HER MOTHER AND RON had set a wedding date. New Year’s Eve. It was less than a month before they were married and he had moved into the apartment. Already boxes of his things lined the hallways. Neatly labeled in black magic marker—CLASSICAL AND JAZZ ALBUMS, ART BOOKS, LIQUEURS. His suits hung in plastic bags, from the dry cleaners. A small painting by Renoir hung on one wall of the entranceway. The flowers in it looked like colored dots, they were so tiny.
“Mom,” Sparrow said, following her mother into her bedroom, “nothing’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
Her mother had had the walls painted a muted gray. “More manly,” she’d told Sparrow. The apartment still smelled of new paint.
“Susan,” her mother said, holding fabric swatches for draperies against the window, “I’m too busy for this.”
“Why can’t you just call me Sparrow? Why can’t you just use my real name? The name you and my father gave me. Sparrow. Say it. Sparrow.”
But Sparrow left the room before her mother could answer.
Later, she stared at her mother as she drank coffee and worked on a client’s portfolio at the dining room table. She wondered who this woman was. She would marry Ron and Sparrow would never know her. Not really. She had once seen a photograph of her with her friends from college, long-haired women, one with black hair, the other with copper, her mother in the middle, smiling. When she had asked her mother who they were, she had answered vaguely. “You know,” her mother had said, “sometimes we are forced to put things behind us. People too. There are choices we make that change our lives forever.” Sparrow had never seen the picture again. She thought now of the one she’d kept, of her father in front of the brightly painted van.
“I won’t be home until late tonight,” her mother said, closing the folder she’d been studying.
“But it’s Saturday. You have to work on Saturday?”
She thought of her mother again, in that lost photograph—girlish smile and blowing hair.
“I have an appointment with the decorator.”
“What decorator?”
“I already told you, Susan.”
“And I told you my name is Sparrow. I bet my real father calls me that.”
Her mother sipped her coffee.
“For the party Christmas Eve. I’m already so busy I thought it would be easier to have it catered and let someone else make the apartment festive. Next year, maybe the three of us can spend Christmas in Watch Hill. Wouldn’t that be lovely?”
“You mean we’re not even putting up our own tree? Is that what you mean?” Everything familiar was slipping away. Sparrow thought of the decorations she’d made through the years in school and at camp, dough angels and cardboard Santas. They were wrapped just as carefully as the glass and metal ones her mother had collected.
“When would we find the time? I had a wonderful idea. Everything done in silver and white. White boughs with silver ribbons over there. Long strands of pearls around the tree. What do you think?”
“I think it sounds ugly. Fake.”
The memory returned to her, of a real tree with tinsel and tiny white lights.
Once, the year before, Sparrow had looked up her father’s name in her mother’s address book, a big fat one covered in gray flannel. The front of the book looked like the front of a suit, with a thin miniature strand of real pearls on it and a piece of lace sticking out of the breast pocket. The book had been a gift from Ron, another one of his pricey, useless extravagances. He had one, too, a book dressed in Harris tweed with a pinstriped tie and onyx tie clip. “A-dress book,” he had said when he showed them to Sparrow. “Get it?” She had not found her father’s name there.
But recently, Sparrow had seen her mother pull out a different address book from her night-table drawer and get a phone number from it. “I hate to hurt Ron’s feelings,” Suzanne had said, “he spent a fortune on it. But it’s impossible to write in that book. The pearls are so bumpy that everything I wrote looks sloppy. Not that it isn’t a clever idea, an a-dress book.”
In the night-table drawer, beside her mother’s diaphragm and passport, Sparrow found the old book, and found on its creased pages inked-out names, addresses crossed off and new ones rewritten beneath them. In the back of the book, amidst postcards and business cards and names of restaurants, Sparrow had found a Christmas card from her father. It was signed, simply, Abel.
As soon as Ron and her mother left, Sparrow went into Suzanne’s bedroom right to the night-table drawer, where she knew the address book was, and took the card out. At first, all she could do was stare at the envelope. It made her dizzy, seeing his name and address right there in front of her, and she had to sit on the edge of the bed. The smell of Chanel No. 5 in the room was very strong. Sparrow called information in Maine and got her father’s phone number but didn’t write it down and it slipped her mind as soon as she hung up the phone. She looked at the address on the envelope again and it was then that she decided to go to Maine.
