by Anna Roberts
“How did I get here?” said Blue.
*
But he misunderstands and shows her something else.
A spring night, a baby in a car seat. Gloria carries her up the steps; the neighbor lady said they’d find the mother here.
It’s one of those little shotgun houses, where the front door opens directly into the living room. Regina opens the door. Gloria knows it’s her from that brief, uncomfortable flash of her son’s bed, but in the flesh she’s so tiny it’s terrifying. Barely five foot, with those lost eyes and the delicate bones of a princess in exile, like if she found so much as a dried pea under her mattress she’d wake up with bruises blooming dark under every rib. For a moment Gloria wants to turn and run; she can’t leave this baby to this fragile looking girl.
But what’s the alternative?
Regina looks into the car seat and overflows. That’s the only word for it. She doesn’t burst into tears, nothing so dramatic as that; the tears simply pour out of her as if they were there all along, like a glass so full that you have to sip from the lip before you can even think about carrying it out of the kitchen. She covers her mouth with two bony little hands, and that’s when Gloria knows she’s doing the right thing, at least this time.
“Oh my God,” says Regina. “Is that...?”
“Yes. It’s her. I asked around. When did you get out of the hospital?”
Regina shakes her head. “I’m okay. I promise. I’m taking meds. My hormones were all out of whack after I had her.” She kneels, still crying, fumbling with the straps of the car seat. All she wants to do is hold her baby again.
The baby clucks at her mother’s awkward handling. “Here,” says Gloria, and sets a hand behind the tiny head where it ought to be. “That’s it. There she is.”
Of all the wicked things he’s ever done that was one of the worst, snatching up that baby like a goblin from a fairy tale. He gave her a suitcase full of blood money but didn’t think to even give her a name. “What’s are you calling her?”
Regina shakes her head. “I...don’t know. I can’t remember. I just gave his name for the birth certificate...”
And he took her. Figures. It was a mess of red tape to untangle, but Gloria always had a gift for scrambling through official bullshit. That birth certificate found its way into a hospital incinerator, and good riddance.
“Yael,” says Regina, and the name is like a red poker to the skin. “Isn’t that a girl’s name? He always liked it.”
“No,” says Gloria. As if. “It’s a man’s name.”
“Are you sure? I thought it was in the Bible.”
Gloria reaches into her purse. “I’ve just been calling her Baby Blue Eyes,” she says. “Sometimes just Blue.”
Regina looks at the baby, who’s settling now. As she should. “Blue. It’s different.”
“So is she.” Gloria fishes out the check. “Here.”
“What’s this?...I can’t...”
“You will,” says Gloria, because there’s a suitcase buried under her henhouse, but she can’t even hand on that birthright to the baby. Things hold resonances, especially things steeped in murder. Every last banknote is bad luck. Gloria knows she should have dumped them on a bonfire, but it’s hard to do that with more money than you’ve ever seen in a lifetime. “Take the money. It’s the least I can do.”
Regina reluctantly takes the check. “Who are you?”
“I’m your fairy godmother,” says Gloria. “And if you love that little girl of yours, forget you ever saw me. And never, ever let her know the name of her father.”
*
There was a twist in the tale, of course. There always is. She went home glowing with self-righteousness and you grew up knowing you were just one social worker’s report away from being declared a ward of the state. And then when she got home she found a message on her answering machine, from another social worker, this time up in Pensacola where her grandson lived with his mom. You know that story, right, Baby Blue?
Talk about no rest for the wicked.
*
“It was hard to hear you.”
A woman’s voice. A Deep South twang. None of it made any sense, but nothing had since the world flipped over and everything was broken glass and screeching metal. Must have landed on the roof, because he remembered being strapped in upside down, and there was blood bright on the smashed glass and dark bubbling out of the man’s mouth and nose. He was drowning and there was no water in sight, but Gabe couldn’t free himself from the seat belt to help him. And there was something wrong with his legs.
“It happens more often than you’d like to think, that kind of nasty auto accident.”
He tried to move his toes. He wanted to scream, fight, struggle, but it was like someone had cut the strings between his brain and body. In his mind he was flailing, but his flesh was useless, inert. And there was a weight on his chest.
“Don’t fight. It’s okay. Just breathe.”
