to catch stars instead. Stars don’t move, unless they’re dying.”
“It’s hot in here,” the Bird Woman says. She scratches under the ruff of feathers circling her neck. “Please. Open a window. Or else bring me a fan.”
“Why not go out for a walk instead?” the Star Catcher offers. He lifts one eyebrow and motions with his hands toward the door.
“Too tired,” says the Bird Woman, punctuating her explanation with a long, elliptical sigh. “I’ve been working so hard, so very hard,” she tells the Star Catcher. “Please, Ivan, bring me some fresh air.”
“Of course,” the Star Catcher acquiesces. “Besides,” he says, “this room is beginning to stink of your birds and their dung. You should think about selling some of them, Jess, really.”
“Why not release them?” the Bird Woman says. She looks down into her folded hands, locked together in her lap. If she looks at him, he’ll see through her; if she doesn’t look at him, he’ll know something is not right. Without knowing her at all, the Star Catcher knows some things about the Bird Woman. He knows the details she wishes other people would overlook: escape tactics, white lies, kindnesses to brush tension under a rug.
For several moments he is silent, so the Bird Woman finally looks up, blinking. The Star Catcher meets her stare.
“Release them?” he asks, eyebrows knitting together. “Wouldn’t you rather sell them at the market? They’re your birds, after all. You made them.”
“But I’ve made so many,” the Bird Woman says. “And anyway, why not? I’m here now, instead of renting the cottage. And sometimes I like to make birds for no good reason. Let them take to sky instead of hobbling around in this tower.”
“As long as you’re sure,” the Star Catcher says, shaking his head. He searches the folds of his robes for a set of keys and, finding them, opens a box on the floor, next to the doorway. Inside the box is a long lever. Kneeling next to it, the Star Catcher pulls back on the lever, using all of his weight. The lever click, click, clicks into position. Gears churn, grinding beneath the Bird Woman’s feet. She can feel the floor trembling beneath her as the dome of the lantern room slowly slides around her, until suddenly a sliver of black sky appears, its shadow deeper where the stars have been plucked. Slowly the gap widens until the lantern room is half-exposed to night.
“Ahh,” the Bird Woman breathes deeply. The air is cold, salty on her lips. It tastes of feathers floating to earth and fish leaping in spangled light.
“Better?” the Star Catcher asks, still kneeling next to the lever, smiling.
“Much,” the Bird Woman says. Her birds flutter and hop around the room in anticipation. She holds both hands in front of her, then, palms up, open, a private signal only she and they understand, and the birds rise up — all of them, except for the ostrich — each with a star or a moon clenched in its talons.
“Stop that! What are you doing?” The Star Catcher stands from where he’d been leaning back on the lever, stretching his arms out, grabbing after the stars and moons that hang lowest in the air. But each one eludes him, floating up and into the night air like the fireflies of his youth.
The birds spread over the city, the island, past the clouds and even higher, spreading outward, like fireworks opening above the boulevards and boatmen, until each star is set back into its proper niche. There are so many holes in the fabric of darkness, and each one fits like
a jewel in an antique broach.
“Call them back, Jessica!” the Star Catcher pleads. He stands in the center of the lantern room, staring up at what took years to collect, then collapses into a pool of black robes like a melted candle, and begins to weep. Openly, fitfully.
“Time for me to go, I think,” says the psychoanalyst, and the ostrich saunters over to pluck him down from the bookshelf by his beard. Then the two of them trot down the stairwell, and the psychoanalyst’s voice echoes back, “Call if you need any more advice, my dear.”
The Bird Woman crawls on hands and knees to where the Star Catcher sits on the cold stone floor, his head lolling to one side, his arms splayed out in front of him, drooping like an unstrung puppet. “All gone,” he mutters. “All gone. I’ll never be able to collect them all again.”
“No, Ivan,” she says, pulling him backwards to rest his head on her lap. “They’re still here. Look up. See them? See how brightly they shine on us?”
