by J Bennett
Gabe sits down next to me. His energy is flagging, and I can lift my hands up and put them in my lap.
“Tammy took Tarren’s soul with her when she died. All that’s left is vengeance.” Gabe stops and shakes his head. After a while he says, “There. Now you know the big family secret.”
I put my hand on his shoulder again. We watch the trees. It’s a shame Gabe can’t see his aura and appreciate its delicate movements and aqua marine shades. How strong it is. How much brighter it glows than anything else out here. I don’t think they know that humans look the best; must be the best to feed on.
“So…” Gabe says finally, “that must have been pretty awkward this morning. Did you…was he, like, naked?”
“No!” I cry.
“Cause you are brother and sister, and that kind of thing just isn’t…”
I sock him in the arm, and Gabe cries out, clutching his injured limb and rolling on his back. “Oh shit! Unfair use of super strength.” His body quakes with laughter.
“It wasn’t funny!” I shout at him.
“Ow. Totally not funny at all,” he wheezes between laughs. I try to keep my expression stern, but I can’t. The giggles burst out, and Gabe, who is just recovering, falls back on his elbows in fits. We are both lost, tears sliding down our faces, stomachs stitching up, our manic laughter peeling out and fretting the birds nearby.
Chapter 25
I wait up for Tarren, but he locks himself in his lab until midnight and then goes straight to his room. No matter. I finish my letter to Dr. Lamsin. This is redemption. Or another way to pick at scabs.
Now that I have a perfectly good computer to write with, I have realized that writing is most definitely out of the question. I don’t have any use for an outlet. Things should not come out. Things should be bound in strait jackets and chains and locked in coffins and encased in cement. Things are the snot bubbles. Vein-covered bulbs rising up out of my hands. Dead puppies. Dead Ryan. Karen with her medicine bag. Lots of cement.
So I apologize instead, and I use my safe little notebook. Small apologies first. Tonight I apologize to Dr. Lamsin, my Shakespeare II professor, for missing her class. For any awkwardness my disappearance may have caused her and my classmates. I sincerely hope that the ongoing search for my body is not cause for continual distraction.
My pen falters. The last lines of the letter wait for closure. I spent some time on the roof yesterday reading Hamlet, and when I close my eyes, the words are there, all of them, suspended in the ether of my mind. I quickly peruse the iambic pentameters, pluck a random flower, and scribble it in, though I suspect it hardly makes any sense at all.
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
I feel slightly better, maybe even a little noble for all the suffering I have endured. Not submitting like Katherina. Not cracking wide open like Ophelia. Not giving up like Juliette. Not yet.
I close the notebook and trace the intricate swirls on the front. It is a quality journal, black with electric blue lines twisting around the front and back cover. It has a real spine and thick vanilla paper. I was surprised to pull it out of the bag of clothes and toiletries that Tarren picked up for me. I didn’t ask him to buy it.
* * *
The next morning I am ready. I crouch on the roof, letting the rising sun wake my skin. The door opens below, and Tarren takes a deep breath of the fresh air.
With a polite cough to gain his attention, I exaggerate my leap for effect, throwing myself backwards off the roof. With a graceful twist, I land softly in front of Tarren. If he is impressed with my mad skills, he fails to show it. I pretend I wasn’t at all expecting a compliment. I try to match his detached air, pushing back my shoulders and setting my face into a disaffected expression with a hint of grimace.
“I want to run with you,” I say.
Tarren frowns. I frown back. We frown at each other. I had meant to apologize. I had meant to say “hello.”
Tarren takes off without a word, and I follow, keeping at his shoulder. We move through the woods, skipping over roots and shuttling up and down embankments. Tarren increases his speed, but I stay with him. We run in silence for an hour as the sun warms the air around us. I’m sure we should have turned back already, but Tarren keeps pushing forward. I realize that he’s testing me.
All I wanted was to see about breaking this tense reserve between us, but he’s turned my gesture of reconciliation into a competition. I keep my face placid, but my anger flares. It’s amazing how easily Tarren can reach inside me and stir up the dark places until the memories, like butterflies, take wing and flutter in front of my eyes.
