Ashes and Birdcages

Teresa had owned the birdcage for six years and could not remember, most days, how she had come to own it in the first place. It was brass, or brass-colored anyway, and it had hung in her rental's stairwell doing absolutely nothing, and when Mariah had called her that Monday morning asking, half laughing, if Teresa had anything weird in her house, because the mood board needed one more object and everything Mariah owned was either a prop pineapple or a portion scoop, Teresa had said yes, actually, I have a birdcage with no bird in it, and the silence on the line had been so long that Teresa checked whether the call had dropped.

"You have a what," Mariah said.

"A birdcage. Empty. It came with the apartment. The landlady said the last tenant left it and she wasn't climbing up there to get it, so it's mine now, apparently. That's how I acquired most of my furniture, honestly."

"Bring it. Bring it right now!"

"Mariah, it's a joke, it's not a design object, it's a..."

"That's exactly what I need," Mariah said, and Teresa could hear her smiling through the phone, which was a thing she had learned Mariah could do, a smile you could hear, "something empty I can fill. Oh my god, that constitutes the entire pitch. That constitutes the entire pitch for the scatter, actually. Bring it."

So that was how Teresa, forty-five years old, single, a bartender who had lived in this soggy southern Chilean town for six years without once doing anything anyone would call impulsive, came to carry a brass birdcage with no bird in it down the wet hillside road at nine in the morning, past the closed surf shop and the closed empanada stand and the one open hardware store, while a man in a yellow rain jacket watched her the whole way with the expression of a man deciding whether to ask and then deciding against it.

Café Pacifico smelled the way it always smelled, which was like roast and salt air fighting each other, and Mariah was waiting at the counter in her work clothes, which were always nicer than the job required, food stylists apparently needed blazers, and she lit up when Teresa came through the door in a way that Teresa had been noticing lately and trying very hard not to notice.

"Give it here," Mariah said, hands out as a child at Christmas, which was a stupid comparison because she was forty-three and divorced from life in a way Teresa was still figuring out how to talk about. Widow. Bradley. Four years ago. Mariah never made it heavy, that was the key, she never made anything heavy.

Teresa handed over the cage and Mariah held it up to the window light, turned it, looked through the little brass door like she was checking for a prisoner.

"It's perfect," Mariah said. "It's stupid and it's perfect. Empty cage, empty ocean, empty everything, and then we fill it. This is the mood board. This is the whole visual language of the event."

"You're being generous."

"I'm being right." She set it on the counter and looked at Teresa over the top of it. "You want coffee? I'm not serving you, that's humiliating for both of us, but I can make you coffee."

"That is the same thing as serving me."

"It's different. Serving is when there's a counter between us and there's a counter between us, but I'm coming around to your side, see, so it's coffee between friends." And she did come around, and made it, pour-over, taking forever the way Mariah took forever at everything, and then led Teresa up the narrow stairs to the tasting loft, which the roastery owner let Mariah use in the afternoons because he liked her, everyone liked Mariah, that was a fact of the town like the rain.

The loft had a long table and a view of the ocean doing its gray thing, and the mood board was already pinned up there, fabric swatches and a photograph of driftwood and a printed schedule, and Teresa, who had agreed two weeks ago to help with this because Mariah had asked and Teresa's whole problem was that she could not say no to anyone, stood with her coffee and read the itinerary upside down first, then right side up.

"Eleven Saturday," Teresa read. "Cliffside above Playa Chica. Readings, two songs, the scattering, then back here for food. You're doing the food? You're a food stylist, not a caterer."

"I'm doing the food. Don't start."

"I'm not starting, I'm asking."

"Yes, I'm doing the food, because if I let anyone else do the food I'll stand there the whole time redoing it in my head, and it's the last thing I'll ever do for him, so it's going to be correct." She said it lightly, which somehow made it heavier, and then she moved on before Teresa could decide what face to make. "Okay, so, readings. I have never planned a ceremony for anyone before. Did you know that? I planned a wedding, one wedding, my own, and it rained and the tent leaked and Bradley said it was the best day of his life and I believe he meant it. But this, this I have no map for. Nobody teaches you how to end a person properly."

