Split Feather

by Deborah A. Wolf

  “Nah. The spirits want us to throw this one—it’s obvious. We don’t want to insult them, right?”

  “Good point.” She trotted all the way to the water’s edge, brought the stone to her face, and kissed it. “Mom and Dad,” she whispered. “Trudy and Mike. Help me find my mom and dad.” She cocked her arm back and let it fly…

  Skip… skip… skip skip… skip… skipskipskip…

  …and damned if it didn’t look like that rock was gonna make it all the way across the river.

  …skip… skip… skip… skip… gone. The stone sank without a sound beneath the wide surface, foiled by a patch of rough dark water in the shadows of Oldtown.

  “Well, you almost made it.” I reached toward her shoulder, but stopped short at the look of naked fear on her face. “Emily? What’s wrong?”

  “I threw it into the whirlpool,” she breathed, eyes round in a pale face. “I threw my mom’s name into the whirlpool.”

  Squinting, I stared at the dark patch of water. It could be a whirlpool, I thought, but it’d have to be a pretty big one if we could see it from here. “I don’t get it. That’s a bad thing?”

  “That’s the entrance to the Underworld,” she moaned. “That’s where old people go to die. That’s where the demons live, Siggy. And I threw my mom in there. She’ll never come back now, and it’s all my fault.” Emily’s face crumpled, and then she crumpled, too, dropped like a stone to lie crying in the mud. I picked the girl up—though she was heavier than I’d guessed—and held her to me, crooning under my breath as I guessed a mother might do.

  Whose fault is it really? whispered my demon. I hadn’t heard her come back, but there she was, hot breath in my ear. Tell her what you’ve done, Siggy. Tell her that you’re the reason she’s lost her mother, and see how much she loves you then.

  * * *

  I carried Emily all the way back to the cabin. You know that weird trick of perception that makes a trip away from home seem to take hours, but then you turn around again and bam, you’re back? Yeah, well when you’re carrying a gangly preteen who cries half the way home and sleeps the other half, that doesn’t happen. That bitch demon yammering in my ear didn’t help, either.

  By the time we got back my arms, my back, and my demon were all screaming obscenities. I was dripping with sweat and chilled to the bone—don’t ask me how that works—and I swear Emily weighed three hundred pounds. I’d been gritting my teeth against the urge to wake her and make her walk the rest of the way, and daydreaming about dumping her on Grandpa’s couch so I could go take a long, hot bath—even though there was no such thing in Tsone.

  But then I saw the way Grandpa was standing in the yard, with his arms crossed over his chest and his feet wide apart as if he was guarding the door. When I saw the people he was guarding against, I stopped dead in my tracks.

  There was a man in a black turtleneck and jeans, armed and vaguely familiar, and a tall woman with the solid build and square jaw of a bulldog. Her mouth was a bloody slash of crimson lipstick against skin as white as milk, and her suit was so crisp no breeze dared touch it. Her pumps cost more than I’d ever made in a year. I could smell social services from a mile away, and this bitch stank.

  She saw us, and her bloody lips pulled back from too-white teeth. I curled my lips back as well, and neither of us was even pretending to smile.

  “Oh, there she is,” the woman in the suit cooed. “Not lost after all. Thank God.”

  “I told you they weren’t lost,” Grandpa John said. His voice was low, his smooth accent hidden away, and he sounded… tired. Scared. “She’s fine.”

  “We’ll see about that.” Those square shoulders turned toward me, and her pumps stabbed into the soft earth thuck-thuck-thuck as she marched closer to where I stood, holding Emily. “Hello, Sigurd. I’ve heard so much about you. My name is Angela… Angela Monday.”

  As she drew near, I could feel my lips drawing back again in a snarl, and a low growl rose in my chest. I’d aged out, didn’t she know that? This bitch couldn’t touch me.

  “What do you want? You people need to just leave me alone. I’m not a kid anymore… you can’t do anything to me.” Never, ever again.

