by Deb Caletti
She wants out. Fuck you, she mouths to the sleeping hump. And it’s not Maggie, either. It’s her. The pieces of her anger shudder and hum from where they lay.
She steps back out of the room and shuts the door. She makes herself a fried egg; also, some chocolate milk and toast, cut into triangles. She considers a glass of wine, but thinks perhaps her story, this story, has had a lot of wine already. She would like to change the direction of it. But she understands something else—this particular narrative must reach its end, just like a road, before she can turn around.
What a bunch of crap, Isabelle! Maggie says. Get the fuck out of la-la land! Stop being an idiot! This particular road does not end at a tidy little cul-de-sac where you make a sweet little U-turn. Open your goddamn eyes. Look! Look where this road goes. It goes straight off a fucking cliff!
Cliff. She imagines those photographs. She wonders again who sent them. She sits in the musician’s black leather lounge chair, pivots so she can see the stretching waters of the sound, and the beam of the lighthouse making its slow arc. She sees a crow out there on the deck rail, peering in at her. She’s never seen them at night before, but there he is, his black marble eyes glinting.
Silvery clouds speed across the sky. The tips of waves glow white in the moonlight. It starts to rain, little pit-pats. She thinks of Virginia, wonders how small a person has to get before she can no longer save herself. The way Isabelle feels right then, in that chair, wearing the too-thin armor of that robe, drinking chocolate milk, she can see Henry’s version of things. His is the version that makes sense, actually. Because she can see how a person could be despairing enough to do the job herself—to jump, without any help from him. Even without any hands on her back, Virginia could have become small enough to disappear entirely, all by herself, with one last move. Isabelle is weary, too. Her personal glow has dimmed. The island feels like it’s closing in on her. She can almost imagine the flameout: her spirit, drained of vitality, filled with despair and enough of Clyde Belle’s misery to fling herself from the rocks just outside this deck.
Don’t be dramatic, Maggie says. Admit it, Isabelle. You can see a different story, thanks to those photographs. You can see a different story, thanks to Henry himself and his petulant ego. Hands shoving.
Maggie is a know-it-all. Maggie should shut her bossy mouth. Maggie…Well, she might have been mean, but people respected her boundaries. Or, at least, they didn’t tread over them. People may like Isabelle, but respect is a whole other thing.
It gets late. Isabelle watches the miracle that is the moon eek along the sky. Finally, she returns to her and Henry’s room. She lets the robe fall to the floor. It drops into a silky puddle. It has no magic powers, unfortunately. It does not stop her trajectory or fill her with the full and necessary outrage. She gets into bed beside Henry.
But she lies awake for a long time just listening to the rain on the roof, and tossing, turning, turning, tossing, wide-eyed, restless, because something has changed. She does not know what has changed, or what the nature of the change exactly is. She does not know if the change has made her larger or smaller. She does not know if the change brings her closer to a ledge or closer to the ground. She only feels this strange flutter, the arc-flap of wings, as a bird either settles or takes flight.
The flutter and the flap, the flutter and the flap. The night goes on. The wind begins to howl. When Isabelle shuts her eyes, she sees only a wide, roomy trail.
You better be careful, Maggie says.
Isabelle tries to pull the covers around herself without disturbing Henry. It is long after midnight when she realizes that the flutter is her heart, and that the change is a realization: Out may not be as easy as it seems.
Chapter 26
There are things like meetings. There are grants, and funding concerns, and there is talk of “community outreach” and “public programs,” which Weary must fight off with words like research facility and focus and (when he brings in the linguistic big guns) integrity. Gavin Gray taught him well; he taught him what was necessary for the survival of Corvus and this place, but also what was critical for Weary’s own survival. Every day, Weary thanks Gavin Gray. He sends love skyward, on the back of a bird.
