by Carrie Laben
“Well, no, I guess not. But they weren’t like me, were they? They were like you.”
The hawk’s head lolled, and more blood ran down its beak, enough to drip off and puddle on the ground. It seemed like a lot of blood for the damage the bottle inflicted. Abby moved her shoe out of the way.
“Should we bury it?”
“It won’t help. He’s out. He split as soon as I hit this poor bastard.”
Martha nodded and dropped her wing. Abby felt an unexpected reluctance to drop hers.
“But get my phone from the car and take my picture with it.”
“Really?”
“When will I ever kill a hawk with nothing but a wine bottle again? Might as well remember the moment.”
Martha shook her head. “I mean, how do I take pictures with the phone?”
“Go get it, I’ll show you.”
Martha walked back to the car. Her shoulders were still hunched against the sky a little bit, but she didn’t look up.
Abby wished she were wearing a fifties dress and driving a fifties car. She could envision the shot, leaning on the hood, one knee bent up, the hawk spread between her hands and her face above, staring dead at the camera. Bright red lipstick, obviously. Maybe a hat. Smirking like a gangster moll. Run it through one of those old-timey Instagram filters. Beautiful. If only she’d had what she needed.
Oh well, she’d make it work anyway. Share it everywhere, get people arguing over whether she’s a monster or just posing with a fake bird to prove some obscure point. Attention for days, and always the chance that some wanna-be activist would take it viral.
Martha reappeared then, holding the phone. “Is it the button with the picture of a camera on it?”
Abby nodded. “See, you got it.”
“Okay, where do I look through?”
“Just look at the screen.”
“How do I… okay, I see.”
Abby hoisted up the dead bird and smiled, all teeth. A smirk in this outfit would be too subtle.
There was a flash, and the artificial shutter sound that the phone made. She dropped her prey and took a step forward.
“Wait, pick it up. I want to take another one. My hands were shaking.”
Martha took a second shot, then a third. “Fuck it,” Abby said after that, and strode across to grab the phone. She flicked through the photos with a practiced finger and eye. The light could have been a lot better, she looked half-dead. Maybe she’d take it lo-fi, make it look like a Polaroid from the 80s. “Good enough.” She leaned up against the hood—there was a set of three ugly-looking scratches and a small dent. Her signal was weak and the photo took a long time to upload. Martha hovered at her elbow the whole time.
“Can you drive?” she asked as Abby put her hand on the passenger-side door handle.
Abby’s impulse was to say no, to make Martha get back on the horse as the saying went. But it was dark and Martha was still shaking. Besides, Abby would be awake forever. “Sure, not a problem.”
She got back into the car and dropped the blood-smeared bottle into the back seat. How long would it be now before it was safe to open without fizzing everywhere? Not that she’d be doing any drinking tonight, so it hardly mattered.
But she showed him, it, whatever the right thing was to call this thing. She couldn’t ignore that. Her mood was suddenly fizzy, no doubt the result of the first few clicks and confused comments and indignant shares of her picture by west-coast dwellers and insomniacs. “It’s a good thing we killed them,” she said, as she worked the car back up onto the road. “Imagine what they’d be like by now if they’d been alive all these years.”
Martha said nothing, and by now it was too dark to see her expression.
It got so bad for a little while that Abby would wake up and, if Martha wasn’t in bed, she would immediately mix two glasses of chocolate milk. The jam jars that year had Flintstones characters on them, and Martha’s favorite was Pebbles, and on days like that Abby always let her have that one. She’d carry the glasses to the barn along with a couple of books—whatever baby crap Martha was reading and one of Grandfather’s notebooks. Abby was getting to hate the barn as much as Martha did.
Her first thought, obviously, had been to just take Martha/Grandfather back into the house, get her calmed down and cleaned up, maybe let her sleep through it. But it turned out that under the burlap sacks, Grandfather had tethered her—himself—to the floor with a chain and padlocked her down. Abby was never sure if this was supposed to delay Mom in her attempts to get Grandfather back in the right body, if it was supposed to keep Martha from trying to follow him, or if it was just mean.