This time he realized the voice was coming from inside his head, but it wasn’t his own. Like someone had crawled into his brain with him, the better to communicate directly. He tasted clean, cold air and for a second he was no longer in the dark, smashed confusion of a rolling car; he was miles above the highway, so far up he couldn’t even see the wreck any more.
Was this how it went? God, what a punchline, if there turned out to be an afterlife. Could a werewolf get to heaven?
Am I dying?
“No,” she said. Ruby. Oh my God, she was in his head somehow, listening in, talking him down. “I’m flying, that’s all. It’s how I found you.”
The horizon was dark. He saw a light play back and forth across it, heard a steady, half-muted beep. He tasted clouds, but somehow he knew that was just Ruby trailing her own senses through his poor bruised brain. Beyond the clouds he tasted rubber and antiseptic, and he knew where he was this time.
Oh shit, how long had he been in here? How much time to the next full moon?
I have to get out of here, Ruby. Don’t let them pull the plug.
Then it was dark again and he was choking. He felt something scrape and slither on the inside of his throat - a hideous sensation, like he was puking up his own trachea, and then a mask came down over his nose, gusting clean, beautiful air. As long as he could breathe he wouldn’t drown, at least not yet. He tried to kick towards the surface, but someone was holding him down and his ears were full of a loud, rapid beeping and too many voices.
“...it’s okay, we got you, we got you...”
“...10ccs...”
“...he’s tachychardic...”
Let me go, let me go, let go of my fucking legs, I’m gonna drown...
He sucked down a lungful of that rich, wonderful air, but then the horizon grew darker and the beeps receded. And it didn’t matter any more, because whatever was in that syringe was just. that. fucking. awesome...
When he surfaced again it was quiet and cool, but he was as thirsty as if he’d tried to drink the ocean. He opened his eyes and tried to speak, but his tongue just made a dry clucking sound against the roof of his mouth. A shadow beside him stirred and he turned his head on the pillow to see a long nose, sunlight shining on a dark blond eyebrow, an arm reaching out to pour water.
“Hey,” said Joe, holding out the cup and straw.
Gabe sipped. He was so parched he could almost picture the water expanding his desiccated brain as if it were a bath sponge, waking it to full function. Waking it to pain. Jesus. There was a cast on his arm and when he breathed too deeply his ribs howled and rasped in a way he knew meant they were broken. Bad, but considering how that car had rolled...
“Lehman,” he said, but Joe just looked puzzled.
“Lemon? No, it’s just water.”
Gabe shook his head. “No. The guy. In the car with me.”
“Oh,” said Joe, in a flat, solemn sort of way that said it all.
Well, that was sad, but nobody could deny that Lehman had been a massive pain in the a
ss, even though Gabe couldn’t at that second remember why. He’d been a source of frustration, and it took a couple of moments of the dislocated emotion rattling around inside Gabe’s head for him to connect it with the other thing that was wrong with the world right now.
“Blue,” he said, trying to sit up. Which turned out to be a mistake. “Oh my God. I have to find Blue.”
“Shh,” said Joe. “Take it easy. We’re working on it.”
Gabe struggled to remember the exact state in which he’d left the world, but all he could really recall was that it had been fucked up on a scale beyond anything else he’d ever experienced. Eli was dead, Gloria ditto, Blue was missing and Axl...oh fuck. He’d taken the kid north to keep him safe and now he’d probably been eaten by swamp wolves.
“Where’s Axl?” he said. “There were swamp wolves –”
“ – it’s okay. Everything’s fine. Grayson’s taking care of the kids. Ruby found you and I came up here.”
“Ruby?”
“Short version,” said Joe. “Our dear dingbat Ruby is now Witch Queen of the Okefenokee. So that’s good.”
“It is?” It didn’t sound good at all.
“Oh yeah. We made peace with the swamp wolves. You don’t have to worry about that.”
Gabe’s skepticism must have shown on his face, because Joe frowned. “What?”
“No, nothing,” said Gabe. “You just...you reminded me of something Eli used to say. He was always telling me not to worry.”
“I’m not telling you not to worry at all,” said Joe. “I’m just telling you that you don’t need to worry about swamp wolves any more.” He picked up the cup once more, and when he spoke again there was an odd note to his voice, somewhere between irritation and regret. “And I’m not Eli.”