SPARROW WAITED TWO HOURS at the station for a bus to Portland. While she waited she ate at the Burger King in the terminal and read Seventeen magazine. Finally, the bus came.
She spent the time on the bus imagining her father. He is tall, she thought, and strong from chopping wood and hiking. Perhaps he lives in a log cabin that he built himself, decorated with plants and quilts. Sparrow smiled at the thought. The apartment where she lived with her mother had a lot of glass—tables, bookshelves, even the bar. It was decorated in black, white, and blue. Just the other day, her mother had come home with a blue neon sculpture that she bought on Newbury Street. It was placed on the black glass table in the corner beside a blue and white oversized ashtray. “Just what this corner needed,” her mother said proudly. Perhaps her father would be standing outside when she arrived, with his head tilted back, like it was in the picture. Perhaps she would stay with her father, Sparrow thought as the bus rolled into the Portland bus terminal. She would sleep in a brass bed and have a large leaded glass lamp shaped like a tulip to read by at night.
From Portland, Sparrow had to hitchhike to Saco. It was snowing. And cold. She hadn’t brought a scarf or gloves or even a hat. Sparrow had never hitchhiked before, and she stood on the corner, huddled inside her baby blue ski jacket with her hands in her pockets to keep warm. Whenever a car approached, which wasn’t often, she took one hand out and waved it slightly.
After what seemed like a very long time, a woman walked by, jingling her car keys. She paused and watched Sparrow’s efforts to get a ride.
“What are you doing?” the woman asked finally.
“I’m trying to get a ride,” Sparrow said, trying to sound older and surer of herself. “To Saco,” she added, “where my father lives.”
“How did you get here?” The woman squinted at her through wet glasses. “By bus.”
“Why didn’t this father of yours pick you up?”
“I’m surprising him. I finished my finals today and decided to come right home. I could have had a ride the whole way if I waited until tomorrow.” Sparrow was surprised at how easily she lied. She wished the woman, who was bouncing from one foot to the next, would agree to take her to Saco.
“Why don’t you call him?” the woman asked.
“What kind of surprise would that be?”
The woman considered this. “Well,” she said finally, “where’s your mother?”
It was snowing harder.
“She’s married to a successful businessman. They don’t live here.”
“Well, I can certainly tell you don’t hitchhike often.”
Sparrow smiled through her frozen lips. “I’ve never done it before. I just want to surprise my father.” This, at least, was the truth.
“You can’t be too careful these days, you know,” the woman said. “What with ax murderers, men dressed like women, all sorts of things. How do I know you’re not really a psycho dressed like a teenager? Huh?”
“I don’t know,” Sparrow said.
The woman studied her carefully. “I’ll take you,” she said. “I just wanted to be sure.”
However, the roads were not plowed yet and the woman couldn’t get into town. Instead, she dropped Sparrow off as close as she could get. Alone, standing on the deserted street with the snow falling around her, Sparrow began to think that she had made a big mistake in coming here. She should have called first. Or come in the morning when it was, at least, light out. But she was here, now, and she had to do something.
She began to walk, quickly, as if she knew where she was going. Her hands were getting numb from the cold and her ears were tingling. She could see the headlines now: GIRL FOUND FROZEN ON LONELY ROAD.
Finally she came to a 7 Eleven. There was a teenaged boy sitting at the counter lazily looking through a motorcycle magazine. Every now and then he would say “Varoom,” softly, and shift invisible gears. A radio played, elevator music. There were customers in the store, buying milk and bread and cans of soup. The clock on the wall had only one hand, the minute hand, and it drooped toward the six.
Sparrow bought some coffee and held the cup with both hands, to warm them.
“It’s going to be a bad one,” one of the customers said.
The boy nodded indifferently. “Varoom,” he whispered.
“Maybe eight inches. Or more. Maybe ten,” the man continued.
Oh, no, Sparrow thought. This was a blizzard. A real blizzard. And she had nowhere to go. She imagined being snowed in the 7 Eleven for days with this boy, eating Hershey bars and dry muffin mix.
