Birdie doesn’t speak. She watches.
Tom paces the room, picking up a knickknack and turning it over in his hand the way someone might if they were looking for the price tag. Your money bought that, she thinks. Countless dollars spent on useless trinkets. It’s a shame now. The whole thing.
Tom roams the room, taking it in as though for the first time. Something is different about him. He projects an energy that is at once so strange and yet so distantly familiar to her. She’s seen him like this before. She can’t put her finger on when. But it’s been a long time.
“How are you?” he asks, finally pulling himself out of whatever distraction he’s been under.
“Fine,” she lies.
His eyes dart to the roughly re-bandaged wound at her shoulder. Then they meet hers.
“Did you take it off?” he asks.
“I wanted to look at it,” she says, her voice defying him.
“Let me see,” Tom sits on the bed next to her and reaches for the blood and pus-soaked gauze. He pulls it back, revealing the still-blossoming kaleidoscope of colors on her skin.
“It’s swollen,” he notes.
He brushes a finger over the entry wound. Birdie recoils too quickly. Pain explodes like a bomb and her skull threatens to burst.
“I’m sorry,” his words are distant. She fights her way through the pain back to the room. Back to Tom.
He draws back a hand like she’s shocked him. Their eyes meet, the tension of what Birdie needs to say hovering between them. She reels for a moment from the feeling in her shoulder, the pain becoming a dull ache that radiates throughout her entire body. A reminder that time is running out.
“Tom,” she says, the word like a death rattle in her throat.
He looks down at her, taking her in as though for the first time.
“I need—”
Tom’s energy shifts, the lightness leaving him to be eclipsed by the broken pieces of him that Birdie has come to know so intimately. The pieces that she has come to fear. The pieces with edges so jagged that anyone passing by would snag on them.
“I want to see a doctor,” she blurts out.
Tom’s nostrils flare, his immediate irritation clear on his face. His brow furrows, the line there like a crevice on a map.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he says. He draws the sentence out, coaxing each word like a reluctant stray. Birdie wonders if he hopes to coax something out of her. A steadfastness in belief that she no longer feels, perhaps.
Whatever it is, it doesn’t come when he calls.
Instead, Birdie feels something else stir inside of her. The ghost of an idea, a thought. Something that she dares not put words to. But it’s there. She thinks that she might have found a way out of this mess.
“I think you’re right,” she says with a serene smile. She fights the urge to yell—to scream—and slap him, tell him that she never wanted this. That she never wanted this child or this life or the burdens that come with it. Instead of that, she just smiles at him, confident in the knowledge that she’s going to find a way out of here. Whatever it takes, she thinks. She’ll do whatever it takes.
Tom smiles, his anger evaporating as quickly as spilt perfume. He reaches for Birdie’s hand and takes it in his. She can’t stand it anymore. She has to ask even though her mind’s made up.
“I heard a journalist came today,” she says.
Tom looks away, hiding something from her, she knows.
“That’s right,” he says. He’s omitting something, she’s sure of it. She doesn’t know what it is, but it worries at her like a splinter that won’t dislodge.
“I hope they can set things straight,” she says. Her words dismiss him. The role reversal is complete. Tom stands from the bed.
“She will,” he says and his lips curve on one side, a lopsided smile emerging. Birdie’s seen it before, but it’s been so long she’s not sure where or when. There’s a whisper of something familiar on it. A name. It knocks around in the back of her mind, not quite ready to step forward into the light and be seen.
Tom steps out of the room without a goodbye. He brings the door all the way closed, its bolt sliding home into the metal notch on the wall.
She is alone.
She looks over at the oil lamp on the bedside table. It will be enough. She imagines the glass shattered into hundreds of pieces, only needing one big enough. The trick will be getting it to break silently, and she can’t see a way to do that yet.
She needs more time.
As the infection pulses out from her shoulder with every beat of her heart, the thought drives itself home: she needs more time.
BIRDIE
6 YEARS AGO
There was another day in Birdie’s life where she decided that she had to take matters into her own hands. That time, though, it had been for Tom.
The night that started the fiasco that was the Morgan Wallace incident was like so many other nights that Birdie spent at Tom’s house. Except in one significant way. Birdie realized on this night that she was in love with Tom.
It didn’t dawn on her in a romantic moment shared under the starlight or in a stolen kiss in Tom’s office. Nothing physical had transpired between the pair. Even so, Birdie spent every waking hour in Tom’s company. She was there with his coffee at the university in the morning, she organized his schedule, she even saw students for him sometimes. Some of them even sought her out before troubling Dr. Wolsieffer.
Birdie had completely put her own writing on the backburner, and she resented Tom for that. The Gorman Fellowship had not turned out anything like what she’d expected. And she didn’t feel unreasonable in her anger about that.
Tom promised her all the time that
