The Tree of Knowledge

I get up at five am. I shower, shave my legs, put on a nice dress, blow dry my hair, apply make up, cover my hair with a scarf. Add a splash of flowery perfume. Ryan gets mad if I don’t look (like a freaking doll) presentable.

I pad barefoot down the stairs and into the kitchen, where Mara has already got the coffee started. Rebecca sits at the kitchen table, nursing Little Bird.

Esther. Rebecca named her Esther, the number two most popular baby girl name in 2013, right behind Mary and before Eve. But I call her Little Bird. She makes these funny high-pitched noises, like chirps. I also call her that because of her favorite song. Nobody else really cares for the nickname, especially Rebecca.

Mara is making pancakes while Rebecca watches.

“You’re over mixing.” She says. “You’ll dry them out.”

“They’re fine.” Mara insists.

Rebecca usually does the cooking. Her cooking is actually the best thing about her. Quite possibly the only thing I like about her. She’s pretty much amazing at it. She’s a culinary school drop out and a Food Network junkie.

My specialties are English muffin pizzas and brownies from a box. They don’t let me cook much.

Near as I can tell, Mara isn’t good at anything besides being a bitch.

Mara thrusts the bowl of pancake mix into my arms.

“Here.” She says, “Fry these.”

“That’s a bad idea.” Rebecca says.

“I don’t care! I need to go change. Kit, make the pancakes.”

She really did need to change. She is pretty much splattered in flour.

When Ryan comes downstairs Rebecca is frying the replacement batch of pancakes while I try to vent the smoke generated by the first batch of pancakes from the kitchen. Ryan sits straight down at the head of the table and says, “Where’s my breakfast? What happened down here?”

“Kit burned the pancakes. I’ll have more in a minute. Don’t worry darling.”

He turns to me, “Kitty,” (I hate being called Kitty) “are you deliberately trying to waste the food I put on this table?”

“No.”

“Well, it won’t be wasted on you. Rebecca, you and Mara make sure she doesn’t eat breakfast. She’s getting fat anyway.”

“Are you going to send me to bed without supper like a delinquent child too?”

He stands up, rage on his face.

Shit.

Little Bird starts crying. We freeze there, Ryan standing, Rebecca making pancakes, baby crying.

Ryan sits back down, waves me away.

“Will you make her shut up?”

If I could be said to have a strong suit, domestically speaking, it seem to be making Little Bird shut up. I am the baby whisperer. I sit on the couch with Little Bird while my stomach grumbles and Ryan, Mara, and Rebecca dig into pancakes. Little Bird cries all the time. Sometimes I think she cries because she knows the kind of world she’s been born into.

But that’s probably giving her squishy little brain a bit too much credit.

The trick is, I sing to her. I look into those big brown eyes and I smile at her and sing. And she just stares back at me and quiets. Her favorite is “Green Finch and Linnet Bird” from Sweeney Todd. The song is about a girl trapped in an abusive home asking her caged bird how it finds the will to sing when it can’t fly away. “If I cannot fly, let me sing.”

Maybe I should give Little Bird more credit.

Sometimes I fantasize that we’ll fly away together. She can stay sweet and innocent and perfect. We’ll grab Jace and Duke and run and never look back.

But Jace is married. And I’m married. Little Bird and I, we just need to learn to sing in the cage.

Since I’m the best at making her stop crying, everyone else elected that the baby monitor lives in my room. I’m the one tasked with holding the baby at three in the morning. And since my room has the baby monitor, Ryan does not sleep in my room. I haven’t had to have sex with him since the night we brought her home. Little Bird is my shield. He sleeps with Mara.

Ryan kisses Mara and me good-bye. He skips Rebecca since she’s still unclean from childbirth. Only three more weeks and one ritual sacrifice to go. Of course, if Little Bird had been a boy she’d be done by now.

Ryan is the CEO of some kind of software company. I don’t really know what it is that he does, but he certainly does bring home the bacon.

So to speak.

We live in a five bedroom house in a nice neighborhood. It’s three stories tall with a big rec room Ryan uses as a man cave on the top floor. The man cave is full of video games he insists he won’t let me play because it’s “not feminine” but really it’s because I’m better at them. There’s a three car garage stocked with a Mercedes-Benz, a Porsche, and a Lexus. There’s an obscenely huge flat screen television in the living room.

Ryan leaving for work is the best part of my day. When Ryan’s not home, I abandon my 1950’s housewife persona and revert back to teenager.

