Rebecca Rasmussen - The Bird Sisters

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2011 by Rebecca Rasmussen

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rasmussen, Rebecca.
The bird sisters : a novel / Rebecca Rasmussen.1st ed.
p. cm.
1. SistersFiction. 2. Single womenFiction. 3. Reminiscing in old ageFiction. I. Title.
PS3618.A78 B57 2010
813.6dc22 2010002532

eISBN: 978-0-307-71798-6

Jacket design by Jean Traina
Jacket photography SuperStock/GettyImages

v3.1

For Kathryn

Contents

sed to be when a bird flew into a window, Milly and Twiss got a visit. Milly would put a kettle on and set out whatever culinary adventure shed gone on that day. For morning arrivals, she offered her famous vanilla drop biscuits and raspberry jam. Twiss would get the medicine bag from the hall closet and sterilize the tools she needed, depending on the seriousness of the injury. A wounded limb was one thing. A wounded crop was another.

People used to come from as far away as Reedsburg and Wilton. Milly would sit with them while Twiss patched up the poor old robin or the sweet little meadowlark . Over the years, the number of visitors had dwindled. Now that the grocery store sold ready-bake biscuits and jelly in all the colors of the rainbow, people didnt bother as much about birds.

On a particularly low morning, while the two sisters were having tea and going over their chore lists, Milly pulled back the curtains when she heard an engine straining on one of the nearby hillsides. When all she saw was the empty gravel drive, the hawkweed poking up along the edges, she let go of them.

We should be glad, she said. Maybe the birds are getting smarter.

Twiss brought the breakfast dishes to the sink. They were down to toast and butter now, sometimes a hard-boiled egg from the night before. How can you stand to be so positive?

Were old, Milly said. What else can we do?

But even she missed the sound of strangers in the house, the way the pine floors creaked under new weight. Had it really been a month since a person other than Twiss had spoken to her? Time had a funny way of moving when you didnt want it to and standing still when you did. Milly didnt bother to wind the cuckoo clock above the sink anymore; there was something sadistic about the way it popped out of its miniature door so cheerfully every quarter hour. But the visitors! Though she and Twiss had devoted their lives to saving birds, not wishing for them to be injured, the last few years Milly had perked up whenever a car turned into their driveway instead of continuing up the road. Most of the time, the people would be looking for directions back to town. Theyd spread out their laminated touring maps with expressions of shame because just in case, the words theyd used to justify buying the maps in the first place, meant they were lost, and there were no noble ways to say that. The men would look up at the sky, trying one last time to discern east from west, and the women would look down at the ground because their husbands had failed to understand a simple map. Milly would put the couples at ease by admitting that she missed a turn every once in a while, even though there wasnt one to miss. Shed point to the blank space between the hills and the river.

This is where you are .

When the sound of the engine grew louder, unlike all of the others during the last month, Milly pulled back the curtains again. This time, a green minivan was barreling down the driveway, kicking up dust that did not quickly settle.

I knew this one was for us, she said.

Better get ready, Twiss said, leaving her cup of tea and going for the medicine bag in the hall closet. People who drive minivans usually know where they are.

And the driver of the green minivan did, although the country wasnt where she was supposed to be at eight thirty in the morning. On her way to drop her children off at the elementary school in town, the woman had run over a goldfinch, and her daughter had cried enough to make her do something about it. The minivans tires, rutted monstrosities that belonged on a tractor, had severed one of the goldfinchs wings and crushed the other one. The goldfinch was also missing his left eye, which the little girl said shed looked for on the road but couldnt find among the crumble of loose blacktop.

Poor thing, Twiss said, which meant the goldfinch wouldnt live. Twiss had spent her life saving birds; all she had to do was glance at one to know if it would recover or not. And all Milly had to do was glance at Twiss, whod never been especially skilled at hiding what she saw.

Twiss kissed the goldfinchs tawny beak.

Yes, you are a poor thing, Milly said, kissing it too.

Twiss took the goldfinch, the medicine bag, and the little girl to the bathroom off the kitchen. After she laid out her instruments on a towel, Twiss would pick up Dr. Greenes old stethoscope. If she heard even a faint heartbeat, shed patch up what she could and splint whatever she couldnt with strips of balsa wood from the old model airplane in the attic. Shed offer the goldfinch a teaspoon of millet and peanut butter and hold him up to the window so he could see the sky. Once a bird had lost his ability to fly, not much else could be done in the way of mending him. Losing a wing was a little like losing a leg and the freedom of movement, of spirit, it granted you; most people could live without the former but not the latter.

Milly steered the mother, a woman with the frame of a thin person but the flesh of one whod had too many children and worries to keep her figure, to the kitchen. Instead of taking the seat Milly offered her, the mother paced across the linoleum, pausing to examine the surroundings now and then. She paid particular attention to Millys collection of ceramic salt-and-pepper shakers lined up like avian soldiers, orange beak to orange beak, hummingbirds to owls, on the shelf above the stove, and to the damask wallpaper Milly and Twiss had helped their mother put up when they were girls, which had bubbled at the outset because theyd applied the glue too liberally. Over the years, the wallpaper had peeled back little by little so that now it clung to the wall desperately when it clung at all.