“Mom, please. Stop. I can’t take a lecture right now.”
“Oh, I’m just getting warmed up. This is the first of many lectures, so you’d better strap in, kiddo. You have really, really screwed things up for yourself. I don’t think you even realize what you’ve set in motion. This is bad, Lucas. Maybe it felt good to give Tristan a taste of his own medicine, but it sure isn’t going to feel good from here on out.”
She sighs the way only moms can sigh. None of the words, all of the guilt.
“I’m in so far over my head here. I don’t know what to do about you. I don’t know what to do for you.”
“You can’t do anything for me, Mom. Unless you can go to Sparrow’s hospital room and wave a magic wand to make her all better.”
“Right now, Lucas, Sparrow is not the person I’m worried about. She’s getting all the help she needs. But you won’t let anyone help you. You won’t talk to me, and you won’t see a counselor. You have got to control this anger. You walk around the house slamming doors, pounding walls, snapping at me and Anna. I don’t know who this is, sitting here in my truck, suspended for beating up another kid. I don’t think you know who he is either.”
We’re on Shenandoah Street now, just a few blocks from home, but she slows down and pulls into the Kroger parking lot. She takes off her sunglasses and tosses them onto the dash. I pretend to fool with the air conditioning so I won’t have to look at her eyes.
“I want to say something to you before we get home, while I have the chance and it’s just you and me. Anna has already had to deal with way more than she should. Losing your dad was terrible enough, but now she feels like she’s losing you, too, and it’s breaking her heart.
“You’re hurting, I get that, Lucas. You’re grieving your father, and then this horrific thing happens to a girl you adore. But you can’t keep lashing out at everyone around you, especially your sister. You can’t expect us to keep swallowing your anger. I am an adult, and I’ll cut you some slack. But she’s still a little girl, and she’s just so—bewildered.
“All you’ve done since Sparrow got hurt is yell at us and sit in your room listening to Johnny Cash over and over again. I’m gently suggesting, honey, that playing ‘Hurt’ five hundred times a day is not the most constructive way to spend your time.”
I look out the window and see Caleb’s mom pushing a grocery cart with a wonky wheel packed with huge containers of the mint chocolate chip protein powder he loves. She gives us a little wave.
“Mom. Stop. I get it, okay? I promise I won’t beat anyone else up.”
“Don’t you dare smart-mouth me, Lucas Oliver. There are going to be serious consequences from what you did today.”
“I know, I know.”
“No, you don’t. You don’t have the first clue. Everything depends on how you handle yourself from here on out. Everything. If you keep this up, the person you’ll hurt most is not me or Anna or Tristan. The person you’ll hurt most is you. And I can’t bear to watch that happen. I won’t. Do you understand?”
“I guess so. I’ll do better, Mom. I’ll try.”
She looks at me for a long moment, then puts the truck in gear. “Okay. Let’s go home and wait for the nuclear fallout. I should probably take away your phone and your laptop, drop some serious punishment on you, but I can’t see how that’s going to help anything. I’ll make pancakes.”
She loves me, but she doesn’t believe me.
I don’t even believe myself.
Sparrow
My stars shine darkly over me.… Therefore shall I crave of you your leave that I may bear my evils alone.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Twelfth Night
21
Day Eighteen
I open my eyes.
Sophie is standing at the window, whispering prayers.
My father sees me and stops pacing. He runs to my side. “Sophie! Soph! Get a nurse! Now, Sophie, now! Oh, sweet Jesus. Hurry!”
Sophie runs, and then people come in, one after the other. They are doing things to the machines. They are doing things to me.
Everything is too much, the lights, the noise, all the people talking to me and to each other. I feel so heavy, like there is iron ore in my veins instead of blood. If I could, I would sink through this bed, into the floor, down, down, all the way down into the dark and silent earth.
My throat hurts.
