The girls’ father was a falconer. That’s the first thing Sydney told Greta. The second thing she told her was that The Falconer’s wife had recently left him. Or he had left her. It was unclear which way it had gone. The last time she’d seen him before winter break, he possessed both the desperation of the abandoned and the false confidence of the abandoner. Sydney did not tell Greta this last part. 

Greta, the youngest in her family, had never taken care of children before. She’d also never met a falconer. More concerned, for some reason, about the latter, she asked Sydney if it was an East Coast thing. Being a falconer. Sydney said not really. Greta frequently asked this question about New England habits or propensities. It was alien to her, all the green and the lack of elevation, the proximity to the sea. She came from somewhere that saw snow in the desert, that called itself the Land of Enchantment, a place whose stock in trade appeared to be mysticism, national parks, Hatch Chiles, and Georgia O’Keefe; where you could drive for the larger part of a day and see only rock. 

“Birds don’t need to be taught to fly,” Greta said when Sydney propositioned her about the job. “They already know.”

“It’s partnership,” Sydney replied. Which, she did not admit, was exactly what The Falconer had told her. 

“Sounds like control,” Greta said. But she took the job anyway, as a favor to Sydney, who would need it back when she returned from study abroad. 

When Greta arrived at the house that first day, he was wearing one of those leather gloves with the laces at the edge. A gauntlet. Stroking a hawk feather between his rough fingers, blue eyes glinting in their weary, time-worn way. With the glove and the eyes and the elbow patches on his thick flannel jacket, he struck Greta as someone who’d spent nearly every waking hour of his life out of doors, and the sun had thanked him for this with bands of scored crows feet as sentimental and possessive as wedding rings—an artifact which he no longer wore. 

Behind him, the twins bobbed in the doorframe. Jerky movements like they had to use the bathroom or had a runaway mouse scurrying around the pant legs of their matching polka-dot leggings. Their blonde hair was stringy, oily, and bluish bags hung tautly under their eyes. They held a ghostlike quality and Greta recalled what had Sydney told her once after watching them for an entire weekend the year prior: Sometimes I feel like they trade personalities. I’ve never been genuinely sure which is which. 

She held her hand out to The Falconer and said, “Nice to meet you, I’m Greta.”

He looked at her, in exactly that way divorced men do. Wantonly, assessing. And really he was just a man. And she was five-foot-nine with wild black hair, straight teeth, and the physique of a long distance runner. She looked at the children disinterestedly and he half-noticed, something in his eyes saying, Finally. Someone who understands my plight. 

“You ladies must be Tamlyn and Sadie.”

The two girls looked at each other knowingly and blinked hard. Slowly the one on the right, still squirming, nodded her head. 

“I’m Tamlyn. She’s Sadie.”

Sadie giggled a little and Greta turned to look at The Falconer for corroboration, which he did not give. 

“Are you teasing me?” Greta asked. “You know, I always figure it out. Syd already told me all your secrets.”

That didn’t go over well. Tamlyn widened her eyes, grew sorrowful. 

“She did? All of them?”

Greta nodded gravely, biting her lip. 

Sadie’s eyes grew glassy and she stomped her Croc’d foot on the seashelled ground. 

“She swore she wouldn’t do that,” she said, and stormed into the house. 

Greta looked at The Falconer again, her stomach folding over itself. At this point she wondered about Sydney’s lack of discernment in selecting a job. How badly did she really need this man’s money? And couldn’t Greta just find her another gig, a better one, by the time she returned in the spring?

“So,” The Falconer says, swiping underneath his eye with the tip of a feather, as if wiping away a tear. “I guess I’ll show you the house.”

–

Before leaving for Germany, Sydney had told Greta one more thing: The Falconer’s bird had just died.

“Don’t ask him about it,” she warned. 

Greta rolled her eyes. “Are you serious?”

“You don’t understand. The birds are his, his life,” she stammered. “His livelihood.”

“That’s a little sad.”

“It is sad, that bird was his best friend.”

“Not what I meant.”

“He’ll get another one, but just understand he’s pretty cut up about it. I mean, he might be fragile. You might have to be careful around him, be nice to him.”

“Did he pay you to be nice to him or did he pay you to take care of his children?”