“Please,” she said to anyone who would listen, “where is Chester Street?”
The boy looked up.
“I…my father lives there and I wanted to surprise him.” Sparrow’s eye caught sight of a worn gold garland draped around the counter. A cardboard Santa held a sign. HAPPY HOLIDAYS. “For the holidays,” she added.
Another customer approached the counter. In addition to milk and bread, he had stacks of girlie magazines.
“Chester Street?” he asked her.
Sparrow nodded.
“That’s heading out of town. That way.” He pointed in the direction from which she had just come.
“Oh, no,” she moaned.
“I’d give you a lift, but I bet those roads aren’t even plowed yet.”
Sparrow looked at the stack of magazines. “That’s okay,” she said.
“It’s not far,” the boy told her. “You can walk it.”
“But I don’t even know where I am.”
“Listen,” the boy said, “if you don’t mind waiting till I close up, you can walk with me. I live over on Myrtle.”
Sparrow had no other choice. “I’ll wait,” she said. She looked around. There were witnesses. If this boy turned out to be one of those psychos the other woman was afraid of, there were people who could describe him. He lived on Myrtle. He pretended to ride a motorcycle.
“Here,” he said in a low voice and he poured her a fresh cup of coffee. “On the house,” he said. “You can read a magazine too.” He pointed to the magazine rack. “Any one you want. Go on.” Then he added proudly, “I’m the only one on at night. I let my friends read the magazines.”
He had friends and a job. Those were good signs, Sparrow thought. She picked up a magazine and sat on a cardboard box full of cat food at the back of the store. She wondered what time it was. Late, she knew. Terrific, she thought, she was going to show up on her father’s doorstep in the middle of the night. During a blizzard.
After some time, the boy came to get her.
“What time is it?” she asked him.
“Quarter of two,” he whispered. “I’m supposed to stay until two, but there’s no one here.”
Sparrow nodded and got up. The boy handed her a large pair of man’s gloves. They were dark yellow suede with curly white trim and lining.
“You could probably use these,” he said. “Someone left them here last week.”
Sparrow put them on. The fingers were so long and wide that her entire hand fit into the palms.
They walked slowly through the snow in silence. Sparrow was so tired that she felt as if she were sleepwalking. She concentrated on her feet, which moved heavily through the snow. Beside her the boy breathed hard, now and then revving his invisible motorcycle.
Until he stopped.
“Okay,” he said. “Go straight down the road for about a quarter of a mile to Crescent Street. Not even. Then turn left and then right and you’re on Chester.”
A quarter of a mile? Sparrow thought. How many blocks is that? Two? Ten? A hundred and ten?
“Where are you going?” she asked him.
“I live right here.” He pointed to a small white house trimmed in multi-colored Christmas lights. Above them hung a street sign. Myrtle Street.
“Oh,” Sparrow said.
He turned and walked away from her. Sparrow wanted to shout to him to come back and walk her the whole way. She watched him walk into the little house. A quarter of a mile, she said to herself. Not even.
She was surprised at how quickly she reached Crescent Street. Sparrow turned left and then right and sure enough, just as he had promised, she was on Chester Street.
The street had very few houses. The ones there were larger than on Myrtle Street, and shabby. Most of them had big front porches and Sparrow could see Christmas trees in every window that she passed. She was struck by the quiet, not a sound. In the distance, a dog barked twice and then was silent.
Chester Street ended in a tangle of trees, all with a thick frosting of snow. Sparrow’s father’s house was the last one on the street. Even in the darkness and with all the snow, Sparrow could see that it needed to be painted. There was a light on in an upstairs window and a Christmas tree downstairs with small twinkling white lights. A cracked streetlight provided enough light for Sparrow to see her way up the front steps to the porch.
It was then, as she opened the porch door, that the enormity of her situation hit her. She was at her father’s doorstep. Sparrow took a deep breath and entered the porch. It was filled with assorted boots and sneakers and jackets. A couch was sloppily draped in a dark green bedspread with ragged fringe. Sparrow peered through the smudgy glass of the front door. She stood, with her hand tightly gripping the doorknob, for a minute, trying to see inside. Then she turned the knob and gasped as the door creaked loudly open. Quickly she pulled it shut. The door stuck slightly, then closed. Sparrow gulped and pressed her forehead against the glass. She could not believe that the door was unlocked, that she had opened it and then slammed it shut so loudly that the neighbors might have heard it. She could not believe that she was at her father’s doorstep. She wanted to run.
