by Averil Dean
He put his hand between her legs. Right away she started to sigh and coo, wriggled into his hand with that eager camera-smile on her face, cupping her breasts in her hands so that the ridge of her implants stood out beneath her skin.
An easy girl. The kind of girl he used to enjoy. He’d tell her what to do and she’d go along, eager to please, those vacant, colorless eyes blinking up at him while she sucked him off like she’d seen the pretty girls do on cable TV. She might throw in some move of her own, some tease of her fingers across his balls or a knuckle to the perineum, something she’d read about in Cosmo and could claim for her own. Probably she’d swallow when he came, going mmmm like his semen was the best thing since mint chocolate chip. And it would be good for the moment. But in a week or a month, she would recede with the rest of them, who existed in his memory like the cities in a traveler’s diary, dreamlike and insubstantial but determinedly annotated:
—the dreadlocked woman whose breasts dripped like ripe fruit into his open mouth (Burning Man, milk lady)
—the French virgin with skin so dark she seemed to melt into the shadows, disembodied, her scent mingling with the briny perfume of the sea (Samudra Beach, Venus blunt—holy fuck what was in that?)
—that sloe-eyed whore who gave him head in Amsterdam, whose little-girl voice had sent him running, terrified, back to the rose-tinted sidewalks and right the hell out of town (blue pigtails, Daddy issues)
Et cetera, et cetera.
And now Emma. He searched her face for something to remember her by. A few freckles on her nose, glitter in her mascara and nail polish. He kept glancing away, then quickly back, as if he could startle her face into his memory by sneaking up on it.
After a moment she pulled away, frowning. “Are you okay?”
He tried to smile.
“I’ll be more okay if you get on your knees.”
She grinned, confidence restored. Everything would be okay, her expression implied, once he’d done her. And she might be right about that.
Assuming, of course, that he could get it up. At the moment he felt nothing, nothing at all. His body was curiously soft, vacant as Emma’s blond head, the blood floating down his arms and legs without the faintest inclination to gather and pool into a hard-on. Even when she unzipped his jeans and took him in her hand...
Nothing.
Maybe it was the Blackbird. Being in Celia’s room, with this girl who could be described on paper in similar terms but was as unlike Celia in personality as it was possible to be. The woman he remembered, eccentric as she was on the surface, was even more so underneath. There was a quiet force to Celia, a sense of the unknowable. She was real, warm, terrifyingly alive.
Only she wasn’t anymore. Now she was only bones, or maybe ash. He wished he’d thought to ask Kate what they’d done with Celia’s body. He could have visited the cemetery to see her name carved in stone. He could have learned her middle name, her birthday. He could finally have brought her flowers.
None of these ruminations was going to solve the immediate problem. He stepped back, zipped up his jeans and pulled Emma to her feet.
“Sorry,” he said.
“What happened? You were really into it yesterday.”
“Into it. Yeah.”
“We were doing good. I mean, that thing you did in the elevator...”
“Yeah, you liked that?”
“I liked that we might get caught.” She eased forward, one hand on the front of his jeans. “I wanted to, kind of. I like being watched. It feels like that here, doesn’t it? Like the ghosts might be watching...”
“Nobody’s watching,” he snapped.
“There could be. You were here then. You met them. Maybe they know you’re back—maybe they can see us. I’m pretty intuitive, my mom always said so. Maybe I can call them.”
He caught her hand and pushed it away. “You might be the least intuitive person I have ever met.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Her head tilted to one side. Though there was a fighting spirit in the words themselves, her eyes were big and soft, head tilted again in that befuddled way, as if she couldn’t quite believe he meant to insult her.
Julian felt a rush of words surge up his throat, unstoppable and bitter as bile.
“It means that I couldn’t be less ‘into it’ if you paid me. If you were swinging a dick. If yours were the last pair of plastic tits on planet Earth and if yours was the last ass I could ever grab and if you were the owner of the last hole between the last pair of legs, I still would not be ‘into it.’”
Her face crumpled, as suddenly and completely as a child’s. Tears welled up at the rims of her wide-open eyes and rolled in wavy gray lines down her cheeks, bearing specks of glitter in their wake.
Julian raised his eyes to the ceiling.
“Why did you even bring me here?” she said.
He dug his car keys from the pocket of his jeans and held them out to her.
“No idea,” he said. “Go home. You can take my car.”
“I—I can’t drive your c-car. Where would I leave—” She teetered around the room, pulling on her clothes, hopping into a boot.
“It doesn’t matter. Go home.”
“How can I—”
“Get out,” he roared, and she snatched the keys from his hand and darted out the door. He heard her feet pounding down the hallway, and she was gone.
Julian stood for a minute looking down at the bed. He smoothed the covers, straightened the pillows and tucked the bedspread underneath. This wasn’t Celia’s bed, he realized now. Her room had looked much different from this, filled with candles and books, and her mattress sat right on the floor without a frame and with only an old door for a headboard. She had a piece of fine silk hung on the wall, embroidered with brightly colored birds sporting long tails that curled like bouquets of flowers at the ends. He had asked where she found it.
