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“Old pisspot!”

She glances at me with an apologetic smile. “Reminds me of my husband, rest his soul.”

“I think he’s funny,” I call.

“Funny?” She frowns and purses her lips. And says nothing more to either me or the bird.

The two of them begin to waltz. The parrot sits on the wrist of her left arm, which she holds up in dance position. With her
other hand she works the wheel, forward, back, and to the side, forward and back again. She hums lightly, the sound hanging
close around her like a vapor. She seems to have forgotten that anyone is watching except the bird.

But the trance falls apart when a truck backfires over on the avenue. Emma’s body jerks and the startled bird immediately
flaps to the corner tree. She doesn’t move right away, and I’m afraid something’s really wrong, but then she slowly glides
the chair forward. Her voice starts up again, murmuring low and thick. I can’t make out the words.

“Toot, toot, tootsie, goodbye!” yowls the bird, hopping backward up the branch. The green of its feathers blends with the
leaves so I can’t tell its exact location.

She lifts her crooked arm to the tree. “Come, baby, come back, darlin’.” Her voice is loud and trembling.

If there were a way over the garden wall, I could climb down the fire escape and help her.

“Hold on,” I call. “I’ll go around front and get your housekeeper.”

But she’s already up and out of the wheelchair, weaving on her feet, her face lifted toward the branches and the squawking,
invisible creature.

“I love you, darlin’. Please.” Her voice wobbles desperately. Now I’m afraid to leave my post, as if she needs a witness.

The bird pops out at the end of a higher limb, screaming like a broken record. “Tootsie, goodbye! Tootsie, goodbye!”

“No!” Emma takes a step. Another. Grabs the trunk of the tree and stands gasping.

I feel suddenly cold in spite of the sun. It’s deeply shady where the old lady now leans. The bird beats his wings and climbs
even higher. She can’t possibly see him, but he continues his screeching refrain. She slowly sinks to the ground.

“Jesus, Miss Madson!” The housekeeper’s come at last, but too late. The bird heaves its wings outward, gives one long animal
squawk, and takes off. The housekeeper feels for Emma’s pulse, first the wrist, then the neck.

I scramble inside and call for an ambulance, then race downstairs.

The housekeeper answers my knock too quickly. She has alarming turquoise eyes.

“I saw what happened!”

“Excuse me?”

“Miss Madson.” The name skids across my tongue. A siren erupts. St. Vincent’s is just around the corner.

“Who are you?”

“I live here.” I lift my hand in the general direction of next door. “Please, how is she?”

“Oh. You’re the one with the pictures.” She acts as if we’ve got all day.

“Is she all right, then?”

The housekeeper wriggles her mouth, casts an eye over my shoulder to the arriving ambulance.

“Please. I know this seems crazy, I never knew her at all, but I’ve watched her, I feel like I know her a little. I just want
to know—”

“She’s gone.” She waves the paramedics through. They hurry. She places her fist on her hips and shakes her head. She’s been
through this process before.

I keep seeing the old lady alone, on her knees. She was dying.

“Please,” I say again.

“Look, lady. I gotta go—”

“What about her family?”

“Hmph. Damned bird was her only friend in the world. Family buried down in Georgia somewhere. You want her lawyer’s number?”

“No. No, I understand now. I’m sorry.”

She lets out a laugh that sounds more like a grunt. “Funny thing, you’re the first visitor she’s had since she moved here.
Five years. Too bad you waited till she’s dead!”

Too bad, I think as the heavy oak door closes. The words pull together, apart. Too bad.

I went back to Wisconsin one last time, after Gramma Lou had her first stroke. It happened too suddenly for Mum to round up
the whole family; Henry and Anna were off in different directions, and Dad resisted, saying he didn’t want the old man blaming
him
if Lou should die; he’d wait until they both were well for his first trip to the farm. I was on summer vacation from college
and felt almost as peculiar as Dad, seeing as I hadn’t seen my grandparents since Johnny Madison’s shooting, but I could tell
my mother needed moral support. I didn’t know what I could do for her. I couldn’t muster the feelings of grief and profound
love that I suspected one should exude in these situations. I felt sorry about Gramma Lou, of course, but she was in her eighties
and I hadn’t seen her in a long time, and if I got too worked up over her, I’d probably end up sidling into the question of
what I’d do/how I’d feel if and when Mum died—and I wasn’t prepared for that. So instead of behaving like a member of the
family, I went along because it was the right thing to do. For mercy’s sake.

I was afraid half Lou’s face would be sliding or her arms palsied or her mouth twitching wildly up and down, but no. She’d
lost some
weight and gained some wrinkles. Otherwise, lying there in her hospital bed, she looked in pretty good shape.

Grampa Henry was the mess. His lower eyelids drooped open, exposing the raw blood vessels normally held inside, and he was
overproducing tears, so his eyes themselves seemed to recede behind a wall of viscous liquid, which shivered each time he
moved his head and then slid down his cheeks. He looked for all the world like an aged basset hound, but he had his faculties,
and that was where Lou came up short.

She would sit up as perky as could be, insisting I was Diana. “Has that Miss Chanel answered your letter yet, Dydee?” she’d
ask me. Or, “You go ask Minnie now, she’ll set you up with some nice chiffon, and we’ll fix a prom dress that’ll just steal
that Georgie Mark’s breath away.” Minnie Hamilton, my mother whispered, used to run the notions shop in Slinger and was run
over by a Greyhound bus twenty years ago, and Georgie Mark had been Mum’s boyfriend in sixth grade and was now a fast-food
millionaire.