Someone approached the door from inside the house. She stood away from the door and it swung open. There, standing before Sparrow, was her father. His dark blond hair was shorter than in the picture, and wavy, and he had a dark red beard. When he saw Sparrow he squinted and scowled at her.
“Are you lost or something?” he said. “Do you know what time it is?”
Sparrow stood on the cluttered porch, her mouth opened slightly, and gulped again.
“What is it?” he said. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m Sparrow,” she said finally.
Her father’s eyes widened.
“Why are you here? Has something happened to Suzie?”
It took her a moment to realize that Suzie was her mother. She had never heard anyone call her that before.
Sparrow shook her head. Right now she wanted to be back in Boston, in her own bed. This was not right at all. When she said her name, her father should have hugged her. He should have done something.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You must be freezing. Come in.”
Sparrow followed him inside. The house was cold and smelled of smoke. The rooms were square and small, like Christmas-present boxes. Her father led her to a room in back. Sparrow couldn’t tell if it was a living room or a dining room. It was lit by a small lamp with a shade that had pictures of covered wagons on it. A cupboard painted a flat Colonial blue held a spoon collection. New Jersey. Vermont. Ohio. Sparrow tried to picture her mother here, sitting in the faded brown La-Z-Boy chair in her neatly ironed skirt and stiff Oxford shirt. She frowned. This was not right, Sparrow thought.
SPARROW AND HER FATHER sat across from each other at the red metal table in the center of the room. It had a large yellow and green rooster design in the middle. Her father had called her mother. He had given a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to Sparrow and then gone into the next room and called her mother. He spoke in hushed tones. The windows had dark green shades on them and Sparrow lifted one and looked out at the snow. It fell rapidly to a certain point, then lifted back upward slightly before hitting the ground. When the phone call was over, Sparrow closed the shade and sat at the table with her father. They stared across the rooster at each other.
“She’s getting married,” Sparrow said.
Her father nodded.
“I mean,” she continued, “to someone else. She’s marrying someone else.”
Her father nodded again.
“And,” Sparrow began as she fought back tears, “she…she insists on calling me Susan.”
“Susan?”
“She says that Sparrow is a silly name.”
Her father smiled. There were a lot of lines around his eyes.
“I wanted to meet you,” Sparrow blurted out. There was a hysterical edge to her voice now. “A person should know her own father, shouldn’t she?”
“Yes, yes, of course.”
“Well, then.”
Sparrow gulped a few times, very quickly.
“I have one picture of you,” she said. “That’s it. All that you are is a man in a picture.” She felt as if she were going to cry.
“Look,” her father said. “Look at these.” He shook some snapshots out of a bag that he had brought in from the next room.
Sparrow picked one up, studied it. The man in it was certainly her father, looking just like he did in the picture she had. The woman beside him had long wheat-colored hair. She wore faded blue jeans and a man’s shirt. They were standing in front of the bright green van. Sparrow looked at her father.
“That’s Suzanne,” he said. “That’s your mother.”
Sparrow looked at the picture again. Yes, it was her mother, all right. Slowly, she picked up the other pictures. In all of them her mother’s hair is long and wild. She is wearing old sweaters and baggy men’s shirts. In all of them, she is smiling.
“What a beauty, huh?” her father said as he picked up a picture.
Sparrow looked at him. He looked sad. And old. He wore a shabby brown cardigan that pulled tightly across his stomach.
“She looks different now,” Sparrow said, to make him feel better somehow.
Her father nodded. “I haven’t seen her for years. Since you came for Christmas one time. You were so little I guess you don’t remember that.”
Sparrow smiled. “I do,” she said. “I do remember. The tree was so big. And it had tiny white lights.”
“You thought they were snowflakes.”
“Where did we live then?”
“In Boston. You and your mother always lived in Boston.”