A woman in a white coat smiles at me, then shines a light so bright, so painful, into my eyes that I squeeze them shut, hoping she’ll be gone when I open them again. I smell horrible things. Blood. Bleach. Sweat. Urine. The way my father smells when he comes home from the prison. Except this time it is coming from me. Tears leak from the corners of my eyes. They turn cold and drip into my ears.
My father’s face, a century older, fills my sight. His hair is dirty and he has a scruffy beard. His breath is bad, coffee and something new and stale. Cigarettes.
“Sparrow? Can you hear me? Sparrow, baby, move your fingers if you can hear me.” He touches my hand.
The feel of his skin on mine makes me want to scream. He’s too close. I try to pull my hand from his, but I can’t lift my arms. They are both in casts from my hands to my elbows.
Something is hurting me, binding me.
I am tied down.
I am tied to the bed, I am tied to the bed, I am tied to the bed.
A scream rises in my throat, desperate, horrified, but I can’t open my mouth to let it out. I can only whimper. Like an animal.
I thrash and pound my hands weakly against the bed. I try to kick my feet, but only one will move. The other is in a cast that pokes out from beneath a thin blue blanket. My toes are black. I kick the mattress again and again with my good foot, struggling to escape, struggling to scream. I arch my back. I try to get away.
The woman in white takes my father’s place. There’s a stethoscope around her neck. Her nose is pierced on one side with a tiny, sparkling jewel.
“Sparrow, be still now. Listen to me. I am Dr. Sharma. Do not be afraid. I am taking the restraints off right now. When you began to wake up, you were very agitated, and we did not want you to hurt yourself.”
I hear the harsh, tearing sound of Velcro. Everything is too bright, too loud.
“Please, Sparrow, be still. There is a tube in your throat that was helping you to breathe. You do not need it any longer, and we will take it out very soon. This is why you cannot speak. Two of the bones in your foot are broken. After they heal, we will take the cast off.”
She looks over her shoulder at the door and shakes her head.
“Absolutely not, Detectives. No questions today. Lucas and Delaney, just family now. Go back to school.”
She motions to another woman, who’s wearing bright pink scrubs. She stands beside me and pushes the plunger of a syringe into a tube that snakes from my chest to a bag above my head.
She smiles at me. “You’ll feel better soon, sweetheart.”
My father paces back and forth in front of the window. The blinds are crooked. He holds his hands behind his back and stoops forward a little, the way he does when he’s practicing an argument. “Sparrow, honey, please let the doctors help you.” I turn away. I don’t want to look at him.
Sophie is crying. She kisses me gently on each cheek. “Welcome back, baby girl,” she whispers. “Welcome back, sweetheart. You’re safe now, my love. You’ve come back to us. No one can hurt you now.”
Even her hand on mine, her lips on my cheeks, are too much to bear. I shrink back into the pillows, trying to get away from the touching, from the feel of other people’s skin, but there’s nowhere to go. I tell her with my eyes to go away, to leave me alone. She doesn’t listen.
Sleep is coming quickly. Everything blurs and sounds faraway, like the ocean on some distant shore.
I am not safe. I will never be safe.
I float away on a sea of despair.
Inside my eyes, my mother waits for me. Down, down, down in the shadows, I see the feathers tremb
ling at her throat, the pearls twisted in her hair, the sharp points of her dark tiara reaching up to the moonless night.
I hear the beat and murmur of her terrible wings.
22
Day Nineteen
“Five minutes, that’s all. Are we clear?”
“Got it, Doc. We won’t be long.”
My father and Sophie are sitting in plastic chairs, in a corner near the window. My father’s knee pumps up and down. Sophie is braiding the fringe on her paisley shawl.
I can hear Dr. Sharma through the closed door. “She hasn’t said a word since she woke up. Not to me or the nurses. Not even to her family. Take it slowly, please. Do not upset her.”
“We’ll do our best.”
Dr. Sharma opens my door and stands aside as Tommy Bayliss comes in, along with a woman in a pale gray suit and a man with a dark mustache. They hang back while Tommy comes to stand beside my bed. He tries to speak softly, gently, but his eyes betray him. He wants something.
