The Warbler

by Sarah Beth Durst

One of the hardest parts about continually starting over is finding new people who see and hear you. Of course, it’s safer to be forgettable, but it wears on you, to live like that.

Forgiveness is for people with other things to hold on to.

Her body wanted to follow where her heart had already gone.

There was no way she could have a baby. She thought of mothers on TV, with friends who threw them baby showers, with overinvolved parents and overindulgent grandparents. She didn’t even have a doctor, hadn’t been to a doctor in years. What about health insurance? Prenatal vitamins? A crib? How was she supposed to afford diapers? Or food? She had to be practical. With a child, you needed to at least be able to offer the stability of a home, and that was the one thing she could never, ever give this baby. Lori rested her cheek against the tree’s bark. It was a catalpa: clusters of white flowers between heart-shaped leaves. One of her favorite trees. This was a nice yard. The flower beds were weeded. She recognized peony bushes and daylilies. She wasn’t sure what other kinds of flowers had been planted, but someone had put thought and love into it. They’d planted bulbs in anticipation of seeing them bloom. I could have had this. If she’d been someone else. If she’d had a different life. She could have had a nice home with a nice garden, with her own catalpa tree. Or maybe this life was always her fate. She certainly hadn’t had any choice in it. But this—her hands curved over her stomach—she had a choice right now. She didn’t have to be alone. Not ever again. This much she had control over. Maybe she couldn’t have her own home, a perfect family, the life of her dreams, the love of her life . . . but she could have this child. She just hoped someday her child would forgive her.

“I mean, out-of-your-control fast. You think you have time for everything you want to do, and then suddenly there’s no more time.” Mom pulled on her oven mitts and lifted the pot roast out of the oven. Meaty steam rose and filled the kitchen. Rose inhaled the familiar aroma of the beef and vegetables that her mother had cooked a hundred times. “Honey, you’re describing being an adult.”

Ugh, I don’t care. Why did it matter if the house sparkled and the lawn matched home-and-garden magazines? It seemed to matter to other people so very much. She hated those pursed-lip looks when she didn’t pull the trash bins back right after the garbage trucks rumbled through. She hated the mix of pity and disapproval in her in-laws’ eyes and, worse, her parents’ if Lori left the contents of her backpack strewn on the couch or Rose hadn’t finished scrubbing a pot. Of course, they never warned her they were coming, no matter how many times she asked. And of course, they’d never blame Glenn. He couldn’t be expected to worry about the house when he had his job, even though he worked nine to six and the housework was nonstop, even though he had two hands and weekends free, even though he had time to bowl with the boys on Thursdays and meet at the coffee shop on Saturdays and watch the game in someone’s backyard on Sundays—there was always a game. She didn’t know why they even needed a house this size. Three bathrooms for three people when Glenn was at work and Lori was at school most of the time? Couldn’t someone just wait their turn? Also, why a lawn? Why did lawns exist at all? There was no point to growing a plant just so you could lop it off once a week so it looked like a carpet. So what if it had a few dandelions? Dandelions were bright and cheery! So what if there wasn’t a thick mat of mulch in the flower beds? Mulch smelled like manure anyway. Most importantly, why di...

Wherever you go, you bring yourself with you.

“You’ve always wanted everything,” Cora said. “And I’ve always loved that about you. But we get one life and the same set of hours in a day. Choosing one path means not choosing another. You can’t have both.”

Move on. What a phrase. As if we can ever really move on. Mom claimed it was possible, but look at where she ended up. All her lessons on how to let go, how to sever ties, how to cut off your heart, how to package your memories and lock them away. And she returned to die in the arms of a man she’d supposedly let go of over two decades earlier. Even she, the expert at leaving, couldn’t “move on.” How can anyone move on when you carry your past with you? I carry

Lori just needed to know there were options, that her life wouldn’t be ruined if she waited, that there was a big beautiful world out there that she’d never even seen and wouldn’t see if she continued on this path. One day led to the next, and before you knew it, you were forty-one and unlikely to live to forty-two. Life wasn’t going to wait for her.

She had to seize it now, before it was too late.

“You’re young! Let yourself be young! You should be out having adventur...

She’s not hearing me. Rose closed her eyes. She didn’t know how to make Lori understand. “It’s insidious, the way the world cages us. We don’t realize it’s happening. We don’t see the bars as we blithely walk into the cage. All the expectations . . . on TV, in books, in commercials, the damn baby-doll toys we give our children, the house-and-picket-fence dream, as if it’s what everyone should have. You can say it’s the men, it’s the patriarchy, and it is. Of course it is. But it’s not only the voices outside you that cage you. It’s the voices that you let inside: This is just the way it is, this is the life you should lead, this is what you want, this is who you should be . . .” I walked into my cage.

“That’s not . . . It didn’t work.” “But it did!” She giggled, which didn’t hurt quite as much—it felt like needles in her flesh rather than daggers in her sides. “You just weren’t specific enough.” Even though Cora was glaring at her,

customers expect—” “That’s how the curse wins,” I say. “Expectations cage us. What other people expect. What we think they expect. What we expect of ourselves. The rules that we think are unbreakable.” I used to beg Mom to try to

didn’t want to share this part of me with Tyler,” I admit. “He was separate. He was Lyssa’s boyfriend. I know I wasn’t fair to him—he didn’t get all of me. Or even the true me. He had a version that I created and then left behind. You probably think I’m despicable.”

“It makes you brave. You found a way to keep your heart intact through all of this—the fact that you can still care, that you’re still a good person . . . It’s remarkable. I wish you could see that, Elisa.”