Postcards for a Songbird Read online

  PRAISE FOR REBEKAH CRANE

  The Infinite Pieces of Us

  A Seventeen Best YA Book of 2018

  “Crane has created an organic and dynamic friendship group. Esther’s first-person narration, including her framing of existential questions as ‘Complex Math Problems,’ is honest and endearing. A compelling narrative about the power of friendship, faith, self-acceptance, and forgiveness.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Crane’s latest is a breezy, voice-driven, and emotional read with a well-rounded cast of characters that walk that fine line between quirky and true to life . . . The novel stands out for its depiction of the American Southwest . . . Hand to fans of Jandy Nelson and Estelle Laure.”

  —Booklist

  “[This] journey of self-discovery and new beginnings will resonate with readers seeking answers to life’s big questions.”

  —School Library Journal

  “The Infinite Pieces of Us tells a story of judgement, family, trust, identity, and new beginnings . . . a fresh take on teenage pregnancy . . . Crane creates relatable, diverse characters with varying socioeconomic backgrounds and sexualities that remind readers of the importance of getting to know people beyond the surface presentation.”

  —VOYA

  The Upside of Falling Down

  “[An] appealing love story that provides romantics with many swoon-worthy moments.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Written with [an] unstoppable mix of sharp humor, detailed characters, and all-around charm, this story delivers a fresh and enticing take on first love—and one that will leave readers swooning.”

  —Jessica Park, author of 180 Seconds and Flat-Out Love

  “The Upside of Falling Down is a romantic new-adult celebration of all of the wild and amazing possibilities that open up when perfect plans go awry.”

  —Foreword Magazine

  “Using the device of Clementine’s amnesia, Crane explores themes of freedom and self-determination . . . Readers will respond to [Clementine’s] testing of new waters. A light exploration of existential themes.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “This quickly paced work will be enjoyed by teens interested in independence, love, self-discovery, and drama.”

  —School Library Journal

  “First love, starting over, finding herself—the story is hopeful and romantic.”

  —Denver Life

  The Odds of Loving Grover Cleveland

  One of Bustle’s Eight Best YA Books of December 2016

  “Now that the title has captured our attention, I have even better news: No, this book isn’t a history lesson about a president. Much more wonderfully, it centers on teenager Zander Osborne, who meets a boy named Grover Cleveland at a camp for at-risk youth. Together, the two and other kids who face bipolar disorder, anorexia, pathological lying, schizophrenia, and other obstacles use their group therapy sessions to break down and build themselves back up. And as Zander gets closer to Grover, she wonders if happiness is actually a possibility for her after all.”

  —Bustle

  “The true beauty of Crane’s book lies in the way she handles the ugly, painful details of real life, showing the glimmering humanity beneath the façades of even her most troubled characters . . . Crane shows, with enormous heart and wisdom, how even the unlikeliest of friendships can give us the strength we need to keep on fighting.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  ALSO BY REBEKAH CRANE

  The Infinite Pieces of Us

  The Upside of Falling Down

  The Odds of Loving Grover Cleveland

  Aspen

  Playing Nice

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Rebekah Crane

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Skyscape, New York

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Skyscape are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542092999 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 154209299X (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542092982 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542092981 (paperback)

  Cover illustration and design by Liz Casal

  For you, the reader, may this book bring you home.

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  1 BIRD ON A WIRE

  2 POLAR OPPOSITES

  3 HOPE THROUGH THE TREES

  4 ANNE BOLEYN

  5 A LIGHT IN THE ATTIC

  6 THE PROBLEM WITH BEES

  7 MONET’S GARDEN

  8 THE TRUTH ABOUT WET UNDERWEAR

  9 CADMIUM YELLOW

  10 SOMEWHERE BETWEEN TRUDEAU AND ZYWIEC

  11 FOR THE LOVE OF CATS

  12 AN ELLIPSIS SPEAKS FRENCH

  13 I’M CURSED

  14 BLURRED LINES

  15 DEATH BY HANGMAN

  16 MIRROR IMAGE

  17 CHEROPHOBIC

  18 TAKE THE PLUNGE

  19 ON THE LEDGE OF HOPE

  20 MOON-STAINED

  21 GONE MISSING

  22 A VACANT ROOM

  23 THE MORE, THE MERRIER

  24 TAKE TWO

  25 THE BUS STOP TO NOWHERE

  26 A KISS TO CONSUME

  27 BABY STEPS

  28 BRAND NEW

  29 A MEMORY WORTH SUFFERING FOR

  30 BEFORE AND AFTER

  31 WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT

  32 THE RELIABLE SOURCE

  33 A BIRD COMES TO CALL

  34 THE DIRTY PAST

  35 GRAND THEFT AUTO

  36 NO MORE PRETENDING

  37 STRIKE THREE

  38 A KISS TO BUILD A DREAM ON

  39 A MILLION PIECES OF LOVE

  40 PALM TO PALM

  41 PRISON

  42 BACK WHERE YOU BELONG

  43 FREEDOM

  44 HOW IT ENDS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

  —Henry David Thoreau

  1

  BIRD ON A WIRE

  When life isn’t working, take another perspective. Lizzie’s go-to is handstands. She flings herself against the wall and flops there like an upside-down dead fish. Somehow she manages to hold herself up. And then she usually says something like, “Imagine if we could walk upside down. Then the sky would be our playground. Wouldn’t that be nice, Songbird? The sky as our playground.”