Sparrow’s heart raced with excitement. Even though he no longer looked like the man in the picture, this was her father. He said she thought the lights were snowflakes.
“I don’t know what to ask first,” she said.
“I’m a poet,” he said shyly. “Your mother used to love my poems. For a time. Then she wanted me to go to Boston with her and teach English while she went to graduate school.”
Sparrow sighed. That was it. He had wanted to stay here in Maine and write poetry and her mother had wanted to leave. Climb the corporate ladder, Sparrow thought angrily.
“It was a wonderful time,” her father said, “when we lived on the beach in a tiny house. We were so happy.”
“Just the three of us, huh? Then she had to go and ruin it all.”
Her father looked surprised. “Well, that’s partly right. I mean, your mother told me, ‘We can’t live on poetry.’ But,” he hesitated. Sparrow waited.
“Don’t you know that having you was the bravest thing your mother could have done? She went to Boston by herself, she knew she was pregnant…” He hesitated again.
“Wait a minute,” Sparrow said as she tried to put the pieces together. “When did we live at the beach? The three of us, I mean.”
“Sparrow,” her father said, “you’ve got it all wrong. I mean, it wasn’t really your mother’s fault. I mean, the thing is, we lived together in that little house, Suzie and I did. I wrote my poetry and she finished up school and then she applied to all these graduate programs. And she got into the one in Boston and then found out she was pregnant. I mean, we never got married, Sparrow. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to get married or teach English or move to Boston.”
“You didn’t want me,” Sparrow whispered.
Her father bowed his head.
“Why did we come back here that Christmas?”
“To show me how well it had all turned out, I guess. Suzanne wanted me to know that I had made a big mistake.”
“I don’t want to be here,” Sparrow said. “I want to go home.”
“Sparrow—”
“How could you not want me?” she said. In the movies this would be the part where she would run out and go back to Boston. But Sparrow knew there was no way back tonight. Instead, she ran out of the room.
A woman, dressed in a full, long nightshirt, was standing in the next room. Her hair hung to her shoulders, pale blond and thin. It was not until she grabbed Sparrow’s arm that Sparrow saw the wedding ring on the woman’s finger.
“Sparrow,” she said in a musical voice.
“Leave me alone,” Sparrow said wearily, but she did not try to break free.
“Sparrow, I know how you must feel. But that was all so long ago. Your father is really a very good man.” Then, “He writes such beautiful poetry, you know,” as if that mattered.
Her father came into the room.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Sparrow sunk onto the couch, felt the broken springs deep inside the cushions.
“I’ve had a picture of you,” she said.
Her father sat beside her.
“You’ve had a lot of ideas,” he said.
Sparrow nodded. She was thinking that she couldn’t stay here and live in the woods like she had imagined. She had wanted her father to be someone who loved her and wanted her, a slim man, outfitted at L. L. Bean perhaps, and smoking a pipe. “It broke my heart,” this imaginary father would say, “when your mother went to Boston.” He would make her thick grainy pancakes in his log cabin. He would hug her close and say, “It really broke my heart.”
It was beginning to get light now, and the snow had almost stopped. Sparrow looked at the man who was her father. His wife with the musical voice stood beside him.
“I’ll get some blankets,” his father’s wife said. “This couch opens up into a bed.” She left the room quietly.
“We’ll get you back to Boston tomorrow,” her father said.
Sparrow nodded.
She and her father sat side by side on the sagging couch.
“Would you like to read a poem I wrote?”
“I don’t care,” Sparrow said.
He went into the back room and returned with a notebook.
“Read the first one,” he told her.
She opened the book and read. The poem was about a tiny sparrow who has to fly away when it is very young. It was not a well-written poem, but it made Sparrow’s eyes fill with tears and then, finally, she cried. Her father took her in his arms and stroked her hair. She imagined him sitting at the table with the rooster design on it, writing poetry late at night. She tried to place her mother in this image, but it was impossible. And she could not place herself here either, in this smoky house with the sagging furniture. She lifted her head and wiped her eyes. Her father looked neither like the picture she had in her mind nor like the photograph on her bureau.
Hesitantly, she smiled at him. His face relaxed for the first time since she had arrived. Sparrow nodded at him, and he tilted his head back and opened his mouth into a wide smile.