Sydney had never asked herself that question, but she felt the answer in her gut. The times she’d stayed with the girls well past midnight, dealing with their tantrums, locking up the house after The Falconer fell asleep in front of reruns of 60 Minutes while his wife was away at conferences, on girls’ trips, or simply avoiding him. Sometimes he’d ask Sydney about school, her major, her life plans or whatever. But usually he told her stories about himself, facts about birds or Rhode Island or birds in Rhode Island while Sydney nodded, wondering if he was just lonely, or if he was trying to communicate something real under all the fronting.

“Both, I guess,” Sydney had said. “He kind of paid me for both.”

–

The Falconer fell in love with birds when he was fifteen, at summer camp. One of those types of summer camps, with the clay pigeons and archery, homoerotic type of brotherhood. He only cared about the birds. It didn’t hurt that the sole female instructor taught falconry, and he was girl crazy, looking for something critical in the shape of a woman. The instructor taught him everything he knew—or, as much as can be taught in three weeks. She had a peregrine named Styx, and The Falconer had been all over that. (He returned home and read Metamorphoses with a religious zeal, a twisted glee.) The last week of camp, the instructor gifted him one of her old gauntlets; his thin teenage hand fit perfectly inside it and the leather smelled like her and also Styx and also wilderness, and sometimes when he missed her that school year he’d jack off at night with the glove on, too rough, too much friction, but he did it anyway. He’d see her face when he finished, messily, cheeks flushed. The novelty took years to wear off. In college, he spent all his days at the raptor center and by junior year he finally had his own bird. Daphne. Named for the beautiful daughter of the river god. 

It was Daphne who had died that winter, just weeks before Greta took Sydney’s place.

–

After Greta’s third week of nannying, Sydney called her from Germany. Partially for an update, partially because she was lonely, partially just to see if Greta would answer. The hour was late in Munich, the city stumbling quietly through a polar night. Sydney stared out the window of her shared flat and watched a handful of young people moving up and down the sidewalk in a heated conversation. A girl wearing a long woolen coat and fashionable fur hat gesticulated at her two counterparts, who threw their heads back laughing. It all looked very cinematic: the falling snow, the pink in their cheeks visible under streetlights. She envied them for their moment, how at home they appeared in a place that to her remained foreign. A hollow silence in her ear, then Greta’s voice coming back at her. Sydney turned from the window. 

“How’s Germany?” Greta asked. “Tell me about it.”

“It’s nice. Cold. Classes are going.”

“These specifics. I feel like I’m there.”

“Sorry. There’s not much to report. Sometimes I feel like all I’ve done is go from one cold place to another.”

“Don’t say that. You’ve gone to a place with much better beer, too.”

Sydney laughed a little. She always laughed at Greta’s jokes and consolations, touched that she cared enough to provide them. “How is he? And the girls?” 

“Hmm. He’s not what I expected, really.”

“How so?”

“I know you said falcon, but you weren’t kidding. Those birds are huge. He stuffed the last one and keeps it in his bedroom. He’s a strange man. Something so…vacant.”

“I was hoping he wouldn’t stuff it. I told him burying her in the backyard or scattering her ashes would make him feel better.”

“You two talked about that stuff?”

“Yeah, I mean, I’ve worked for them since freshman year.”

“But why? Couldn’t you get a work study at the library or something? That house, it creeps me out.”

“This is all under the table, baby,” Sydney said, putting on a voice. She couldn’t pull it off, and Greta didn’t laugh. “How are the girls?”

“Weird. They are weird children.”

“That’s about right. Have you heard from the wife?”

“No. She just stares at me when she drops them off from piano lessons on Monday afternoons.”

“Do you and he talk at all?”

“So many questions.”

“No, I don’t know. I’m just curious.”

“I hardly talk to him. He is getting a new bird though. He did say that.”

“So fast? Did he say what kind?”

“Red-tailed hawk, I think.”

“Switching it up. Good for him.”

“Sure. How’s your place? Have you met cool people?” 

Greta’s voice, distracted. And in response to the invisible preoccupation, Sydney became embarrassed. Then she heard the beeping of a car horn, Greta swearing under her breath, and Sydney understood she was merely driving, and perhaps the distance had nothing to do with her. 