There are all these phone calls. Emails. Caw-cawing chatter. But at the heart of it, at the every-day center, there’s Weary and the research; there’s Little Black and Corbie and Rousse and Snap and Billy and Simone; Yves and BG and Fou-Fou and Petit, and the captives, like Mean Boy and Lovey and the injured Bobo, and the rest. There is Matias with his clipboard in the pens, and Aimée in the jungle, sitting on a stone, eyes up to a nest in the hidden V of a tree. There is the bam-bam of hammers as Hector and Lotto repair damage from the storm, a fallen drainpipe, the roof of one of the pens. They have already removed the X’s of tape from the windows, which they’d tacked up after the typhoon warning came.
They are a smoothly functioning communal roost. Smaller in numbers than the hundred to two million crows in some roost locales, and more recently settled than the hundred years that many roosts have been in existence. But a communal roost just the same.
Weary leaves early, because all is ticking along and functioning beautifully without him. Also, he sneaks away right then because like many American crows, he leads a double life. There is the territory he lives in with his large extended family, and there are the places he flies solo, fields and dumps where he goes alone to scavenge and feed his hungers.
Today, it will be all business, though. Or, rather, this day is not about physical hungers but driving emotional ones. When Jean-Marie appears on the apartment balcony as Weary sits at the table at Le Bilboquet now, Weary only downs the last drop of an espresso. He does not need the shot of liquor this time, the tiny-glass courage required to disrobe in front of the gorgeous Jean-Marie. This will be a quick meeting. Weary races across the street. It’s hot, the hottest month, humid. He wipes the sweat from his forehead before Jean-Marie opens the door, because vanity is still vanity. He hopes he still smells good after all that waiting in the humid shade under Bilboquet’s striped awning.
Jean-Marie wears aviators on his head like a guest star on Miami Vice. He’s dark and sexy enough for the television version of the underworld work he does, even if it’s 1970s style, all unbuttoned shirts and tight jeans and sideburns. Weary considers his retro good looks a perk, a buy-one-get-one, a party favor. Jean-Marie takes the new envelope that Weary hands him. Weary packed the single photo most carefully. If Isabelle rips it up or trashes it, there’s no replacement. It’s a risk, but what isn’t. He’s counting on Isabelle. She’s his last chance. She’s the plan, one hundred percent, and if the plan goes south, there will not be another. At least, that’s what Weary says now. He’s too tired to do this again. Fury is exhausting. Worry is, too, and so is responsibility of this magnitude. If Isabelle fails him (or, please, please, no, if he fails her) he’ll turn his eyes back to the birds and only the birds. Henry North will have gotten away with it—with all of it, murder and soul murder.
This exchange completes Weary and Jean-Marie’s business for today. He’s almost sorry to be going so quickly, because there’s this fleeting relief with Jean-Marie, the freedom of being known. But, then—maybe they both aren’t in such a hurry after all, because Jean-Marie’s smile is slow.
“Regardez ce que je dois ici.” Look what I have here. Jean-Marie waves a small package like a treat, raises his dark eyebrows enticingly.
“You did it,” Weary said.
“Bien sûr.”
“So soon! I thought I’d be waiting weeks.”
“I aim to please,” he says. Oh, and he does. He does. Jean-Marie’s voice is low.
“Let me see.”
“Où est ma merci premier?” Where is my “thank-you” first?
Heat radiates from Weary’s face down through his whole body. Well. Well, why not? Is this moment not worth a celebration? It’s perfect, really—no time for nerves or regret, only the fast sweep of passion. Jean-Marie
leans in, and there is his warm tongue. There’s the rough press of his cheek, and then a grind of hips. Weary thinks of the cloacal kiss, the rubbing of the male crow’s cloaca against the female after she solicits sex. Quickly, though, crows and anything avian is gone, everything is gone, except bodies and their vibrating. Weary’s hands undo Jean-Marie’s shirt, his pants. Jean-Marie’s skin burns hot; it’s slippery with sweat, and they drop to the floor right there. Right there in the hallway of Jean-Marie’s apartment.
