She walked to the first bedroom and placed the swan for Daisy on a single bed in a small bedroom one door down, and Beatrice’s thoughts meandered back to the day when they’d each chosen a bird, their own bird that represented their personality and choices. It had been a game back then, a playful amusement at Beatrice’s graduation art show thirty years ago. With over fifty paintings of her bird paintings hanging on the white walls of the SCAD student center, gooseneck lamps illuminating each bird she’d painted, they had stood shoulder to shoulder and picked their favorites.
Dani, both adorable and fragile in a flowered yellow dress, a fashion major wearing one of her own fantastic creations, chose the oystercatcher with its distinctive red beak.
Beatrice had told her, “It’s a little shorebird who always needs to be in large groups, so that works quite well for you.”
Dani had smiled. “I don’t care about all that. I just think it’s cute.”
Now Beatrice looked for oystercatchers wherever she went, and because of that she often found them and smiled thinking of her friend who had passed twelve years ago.
Victoria, on the other hand, had chosen the brightest and most beautiful of the paintings. Victoria, with her blond chignon and looking like she’d stepped out of a 1940s poster, had lit a menthol cigarette and leaned toward Beatrice, who took the cig from her and took a long draw. Victoria had pointed, “I want this one!” She’d pointed at a bird in flight, its blue feathers intricate and vibrant.
“A Blue Bird of Paradise.” Beatrice’s words had laughter hidden in them. “Of course you would pick that. They are the most extravagantly beautiful birds in the world. And polygamous to boot.”
The roommates had laughed, and Victoria, who now ran her own art gallery in Atlanta, had grinned like she’d just won the bird-choosing contest.
Then Daisy had stepped forward and said, “This is so fun, like pulling a Tarot card.”
Daisy, the most ethereal of them, who’d been at SCAD on an equestrian scholarship and whose study of architecture kept her wandering the streets of Savannah day and night, sketching and dissecting the preserved buildings. She’d stood in front of Beatrice in bell bottom jeans and a five-year-old Billy Joel concert T-shirt and said, “I want one of those.” She’d pointed at a murmur of starlings.
“Those are starlings,” Beatrice had told her. “They’re known for speed, agility, and staying in groups, called murmurs, for keeping each other safe.”
“Exactly then.” Daisy had smiled. “That’s my bird.”
“You merely want to be safe?” Victoria had asked, stepping next to her, smoke curling from her nostrils. “Please tell me you want more than that.”
“Oh, way more,” Daisy had said. “But I like how they stick together. You know, like we do. We’re a murmur. And the speed and agility. I like that a lot.”
“Yes.” Beatrice had hugged her friend and turned to Rose. “Your turn.”
“So much pressure.” Rose had grinned and bit the end of her thumbnail just as she always did when she felt pressure but wanted to pretend she didn’t.
“The swan.” She’d pointed at a painting of two swans sitting serenely on the water of a pond. “They mate for life just like Chip and I are about to do. And they are so serene and beautiful and peaceful.”
Victoria had groaned. “Oh God, here we go. Chip. Chip. Chip. Enough of the Chip. Can’t you even choose a bird about you without it being about him?”
The roommates had tried to stifle their laughter, but it was impossible. Victoria could not have been more right: enough of Chip. He was Rose’s childhood sweetheart, and she was going to marry him come hell or highwater. She didn’t date. She didn’t flirt. She phoned Chip, off at college in North Carolina, every day.
“You think he’s waiting for you?” Victoria had scoffed. “He’s at Duke, where the sorority and the—”
Rose had stepped up and placed her hands on her hips. “Just because you don’t know how to love just one person doesn’t mean—”
Beatrice had held up her hands. “Victoria. This is my art show. Let it go, please!”
Victoria had rolled her eyes and turned to Beatrice. “Okay, you choose now.”
“Well honestly, they’re all mine,” she’d told them.
“Pick one.” Victoria would not let it go.
“This.” Beatrice had walked up to stand in front of the premier painting in the show, one so recently done that the stinging aroma of oil paint could be detected still. Pegasus rose from a forest floor, a black horse with wings wide and in motion.
“But that’s not a real bird,” Dani, always so logical, as if life were one of her dress patterns and they could sew it together with the right directions, had said.
“It has wings,” Beatrice had said. “That’s good enough.”
Dani had shaken her head, curls bouncing. “But Pegasus flew too high. Right into the sun so her wings melted.”
Rose, their resident expert on all things mythic (which, now and then, could get annoying, to be honest), had laughed. “No! That was Icarus who flew too close to the sun. Pegasus is divine, and the child of the sea god Poseidon, so Beatrice as Pegasus makes sense, right? Here in Savannah at the edge of the water and . . .” She paused for dramatic effect. “And then she became a constellation. Pegasus represents inspiration. Our Beatrice is a winged divine creature, an inspiration, and a constellation. It fits perfectly.”
Beatrice had laughed and taken a bow. “Thank you very much!”
Victoria had spread her arms out as if she would take flight. “So the rest of us get to be mortal birds?”
And with that they had each walked into the night with their totems, ones they had carried with them ever since.
Now back in the kitchen, Beatrice smiled at the thought of her friends each finding their bird on their bed.
Daisy the starling who had gone off and built her own murmur: a family of four now dwindled to three with the death of her husband.
Victoria the Blue Bird of Paradise who’d never married but loved her art studio like a spouse.
Rose the swan who did marry Chip Chip Chip and have four children to burrow in their nest.
They could not, Beatrice had thought more than a hundred times, chosen better birds than they did. True totems.
And she, their Pegasus, still and always trying to find a way to fly with every bird she painted.
Waiting impatiently now, Beatrice ambled outside and took a leisurely lap around the edges of the scrubby island, just enough to get her bearings. It was otherworldly: the birdsong, the sunlight falling through thick Spanish moss and landing on the ground in abstract patterns, a silence she was so unaccustomed to that she almost checked to see if she had her noise-canceling headphones in her ears. She spied a gray heron standing as still as time on the edge of the marsh; a painted bunting making a dive for the pine branch, and a sandpiper that skittered across the sandy shore poking the ground in manic thrusts of its little beak. She scanned for an oystercatcher, her sign that Dani was near in spirit, but not yet . . .
Just the thought of her friends brought her closer to calm. She gazed up at the live oak branches, which were gnarled and twisted by time and wind, at the driftwood piled like bleached bones on the sand at water’s edge. She imagined that this was what the land was like a hundred years ago. It had changed all the while with tides and storms, yet at the same time it remained itself.