On Little Wings

  By Regina Sirois

  ISBN-10 1468096478

  ISBN-13 978-1468096477

  ASIN B006MITQRC

  On Little Wings

  All Rights Reserved

  Copyright © 2011 Regina Sirois

  v1.10

  Cover photo and design © 2011 Justin Sirois. All rights reserved.

  Used with permission.

  This book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without expressed written consent of the author except in cases of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  www.reginasirois.com

  I write this story for Audree,

  who looks like a Kansas wheat field on a summer day.

  May your little wings always take you where you want to go.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  * * *

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 2 CHAPTER 3 CHAPTER 4 CHAPTER 5 CHAPTER 6 CHAPTER 7 CHAPTER 8 CHAPTER 9

  * * *

  CHAPTER 10 CHAPTER 11 CHAPTER 12 CHAPTER 13 CHAPTER 14 CHAPTER 15 CHAPTER 16 CHAPTER 17 CHAPTER 18 CHAPTER 19

  * * *

  CHAPTER 20 CHAPTER 21 CHAPTER 22 CHAPTER 23 CHAPTER 24 CHAPTER 25 CHAPTER 26 CHAPTER 27 CHAPTER 28 CHAPTER 29

  * * *

  CHAPTER 30 CHAPTER 31 CHAPTER 33 CHAPTER 34 CHAPTER 35 CHAPTER 36 CHAPTER 37 CHAPTER 38 CHAPTER 39 CHAPTER 30

  * * *

  CHAPTER 40 CHAPTER 41

  * * *

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  * * *

  On Little Wings

  The DNA of mice and humans is 98% identical. 98. And somewhere, in that two percent is the difference between whiskered crumb munchers and the people who read Shakespeare and study Ptolemy. We spent four days talking about it in advanced placement biology. Mr. Johnson was convinced that all the secrets of the universe hid inside that tiny fact. That two percent.

  I believe in the secret of two percent. My home in Constance, Nebraska is 98% identical to the stoic town of Smithport, Maine: Small homes, tough country people who scrape together modest livings, raw scenery and cable television to make up for the isolation. But so many things fit into that unpredictable two percent: The entire Atlantic ocean, for instance. Not to mention an octogenarian movie star, a secret aunt, and my first heartache.

  Other than those things, mostly identical.

  And the day everything changed, the day I finally knew how much I never knew, followed the rule of two percent. Ninety eight percent normal. I would have missed it altogether had I not pulled down a moldy paperback from my mother’s bookshelf while working on an English assignment. I almost never saw the dog-eared photograph stuffed deep in the crack of the back cover. Almost didn’t look twice at the unknown face. Until I did. Again and again. Because the face wasn’t unknown. Not entirely. She had the same freckles, same golden olive skin I’d looked at in the mirror for sixteen years.

  From the kitchen the smell of grilled onions wafted on the air. The news droned from the living room. The phone rang.

  Everything the same.

  Except the two percent that meant nothing would ever be the same again.

  CHAPTER 1

  Can anyone know exactly what it means that I shut the door softly? That I walked away? Despite the shock, I didn’t slam it. The sound would have shattered me. I refused to go fast. I knew if I started running the hard knot of feelings in my chest would fly free and unravel, leaving me forever tangled, forever bound. To stay in one orderly piece I commanded my feet to take long, slow steps, but the rest of my body rebelled against the mandate to keep calm: my fretting lungs, punching heart, pounding pulse.

  “Nineteen houses,” I exhaled, which brought my tally of spoken words in the last half hour to three. The only thing I uttered to my parents before leaving was, “Cleo’s.” It told them where I was going, and frankly, they deserved nothing else.

  I possess an impressive arsenal of tricks to stop tears before they start. My favorite is blinking while saying the Pledge of Allegiance, but I like to imagine goats eating random things around me, as well. For this special occasion I used pointless facts. I looked hard at my surroundings and repeated silently what I saw like it could save me. That is a bed of red pansies…. There is a chip in that brick on their house…. The Larson’s car has rust on its muffler… That window is losing its trim to wood rot…. In noticing every mundane detail, I attempted to forget the biggest one – everyone had lied to me for my entire life.

