And then a black bulge came hurtling through the window, squeaking loudly, its wings brushing her face.
Leeda was up and screaming, tumbling onto the floor and running into the hall, beating at her face, at her clothes, sure it was still on her. She burst out onto the grass still screaming and flapping madly at her hair. Finally she came to a stop and spun around. No sign of the bat. She inspected herself again and again. And finally breathed a sigh of relief.
She walked out farther into the grass, stood with her hands on her hips, and took a deep breath of fresh air. Now that she was standing, she realized she actually felt strong. Healthy. As if the last vestiges of pneumonia had died off while she sat on the bed. She decided to take a walk.
She wouldn’t have remembered the cigarette at all if she hadn’t seen the plume of smoke rising above the trees about ten minutes later. Leeda came to a standstill then. She rocked back and forth on her feet, once, twice, looked around as if, if it really was what it might be, she could figure out a way to pretend it hadn’t been her. But she got over that quickly. She launched into a run, yelling toward the house.
After the fire department had been called, all Walter, Poopie, Birdie, and Leeda could do was watch the building burn.
Because it was breezy, the fire had spread, almost gently, like it had just reached out and embraced the men’s dorm in a thoughtful hug. The two now stood next to each other very much ablaze. Nobody said anything for a long while.
“Well,” Walter said. “They had to come down sooner or later.” He put his hands in his pockets.
The four of them looked at each other. Leeda wondered if they were all thinking what she was: that it was the end of an era. Or at least, the era as they knew it. And Walter didn’t seem all that concerned.
“Leeda, you want a ride to your graduation?” Poopie asked.
Leeda looked back at the fires. “Yeah.”
As Becca Wise, the mayor’s daughter, cracked her way along the peaks and valleys of the national anthem, Leeda looked over her shoulder at where her family—Danay, her dad, her mom, Birdie, Uncle Walter, Aunt Cynthia, and Poopie—sat. Birdie sat not far behind them, looking proud. Leeda looked back at Murphy’s empty seat, thinking she had been right. Graduations were worth missing.
After Becca, there were the speeches, then names were called. As each graduate rose to accept his or her diploma, there were loud cheers and wolf whistles from families in the back.
Leeda fidgeted until she heard her name, followed by a low round of clapping and cheers, but there were no wolf whistles. Her wolf whistler was missing. Murphy would have made a fool out of herself to yell for her.
When everyone threw their caps in the air, Leeda tucked hers into her robe and walked out onto the lawn. In the gaggle of hugging students that poured onto the grass, she was grabbed and squeezed and congratulated. She smiled and laughed, but she quickly made her way back behind a pillar of the tent.
As Leeda watched from her secret spot, her family materialized in the crowd—her dad carrying the camera and shaking hands with one of the teachers, Danay and Brighton hand in hand, Birdie and Poopie whispering about something. And her mom. Her mom stood apart, watching. Playing her role. Careful not to give anything away. Just like her.
When they all left for the graduation dinner at Liddie’s a few minutes later, Leeda detoured by the orchard. She dug around the side of Orchard Road, searching the dried leaves and debris. All that was left of the Barbie was a head without a body. She stuck it in her pocket, thinking what Murphy would have thought—that if anyone saw her walking around with dismembered doll heads, she’d look like a psychopath.
When she arrived, Lucretia was sitting at a white-draped table with a group of women from the Magnolia Garden Guild. Leeda walked up beside her and put the Barbie facedown on the table.
Lucretia squinted at it, then looked at Leeda, bewildered.
“I don’t think this was ever mine.” Leeda crouched down by her mom’s chair, feeling her nerves along her skin, like she was fully there in every part of her body. She felt solid and Leeda-shaped, whatever that shape might turn out to be. And she felt a little bit Lucretia-shaped too, for better or worse. She was both.