I squeeze my eyes shut, willing him to disappear.
“Hey, kid,” says Tommy. “You scared the crap out of us. How are you doing?”
I breathe slowly, keeping my eyes closed. If I don’t see him, he isn’t here. If I don’t see him, I will not hear him.
“We need you to tell us who did this to you, Sparrow. Who hurt you?”
One beat. Then another. A long, long pause. I hear the leather of his shoes creak as he shifts his weight. After a while he walks away. The three of them whisper urgently together near the door. The men leave. The woman stays.
My throat is on fire from where the tube used to be, from throwing up in my lap when my father tried to wrap his arms around me. I’m so filled up with pain that I feel it leaking out of my pores, filling the room with its raw, animal power.
I open my eyes again. The woman walks over to my bed.
“Sparrow,” she says. “My name is Violet Bell, and the gentleman out there with Officer Bayliss is Daniel Gutierrez. We’re both detectives, and we work with young women just like you. Please, it’s important that you tell me who did this. Can you remember anything at all? Even the smallest detail would help us.”
If there was any part of me that was still alive, the faintest flicker of life left at my core, it goes dark now. I feel her passing, the girl I was before. All that I ever was or could be is gone. This is the girl I am now, battered and empty. Unrecognizable, even to myself. Especially to myself.
“Just say his name,” says Violet Bell. “That will be enough for now.”
Tears spill down my cheeks, but I don’t make a sound. I’ll never say his name again.
I promise, Mama. I’ll be quiet. I’ll be good.
I am not the kind of girl who tells.
Lucas
Affliction is enamored of thy parts, and thou art wedded to calamity.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Romeo and Juliet
23
Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down
It’s only November, but it already seems like winter, so freaking cold in Delaney’s car that I can’t feel my nose or my feet. It’s like we skipped right over fall and went straight to February.
Sparrow has been home for a month. She refuses to see anyone, nobody from ballet, nobody from school. If people show up unannounced, Sophie and Mr. Rose turn them away. Yesterday they called in the cavalry, which is basically me and Delaney, without the horses.
In spite of the hot chocolate and bagels we brought from Nora’s and the Taco Bell chili cheese burritos I made Delaney stop for on the way, I don’t see how this is going to end well. We went to the hospital five times, hanging around outside her door like faithful dogs, enduring the pitying glances of the nurses, the whispered apologies from Sophie and Mr. Rose. She was having a bad day. She was asleep. She didn’t want to see anyone. She didn’t want to see us.
We pull up in front of Sparrow’s house, but Delaney speeds up and drives past, turning out of the cul-de-sac and back down Larkspur Way.
“Laney,” I say, pitching a burrito wrapper into the back seat. “What are you doing? We said we’d be there at four. That’s five minutes from now.”
She parks across from Mr. Chastain’s house, three doors down from Sparrow’s. Bundled in hat, scarf, blue down parka, and fingerless gloves, she looks like a Smurf about to harness up some sled dogs and run the Iditarod.
“Can we please just sit here for a minute?” she says. “I need to get my guts up.”
“Yeah, sure.”
Mr. Chastain comes out onto his front porch with a glass of red wine, and we wave at him. He’s done this every day since his wife died last year, even when it’s cold, even when it’s raining. He wears a heavy corduroy coat and a green fedora with a feather in the brim. When he sits down in his white wicker rocker, he puts one hand on the chair beside him, where Mrs. Chastain used to sit. He rocks for them both.
Delaney unwraps her cinnamon raisin bagel and takes a bite. As she stares out the windshield, she wipes cream cheese from the corners of her mouth and says, “My Swan Queen blows.”
“No, it doesn’t,” I say automatically, though she’s mostly right. She’s only been dancing Sparrow’s role for a few weeks, but she can’t get out of her own way. She’s tentative and nervous and stressed, so she makes mistakes. What little patience Levkova had is starting to wear thin with both of us. I can’t hide that I’m uncomfortable partnering with Delaney. And it’s not her fault, so I feel like a jerk.
