Authors: Laura Wiess
I huddle on the back steps,
knees drawn up, hands in my pockets, and toes numb from the creeping cold, watching the birds gathered at the feeders, cardinals and chickadees mingling with wrens, blue jays, and doves, all picking at the seed spread across the frigid January ground.
A shadow flashes past and I glance up, growing uneasy as the birds continue to feed, oblivious to a thin black slash in the sky that’s coming closer, looming larger, sharpening into strong wings and a curved beak, circling unnoticed over the peaceful scene below.
It veers out of sight, and as I exhale, the birds at the feeders explode in a flurry, hurtling into the air as the hawk bullets in. They scatter, frenzied, panicked, and streaking toward me, hitting the false sky reflected in the window with dull, solid thuds and falling broken to the leaves below.
The hawk, fierce, beautiful, inevitable, plumage dark and shining iridescent, lands and stands motionless, ignoring the feeble fluttering of the dove trapped in its talons. I watch, paralyzed, as the dove’s twisted wings flap uselessly against its captor, hear the triumphant keen as the hawk surveys its domain then dips its head to
peck, tear, peck…
And then there’s no sound at all but my own mindless
Have mercy, you took it, now kill it, don’t make it suffer,
and when the numbing fog inside me finally burns away and I’m close to screaming, the hawk tenses, spreads its wings and, with the limp body caught firmly in its grip, carries it off.
The feeders sway, abandoned.
Buff-colored feathers, torn loose and stained bright ripple and twitch in its wake.
Trembling, I rise and search for survivors. At first I see nothing but casualties: four sparrows that were never the targets but still fell in the course of the assault.
Then I spot the fifth bird, a wren, lying beneath the window on a drift of matted leaves. It blinks, quivering and still too stunned from the shock of impact to fly.
I crouch, weeping, and gently close my hand around it, absorbing the residual terror fueling its tiny heart. Cradle it close for a moment, then place it on one of the stray-cat towels in a warped and weathered shoe box, close the lid, put the makeshift sanctuary on the step, and return to bury the dead.
The strays however, always hungry, always prowling, have already discovered the small, cooling bodies and carried them away.
The relief that comes from this shames me, but I’m still thankful because the birds who died quickly have not only been spared but have spared
me
the struggles of the mortally wounded, of kneeling helpless beside a body too broken to fly but not broken enough to die, beside living wreckage that cannot be healed and would never again be more than a twisted, flightless song trapped on the ground alone, defenseless, and forsaken by its own kind.
And so I wait in the chill of the thin, gray light until the tears dry, the lost have been mourned and the hawk forgiven, and then return to the porch, open my jacket, and tuck the shoe box in close against
me to warm it, not speaking, not lifting the lid to see if the little wren is still breathing, just waiting while the faint flutter of a single taken dove ripples through me again and again, just waiting, keeping quiet watch over the wren in the bottom of the shoe box and wondering if it will ever recover enough to be released.
Where is home?
Home is where the heart can laugh without shyness. Home is where the heart’s tears can dry at their own pace.
—Vernon Baker
I walk through the little woods,
Serepta at my heels, and together we travel the deer path to the old wooden bench under the catalpa tree. Sit in the shade of those generous, heart-shaped leaves and breathe in the scent of the delicate white flowers.
It is impossibly beautiful.
Serepta, slow and arthritic, gathers herself and leaps up to settle beside me.
Birds—robins, sparrows, and wrens, maybe even the one I know—flit through the meadow grass, and a worn, raggedy monarch, perhaps the first to return from the winter migration, flutters past us and along the wood line in the sun.
It’s fawn season, too.
There are hoofprints in the mud along the pond’s edge, and for a heartbeat I think I hear you whisper,
Wild horses, Hanna.
I know it’s only the sweet breeze rustling through the catalpa, but today, on my eighteenth birthday, I very much want to believe it’s you.
Because this morning I discovered you left me everything you ever loved.
I lift my head, listening to the faint sound of a motorcycle in the distance.
It’s a Harley—it has a very distinctive sound—and it’s headed my way.
I smile and wipe my damp cheeks on my sleeve. Lift Serepta up into my arms and, cradling her close, rise and start back along the deer path.
Wild horses, Gran.
I miss you so much.
READING GROUP GUIDE
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UESTIONS FOR
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How It Ends
began when I was wondering about the experiences people keep hidden in their hearts, thinking about how there’s always so much more to people than we see, and what a huge mistake it is to believe we know everything there is to know about a person, whether it be a stranger, family member, or friend. It shifted into higher gear when two of the images I’ve been carrying around in my mind for years surfaced and wove themselves into the mix.
The first image came from one of the stories my mother used to tell me, about how it was back when she was a little girl in the 1940s. She lived in a neighborhood where all the kids used to play out in the street, and although no one talked much about the kinds of men who offered candy to children, all the kids were warned by their parents not to go near this one house on the block where an old man and his invalid wife lived, especially if it was dusk or he called you into his garage for any reason.
The local kids ran away from this guy whenever he beckoned but one day there was a new girl of about fifteen living there, a state kid, an orphan, placed with them to live and work. She had no one, and so was trapped: on the surface the old man and his wife looked harmless but behind closed doors, it must have been an unimaginable hell. She was rarely allowed to come out and play with the other kids and did not even go to school.