The gun held steady, aimed at my head. Tarren’s gun. Blood all over him. His cold eyes locking onto mine in the mirror. His humorless mouth. Glowering face. The stupid nice things he does that almost make me feel sorry for him.
But I don’t.
If Tarren wants a competition, then he’ll get it. One glance at his energy field, and I know that I can beat him. Sweat runs down his face, and his heart is thudding hard. The heavy sun propels me even as it weakens him.
Miles slips beneath our shoes, and Tarren stubbornly keeps up the pace. I stay at his shoulder. The trees trap the heat and turn it swampy around us. My body is wet, and the things inside of it — lungs, hamstrings, calves — ache with deepening timbres. But I’m going to win, and it won’t be long now.
We’ve been running hard for hours. Tarren’s steps are swaying. His energy is faded to a thin foggy glow that hugs close to his body and spikes with red and wild yellow jags.
I want him to fail, and I sing it to him in my head. Fail, fail, fail. Fail on the trail. Fall on a nail. Darkness stirred up and tasting sweet. I am giddy with the idea of watching him crumple from heat exhaustion. He needs to be humbled. Except he’s already been humbled. Broken to this and me trying to crush the pieces smaller. Just as fast as it comes, the anger empties from my mind. I surprise myself — I slow down.
“Tarren,” I call, “I can’t…can’t run anymore.”
“You sure?” he tries not to wheeze. His cheeks are flushed deep red, and his hair goes black when it’s soaked like this. He still insists on long sleeves and pants even though I know.
“Yeah, I’m about to drop. You can keep going though.”
“It’s fine,” he says. “You don’t know the way back.”
His heart rate is still fluttering hard, so I beg to walk. We amble through the woods. There are so many questions flitting through my mind all twisted and warped with the heat and my weeping muscles and the song with its claws out.
“What was she like?” I hear myself ask. “Diana.”
Tarren looks at me with guarded eyes. “My mother?”
“Our mother.” I keep the hurt out of my voice. It may have been an accident.
Tarren takes his time with the answer. Musing isn’t the right word. It’s too casual. Processing is better. He must have an entire company inside of his head measuring, chiseling, having committee hearings on possible answers and testing their structural integrity before releasing a finished product into the world.
“Tired,” he says.
“What?”
“I remember…she always seemed tired.”
“Wait,” I can’t keep the disappointment out of my voice, “I thought she was, like, Amazon Mom. Intelligent, courageous. Gabe says she was incredible.”
Tarren tilts his head in a very un-Tarren-like way. His face is thoughtful.
“Of course she was. It takes a lot of energy to be incredible.”
“Oh.” This is when I realize that there is a Tarren underneath the mean, angry Tarren I know. Not exactly a good Tarren, but a real Tarren; someone who looks like he may just smile for real.
Chapter 26
Two weeks pass, and something like a routine begins to develop until Gabe finds an angel and we go after it.
* * *
Tarren and I run each morning, silent, focused, racing
the sun as it lumbers up over the horizon. I follow the rhythmic rise and fall of Tarren’s shoulder, and these are the scarce moments when my mind empties, and the song is hollow and distant. We come home to bluegrass strumming out of Gabe’s computer speakers as he studies death and finds small flowers of humor in that seemingly barren field. He gives us the “obit of the day,” and I pretend it’s not creepy, and that there isn’t something sinister, staked gauzy and invisible like spider webs around our lives.
In the afternoon the boys go into town to fight and return home with new bruises and little jags of red in their auras. They spend the long, hot noon hours shooting empty soup cans in the backyard or grunting with weights in the basement. In the evening, Gabe replaces bluegrass twang with punky alternative beats as he fiddles with web code, plays online poker and chats with friends who will never know his real name. Tarren finds chores to do over at Dr. Lee’s house or riddles me with questions in his lab.