“Yes, it does, and you know it. But thank you for lying. I know Levkova’s saying I’m learning it just in case Sparrow can’t do it, but I still have to learn it, you know?”
“You’ll get the hang of it.”
“Maybe,” she says glumly. “But I’m never going to nail those turns in the Variation. They make me dizzy as crap. And the footwork in the Coda is killing me. Sparrow did it like she had springs in her feet and barely broke a sweat. And her arms were boneless! I’m so seriously screwed.”
We started rehearsing with Levkova, just the two of us, at six thirty this morning, almost three hours before everyone else arrived. We’re not clicking because we dance like Sparrow’s shadow is between us.
It doesn’t help that Levkova’s been acting super-weird lately, distant and distracted. Just after we began this morning, she stopped watching us and stared at the place where Sparrow always stands at the barre. She was crying. Like really crying, tears streaming down her face. We pretended not to notice.
When we were done, she didn’t give me any corrections, focusing completely on Delaney. I’m good, but I’m not that good. Something’s up.
We’re both quiet, finishing our hot chocolate, trying to stay warm in the frigid car.
“So why’s your mom so mad at you today?” she asks.
“Change the subject, please.”
“Tell me or I’ll put cream cheese in your hair.”
Lately Delaney’s the only person I can stand to be around. Caleb and Iz and Luis and Sam all want to hang out and pretend everything is the same. Which it isn’t, especially now that it looks like I won’t be going back to school for the foreseeable future.
“It would be best for all concerned…” is how the email to my mother began. Dr. Freeman explained that Tristan’s father had “retained counsel,” and threatened to sue the school if I were not kept away from his son. He said he’d get a restraining order against me if I got anywhere near his golden boy. Not sure he could actually do it, but he’s friends with three judges, so let’s just say that the odds are not in my favor. Mr. Freeman wants me to “lie low” for the rest of the semester. My mom’s working a deal with him and my teachers that would let me graduate on time. I can’t make myself care.
“Laney, my mom’s mad at me all the time. Nothing special about today.”
“Nah, she was really smoked when I picked you up. She had the crazy eyes. What was it this time?”
“You are like a freaking badger. You know that, right?”
She grins, but it
doesn’t go all the way to her eyes.
“It’s one of my many charms.”
“Okay, so she’s trying to get me to write this letter of apology to Tristan and his parents. I pointed out that this may seem slightly insincere, since the beatdown happened almost two months ago.”
“Definitely cruel and unusual punishment.”
“I know, right? But she thinks if I act all sorry and ashamed of myself, Dr. King will calm down and stop screaming for my head on a pike.”
“You know what I think?” she says, flipping down the mirror on her visor and checking her teeth for bagel remnants. “I think his father’s all hat and no cattle. He’s just yelling because he likes the sound of his own voice. So you broke Tristan’s stupid nose. It’s not like you killed him, or you know, put him in one of those wheelchairs you move by blowing through a straw.”
“He had a couple of cracked ribs, too. And both eyes were black.”
“Oh, boo frickin’ hoo. Cry me a river. He so had it coming. I’ll bet at least half the people who saw that fight wished they’d been the one to rain down the fisticuffs.”
“Yeah, well. I’m not sorry, and that makes it kind of hard to write an apology. My mom told me to suck it up and fake it. She wants me to say whatever will get them off my case and let me go back to school in January. So I tried. I really did. Sat in front of my laptop for an hour, trying to come up with the perfect apology. She did not approve of the result.”
“I can’t wait. What did you say?”
“‘Dear Tristan, I’m sorry you’re a douchebag. Very truly yours, Lucas.’”
She throws back her head and laughs, the old Delaney laugh I haven’t heard in a long time, an earsplitting combination of snorts, gasps, and braying donkey.
“Oh my God, that’s why your mom’s so chafed.”
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