“A friend gave it to me,” she said. “This nice old guy who used to come in for coffee every afternoon—black, no sugar, no nothing. He liked to talk. He told me stories about the Blackbird, people he remembered from when he was young.”
That was her. That was Celia all over. He imagined her nodding gently, encouraging the old man’s nostalgia, revealing nothing about herself.
His throat ached. He couldn’t lie here in Celia’s room, where she’d lived and fucked and wept and died. The walls still smelled like her, that peculiar warm scent of her, that smoky vanilla mixture of sex and incense and Celia’s own sweet skin.
He went out to the hallway, down the row of doors. Four on each side, counting the one he’d closed behind him. A tiny hotel by anyone’s standards, but Celia had dreamed of it since she was a little girl. She and Rory and Eric had played here as children during the years when the hotel stood vacant, and Celia had fallen in love. He imagined her wandering down this hallway, her tawny hair made dark by the shadows, fingers trailing along the walls. She would have skipped down the curved staircase, her little feet pattering on the floor. She would have been humming, craning her neck at the pine trees outside the leaded windows. Would have laid her hand on this very banister and felt the smooth wood warm to her touch.
Later, after Eric had bought the place, they had stripped the pine floors and waxed them to a lustrous amber glow. Celia brought in low couches lined with pillows and blankets in rich colors and contrasting patterns and arranged them around the river-stone fireplace with a copper-sheathed coffee table at the center—a contribution from Rory, a nod to the hotel’s mining days. Everywhere there were candles and old brass lamps, dropping pools of golden light that flickered and danced when anyone walked by, and from the ceiling hung a chandelier made of elk antlers. But the brightest light came from the fireplace itself, and this was where they gathered every night after dinner, cradling cups of mull
ed wine or cold mugs of beer. Rory always sat nearest the fire, stirring at it lazily with a long green stick. Then Kate in the chair next to him, and Julian directly across. Celia would stretch out on the divan, facing the hearth, her long legs draped across Eric’s lap, her eyes sparkling with firelight.
Sometimes, rarely, Eric would bring Celia her guitar and she’d play them a song. She had a book of old children’s poems and had composed some simple melodies around them.
My age is three hundred and seventy-two,
And I think, with the deepest regret,
How I used to pick up and voraciously chew
The dear little boys whom I met.
I’ve eaten them raw, in their holiday suits;
I’ve eaten them curried with rice;
I’ve eaten them baked, in their jackets and boots,
And found them exceedingly nice.
But now that my jaws are too weak for such fare,
I think it exceedingly rude
To do such a thing, when I’m quite well aware
Little boys do not like to be chewed.
She was not particularly musical and the chords were uncertain, but her voice carried with it a sort of enchantment that held him frozen and breathless, hardly daring to blink. She had a slow, throaty drawl, a holdover from her father’s Cajun heritage, and she’d set the melody to a gentle waltz rhythm that rocked her body in small circles as she played. He remembered thinking that she should have been somebody’s muse, an artist’s lover, but had the misfortune to be born and raised among athletes.
He would have watched her for hours. But she’d see something in his face and she’d hesitate, pressing her fingers flat over the strings to silence them.
The fireplace was dark now, and the room had been redecorated. The velvet divan had been replaced by a leather sofa, so slick and firm that he almost slid out of it when he sat down. The side tables were ye olde lodge style, made of logs and twigs; a pristine iron coffee table had been sanded around the edges to make it look worn. Celia’s collection of local art had been replaced by matted nature prints in thick frames, and next to the door, a brass plaque declaimed no smoking in neat black letters. No copper bin full of logs, no scent of pine sap in the air—and, cruelest of all, the hearth had been fitted with an electric fire and a pile of fake ceramic logs.
Julian crossed his arms to warm himself. He hadn’t realized the hotel would be so different. In a thousand years he wouldn’t have guessed that it now belonged to Kate Vaughn.
I couldn’t let it go, she’d said, and that much he did understand. This had been a magical place with Celia in it. But the hotel was dead now. Celia had gone cold inside these walls and she was gone.
Julian leaned his head back on the unforgiving sofa and closed his eyes.
* * *
In the morning, he walked to the gas station, the only one in Jawbone Ridge. He bought a red plastic gas can and filled it at the pump.
A pickup truck had stopped beside him. The driver, a young man with sleep-flattened hair, asked if Julian needed a ride.
“No, thanks,” Julian said. “I don’t have far to go.”
Back up the hill. His feet pounded a rhythm on the gravel, the weight of his body seeming to be all in his feet while his head and torso floated helium-light up the curve of the road. To his right, the mountain rose in scrubby lumps of rock and patches of grass, where a season’s worth of pine seedlings bristled in soft pale green swaths across the earth. The ground fell steeply away left of the road, then rose again in bounding ridges along the banks of Deer Creek. He could hear the water moving—not in a rush of snowmelt, but with the runoff from an overnight storm, the water flowing rapidly in humps of white and brown.
He rounded the last bend in the road and started up the long, steep drive to the vacant Blackbird Hotel.