  “Oh, we’re not here for you, Sigurd,” she cooed. “A report was made of an abandoned child, and it’s my job to make sure she’s taken care of.” Her pale eyes glittered as she looked at the girl in my arms. I tightened my grip on Emily, who shifted and made a noise of protest in her sleep.

  “You leave her alone,” I hissed. “Emily is just fine… we’re taking good care of her.”

  “Are you?” Monday met my eyes and smiled; the sweetest, bitchiest smile ever to crawl across a human face. “That’s for me to decide, isn’t it?”

  The man behind her shifted. I glanced at him, and my eyes went wide. He’d been washed and shaved, and wore a high collar to cover the scars at his throat, but I recognized with a jolt why he seemed familiar. It was the guy who’d tranq’d me… the same guy whose throat Bane had slit, not ten feet from my face.

  A tree hit my back. Only then did I realize I’d been backing up, and that I was growling.

  “An old man, and a crazy girl who likes to set fires,” Monday continued, shaking her head slowly and smiling all the while. “I’m not sure this is a safe placement for a child. It’s a good thing we came, after all. I wasn’t sure Geoff would make it… he’s had a hard month.”

  The man smiled at me, and tugged at the neckline of his shirt. Oh godfuckingdamninhell, I could see jagged flesh and stitches.

  “Fuck off,” I ground out in a voice harsh as a raven’s. “You just stay the fuck away from my family, or I will end you.”

  Monday tipped her head to the side, smile never slipping.

  “Charming,” she said. “I do so look forward to getting to know you better… Siggy.”

  16

  The sharp edge of the splitting maul sank deep into the flesh of the birch log, sending splinters flying and shock waves up both of my arms to settle into an ache deep in the shoulders. Again and again I hefted the battered tool, finding a deep satisfaction in the weight of it, in the strength and grace of my movements, in the violence of the act.

  Chuck-chuck-thud went the maul.

  Thump-thump-crack went the log.

  I may or may not have been picturing Angela Monday’s face at the time. Not sayin’.

  Grandpa John sat nearby, wishing perhaps that I hadn’t stolen this chore from him. He was as wound up as I was, and it seemed I may have gotten a fair bit of my temper from him, adopted or no, human or no.

  “Thank you for your help,” he said quietly as I set the maul aside and stacked the bits of wood I’d chopped nearly to kindling. “I know this isn’t easy for you.” He wasn’t talking about the shattered birch at my feet.

  “Not so easy for you, either,” I countered.

  “No, it’s not.”

  Garvin had taken Emily mushing. They used wheeled carts in the summer to train their dogs, and it looked like great fun. I supposed it was meant to distract her from the sword of Damocles which had been hung over her head by that damned Monday, but judging from her soft weeping long into the night, nothing we did seemed to help much.

  Fuck Monday and her slit-throat companion, whoever the hell he is. Whatever the hell he is. I hefted another heavy log, twice as big around as I was, and wrestled it onto the broad round of spruce that served as a chopping block. The maul fit my grip just fine, cool to the touch and deadly.

  “Is this how it happened with me, when I was little?” I asked, the words sounding casual but tasting of copper and tar. Up went the maul and around and down, and the face of my anger split again beneath my assault. “Did you fight to keep me, too?”

  Grandpa John clasped his hands between his knees, and his head bent low. He looked tireder, weaker than I’d seen him before. Like an old tree bent to busting under too much snow.

  “Yes,” he said.

  I split Monday’s face over and over again as I lis
tened to him speak. We didn’t look at each other, not once, as the words hung in the air between us like demons.

  “Your mother had been gone for some time… she was never one to stay in one place for long. She liked music, and dancing, and she liked to be surrounded by beautiful things. Not to own, understand, but to look at. Paintings, and sculpture, and men. She went wherever the wind blew her, and it was always a storm back in those days.”

  It was love, not censure, that I heard in his words. I pictured my mother as a young woman, her hair down past her waist—I’d always pictured her that way—arms outstretched as she danced to some inner music, eyes half-closed as she tried to catch the last bit of a song. It fit with the impressions I held of her… movement, and color, and song.