Leeda wrapped her fingers around her mom’s wrist with a kind of intimacy they didn’t use with each other. She could feel Lucretia’s pulse through her skin. The skin felt as fragile and soft as a butterfly’s wing. She made a promise to herself to do this more. To be more fearless. To stop loving her mom by her mom’s rules and to stop expecting her mom to love her by Leeda’s own. Lucretia stared down at her hand, her lips tight, her jaw straight and stiff.
“Mom, I…need…something.” Leeda lingered on the word need. She didn’t want to use it lightly. There were things she had thought she needed that maybe she didn’t, and there were things she needed much more than she had thought.
Maybe it wasn’t too late for her to dig them both out of the muck.
On the afternoon of May 16, Poopie Pedraza was standing on the front porch of the Darlington farmhouse when a swarm of bats surrounded her. They circled her head like a halo for a few moments, her arms outstretched to swat them away, and then they swarmed down the gravel drive and off toward the barn. There they disappeared down a hole, its entrance no longer littered with junk, and into the caves that ran beneath the Darlington Orchard. Some things were better when you just let them run their course naturally.
Forty-nine
Murphy got lost three times on the trip from the Port Authority to campus. After thirty hours on the bus, though, the delay seemed like a drop in the bucket. In Bridgewater, she had always felt like she moved so fast compared to everyone else, but it took five minutes on the streets of New York for her to feel thoroughly, achingly slow. In New York, apparently, Murphy was inept, clumsy, lopsided. She took wrong turns. She stared with big bumpkin eyes. Murphy had always sneered at people who had big bumpkin eyes. The only thing she’d recognized so far was the Empire State Building, far in the distance.
It took her an hour and a half to find the campus and another half hour to find the student life building. She walked to the desk expecting some kind of welcome, but all she got was brusque directions to Hayden Hall, room 412. The number seemed ambitious. She felt more like a one or a two. Maybe a negative two. Without a bunch of people around who knew more about her than she wanted them to, she could feel her idea of herself shaking apart, and she’d only just arrived. What would a week do?
At her building, she squeezed in the door behind the person in front of her and made her way to the elevator, feeling as wobbly and lopsided as ever. She rode it to the fourth floor, stepped into the hall, and peered around. The hall was lit by long fluorescent lights, not sterile, but clean and bare.
A couple of girls were standing by one of the doors, talking. “Hey,” she said. She tried to paste a look of indifference on her face as she wobbled past them. She disliked them immediately.
They hey’d her back and she kept going. She was surprised to find how close she was to turning around and heading back to Port Authority. She actually slowed, hovered, and looked over her shoulder.
When she turned back around, she saw a pair of legs poking out from one of the doorways at the end of the hall. Murphy decided to dislike whoever owned them. They were long, perfect, expensive legs—the least likable kind. And her heart sank as it became clear—by counting the door numbers ahead of her—that they were sticking out of her dorm room. Finally she had wobbled along far enough to see who they belonged to. When she did, she came to an abrupt halt.
“You left me all these IOUs,” Leeda said, holding out a fistful of paper scraps. “I need to cash in on them.” She smiled. “See, I don’t have a thing to wear,” she said in an exaggerated Southern drawl.
Murphy tried to pull herself together again. She blinked at Leeda, then leaned against the dorm room door opposite hers like someone had pushed her into it. She let go of her suitcase and it wobbled between them.
&n
bsp; Leeda stood, leaning back too. There was a bit of Lucretia in her; Murphy could see it. “Mom bought me the ticket. I think it cost, like, eight hundred dollars with two hours’ notice.”
“She owes you,” Murphy said.
“Yeah.”
Leeda peered about and Murphy followed her eyes down the hall. It was like they didn’t know each other even though they did. And then Leeda leaned forward and just sank into her, squeezing her tight, and all that disappeared. “I just needed you, Murphy.”
Suddenly she was all Leeda. The fear in the air evaporated—Murphy’s and Leeda’s. It flew up to the clouds. Something about the two of them holding on to each other sent it drifting south.
