CHAPTER ZERO
SUMMER 1998
My little sister collides with the open doorway of the master bedroom, skidding to a halt at the foot of the bed in a gust of chlorine and sunscreen and girl sweat. Remnants of last night’s homemade makeover from our slumber party for two still cling to the round curves of Kitty’s face—mascara smudged in purple-black bruises around her eyes, lip-liner residue crusted in damp red grit along the edges of her mouth. Hours of late-night Blockbuster New Releases and Girl Scout Thin Mints have thinned the stain on my little sister’s lips from Fairuza Balk red to Alicia Silverstone pink, but even the chemically treated water from our backyard pool isn’t strong enough to wash the color away completely.
The air-conditioning clicks on, and Kitty’s teeth chatter when the blast of too-high cold cuts through her black one-piece. She hugs her arms across her chest, eclipsing pinprick nipples that stab out against the faded white and yellow daisies on the hand-me-down swimsuit. Dolphins coil around my sister’s legs in sun-bleached shades of neon pink, blue, yellow. Longleaf-pine needles stick to her wet forearm.
She didn’t bother to clean the pool before jumping in.
Adrift on my back in the center of the waterbed, I wait for Mom to say something maternal—Kitty, go dry off, or Katherine, you’re tracking pool water into the house. But seated on the floor of the walk-in closet on the other side of the bedroom, her uncombed hair a wasp’s nest around her as she studies her reflection in a cosmetic compact mirror, Mom doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t even look up.
“You’re dripping all over the carpet,” I tell my sister.
Breathless, Kitty’s voice comes out shrill enough to shatter the tiny mirrors in our mother’s compacts, send them glittering onto the closet floor. “Norman is dead!” She shivers again, and her wet feet stamp damp splotches on the carpet when she tightens the towel around her legs.
“Jill, come see, in the pool,” Kitty says. “Norman is dead.”
Water drips from the ends of my sister’s hair, trickles onto her cheeks, and leaks down her chin. Even when they’re plastered against her forehead, you can tell Kitty’s bangs are crooked, chopped into erratic points when she’d used the kitchen scissors to barber free a stray splat of bubble gum, then snipped short the hair around her forehead so she could look like Drew Barrymore or Claire Danes. It might have worked, except Drew and Claire are both blond and skinny, and Kitty brunette and still growing out of her baby fat.
“You’re lying.” I use my Big Sister Voice. Norman is fine. Why wouldn’t he be fine?
Kitty rolls her eyes as she pulls the towel tight over her chest. “Why would I lie about your stupid bird?”
“Because you lie about everything.”
My sister staggers backward. Her lower lip trembles. Kitty’s stunned by my cruelty. So am I.
We wait for Mom to intervene. Girls, be nice, she should say. Jilly Bean, be nice to your sister, or Kitty Kat, don’t antagonize Jill about her pet. But other than the rain of Kitty’s pool water onto the master-bedroom carpet, the slosh of the waterbed beneath me, the stifled, violent drumbeats of music somewhere beyond the patio doors: nothing.
I flop my head onto its side, so I face the walk-in closet where my mother hunches over a ring of pink plastic squares, each open to reveal colorful palettes of blushers and eye shadows. Capped pink lipstick tubes lay scattered around bare toes tipped in chipped nail polish as Mom uses a greasy white sponge to pat foundation across her cheeks, over her forehead, down the bridge of her nose. When she’s finished, my mother’s face glows too white against the crepey tan of her neck. She sets down the sponge without blending the foundation line at her chin, then reaches for a pink square and drags two fingers across a circle of blue.
Mom rubs oceans around each eye, her fingertips smudging bruisy blue on the stubby pink lipstick cylinder clenched in her first. Then, she pops the cap, twists out the stick, and traces red wax over her mouth from muscle memory: two quick dabs on the cupid’s bow of the upper lip, a thick smear along the bottom.
She looks up and stares blankly in my direction. Then she rolls her lips together to spread the color even.
Again.
Again.
Color stains the skin around my mother’s mouth. Her entire jaw is bleeding.