"No, they don't," Teresa said.

"So you'll help me pick the readings. You read more than I do. You're the reader."

"I read bar receipts."

"You read books, I've seen them, they're stacked by your bed like a threat." Mariah reached across the table to turn the itinerary toward Teresa properly, and her hand landed on Teresa's wrist, and stayed. That was the thing Teresa had been noticing and trying not to notice. It stayed a beat too long, warm, her thumb near the tendon, and then Mariah took it back as if nothing had happened, and pointed at the schedule, and talked about songs, and Teresa drank her coffee and listened and thought, not for the first time, that she was in some kind of trouble and that the trouble had started weeks ago and she had done nothing, nothing at all, to stop it.

Because here was the thing, and Teresa had been circling it for three nights now, lying in bed with the ceiling doing its water-stain thing above her. Teresa was forty-five years old and had been with exactly one kind of person her whole life, men, four of them of consequence, the last one Darrell, two years, ended fine, ended the way a fire goes out when nobody puts wood on it. And somewhere in the last year, mostly since Mariah moved into the rental two doors down and started coming into the bar and staying too long and touching Teresa's arm when she laughed, Teresa had begun to suspect that the thing she had been calling being picky was maybe actually a door she had never opened, and that it had been there the whole time, painted the same color as the wall.

She said it before she could stop herself. That was how it came out, on the loft, with the ocean doing its gray thing and the empty birdcage sitting on the table between them like a dare.

"I've never touched another woman," Teresa said.

Mariah went still with her hand flat on the itinerary, and when she looked up, her eyes had gone somewhere darker, and she said, "Me neither. I've been bored of being good, too."

The loft got very quiet. The roaster downstairs kept up its low noise like weather.

"That's not," Teresa started, and stopped, because she had been about to take it back, to laugh it into a joke, and Mariah was looking at her in a way that made taking it back feel like the actual cowardice of her life.

"It's exactly what you said," Mariah said. "You don't get to say it and then un-say it. I heard it. I've been standing here for months trying to say it myself, and you just said it, so now we're both standing in it." She turned the itinerary paper around slowly, not looking at it. "I was married thirteen years, Teresa. I loved him. That's not in question and I'm not going to stand here and rewrite him. But there was a whole list of things I filed under someday, and then someday stopped being available, and I promised myself I would stop filing things."

"What's on the list?" Teresa asked, and heard her own voice come out lower than she meant.

Mariah smiled, that hearable smile, and looked out the window at the water, and took her time, because Mariah took her time at everything.

"Food I've never made. Places I've never been. And people," she said. "Kinds of people. One kind of person, specifically, that I have spent my whole life being curious about and never once been brave enough about." She turned back. "So. The birdcage. Something empty I can fill."

"You can't just make my own prop a metaphor at me," Teresa said, and her face was hot and her heart was doing something she was not going to narrate, and Mariah laughed, one short real laugh, and came around the table, and stopped an arm's length away, close enough that Teresa could step back if she wanted, which was, Teresa understood later, the whole point of the distance.

"I'm not making anything at you," Mariah said. "I'm asking if you want more coffee, or if you want to stand here and see what happens next."

Teresa set her cup down, and the sound of it on the wood was very loud in the quiet loft, and she said, "More coffee. Obviously. Coffee first, then whatever this is, in order, like adults."

Mariah laughed and went downstairs for the carafe, and Teresa stood at the window and watched the water and told herself that agreeing to more coffee was not the same as agreeing to the rest of it, and also told herself she was a liar, and both thoughts sat comfortably side by side in her head, which was apparently just how her head worked now.

They did not resolve anything at the loft that afternoon. That was the strange part, looking back. Mariah poured the coffee and they talked about Saturday, the readings, whether the second song should go before the scattering or after, and the whole time there was this current running under the conversation like a wire under a floorboard, and neither of them stepped off it, and neither of them stepped on it either. At some point Mariah said, "Come by tonight, I need a second opinion on the dress," and Teresa said yes before Mariah even finished the sentence, which told them both something, and then they went home, two doors apart, and Teresa stood in her own kitchen for a while doing absolutely nothing with her hands.