And Murphy, who’d wobbled her way all the way from Bridgewater, caught her balance again.
Fifty
Walter left Birdie in charge the day the workers were supposed to arrive. It was a big measure of trust. It was also the first vacation Birdie could ever remember her dad taking without her. He and Poopie were driving to a bed-and-breakfast in Savannah. Birdie tried not to think about how weird it all was.
Without anyone but Birdie there, the orchard seemed bigger than usual. Birdie caught up on the last of the preparations for the workers. Several times that day, like every day, she wondered what Leeda and Murphy were doing at that moment. She walked the perimeter, watching her footsteps. She wanted to think about anything but the bus. In the back of her mind was the idea that despite everything, Enrico would be on it. Or rather, at the topmost part of her mind there was the back-most possibility that he might show up in a few short hours and set everything right again.
She wound up and down the rows of peach trees. The peaches dangled from the branches in clusters, like cells, ready to be picked. Birdie felt around a few, her fingers squeezing gently on the flesh, testing, pulling lightly until she found the right one and pulled it off. She bit into it deeply and immediately knew she’d been too hasty. It was sweet, but it wasn’t perfect. She ate the rest anyway, relishing the fuzz on her tongue and the way it felt when her teeth met the pit, and because it was a superstition of hers with first fruits, she made a wish.
She couldn’t believe how slow the time went. When she checked the clock in the kitchen, there was still an hour to go. An hour might make her fall over and die. She decided to trek to Murphy’s garden.
Already in the three weeks since Murphy had left, lots of weeds had crept back in. Birdie wasn’t sure she’d find the time to dig them all out again. But she could stave them off for a while. She knelt and began grasping and yanking. She worked there for a long time until the sound she’d been waiting for yanked her out of her thoughts. She wove through the garden, across the lawn, and situated herself in front of the porch.
They trailed off one by one, waving and moving toward her. Emma, Raeka, Fonda, Alita, Isabel…She hugged them and watched over their shoulders, so intently that when he climbed off the bus, she thought she was going crazy and seeing things. He had a look of concentration on his face, and then he looked straight at her. Or more like through her. He didn’t smile. He just tucked his hands in his pockets and stared around as the others pulled their bags out of the luggage hatch.
Birdie swallowed. She didn’t move as she watched him make his way to the hastily built new dorms, which were clean and white as marshmallow cream. She couldn’t react. It was like she had dropped deep down inside herself, like a rock dropping into a well. The ripples went on somewhere below the surface. She answered the others’ friendly questions, watching him from the corner of her eye, already picturing turning around, walking into the house, closing off her heart, covering the well. It would be easier.
Finally the rest of the workers migrated off toward the dorms with their bags. Birdie turned and moved up the porch. She walked through the front door and down the hall, then right out the back door. She circled the house, staring at the dorms. Then she walked onto the stairs again, and again into the hall. Majestic looked at her like she’d lost her mind.
She crouched down and rubbed Majestic’s ears intently. She thought of Honey Babe. Standing still had never kept things from changing. She walked back out the front door and, her ears already going red from embarrassment, set a path for the dorms.
The men were standing in the hallway talking when Birdie walked in. They all looked at her, curious. She didn’t say anything and moved through them, walking down the hall, peering in all the open doorways.
He was facing the window. He must have sensed her standing there in the hall because he turned around. “Hi, Birdie,” he said, resigned, as if he hadn’t wanted her to come. Again he didn’t look at her as much as past her. She felt her hope flag.
Birdie shoved her hands in her pockets. She was wearing the same overalls from days ago. She could feel the round white pebble she’d picked up from the road. She squeezed it hard, like she was trying to crush it.
“I just wanted to see if…we were okay,” she said, feeling relief. “Just to make sure we can be friends. I don’t want it to be weird, you know?” Friends? Different bits of Birdie died as she said it. It was like stars exploding and burning out one by one. She wondered if this was part of getting older. Parts of your heart exploded and died.
