Birds in the Air

Chapter 1

Chapter 1It’s a midwinter Wednesday, a blustery, unforgiving sort of day, and Emma Byrd is talking to her house. She doesn’t usually talk to houses, but here she is, stranded in an island of boxes, bundled up in her husband’s blue and gold high school letterman’s jacket and his thick, wool camping socks, and she wants to tell someone, anyone, how much she hates January. She wants to explain how January’s blank days make her feel aimless and adrift, her mind unable to focus without December’s long list of errands in front of her. But her husband’s at work, her kids are at school, and her phone is in the other room, out of reach. So although she wants to talk, there’s no one to listen. The house, she has decided, will have to do.

“I’ve always hated January,” she explains to the fireplace, where flotillas of cobwebs float dreamily in the corners. Pulling a stack of folders from a box, she looks around for someplace to put it and settles for the top of another box. “When I was little, I stood at my window and begged it to go away. But it never listened to me. It just stayed January day after day until I thought I’d go crazy.”

So what is she doing here, unpacking moving boxes three weeks after Christmas? What sane person would pack up and move house this time of year? The sky is a gray blanket outside her window, the morning light dim and unpromising. “It’s all your fault,” she grumbles at the wide-planked oak floors. She squints menacingly at the wainscoting, shoots a suspicious glance at the built-in shelves. “If it weren’t for you,” she says, glaring at the crown molding, “we would have moved in April, and I’d still be in a house that actually got warm when you turned on the heat.”

A branch smacks the window, and Emma jumps, nearly falling backward over an unwieldy stack of books. On this particular January morning, the wind is having a field day, repeatedly blasting the north side of the house and causing all the windows to rattle like chattering teeth. Emma pulls the letter jacket tightly around her shoulders. Call about insulation, she adds to the running list in her head, which also includes Call about leak in the upstairs toilet, Call about Sarah’s bedroom door, which refuses to stay shut, and Call about weird smell in cellar.

She’ll call this afternoon. She’ll sit down at the computer and do an Internet search for “Plumber, Sweet Anne’s Gap, NC” and “Carpenter, Sweet Anne’s Gap, NC.“ She doesn’t know who to call about weird smells in the cellar, but maybe she can ask the plumber.

“Why don’t you just go next door and get a recommendation?” Owen asked at dinner the night before. “They’ll know who’s good.”

“I don’t want be a bother,” Emma replied. “Didn’t the realtor say that Hannah Byers is really old? She might not appreciate visitors.”

“She might have Alzheimer’s,” Sarah said matter-of-factly. Her best friend Sophie’s grandmother had Alzheimer’s, and Sarah considered herself an expert on the subject in the way only a ten-year-old could. “She might give you the name of a plumber who isn’t even alive anymore.”

“Not everyone who’s old has Alzheimer’s, sweetie,” Emma told her daughter. “It’s probably not a good habit to make assumptions.”

Sarah shrugged. “Well, if she does, we can call Sophie to get advice.”

“Speaking of calls to Sophie, I don’t even want to know what the phone bill’s going to be this month,” Owen said. “You guys need to be communicating via computer like everyone else in your generation.”

Sarah brightened. “You’ll get me a smart phone?”

Emma and Owen shook their heads in concert. “Not until you’re thirteen,” Emma told her.

“And maybe not even then,” Owen added. “I meant email.”

Sarah pouted into her pasta. Owen turned back to Emma. “All you do is go next-door, say, ‘Hello, Mrs. Byers, I’m your friendly new neighbor, Emma, and I need the number of a good plumber.’”

“Mom’s not really all that friendly, though.” Ben, who had spent the last few minutes examining the stack of baseball cards hidden in his lap, looked up at Owen. “She’s nice, but not friendly. She should probably let Mrs. Byers know that.”

“I am too friendly,” Emma protested. “I’ve always been friendly.”

“No, you always wave and say, ‘Hi,’ in a really loud voice,” Ben corrected her. “Friendly is stopping to talk, the way Dad does.”