Martha/Grandfather could feel when her body was coming back, and warned Abby, and she’d take the books and empty glasses and pretend that she had no idea what was happening. At times they’d return like they had that first day, with Mom angry and determined, but other days she seemed cowed, or even conspiratorial. Sometimes Abby couldn’t read who was manipulating who at all, they were so tangled up.
Neither Mom nor Grandfather ever offered any more explanation or excuse for their absences, and sometimes Abby wondered if she was making them suspicious by not asking, but the whole subject was now like a tomato left on the counter too long and rotting inside. She couldn’t bring herself to touch it, so she kept pretending that the normal-looking skin was fooling her, even though she knew it was only going to get worse. She just didn’t know if it would collapse or explode.
One of the things getting worse was Martha’s health. She barely had time to recover from one morning in the barn before she was subjected to the next, and even on days when it didn’t happen, worrying about the next time was sapping her. They only ever took her out in the morning, and Abby could tell as each afternoon dwindled to evening how she got more and more nervous. She started ignoring bedtime until Mom scolded, and even once they were in bed she’d stay awake in the dark, whispering to a half-asleep Abby. Days started feeling longer, even though the solstice was well past. Then Grandfather would give Martha a sharp look and dark would come on faster than it should.
“Can’t you fight it?” Abby whispered back to her one night. “It’s your body. Can’t you just hold onto it and push him back out somehow?”
It was a stupid question. Obviously Martha couldn’t fight Grandfather—no one could. But Abby didn’t like listening to Martha suffer without trying to solve the problem.
Martha didn’t answer. She’d fallen asleep, despite her struggles. And during the day she was tired. She didn’t eat much, and she was starting to look as though something of Grandfather’s age was creeping into her. Her hair was brittle and fell out when she brushed it, leaving tangles on the bathroom floor. She bruised easily.
Abby didn’t think that Grandfather would kill Martha on purpose, but she was starting to worry that he was careless enough to kill her by accident.
It was early August, and once school started again he’d have to stop using Martha for whatever he was doing, at least on weekdays. But that might not be soon enough.
CHAPTER TEN
The beginnings of Abby’s good mood evaporated as soon as they were back on the road and she tried to accelerate. As the car reached thirty-five miles an hour, it was obvious that something was wrong. It felt like the back end was a whole separate beast, trying to overtake and pass the front end. If it were winter she’d have been convinced that she was hitting black ice, over and over—a sensation that brought on a clench of terror for anyone who grew up in the Snow Belt. She couldn’t hold a line until she slowed back down to a crawl.
“What are you doing?” Martha’s voice, sleepy and almost disembodied, came from the passenger seat after Abby had taken the vehicle through a dozen iterations of go slow—get frustrated—speed up in hopes that the problem would somehow cure itself—swerve and stamp the brakes just in time to keep from putting the car in the ditch again.
“Something is wrong. The accident must have screwed up an axle, I don’t know.”
�
�Is it safe to drive like this?”
The hint of a whine in Martha’s voice made Abby snap, “Of course it is,” but the truth was, it probably wasn’t. At any rate, it wasn’t safe to drive at highway speeds. And they couldn’t very well crawl to Minnesota that way. She guided the car to the shoulder.
She put her hand out for her phone, but even as she did she realized how stupid it was to expect it to solve their problem this time. No one had driven by this way. There wasn’t even the light of a farmhouse anywhere in sight. There wouldn’t be an Uber driver in a hundred miles of here. What did people do in this situation? They called Triple A, or highway patrol. That might not be so bad, get a friendly officer to drop them at a hotel, get a new car in the morning. But that’s if she had a signal, and would she?
She didn’t. Fucking Martha must have gotten them lost.
Even as she thought it she saw a gray-pink stain of light above the trees in what must have been the east. She whipped around to face Martha, who to her surprise was already facing her.