He isn’t listening, though. It’s obvious from the way he shakes his head in disagreement, with dissatisfaction. “No,” he says, wincing with tears. “Gone, gone, gone. What am I going to do now?”
Stroking his forehead, she leans down and kisses his worried creases. In her head, the psychoanalyst’s head is still talking. He’s telling her that what she’s doing will make everything happen again. It’s a pattern, my dear, he explains. He’s right, she knows that, but she says what she wants to say anyway.
“Let them go,” she whispers into his ear. “Some of them might come back.”
The Guardian of the Egg
My sister was the girl with the tree growing out of her head. You’ve probably heard of her. You might have seen her on TV. Her picture was plastered all over the place for a while. That shock of wheat ruffling around her face like a great golden mane, the weeping willow tree growing out of the top of her head, her skin white as chalk and smooth as porcelain, those tiny tiger lilies that grew between her eyelashes. And all of those geese she kept under her mossy cloak! A freak show, really. I understand why everyone thought she might be working with a foreign government, or that she’d been irradiated by the local nuclear power plant. But, really, she was just another ordinary teenager under all of that flora. I know because she was my older sister.
Hester was a straight A student. She was going to be class valedictorian. No one was really surprised. She wore white stockings and old-fashioned sweaters with pearl buttons. The girls at school used to make fun of her because of how she dressed and because of how smart she was. Also maybe due to the fact that she had braces and bad acne, and her hair might have been styled better, and she had a habit of looking down at her feet shuffling through the hallways. She bumped into people a lot because of this. I was two years younger, in the tenth grade. I pretended not to know her. It was easy to do that because she never saw me in the hallways. Her head was always pointed toward the floor.
When the tree started growing out of her head, it was springtime. Only a few more months of school remained before she’d graduate and go off to college. At first, you could look right at her and not notice the tree, unless you got close and examined the part down the middle of her hair. After a few weeks, though, it was the size of a flower blooming, a little weeping willow. Kids started to call her Daisy Head Maisy, and they’d laugh and elbow each other when she walked by. Hester didn’t pay them any attention, although I’d shrink back into the hollow of my locker whenever I saw her coming, those weeping willow branches swaying back and forth like a grass hula skirt.
Hester didn’t seem to mind the tree. In fact, I remember the strange grin on her face when she discovered it, like she’d found forgotten money in one of her pockets. She seemed so excited that she parted her hair down the middle instead of on the side, as if she wanted people to notice it. She walked with her head held high. She looked a bit like maybe she thought she was better than everyone. I remember asking, “Hester, why don’t you get scissors and cut it off?” and she winced as if the very thought was repulsive.
“I like it, Stephen,” she said, tilting her head one way, then the other, while she looked at the tree from different angles in the mirror.
“It’s gross, Hester,” I said, and she narrowed her eyes and said, “I don’t expect you to understand this. Maybe you’re even a little jealous?”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. She sounded slightly religious, flipping her hair over one shoulder, then the other, examining the tree growing out of her cranium as if it were a pair of earrings. I’d never seen Hester so concerned with a mirror.
My parents took Hester to a neurologist and then to a psychologist, to ease some of their worries. The neurologist said the tree couldn’t be removed because its roots grew directly into her cerebrum. She’d suffer brain damage if we fiddled with it. “And anyway,” he said, “it doesn’t seem to be hurting her.” The tree roots conducted electrical currents, just like the other nerves in her brain. The psychologist said Hester was remarkably sane, considering she had a tree growing out of her head. “She’s coping quite well,” he told my parents, and all my mother and father could do was raise their eyebrows and nod.
Our high school decided to graduate Hester early. The school board said they didn’t want any problems. “Besides,” said our principal, Mrs. Merriman, “everyone knows Hester is the smartest student in her class. Graduation would have been inevitable, wouldn’t it?” She shook hands with my parents briskly, then asked her secretary to see that all the forms were properly filled out.