–

It took virtually no time for Greta to notice that he wasn’t a good father. Sydney had never put it so plainly. When she mentioned him to Greta over the years, she made him out to be a real intellectual, a delightfully eccentric kind of man. Greta found little evidence of that. And while he wasn’t unkind to his children, he didn’t seem to like them very much either. With The Falconer, there was no abuse, no raised voice, no body shaming. None of the usual crimes against daughters. His deficiency was sadder than all that; it was simply disinterest. He held no curiosity for domestic life. Instead, Greta noticed how he focused all of his energy into his work, his drink, and his students at the college. There weren’t many of them, with fewer and fewer young people drawn to the avian arts. He mentioned to Greta once, in passing, that he and his passions belonged to a different time. To her it seemed the laziest, most self-aggrandized of excuses. He had a habit of disappearing at dinner, birthday parties, piano recitals, soccer games. Just a look in his eyes, like, how did I get here? My life is somehow comprised of decisions I cannot remember making. And because of this, probably, the girls were needier than most. Always agitated, always bouncing or finicky, pulling out their hair or acrobating off furniture, stretching in the doorframe, doing the splits. They plunked on the piano halfheartedly when Greta was around, but broke into show tunes the moment they heard their father’s tires in the driveway. They made him crowns out of construction paper and staples, stacked them on his dresser, and waited to see how he’d respond. Greta would come back to work a day or two later to find them in the trash, crumpled, and a rage would swell in her chest so terrifying it took her by surprise: was she beginning to actually care for these children? Or did she simply hate their father?

On a Wednesday in early February, Greta was accused of kidnapping the twins from school. The Falconer got his days confused, or maybe he didn’t. Maybe he wanted to punish his ex-wife, force her into an uncomfortable conversation with the striking twenty-one-year-old he paid to take care of their split-custody children three days a week. His ex-wife told him multiple times that she wanted to take the girls to see their grandmother that afternoon, to celebrate her birthday at her care center in Wakefield. There were balloons in the car, a cake in the trunk, a change of clothes for the girls, and new, starched bows for their hair. But Wednesdays were Greta days, and because no change in plan was communicated, Greta arrived at the school exactly five minutes early, and the girls, who never paid much attention to schedules or plans or even days of the week, piled into the car with her. They wove down the highway, the girls threw their hands in the air when they hit the jug handle, and Greta sang roller coasterrrrr while they rolled around the backseat, tethered by carseats. The jug handle ritual was their favorite part of the drive, a precious gift from Greta. They stopped at McDonald’s on the way home, Greta buying them McFlurries and fries because she was on her period and also deeply hungover, and needed sugar and salt and something that would ingratiate her to the twins, clearing the path for an easier night of homework and bedtime. 

She drove one-handed, digging into the bottom of the McDonald’s bag for bonus fries; she’d just caught a long, burnt one when the call from The Falconer came in. The car was old and didn’t have Bluetooth, so Greta balanced her phone on her knee and put it on speaker. His voice, so smooth, capable, with just enough of that distraught divorcé delirium meant to inspire sympathy. 

“I fucked up, Greta,” he said immediately. 

The girls tittered in the backseat at his foul mouth. 

“Okayyy,” Greta responded. 

“The girls’ mother”—he never used her name post-divorce—“thought she was on pickup today. It’s a whole mess. The teachers couldn’t be sure they saw you at pick up. So my ex, she called the cops. They’ll be waiting at the house.”

Greta swiveled in her seat to look at the twins, whose faces had gone ghost-white.

“Okay, but it’s no big deal, right?” she enunciated into the phone. “You’re on speaker, and it’s no big deal. The cops are just checking in,” she continued. Her tactic worked, the girls began to relax slightly, but their father was not smart enough to play along. 

“No, this will probably not be fun, Greta. She’s very upset with me and she’ll likely take it out on you.”

Sadie’s eyes started tearing and Tamlyn took very shallow breaths. Greta sighed and said, “Gotta hang up now, we’ll handle!”

She swallowed the rest of the McFlurry in one bite and said, “Girls, do you know sometimes when you’re upset or all messy inside, it can feel really good to scream?”

She’d never seen them so scared, and fuck that. They should not know this fear. Their stupid fucking father, she thought. 

They shook their heads in unison and she once more felt certain they were connected to a hive mind, something in the dark forest that told them when to act girl and when to act sylph. 

“Well, sometimes I like to do that and I’m going to do it right now. If you’d like to join me, let’s roll down the windows.”

