I hear the birds. They flutter behind the sunken bedroom window, their shadows dancing amongst the dusty dawn sunlight streaming through the parted corduroy curtains that I have hemmed unevenly. The birds are persistent and glorious. I lay in bed between baby-pink sheets and a white blanket, simmering in morning breath. Seashell-pink and pewter throw pillows litter the beige carpet with its nearly pristine vacuum lines. There is a trail of footprints from the bed to the ensuite bathroom to the bedroom door. 

        Tobias leaves coffee on the chipped granite counter of our too-small kitchen before he heads to work. There are two mugs, both gray and indistinguishable from one another. One of the mugs is half-empty, its contents a velveteen black. His. The other is filled to the brim, churning with cream. Mine. I always drink them both. 

        There are number candles resting in the center of the counter, a curved three and a one with burnt wicks and concave pools of once-melted but now-hardened wax. Clumps of frosting are still on the bottom of the three candle. Tobias licked the one candle clean and left the three for me, but I’d forgotten it as I cut up the lemon and raspberry cake with a dull knife. Lemon for me and raspberry for Tobias. It was our thirteenth wedding anniversary yesterday.  

        This morning, Tobias has also left the grocery list beside the coffee, atop a printed newspaper with blaring headlines: “New Evidence in Madeleine McCann Case!” “Severe Weather Forecasted for This Week.” “Meet This Year’s Miss Fairest of the Fair!” I started the grocery list last night on a pad of notepaper that can be magnetized to the side of the stainless-steel fridge. Floral designs hover in the margins. Tobias’ doctor handwriting fills three lines below my neat cursive, illegible and slanted. I text him asking what he needs, but I know he won’t see the message until hours after I have left the store. He’ll be in back-to-back surgeries until noon. 

        Grig’s is an uncharacteristic grocery store. The lottery ticket counter is infinitely busier than the three checkout lanes. The conveyer belt of lane two snapped last month, but the remaining checkout lanes are still less populated than the lacquered ticket counter. Two-thirds of the store is full of non-perishables, and the remaining third is split between refrigerated displays, a bakery, cases of raw meat, wooden crates of fruit, and tanks of for-sale goldfish and guppies. The air reeks of over-sprayed clean-laundry-scented air freshener. 

        There is no other grocery store for fifty miles except for the over-priced chain stores. Grig’s suits Tobias and me just fine. 

        It is my day off, and it is my turn to get groceries. I shove around a metal shopping cart with two squeaky wheels, one sticky wheel, and one wheel that won’t turn. Boxes of uncooked pasta, canned tomatoes, almond-and-chocolate granola bars, 2% milk, a dozen eggs, frozen bake-at-home cookie dough. I wind my way to the fruit crates. They are wooden monstrosities that never fail to give me splinters. I have wasted countless hours digging them out of my flesh with cosmetic tweezers. 

        Hunched over a crate of oranges is a familiar gray-haired woman. She is tutting to herself, deftly snatching tangerines out of the oranges, and returning them to their correct crate. Her gaze snaps up as I push my squeaky cart closer to her. Agate eyes fasten onto my face, her brows knit. “Elizabeth?” she asks, mouth pouched in a taut circle. 

        “Mrs. Sonnet?” The goldfish and guppies in their tanks gape. 

        “It has been . . .” Mrs. Sonnet swallows, her turkey neck shuddering as if awaiting the caress of a butcher’s knife. “Ainsley’s birthday was last week. Thirty-two.” 

        “You still celebrate?” I ask. Mrs. Sonnet flinches, and I don’t. 

        “Wouldn’t you?” Mrs. Sonnet makes direct eye contact with me, her hands still sorting tangerines from oranges. 

        “No.” There is an endcap display of birthday candles over Mrs. Sonnet’s shoulder. There are no number three candles.  

        “Married? Children?” 

        “Married.” 