SPARROW HAD SLEPT ON the pullout couch without a real pillow. Her father’s wife, Melanie, had looked around the house for an extra pillow but couldn’t find one. Instead, she gave Sparrow two tiny square pillows with needle-point monograms on them. Abel’s initials were in blue, Melanie’s in yellow. Sparrow traced the letters on her father’s pillow.
His middle initial was F, a large blue curlicue F. The pillows were hard, and no matter how she arranged them under her head, they hurt. Finally, she put them on the floor.
In Boston, Sparrow’s bed was big, with three long goose-feather pillows wrapped in Marimekko cases. Along the borders of the walls, a painter had copied exactly the lollipoplike flowers in the sheets and bedspread and curtains. As a finishing touch, he had painted scattered flowers on the white floor. Just a few, here and there.
“You see,” Sparrow’s mother had said as she surveyed the finished room, “if you choose a theme and stick with it, it all will work out very nicely.”
Sometimes at night, Sparrow had the feeling even as she slept, that her mother was in the room, sitting on the bed, watching her. But in the morning, Suzanne showed no evidence of that. She moved around the apartment, starched and efficient, as if she had been in her own room the entire night. Once, though, Sparrow had woken up in the middle of the night and found her mother asleep beside her, still in her clothes from work. Sparrow had moved closer to her on the bed, and Suzanne had wrapped her in her arms. The next morning, Sparrow woke up alone and neither of them ever mentioned it.
Sparrow woke up in her father’s house to the sounds of a snowplow outside. She wandered through the square rooms until she reached her father and Melanie sitting at the rooster table. In the daylight, the colors in the house seemed faded, like an old book. She entered the room feeling uncomfortable and foreign.
“Did the phone wake you?” her father said.
She shook her head. “The snowplow.”
“Harry’s out there early this morning,” Melanie said. Then she added, “He drives the plow.”
“Oh,” Sparrow said.
Her father looked at her. “It was your mother who called. She’s coming to get you. Driving up.”
Hope returned to Sparrow. Her mother was coming here. She would see her father, see the desolation he lived in, and take him back to Boston with them. Or maybe they could all stay here, in Maine somewhere. He just needed some fixing up, after all. When he smiled at her the night before, Sparrow had seen the man from the picture. Perhaps her mother would see him too.
“How about some breakfast?” Melanie asked her.
“Sure.”
Melanie disappeared into the kitchen.
Sparrow smiled at her father.
“Well,” she said. “You two haven’t seen each other for a long time. You and Mom. It should be something, huh?”
Her father frowned. “Sparrow,” he said. “I’m married to Melanie, you know, and your mother is what? Engaged to someone, right?”
“Ron. He’s awful.”
“I don’t know, Sparrow. I understand why you came here. Maybe years ago I should have made more of an effort. Tried to see you or something. It just seemed so pointless.”
Sparrow felt the pain she had felt so many times about this man, her father, return. He had never wanted her.
“Pointless,” she said.
“You know, I never realized how Suzie would be about all this. How secretive.” He shook his head.
“I don’t even know your middle name,” Sparrow said, remembering the big blue curlicue F on the pillow. “Or where you’re from, where you were born or anything. And you’re my father. You know, even orphans can go and find out their father’s middle name. And you are my father.”
Sparrow saw sadness in his face, behind the beard and fleshy skin. His eyes had no sparkle in them. But sadness wasn’t enough. It wasn’t what she wanted. She imagined them together, walking through the snow, talking about their lives, sharing all the little things they had missed about each other, the kinds of stories families told over and over for years. Sparrow had sat at friends’ houses, around the dining room table or in a den, with snapshots in front of them, and listened as the family recalled special memories—a car horn sticking in Hershey, Pennsylvania, a child getting stuck in the chimney looking for Santa.
“One time,” Sparrow said to her father, “Mom and I went shopping at Filene’s. I was around eight years old. And I tried on this lady’s hat in the hat department. It was a fancy one, with netting and rhinestones and a big black feather in the back. I kept it on the whole time we shopped and wore it all the way home before Mom realized it. I mean, no one noticed it all day! The entire day!”