She turned off child lock and all four windows went down and she counted to three and screamed out the window at the top of her lungs until tears rolled out of her eyes. She’s psychotic, briefly, in precisely the way the world likes to think women are psychotic. And the twins found their voice and were scared of it at first, but then their shared voice broke and reached two distinct pitches and they crowded Saugatucket Road with their noise. 

“Ooh look at the pretty lights,” Greta said then, as they pulled into the drive behind the waiting patrol cars with their red and blue checkering the night in shadows.

–

To make up for the incident with their mother and the cops, Greta took an extra shift on a Saturday night so The Falconer could go out with his buddies. He promised to be home by eight-thirty; he had to let the new bird out, anyhow, before the snow hit later in the nighttime. But eight-thirty quickly became nine, then ten, then it was nearly midnight and he’d stopped responding to Greta’s texts entirely.

Her long body lay sprawled across The Falconer’s couch—one bought hastily at Goodwill after his ex-wife took the nice one—and she wore the sweatshirt of some man she’d shacked up with the weekend prior. That same man was lighting up her phone asking why she wasn’t at the bars, on the football field, at their frat house, poised with a handle of New Am in her grasp. She ignored the texts without thought, not even bothering to save his number. She sat watching SNL or Letterman and she wasn’t so much lonely as she was bored. When Letterman grew stale and the SNL cast broke character for the third time in one sketch, her weary eyes fell on the falcon’s crate. 

Greta turned down the TV and walked up to the crate, heard the beating of its wings against the wooden boards. She knew what to do, she’d seen The Falconer do it before—softly jimmy the wooden panel, separate it from the hinge. The hawk in its boarded cell could hear her and settled, as if sensing the chance of emancipation. She thought about doing it but then her mind walked away from her, and when it returned, she’d already done it. The crate was open, the bird was freed, walking around the room like something medieval, and perhaps cursed. The girls were asleep; Greta had run wind sprints with them in the backyard for forty-five minutes so they’d pass out in a post-adrenaline fugue state, just like this. It was her and the bird. Greta sat back on her haunches and reached out to touch its beak, marbled, strong, yet delicate and crushable as paper. 

Then, the craziest thing; The Falconer’s tires sounded on the gravel driveway and it’s as though the bird knew, and freedom was nothing—just a window too small to crawl out of. It rushed back to the crate again, the perfect prisoner, and its eyes locked on Greta pleadingly. She fiddled with the mask, unsure how to reattach it, panic rising in her chest so quickly it climaxed as bile at the base of her throat. 

Unsteady on his feet as he walked through the front door, he stank of pale ale, eyes slightly gone. She knew better than to stick around when he was like this; she moved in flashes so quick he couldn’t orient her in the room. The Falconer fumbled for cash, she took it, not even letting him count it, and ran at a full sprint to her car, throwing her body into the driver’s seat and slamming the door with force like all women do, immediately locking it behind her. And then she laughed. She laughed, maniacal. Because she’d done the very same thing the bird did. The very same thing she could not comprehend. Locked herself in a box, just to escape him. 

–

One afternoon while Sydney was watching the girls her freshman year, they pretended to be mermaids in the bath, for hours. Sydney sat on the toilet and faced the wall while they played, feeling rather uncomfortable as they splashed in the tub. They weren’t toddlers, their limbs were stretched out and lanky, and Sydney felt it wasn’t right that she be chaperoning their nude play. When the doorbell rang, she told them to sit still and keep their head above water until she returned. They ignored her, plastering their long, spindly hair to the side tiles of the shower, playing Ophelia on the surface while the other one fake-wept over their sister’s faux corpse. 

Sydney hadn’t been gone for more than two minutes before she heard a cry from the bathroom, and returned to an embarrassed Tamlyn, clutching herself under the water. When Sydney asked her what happened, her cheeks flooded scarlet and she shook her head, plunging under the water while her sister shrugged. When Sydney returned home that night, she found a note in her bag, filled with drawings and a painstakingly articulated apology: Sydney: [heart drawing heart drawing spider web drawing] it said. I am sawry 4 yelling @ u. I slipd in the [drawing of tub] and hert my vaguiniea!!! I am O.K. now. Don’t tell my Mom or Dad.

