Two for Joy

When I learn I am pregnant with twins, my aunt gifts me a small woodcut print: two magpies, one swooping low with bold, outstretched wings, the other stock-still and bright-eyed. Two for Joy, it’s titled. I look up the phrase and find an old, old rhyme. If you encounter a mischief of magpies, the number of birds determines your luck—so they say.

My own little magpies turn out to be reflections of their inky predecessors. One in constant motion and the other forever observing, they don’t stay little for long. There is a golden period between one and five years old when they are nothing but undiluted sweetness, their mochi-cheeked baby faces kissable and somehow—always—flower-scented. I want to trap them in amber, and am astounded at my smotheryness and motheryness, these impulses and emotions I never expected to unearth. Their tiny voices melt me; their tears destroy me. 

They gather treasures every day, exult in rainbow beads and shiny spoons and curls of ribbon. In their hungry hunt for anything that sparkles, they lead me into the wilderness where I watch them climb trees, catch bugs, love the dirt they stand on. We learn the names of native plants and birds and use our bodies to act out the life cycle of a flower and the way the Earth’s tilt creates the seasons, and I soak in sunshine and frost and feel in my bones that life is good. Our mantel fills with river rocks, pearly shells, mosses that fade and crumble too quickly, star-hearted cottonwood twigs, and one delicate, unidentified, needle-toothed skull. We hang prisms and windchimes in the windows and our home is full of warmth and color and light. 

The girls have a way of being together that is somewhere between magic and a secret language, with a nonstop, nonsensical narrative of make-believe that weaves back and forth between them as fluid as water, as if they share a single mind. 

“After all,” says one, “we used to be the same person.” 

“No,” says the other, “just the same egg.” 

My daughters are downy and round and defenseless, even with their ballasting togetherness.

But then they stretch and grow knobbly and long-limbed, developing a sharpness in their bodies and minds that I long to sand back to smoothness. They begin to watch the world warily, searching for thorns instead of jewels. They ask me about war and unkindness and hunger and greed. They ask how soon our dog, their oldest friend, will die. And if they will be grown-ups by the time I die, and if they will be left alone. And if children ever die, too, and exactly how, and exactly why.

I do my best to answer them, stroking their dandelion-fluff hair as I teeter on that fine line between gentleness and honesty, and I wish so dearly that I could carry them back to when they were pudgy and squishy and uncomplicatedly happy. One day it’s as though enchanted glasses have settled onto the bridge of my nose, because I can see a child nestled inside each grown person, soft and shining and fast asleep, forgotten, like the brightly-painted, solid-wood heart of a matryoshka doll, these tender, wondrous creatures that each one of us used to be—before, before, before. And I know that my sweet girls are being transformed just the same, and that I cannot do a thing about it, because the world is packed too full with jagged edges. And I think of the luminous life we’ve created together, my daughters and I, our mosses and our rainbows, and I wonder: can they carry that with them, somehow, into whatever comes next? Muddied or cracked or faded, maybe—but, when morning comes, still there?

No one can promise me that. No one can assure me that their fragile, glimmering hearts will make it through in one piece. 

When the girls are nearly seven years old, three baby magpies appear in our backyard, huddled under the rowan tree. I worry about them at first—have they been abandoned? Are they hurt? But the internet assures me that magpie fledglings always leave the nest before their flight feathers have grown, that these earthbound babies will be fed and guarded by their parents from above. They’ll shelter in the undergrowth overnight. They have to learn to fend for themselves. They will be fine.

So the girls and I watch them through the kitchen window. Our gray-muzzled dog limps outside and is bombarded fiercely by the parents, who seem to be made of nothing but graceful, kite-diamond tails and flashing, iridescent wings. They swoop and scream their harsh warning cries—too close, get back, danger!—and he looks back at them with patient, world-weary eyes. He knows they just want to protect their little ones.

They plunder our strawberry patch for their children, too, snatching the treats the moment there is the palest blush of pink. My daughters hold a grudge at first—for them, each strawberry is a celebration, and they split even the smallest gem down the middle to share—but they soften as they watch the young birds fluff their feathers. The fledglings curl against one another most of the time, perched on knotty branches the girls piled under the rowan long ago for some game. When their parents drop down to feed them, they tip their heads back and grow noisy, mouths agape, then settle into silence again when they are left alone, a whole earth and sky spreading wide around them.

One day, when the long night ends, two baby magpies blink in the sun instead of three. I don’t say anything to the girls, and tell myself that this must mean they are starting to fly, that they are moving on. A few days later, they are all gone. The girls cry a bit because they didn’t get to say goodbye, but then they smile at each other, imagining those babies in the sky, their black-and-white wings open at last. Going, going, gone behind the clouds.

That night, after the girls go to sleep, I step outside. I already know what I’ll find. But I am not entirely right, in the end, and there is only one little magpie dead in the tall grass. I bury it.