The first time he’d come here, it was with Celia alone. He had been familiar with nearby Telluride, having trained and competed there several times over the years, but had never found a reason to go around Bald Mountain and turn up the side road for Jawbone Ridge. But when he started seeing Kate, and spending time with her circle of friends, he began to be curious about the place. He wanted to see for himself what was going on inside the Blackbird Hotel.
Celia was sweet that day, eager as a child. She showed him through the rooms, each one littered with sawhorses, hand tools and buckets of paint. An unwieldy industrial sander was sitting in front of the fireplace. Wrappers from someone’s lunch lay crumpled on an overturned pail by the window. But as she described their plans in detail, Julian began to see it come alive.
“I like this place,” he said, looking around. “Good bones.”
Her face lit up.
“It’ll be beautiful when we’re finished,” she said. Then laughed, ducking her head. “Or, not beautiful exactly, but handsome. Proud of itself, you know? The poor thing’s been sitting up here alone for as long as I can remember. I want to fill it up.”
“You talk about the hotel like it’s a person,” he said.
She ran her hand down the sanded banister.
“Not a person, exactly. But personal.”
Afterward they went outside to sit on a slatted pine bench overlooking the river. A breeze moved through the aspen, rustling their coin-bright leaves, and from overhead they could hear the wind sighing through the pines and the occasional caw of a hidden crow. For a while, Celia was silent. Then she said she liked the sun.
“You’re not very tan, though,” he said.
“No. I only get freckles.”
Her skin was lovely in the clear light—a smooth, velvety white like the petals of a speckled flower.
“You bought this place together?” he said. “You and Eric and Rory?”
“On paper, yes. But it’s Eric’s money. His dad died a couple of years back and left him what he had.”
“You all went to the same school, I think Rory said.”
“He and Eric were in the year ahead of me.”
“Did you enjoy school?”
She considered a moment before replying.
“No.”
“Why not?”
Again she paused, thinking it over. “It’s too hard to know what the teachers want you to say.”
“They want you to say what you think.”
“Do they?”
She was quick with that, her eyes wide-open. For the first time, he began to see the guile of this girl.
“Sometimes,” he said.
They sat for a while in companionable silence. Celia didn’t rush to fill it. She was quick to catch a mood, poured herself into it like water.
“Have you always lived here?” he said.
“Since I was four, when my dad and Rory’s mom got married. He came out here on a contract to do some construction work on a new hotel—actually it was the Adelaide, one of the Vaughn properties. Didn’t you say you were staying there?”
Julian nodded.
“Beautiful, isn’t it? One of the best views around, I’ve always thought.”
“You like it up here?” Julian said. “You’re happy?”
“Yes.”
It struck him then how rare it was to receive monosyllabic responses. Most people would say, “I love the mountains” or “It’s home” or “The skiing is amazing.” This girl was content to simply say “Yes.” But her replies had weight, a forceful impact. She really meant yes; it was a firm and definite assent. She gazed down at the water, nodding gently.
Her placidity surprised him. With her wild tangle of hair and gypsy’s clothing, he would have suspected a more nomadic spirit. But Celia never expressed—to Julian, at least—a desire to travel. She sat next to him in the sunshine with her hands folded in her lap, that sweet faraway expression on her face, as if she’d
left her body unattended while her mind was elsewhere.
Impossible even now to imagine a girl like that with a gun in her hands.
Julian’s gun.
He passed now through the hollow vestibule, up the curving staircase to Celia’s room. His footsteps made a slow heartbeat of sound as he came through the door, which in turn gave a tiny scream on its hinges, but when he paused at the foot of the bed—silence.
He opened his suitcase, felt around under his clothes and pulled out an old book of poems. The pages fell open to the verse that had been running through his mind since they’d arrived last night in his car. He read through the poem to the last stanza, the only one he couldn’t remember:
And so I contentedly live upon eels,
And try to do nothing amiss,
And I pass all the time I can spare from my meals
In innocent slumber—like this.
He ran his hands over the pages, the delicate drawings. Then he ripped the pages from the book, tossed the cover on the bed and twisted the papers tightly into the shape of a cone. He set this aside, uncapped the gas can and doused the bed. He splashed gasoline on the walls, opened the window, soaked the curtains and the carpet. The rest of the gasoline he carried down the hall. He turned the can upside down as he descended the staircase, leaving a small pool of fuel on the old floorboards at the bottom and another on the smooth leather cushions of the sofa. The fumes rose to his face, toxic and fragrant as perfume. He tossed the gas can aside and went back upstairs.
He retrieved the paper cone, pulled a lighter from his pocket and flicked it at the tip of the pages. Flames licked at the edge of the paper and bloomed from the cone, a fiery bouquet. At a touch, the fire sprang across the covers in looping lines that melted into a pool of blue-tipped flames. He backed away slowly, the heat rising over his skin in breathy gusts.
The tune continued to trail through his mind, fragmented and disconnected: Oh, I used to pick up and voraciously chew, the dear little boys whom I met...
From the end of the hall, he heard the room ignite in a groaning rush. A few seconds later, the first flames leaped through the open door. He dropped the fiery cone at the foot of the stairs and watched as the fire retraced his steps, up the curve of the staircase and into the hall.