Sydney showed Greta, unsure whether to laugh. They were dorm mates at the time, their friendship nascent. Greta had more sense about the whole thing. She told Sydney to text a photo of the note to the girls’ mother and explain the situation. 

“Just to be safe,” she’d said. “Protect your own ass. Or, vaguiniea.”

–

When winter overtook that stretch of New England, everything went dark, retracted in time. The sun became tangled in the bare branches of the forest by early afternoon, and sank quickly, taking the light with it. Greta left her evening class to find the sidewalks and roads slick with fresh ice, like sugar glass. Everyone’s cheeks went rosy, everyone’s fingers went blue. Greta never remembered to wear gloves, so when Sydney called while she walked back from class, she switched the phone from one hand to the other, right ear to left and back again, stuffing the freezing hand into her bomber jacket before it lost all feeling.

“Do you think there’s something kind of broken about him?” Sydney asked on one of these calls. Greta only sighed, picking at a bit of mascara stuck underneath her fingernails leftover from a rush job before a study date. 

“Syd, this man is not that interesting, I promise you. You’re in a foreign country, for Christ’s sake. Pay better attention.”

Sydney went quiet. 

“I just mean,” Greta went on more kindly, “Can we talk about something other than him? Tell me about Munich. Or the last movie you saw. Or, if you must, how am I to tell the twins apart once and for all?”

“Tattoo them in their sleep,” Sydney said, joking even though it was hardly funny. She sat in a cafe near her flat, watching a group of tattooed young people discuss something serious over a plate of shared pastries. All around her, people were living, communing. But not her. “Remember how we said we were gonna get matching tattoos freshman year?”

“There’s an idea,” Greta said. “And thank god we didn’t do that.”

“He wouldn’t even notice, I bet, if you did,” Sydney said.

“Who cares who cares!” Greta shouted back into the phone. “Fuck The Falconer! Fuck him!”

Sydney laughed but she wondered, Wait, have you? Would you tell me if you did?

When Greta arrived back at the house after the incident with the new falcon, she was tentative, waiting for punishment. After parking at the end of the driveway, she checked her phone to see how long until the bus dropped the girls on the corner. Roughly seven minutes; she continued inside. The crate was right where she let it, and below the sound of her breathing she could hear the bird repositioning itself, moving uneasily from clawed foot to clawed foot. The mask was no longer on the floor. He knew; there was never a version of things where he didn’t. She felt a solidarity with the bird spin up through her stomach, catching in her heart and she put the palm of her hand against the side of the crate. The inner shifting stopped, and Greta imagined the two of them syncopating. It’s tender, this moment between them. She might not enjoy children much but she had always gravitated toward wild animals. Coming from where she came from, this was a requisite for existence. And she felt for this bird, her third charge, in a way. A third young lady she’d been tasked with. With his beer habit and his cold icy eyes and the crows feet scoring his oracular bone like he was hiding so much more than he let on, Greta did not feel The Falconer had done anything to deserve these girls. The whole house was like the bird’s crate, made of the same wood with a similar barn door creaky on its hinges, so difficult to unlatch. 

The bus horn blared from the street and her hand fluttered from the crate to her heart and she flew out the door to collect the twins, the falcon back to shifting in its confines, volleying in its mind only the briefest memory of freedom. 

The closest decent tavern on campus wasn’t on campus at all. It lay in another town, twenty-five minutes through the forest, closer to the bay. Each year, a handful of students died from drunk driving on the road out. Sydney’s first freshman year hall mate had, and after that she volunteered to sober drive more than was really necessary, as a way to beat back the nightmares she had of that girl wrapped around a deciduous pine. That’s how Sydney met Greta: Greta was confidently wasted after a football game, preparing to load herself in a junior boy’s Ford Bronco with an open top. It was starting to snow, her eyes were drug-black. Sydney had the distinct thought that this girl was too beautiful to die. 

On Saturday nights, the tavern was college-heavy. No grownups. On Friday nights, it was a mixed bag. Men from town or driving back to their suburb from Providence were more inclined to stop after work, blaming a late night at the office or an impromptu happy hour as the reason for their familial neglect. They liked to gawk at the college girls; the college girls liked men who bought their drinks. Men with real paychecks and a tab open, and an ID that wasn’t dangerously close to being confiscated. 