  “When she came back to us, she was heavy with child—with you—and quiet. She wasn’t interested in singing anymore, or dancing, or even listening to the radio. I don’t know whether something bad had happened to make her lights dim so low, or whether she was too busy listening to the music inside her belly, and I didn’t pry. I was still young, or young enough, to think I had all the time in the world to ask my questions. All the time in the world to wait for her answers.

  “But then you were born, and she was busy being a new mother, and the questions were set aside until they’d grown stale. After a while it would have been silly to ask. Disrespectful. She wasn’t the same girl who had left us, our little Lucy, but she was still our daughter. And she loved you, I can tell you that she loved you as fiercely and true as ever a mother has loved her child.”

  “If she loved me so much, why did she leave me?” It was a cry from the heart. I hadn’t meant to say the words out loud—not then, not ever—but there they were, and there we were, and words once spoken can’t be tossed back into the water like an unwanted fish.

  “I don’t know, Siggy. I don’t know,” he answered. “She promised to come back for you, and I believe in my heart that she would have come back if she could have… I just don’t know.”

  Sometimes people disappear, and nobody ever knows what happened to them. Was she dead? Buried in a shallow grave somewhere, old bones at the bottom of a river? Bad things happened to young girls all the time, I knew, and sometimes a heart that’s broken stays broken forever. Was it a kinder thought than that she had left me behind because she didn’t want to be a mother? Either way, I figured, pretty much sucked balls. And the log I was chopping was reduced to toothpicks and dust.

  “We waited for her to come back, your grandmother and I, and you, but life went on. We were happy. You were such a sweet little girl. Sad, but sweet. Quiet and thoughtful.”

  “Quiet?” I burst out laughing and dropped the heavy maul on the ground. “Thoughtful?”

  He didn’t smile, but there was one in his voice. “Yes, and kind. The kindest little girl who ever lived. You wouldn’t even kill a spider, or let me kill one, either. You dragged home every stray puppy you could find, and some that weren’t stray. You even liked woodbugs.”

  I shuddered. Woodbugs, I had learned, were worse than demons by a good margin. Horrible, flesh-eating little fuckers.

  “That doesn’t sound like me at all.”

  “And you were the apple of your grandmother’s eye. The sun in her sky, the flower in her garden. She sang a song for you with those words; I can’t remember it now, but I remember that part. ‘The flower in my garden…’” His voice trailed off.

  “So what happened?” Why did you let them take me away? I added without saying it. His shoulders shook, and it wasn’t from laughter, or because he was old.

  “We wanted to keep you forever,” he said. “We tried to keep you. You were happy with us. But some white lady with yellow hair and a little pink hat came to the village, and she said our house wasn’t good enough, because we had an outhouse instead of a toilet. She said we weren’t good enough—we were too old, she said, we didn’t have a lot of money or a television or a car. We told her we didn’t need those things, that what we had was just fine, but our words were no more than the wind in her ears, or a bird squawking. We weren’t good enough, and so they took you away.

  “It killed your grandmother. We went to Anchorage looking for you, took the papers they’d given us, but they told us that you’d gone to live with some white folks Outside somewhere. A better family with a nice big house and two cars, and you weren’t ours anymore. When we came home…” His voice broke, and for a long while I waited. A raven cried from the trees somewhere.

  Qa’hoq, qa’hoq.

  “When we came home, my Catherine took her walking stick, and she went across the river, to Oldtown where she’d first found your mother. When she didn’t come back, me and some fellas went looking for her… but all we found was her walking stick, on the river bank near the whirlpool. That’s when I knew that she was lost to me forever. She went walking down by the river, and she never came back.”

  Qa’hoq, the raven mourned. Qa’hoq.

  * * *

  The sun never really set that summer, but Grandpa John’s little cabin seemed dark that night, the air thick and muffled with our sorrow. Grandpa John always went to bed early, but this night he barely made it through dinner, pushing his moose ribs aside with a sigh so heavy I half feared no indrawn breath would follow it.