“Why won’t you ever let me help?” her sister said angrily. “You make me do things I’m not good at but when I actually do something I am good at you get all mad.”
“I’m not mad,” Abby said, and to her surprise it was the truth. It had been long years since she spent the night in a car and she would’ve hated to repeat the experience. Maybe there was no harm in letting Martha have the satisfaction for once. Giving her a sense of… not power exactly, what was the word the shrinks on TV used? Agency. That sounded right.
She didn’t form a plan for any of it; if she had, she would have seen that it wouldn’t solve the real problem. She just picked up a pack of matches one afternoon in the kitchen and thought, I can burn the barn down. Then they can’t chain Martha up in the barn.
That said, when she looked back years later she still thought she had been clever for a first-time arsonist. She checked that Mom, Grandfather, Martha were all safely in the house. She took the matches to the back of the barn so they wouldn’t spot the fire until it was too late to stop it. She’d thought it would catch easily because the wood was so old, but the first match just charred a quarter-sized spot on the beam she held it to. There wasn’t much straw left, and it was rotted to almost nothing, went up so fast that it wouldn’t start the beams either. It was the burlap sacks that finally did the trick.
She watched over the flames until they were strong enough to survive on their own. Leaving the barn, she skirted around the little grove of trees so she couldn’t be seen from the house, slipped away up the hill. She threw the matches in the creek, with some vague idea that they might have her fingerprints on them, and then immediately regretted it.
There was no way to tell time except guessing by the sun, but it felt like a long wait before she heard the sirens come tearing out from the direction of Alden. Then another set came tearing out from the direction of Corfu and Batavia. Then more sirens from the east. It occurred to Abby that they might put it out before the grain shed went up. Then what?
She wanted to go and watch, be sure one way or the other. She thought she could do it, probably, without her thoughts giving her away. All she had to do was concentrate.
She skirted around through the neighbor’s fields, through her own yard in billows of black smoke that stank more than it had a right to. There were seven fire trucks in the driveway, men in bulky grimy rubber suits everywhere. Hoses were pouring out arcs of water onto the barn but there was obviously no hope for it. They were wetting down the house, too, and although it wasn’t on fire she could see now that it was too close. There was wind. Flames were reaching out, trees were catching. She hadn’t thought of that.
She slipped through the side door. She had to save Grandfather’s notebooks. A few years later she’d pretend that she knew she’d need them to help Martha, but she just wanted them, didn’t want the fire to stop her from finding out.
She was too late. The fire wasn’t there yet, but Grandfather was. He was standing in the doorway of his bedroom, arguing with a firefighter who looked a bit cleaner and more commanding than the men she’d seen outside, the two of them leaning in so they could shout at each other without raising their voices. Their wills were so thick around them that at first she was afraid that the cloud was smoke, but she couldn’t smell it. She knelt down behind the banister where the stairs turned into the landing.
“You don’t seem to understand. This is an order. You have to leave now.”
“Order? This is my home. I’m not leaving while I can still save something.” Grandfather’s voice wasn’t loud, but he was using a tone that Abby knew enough to be afraid of even if the fire chief didn’t.
“That’s our job, Mr. Waite. You need to come with me.”
The fire chief was determined. But Grandfather was determined and powerful. He pushed and the other man backed up a step, probably without even realizing he’d done so.
Grandfather was determined and powerful. But as Abby watched, she realized why he wasn’t as powerful as usual, why the argument had gone on even this long, why he was letting himself get pissed off. By Grandfather’s side was an old black hard-sided bag, the one he used for their trips, and it was bulging full, and the bookshelves behind him were empty. But something was still distracting him, tugging his attention away.
It didn’t have to be the rest of his notebooks, but whatever it was, it was important to Grandfather, and that meant it was important. She crept forward, trying to see where those stray thoughts were pointing.
She wasn’t sure who spotted her first, but it was the fire chief who stepped forward, his instincts telling him to protect her. “Is this the girl you couldn’t find?”