Greta was at the bar that Friday night, after an intramural game. She’d changed into jeans and a big sweater and combat boots; her hair, a little frizzed out around her face from the exercise. The Falconer was there too, under the old string lights hung around the bar rack. Greta noticed him first. It was one of her meaner thoughts: what a sad old man sitting there, all alone. I know that man. The plaid shirt he wore had a split seam on the left side, which he didn’t seem to be aware of. Though it was winter, he wore no undershirt, his faintly creased pale skin poked through the hole. Greta’s gaze shifted to his back pockets, just visible over the barstool. He typically kept his gauntlet tucked into one of the pockets, letting it peek out casually as if he were desperate for someone to ask about it. Greta would sooner bleed from the eyes than hold that conversation. But if he behaved this way, she thought, that must mean he was sometimes successful. She recognized the New England draft sitting on the bar in front of him. She knew it tasted like the hops were soaked in soap and mixed in bog water. No crispness, all rot. His breath would smell of it. She guessed there were a few crushed cans of PBR abandoned on the floor of his truck in the lot, wouldn’t put it past him to drink and drive like that. The thoughts and the judgements came harder and faster, fluttering through her head. Although he bothered her in a distant kind of way in his household, she hardly thought of him once she left work. But here, in a social place inhabited largely by teenagers with fake IDs, he began to repulse her. As if a string had been pulled and in the glow of a bulb light, she could finally see the danger in him, the actual harm he might cause.  

Her third beer hit the bloodstream like a lullaby and she forgot him, drifting from one friend to the next. The boys started up another game of pool and she joined them. While chalking her cue, a girl on her intramural team appeared at her side and whispered. 

 “That hot man at the bar has been watching you for ten minutes,” she said. “Go say hi. I’ll come with you.”

Greta turned without meaning to, and there he was. 

“I babysit for that guy.”

She averted his gaze again, brushed off the friend. The Falconer called her name softly, like a whistle. She stayed stubborn, didn’t answer. But his eyes bore hard, unashamed. She refocused on the boys standing around her, and leaned against her pool partner, Daniel, who had a poor shot and spit when he spoke. When a spray landed on her face, she wiped her cheek with a sense of comedy, and flirtatiously dried her fingers back on his shirt. Daniel grinned and pulled at her waist, and Greta felt grateful to have a young man as her armor. Minutes later, she lost the game of pool and it was her turn to buy a round. There was no avoiding him. 

When she reached the bar top, he said, “So many friends, Greta.”

She smiled and looked at the empty glasses lined up in front of him. Counted, onetwothreefourfive. “Who’s driving?” she asked. “Who’s watching your children?”

“Their mother.”

As the bartender poured four fresh pints, Greta pulled out her wallet. The Falconer tried to stop her. “I got these, Greta,” he said. “My treat.”

“That’s okay,” she said, shirking him. “Fair is fair, I must pay up.”

He stared at the cash. “Well, I suppose it’s my money anyway, right?”

She couldn’t veil her disgust. 

“Excuse me?” 

He hung his head, shaking it. “I’m only teasing.”

She reached for the pints. “I’ve really gotta run.”

“Greta, stop.”

“Have a good night.”

“I noticed the mask on the floor. I know you let the bird out.”

“She set the pint glasses back down. 

“No, I didn’t.”

“Then how did the mask end up outside the crate?”

For a moment she thought of blaming the girls, betraying them. How easy, weren’t children the ultimate scapegoat? But she couldn’t. And would he even believe her if she did?

“I couldn’t begin to guess. What do I know about birds?”

“Enough to break one out of a crate, apparently.”

She shook her head, looked over her shoulder at her friends. The Falconer touched her arm and she whipped back around.

“I’m not trying to give you a hard time. If you’re interested in them, I’d love to teach you. I could take you out in the fields behind the college, get you your own glove. Why don’t you take one of my classes next semester?”

“You think I let her out because I’m interested in falconry?” she said, incredulous, and for the first time since she’d met him his face ever so slightly fell. 

Her own father was not like this man. And how embarrassing to have one of this variety. She suddenly felt deeply sorry for the women who might be ensnared by him. The long mouth, the freckles, the big fat hole in his life as tempting to drown oneself in as a swimming pool. The delicious void of it. She was immune, and that gave her power. She knew that. He knew it, too. His eyes were all blue, nearly no pupil. And his lashes were flecked, like those of an Appaloosa horse. When you broke him apart like that, he was a handsome man. But put all together there was something lopsided, not quite right. It was not so simple as a good man lodged inside a bad one, or a bad one presenting as a good one. He might be a true chimera, not that and not this and not that, but sometimes, all of the above. 