  And I say something like, “Wouldn’t we just float around everywhere?”

  “Exactly.” Lizzie responds like I’ve asked the perfect question, even though we both know she wishes I had more of her imagination. She nods, her long brown hair dangling to the ground. Her face blooms with red, the blood rushing to her head, but she talks like she doesn’t care. “We could dance on the sunrise and float to the moon.”

  When I tell her that her face is about to pop like a balloon, she comes down from her handstand.

  “God, it feels good to be back on the earth,” she says.

  “I thought you wanted to dance on the sunrise.”

  “I realized something, being upside down.”

  “What?” I ask.

  “Gravity is like a parent. It holds you even when you don’t want it to.”

  Not all parents. But
I keep that to myself.

  When I want to take a new perspective, I prefer the top of the garage instead of a handstand. I’ve tried to do what Lizzie does, just fling myself upside down and trust I can hold my weight, but I always worry that I’ll fall on my head. Lizzie is the only person I know who can float on clouds and dance with the sunrise, because Lizzie is made up of magical things—the stuff in the atmosphere you can’t see until it lights up and becomes a shooting star.

  Up on the garage, I hug my knees to my chest and perch like a bird. From here I can look around at all the rooftops in the neighborhood. Lizzie asked me once what I see from that high up. I told her most people in the neighborhood need to clean their gutters.

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Have you seen the way some of the people walk around this neighborhood all clogged? The inside always comes out, Songbird. No matter how hard you try to ignore it.”

  Chief is the worst offender. His gutters are so clogged he doesn’t remember what it’s like to breathe without pain. Most days he’s so stopped up that words get stuck in his throat and he has to force them back down with a deep swallow.

  The first time Chief saw me on the roof of the garage, he asked that I “please refrain from breaking any bones or smashing my head.” If Lizzie is freedom, Chief is handcuffs and locked doors.

  “All it takes is one slip of the foot,” he said.

  “You can’t live worried about slipping, Chief,” I said. “Better to have the confidence you can catch yourself when it happens.”

  “You know that’s not true, Wren. It’s better to just stay away from danger. Stop talking like your sister.”

  I love when he compares me to Lizzie. It rarely happens.

  “And stop calling me Chief. I’m your dad.”

  “OK, Chief.”

  His move is to put his hands on his hips, like a police officer. I’m pretty sure if you looked him up at Sacred Heart Hospital in Boise, he’d be the first recorded case of a child born with a mustache and a badge. Chief has been a police officer his entire career. He currently works the graveyard shift for the Spokane Police Department. He claims to like the action of nighttime. I think he just prefers to sleep during the day, when everyone else is awake. It keeps him properly detached from a normal life and the things people do in a normal life, like eat cereal in the morning and kiss each other before bed at night.

  But I understand his choice. If all you ever see is people at their worst moments—broken, bruised, drugged, dead—humanity becomes the enemy. A thing to be tamed and tasered, not loved.

  Lizzie is the one who started calling him Chief.

  “Why not just call me Officer?” he asked. “Officer Plumley.”

  “Because it’s boring,” she said. “It’s too long, and it doesn’t sing. Don’t you want your name to carry a better tune?”

  “But it’s accurate.”

  “Accuracy is overrated. I’d rather be creative. There’s nothing creative in calling you Officer.”

  Chief’s outward annoyance was really inward love. Sometimes love does that—it presents itself cloaked in something darker, in odd shapes, in tears and groans and messes, because just like the rest of us, love is afraid to be itself. Sometimes to catch love, you have to hold it to the ground, strip it down, wash the dirt away, and wait. But love will eventually surface to breathe. Most of the time.

  It makes sense that Chief covers up his love. Fourteen years ago a piece of his heart walked out the door and never came back. He has to fill the hole with something. We all do.

  Lizzie fills hers with stories.

  Chief fills his with work.

  I fill mine with blame.

  Leaving does a strange thing to those who remain. It starts with one—one person who walks out the door. And a piece goes missing. But that empty space follows us, creating more holes. There was no mom to bring cupcakes to my class on my birthday in first grade, and so no one was celebrated. The day passed as any other. And more pieces went missing. The school didn’t have my mom’s email address, so I was left off class party lists. And a piece slips away. A school play. A science fair. Empty chairs where a mom would have sat and cheered. Until one day in junior high school, I was forgotten. I became like vapor—barely felt and rarely seen.

  But Lizzie kept me from being lonely.

  Love made Lizzie, but by the time I came around, it was practically gone from our house. All that was left were ghosts and the faint echo of what once was. I was made from discarded scraps of love—the pieces left out in the rain, like a rusted lawn chair someone brings inside for just one night, hoping it will salvage the whole house.