She changed her shirt twice, which was ridiculous, since she had been in her own clothes all day in front of this woman already, and finally she walked the thirty seconds down the lane at seven, in the blue dark, with the wind coming off the water and pushing her sideways on the gravel.

Mariah's rental was warm and smelled like garlic, and there were fabric swatches on the kitchen table again and a garment bag hanging off the back of a chair.

"You ate," Teresa said, nodding at the pan on the stove.

"I cooked, I don't know that I ate. Sit, no, don't sit, actually, come here." Mariah unzipped the garment bag and pulled out the dress, black, simple, the kind of dress that costs more because it looks like it cost nothing. "The service is Saturday, eleven, and I cannot stand in front of forty people looking like someone who gave up, so. Second opinion. Then zipper opinion. It doesn't zip right on its own."

Teresa said okay. She did not trust herself to say anything longer than that.

Mariah stepped into the dress in the middle of the room, no shyness about it, just a woman getting dressed the way she would in front of a tailor, and pulled it up, and turned her back to Teresa, and lifted her hair off her neck with one hand.

"Zip," she said.

Teresa took the little metal tab. It was such a small task. It was nothing. She had zipped a hundred dresses for a hundred women at the bar, back when she worked nights with a coat check, and she started pulling it up, one tooth at a time, and the dress parted just enough at the back to show the line of Mariah's spine, pale in the lamplight, and Teresa's knuckles followed the zipper up and then, past the zipper's end, her fingers were just fingers on bare skin, flat, warm, at the top of Mariah's back where the fabric closed, and she should have taken her hand away immediately, that was the protocol, that was what any reasonable person would do.

She did not take her hand away.

Mariah did not move either. She stood there holding her hair up and looking at the wall, and Teresa's hand rested on her back like it had been assigned there, and the stove ticked, and outside the wind shoved at the window, and neither of them said anything for what Teresa later estimated at eleven seconds, because she counted, she was counting because she could not believe it was happening.

"You're not taking your hand back," Mariah said finally, quietly.

"No," Teresa said.

"Okay." Mariah let her hair fall. She did not turn around. "Okay. Good."

Teresa looked at the back of her own traitorous hand on that warm skin and thought, with the clarity of the truly doomed, that she had two choices and one of them was going to ruin her life in the best available way. She slid her hand down, slowly, along the curve of Mariah's spine, feeling her breathe, and Mariah shivered, an actual visible shiver, and Teresa felt it under her palm and thought, oh, so this is what that does to a person.

"Mariah," she said, and her voice came out strange, half whisper. "I have to tell you something, because if I don't say it out loud I'm going to pretend later that I didn't know."

"Tell me."

"I've been wanting this, wanting you, for months, and I have never in my life wanted a woman this much, this is, I don't have a comparison, this is the most of anything I've ever wanted." She said it all in one breath, into the space between Mariah's shoulder blades.

Mariah turned around then, in the half-zipped black dress, and her face was doing several things at once, and she put her hand flat on Teresa's chest, over the sternum, over the heartbeat, and said, "Mine too, god, mine too. Forty-three years and I thought it was a curiosity, and then you carried a birdcage down the lane at nine in the morning looking like the last honest woman in Chile, and it stopped being a curiosity."

"You didn't even like me yet."

"I didn't have to like you, that's the point, it wasn't waiting for a reason." Her hand was still on Teresa's chest. "So now we've said it. Both of us. Out loud."

"So we have."

"Now what," Mariah said, and it was not a rhetorical question, Teresa could hear that it was a real one, an actual open door held open, and Teresa understood that whatever happened next, one of them had to be the one who stepped through, and it was apparently going to be her, the careful one, the good-girl one, the woman who alphabetized her spices and paid her rent two days early.

She reached up and put her hand over Mariah's hand on her chest, and then she asked, because she was going to do this correctly if it killed her.

"Can I kiss you?"

"Yes," Mariah said, immediately, no pause at all, and then, "please, yes!"

So Teresa kissed her. It was clumsy at the start, noses, an angle