Paper Birch

The main saltbox house stood at the end of a long gravel drive, protected by a wrought-iron gate and surrounded by hedgerows dressed in holly berries.

The thriving front garden was carefully tended to, even now, in the deep of winter, when frost glimmered on the sloping lawn each morning. A stone angel in prayerful repose bowed her head beneath a crown of icicles.

At night, deep in the woods beyond, I could count each star individually. I told myself that this was a blessing, even as I resented this village where the faces were all too familiar and the generational curse had seemed, inevitably, to settle. Even upon me, the one they had once called a prodigy.

Now, I supposed, I was the prodigal.

*

I did not live in the main house. My residence was the guest house at the very edge of the property, an add-on that had come many decades after the original building. Nevertheless, it had a certain charm.

It stood at the precarious edge of a large ravine, where I often saw various birds of prey flying low amongst the trees and disturbing the carefully laid snowfall on the evergreen branches.

I wasn’t too much of a birdwatcher, but after a certain amount of time, one had a way of learning the individual strains of natural noise that played as a backdrop to our daily existences.

It wasn’t the hawks and falcons that haunted me most days. I was often roused out of my strange dreams in the early mornings to an even stranger alternating set of sounds: the cries of both male and female barn owls.

Sometimes there was a shriek, which struck through the air with as much force and brilliance as lightning above the flatlands; other times, a slow murmuring waver, trembling through the grey air like static on some distant radio.

*

I didn’t mind the little house. I could enjoy my coffee by the window and watch the snow fall, paint with watercolors at the kitchen table. On bright days, when the sickness released me slightly, I felt like I lived inside such a painting, and I couldn’t really fathom my good fortune.

This was due to the fact that I knew, in every other imaginable way, I was probably—definitely—undeserving of such a desirable place to live out the liminal hours and days and months—years, now—between pre-pandemic life and whatever lay beyond.

*

The pure entitlement I still carried around was ridiculous. I knew it. Everyone knew it. My family was waiting for me to admit it aloud.

I had lasted one year, a decade ago, in a college dorm room I had begun to fear was trying to kill me. There were spiders on the walls, wires inside them. Everyone was listening to me. My thoughts were too loud. I carved up my arms with a jack knife and trembled in a cotton T-shirt in midwinter. My hallmates began to avert their eyes as I passed.

Art history was a pointless degree anyway, my mother told me the day I moved back home, and I would be bored with any job that it could potentially qualify me for.

Museum curators were expected to work long hours in solitude, and surely with my condition I would not manage. I would panic at the sound of footfalls in the echoing rooms in the middle of the night. I would look at the paintings too long until they came crawling to life, the Renaissance spaniels barking and the wheat fields bleeding beneath the starry night.

At eighteen, listening to my mother state these things so matter-of-factly, it had all made sense. And besides, I was poor. Too poor, at least, to continue on this aimless, indecent path of pretension.

*

For a time, I worked in my family home to feed my mother’s delusions. I kept the cellar stocked with food we were not permitted to touch, and I tried to ignore the sound of conspiratorial pundits, venting their frustration on their radio shows, always loud enough that the floor in my upstairs bedroom vibrated.

She cleaned feverishly, sweeping imagined dust from the faded linoleum. She yelled at the neighbors. She yelled at me. Sometimes she picked fights with my father, weeping and pleading for his help, even though he had moved out when I was nine.

Dutifully, like the good daughter, I swallowed medicine each morning: large salmon-colored pills that gave me odd tics and made me feel seasick with nausea but took away the whispering voices and the shadows in my periphery.

My coffee grew cold and I lost hours disassociating. There was an aura around my face in the mirror, prisms of light in the living-room floor lamp. Often, I heard orchestral music with no source.

*

I found jobs, though they were strange and random and often seasonal, the type of work done by country kids who grew up to become country people. I did my time chopping Christmas trees on a farm down the road, picking blueberries, pruning vines, cutting stems in the warehouse of a florist who made six figures.

Eventually, through some miracle, I found work that felt truly meaningful. My aunts and cousins and even my father arrived when they heard, raising glasses of celebratory champagne.

“What is it that you’re going to be doing, exactly?” my oldest cousin asked.

I would be writing a consistent column in a local art magazine. The joy of such creative work invigorated me enough to strive for wellness. And for months I was remarkably well.

I bought a humble but reliable hatchback and began driving, aimless, full of fresh appreciation for my roots. I interviewed a local artisanal craftsman, a Japanese Kintsugi expert, a New York expat whose work hung in a museum in sleepy Hudson.

I began to find inspiration in the landscape around me, suddenly beautiful and bright and new. In the summer the roadsides bloomed with wildflowers. In midwinter there were diamond-bright fields and frost-choked pines dripping like fine art installations.

There was beauty in the endless expanse of stars, too, the sky wider than city people could appreciate. Venus was present with the moon that night in early January as I slept upstairs, the smell of pine still lingering from the holidays.