Her father looked baffled, then smiled politely.
“Sometimes, even now, when I go shopping, Mom will say, ‘Stay away from the hats!’”
They looked at each other.
Nothing is right here, Sparrow thought.
“It’s just a little thing I did,” Sparrow said. “It’s sort of a family joke now.”
He still didn’t see the point. Instead, he looked relieved when Melanie came in with two round toaster waffles. When Sparrow poured syrup on them, the waffles soaked it up like sponges.
“I can’t eat these,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t eat them.”
Sparrow went into the room that Melanie called the parlor. Heavy green drapes blocked the view outside. Sparrow had to wedge herself between the Christmas tree and an overstuffed bright green armchair to get to the window at all. And then she had to lift the heavy curtains to peer out. Behind her, on the chair, were two pillows. One had a parrot needlepointed on it, the other a dove.
“I can make you something else,” Melanie said from the doorway.
Sparrow shook her head.
“Well, then, I guess I’ll be on my way.”
Sparrow turned. Melanie had on an orange down coat and big rubber boots trimmed in bright yellow.
“It was very nice to meet you, Sparrow. I have to go to work now. I’m a cashier, down at the drugstore.”
“I’m sorry I came,” Sparrow said.
“Oh, no,” Melanie said in her singsong voice. “I’m sorry you can’t understand your father. Abel.”
Sparrow turned back toward the window. Why is it, she thought, that no one tries to understand me?
A while later her father came to the parlor and stood in the doorway too.
“Franklin,” he said.
“What?”
“My middle name is Franklin. And I’ve lived in Maine my whole life. I was born up north. Near Presque Isle.”
Sparrow didn’t respond.
From down the road she watched as Ron’s gray BMW approached. When it stopped in front of the house, Sparrow said, “She’s here. And he’s with her.”
Ron’s car looked like a space vehicle against the backdrop of snow and old houses. Sparrow watched Ron and her mother. They sat, motionless, for a very long time. Her mother was holding a cigarette without puffing on it at all.
“Maybe you should go out there,” Abel said.
“She came to get me, didn’t she?”
“Yes,” he said.
“So let her get me.”
Sparrow still didn’t turn around to look at her father, who had changed into his good blue shirt and put on a wide tie with a bright psychedelic pattern, a Christmas present from Suzanne in 1968. Sparrow lifted the drapes and looked out again. They both were still sitting there, looking straight ahead. The smoke from her mother’s cigarette twirled like a tiny gray tornado.
THE RIDE UP 95 NORTH from Boston to Maine was quiet. Suzanne felt there was nothing else to be said. She woke up and decided she would go up there and get her daughter. She had to claim what was hers. Abel had never wanted Sparrow and he wasn’t going to get her this easily. Not now. Not after sixteen years.
Suzanne imagined the two of them together, father and daughter. She hadn’t told Sparrow a few months earlier, when the girl had thrust that old picture of Abel at her, that she did indeed have her father’s wide smile. Or that sometimes, when she cocked her head a certain way, Sparrow looked exactly like Abel. And now the two of them were probably giggling together, becoming fast friends. She remembered a couch she and Abel had in their little beach house. It was an old thing with an Indian print blanket draped over it, one of the kind of blankets sold at college fairs back then. Above the couch they had hung a matted Picasso print of a hand extending flowers. It was on this couch under this picture that Suzanne imagined Sparrow and Abel.
In New Hampshire she said to Ron: “Could you please stop? I want some cigarettes.”
He frowned but didn’t say anything about how the upholstery absorbed smoke.
They didn’t speak again until they reached the house. When they parked in front of the old house with the chipped paint, Suzanne said, “Oh, dear.” And then they sat in the car for quite some time.
Fear raced through Suzanne’s mind. What if Sparrow didn’t want to come back? What if Abel had read her poetry and baked her Hello Dollys and drawn her into his strong arms in a big hug? What if she lost Sparrow after all?
The cigarette she was holding turned into ash and fell on her lap and the seat of the car. She gasped, brushed at the ash, which disappeared into her gray wool trousers and the deep gray upholstery.
“Should I come in with you?” Ron asked her.