For the first day or so, my mother faced this displacement by bravely pushing me aside and cajoling Lou with her own memories
of times they’d shared. But after a while the vacant stare my grandmother turned on her and the loving recognition with which
she mistook me began to get to Mum. She stopped explaining Lou’s trips to the past. She let my questions drop into the great
black hole of her resentment. I had come to comfort her in her hour of need and I’d ended up stealing both her mother and
her youth. Even though she knew as well as I that a short circuit in my grandmother’s brain was to blame, this was not what
Mum had bargained for.

Gramma Lou chattered, Grampa Henry wept, and my mother squirmed and smoldered for three days. We were having one of our, by
then, silent dinners in the hospital cafeteria when we were paged. Before we could get upstairs, my grandmother was dead.

Grampa seemed to pull himself together after that. Three months later he would drop dead while shoveling sheep manure, leaving
the farm and every penny he owned to a young woman of fifty to whom he’d engaged himself. But for the moment, he and Mum worked
to
gether with surprising clarity to arrange the burial and a small memorial service in the community church. I was helping my
grandfather with the guest list for the service when I learned that the Madisons had moved away.

“Yup,” Grampa said, “after their boy died, Lottie just kinda fell apart. You’d think with ten others she’d have some resistance,
but no. Damn Catholics. They’ll forgive murder with a couple of Hail Marys and a whirl of the old rosary, but suicide—now,
there’s a sin that’ll get you eternal damnation. Poor bastard. For years she kept talking about him like he was still alive.
The sinner. Newt finally decided the place was too much for her, and he up and moved ’em all out. Never heard another word
about ’em. Nobody did that I know of.”

My grandfather’s ranting brought Johnny back for me, along with my own feelings of anger and blame at him for having abandoned
me. That evening I walked back through the farm, over the stile and across the pasture, down into the hollows and up the ridge
overlooking Glabber’s woods, which had since been subdivided into two-acre residential parcels. But for the most part the
land was still there and beautiful. And Mount Assumption still presided over the whole with its sinister, mindful warning.

As I walked, I wished Johnny’s ghost did indeed reside in the spaces he’d haunted in life. I thought about his mastery of
nature, his longing to cross the line between fact and fantasy. I remembered his plan to orbit the world and end up marrying
me. Maybe he’d made it to heaven, maybe to the next giant’s kingdom, but it seemed clear that one thing he had not yet done
was rise from the ashes reborn.

When I reached the overgrown foundation where that burned-out hay shed had stood, I opened the locket we’d found there together
and buried the scrap of carbon I’d kept in it all those years. Like the phoenix, I told myself, his spirit will rise again,
take the body of another Johnny, a golden boy with a love of the sky, a man of nature who views the world from the awkward
angle of a visionary.

That weekend I took the first of my lovers who reminded me of
Johnny, in the blue room on the plane back to New York, with my mother six rows away.

She called last week as if the gallery opening had never happened, to invite me to a party.

“I know this kind of socializing is hard for you, darling, but once you’ve established these contacts you really will thank
me. Might even be some romantic interest. That’s why I asked Henry. There’s a fabulous ceramicist from Belgium who’s just
sold a piece to the Whitney. Reminds me of that sculptress he used to go with, remember?”

I remembered that Henry had last been seen squiring Coralie at Mum’s behest.

“Will Dad be there?”

“Yes and no. You know how he is.”

“Mm.” I remembered the other art parties Mum had held over the years. Dad hiding alone in his workshop while Mum played Pearl
Mesta outside.

“You’ll come,” said my mother.

“I guess.” I would go, but not to pacify Mum and not to establish contacts. At least not the contacts she had in mind.

The penthouse terrace my father long ago advanced as one of the apartment’s most winning attributes lends itself beautifully
to parties. Purely out of spite, I’m sure, my mother never did reestablish her pots of Alpine rock plants, but created a whole
new motif of trellised wisteria and beds of imported dirt from which sprout six-foot fruit trees. Tonight more than one guest
would comment that Diana had created a country estate in the middle of midtown Manhattan. Lest anyone fail to draw this conclusion,
my mother had hired four uniformed servants and a low-key dance band. She’d laced tiny white lights through the trees and
set up a bar and a half dozen crisply clothed tables under the trellises. The guests, who ranged from the torn-jeans and bustier
crowd to the leather generation, seemed uniformly out of place. Nevertheless,
the backcountry aura was unmistakable and, to me, vaguely disturbing. It reminded me of another place and time, but I couldn’t
immediately think where.

“Maibelle!” My mother tangoed toward me in the arms of a tall bearded Neanderthal. She grasped my hand.

“This is Scott Sazaroff.”

A true photo-stallion. He bowed gracefully and excused himself before she could further detain him.

“We’ll talk later,” she called after him. “Don’t pay any attention, Maibelle. You’re only as good as your work in Scott’s
eyes. Once he sees your portfolio he’ll do anything to help you. I’m really pleased you came, darling.” And for the first
time she took a good look at me.

I was wearing a plain white button-down blouse, a seersucker skirt, black flats. Decidedly ordinary. Inconspicuous. Mediocre.
Clothes I’d intended to hide in. But in this crowd the ordinariness stood out like a dead bloom in a fresh bouquet. She pursed
her lips and straightened my collar.