“Abby,” Grandfather said with the fake warmth he would put on sometimes for the public. “There you are.”
“Your mother’s having a fit,” the fire chief said. “This isn’t a good place to hide, you’re not safe here.” He grabbed her hand as soon as he reached her, his intent so focused that it almost hurt. He was glad without knowing it for the excuse to get away. As he pulled her back down the stairs, Abby was able to glance back just long enough to see Grandfather turn and bend toward the big dresser that sat beside the bed.
The fire chief dragged her out the front door and onto the lawn, where Mom and Martha were waiting. Mom gave Abby a look that made Abby think she suspected, and then she grabbed her and hugged her so that it was hard to breathe, and Abby could tell she was feeling her pockets. Good thing she’d thrown the matches away after all.
But that reminded her of all the things she had to pretend not to know. “What happened?”
“The barn’s on fire! Where have you been?”
“I was reading and I fell asleep.” It wasn’t a where but it sounded like an answer.
“Well, you scared the life out of us.” The fact that Mom said “life” instead of “shit” made Abby even more nervous.
Mom didn’t keep the act up very long, though, before she went back around the house to watch the progress of the flames and left Abby alone with Martha. Now she could relax for a second and actually think about what she’d done.
“Are you okay?” Martha said. She seemed not very okay herself, pale and sweaty.
“Of course I am. So long as Mom doesn’t figure out…” She looked around. There were no firefighters nearby. “At least you’ll never have to go in there again. You should be happy.”
Martha stared at her for a moment, squinting even though the sun wasn’t that bright. “But what if everything else in there can come out now?”
“I don’t think that’s how it works,” Abby said, but in fact it hadn’t occurred to her. She hadn’t given Martha’s boogiemen much thought one way or the other. Certainly there were things that could be trapped by a building and then bust loose when the building was destroyed, but those were things that were scary, not the psychic leftovers of some old pigs.
“Grandfather’s sure it was the Davis kids and their friends,” Martha said. Ab
by nodded, relieved. If that was what Grandfather had decided, then Mom would end up agreeing with him eventually, no matter what she suspected now. “He’s upset.”
“I saw him inside, I thought he was pissed off because the fire chief was telling him what to do.”
“He’s pissed off about that too. He’s pissed that volunteer firefighters are crawling all over the place, but he can’t exactly make them leave, I guess. Or the house will burn down.” Martha shivered, even though it was warm. Over her shoulder, Abby could see the sun starting to set, hours early.
“What does he think they’re going to see? They’re too busy to read his books. If they even can read,” Abby said, trying to mimic Grandfather’s voice and make Martha laugh. It fell on stones.
“I don’t know. I don’t know if you should have done this, Abby. If he ever figures out that it was you…” Martha closed her eyes and lunged in at Abby for a hug. It had been a long time since she’d done that. Not since June.
Abby’s jaw tightened, and she realized when Martha squeezed her that her stomach had started to feel sick. She wasn’t going to get caught! She shouldn’t have to do all the work of comforting Martha too.
“I did it for you,” she muttered as she leaned in towards Martha’s ear. “So if Grandfather catches me, it’s your fault.”
Martha sobbed, and a firefighter on her way to the trucks stopped to wipe sweat from her forehead and pity them. “It’ll be okay,” she said, “we’ll save the house.” Then she kept on going.
They did save the house. The barn collapsed, though, and Grandfather was given a summons for failing to obey the lawful orders of an officer, which the fire chief, as it turned out, technically was. The Darien fire company, the closest one, stayed late into the evening hosing down the rubble while Grandfather and Mom watched; they sent Abby and Martha to bed but neither girl went to sleep. They crouched by the window and watched until the firefighters coiled up their hoses and drove away, well after moonrise. Looking down at Grandfather from above this time made Abby feel as though everything had come full circle, as though she had fixed everything, but she didn’t say anything about it to Martha.