She walks closer, no longer concealing herself. In her time as Tom’s Girl Friday, she’s learned that confidence in situations where you don’t belong takes you quite a long way. Sid hears her crunching through the grass behind them and turns swiftly, and his rifle smacks him in the face as he does.
“What’re you doing down here?” he asks. The other two men turn, spooked.
“Tom said I could go for a walk after dinner,” Birdie lies. Her eyes meet Ollie’s.
“Yeah, he told me as much,” Ollie vouches for her, and honors the unspoken agreement between the two of them.
Sid looks between them and then over to Jeff, who shrugs, unwilling to get in the middle of Birdie’s business. If he’s uneasy around Tom, he’s petrified by the women running this place in the shadow of their fearless leader. We’re the puppet masters, Vanessa had once joked to Birdie. At the time she hadn’t thought much of it, but as Tom descended deeper and deeper into the role that he’d created for himself, she saw that Vanessa really believed it. And what was more, it was true. Even if Tom didn’t know it.
Birdie smiles at Ollie, revealing the gap between her two front teeth. It’s a feature that caused her endless grief as a child and an adolescent. It wasn’t until she met Tom that she embraced the flaw. She had begun to smile without a hand covering her mouth after she met him.
Ollie smiles back stupidly.
Birdie steps up beside the group.
“What is that?” she asks with a sharp intake of breath.
Standing on the other side of the creek, on the border of Wade’s land, is a ghoulish scarecrow. A bull’s skull sits atop its shoulders, held on by barbed wire that runs through the eye sockets. A ribcage with spindly, elongated bones protrudes at the chest and parts the buttons of the plaid shirt draped over it. Articulated arms fashioned from the leg bones of cows terminate with hooves still sporting hair at the ankles. Birdie thinks she can smell blood. She knows she can smell decay.
“They left a note with it,” Ollie hands Birdie a folded piece of paper. She opens it. ANY DAY NOW it reads. Birdie feels a chill that doesn’t originate on the night wind. She hands the note back to Ollie and rubs her arm.
“Right?” he asks. “Creepy.”
She nods and looks past the skeleton, over onto the Bower property.
“Yeah,” she says.
It is creepy. It’s a step above the dead cats that Wade left on the cattle guard a month prior.
“We should take it down,” Jeff says. “Orders.”
Ollie and Sid nod. The three of them begin to dismantle the strange idol. Darkness descends on the land like a blanket and the stars and moon begin to illuminate the grass around them in shades of silver. The bones almost glow.
A shot crackles across the field in the darkness. The remaining pieces of the scarecrow crumple to the ground and the guys hit the dirt. Birdie isn’t fast enough. Another shot sounds and she feels the impact at her shoulder. She hits her knees and falls to the side, her body reeling from the shot.
“Birdie!” Ollie cries out.
Birdie hears more gunfire. This time originating from their side of the creek. She hears the scuffle of boots against the dirt, clambering their way to her. Ollie appears like a vision. An angel, his silhouette silver against the moon behind him. He kneels down. More shots ring out.
“Oh, God,” he brushes hair from her face. He reaches for her flannel shirt and rips out two buttons getting to her wound. He puts his weight on it and Birdie yells out in agony. Unbearable pain spikes her adrenaline and makes white spots dance behind her eyelids.
Her vision tunnels and she’s falling.
Down. Down. Down.
Into nothingness.
IONE
We are never closer to the worst parts of ourselves than after searing rejection. Suddenly, that usually quiet voice of self-doubt grabs a megaphone to make daily proclamations about the state of things: It’s because you’re stupid. Or fat. Or both. Or maybe you’re just fundamentally unlovable. Then it gets into specifics. He would never have waited for you. You’re an idiot to have chosen your career over him. The thing is, no one is immune. I’m successful. I have a career. I have a life that I’ve built from ashes. Even though I know this, the voice is loud, speaks clearly, and demands to be heard. And I, the captive audience, am forced to listen.
I tell myself these things are untrue. The thought crosses my mind that I made the right choice, that if Wes could wake up and decide he didn’t love me, it would have happened anyway eventually. Better now rather than later.
I wonder if it happened as quickly as that. I wonder if he met the new girl before or after he decided he was done with me. Was she the catalyst? Or had he made up his mind the minute I boarded that airplane last year that he wouldn’t wait on me? As I think this, I know in my heart that I wouldn’t have waited on him. No matter how badly I wanted to, I wouldn’t have suffered that indignity. Not for him. Not for any man. Never again.
I pour myself another glass of white wine from a bottle I was given as a gift. The giver of the bottle had hoped I might save it for a special occasion. Tonight feels special enough. I put it in a coffee tumbler and get in the car. The nice thing about white wine is that it doesn’t stain your clothes when you hit bumps on your gravel driveway. The driveway stretches out almost a half-mile and going up to get the mail has seemed like a monumental task. A chore I’ve left undone for the past week
