Blackbird

by Averil Dean

  Her father was still smiling. But it wasn’t a real smile anymore.

  “Talented girl,” he said. “She your daughter?”

  The circus man said nothing. Just looked at her father steadily, then slowly, deliberately, he fixed his eyes on Celia.

  Heat crept up her neck and prickled in her cheeks. Those shiny black eyes were communicating something dark and foreign, a subtle menace laced with some indefinable thrill that dropped her stomach like the crest of a roller coaster. Badly she wanted to look away. But she found she couldn’t. She could only stand rooted to the ground, her mouth half-open, unable to breathe.

  “Goddamn,” her father said. “Just saying she a good, nice girl, that’s all...”

  He took Celia by the hand and pulled her along, muttering and shaking his head. She could feel the circus man behind her, all the way to the truck, all the way home.

  * * *

  In the motel bathroom she cleaned herself and wiped the drops of blood off the floor. So much blood, and somewhere in all of that was the seed she had managed to uproot.

  She sat on the cold tile, her back to the wall. The mottled plastic veneer was coming loose around the bathroom counter, and a bulb was out in the vanity lights overhead. Everything in the room had probably started out blue, but the blueness had become exhausted and had long since faded to gray.

  It seemed a more fitting place for a murder than the well-lit clinic downtown. Vaguely seamy. Possibly the scene of other crimes like this one, over the years.

  She imagined Rory’s face if he knew where she was tonight. He would hate this; he would never understand.

  Why’d you do it, Cee? You know I would have helped.

  But I don’t know who the father is.

  I am, he would say. Eric is. Either way, you wouldn’t be alone, Celia.

  But Celia knew it wasn’t as simple as that. They all would be watching the baby. Would he have blond hair or black, blue eyes or brown? Who would he walk to with his first lurching little scarecrow steps? Who would he call Daddy? Would he grow up wondering, hearing the whispers, diminished in some way by the uncertainty? Would Celia have to choose between Rory and Eric, and have to make the choice based on the paternity of this child?

  A baby would have been a rejection—her body’s rejection—of one man in favor of the other. She imagined a microscopic slide, one helpless, moonlike egg under attack by a hundred determined sperm. One getting in, the others left to die.

  Her body was trying to make her choose.

  And she knew firsthand how it felt to be the odd one out of the triangle. Rory and Eric were together now in Vegas: Rory was working in Karl McFarland’s construction company, Eric had started classes at UNLV. It had all been arranged; they couldn’t let their parents down by quitting before they’d started. They swore they’d be back next spring when she graduated, that they all could be together, but Celia felt the sting of rejection all the same. She sometimes couldn’t take their calls. Their laughter made her cringe, flushed with a jealous chill at all the inside jokes she no longer shared.

  She found herself keeping secrets of her own. As a comfort or some sort of childish revenge. She didn’t tell them she hadn’t stayed to finish high school, or what people were saying about them now that they were gone. She pretended not to hear.

  She’d never tell them what a task they’d left her with.

  * * *

  Rory’s thumb hovered over the glowing white face of his phone. Celia had gotten a cell months ago, so technically the number should come up CELIA—CELL, but he liked the way it looked this way—the old way—when she called. HOME.

  It was too late to call her now, it would have to wait until morning. He got out of bed and went to the kitchen. The refrigerator was nearly empty except for a couple of Cokes and some leftover pizza. He thought wistfully of the fridge back home, which was always crammed with food. Celia had long since taken over the cooking from Darlene. She kept the leftovers neatly stacked in Tupperware bowls with little pieces of tape on top, noting the date and contents. She said it made her feel like Nigella Lawson to find a use for every scrap.

  Eric had laughed at that, juggling a couple of cantaloupes in front of his chest while they pushed a basket around Clark’s Market.

  “More than a mouthful’s a waste,” he said archly, just as a hunchbacked old man darted by on his scooter.

  “Just open wider,” called the old guy, rounding the corner.

  They fell about the produce section, laughing so hard they couldn’t make a sound.

  But you had to cook to produce leftovers like that, and neither he nor Eric could do more than scrambled eggs and toast. Most nights they ordered out for pizza or Chinese, or stuffed themselves at a casino buffet. It was never enough; he was hungry all the time.

  He grabbed a Coke and shut the fridge with his foot. A jar of pickles slid from one end of the door to the other, landing with a loud thump. “Shh,” he said to the fridge, glancing down the hall to Eric’s door.

  The lamp was still on; he could see a crack of light along the floor. When they had first moved in, Rory thought Eric must spend a lot of hours reading late at night—he went through two or three books a week, flew through them as fast as Celia did. Later he realized that the light was never turned off. Eric slept with it on.

  Rory couldn’t blame him. Living alone with a father who drank as hard as Sam Dillon would make anyone feel the need to be prepared. All through their childhood, Eric had borne the brunt of his father’s temper, collecting bruises inside and out. He had his own ways of coping.

  It used to drive Celia crazy, seeing how resigned Eric was to the situation.

  “Why don’t we call child services?” she’d say. “Or tell a teacher? We could talk to Mr. Brewer...”