At three o’clock in the morning, my mother stumbled outside onto the freezing lawn and collapsed in a thin white nightgown.

*

The main house was owned by an elderly and stingy old man who insisted his name was Job. I refused to believe this, because I was well, but five years ago I would have feared him, like I feared anyone with a biblical name.

Now, I simply found it irritating. To adopt the name of history’s most unlucky man when, in the midst of a pandemic and a recession, you owned eight acres of land, one must either be very out of touch or very arrogant.

The man was over eighty years old and I knew he was wealthy, because he remarked, in the sort of way that implied the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, that he was charging me less for the guest house than I could hope to find anywhere else in town. It was true, so I didn’t argue.

He moved with a stiff yet determined gait and spent most of his time either chopping firewood, which he would sell at the roadside, or burning it himself.

Sometimes I found him bundled in his heaviest coat and plaid woollen scarf dusting the floor of the barn, a bright red box-like building that stood out against the sweep of freshly fallen snow, a blood-soaked cloth.

Alongside the barn was a kennel where the man kept two coonhounds. They howled and yelped at the sight of me as I trudged past the barn, the female’s pregnant stomach heaving.

*

At dawn I awoke, first, to the slow and languished call of the barn owls, and then to a less expected sound: lively chatter outside, in the yard. This was unusual, of course. The man was usually stoic at the best of times, doing his odd jobs around the yard and the house in voluntary solitude.

Presumably, at least part of his aloneness was not so voluntarily: his wife had been dead for nearly two decades. He never spoke of her, nor his family at large, which is why I was shocked that morning when I met his granddaughter.

When I stepped outside of the little house, a mug of coffee still in hand, I found a trail of footprints in the sludgy, dirt-stained snow. The barn door stood open.

Inside, the old man—dressed only in a blue flannel housecoat and slippers—was bent over, murmuring soft sounds of affirmation. Beside him was the bent form of a young woman in an expensive puffer jacket, cool blonde hair tucked beneath a beanie.

The girl heard me approach first, and she glanced over her shoulder only to break out into a delighted smile. I saw that the old man was tending to a bundle of puppies, four in all, curled close to the blue tick female and nursing through quiet whimpers at her swollen belly. The bitch looked proud, gazing with warmth at her litter, while the male dog stood warily nearby.

“Would you like to hold this one?” the girl asked me, and I realized, suddenly, that she had a fifth pup in her arms. Swaddled in cotton sheets, it looked impossibly small, too frail to survive.

“We’ve been bottle-feeding him all night,” she said quietly, casting her eyes down lovingly. “He’s the runt. The mama tried to smother him.”

In silence, I watched, and marvelled. The girl who was a stranger cradled this tiny, blind creature, squirming without much resolve, until we both heard the sound of soft snores.

I looked up into the girl’s eyes and realized with a shock that she was not at a stranger at all.

*

Ivy had a marketing degree and an apartment in Brooklyn which she had recently chosen to abandon in favor of moving “back home.” Home was here, in the country. And her grandfather was Job.

“Is that really his name?” I asked, because I needed to know. She was chopping ingredients for a stir fry in the kitchen, and it was my first time ever standing inside the main house.

She laughed loudly at this. “Of course not.”

We ate dinner together that night, poured our way through a bottle of full-bodied merlot. We shared stories interrupted only by the occasional needy whimper of the puppy, who Ivy allowed to suckle at a bottle. I tried to ignore her perfect, gleaming white teeth, her fake tan, the ease with which she moved.

From the moment outside the barn, I had recognized her, and then slowly came to remember the missing details: we had attended preschool together, even played in my childhood bedroom together once, before my mother rushed in to scream about fluoride in the water.

I didn’t voice these thoughts aloud, although I remembered. I remembered most everything, constantly revisiting my childhood the way cartographers drafted maps: like it was a necessity, requiring the most meticulous and steady hand.

She, on the other hand, said my name in her mouth like it was a brand new taste, something sweet yet foreign.

“Lauren Rutland,” she said with a twinkle of curiosity in her eye. “What is it that you do again?”

That night, after she pulled out of the long driveway in her white Audi, I began to investigate.

*

On social media, Ivy was alluring. Exposed brick photoshoots with perfect lighting. Polaroids scattered on hardwood. Too many friends to count, wearing glitter eye makeup on New Year’s Eve. She moved with the elite and made no attempt to hide it.

I tried to close my laptop but couldn’t. Catatonic, I stared at the images as the sound of the grandfather clock became steadily louder, louder, louder. Something stirred in my chest. I could feel my ribcage, suddenly, expanding with the beating of my moth-wing heart. The beginnings of rage.

I recognized this feeling, and considered my medication, but it could wait, it could always wait—I needed to know, needed to understand, needed to conceptualize how someone who had once been my equal had surpassed me in every imaginable way.

The male barn owl, that night, was wailing, but it sounded more like laughter, like everything did these days. I knew there would always be laughter, no matter how hard I tried to avoid it, or hide, or pray for relief. I knew this with certainty.