I asked my mother—who had been maybe 9 or 10 back then—what happened to the girl and it turns out she got pregnant, and was sent away in shame for getting herself into trouble. Can you even imagine? She—an orphaned child—was
an unpaid servant, denied an education, sexually molested, impregnated by her foster father, and then punished for it, whisked away as if it were all her fault. How convenient.
The image of this faceless, anonymous girl trapped in a house of horrors, has haunted me for years.
The second image was from a story I read years ago about a man who was supposedly a deer rehabber and an amateur taxidermist. (Anybody else see a conflict, here?) Wildlife rehab is a wonderful, difficult, heart-and-soul endeavor if it’s done correctly and with the best interest of the animal in mind, but supposedly this guy had been taking in orphaned fawns and shoving them into a dark, dank outbuilding along with deer corpses in various stages of decomposition, dissection, taxidermy experiments, chemical treatment, etc., and basically leaving them there to die of starvation.
It was not a stretch for me to imagine the imprisoned fawns confused, hungry, scared, and locked into what could only be a living hell with no food or water, with the thick, unrelenting scent of terror, death, and rot all around them, no sun, no breeze, no grass, no freedom, laying in chemicals that burned through them, blood, feces, mud…I couldn’t get such self-serving cruelty out of my mind and wanted to know
why?
Why would someone do this? So I began to imagine an answer.
Somehow the anonymous orphan girl and the fawns wove together, along with the idea that no one is ever all they appear to be, a fascination with the imprints we leave on each other throughout our lives, and wanting to explore how love is born and how it dies. These threads became the fictional
How It Ends.
As far as research goes, I explored taxidermy, the old mandatory sterilization laws for the unfit, medical pieces regarding the
treatment of women and the maladies supposedly born of their reproductive organs, the Hunger Winter, mandatory community service, Parkinson’s disease, physician-assisted suicide, and the right to die.
Both, I think. What intrigues me most about the teen years—besides the fact that you’re coming up and everything is new, you’re jockeying for position and trying to feel your way through an unfamiliar world filled with hazards, pitfalls, excitement, and experiments—is “kid logic.” I love kid logic even when it completely unnerves me. I remember it very clearly because my own kid logic sprung from wanting to get out there and live my life, and not get caught or get in trouble for doing whatever it was I was doing.
I think it happened as the characters became known to me, and their concerns placed them in an environment where the dreams they had left had room to grow. Helen and Lon, going through what they had in the past, needed space to live their own way. Helen was attuned to the suffering of those who couldn’t speak for themselves and so she tried to find an active and ongoing way to help by providing food and shelter, spaying/neutering for the
cats and a home base. Hanna grew up seeing this behavior as normal but when she had to fill in for Helen, she thought it was a pain. Then she looked harder, saw the need, stepped up of her own free will, and chose to help, too.
I see the place where Helen and Hanna live as the far, wooded outskirts of town—a small town—with the inevitable development creeping toward them but not quite there yet. There are still woods to support the wildlife, and it’s still a place where people can live privately and have room to stretch out.
So no, I’m not surprised that living in the country has sort of bled over into this book. After growing up in central Jersey, living up in the mountains now is an ongoing adventure. Kind of a culture shock—no pizza delivery here—but it’s worth it. I learn something new every single day—which of course means that I get to feel stupid every single day, too, because I don’t know what I’m doing—and it’s tickling me to death. I love it.
Lots of things become fictionalized and feed in: moments, issues or causes I find intriguing or am passionate about, things I learn along the way, emotions I wonder about and more. I have to feel what the characters feel as we go along, especially when I’m sitting firmly on one side of the fence and the challenge is to try and see a situation or a belief from the opposing side. Doing that opens new doors in my mind, helps me to understand different points of view and respect other sides, even if I still don’t like or agree with them. It creates a wonderful chaotic jumble of thoughts.
I work best when I’m not interrupted, alone in my studio,
sometimes with silence, sometimes with specific music playing low in the background. I do a lot of research in every direction that seems interesting, exploring whatever strikes my fancy, and let it all simmer together until something sparks and a character with a question is born. I never know what that character is going to be made of until they show up.
I don’t have an absolute, but I know it wasn’t any one big thing that split them up, more like they came together with two separate, naive fantasy ideas of what their young, happy lives together would be—eternal romance, eternal hot sex, no fuzzy slippers or baggy sweats or overdue bills, no zoning out in front of the TV or the dreaded, frustrated
Um, honey? We have to talk
moments—and were not prepared for the ups and downs of reality or the warring expectations, which bred discontent and disappointment, resentment and the pain of watching love founder and almost die.
I’m glad they found their way back to each other, though.
Here’s where growing up in a family of storytellers came in handy, as the old days—in glorious, vivid detail—were always offered up as a companion to progress. The stories were bizarre, funny and interesting, and I must have absorbed far more than I thought I did, because they’re definitely coming in handy now.
There was serious research too, of course, especially when it came to things like mandatory sterilization for whoever was deemed
unfit
(want to chill your blood? It was still happening in the 1970s), the Hunger Winter, Parkinson’s disease, the right to die and more.
I have several stories in the works but there’s a certain romantic comedy that seems to be a little more irresistible than the rest….