  I let my mind drift outside my fevered head and watched myself walk down the quiet street. The girl I saw looked so peaceful, so normal. I continued my silent narration: That blond girl is whispering to herself. She forgot to put her shoes on. There is a hole in the knee of her jeans. Her breath smells like chocolate. She has tiny freckles on her nose. She just saw her parents yell at each other for the first time in her life. She is trying not to cry. She has an aunt….

  She has an aunt.

  I have an aunt.

  I squeezed the photograph in my fingers until the paper threatened to buckle under the pressure, but avoided looking at it. It contained too many facts that I couldn’t say out loud. Not yet. But one clawed like roots into the dark recesses of my brain. I didn’t speak the words, but they thrummed against the bare spots of my soul. I have the same freckles. I have the same freckles. I have the same freckles. All my life my mother told me that I had thirty seven perfect, sugar-sprinkle freckles running across my nose. (I tried to count them once. I stopped at forty three because I knew by then that she just made up the number. I didn’t mind.) My mother never told me who else had perfect freckles. There is nothing particularly unusual about looking like your aunt. I imagine it happens all the time. But it is indescribably jarring when you are sixteen and your aunt doesn’t exist one second and then is living, breathing flesh the next.

  I should have known the photograph was dangerous as soon as I saw the faded colors. I learned that lesson in eighth grade when my father showed me a colored photograph over one hundred years old. He held up his copy of Popular Mechanics and a Russian peasant in a red and gold skirt looked sullenly at me from under her purple head scarf. It is easy to look at people in old black and white photos; easy to pity them. Easy to dismiss them. But when they challenge you with blue eyes and red cheeks and you can see blood in their skin, then it is a strange phenomenon. You become responsible for them. It’s your job to keep looking and wondering and hurting for them. You are forced to think of her first kiss, her last breath. And then you have to admit that she is dead, which seems horribly rude. I slid the picture of my smiling aunt Sarah into the dark safety of my back pocket and tried to guide my thoughts back to safer waters.

  That leaf has been eaten by a bug and is turning brown… Mr. Turner’s kids left his hose out again…. Sixteen years of being told that my parents were both only children. I caught myself as my hands started to tremble in anger and forced my thoughts back to the visible facts. Cleo’s house is only one block away now… Cleo has green eyes the exact shade of a crocodile in the sun… Cleo will know what to do…

  My best friend, Cleo, and I knew the route between our homes the way most people know their birthmarks and scars – intimately. Nineteen houses, two cul-de-sacs, eleven privacy fences, three trellises, five swing sets, one swimming pool, seven dogs, one ‘beware of dog’ sign, only one concrete statue of a dancing frog using a mushroom for an umbrella (thank goodness) and one wooden wheelbarrow overflowing with pink flowers. Everything familiar, predictable, and suddenly, thoroughly meaningless.

  I wondered for a moment what Cleo would say. All I
knew for certain (as certain as anyone can be with Cleo) was the way my story would make her blank face twitch until her reluctant mouth finally rounded into a satisfying, silent ‘O.’ I paused my thoughts on her stunned face and smiled at the dimple that dug into only one of her cheeks. That dimple always softened her ferocious beauty into something comical.

  Thinking about Cleo’s face is not uncommon in our town. She is one of our regional points of pride. A natural resource. But Cleo refuses to notice. It is her unbreakable rule not to notice. And when you begin life as ugly as Cleo, I think you get to make some of your own rules. (And yes, I know it’s wrong to call a child ugly, but you weren’t there.)

  Since Fortune eventually favored her, I don’t mind saying that Cleo might have been the ugliest child nature ever allowed; If not in the history of the world, at least in the living memory of Eastern Nebraska. I know some people can tell you where they were when man walked on the moon or the Challenger exploded or the World Trade Center fell. In Constance, most people can tell you where they were when they first saw Cleo.