  But people leave anyway, because small scraps of love, left unsown, blow away easily in the wind. And yet the rusty, weighted chair remains.

  Some people are just born different. But not an intriguing different. A lonely different. An invisible different. A forgotten different. Even my mom knew it. Chief won’t admit it, but I’m sure I’m the reason she left. I’m the piece that broke it all.

  When life isn’t working, take another perspective. Life on the ground hasn’t been so good lately. Chief doesn’t want me on the roof, but it’s what birds do. We balance ourselves on the tiniest wires, and when the wind blows, we see if we can stay steady. You’d think we’d learn our lesson and find a more stable place to sit and watch the world below, but I see more birds on wires than anywhere else. It’s in our nature. We’re drawn to the edge.

  And even when birds seem to be falling toward the ground, somehow we catch ourselves before we hit the pavement. Right before we lose it all, we find the strength to soar skyward again.

  2

  POLAR OPPOSITES

  Let’s get one thing clear: everyone is pretending. Life is so much easier when imagined. For example, right now Chief and I are pretending that it’s six thirty at night and not eight in the morning. And that’s not the only thing.

  “What are you doing?” Chief says, addressing the Wheel of Fortune contestant skeptically. Then he solves the puzzle, saying each word loudly at the television, overly enunciating, his beer cupped in his hand, the condensation dripping on the couch. “Baking a turkey potpie.”

  “Making a turkey potpie,” I correct him.

  On the TV the contestant is enthusiastic. “Pat, I’d like to solve the puzzle.”

  And Pat Sajak, who’s pretending to be a deep shade of carrot orange when really it’s a spray tan, says, “OK, Rita, go for it.”

  Pat’s aura is a pickle green. I can see it through the television. It clashes with the orange.

  As loudly as Chief had been a moment ago, contestant Rita says, “Making a turkey potpie!”

  If only people were as easy to solve as the puzzles on Wheel of Fortune.

  I was right, and Chief gives me a sideways grin as if he doesn’t know whether to smile at this moment or frown because there’s something depressing about watching a DVRed episode of Wheel of Fortune at eight in the morning while drinking light beer. I’m sure it’s the same at six thirty every night at the Spokane Happy Homes Assisted Living Center. Ida, Virginia, and Dolores probably get together in the common room and comment on Vanna White’s dress and Pat Sajak’s bad tan, yelling “Big money! Big money!” and drinking sherry. And in both places people are just surviving, but no one wants to admit it.

  “Phrase,” I say at the beginning of the next round, echoing Pat, my eyes on the TV.

  “Wren,” Chief says, setting his beer down on the coffee table.

  “It’s a prize puzzle, so it’s probably something to do with the beach. They always send people to warm places.”

  “We need to talk.”

  This is the moment Chief decides to stop pretending.

  He’s on his third beer. He just got home from working the graveyard shift. Chief barely remembers what it’s like to live in a world dictated not by the light of a siren but by the warmth of sunshine. I shouldn’t blame him for his l
ack of imagination. His aura is smoke gray, like the color of murky twilight right before everything goes dark.

  I’ve felt it brewing, like I’ve felt summer creeping in and drying the usually humid spring air. Chief is turning, just like the seasons. I prefer waiting. Change means moving on, and I’m not ready for that. Chief and I need to hold still for a while longer.

  I get another beer from the fridge and replace his empty one. Chief drinks six beers every day—no more, no less. He figured out years ago that six was enough to put him to sleep so that whatever he saw last night at work doesn’t haunt him. At least, not while he’s awake. I can’t speak for his dreams.

  Fourteen years ago, when he woke up and discovered he was a single dad, Chief decided that the only way to stay sane was regimen. That’s how we get through life. Lizzie hated it. She spent fourteen years messing everything up.

  And yet, presently, the house is too clean.

  “Thanks,” Chief says when I set the beer down on the table.

  “What’s my gesture?” I ask.

  “Huh?” He looks extra tired today, which means something bad probably happened last night. Rarely is it death. But I think seeing people who are willing to live desperately is worse. We’re all clinging tightly to life, but at night Chief sees people holding on by a thread, their nails bloody, their fingers bruised, their hearts barely beating in the dark.

  “If you were to classify me as a gesture, what would it be?” I ask. “Am I a smile? A frown? Please don’t tell me I’m a furrowed brow.”

  “A furrowed brow?”

  “Yeah, a furrowed brow.” I imitate it. “You’re clearly ‘hands on the hips.’”

  “I’m confused as to what you’re asking me,” Chief says.

  I point at him. “Right now you’re furrowing your brow. Maybe I’m wrong about you.”

  Chief stands up and places his hands on his hips. “You’re trying to distract me.”

  “No, I just think I’m a furrowed brow, and I want your opinion,” I say. Chief looks at me, bags under his eyes and sallow skin and gray hair that wishes it was brown again. And I wish I were a hug. A freaking gigantic “Great-Aunt Evelyn who smells like Chanel Number 5 and has smooshy boobs the size of melons” hug. The kind of hug a person disappears into and never cares to come out of. Love that people dissolve into. Love that people need.