Tarren’s lab. I expect needles, jumbo computers, brain wave readers, beakers foaming with purple liquid. Instead, I find a small and tidy room filled with books, a locked filing cabinet, a small fridge and a single microscope on a desk. I notice the faint outline of shapes on the walls beneath layers of white paint and remember Gabe telling me that this had been Tammy’s bedroom.
There are no crazy experiments, no dashes of lightning and high, cackling laughs. No trace of any vial holding a magic, glowing cure. Instead, it’s just Tarren with a never ending list of mundane questions breaking me into bits and pieces. I lie more than I should. A recorder sits on the desk next to me drinking up my hedges and nervous stutters and long silences when I don’t know how to answer or evade.
I don’t tell Tarren about the colors in the auras. Or the song. When Tarren asks again and again about how Grand changed me, I emphasize the one needle part or spin around on the stool, because this always makes him frown.
It is almost a relief when Tarren asks me to do pushups or pull ups, to jump, to run a loop through the woods as fast as I can or to lift ever-increasing amounts of weight. I never press to my full limit. Some deeply-embedded fear doesn’t want me to reveal my true strength to Tarren, or perhaps to myself. It terrifies me how my muscles can unleash a tide of pushups, how I can bench press two hundred pounds, two fifty, three hundred, before I stop because this is so, so, so wrong. I can’t decipher the dark, muddy colors that climb into Tarren’s aura while he watches and records my numbers.
I learn that the key to extricating myself from Tarren’s questions and his tests is to start asking him questions of my own.
What did our mother’s voice sound like? When did Diana tell her children about angels? When did she start training them? When did they begin to kill? Do other people fight angels? Do the Fox brothers have aunts and uncles and grandparents?
Soon enough Tarren will put storm clouds on his face and duck behind them.
“We’re done,” he says, and I’m free to go hang out with Gabe, read a book on the roof, imagine new Grand-killing scenarios or write more apologies to the people from my old life.
At night Gabe is in the mood for rock and cranks it loud as he pulls up different map views on each computer screen and searches for patterns among the dead. If he doesn’t find anything, we watch cheesy action flicks or he’ll goad me into playing video games. He always fries me with fireballs, skewers me with a samurai sword or pummels me into pulp, but I’m getting good quick.
I ask him the same questions that put storm clouds on Tarren’s face, and Gabe takes some delight in answering each one with a blatant, long-winded lie that closely resembles a plot from Star Wars, Indiana Jones or one of the National Lampoon Vacation movies.
* * *
On a particular night when I’m in one of my moods where I can’t really handle anything, I crawl up onto the roof and think about Diana. When I close my eyes, I can see her face perfectly, the way it was in the beach photograph on the bookshelf in my bedroom.
She was beautiful and strong – a modern day Amazon – but I think she was a terrible mother to raise her children as soldiers. To press guns into their hands and deny them a chance to know anything different. What kind of love is that? Was she so obsessed with revenge that she would sacrifice anything?
The question echoes in my mind then turns its fangs on me. How far would you go to kill Grand?
I know better than to answer. I try to rein myself in, but the darkness is awake and churning.
Diana…Mom, when you gave me away, were you protecting me or glad to be rid of me? I stare up at the stars, imaging her blue-gray eyes hidden somewhere beneath their bright points.
Why did you even carry me to term?
Gabe rescues me from my thoughts. He clamors loudly onto the roof, stretches out on his back next to me and lets out a big sigh. I’m sitting up, legs crossed, and I automatically tuck my hands protectively into the sleeves of my too-big jacket.
We both look up at the stars and don’t say anything for a while. Perhaps they catch the secrets of our hearts and hold them for us until we are brave enough to give them voice. Pixie Girl is stupid girl.
The night is filled with cricket harmonies and the slow dip of fireflies below. I take a breath, smelling the scent of pine needles, hearing the animal songs lifting out from the trees around us. It still seems so strange not to hear an undercurrent of traffic, the many different voices of strangers going about their lives in close approximation to yours, to breathe and not catch hints of barbeque or fast food or car exhaust. There is such a loneliness in this—remembering what I alone have lost.
