Birds of Summer Read online

  Most of the way home she stumbled along in a blinding storm of angry humiliation. Ignoring Sparrow’s chatter, she listened only to a litany of phrases, which kept repeating themselves like a broken record inside her head. “How could I be so stupid—stupid to hand in that letter—stupid to write it in the first place—stupid to write to someone who doesn’t exist. And, most unbearable of all—stupid to have cried in front of Pardell. For no reason! There was nothing to cry about. Nothing had changed. Everything was just the way it had always been—and she hadn’t cried for years and years.

  It wasn’t until they reached the first redwood grove that she began to calm down enough to look at what had happened from some other points of view. She’d noticed that about redwoods. There was something about them—their size and age maybe—that made you realize a lot of small miserable things just didn’t matter very much. She’d stood there before, looking up at their beauty and their slow, patient strength, and whatever it was that had been churning around inside her suddenly felt small and hushed. So, because of the redwoods or for whatever reason, she began to realize that there was one consolation. At least she knew that Pardell wouldn’t tell anyone about what had happened. She didn’t know how she knew, but she did. And there was what he’d said about her writing. She couldn’t help feeling good about that. And what he’d said at the end about Grant’s not knowing what he’d been missing. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense, actually, but for some reason it made her feel quite a bit better.

  By the time they’d reached the second grove, she’d cheered up enough to register a little of what Sparrow had been trying to tell her about a movie on the evils of smoking that she’d seen at school. Still thinking about Pardell—that he might never mention it again, and she certainly wouldn’t mention it, and it would almost be as if it hadn’t happened—she was halfway listening to Sparrow rattle on about how bad smoking was for people.

  “Is smoking pot as bad as cigarettes?” Sparrow was asking. “Do people who smoke pot get those sores inside them, too? Summer! What’s the matter with you? Why won’t you talk to me?”

  “Nothing’s the matter,” Summer said. Sparrow’s soft round face was puckered into a worried frown. Summer grinned at her. “Nothing’s the matter, Funny-face. Come on. I’ll race you to the turn-off.”

  When they arrived home a few breathless minutes later, they found Galya there. Sitting cross-legged on the foam rubber, she and Oriole were drinking peppermint tea and talking nonstop, the same as always. Nonstop, at least, until they heard footsteps on the stairs—and broke off abruptly.

  Galya got her tongue going again first. “Hi kids. Come here and give us a smooch.” She held out her arms with their jangly bracelets. She looked the same as she always had—homespun skirt, peasant blouse, sandals—except that recently her outfits, while still hippie style, were more craftshop-expensive instead of homemade-cheap. But her gray streaked hair was still long and loose and her hands were as garden-rough as ever.

  Sparrow flung herself into Galya’s arms. “How’s my favorite production?” Galya crooned as she snuggled Sparrow, kissing her on both cheeks. “How’s my beautiful redheaded masterpiece?” Galya always made a big thing out of the fact that she’d midwifed Sparrow’s birth, claiming that made Sparrow partly hers.

  Sparrow hugged back for only a moment before she pushed away. “Is Marina back?” she asked. “She is, isn’t she? Didn’t Marina come back home?”

  Galya and Oriole exchanged quick glances. The flick of Galya’s eyes was ambiguous, but as usual, Oriole’s face was an open book. The sneaky guilt of her expression was about as hard to miss as a thunderclap. Summer hoped that if they were going to lie to Sparrow, Galya would be the one to do it. Watching Oriole lie was a maddening mixture of anger and humiliation.

  “No, baby,” Galya said, trying to hug Sparrow to her—to comfort her, or perhaps, to avoid having to meet her eyes. “We hope it won’t be too much longer before she can come home. But you know, it’s a lot warmer and drier in Lodi, and it’s better for Marina there.”

  She went on for quite a while about how much better Marina’s wheeze was and how much she was missing Sparrow and what her new school was like—and Summer listened wondering how she could be so convincing if she were making it up. Oriole’s face might have been an indication—but she’d gotten up to make some more tea and was standing over the stove with her back turned. Even when Sparrow began about finding the troll doll, Galya’s answers were smooth and quick. “It must have been there all along, sweetie,” she said, “and you just didn’t happen to notice it. I’m sure that must be it.” She turned to Summer as if she’d been reading her suspicious thoughts. “I’m sure that was it. Don’t you think so, Summer?”

