She stands barefoot in the yard, squinting through the lenses of her glasses. Her dark hair, like his, is unwashed, curled in a loose knot at the nape of her neck.
She is scanning the sky, which is pale and blue, the light just starting to fade. Behind their fence lie the woods, pine trees packed tight on a slope, at the top of which, a mile or so in the distance, is a large blackened patch, the bare branches proof of the last wildfire.
In their yard, the two swallows are skittering back and forth between the nest and the olive tree. The yellow house next door looks deserted.
“Hey, birds,” Ben says for Annie’s enjoyment. “What’s wrong with you guys?”
He likes the shape of her mouth when she smiles, her small teeth, not quite straight, her lips waxy with ChapStick.
“Yeah,” she says. “What’s wrong with you guys?”
Their birds continue screaming. This is the way they think of them, as theirs.
Grace suddenly opens her eyes. Her little arms shoot out from her sides as if startled.
“Do you hear that, Gracie?” says Ben. “Those are birds. Birds are the only animals that can fly.”
They’ve been advised to talk to her as much as possible, but they did not need to be told. It is an immediate urge: to tell her everything they know.
Just three months removed, their apartment in Brooklyn feels already like a cage from which they’ve finally been sprung. That apartment, three hundred square feet, and the site of so much unhappiness. And what luck to be released right here, to this place, these mountains, bordered on three sides by state forest, a place where the smell of pine sap floats over fences, where they sit evenings outside in Adirondack chairs, bought for ten dollars at a yard sale, and where they listen to the crickets buzzing in the trees and to the voices of children playing in the woods. And the stars—you can actually see the stars. And the cabins—some people actually live in log cabins here. And the strawberries and the tomatoes and the avocados and the corn, all of it sold at the produce stand on the road into town, stocked each day with the fruits of the valley below. Here is where they’ve waited these months for the baby to come. California.
A second sound now surfaces, just as urgent or more so, the doorbell. Someone is ringing it again and again. Surprise jumps between Annie’s eyes and his, no words needed. So much can be said without saying it, the efficiency of marriage.
Ben is the one who answers the door, and so he is the one who finds her: one of the girls from next door, the younger one, is standing in sandals on their front porch. She looks as upset as the birds.
“Excuse me,” she says, her voice breaking, her dark eyes blinking with tears, pink cheeks.
She is maybe ten years old, or eleven, sucking on a strand of her hair. He is not used to speaking with children.
“Are you okay?” he says.
Suddenly his wife is beside him, taking over.
“My God,” says Annie, one hand over her mouth. “What is it?”
“It’s an emergency,” says the girl. In her ears, tiny studs, the color and shape of ladybugs.
Annie reaches out toward her shoulder, but the girl steps away.
“I’m not supposed to touch anyone,” she says.
Annie’s eyes flash at Ben’s.
“What do you mean?” asks Annie, but the girl doesn’t say.
They’ve been watching these sisters for a while. They have seen them walk to the bus stop in the mornings and water the vegetables at night. They know they sit reading sometimes in the windowsills or in the widow’s walk at the top of that big, old house. The quiet ways of these girls seem so different from their father, who came over shouting one day, something about a tree. He and Annie could not make him believe they were only renting this house, and that it was the owners who must have cut down that fir.
“Just tell us what you need,” says Annie to the girl.
Right then, a window scrapes open next door. The girl’s older sister calls out to her from their house. “Libby!” she shouts. How startling to hear that quiet girl yell. “Get back here,” she says. “Get in here. I’m serious.”
These girls are afraid—Ben can see it in their faces.
Across the street, a nurse is just arriving home in blue scrubs. Ben knows her name, Barbara, and nothing else. She glances in their direction, in curiosity or in judgment, but she keeps moving. She goes inside.
“Please,” says the girl on the porch. “I just need to get into your backyard for a minute.”
He cannot understand what is happening, but whatever this girl needs, he wants to provide it. This girl is his daughter in ten years. He has begun a running narration to that older Grace, mouthing to himself as she sleeps on his chest: When you were a baby, he likes to say, we lived in California.
“Come on, then,” he says to the girl.
She refuses to come into the house, so they walk the long way instead, around the side, all three, he, Annie, with the baby, and the girl. He unlatches the gate in the side yard. He throws it open. The girl runs through.
They have stopped asking her questions.
Soon the girl is crouching over something in the grass behind the oak tree. This is when they finally see it: a white kitten is huddled in the corner of their yard. In its mouth, it holds a tiny swallow, fresh wings hanging from its teeth.
“Let it go, Chloe,” she is saying. “Let it go right now.”
Later, Ben will think of this moment as the arche kakon, the start of the bad times, as he would say of Greek tragedy, as he has written so often on whiteboards for his students, as if that kitten were an omen of every rupture that will follow. But Annie would laugh at this kind of thinking. She is a scientist, his wife, a scholar of physics. You’re too superstitious, she would say. But isn’t her physics just as much like magic as anything else?
The girl squeezes the kitten’s jaw until it drops the bird on the grass. It’s one of the babies. Dead.
“There’s a hole in our screen door,” says the girl, holding the kitten with two hands. “This one keeps getting out.”
She runs from the yard, and soon they hear the slamming of her front door.
Ben crouches over the bird. The small wings, those miniature feet. He can see the wounds where the cat’s teeth have punched through the feathers and the flesh.
Their birds continue crying out from above. How much do they know? he wonders. How much can they feel?
“Do you think they’re okay?” says Annie. There are tears in her eyes. This is something that has been happening since the baby, a change in hormones or in outlook—who can say? “Those girls?”
Annie is looking at the house next door. She is chewing at her fingers. It’s a habit of hers, the reason her skin is so raw and so red around the nail beds. He touches her wrist; she stops.
“I don’t know,” he says. A moroseness is creeping into his head, heavy and familiar. “I hope they’re okay.”
But you never know for certain what goes on in other people’s houses. Their neighbors in Brooklyn never would have guessed how close Annie came last year to moving out.
They try to go back to their meal, but the onions have charred by then. And soon the baby is awake, her cries filling the kitchen.
Ben has forgotten to defrost a bottle of breast milk, so he works on that now, turning it over in warm water at the sink, while Annie tries to feed Grace with her body, from which only a few drops of milk ever flow. Grace looks more and more desperate—she keeps pulling her head away from Annie’s breasts.
“I can’t believe you forgot to warm the bottle,” she says. She takes it from his hands and holds it under the tap, as if the slush inside will melt more quickly under her watch than his. He knows what she is not saying, how his mind is always drifting in a thousand directions. “We have a child now,” she says. “You can’t be so flaky all the time.”