“We are friends.” Enrico looked her very straight in the eye. It was how much he seemed to mean it that made her die most of all.
“Good.”
“Good,” he said.
They stood in silence. Birdie swallowed so loudly she was sure he could hear it. She squeezed the pebble. She could feel the moment tumbling out of her fingers. She had to say something more. She just didn’t know what.
“I…” she started, and stopped. She held out her hand, her palm flat, to show the pebble. She stared at it because she didn’t want to look at him. “I picked up this pebble the other day. And I didn’t really know why I did it….” She cleared her throat, glancing around the room. “But I think it’s because Murphy puts rocks on the bus.”
Put. Past tense, she reminded herself. Murphy had gone. Birdie was getting flustered. She didn’t know how to make it make sense to someone else. Birdie sighed. “You know, rocks are really old. It’s probably been here for a million years. I mean, what are the chances it would ever end up anywhere else?” she said finally, as if that said everything.
She thrust the pebble into his hand and held his fist closed. “I don’t want to be friends.”
Enrico didn’t pull his hand away, so Birdie reached her arms around his neck gingerly. She pressed her head against his shoulder and held him, tighter and tighter. She leaned her head against his ear. She moved the bridge of her nose up the side of his cheek. He kept his face very still.
She touched the top of her cheekbone to the top of his. She put her fingers on the bones of his shoulder, deliberately, like they were buttons she wanted to press. Like she wanted to know how to operate him. She felt the terror of not knowing if he wanted her there. Birdie was dangling in space.
And then he moved just slightly, and she felt his breath on her cheek, and then his lips, softly, right near her ear. One tiny kiss. And then he sank into her.
Of course, Birdie thought. Of course he did.
Over his shoulder, she looked out at the peach trees beyond the glass. The branches reached for one another across the rows.
At times on the orchard, the leaves fluttered like locusts. At times they turned upside down and showed their white undersides in an almost embarrassing way. At times they turned orange and brown. And at times they came spinning off the trees like whirligigs. Now they were perfectly, sublimely still, like an audience.
Birdie moved her lips to Enrico’s and sighed into them, touching her forehead to his.
From the trees, they looked like full-grown lovers.
Epilogue
There were traces left behind.
At the Darlington Orchard, a garden began its slow decline back into wilderness. Weeds sidled up to the flowers, cautiously at first. The kudzu began, slowly but
not that slowly, to climb the trellis, intending to cover it completely.
In the Darlington house, a little crayon Poopie drawing hid behind the pasta jar in the pantry, looking for all the world like the Virgin Mary. A silver gum wrapper dropped on the porch sat balled up and wedged indefinitely in a corner of the doorjamb. A red notebook covered in exuberant handwriting and messy black stars sat at the bottom of a trash bin. It would stay there for twenty-three years.
In the pecan grove, Methuselah’s offspring grew taller. At the Balmeade Country Club next door, a peach tree began to grow on the ninth green. In the house next to the Pearly Gates Cemetery, Rex Taggart went to bed with a hole in his heart. Over the years, it wouldn’t heal, or shrink, or weaken. That night, it would only begin a slow journey to a place where it could hide.
In a dorm room in New York City, Murphy and Leeda lay on Murphy’s bed, studying. The room screamed Murphy. She’d flung CDs and notebooks on every surface that was hers. Her dirty clothes hung from the corners. And a postcard sat stuck in the frame of the mirror above her desk. Occasionally Murphy or Leeda looked up at it, like it needed to be included. On the front was a photo of the campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. On the back were the words: School here is amazing. Mexico is amazing. You are amazing. It was the only postcard they ever got from Birdie. She preferred to send letters.
For a while, Poopie Pedraza swore she could see the ghost of a little girl walking around the orchard property, age seven or eight, with an auburn ponytail and chicken legs. It was the way Poopie would always see Birdie even though she saw the grown Birdie too.