        “Hm.” Mrs. Sonnet tuts once and rests her trembling, wrinkled hands on the handle of her shopping cart, which is brimming with loaves of bread, hamburger patties, and three whole watermelons. “Then you do not understand how it is to be a mother.” 

        I am careful with my words. “I lost my sister.” 

        “You don’t have the right to say that,” Mrs. Sonnet hisses. “She was not your sister.” She wags a pointer finger in my direction, and her eyes flutter back and forth in her skull. Her rouged cheeks bloom into a deeper, fiery red, and she presses her coral lipsticked lips together. She probably applied the lipstick with the same technique she taught Ainsley and me all those years ago. Overline the lips, draw on the cupid’s bow, fill in the rest, blot with a tissue. 

        I lower my voice and lean across the fruit crates toward Mrs. Sonnet. A line of wooden splinters from a crate’s edge pokes through my thin t-shirt and scrapes my lower stomach, hip bone to hip bone. I will need the cosmetic tweezers again. “Then she was not your daughter.”  

        The smack of Mrs. Sonnet’s hand against my cheek forces me away from Grig’s, away from the lottery counter and the oranges and the fish tanks, back to that day, to the day I lost Ainsley and Mrs. Sonnet. 

*** 

        The sky was bitter, and the trees shuddered. In the distance, the river whispered, and we strained to listen to what she had to say. We laid on our backs in the grass, Ainsley and I, and hoped the falling leaves didn’t dive-bomb our wide eyes. We refused to close them for anything, not even the sun when it peered out from behind clouds. 

        “Mom won’t let me go to your sleepover,” Ainsley said. “Pageant the next morning.” 

        “It’s okay.” I sunk my fingers into the dirt and felt damp soil packing beneath my fingernails. 

        Ainsley sighed her windchime sigh. “Can we trade moms?” 

        I didn’t reply. My mother was dead. Ainsley knew this. 

        “Do you think Mom will let me stop competing when I’m not cute anymore?” Ainsley asked the clouds. 

        “No,” I replied, a proxy for the oncoming rain. “We will be adults one day,” I reminded her. 

        “I’m going to be a cool adult,” Ainsley declared. She waved her hands in the air and fluttered her fingers in my peripheral vision. “I’ll have a fluffy golden retriever and make my curtains uneven on purpose and my house will not contain a single drop of pink.” 

        “What’s wrong with pink?” 

        Ainsley flopped onto her side and propped herself up on an elbow to peer down at me. I could visualize Ainsley’s cotton-candy spun blonde hair, strawberry blush, agate almond-shaped eyes, and rosebud mouth while still staring at the sky. “Mom says pink is my color. The devil should bleed pink blood.” I turned my head to look at Ainsley. She glowered for a moment, then her lips pressed together before breaking into a grin. “And husbands. We can have husbands when we’re older.” 

        Ainsley dramatically laid back down on the grass. “He’s going to have blue eyes and blonde hair and be the most handsome man ever, and he’ll be a doctor or a lawyer or an heir, just somebody with money, so I can stay home and read books, and then we can travel the world. And maybe children, but I won’t let them do pageants.” Ainsley lost herself in her fantasy life for a couple minutes, and I let her lollygag. It gave me time to think. “What about you?” Ainsley finally asked me. 

        “I want someone that’s dependable,” I replied. 

        “That’s boring,” Ainsley scoffed. “But, um, if that’s what you want, that’s cool,” she amended. 

        A thick raindrop splatted on my eyebrow and my eyes flinched closed. “Shit,” Ainsley said, holding out her hand palm-up. I flinched again. 

        Ainsley scrambled to her feet, twin braids flailing, then yanked me by the hands until I stood beside her. We walked through the woods back toward home. Our tennis shoes had become a muddy mess as we traversed puddled soil. 

        “Wait!” Ainsley cheered, turning on her heel and dashing away from me toward the river. The further she ran, the more mud she kicked up behind her, splattering her light-gray skirt and the bare skin of her calves with flecks of staining brown. 