  “Oh sure,” Summer said, but she was less sure now than a moment before, mostly because Galya was giving her a level-eyed super-sincere expression that suddenly reminded her of the time Galya had told them about how she’d gotten Jerry to marry her.

  The problem had been that neither Jerry or Galya had believed in marriage when they first met, but after they’d had three kids and Galya had inherited the land and started the organic farming business, she’d changed her mind. She knew Jerry well enough to know that if she came right out and said so, it would only make him more against the whole idea. So for months she had come down to see Oriole and report on her latest schemes and strategies to get Jerry to change his mind. Sometimes she’d act it out, taking both parts in the arguments and conversations in which she would come out strongly against marriage so that Jerry would be trapped into taking the opposite point of view. It was a technique that worked very well on Jerry, Galya said, because, like most men, he specialized in opposite points of view.

  “It’s just that I can’t see myself making promises about how I’m going to feel ten years from now,” she would say—acting out how she’d said it to Jerry—and there would be that very same super-sincere expression on her broad dark-eyed face.

  Obviously Galya was conning somebody again, but this time it was the McIntyres, or at least Summer and Sparrow. All of which made it look even more probable that something weird was going on at the Fishers’. And for some reason, whatever it was was related to Marina’s absence. That brought the whole thing closer to home, because whatever affected Marina was going to involve Sparrow to some extent. And that made it Summer’s business, whether she wanted it to be or not.

  5

  SHE HEARD THE PEACOCKS screaming as soon as she stepped off the bus. Partway up the hill she came across a bunch of them in the middle of the drive—three males and several of the much less colorful but no less proud and arrogant females. One of the males was parading in a circle with his tail fanned in an enormous halo of quivering plumes. The others, definitely unimpressed, went on about their business, but Summer couldn’t help stopping for a moment to watch.

  They’d fascinated her since her first day at Crown Ridge when she’d come across a flock of them stalking haughtily across the lawn in front of the long, low house—creatures from some pagan paradise, their incredibly gorgeous plumage in strange contrast to the weird reptilian movement of their gaudy heads and dragon-clawed legs. Even now, after finding out how dumb and neurotic and basically useless they were, she still found them intriguing and somehow, even more than the Arabians, a very important part of the whole scene at Crown Ridge Ranch.

  She stood motionless, watching the preening strut of the big male until he lowered his gigantic fan and wandered off among the shrubbery. Then she picked up a couple of fallen plumes and hurried on up the drive.

  Nan was still eating her breakfast when Summer knocked on the back door. She was wearing her quilted velvet dressing gown, and her long pale hair was looped at the back of her neck in a loose chignon. As always, she looked as classy and perfectly groomed as one of her horses. While Summer unloaded her backpack—two boxes of strawberries and some tomatoes from the Fisher greenhouses—Nan went back to her coffee and croissants at the breakfast table.<
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  “Oh, marvelous,” she said when she saw the strawberries. “Just what this breakfast needed. Would you give them a little wash and put them in one of the blue bowls. Just one box for now. That will be lovely.”

  Of course Galya had already washed the berries, but Summer didn’t argue. When they were all carefully rewashed and arranged in the bowl, she took them to the table.

  “Thank you, dear. They’re beautiful. They look like a painting in that bowl, don’t they?” Nan said. Then she smiled her wide, even-toothed smile. “Now sit down for a moment.” Summer sat down and smiled back. Nan’s gaze was warm, approving and concerned—very much the way it was when she looked at her Arabians. “Did you eat before you came this morning,” she asked, and when Summer shook her head, “You really shouldn’t go without breakfast, dear. You’re much too thin.”

  “I wasn’t hungry,” Summer said, “and besides there wasn’t—” She stopped, shrugging. But Nan saw the shrug and asked, “There wasn’t what?”