  For me it was age five. Sitting at the puzzle table. She entered the Children’s Garden Preschool clutching her mother’s hand, standing a head shorter than any of us. Her protruding stomach and bowed legs gave her an undeniably ape-like appearance. Two enthusiastic claps and the teacher announced, “Boys, girls, this is Gerry. She will be joining our class. Let’s all say hello!”

  Her mouth hung open due to a severe overbite which made me think she was what all of our mothers called “special.” Thick, plastic glasses magnified her lazy eye which wandered at random before coming to a rest staring ponderously at her nose. The same James Barry, who now sits behind us in third hour and would happily give up food for a week to have Cleo look at him in disdain, wrinkled his nose and eyed me with an expression that said “Are you seeing what I see?”

  Oblivious to all of us, Cleo stomped to the art table. When her stare caught me out of the crowd I met it. I was trying to tell which eye she was seeing out of because the lazy one was wandering toward the ever-reproducing snails in the fish bowl, but she mistook my thoughtful gaze as an invitation. Her hand whipped to the table, grabbed a paintbrush and thrust it toward me. At a loss for what else to do, I took it. Cleo claimed me with that paintbrush like pilgrims staking a flag in the New World. I accepted it because I pitied her as a pet of sorts, and she offered it because she saw me as a kind of servant. Both secure in our superior positions, we mutually entered our friendship.

  How ugly Geraldine turned into beautiful Cleo bewilders the people of Constance as much as the question “how did she get that ugly in the first place?” Most people look at her today and think that Cleo is short for Cleopatra, in homage to her shining dark hair, satin skin and large eyes. I am the only other soul on earth who knows the truth. Her name was gifted to her in the first grade by an animated fish. One Saturday morning we were watching Pinocchio. I was gazing catatonically the way all children do with cartoons, but Gerry was shaping her life. When the movie ended I tried to get her attention by snapping my fingers (a newly acquired skill) and saying her name, but her only reply was, “My name is Cleo.”

  “Like the fish?!”

  It took me several hours to take her seriously. I gave in much faster than her parents, who persisted in calling her Gerry for months. People took her new name with good graces, figuring someone so ugly needed extra concession. And then, ever so gradually, somewhere around fourth grade, Cleo turned dead average. Her lank hair decided that it was a dark, ashy brown that shone with a strange, silvery luster. In sixth grade braces eradicated her overbite, leaving her tiny white teeth in a pearly row. By seventh grade an eye surgery eliminated the hideous glasses that dominated her face and left behind two huge green eyes framed in inky lashes. No one in Countryside elementary noticed. We grew so accustomed to the ugliness that our eyes kept seeing it long after it disappeared. The boys in Meadow Heights Junior High, however, sat up and took notice.

  Only then did we recognize that our ugly little Cleo was ugly no longer. The women at Christ’s Church who spent many years praying for the unfortunate, little Douglas child suddenly looked up to heaven in confusion. They were hoping to comfort her soul and God had taken the short cut and given her a full-blown makeover. They eventually forgave Him after seeing that she took no more notice of her beauty than she did of her ugliness. The meddling women sighed in relief that Cleo had escaped the dreaded sin of pride and turned their prayers to more pressing matters.

  As I rounded the corner past the dancing frog statue (we named him Gilfred) Cleo’s beige home came into view. A skinny rabbit jerked its head out of the grass and ran a chaotic path before disappearing beneath my favorite lilac bush. You are scared of people. You are a brown rabbit. I’m running away, too. I’m just walking slower. I stopped walking altogether when my feet drew level with Cleo’s yard.

  Something restrained me from going forward and it wasn’t just my ignorance of how to replay the disturbing scene at my house. I felt contaminated by the memory, inadvertently rubbing my arms as if the lie had turned to dirt and stuck to me. I pulled my Aunt Sarah’s photo out of my pocket, my hands growing shakier with each breath. If I say it out loud, this will all be real.