  “And then what?” Rory said. “They take Eric out of the house and where would he go?”

  “Maybe they could find his mom.”

  “Why? Would you want to live with yours? I sure as hell would not want my dad to be tracked down and saddled with me. They’re MIA, Celia, all of them. They don’t give a shit.”

  “A foster home, maybe? Or just—”

  “Are you living in the real world? I swear, sometimes I wonder whether you know anything about life at all.”

  “Sometimes I wonder whether you even care what happens to him!”

  “Of course I do. Jesus, Cee.” He took a deep breath. “Eric’s dad hurts him. He doesn’t injure him.”

  “It’s the same thing.”

  “No, it’s not. Eric will get through this, and eventually he’ll get to the end of his rope and lay the old sonofabitch out on the pavement, and that’ll be the end of it.”

  “And in the meantime we’re supposed to watch him get hurt and hope he doesn’t get injured?”

  “We’re going to let him handle it. Back off, Cee.”

  She had turned away, pink-faced and frustrated. And she was right, of course. The line between hurt and injured was not always easy to see. There were injuries that didn’t show up on the skin or on X-rays or medical reports. Eric was carrying a lot of those.

  Rory popped open a Coke and carried it back to the couch, turned on the TV that was showing a commercial for $3.99 steak and eggs at some divey-looking casino downtown.

  A strange city, Vegas. At first he had been agog—and appreciative—of the women on the billboards, tits and ass for the morning commute, and everything open, as it were, all day and night. But the novelty quickly faded. Now the city depressed him. So many hard surfaces: the cement and blacktop, the cracked desert floor, tightly packed rows of stucco houses in every imaginable shade of beige. The sound of a nail gun or table saw could travel unbroken for miles across the flat, arid sky.

  He missed the mountains, the crooked little houses propped along the ridge, the damp hu
sh of a snowy day. The seasons here were all the same; whether hot or cold, the sun hovered over the desert like a great blind eye.

  He tried to hide his homesickness from Celia. By tacit agreement, he and Eric kept their calls to her short and upbeat. They told her about the apartment, the city, Eric’s classes and Rory’s job in construction.

  They told her about the plan.

  “By the time you finish school,” Rory said, “I’ll have almost a year on the job. I can get a job with the forestry service, and Eric can maybe take some time off school—wait tables or something. We’ll find a place for the three of us, wherever you want.”

  Celia listened quietly, hundreds of miles away.

  “Cee, what’s wrong?” Eric said.

  The phone on the table between them was silent, but they could feel she hadn’t hung up.

  “I’m eighteen,” she said.

  “Yeah...”

  “I could be with you now.”

  “But you need to finish school.”

  Another pause.

  “Yes...” Her voice was vague, drifting back to silence.

  They hung up after that call with a sense of unease.

  “She thinks we don’t want her here,” Rory said.

  “I know.” Eric’s lopsided grin flashed out. “She’s jealous, thinks we’re out here banging each other.”

  “Bitch, please.”

  They laughed nervously.

  Rory wished that Eric—the only one of them with the power to put things into words—would explain to Celia that it wasn’t really about school.

  He tried to imagine Celia in Vegas, under the glare of the sunshine and the flashing lights, on the littered, flat, dusty city streets, or here in the barren apartment, sitting on the brown plaid sofa. His imaginings took on the quality of a surrealist photograph: a mermaid in a taxi, or a flying tree with its roots exposed.

  They didn’t want her to come here. They wanted her at home, in Jawbone Ridge, waiting for them. It upset them to think of her in the coarse desert light, surrounded by plasticky mock-ups of things that did exist elsewhere—castles and pyramids and cities and canals. Things that were wondrous in their natural setting, here were only facades, outlined in strips of neon. The fact that she was at home meant the whole thing between the three of them still existed, was still possible. They could buy the Blackbird someday. They could live in it together, make it their home and livelihood. If Celia left Jawbone Ridge, even to be with them, the dream might disintegrate altogether.

  It was fragile, this thing they shared. It could easily come apart.

  Rory turned off the TV and went to the window. Outside the wind was howling like it never did back home. A single dry leaf skidded by, illuminated briefly by the street lamp before disappearing into the empty desert lot across the street.

  It reminded him of the night his mother had sat them down side by side at the kitchen table and herself across from them to say that Eddie Dark had died and wouldn’t be coming home.

  Celia had sat for a minute in her orphan’s haircut, dry-eyed in the paling light, as Rory asked what happened. Feeling nothing—nothing at all for the man who had raised him as his own.

  “He touched a live wire,” his mother said. “Under a house he was working on. He got a shock—”

  “No,” Celia said. “No, no, no, no—”

  She leaped up and flew out the front door, down to the street calling “no no no” until she ran around the bend and out of sight.

  Like a leaf driven by the wind.

  Rory had found her later with Eric. He tried to bring her home, but she clung to Eric’s arm as if he were the only thing keeping her feet on the earth. When Rory reached for her, she turned her face to Eric’s chest, her eyes squeezed tight, both hands clamped over her ears like Rory was a danger to her sanity—or the cause of all her trouble.