It drives Mara ape shit.

Rebecca spends her day praying mostly. Woman does a fuck ton of praying. She bakes muffins and cookies. She makes croissants from scratch (no wonder I’m getting fat). She does the grocery shopping and preps the evening’s dinner.

Mara cleans. I don’t really know why. It’s not like the place is that messy. Is it really that criminal to have dirty dishes in my room? It’s not like we have rats. And do the toilets really need to be cleaned every week? She gets pissed when I don’t help, but I don’t see the point in wasting my effort dong a bunch of stuff that doesn’t really need to be done.

When Ryan leaves for work I take off my make up, put my night gown back on, and go back to sleep.

I wake up at noon and attempt to summon the motivation necessary to get out of bed. I fail. I’d get up if I could just think of a compelling reason to do so. My stomach rumbles, indicating my compelling reason.

I wander downstairs in pursuit of lunch. The key to a successful lunch is for Mara to not notice I’ve left my room. She usually won’t bang on my door if I stay in there, but the minute she sees me outside she’s shoving a toilet brush into my hands.

God bless Rebecca. She had a baby a mere seven days ago and still made croissants. I snag one and grab some turkey and cheese out of the refrigerator, intent on making myself a sandwich.

I look to the fruit basket, thinking of grabbing a banana to go with my sandwich, and that’s when I see them. Rebecca went grocery shopping while I slept. She bought pomegranates. I pick one up. The pomegranate in my hand, the memories rush at me like a wave pulling me under. Jace’s dad’s pomegranate tree. Bursting the little seeds and painting my lips with the juice, like lip stick. Sneaking illicit sips of the homemade pomegranate wine his dad made. The sweet taste of the fruit and the feel of the bark on my bare legs in the summer time. His arms around me, kissing him, sitting on the branch.

“I thought you were going to sleep all day.”

Startled, I drop the pomegranate. It rolls to a stop at Mara’s feet. She stoops to pick it up.

“The laundry needs to be folded, if you can manage it.”

And Little Bird, I swear she just knows. She starts crying right on cue. I point upstairs.

“I have to-“

“Just go!” Mara spits.

I flee up the stairs into the nursery. I can hold back the tears just until I shut the door behind me and then it pours out of me.

I miss him so much. I don’t even need to be with him. I just want to talk to him again. I lost my best friend and now I don’t have any friends at all. I have no one to talk to. It feels like he died and left me so very alone. I don’t think I can take it anymore. I can’t go on like this.

I scoop up Little Bird and sing to her, tears still streaming down my face. Little Bird cries with me. “Green Finch and Linnet bird, Nightingale, Blackbird, how is it you sing?”

Little Bird eventually drifts off. I’m still hiding from Mara, so I climb out the nursery window and onto the roof. There’s a good natural hold above the top corner of the window from a chip in the stucco, and from there it’s easy to pull myself up and over the lip of the roof.

This is not the first time that I’ve done this.

I like it on the roof. It’s the one place that’s totally mine. Where no one comes in and no one can find me. And I can feel the sun on my face and watch the squirrels in the trees. It’s the next best thing to actually leaving the house. Ryan won’t allow me to leave unless he’s with me.

I’ve almost run out of time now.

Little Bird’s bedroom is directly across the hall from mine. So all I have to do I walk straight across the roof. I squat down, grasping the rough edge of the roof with both hands and carefully let my feet swing over the side. This side of the house is a bit more tricky, lacking in convenient gouges in the stucco. But down is always easier than up. All I have to do is let go, while swinging my body towards the wall so I slide down and catch the top ledge of my window with both hands so I don’t, you know, plummet to my death.

Safely back in my bedroom, I reapply my makeup. I put my dress and my head scarf back on. I rush downstairs just as Ryan’s Mercedes pulls into the garage. I run into the kitchen. Rebecca’s in there, stirring something that smells delicious. She hands me a bottle of wine.

“Here!”

I uncork the wine, pour a glass, and rush to the front door just as it opens. I greet my husband with a kiss and a beverage and let him know that dinner will be ready in a moment. Back in the kitchen, Rebecca asks me to go get Mara and tell her dinner’s ready.

It’s not really like Mara to miss greeting Ryan at the door.

I open the master bedroom door. Across the room, I can see into the open bathroom. Mara is standing there, her turn to be startled by my sudden appearance. She’s crying. In her hands is a home pregnancy test. The strip is blue.