  Sarah’s smile didn’t break in the late evening sun, but her squinting eyes looked more thoughtful. I am real, Jennifer, she answered. I turned my head, frightened to hold her stare. The colors made me too responsible for her.

  Cleo’s front door is burgundy. I am not going to cry. I pledge allegiance….

  CHAPTER 2

  The door to Cleo’s house sprang open, interrupting my thoughts, and to my relief Cleo hopped onto her front porch. “Come to beg for help?” she asked. The words shocked me so much that I flinched. She registered my confusion and quickly mirrored it. “Hanshaw… the assignment,” she prodded, “Are you stuck?”

  Understanding flooded me with relief. She was referring to the three page assignment for World Literature that Mrs. Hanshaw had sprung on us four hours ago. An assignment that four hours ago seemed like an actual problem.

  “No. Yes. Yes and no.” I took a steadying breath, still not approaching her open door. “We need to walk. Or at least be alone.”

  “Be right back,” she promised and disappeared inside. I could always count on Cleo for instant action. Her steely mind snapped at decisions with blinding speed. Within moments she was beside me holding out an extra pair of brown, plastic flip flops.

  I looked down at my feet. “I forgot I was barefoot.”

  “Did something happen?” she asked, taking me in from my toes to my face.

  “Yeah.” Even that small admission crashed through me, dropping from my lips through the middle of my chest and landing with a sick thud in my stomach. I couldn’t find the words yet. Cleo started walking while pulling her shining hair into a rubber band. “Do you want to go to the graveyard?”

  “Yes.” I couldn’t imagine telling this story on the sidewalk, or flopped across her bed. I needed somewhere gentle, wild, solitary. A place where the wind would eavesdrop and then carry the difficult words far away.

  “Are you okay?” she asked softly.

  “Sort of.” My chin shook and I pressed my lips together, trying to master the muscles that wanted to open my mouth in a childish wail. Cleo looked at me quickly in curious sympathy and then set her eyes forward, leading the way past our streets to the wheat field.

  Technically, going to the Cowling Family Cemetery is trespassing since it is in the middle of a farmer’s private wheat field, but no one ever stopped us. Years ago, after we first discovered it playing with binoculars, the farmer caught us sitting among the headstones when he passed by on his tractor. From his high perch in the saddle seat his fierce glare looked terrifying, but after a good search of our frightened faces, his expression smoothed and his mouth straightened to a calm line. “Be careful,” he growled over the noise of the motor before he touched the brim of his shapeless canvas hat and moved on.
We took that as permission.

  During growing season the small plot is obliterated by the tall wheat, and all we can see from our houses are two scrubby oak trees that stand guard over the graves. Those two trees, one twisted by the wind, the other missing half of its branches from rough weather, are the only interruption of the endless horizon. Beyond them the golden fields roll into vivid, green stalks of corn and then into the deep indigo of the sky.

  I don’t know if the farmer got sick of us trying to pick our way through his precious field but three years ago he cut a smooth, narrow path from the edge of the street straight to the graveyard. If we knew where he lived we would have thanked him, but something about his somber face didn’t invite gushing. Maybe he figured even the dead need a visitor from time to time.

  We ambled along that path through the dry wheat while I tried to think of what to say to Cleo. Halfway through the field, as I picked my way through the stalks, I slid Sarah’s photo from my pocket. “Here,” I said.

  Cleo turned her head and looked confused as she took the picture. “What is it?” she asked. I didn’t answer and she stopped walking to study it. Her eyebrows contracted and a thoughtful line burrowed into her forehead. She looked up at me, and then at the picture, squinting in concentration. “I don’t think you’re adopted,” she announced with an air of finality.

  “What?” I almost screeched.

  “Well, she looks a lot like you. You must be related, but if you’re worried you’re adopted, I don’t think you are.”

  “I never thought I was adopted,” I said, unable to stop an incredulous scowl. I took the picture back and brushed past her, taking the lead. “It’s my aunt.”