  Uncanny. The instincts of that girl.

  November 2002

  “WOULD YOU LIKE to talk about what happened last week?”

  “Not really.”

  Eric sat with his knees wide apart, slouching into the nubby green sofa. He wanted to bite his nails but was too well aware of the quick brown eyes of the man across the coffee table, who tilted his head alertly, as if Eric had agreed.

  A small electric heater ticked on.

  Eric plucked at his fingernails, pressing each one between two fingers of the opposite hand.

  “Has it really been a week?” he said.

  “Yes. A week today,” said Dr. Paul. “Does that surprise you?”

  Eric shrugged, but inwardly he was disconcerted. A week. How had an entire week passed? Where did it go?

  “The last time we talked, you seemed a little unclear about what happened the day you came in.”

  Eric lifted his head. The doctor, a round-breasted bird of a man, was gazing at him as if he’d spied a juicy worm just breaking the soil.

  Dr. Paul. It occurred to Eric that he didn’t know whether Paul was the guy’s last name, or whether he’d just stuck a title on the front of his first name the way pediatricians sometimes did.

  “Do you want to tell me what you remember from that day?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?” Eric said. “You’re the one with all the papers in your lap.”

  “Do the papers bother you?”

  “It all fucking bothers me.”

  “What does?”

  “This.” Eric spread his arms. “All of it. Locked up in here like a goddamn lunatic.”

  “You’re not locked up. You can check out anytime you want.”

  “But you can never leave,” Eric sang.

  Dr. Paul gave him a mournful smile.

  “I’m here to help you.”

  “I don’t want your help.”

  “I think you do.”

  “Yeah? What makes you say that?”

  The little man gathered his papers and set them on the table beside his armchair, handling them gingerly as if they were living, fragile things.

  “Because one of the first things you said to me a week ago was ‘Please help me.’ Do you remember?”

  Eric ripped at a hangnail, drawing blood.

  “What made you say that, do you think?”

  “I was confused.”

  Dr. Paul nodded.

  “It’s just...”

  Eric stopped. The space heater clicked off, leaving the room in a silent fug. He pressed his hand to his forehead. He hated these thick pauses, the manipulation, that expectant look on the shrink’s face like he was waiting for Eric to have a revelation. Patient, heal thyself.

  “Go on,” the doctor said. “Please. Finish the thought. You said you were confused. What did you mean exactly?”

  “I don’t know. One minute we were...”

  “It’s okay, Eric. Go on.”

  “One minute everything was more or less okay, and the next I was wigging out. I sort of forgot who I was. Not completely, but—”

  “Who did you think you were? Do you remember?”

  Eric swallowed.

  “It’s crazy.”

  “It’s not crazy. I promise. You thought you were someone else?”

  Eric leaned his head back on the couch. He still could see Celia’s face, her long sleek body and sleepy mouth. Her voice, as if in a dream: Rory, Rory... Her breasts in their mouths, each of them fastened to her body, their fingers tangled between her legs.

  “Rory,” he said. “I thought...for a minute I forgot...”

  “Who is Rory?”

  “My best friend. More like a brother, really.”

  “And what’s he like?”

  “Rory? Oh, he’s—” Eric searched his mind. “He’s like Jesus, man.”

 
The shrink raised his eyebrows, thin as feathers, floating above the gold wire rims of his glasses.

  “Like Jesus? How so?”

  “Well, not to look at. What I mean is that he’s righteous. You know that line from the Bible? ‘Great vengeance and furious rebukes’?” Eric lifted his sleeve and turned to show the tattoo on his arm: ezekiel 25:17. “That’s Rory. You mess with one of his people and he’ll rain fire on your head.”

  Dr. Paul nodded slowly, his head tilted to one side.

  “I see.”

  “Righteous.”

  “And he’s the one who brought you in?”

  “Right, yeah. I think I scared him.”

  Rory’s face flashed through Eric’s mind: eyebrows drawn, shaking his head. Spooked.

  Stop. Stop. Stop saying that, man. You’re starting to freak me out.

  “I did. I scared him.”

  “He doesn’t sound like a man who scares easily.”

  “No. In fact, this might have been a first.”

  “Do you remember what happened to scare him?”

  “Wouldn’t you be scared if your best friend suddenly decided he was you?”

  Dr. Paul bobbed his head, smiling a little. A light flickered from the phone on his desk: a call had come in.

  “Aren’t you going to get that?” Eric said.

  “No. Tell me wh—”

  “We were with Celia.”

  “Is that your girlfriend?”

  “My girlfriend, his girlfriend. You can see how it might get confusing.”

  “You have the same girlfriend?”

  “Well, technically Celia is Rory’s stepsister, but it amounts to the same thing. I mean, we’re both fucking her. At the same time, occasionally.”

  The words sounded ugly, put that way. He wished he could take them back and say something real. We both love her. We love each other. This is not an emotionally incestuous threesome between us; this is a big romance.

  But he didn’t say that. He wanted to sting this little bird-man, who probably thought he’d uncovered some critical malfunction in Eric’s sex life. He waited maliciously for his words to strike home.