She stared at him without feeling anything but distaste. For the past two months she’d wondered what redeeming qualities Sydney found in him. Why she herself hadn’t been able to locate them. But the answer was now obvious: Greta was not like Sydney. She did not know a father that was like a trench war, like a civil war, like a cold war. She knew Sydney and her father followed such a pattern; Sydney had told her they’d been completing and recompleting this loop since her birth. Greta knew men could smell it on Sydney, and she knew Sydney had never tried hard enough to wash that scent off. All her life, Sydney had told her, she’d worried over this bug. And for Sydney’s whole life, Greta now saw, men like The Falconer had promised her it was not a bug, but a feature.

Anger welled in her throat again, the way it had that day with the cops. It was real and almost painful, the wild surge of it, and though she didn’t totally understand it, she also felt she couldn’t entirely dismiss it either. Across the bar, her friends had moved on to shuffleboard. Watching them, she suddenly felt a new tenderness for Sydney; how strange must her life have been for a man like this to seem more safe a harbor than the uncomplicated fun of people her own age? 

“You don’t impress me,” she ventured, finally. “You’re aware of that, aren’t you?” When The Falconer didn’t respond, she grew bolder. “I don’t think Sydney’s gonna need this job back in the spring. Just leave her alone, okay? I want you to leave her alone.”

He breathed out, fixed an admonishing smile to his face. “You think I don’t already know what Sydney needs?”

–

The Falconer, it’s important to understand, grew up in the forgotten groove between generations. He straddled that line of Boomer and Gen-X, society’s proverbial middle child. This was compounded by the lackluster place of his birth. He grew up in the margins of New England, distracted by birds, his life lacking color. There was an isolation to the days of his childhood, followed by an adolescence devoid of much friendship, or romance, or tenderness. At twenty-five, he met a woman. She wore out-of-style hiking boots and knew the scientific names of the conifers and pines that surrounded their town. She liked red lipstick and white wine with ice in it, and there were just enough similarities between them to get the two of them talking one night at a mutual friend’s wedding. Beneath their introduction, a cover band played music so generic it slipped underneath them and carried the evening along, like those automated walkways at airports. Their resulting courtship moved like this, too. An uninspired kind of progression: Narragansett Bay for their third date, clouded skies and sunburn. A fully predictable thunderstorm the two of them did not predict. Then, the bed in his rented house back in Wakefield, a leaky roof, threadbare sheets. She hadn’t noticed the bird until after, and the sight of it intensified the chill already running across her shoulders, the A/C buzzing in the window only making her shiver more. 

“This is Daphne?” she’d asked. The bird looked at her like, Help me. Or, Why him? Or, At least now there are two of us. 

He’d stared at the bird from his place in bed, nodding. 

“Isn’t she the most exquisite animal you’ve ever seen?”

When they married, he said to her: “You look real nice in that dress.”

When the twins were born, he looked at her and said: “Well, aren’t they something?”

But Daphne? Daphne he had big boy words for. Daphne was the most exquisite animal he’d ever seen. 

–

On her second attempt, Greta was more direct. She saw her opening and knew it was unlikely to come again. So she was quick about it. Back into the house once his truck had pulled down the drive, turned at the stop sign. The front door swung open, she headed for the crate. One latch, two latches, and the bird was sprung. She removed the mask, removed the stay from its talon. She felt like a magician, an emancipator. Did you know there was a bird in this box? A wholeass bird, right here, shoved into this box? This time, the bird stepped out quickly, Greta imagined it must have mapped the parameters of this room with all those hours alone in its confines, dreaming of the sky. Backing away from the door, Greta revealed to the bird the exterior world. And then she understood, finally, none of us ever really free anything; it’s just a matter of returning something rightfully owned: a future, a life, the open sky. In her youth and vigilance, she suffers this one precious blind spot. The bird stepped, then half-flapped, then it’s outside in the late winter air, early spring fighting its way up with the crocuses, like Persephone up from the underworld for her brief reprieve. And finally, actual flight. The lasting kind. The bird, gone. Just a body in the air. Beautiful, for a moment, then unrecognizable. At a distance, it could be a crow, an osprey, a pigeon. Anything at all. 