  “Oh nothing. About the strawberries—Galya said to tell you she’d have more next Saturday. Bigger ones.”

  “That will be lovely, but these are quite nice. Amazing really, for this early in the year. Now you just jump up and get a plate and some silverware and have a few of these berries and some nice hot croissants before you start to work. No, don’t argue. You’ll get ever so much more done on a full stomach.”

  Summer hadn’t intended to argue. There wasn’t much point with Nan, particularly when it came to being fed. Richard, who had the beginnings of a pot belly, sometimes made comments about Nan’s nurturing compulsion. According to him, Nan force fed everything that came within reach. Actually, he wasn’t far wrong. Nearly everything at Crown Ridge looked slightly pudgy, from Richard right on down: eleven Arabians not counting the colts, two dogs, four cats, six canaries and about a dozen peacocks. And judging by the amount of plant food Nan was always doling out, even her African violets were probably overweight.

  There were, however, definite limits to Nan’s nurturing instincts. During their many discussions, usually held over one table or another, Summer had learned that Nan disapproved of feeding people when it was done by governments or institutions. She was very much against food stamps and school lunch programs, and she even wondered if feeding starving people in other countries didn’t ultimately do more harm than good. “Richard and I are sorry for hungry people, of course,” she’d told Summer more than once, “but we believe that giving people food takes away their freedom and initiative.”

  That was another thing Summer didn’t argue with Nan about. Actually, in some ways she agreed. Nobody could possibly hate food stamps as much as she did—but at the same time she was pretty sure that she and Sparrow would have starved to death several times over while Oriole was developing the initiative she might have been capable of if her food stamps had been taken away.

  So Summer just listened and watched, and it didn’t take long to figure out that Nan’s food dispensing behavior was only triggered by mouths that, in one way or another, belonged to her. And when she began to insist on feeding Summer, it seemed to indicate that she was thinking of Summer as one of her possessions. It was a concept to which Summer had given a certain amount of thought.

  As soon as she’d eaten enough strawberries and croissants to satisfy Nan, she got to work. As usual, she began with the kitchen. Scrubbing a kitchen, even one like Nan’s with its sleek tile surfaces and gleaming appliances, was still pretty much your basic everyday drudgery. She worked hard and fast to get it over with and get on to the rooms she really enjoyed.

  It was almost eleven o’clock and the master bedroom was nearly finished when Nan came into the room. Summer was dusting a picture, the small one in the silver frame that always sat on the night stand, and when Nan saw what she was doing something frightening happened to her face. For a moment Summer wondered if she could have been told not to touch the picture and had somehow forgotten, but then she realized that what was written on Nan’s face wasn’t anger after all. She waited, holding the picture carefully with both hands, as Nan came slowly around the bed, took it away from her and just stood looking at it for a long time before she said anything.

  It was a photograph of a little girl about six or seven years old wearing an English riding outfit and sitting on a small pony. Summer had noticed the photo many times because the girl with her round-eyed face and thick pigtails reminded her of Sparrow. But now, looking more closely at the short-nosed, wide-mouthed face, she suddenly realized that there was a definite resemblance to Nan.

  “You?” she asked. “When you were little?”

  Nan shook her head. “No,” she said. “This is Deborah. My little girl.” Although she had said is not was, Summer knew immediately that Deborah was dead. Nan’s face said so, and so did the throb in her voice. Summer waited, and after a moment Nan went on. “She died of leukemia a few months after this picture was taken.”

  Summer’s voice wavered when she said, “I’m sorry” and Nan reached out and squeezed her hand; but what had made Summer’s throat tighten really had very little to do with Nan and the dead Deborah. Mostly it was because of Sparrow who was the same age and even got the same funny expression on her face when her picture was being taken.

  At lunch that day, while Nan was making sure that Summer ate every crumb of an enormous crab salad sandwich, she went on talking about Deborah—about what an exceptional child she had been, bright and beautiful and happy—and about the diagnosis of leukemia and the terrible months that followed. After it was over, Nan said, she had gone into a state of deep depression that lasted for many months.