Emma thinks about their discussion now as she runs a utility knife across the top of a box and peels back the flaps. It’s true that as a rule she’s more comfortable with books than with people, but it isn’t like she doesn’t have friends. Well, not here, of course, but they’ve only lived in Sweet Anne’s Gap for a week, and she’s been too busy unpacking boxes to get out and meet people. Besides, who could make friends in January? You survived January by lying on the couch in your flannel bathrobe with a mug of hot chocolate and watching the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice. Everybody knows that.

She looks up from the box she’s unpacking and surveys the room around her. This, at least, is a room that needs no repairs. As long as she can remember, she’s always wanted a room exactly like this, a room with a fireplace and a window seat, a room where Emily Dickinson might have felt at home. It’s the sort of room that makes you lose your mind and move house in January, Emma decides. “I should have known better,” she complains to the fireplace, but she doesn’t mean it. The whole house is marvelous. Flawed, in need of serious repair, but marvelous nonetheless, and it cost a third of what it would have in Chapel Hill. And best of all, Emma finally has a room of her own.

“Now I have no excuses,” she says in a firm voice to the crown molding. “I have the room, I have the time.”

She reaches into the box and pulls out a book, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, one of her favorites. What would it be like, to be Barbara Kingsolver, sitting down at her desk every day, putting words on paper until a story spills off the page and into the imaginations of thousands of readers? It’s what Emma has always dreamed of doing, ever since second grade when she wrote a one-page epic called Oh, No! My Dog Ran Away! “Wonderful!” her teacher had written next to three gold foil stars on the bottom of the page, and Emma had been hooked.

Yet here she is, forty, and it’s been years since she’s managed to write anything besides press releases and talking points. She knows it’s an old story: You graduate college with all sorts of dreams, but you have to pay the rent, so you take the so-so job at the community newspaper, and that leads to a slightly better job writing PR copy at a small local firm, and that leads to another, better job, and suddenly you’re a public relations specialist. You try to write at night, and some nights you do, but it gets harder after you get married and have kids and a mortgage. In fact, it becomes impossible.

But now, much to her surprise, Emma finds herself in a new story. She’s happily unemployed, with all the time in the world to write, at least between the hours of 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. All she has to do is put the house in order, clear a space on her desk, and get started. She does her best to ignore the nagging worries that sneak up on her in the middle of the night, like what on earth is she going to write about and what if she doesn’t have any talent? What if she’s used it all up writing content marketing?

Overhead, a pipe begins to clank. Don’t you have to flush a toilet or turn on a faucet for the pipes to clank? Emma stands and brushes off her hands. A plumber. She needs a plumber. How can she write novels if the pipes are making a racket all day long?

“I’m going to go next door and ask Mrs. Byers for the name of a good plumber,” she tells the fireplace firmly. “And then I’m going to come back and finish unpacking my books, and then I’m going to — oh, I don’t know — join the PTA or something and make lots and lots of friends. Oh, and find a carpenter.”

Emma takes off the letter jacket, puts on her shoes, then finds her coat on the couch in the living room, where she left it that morning after walking Homer, their chocolate brown Lab now asleep on Ben’s bed upstairs. The living room had been the first room after the kitchen they’d gotten unpacked and in working order, and she feels a surge of housewifely satisfaction as she looks around. The couch, newly spruced up with a white twill slipcover, faces a picture window that opens to a view of the mountains. Two overstuffed chairs cozy up to the wicker trunk that serves as the coffee table, and a rocking chair stands guard in front of the fireplace. The look is simple, elegant, and uncluttered. Emma knows that it’s only a matter of days. Children, like nature, abhor a vacuum, and soon Sarah and Ben will fill the room with their markers and drawing pads, Ben’s matchbox cars, Sarah’s unending supply of Barbie paraphernalia. Maybe when she returns from visiting Mrs. Byers, she should take pictures; the room will never again look this composed.