The text she sent Sydney afterward said: Sorry I had to do it, Syd. I’ll help you find another job, I promise. 

Sydney had no idea what it meant. She only felt that he must’ve finally gotten to her after all. And she was so jealous. Of him and of her and of him. 

When Sydney returned from Munich in late May, she didn’t see Greta right away. Sydney’s car key appeared in her dorm mailbox, placed there by Greta at an unknown hour. Greta was busy any time Sydney asked to see her, so Sydney took to walking around campus alone, looking for her during finals week. She put off driving home to Connecticut in case Greta randomly called, free for a last-minute meeting. It became embarrassing, how many times she asked to see her. 

The Falconer called Sydney the day after she landed at Logan Airport. Surprised, Sydney arrived at the house on a Tuesday afternoon. Icy masses of snow still clung to greening patches of grass, but the feel of impending summer was palpable in the breeze. He opened the front door. Everything looked the same. She studied the house, looking for evidence of something, but there wasn’t anything. The only proof of Greta’s presence was the fact that the girls now enjoyed running wind sprints in the backyard. That, and sitting atop their shared bedroom dresser was a drawing of three birds perched on a telephone wire. It was an impressive sketch for a child, clearly more work had been put into it than their usual creations. But what Sydney really noticed was the inscription in the lower right hand corner: For Greta, from Tamlyn. It’s us! [heart drawing] But this drawring is rly good, so can I keepe it pleaz?

The morning before Greta flew home, they finally met for coffee. Students circled the rec center. Deadbeat seniors, vehemently denying adulthood, lounged on the nearby quad, smoking and drinking. Greta’s skin had already begun to tan and she’d cut her hair since Sydney last saw her. Sydney tried to tell herself Greta wasn’t as interesting or stunning as she remembered, but even she didn’t want to believe her own lie.

Things felt the same and they didn’t. Sydney told Greta about Germany; the cold, unfriendliness of the people, how little of the language she retained. She tried to be positive, inventing stories to delight her friend, but she suspected Greta saw right through them. Still, Greta laughed, asked good questions, nodded exactly when Sydney wanted her to. But she disclosed nothing about her own semester. Nothing about her summer plans. Their iced coffees sweat nervously on the chipped wooden table between them. The ambient music in the cafe was too quiet, it hardly drowned out the sound of the senior barista training a new staff member, speaking to her in pedantic tones. Minutes later, the smell of scalded coffee. 

Greta stood up suddenly. She hugged Sydney goodbye tightly and Sydney understood the meeting was over. Sydney couldn’t help herself. Before Greta walked out the door, she said, “Thank you again, for all the help while I was gone. With the girls.”

Greta looked down at the ground. 

“So you’re back there already?”

“Yeah, just a couple times this week before I head home.”

Greta nodded, watching the door. 

“Hey,” Sydney started again. “Did anything happen while I was away? Anything off, or whatever?”

Greta breathed out slowly and shook her head. “No, it didn’t.”

“Because you’d tell me, right? If something weird happened—I hope you know you could tell me.”

“Nothing happened,” she said, after a prolonged shrug of her shoulders. “Take care, Syd.”

Sydney watched her until she disappeared over the campus hill. Greta never looked back.   

–

Years later, Greta would not remember much of it. She’d think little of Sydney, only every once in a while with a passing fondness edged with concern. She would not remember The Falconer’s blue eyes or the cries of the young bird while caged, the ever-present PBR on top of the crate. Nor how The Falconer came home smelling of sweat and white pine, would not kiss his daughters, would not look her in the eye. Not even the long driveway, the sounds of the forest, her own high-pitched fear, or the foreign headlights lighting up her rear view mirror on her eerie drives back to campus. She’d only remember that day she arrived at the house days after freeing the bird, finding the animal back in its crate—its talons bound in leather stays, its eyes masked. How The Falconer looked at her when she came through the door, delighted by her confusion, having won the game, if it was a game, and of course it was a game. 

She’d remember the long smirk lining his mouth. And the girls, sitting on the couch watching cartoons, catatonic, as The Falconer untied the stays from the bird's feet, removing it from its crate. Then, gloved, left-handed, how he walked out the front door to show it the gray sky.