        “Ains?” I asked. 

        “I’ll be right back!” she laughed over her shoulder. “I promise.” She turned to flash me an impish smile, glittering with mischievous brilliance. Then she ducked behind a tree trunk and was gone. 

        I waited where I was, tucked under the embrace of two trees’ intertwined branches. My hair had soaked through, and I could feel the skin of my toes wrinkling like raisins from the wet that had seeped into my shoes. The rain poured for a minute more, then drifted away toward the neighborhood. Stray droplets plinked into standing water. 

        I gnawed on my lower lip, peeling away dead skin with my teeth. “Ainsley?” I yelled toward the trees. “Where are you?” to the sky. “Ains?” to the clouds. 

        I hurried forward and pressed my palm against the rough bark of the trunk Ainsley disappeared behind. When I couldn’t see her, I ran, back the way I came, past the trees and to the slick pavement of the neighborhood streets. My shoes squelched, the porous memory foam squishing into the bottoms of my feet and my raisin toes. 

        Ainsley’s house was at the end of a cul-de-sac. It had sagging white shutters, faded-blue siding, and sidewalk chalk illustrations of rainbows, puppies, and flowers on the driveway, now faded and cloudy from the rain. The garage door was open, Mrs. Sonnet’s gray minivan parked beside Ainsley’s pink-streamer bike and the empty bay for Mr. Sonnet’s Nissan Altima. I dashed into the garage, through the house door and into the laundry room, which was off of the kitchen. 

        “Welcome home, sweetheart,” Mrs. Sonnet said from the kitchen. She hadn’t looked up at me, instead leaning over a pan of sauteed vegetables, using a knife to push diced red peppers off a wooden cutting board into the pan. If it were an ordinary day, she would have invited me to stay for dinner, and then maybe a movie or a makeup lesson. 

        “Did you—” Mrs. Sonnet looked up and saw me, panting, dripping wet, white as a sheet, shivering. “Elizabeth, is everything alright?” I stared at Mrs. Sonnet, at her apple-embroidered apron, at her brittle blonde hair tied back in a knot, at the smile wrinkles around her eyes. “Honey?”  

        Mrs. Sonnet set down her knife and cutting board. She grabbed me gently by the shoulders with her palms, dirty fingers held aloft in the air to keep vegetable juices off my shirt. “What’s wrong? Where’s Ainsley?” Her brow wrinkled. 

        “I don’t know,” I managed to whisper. I was now standing in a water puddle of my own making, from dripping hair and clothes and shoes. “She went toward the river, and now she’s gone.”  

        Mrs. Sonnet went gray. “Okay,” she said, striding back into the kitchen to shut off the stove. “Um.” She stared momentarily at her dirty hands, which she wiped on her apron. “Show me where you last saw her.” 

        Mrs. Sonnet and I ran back toward the trees, me in my squelching shoes and Mrs. Sonnet in her fuzzy, pink house slippers. We hurried into the woods, toward the river. We didn’t speak, only panting to catch our breath. 

        The riverbank was flooded, the muddy bank overrun with swirling currents. As I stepped toward the water, Mrs. Sonnet reached out and grabbed my hand. “We stay together,” she demanded. Her jaw was set, and there were tears in her eyes. 

        We walked up and down the bank, calling out Ainsley’s name, hand-in-hand, our fingertips white. After a few minutes, Mrs. Sonnet pulled out her phone and called 911, then she cried silently as I continued shouting. 

        “Ains?” I screeched. “Ains!” I howled. “Ains! Ains!”  

        “Stop it!” Mrs. Sonnet yelled. She let go of my hand. “Be quiet, I think I heard her.” I snapped my mouth closed and my teeth clanked together. We stood still, ears peeled, straining for her voice, for her cry of help. There was the rustle of the trees and the whoosh of the river. I listened harder.  

        I hear the birds.