Lucy

The room is still. At first.

My eyes were still closed as I took in a breath—the first one of the day. My temples ached, and I blinked, letting the light meet my eyes in painful bursts. I felt like a rag doll, flung into a dumpster.

I started to wiggle my toes and took long deep breaths to wake myself up. Nancy, one of my counsellors, taught me that years ago and it always stuck with me.

I used to tell her I woke up angry and depressed.

"Try waking up with a wiggle and a deep breath," she'd say, as though she hadn't heard me. She was such a bitch, Nancy was. I always managed to have a spite-laugh when I thought about her, though, wiggling my toes in the mornings.

The sun filtered through the window and bounced off the waxed, hardwood floor. I managed to slump my head in an awkward half-propped-up position against the headboard. I felt a faint brush of wind from the window.

Why do you always have to test?

I remember my sister saying something like that last night. The night started coming back, but all disjointed, like some prankster had gotten into the overhead projector slides.

I looked around at her walls. Cream, crisped up by white trim. And all the furniture matched.

It had been a while since I had stayed at her place, but Katie had always been so methodical about her furniture, so I guess the habit had stuck.

A wine bottle sat on the floor.

The smell of uprooted earth wafted through the open window and mixed with the scent of stale wine.

Could that smell seriously be coming from just that one bottle?

Shadows played across the far side of the room, coming from the hall. Andrew must be there, I sensed. I realized he was talking on the phone.

"No—I don't know what happ..."

He seems to be interrupted by someone on the other end. His tone was serious.

I stretch out—a huge cat-like stretch that would have made counsellor Nancy proud. Gold star on the participation chart, for sure. I let my bones crack and muscles pop and settle as I started to get up.

A birdcage hung in the corner of the room. Its door was open.

I walked over to it, and a tension built in my chest.

No bird. Lucy was gone. The door to the cage was hanging open.

I ran my hand down the thin metal bars. Glossy magazine pages lined the bottom of the cage, and two bowls of water and food were full.

I looked at the sunflower seeds in the bowl and thought about the time I planted sunflower seeds with my Mom at our old house in Kingston.

I was eleven and Katie had just turned thirteen and she had managed to convince our parents to let her use a third of the backyard for growing lavender. As I watched the violet bushes grown higher and thicker, I decided I wanted to use a section to plant sunflowers.

"Sunflowers are just too...consuming," my mother told me.

So I was only allowed to plant three sunflowers in a big chipped terra cotta pot in our front yard.

When I was seventeen, I went on my first road trip. I saw a full field of sunflowers in California with my own eyes. I was visiting my cousin who knew they were my favourite.

"It's forever. You won't believe it," she said. I barely could.

We drove through field after field of yellow and green. The glow of the was like a Rothko spectacle—too much to take in at once, and completely surrounded us. I remember my cousin's car that drove us there was a beater—sky blue—and how it looked against the backdrop of intense yellow.

That car got us around everywhere that summer. Concerts along the strip, beach after beach, movies downtown, to visit summer flings in San Diego, and sneaking into wine tastings in Napa Valley.

I remembered my cousin, behind the wheel, in complete control.

I had come back from that trip determined to buy a car. It was my ticket to my life away from home—to joyrides, to a life on the road, to whims of travel and adventure. I worked after school and every Saturday as a hostess at Oasis, a waterfront restaurant down by the docks, putting my tips and earnings into a locked account. And in three months I had saved up enough to buy my first car, just in time for summer.

A sky blue beater like my cousin's, with a CD player and a sun roof. Soon after I had bought the car I became the friend and family member with the extra wheels. I gave rides, picked up little brothers from soccer practice, and was the extra car for family vacations.

Katie had expected rides from me too.

To parties, and from parties. To late night rendezvous with boyfriends, and to pop-up music shows in the quarry and the gravel pits.

When I would pick her up, her eyes were always so red. She'd slur her words, "My sisterchauffeur. That's what'll call you."

One time I needed help getting her into the car, she was so out of it.

She would always roll down the window. She wanted it open, even in the dead of winter.

"I need to let the world in," she'd say.

I stared at the open window of her birdcage, and thought of that open window on our rides together. My little blue car let her get away with so much. It took her to places she shouldn't have gone.

But it also brought her back safely.

I fingered the bars of the cage and the outline of the open door, like the open window in my teenage car.

How could I have let her bird out? Lucy, where are you?

I remembered that the bedroom window was open. Shit.

My own night started to come back to me. The slideshow continued as visions of Andrew and Katie screaming and dancing to The Pogues came back in fragments.

I saw another bottle on the floor, a forty of whisky, and a burnt beer can ashtray.

I touched the small metal door and remembered that I had opened the cage last night, and let Lucy out.

I looked at the spilled beer, the sunflower seeds, the ashtray.

And I smelled lavender.

I closed the window and began to look for Lucy.