Mirror glass glints from the carpet as Mom trades one lipstick for another. She uses the waxy stick to scratch short dashes around her ankles, across her throat, up her arms, leaving behind lines of red thread that stitch my mother’s extremities to the rest of her body. She presses her wrists together, spreading red over her skin. Her ocean eyes roll up to lock onto mine as she bends her head and drags a wet tongue up the seam on one forearm.
“Did you hear me?” Kitty’s voice cuts me from the foot of the bed.
Mom’s head lifts to reveal a liquid red streak down the center of her fat pink tongue.
“Kitty, seriously,” I say as I look away. “Stop.”
My sister vibrates at my feet. “I am serious! Norman is floating in the pool, I swear.” Kitty’s whine is helium and her face flushes. “Face down, one glassy little eye staring at me. It’s creepy—like in Psycho.”
“That’s a shower, not a pool.” The famous scene is even more harrowing in the book than it is in the movie, but this I don’t tell my sister. In the book, Norman Bates doesn’t stab Marion Crane to death; he decapitates her. “And Norman isn’t the victim, he’s the bad guy. So it’s not like the movie at all.”
Last Halloween, after Kitty went to bed, Mom and I stayed up late to watch the old Hitchcock film The Birds. Then we burned through my trick-or-treat candy, trading Almond Joys for Milk Duds in a double feature with Psycho. The next day I offered to babysit Kitty when Mom went to the grocery store, and we watched the movie again. My sister sat as upright as a headstone, silent and unblinking, when Norman and Marion debated sending his mother to the madhouse. “We all go a little mad sometimes,” he’d said, and soon after that, Mom stopped talking, and everything changed.
When the cockatiel arrived on Christmas morning, the first name I thought of was Norman’s. Now, when Kitty shivers, I think maybe it’s not because she’s cold.
Her next stomp sprays me with either pool water or spittle. “Jill, come see. Maybe he’s still alive.”
I fix my eyes on the underside of the popcorn ceiling. I don’t want to look at my mother, the red lines beading on her skin. I don’t want to look at my sister. I don’t want to think about my cockatiel, or Marion Crane.
“Go away, Kitty.”
“What is your problem?” My sister’s shriek is lightning. “Your stupid bird is dead in our pool!”
I give the mattress another jerk then lie stiff, arching my back as the waterbed rises and falls beneath me. Kitty growls, then slinks away. When the glass door to the patio slides open, faraway guitar riffs spirit me downstream. When the door slides closed, the room falls back to silence, punctuated by the sound of my mother’s paint-chipped fingernails tapping on shiny pink plastic compacts.
“Mom?” I direct the word to the ceiling, the single syllable heavy with my entire heart.
The waterbed waves go flat, and I twist to look at my mother, stitched together on the closet carpet. The tip of red wax slips between her lips. Her white teeth bite down. Red bubbles form in the corners of her mouth, then begin to run down her chin.
I climb off the bed, my bare feet following Kitty’s cool footprints down the hallway, through the sliding doors that lead to our patio and the pool. Guitar and drums blend with male falsetto as music floats across the backyard from the boom box she’s lugged outside from our shared bedroom.
My eyes slide to Norman’s tall, wrought-iron birdcage.
It’s empty.
Frost prickles through my chest despite the intense summer heat. The bird’s perches are there, his toys and millet, but the yellow-face cockatiel is gone. The cage door is propped open with a clothespin bleached white by the constant summer sun. Before she’d gone into the master-bedroom closet, Mom had stood on the patio and stared into the surface of the pine-needle-strewn pool.
I drag my eyes to the water.
Wings splayed out on either side of his body, Norman floats face down. His small form lists lifelessly in the deep end of our pool, gray feathers and curly yellow crest waterlogged and dull in the filthy chlorinated soup. Longleaf-pine needles, like the ones slicked to Kitty’s forearm, drift around him. A funeral pyre, unburned.
My feet sink into the water as I sit at the edge of the pool. Liquid laps over the tile, as warm as what slips from the tip of my cheeks and leaves tiny wet dots on my T-shirt. I hadn’t realized that I’m crying.
Kitty’s feet patter across the concrete and her damp thigh settles against mine. Her feet slide into the water, too, smaller than my own but just as blue.
“I’m sorry about Norman,” she whispers, then takes a deep breath. “Is Mom going to be okay?”
Copyright © 2026 by Lindy Ryan
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