She steps out onto the front porch and takes a deep breath. Fresh mountain air, she tells herself. Fresh, bitterly cold, possibly doing damage to her lungs, January mountain air. What doesn’t kill ya makes you stronger, she can hear her father say, and she can’t help giggling. Her dad has always been a fount of fatherly wisdom, and Emma and her sister Holly delight each other over the phone with their Big Ed imitations. “It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice,” Holly might intone sagely if Emma complained that Owen wasn’t getting the recognition at work she thought he deserved. “The only time success comes before work is in the dictionary,” Emma liked to repeat to Holly, who usually replied, “It’s not how far you fall, it’s how high you bounce.”

Still, sometimes her dad has a point. Pulling her scarf more tightly around her neck, she takes another breath, throws back her shoulders, and walks out into the late morning chill. She can be such a baby, complaining about things that bother everyone — long stretches of rainy weather, traffic delays, a bout with the common cold — as if she were the only person in the world affected by them. Everybody’s cold in January, she scolds herself. You’d be cold back home, you’re cold here, you’d probably be cold if you went to Disney World. Suck it up. Buy some long underwear.

Buy long underwear. She adds that to her list.

The gravel drive spills out messily onto the road. “We’ll need to get that paved,” Owen had declared as soon as they’d gotten out of the realtor’s sedan to see the house for the first time. He spoke like a man with one hand on his checkbook, ready to buy, and they hadn’t even stepped inside yet. They didn’t have to. One look at the wrap-around front porch, the multitude of gables, the oak tree in the front yard shedding red and yellow leaves, and they were hooked.

“Everyone here has a gravel driveway,” Emma had said, looking up and down the road. “A paved driveway might look out of place.”

“Maybe,” Owen said, not believing it for a minute, his precise engineer’s brain calculating the volume of concrete he would need to set the drive to rights. But paving a driveway is not a mid-winter job, and so Emma happily kicks little bits of gravel as she ambles along the road to her neighbor’s, officially next-door, but in reality a few minutes’ walk away.

Mrs. Byers’ house sits back on its sloping lot like a squat Buddha. It appears to Emma to have started out as a one-story house that had another floor added on, and then some years later yet another. None of the house’s layers quite match, and they seem to be sinking into each other. The first story is brick and traditional, the second wood and a bit rustic, and the top story is a gingerbread concoction covered in vinyl siding. “It’s a real looker,” Owen had commented dryly the first time they’d seen it, and Emma had to agree that houses didn’t get much stranger than this one.

Halfway up the drive, Emma wonders if she should have brought something, a plate of cookies or a houseplant. But no, it’s the other way around, isn’t it? Mrs. Byers should make the cookies, preferably chocolate chip, and knock on Emma’s door. Not that Emma minds the oversight. She imagines herself in the front hall, dutifully answering questions about their reasons for moving: Owen’s new job with the Department of Transportation, the desire to slow their pace, back away from the demands of modern suburban life.

That’s the problem with small talk — you were supposed to keep it small, vague, impersonal. But Emma likes personal details best. She likes to hear the stories behind scars — Your sister hit you in the face with her Chatty Cathy doll? — and interesting bits of family history. She likes to know how people fell in love with their spouses or chose their children’s names. Wading through polite talk, unrevealing talk, she can feel herself grow heavy and dull. Yes, the weather certainly has been beautiful, yes, we think the school has a wonderful music program.

By the time she reaches the Byers’ front porch, she feels winded from the climb. She stands at the screened door, waiting to catch her breath and practicing her lines in her head. “Hello! I’m Emma Byrd, your new neighbor, and I need a plumber!”

The front door opens before she has a chance to knock. Emma finds herself looking through the screen at a slightly bent figure with snow-white braids wrapped around her head and lovely, powdery cheeks etched with tiny lines.

“Hello! I’m Emma — ” Emma begins, sticking out her hand, although she isn’t sure what she intends to do with it. She can’t exactly shake hands through a screen. What she really wants to do, she realizes, is touch her neighbor’s face, which looks impossibly soft.

But before she can even finish her sentence, the woman cuts her off. “I’m sorry, honey,” she says, shaking her head sadly. “But I just ain’t got the heart for anybody new.”

With that, the woman closes the door, leaving Emma with her hand still extended.

“You don’t happen to know a good plumber, do you?” she asks the door. When the door doesn’t reply, she sticks her hand in her pocket and walks back home.