It didn’t struggle, didn’t try to move its broken wing or attempt to squirm from her hand.
“What are you going to do?” Katie asked.
“I’m going to help it.”
A few seconds passed, then Katie said quietly, “How?”
Cradling the bird in one hand, Riah placed her other hand gently on top of its head.
“Let’s take it back to the house,” Katie offered. “Then we can see if Mommy can help.”
“It’s okay.” Riah closed her fingers around the bird’s fragile head.
“What are you doing?” Now a sense of urgency. A nervousness—
Riah twisted her hand.
One quick and abrupt movement. The bird let out a tiny chirp that was cut off in the middle, but that was all. It didn’t quiver, just became still.
“No!” Katie screamed.
That easy. That quick. Limp and still.
Riah lifted her hand to see what the bird looked like and saw that it didn’t look very different at all. Just lay so, so amazingly still.
She knew that sometimes nerves cause animals to twitch after they’re dead, that chickens will run around even after their heads had been chopped off. In fact, she’d seen something like that firsthand herself when she was about Katie’s age. But that wasn’t with a chicken. “I killed a snake,” her dad had told her. “But it’s not dead yet. Come on. I’ll show you.”
Riah couldn’t understand how the snake could be killed but not yet dead, but her dad led her past the line of tomatoes in the garden behind their house, where she saw a shovel with a dirty red stain lying beside the body of a three-foot-long black snake. The head lay a couple feet away and was motionless, but the snake’s body was curling and writhing furiously on the grass.
Killed, but not yet dead.
After a moment Riah had gone over and picked it up, then held it while it continued to squirm and spasm, held it while its severed neck leaked warm, sticky blood onto her hands, held it until it stopped moving for good.
And now, as she cradled the dead bird in her hand, she thought of that writhing, dead snake.
But the bird didn’t squirm at all.
So still.
Katie, who was crying loudly, had almost made it back to the house. Riah wasn’t surprised by her sister’s reaction. Honestly, she wasn’t surprised by her own, either. It’d been so easy to stop that bird’s life, to quiet it into death, and now she realized that it didn’t either bother her or please her, gave her no sense of accomplishment or of loss, no satisfaction or disappointment.
She knew that she should probably feel something, that normal girls would feel bad or guilty or sad in some way, or get upset and start crying like Katie had, who was now calling for their mother.
Katie, a normal girl.
Riah, the freak.
She laid the bird gently on the ground in a patch of dandelions near the stream, hoping that the gesture would somehow make her feel more reverent or more considerate of the bird’s death, but all she really felt was a sense of curiosity at the angle of the bird’s head and how it looked so odd twisted that way.
She tilted her own head and studied her reflection in the water, tried to see what it would’ve looked like if her head was bent in the same way as the dead bird’s, but she couldn’t quite get the angle right.
Back at the house, her mother had yelled at her, but her father had laughed it off. “Same as a racehorse,” he said in his wet, thick-tongued way. “Those things break a leg, the owners put ’em down right there on the track. Doesn’t matter who’s in the stands — women, kids, makes no difference at all, they make everyone watch.”
Riah’s mother gave him a scolding look. “Hank, that’s enough.”
He gazed at his youngest daughter, who was still sniffling, and his tone became firm: “Day comes when you gotta learn that everything dies. Just a matter of time. Better to learn that now than later.”
He went back to his corn bread and ham with a renewed passion.
“You don’t need to upset Katie and you don’t need to encourage the older one,” Riah’s mom said.
It’d been right around the time when Riah turned thirteen and her dad began visiting her bedroom that her mother had stopped referring to her by name and just started calling her “the older one.”
Her dad grunted at the comment from his wife. “I’m just saying, killing a crippled bird isn’t cruel. Put it out of its misery. It’s the caring thing to do.”
“Caring? Really?” There was unusual defiance in her mother’s tone.
“Yeah.” His eyes narrowed. “Really.”
Riah watched Katie stifle back a tear. The girls had learned long ago not to argue with their father. He didn’t take it very well — especially after he’d been drinking, as he had already this afternoon.
Her mother’s leg got a little jittery beneath the table. “And is that what you’d want us to do to you? Snap your neck if you broke your leg? Would that be the caring thing to do?”
“Don’t challenge me, woman.” Each word had become a hammer blow. “Don’t make me put you in your place.”
Riah noticed a tiny tremor in her mother’s hands and saw her throat tighten. She knew that on those nights when her father visited her bedroom, he often stopped by his own room first. She didn’t know exactly what he did to her mother on those nights, but she knew enough. There was usually yelling and crashing and sometimes sobbing. Her mother typically wore more makeup than usual the next day. But even then, the bruises were still visible.
I wonder how long it takes her to put all that makeup on.
Now her mother seemed to compose herself and looked at her husband harshly, but she did not challenge him. Instead she rose stiffly, picked up her plate, and headed to the kitchen. “Come on, Katie,” she said. “Help me with the dishes.”
Katie quickly left the table and hurried to the kitchen, and then, when Riah and her father were alone, he gave her a wink and put his hand on hers.
Your mother yelled at you and he defended you. You should thank him. That’s what you’re supposed to do when someone helps you.
She smiled back at him, playing the role of a girl who cared about her father.
“Alright,” she said, her voice soft, meant only for him. “After they’re all asleep.”
She knew he would understand.
“That’s my girl.” He stabbed his fork into his ham. “That’s my good little girl.”
Now, twenty years later, Riah headed across the Benjamin Franklin Bridge toward RixoTray Pharmaceuticals’ corporate headquarters in central Philadelphia.
She knew that the CEO, Dr. Cyrus Arlington, was working late. It wasn’t quite 8:30, and Riah hadn’t told him she would be swinging by. He’d been in London, and she hadn’t seen him since he’d left two days ago. Tonight she wanted to see how he would respond to the surprise.
That’s what she did sometimes. Tested people to see how they would react to the unexpected.
To observe what normal people do.
To learn what it would be like to be normal.
It might have been her curiosity into human nature that was one of the reasons she’d become a doctor in neurophysiology: to understand how people think, communicate, feel — and maybe to begin to understand more of what it means to be human.
That was before joining Cyrus’s neurophysiology research team to work on the neural decoding studies, before seducing him to try and discover more about the meaning of love.
Over the years she’d realized that if there was one thing she wanted, it was to find out what it would feel like to care about somebody or something the way other people did — where family members or friends mattered, where your heart might get warmed or anxious or broken. What would that be like, to feel more than just curiosity about someone else’s joy or pain?