  “That’s why we’re here, actually,” she told Summer. “I’d always wanted to raise Arabians, and Richard thought it would be good for me. A change of scene and something to occupy my mind. So when he heard about this place, he bought it, and we sold our home in Connecticut and moved out. Richard was already spending as much time on the West Coast as on the East, so it made very little difference as far as our time together was concerned. I was terribly busy at first with the remodeling and finding good breeding stock, and after a while it did help.”

  “You never had any other children?” Summer asked.

  “No. There were some serious problems when Deborah was born and eventually an operation. I wasn’t able to have any more children.”

  Summer gathered up her dishes and Nan’s and took them to the dishwasher, where she stood for a moment staring out of the window and down the long sweep of lawn to where the peacocks were passing in ceremonial procession. But this time their weird prehistoric posturing was depressing—sinister almost, like some strange inhuman ritual for the dead. She turned her eyes away. Later, as she was sponging off the table, she asked Nan if she’d ever thought about adopting a baby.

  Nan sighed. “Actually I did,” she said, “but Richard wouldn’t hear of it. His parents adopted a baby boy before he was born and it turned out tragically. Jeffrey, his adoptive brother, turned out very badly. He died, eventually, in an automobile accident, drunk driving, and Richard’s parents nearly impoverished themselves to take care of the hospital bills—his and the other people involved in the accident. It all happened years ago, but it left Richard absolutely opposed to adoption. Nothing I could say, no examples of successful adoptions, made any difference.”

  The half-hour Summer usually allowed herself for lunch was over long before Nan stopped talking. Every time Summer tried to get back to work, Nan made her sit back down to hear a little more. When it was finally over, she understood a lot of things about the Olivers that she hadn’t before, but she was also a long way behind on her work. It was almost time for her bus and she was only starting the study when Nan came into the room.

  “Here,” she said, handing Summer her check. “It’s for the full amount. It was my fault you didn’t finish. You run along now and catch your bus. We’ll just skip the rest of the house this week.” She stopped, looked around the study, and ran her finger
along the edge of a bookshelf. “Unless you could come back tomorrow morning.” She smiled her wide smile. “Would that be possible, dear?”

  Summer said that it would.

  When she got back to the trailer, Cerbe was tied up and Sparrow was home alone. She was sitting at the kitchen table drawing pictures, and she jumped up when Summer came in.

  “Hi.” she said. “Hi, Summer. Did you bring me a peacock feather? Did you get to feed the horses today? How are they? How are the horses? Are there any new baby ones?”

  Summer hung her backpack on the hook by the door. “Where’s Oriole? she asked.

  “She went into town with Angelo to go shopping. She said they were going to get bananas and raisins and everything. And you know what, Summer? Cerbe was very bad, and that’s why he’s tied up.”

  “Did she say when she was coming home?” Summer said.

  “You know what Cerbe did? He tried to bite Angelo. And Angelo had to climb up the madrone tree and yell for Oriole to come and get him. And Oriole spanked Cerbe and tied him up, and he’s supposed to stay there until she gets back and …” Sparrow stopped babbling and stared at Summer.

  The anger wasn’t at Sparrow, but she obviously felt it. Watching Summer warily, she climbed back into her chair. “She said she wouldn’t be gone long,” she offered hopefully. “She’ll probably be back real soon.”

  Summer took the stuff out of her backpack and slammed it down on the table so hard that Sparrow jumped as if she’d been slapped. Then she turned and stalked out and right down to the end of the trailer where Cerbe was tied. Watching her approach, he performed his ritual welcome dance, bouncing around in circles and then crouching in a kind of bow, with his curly tail waving like a frenzied football fan’s banner. When she squatted down in front of him, he gamboled around her, tangling them both in his rope until she toppled over. She lay on her back covering her face with her arms to protect it from his kisses until he got tired and collapsed beside her, his chin on her shoulder. Reaching over she took hold of his muzzle with two fingers and lifted his floppy lips to reveal the long sharp canines. “I wish you had,” she whispered fiercely. “I wish you’d bitten his leg off.” When she got up, she untied Cerbe and took him with her into the trailer.