  He’d shrunk in on himself since that Monday bitch had come to town, he had aged even past his years, and I thought maybe he’d given up before the fight for Emily had even begun. As for the girl, she was by turns overly animated and dramatically morose, speaking too quickly and too loudly in a whining voice that grated on my nerves till it was all I could do to finish my own dinner, clean our few plates, and bundle myself into the little loft I’d come to think of as my own.

  Left to her own devices Emily would read for a while—her snub little nose was buried in a book whenever she wasn’t out in the woods or by the river—and the pages as she turned them made a noise dry and brittle as old bones.

  It came to me then, in the dark of the midnight sun, that if I had grown up here, in this cabin—with my grandparents to love me and a wide, wide world to explore, dogs to run and fish to catch—that my soul might have grown into a different shape. I might have been a child like Emily, bookish and bright-eyed and full of mischief that lent itself to pranks and jokes rather than bloodied noses and singed curtains. I might have grown up happy, and not become this twisted thing with a dark soul, who saw demons and burned with anger.

  They’d gotten me, and now they were coming for Emily. They were coming for her. I could feel it—we could all feel it.

  The light went out, the house went quiet, but for the sound of a young girl crying herself softly to sleep.

  Fuck this, I thought, not on my watch.

  “Emily?” I called softly into the sunlit night, only half expecting an answer.

  “Yeah?” Her reply was muffled.

  “Do you want to come up here?”

  A long silence, and then, “Yes, please.”

  She blew her nose, grabbed her raggedy old teddy bear, and climbed up into the loft with me. I started to tell her a funny story one of the kinder mothers had told me, about a crookedy old woman who walks to the well for water with her hair swinging back and forth tok-tok, tok-tok, but when she gets there the well is dry. So she heads to the river, tok-tok, tok-tok, but that has dried up, too.

  I couldn’t remember the rest so I made some shit up about a talking fish that turned into a handsome prince, but she was too old for handsome princes so the old lady turned him back into a fish and had him for dinner. It wasn’t a very good story, but that wasn’t the point.

  “I’m not used to telling stories,” I apologized, feeling kind of lame.

  “That’s okay, Aunt Siggy.” Then, in a voice that broke my fucking heart, she added, “I miss my mom.” And she started to cry.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” I said, patting her shoulder like she was a dog or something. I wasn’t very good at this shit, but I was trying.

  �
�Do you think she’ll come back?”

  What do you say to something like that? Seriously, what do you say? The crickets started up in my head, evil fuckers, and pain jabbed me in the eye. What do you say? “No, she’s never coming back”? Or “Yeah, she’ll be back by morning.” I opened my mouth to say something dumb and neutral, but the words just popped out.

  “Yeah,” I told her, “both of your parents will come back. They’re lost, that’s all, but they’ll find their way back home.” Suddenly my demon screamed and winked out with a *pop* and a smell like burnt metal, and the pain in my eye went with her.

  Well, that was fucking weird, I thought, and, yeah, I’d just told a kid that her lost parents were coming home. Way to go, Siggy.

  Emily snuggled closely, hiccupping a little, her crusty old bear squashed between us.

  “Do you really think so, Aunt Siggy?”

  “Yeah, I really think so.” And I did, though I couldn’t have said why. I waited for her to say something more, and waited, and waited, till her soft little snores told me she’d slipped away. I lay awake late into the night.

  Emily flailed and sprawled across the entire bed till her elbow jabbed into my neck, but I didn’t move for fear of waking her. I wondered at my own certainty. What had possessed me to say such a stupid thing? Was that the crazy talking, or stupid wishful thinking? Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Trudy and Mike really were out there, trying to get home.

  Weird… and kind of exciting, I couldn’t lie to myself. What if I’d had a kind of premonition or something?Come home, I wished hard, thinking of Trudy laughing in the kitchen. Your kid needs you. And it seemed like I felt an answer, a little tug at my heart.

  We’re here, we’re here.

  Hoping, wishing, I reached out for some sense that my mom was out there somewhere, too, that someday she’d find her way home to me. But there was nothing there, just a dark empty hole where a mother should be. Nothing.

  I should have known better.