Reporters and talk show hosts stalked the sidewalks and fast food restaurants of our formerly quiet town. Paparazzi flashed pictures of innocent young girls who happened to be wearing their hair in a ponytail. Ponytails soon became stylistic suicide due to the first-glance similarity they shared with a tree growing out of a girl’s head. This frustrated and angered many female athletes who liked to put their hair up while they jogged or played softball. Now they had to brush their hair out of their eyes as they dribbled or leaped hurdles. Because my sister was the reason for their troubles, the female athletes petitioned for her to move out of town. The petition never made it through the court system, though. A judge threw it out on account that you can’t petition people to leave town. They have to do something wrong first, he said, and Ada McGowen, our school’s best volleyball player, said, “Oh yeah? Well what do you call someone who grows a tree out of her head? I’d say that’s pretty wrong, wouldn’t you?”
Hester seemed oblivious to the troubles her tree caused. She said, “Really, Stephen, my tree isn’t the problem. Those people create their own messes. They’d just like to think my tree is the reason.”
She seemed very wise and old when she spoke like this. In fact, Hester didn’t seem like Hester after a while. I would search her face as she wandered through our tiny backyard, running her fingers through the water in the birdbath, cupping the water in her hands and releasing it, the sun glinting through the water as it ran back into the bath, and sometimes I couldn’t even recognize her as my sister. She seemed larger than she used to. Majestic, even. This was when her skin turned pale and chalky, and overnight her hair changed from silky blonde to a shaggy, golden wheat. This was also when my mother stopped Hester as she passed by the hall where our parents measured us each year on our birthdays to place a pencil mark where the top of our heads met the wall.
“Hester,” my mother said, “come back here a minute.”
My mother took a pencil from the mug that sat next to our telephone. She marked the wall with a thin line, even though she’d already done the same thing three months earlier, on Hester’s seventeenth birthday. When Hester stepped away from the wall, my mother shook her head, her eyes widening.
Within three months, my sister had grown nearly four inches.
I don’t know how to describe Hester before her changes started to happen. She was Hester, my older sister. She was plain and awkward and bad at conversation. You wouldn’t invite her to a party. You wou
ldn’t ask her to a dance. You probably wouldn’t want to have a locker next to hers, either. You could become strange by association if you spent too much time near her. Hester didn’t have any friends, and neither did I, but I had none because of Hester. Because of my embarrassment for Hester, I never brought anyone home. I’d meet Alex or Ryan or Chelsea at the movies, or the mall, or else at a coffee house or the park. They never asked about my family, and I never asked about theirs. We were conspirators in covering up our own pasts. We respected each other’s secrets, never prying or becoming curious. We knew our own secrets weren’t that interesting, and what pain we harbored no one else would understand. We wouldn’t find each other’s problems to be problems anyway, so we never asked what they were.
It was unavoidable, though. After Hester started to change, after the town itself started to change, and the media slipped into our lives, everyone discovered we were related. I was now the girl with the tree growing out of her head’s brother. You might have heard someone call me by that name. You might have read a reporter quote me wrong in any variety of news articles or docudramas, and I never approved of the actor they chose to play my part in the made-for-TV movie, Wild Thing. He was uncouth, and my hair isn’t even blonde. I never wear hiking boots either. That was a dramatic affectation dreamed up by the director, most likely. But people started recognizing me anyway. I could no longer exist anonymously. Suddenly my identity was more Hester than Stephen was ever Stephen. When people saw me, they thought of Hester.
“How is your sister?” they’d ask. Or else, “Is Hester still growing?” Or even, “Tell your sister her sort doesn’t belong in our town.”
I’d nod and twitch a little at the people who held violence toward Hester in their hands. They seemed unforgiving, as if she’d done something to personally affront them. The postman in particular became decidedly spiteful. “You should get someone to start landscaping this crap,” he told me one afternoon in the summer. I looked to where he was pointing and saw vines growing around our mailbox. He pulled some vines away from the lid, stuffed our mail inside, then snapped the box shut.