Other Birds

by Sarah Addison Allen

Zoey had spent too much of her life as an outsider to ever think of running to anyone when she was afraid. It wasn’t that she was particularly brave, she just didn’t want the disappointment of being turned away.

It had taken him all his life to understand this, but even unlikable things have worth. It was how, after all, he’d learned to live with himself.

But she felt no stirring of desire anymore, which, perversely, gave her hope. Because how much easier would life be if she never felt longing for anything ever again? For a woman who wanted no connections, she still found herself caught up in them with men, and they were always like this—burning hot then just as quickly burning out. Maybe Asher had cured her. Maybe it was all out of her system and she could finally be the person teenaged Charlotte had wanted to be.

Even the small glass ball ornaments she’d hung by fishing wire from the ceiling gave the impression of air bubbles floating to the water’s surface. It was folklore Charlotte had grown up hearing, how these glass spheres called witch balls had been used for centuries to protect homes against ghosts and evil spirits.

She was young enough to think that drama was something you had to run toward. She had no idea that drama doesn’t need to be chased. It knows exactly where you live.

It was an odd feeling, when she really thought about it, not having anyone in the world who knew everything about you and loved you anyway.

Stories aren’t fiction. Stories are fabric. They’re the white sheets we drape over our ghosts so we can see them.

How odd that pretending to be someone else has made me happier than I was when I was just being myself. It’s almost as if, once I got over the guilt of loving my future more than I loved my past, my old life dropped away and became make-believe, and my present life became my second birth.

Once you accumulate enough regrets in life, they cease to hurt you. They are simply one more thing you collect, like age spots or ugly figurines. You barely even see them anymore.

Maybe I thought that if I just collected enough words, I could totally rewrite myself one day.

“There are birds, and then there are other birds. Maybe they don’t sing. Maybe they don’t fly. Maybe they don’t fit in. I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather be an other bird than just the same old thing.”

So Zoey understood that mothering was in the details you never saw. And the lack of it was the things you always noticed.

“If the people around you don’t love you just as you are, find new people. They’re out there.”

We all want to think we’re worth the trouble.

It made him even more scared of rejection, because who would ever believe in a loneliness so overwhelming that you called upon a ghost to alleviate it?

She did love the thought of him, of what his being here meant. He was another invisible thread, another connection.

It was like Charlotte was somewhere else, a place where she was wholly herself, when she was drawing.

There were only two times in a person’s life when a family secret should be revealed—at the very beginning, or at the very end. When a bomb like this is dropped in the middle, it forces the person to spend the rest of their life struggling to live a life redefined, because everything they’d known as truth was suddenly false.

Charlotte had sat on one of the couches and talked. She couldn’t even remember what about now. She could only remember how they’d faced each other, mirroring the other’s body language, and that there had been one moment when she’d thought, I could stay like this forever.

She was used to bottling everything up until she fell with a white-hot intensity that felt like the hunger of her childhood, when she would quickly fill herself out of fear of not getting enough. She’d never had this kind of slow attraction to a man before, something that felt like she didn’t need any more than this.

I was scared for Oliver. It frightened me with its intensity. What if something happened to him? If I had felt something this intense while I was alive, it surely would have killed me. Camille says it wouldn’t have killed me. It would have given me holes. And the holes are where the love comes through.

I see things so clearly now. How wrong I’d gotten it. It is love, even if you’re not loved back. It is.

Most of the time they simply stared out at the garden, every once in a while turning to smile at each other as if they couldn’t quite believe this was their life now, that they were actually adults being trusted to navigate this world on their own. But once, he’d reached over and taken her hand and kissed it for no reason she could think of. It was as if she’d touched something electric, and she’d found herself thinking she would be perfectly okay if everything changed.

A dream, a story, an invisible bird—it was all the same thing, really. Not everything has to be real to be true.

His business was gone, sold, and there was money, money, money, always money, but not happiness, because he did not have anything to do.

Benedict enjoyed making people happy for those few moments between seeing something delightful he created, and having it pass between their lips. Baking for others, he discovered, was an ancestor to love. It was something from which love might one day become.

Benedict would always bow and say, “Your dream is mine.” It was this simple phrase, said to Eloise every day for months, that began to alter her feelings. She was used to men adoring her, to their grand gestures and expensive gifts. But they never listened to anyone’s heart but their own. Certainly not hers.