𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐁𝐄𝐆𝐔𝐈𝐍𝐄

𝐓𝐄𝐍, 𝐈

10. | THINGS I SHOULD HAVE SAID, I

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MAY 1985.

It started like this: one morning, Diana woke up and didn't recognize who she was.

She rose as she always had, moving from bed to bathroom, noting the minutes before the girls had to be roused for school. Hair, uniforms, and breakfast had been the only things on her mind before she had discovered the face in the mirror.

With her fingers around her neck and her lips rounded, she peered as deeply into her mouth as her jaws would allow. She examined her inner cheeks, her tonsils, the surface of her tongue, the ridges of her teeth. She practiced her vocals, first with a long, slow swallow and then with a deep breath that lifted into a two-octave pitch. She stood on the tips of her toes, tilted and turned her head from side to side, brushed back the sleeves of her shirt, and stared at the reflection until her eyes stung.

The same mouth, the same voice, the same cheekbones, the same eyes, the same hair, and that same shoulder scar from childhood were there. The woman who peered back at her, however, was foreign. She had the countenance of a stranger, the preternatural spirit of an unwelcome substitute.

She frowned.

So this was the woman responsible for the past year.

The woman who had made her more obsessed with work, more neurotic, more temperamental. Impatient, listless, and angry. The woman who had encouraged cravings for vices that hadn't called to her in years and that had also unceremoniously revived the little sparrow, a contradictory thing, prone to civilizing with enough coaxing but easily inclined to flight when agitated.

After all these years, she realized the sparrow was a part of her design. Persistent and dormant, holding itself in a concealed position until it was time to rise. She wasn't a runner. She was a flier, and the sparrow, as feral as it could be, was a protector only she was capable of understanding.

The combination of the two—the sparrow and the woman she did not recognize—was dangerous.

Her lack of awareness made it difficult to warn others. How could she? There were things happening inside her, things she could barely give voice to. She could be going about her daily routine and then the clay pot inside her would crack. It could be the wrong question, a familiar aisle in the store, an aroma, a song that restored an unexplored memory. The contents of the clay pot would leak and she would have to scurry to seal the breach. Her mission always ended in success, but not before she did something off her head.

Her linchpin and greatest confidant was gone, so occasionally, when the threshold of her sanity was low, she called Barbara. She gave her the same advice each and every time, and as any other little sister would, Diana ignored it.

With one exception.

The one time she heeded her sister's advice, everything went off the rails. It ended with her alone, sitting over a tulip cup of ice cream, her trembling lips coated more with wet, runny salt than actual caramel.

She had been at an impasse. Michael asked her an offhand question and when she didn't respond directly, he prodded her for answers, made bizarre insinuations. He was hurting, she knew, and was desperate for reassurance, even if it meant being guided by his more volatile emotions. If the real Diane were there, she would have met his moods with the same Herculean level of calm she always had, but as of late, the strength she had to mitigate all things, including him, was in short supply.

She warned him, and when the warning wasn't heeded, she had gone straight for the exit, the sparrow and the unrecognizable woman carrying her the entire way.