Chapter One:
No one expected her to die. She wasn’t that old. She hadn’t been sick.
One night she lay down on her bed and never got up again. Or so they said. Not to her. To each other. No one spoke to her. She tried to speak. But no one heard her. She had finally become invisible, as she had often wished to be.
It had been a beautiful spring day. The daffodils bobbed their glorious yellow heads in the breeze, and the buds on the maple tree branches shone red in the sunlight.
The pussy willow tree at the end of the yard spread open its soft buds against the brilliant blue sky. She had stood under it, admiring its perfection, and watched white clouds drift by, looking as if they were weaving themselves between the branches.
Neighbors up and down the street had come outside. They were checking their lawns to see what winter had done to them, and waving, delighted to see each other on this glorious day. The children were riding their bikes down the middle of the street, confident that no cars would dare bother them.
Spring had come. The days had lengthened, and the temperature no longer dropped below freezing at night. An easy winter had not diminished the joy of the arrival of spring.
While the neighborhood rejoiced in a beautiful day, Connie Matthews had kept her emotions in check. Connie believed that being too happy, or too sad, was a dangerous thing.
For Connie, that day had been good. Not great. But good. Okay. Just as life had been for the past fifty years. She woke up, made her bed, and swept the floor for any crumbs that might have escaped her careful eye the day before.
Although Connie often left food out for the animals that visited her yard, she didn’t want a mouse coming into her house searching for food. That was not where they were supposed to be living. They had other places to live. This was her home—hers, not theirs.
Connie hated capturing mice. At first, she had live-trapped them. But there always seemed to be more. It occurred to her that perhaps they were returning to the house. One day she dabbed a drop of red nail polish on a mouse’s tail before releasing it.
The day she trapped that same mouse again, she had to admit that they were finding their way back to her home.
Hating it, but knowing it was the only way, she had resorted to using traps that killed them instantly. At least she hoped so. Every time one died in the trap, Connie prayed that they would not come back and haunt her dreams.
In high school botany class, they had been required to capture bugs, kill them, preserve them, and pin them onto boards. After two days of capturing, killing, and pinning, Connie had nightmares of the bugs flying down the tiny hallway to her room and torturing her.
Connie was never sure who had intervened for her. Maybe she did it herself. Perhaps she had spoken up and told the teacher what was happening. She hoped that was what she did—that she had spoken up and did something instead of letting it happen to her.
But whoever spoke to the teacher had somehow persuaded him that there was another way to study bugs. She never had to kill again. Until the mice.
But to Connie, this was different. There was no preserving the mouse and pinning it to a board for further study. That meant it might have a chance. If there was something like life after death, perhaps it ran off to join the other mice in some other place. Maybe a place better than this one.
So as Connie released the dead mice from the trap, she would send it off in her mind to join its friends. No need to be mad at her for doing what she had done. Her house was not made for mice.
The morning she died, Connie had found a mouse in the trap. She had put the body near the tiny stream that ran through the small woods behind her house. She didn’t believe that the body was a mouse anymore, and maybe the hawk would enjoy a free meal. Perhaps then it would not bother her birds because it would be full of mouse instead.
Her birds were Connie’s pride and joy. If they were in her yard, her woods, her garden, they were her birds. She watched them through the windows of her living room, and the glass door in her bedroom. She had feeders everywhere, and birdhouses, too.
That day, her last day, she sat in the one chair in her living room and watched the bluebirds choose which house they would build a nest in. They were so indecisive. Or at least it appeared that way to Connie.
For the last month, she had watched them try to pick a home. First, they would peek into each house and then flit over to sit on the next. Sometimes they would go inside the house, poking in their heads first, and she would think “finally.” But later, they would be house hunting again. Their indecisiveness drove Connie crazy.
“Pick one, for heaven’s sake,” she would tell them through the window.
While they played around choosing their homes, the house sparrow would take over the birdhouse. For the first few weeks of spring, she would pull the sparrow nests out of the box, telling the bluebirds that she couldn’t do this forever.
She loved the bluebirds, but she hated that they didn’t stand up for themselves. She wanted them to take what was theirs. She wanted them to fight the house sparrows when they raided their nests.
In her heart, Connie knew she had become more like the bluebirds. She could decide nothing important. She was afraid to stand up for herself. Afraid to take action. She had made herself into this timid woman. There was no one to blame but herself.
So, instead of living the life she had once dreamed about, she worked in the garden. She would wave at the neighbors. But they knew not to come over.
She had nothing to say. She didn’t like gossip, and she didn’t care what they did with their own lives. And since she had done nothing with hers, she had nothing to share.
I could have done life differently, Connie thought, as she watched the people stare at the woman in the bed. The woman who looked just like her. Now that it was too late, she knew she should have. She shouldn’t have let herself be trapped like the mice in her house. Live trapped, but barely living.
One person standing around the bed was crying. A little. She has to, Connie thought, because Karla would worry about what people would say if she didn’t feel sorrow at her mother’s death.
But Connie knew better. Karla was relieved. Now she never had to worry about taking care of a mother she barely knew.
Whose fault is that? Connie asked herself.
No one needed to tell her it was her own.
Later they would discover why she had died, but only she knew why she had not lived.