Life is short. That’s one thing Weary knows. There is joy in what has occurred. He is surprised with pleasure, with Jean-Marie’s tongue; he is surprised by the waiting package. He cries out. It is over in seconds, same as with Corvus. Seconds are long enough. Jean-Marie politely kisses down Weary’s neck, but then pulls on his pants.
“Ne pas oublier,” he says. Don’t forget.
As if. Weary could never forget that package; he could never forget any of this day and its unexpected delights. This is what it looks like when things go right. When things tick along according to plan, the whole day moves gratifyingly forward. He can feel so tired, and then be so invigorated. He can be ready to just let it all go, and then he can remember everything—the beauty of his life now, the relief of it, and the beauty of his anger, too.
Weary waits until he’s back in the sweltering Jeep before he opens the envelope. In those shorts, the sun-hot seats sting the back of his legs. Oh, whatever. Who cares about the searing pain! He rips open the package to find the precious document inside, the handsome burgundy of the French passport.
He flips it open. There’s the photo, and it’s lovely.
Chapter 27
“Package for you, Isabelle. Under the front desk,” Jane shouts.
The shock smacks her. For a second, Isabelle can’t breathe. The degree of surprise is her own fault. She’s allowed herself to believe that the package-sender had stopped. For two weeks, there have been no strange items in the mail, no furtive outreaches. She could almost tell herself that it had all been a creepy but brief interlude, something she needed to move through to get somewhere else.
And she could almost tell herself that those packages had merely messed with her head, except, packages or not, she has still been secretly feeling it—an agitated sense of a ticking clock. It’s…She doesn’t know. Just something imminent. Because, while there have been no watches belonging to dead women and no photographs of plunging cliffs, there has been Henry, pressing about a wedding date. Henry, with his petty jealousies and small criticisms (I can’t even see you with some dumb jock like Evan or You lack sturdiness, Isabelle or Your flakiness is showing, Iz). Henry, with his restless discontent, which could be—really it could, she’s seen it a million times—the result of the endless Northwest winter.
And there has been Ricky Beaker in his squad car, parked under lampposts and across streets, lurking behind her a few lengths back. There is no longer any question, none at all. He is following her. He is watching her. Sometimes, he even gives a little wave, as if he’s there by mutual agreement.
Now a package—here? Here? It frightens her. The sender knows where she works, and probably a lot more about her, too. Who are you? her thoughts shout. This mysterious sender scares her more than Henry ever would or could.
The sender, or what the sender sent? Maggie asks.
Shut up, shut up, shut up!
Isabelle unwraps Jane’s scarf from around her neck. She takes off her hat. She’s afraid to look. She edges toward the desk. Peeks. Yellow padded envelope, familiar foreign stamps. She feels sick. She feels dizzy.
“Australia!” Jane says. She’s come out of her office to refill her cup; she’s holding the glass carafe of the old Mr. Coffee machine they have on a little table in the main room. “Isabelle?”
“Australia?”
“Your package. Are you okay?”
Isabelle tries to examine the stamps from where she’s standing. It’s true. They look different from the ones before, the ones from France.
“Isabelle?”
“Um.”
“What is going on?” Jane says. “I’m finished with the ducking and dodging. You need to talk to me.” Eddie laughs loudly outside. He’s with Bonnie Randall of Randall and Stein Booksellers and her new boyfriend, Dan Wykowski, the art teacher at Parrish High since Isabelle went there. They’re heading into the city for the weekend. Dan has Bonnie’s flowered overnight bag hanging from his shoulder.
“I, uh…”
“What is that? Who is that from?”
“I don’t know, Jane.”
“Let me see that. Hand that over.”
“Jane, it might be…”
“Is someone sending you stuff?” Jane has the envelope in her hands.
“Yes.”
“Isabelle, Jesus, sit down or something. You look like you’re going to pass out.” Jane rips open the envelope. Reaches inside. Now she holds a photo. A single photo. A square one, an old one, one from the time of Instamatic cameras. “What is this shit? Who is this?”