I knew a lot of things, I realized, that could potentially help me.

I knew that Ivy’s grandfather had a stash of hundred-dollar bills beneath a mattress up in the main house. I knew that holly berries, in no short supply along the perimeter of the property, were lethal in large doses. I knew that a fall from the top of the ravine at the right angle would crumple a human being’s skull on rocks.

I lay on my back and heard a comforting voice in the darkness. One I didn’t recognize. She spoke loudly and plainly, reassuringly, like a mother. Warmth rose in my chest, replacing the bile of anger. I didn’t cry. I felt no bitterness. I felt relaxed, as I began to form a plan, validated by the maternal lilt of her sweet, sweet voice.

*

“We used to write notes to each other on these,” Ivy said. She had taken a week to return, but she was here to stay now. She was standing alongside the paper birch tree on the front lawn, posing for a photograph, but she had been caught off guard by a piece of rough bark sliding easily off the branch.

I was crouched a distance away, trying to get her at best and thinnest angle. I stood up, feeling as though my body was as light as a ray of winter sun, and made a curious questioning sound.

“I remember you now,” Ivy said. “We were friends as kids. We used to write notes to each other on these scraps of bark.” She laughed aloud. “I can’t believe I didn’t remember. I didn’t recognize you. I’m sorry, Lauren.”

I shrugged. It didn’t matter to me now whether she recalled our brief childhood friendship. I was dutiful, doing my job, assisting her with her glamorous curated life. That night, after dinner, I would kill her.

“I wonder if I still have some of them,” Ivy mused. “You know what? I bet I do. They’re probably in the basement. Do you want to come up to the house?”

The house. She called it that every time she spoke of it. The house. As though it were the only one, and mine was nothing but a shack, a homeless shelter. I was the “less fortunate” Ivy spoke of on her blog, after attending a winter-themed gala with a cliché name and a sea of white people who all looked the same in their sequined party dresses.

“Yes,” I said in monotone. I could feel my vocabulary slipping away, bearing down on me: I didn’t dare speak, for fear a stream of formal yet jilted consciousness poured out. I had to appear normal.

As I stood, I moved to brush pine needles off my corduroy pants. The smell of sap hung heavy in the air. Ivy approached me with a joyful, slightly teasing smile playing on her dewy cupid’s bow, and I could almost taste the notes of blood orange in her perfume.

She raised her gloved hand to remove something from my hair, and a syrupy patch of pine needles came away.

“There,” she said, smiling. “Let’s go inside. I’m getting cold.”

*

We cooked, and laughed, and dined together, but Ivy disappeared into the basement as I poured the drinks. She was, stupidly, determined to find the collection of notes. I presumed, rationally, that they were long gone. It infuriated me that she was so fixated on something so trivial, something so meaningless.

I had arranged the toxic mixture hours earlier and my hands did not shake as I poured it into a wine glass for Ivy. The deep plum-colored pinot noir was rich and heady, heavily layered with so many natural notes that I knew she would not recognize the unnatural.

I leaned over to ensure the glasses were level, full of the same amount of liquid, a hollow attempt at mimicking kindness. I remembered what I was supposed to do: to be kind, to smile, to listen to her share her stories about city life and force down the urge to scream and wail my frustration.

A skittering sound interrupted my focus and, suddenly, in a whirlwind, I was assaulted by the excited yelping and leaping of the coonhound pup. Ivy’s laughter followed, and then her shadow fell on the hardwood. Out of the corner of my eye I watched her enter, dominating the space with her immaculate luxury: black turtleneck, glittering gold eyeshadow, rose-colored lips.

She swept past me, reaching for the whining runt, knocking the wine off the counter in a shattering rainfall of broken glass.

When she resurfaced, her perfect hair less perfect, the pup wriggling in her arms, she laughed again in a different tone. Apologetic.

“I’m so sorry, Lauren,” she said breathlessly, brushing her long curls back out of her face. Her cheeks were flushed. “I’ll clean this up right away.”

She vanished down the hall to collect a broom and dustpan, and returned a moment later, still laughing with embarrassment.

“I put him in his crate,” she explained, and unsurprisingly, a tiny howl emanated from the guest room down the hall. “I’m sorry, I really didn’t think anything of it. I thought I had a good grasp on him, but you know how puppies are.”

I didn’t. I had never been allowed to have a dog, growing up. My mother hated them.

I watched Ivy sweep in silence, the shards of broken glass glinting as the slants of moonlight fell in through the kitchen window.

I realized my hands, finally, were trembling, and my heart was racing as though I were running for my life. My throat was torturously dry. I couldn’t swallow. I couldn’t cry. I didn’t dare move.

Another disgruntled howl came from the guest room, and then the pup fell silent.

I regained my composure, grabbed a wet dish cloth, and bent to wipe up the wine. It was drying fast on the floor now, leaving a sticky purplish bruise on the otherwise slick and polished wood.

Ivy beamed at me with gratitude, through sparkling eyelashes.