Earlier that morning, when she told him she was going to Maine, he had said, “Should I drive you?” This time, she shook her head and got out of the car.
The air here was as she remembered it, sharp and cold, almost painful. She slipped a few times on her way to the house, her black Bally shoes not able to grip in the snow. Off balance, she teetered up the stairs and onto the porch. There was a couch there, with an old green blanket over it. She fought back an impulse to pull off the covering and see if it was their couch.
The door opened then and Abel stood in the doorway, fatter and bearded, but definitely Abel. Suzanne inhaled slowly, struggled for composure. Sparrow was behind him, peeking over his bulk. She shifted her gaze from her daughter back to Abel. Her eyes scanned his face, saw a younger man there, a younger man standing in front of a freshman composition class and reading an essay about her to everyone. And Suzanne felt her heart race wildly like it did that day.
But all she said, sternly, was, “Hello, Abel.”
Her eyes settled on the tie, an outdated, too wide, brightly colored tie. And she remembered buying it and wrapping it in Christmas paper with tiny Santas or snowmen on it. Suzanne had thought back then that the tie symbolized both their worlds—his unconventional one and her traditional one. It had meant they could have both of those worlds. She remembered sitting at his feet, wrapped in an old flannel shirt of his, telling him all these things as he opened the present. Now it stood as proof of the silliness of that time and those ideas.
As if he knew what she was thinking, Abel tugged at the tie.
“May I come in?” Suzanne asked. “May I come in and get my daughter?”
He stepped aside and Suzanne brushed past him, bringing the smell of Chanel No. 5 and the cold winter air in with her.
“Is your friend going to stay in the car?” Abel asked.
“He’s not my friend,” Suzanne said. “I’m going to marry him.”
Abel raised his eyebrows. “Yes. Well, you wouldn’t want to marry a friend, would you?”
“Susan, are you ready to come home?” Please, Suzanne thought, say yes. Say you want to come home with me.
“I have to get my purse and things.”
“Yes. Well then, get them.” Relief filled her. She was getting her daughter back.
SPARROW SAT ON THE STAIRS and listened to her parents.
“You are as beautiful as ever,” her father said.
“You look well also.”
“No. I said you are beautiful. As always.”
They were in the parlor. Sparrow couldn’t see them but she pictured them sitting side by side on the pale green couch facing the Christmas tree.
“I did it all wrong, Suzie. The girl came here in the middle of the night—”
“The girl?”
“Sparrow. Sparrow showed up here full of some crazy ideas.”
“She’s like that, you know. So full of dreams. How could you know?”
“She wants us to fall back in love, I think. This guy you’re marrying—”
“I hope,” her mother said, her voice icy, “you told her that was completely impossible. I hope you explained to her that was impossible.”
“Suzie—”
“Where is she?” Her mother’s voice was shaking now. “What is taking her so long?”
“Suzie,” her father said softly.
“Don’t touch me. Get away from me.”
This was not her mother’s voice. There was no control at all. It was fragile and trembling, like a little girl’s. Sparrow ran down the stairs, but her father was alone in the parlor.
“Where did she go? She didn’t leave, did she?” Sparrow asked him.
He pointed to the bathroom. She went to the door, knocked, then went in. Her mother was sitting at the edge of the tub, clutching the sink. She didn’t look up when Sparrow came in.
“Are you okay, Mom?”
“Please, Susan. I’ll be right out. It was a long ride, that’s all.”
Sparrow hesitated. “Mom, are you crying?”
“I’ll be right out. Please,” Suzanne said. She didn’t raise her head.
THE THREE OF THEM STOOD awkwardly on the porch. Suzanne was cool and composed as they said good-bye. Abel bent down to kiss her cheek, but she turned her head sharply and her neatly blunt cut hair whipped across his face.
“Are you ready, Susan?”
“Sparrow,” Abel said softly.
Sparrow looked at her father. He handed her a white plastic bag.
“I think you’ll like these,” he said. “A few pictures.”
She thought briefly of reaching out and hugging him but didn’t. Instead, she thanked him and walked away with her mother. Suzanne gripped Sparrow’s arm tightly for balance as they walked down the icy path toward Ron’s car.