Jane holds the photo close to her face. She needs her glasses. Isabelle sits in the black padded chair next to the coffee machine. There is a helpful little bowl with creamers in it, and a glass container of sugar packets. There’s a stack of cardboard cups, each with a handle that folds out like a single paper ear. Outside, Eddie hooks his thumb at her. Get a move on, he mouths. They all forget she’s the boss.
Jane pops her head out the door. “Get Joe to do the lines. He’s fueling.”
“Yessir,” Eddie says.
“I don’t understand,” Jane says. “Do you know who this is, in this picture?”
“Yes.”
She takes the photo from Jane. She holds it carefully at its corners. Virginia smiles a quiet smile. There’s a large sky behind her. She wears running shoes, and a pair of shorts with lots of pockets, and a T-shirt with a winged heart. She has a windbreaker tied around her waist.
“Who?”
“It’s Virginia. Henry’s old girlfriend. Fiancée…The one who…” Isabelle can barely speak.
“Oh, shit. Oh, fuck.” Jane sounds just like Maggie then. It seems both possible and entirely impossible to understand how the two of them worked together all those years. “Give me that! Get rid of it! Who is sending that to you?”
Jane reaches. “No. I need this,” Isabelle says.
“Good idea. You’re right. That’s the right thing. You have to report this. Let’s show Ricky. He’s out there practically all day anyway…”
“I need to keep it,” Isabelle says again.
“Isabelle? How many of these things are you getting? You have to tell me what’s going on here.”
Jane means business, and that’s only one of the reasons to love her.
—
She does tell, but she doesn’t tell. She tells about the packages, reminders, she explains to Jane, from relatives who want to make sure Virginia’s not forgotten.
But these are not just reminders from Virginia’s relatives. These packages are from someone with a message.
This is the part she doesn’t say.
Because in that photo, Virginia wears a watch. Isabelle knows this watch very, very well. In fact, it’s in her pocket right then, as she sits by the old Mr. Coffee machine, with its liquid turning acrid. She knows what’s engraved on the back: Virginia Arsenault. ARHS. One of the most important things about this photo is the purple flowers at Virginia’s feet, the same purple flowers as on the trail. Also, the double hump of mountains in the back that form a huge W.
But the most important thing is the watch. The unbroken watch. The watch without a ripped band.
It tells a story. At least, it is trying to. Watch on. Watch ripped, and off. Watch on, ripped, and off, the day of the hike. Piece plus piece.
She grasps the dilemma immediately. She grasps it because of the calculations her own mind makes. What does this photo say? Nothing! Not one thing. There is no proof of when it was taken, for starters. Even if the
se were the same clothes Virginia wore on that same day, it is still not proof. There is no date. The hike could be one of a hundred hikes. The ripped watch and the photo together wouldn’t be considered evidence. Where was the watch even found? If it were with her body or on the trail, Isabelle assumes it would be packed away in a case file. If it were found somewhere else, where else? By whom?
It could be a trick. And why no note, no name? It’s frightening, and it says nothing, even if it is trying to say everything.
“You stay here,” Jane says.
This is not a difficult command to follow. Isabelle wouldn’t mind staying by Mr. Coffee and Jane forever, protected by steady usefulness and dogged strength. She might sit there as long as a glacier.
“Little Ricky is right out front,” Jane says. “I’m going to have a word with him.” Jane is already putting on her big lumberjack coat, the denim one with the red plaid inside.
“He follows me. He’s making me nervous, Jane. I can’t stand it. I go get a latte, there he is. I buy a stamp, there he is.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
Isabelle sits in that black padded chair and watches as Joe unties the lines and Eddie’s plane lifts off. It’s an office she’s been in a million times since she was a tiny girl. Yet she experiences an odd displacement. Like she’s waiting in some other room or office. A police station, maybe.
She is not feeling like herself. In fact, her self, whatever that strange thing is, hovers like a vapor. She is wispy and insubstantial. She can’t put thoughts together, only purple flowers, trail, watch, as the plane crosses the sky like the crows on their commute.