Colorado loses its heat at night, but Gabe, as always, seems comfortable in just his t-shirt. For good measure, he kicks off his shoes. One of them picks up speed and goes tumbling down the slope of the roof.
I am up, leaping like a dancer, hooking a finger through the laces and catching the shoe just before it plunges into the night. I bring the renegade footwear back to Gabe.
“Show off,” he drawls. The smile doesn’t linger on his face, and I notice new, darker shades pulsing in his aura. For no discernable reason, Gabe begins answering the questions I’d given up on asking.
He tells me that Diana started training her children young in self-defense. She taught them how to run away if the angels ever came, how to hide. Always know the exits. Look at everyone’s hands, but don’t let them know that you’re looking. Stay calm. Always stay calm.
Gabe doesn’t realize how well I can see his face in the darkness, because as he speaks, the careful indifference slides away, and all that’s left is the lost puppy look, lots of lines, and the smiles fled far away.
“We had a choice,” Gabe insists though I did not challenge him. “Mom never pressured us to fight. Tried to talk us out of it, actually. But I wanted to fight. So did Tammy. We wanted to save people. Be heroes. Mom said heroes were idiots who whittled away their lives for a world that couldn’t be saved. She said it was lonely, bitter, exhausting. Constant sacrifice. I thought it all sounded awesome. Tarren was the smart one. He said ‘no.’ Sometimes I think the only reason he ever started looking for a cure was so that he could end all this and have his family back.”
“Of course, that was before,” Gabe adds.
I simply cannot abide the wretched look on Gabe’s face, so I take a deep breath and say, “I didn’t go to my prom either. No one asked me junior or senior year. I bought a dress though, just in case. It’s still hanging in my closet at home. Well, if my parents didn’t clean it out.”
Gabe turns his head in my direction.
“The police called off the search for me yesterday,” I tell him. “Did you know that?”
“Yeah.”
After a while he says, “I didn’t know about you for a long time. Mom only told me the week before she died. Not sure why. Maybe she wanted to confess. Lay her burdens down before the end. Afterwards, I would wonder about you sometimes.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, what you looked like. If you had an
y funny quirks. What kind of life you led. If you were happy. I kind of imagined you with more freckles for some reason. And sometimes if things got real bad — the first time was when we had to drown this guy. Me and Tarren and Tammy all holding him under, this angel, in his own pool — I would think of you out there in the world and how we were making it a little safer for you, maybe a little better.” Gabe’s voice is soft and shy, and he’s gone back to noticing the stars. “I know that sounds lame, but it helped.”
“And how did I turn out? Anything like you imagined?”
“Angelic,” Gabe says with a grin, and then when I don’t respond, “or was that stupid?”
“Kind of a sore point.” Now I’m looking up at the stars, counting them rapidly in my head because I can now.
“Well, then not angelic at all. You’re a low down, ig’nant, scumbag human like the rest of us.”
“Thanks Gabe.”
“Anytime Sis,” he replies, and the word jars me out of my count. It takes me a moment to recover, but when I do, I am bold enough to say, “Tell me what’s wrong.”
Gabe is quiet for a while. I follow his gaze up to the stars, trying to see what’s painting yellow hues into his aura.
“Mom was right,” Gabe says, “this isn’t a good life.” His voice is low and sad and those lines are back, digging in around his mouth.
“Gabe, just tell me.”
He sits up, still won’t look at me. “I found something.”
“Grand? Is it Grand?”
“Nah, Grand would never be stupid enough to show up in my search algorithms. No, there’s been a few deaths out in Arizona, California and Mexico. Looks like an angel. I haven’t told Tarren yet. He’ll have us out the door and on the road in ten minutes.” Gabe pauses, swallows. “He won’t want to leave you alone in the house.”
“Good, because I’m coming. I’ll need a gun,” I say.
Gabe grimaces. “Maya, I don’t want this life for you,” he says as if he honestly doesn’t realize that revenge is the only reason I have left to exist.