“No,” said Gabe, and he had a strange, sighing feeling that at least one thing had gone right for them for a change. “No, you’re not.”
12
Lyle Raines is full of shit.
It’s been three days and the rain has washed all the chicken blood away. The porch swing creaks, but it’s nothing more than the breeze. Eli was supposed to sweep the yard but he’s busy with some girl, so the leaves spin in bad tempered circles under a sour January sky. It’s 2001, a date that was supposed to be sci-fi, but nobody’s driving a flying car and there’s none of that silver-jumpsuited utopia they were all promised in the Sixties. Instead it’s much like the Eighties or the Nineties, complete with one of those half-bright Bush kids trying to be president.
Business as usual. Nothing like the tear you’d have to feel in the fabric of your life if you knew someone you personally brought into the world had gone out of it. She sees mothers crying on Geraldo, saying they don’t know if their children are dead or alive, but she doesn’t believe it. You’d know, somewhere in the center of your bones.
So when she smells hot iron she thinks she’s having a stroke, because if he’s here then West is dead, and she knows West is still alive. Poetic justice; she’s going out the same way as old Celeste. She raises her hands because they say that’s one of the symptoms, if you can’t raise your arms, but there’s no weakness, no numbness. Just the nails in the doorframe sizzling gently against the wood.
“Yael?”
She looks out. The leaves in the yard spin faster, whirling up into a tiny tornado. It’s him, no doubt, but why? He loves flesh too much to just bail out, even if West really did do half of the things she suspects he did.
“What are you doing here?” she says, and Yael jumps in her open mouth, out through the back of her head and curls up hissing behind the refrigerator. In that second as he moves through her she tastes blood, sees a boy hung up like a deer in a dark basement, three girls weeping in a knot, a black lady praying to Jesus. And she knows her face because it was in the papers - Sandra Dean. Goddamn, what did he do? What did he do this time?
“Is he dead?” As she asks she realizes she almost wants Yael to say yes. There’s nothing else to be done for West. All she can do is hope that bad blood didn’t leak out into Charlie or the little girl.
Yael doesn’t answer, doesn’t need to. The leaves flutter back to earth and she hears his footsteps, those dumb alligator boots clacking on the path. He’s alive and whole, but when he smiles there’s a gap where an eyetooth used to be, and the sun comes down just so and lights up a new gray hair on his temple. It’s one thing to watch your baby shoot up into a reedy young man, but to see him going gray is enough to make her feel like one of those two hundred year old turtles, the ones that only see land to bury their eggs and then swim away to continue their long, mysterious lives out there in the deep.
“Hey Ma,” says West, so much like Charlie that it scares her. “Yael about?”
Gloria laughs. She can’t help it; he’s like a neighbor boy come calling to see if his playmate is home, only his playmate is a pissed off spirit and he’s a creature so steeped in blood that even his own mother doesn’t know if he can rightly be called human any more. “I knew you weren’t dead,” she said.
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Here and there. It’s a hell of a story.”
“Probably why Lyle told it in the first place,” says West, leaning on the door frame. Yael snarls. “He’s only nearly as dumb as he looks.” He accidentally touches one of the hot nails and shakes out his fingers, blowing on them. “Hell of a warm welcome there, Ma. Aren’t you pleased to see me?”
“I guess I’m slightly relieved to see you didn’t get turned into sausage,” she says. “But don’t go confusing maternal instinct with anything else. What the hell happened up there?”
He pushes past her and takes a seat at the kitchen table. Lights up a smoke. “It was the dumbest thing, Ma,” he says. “Lyle’s little better than a middle school girl. That boy - my Charlie - he didn’t know dick about who I really was, but he loved me all the same. L-O-V-E-D. Like it was genetic or something. He knew on some level that he was mine. Can’t explain it.”
“I can,” says Gloria. “You’re two peas in a pod, only he has just enough decency not to act on his worst impulses.”
“Yeah. That or he didn’t spend his formative years possessed by the ghost of Rumplefuckingstiltskin or whatever his own mother made a deal with.”
Yael shivers, and there’s a nasty thought. What the hell do you have to do to make a thing like him sick? “Cry me a river,” she says. “You’re too much monster even for him, it seems. Now why am I hearing you got served up for supper?”
West actually giggles, a little boy sound she hasn’t heard for so many years. “Told you,” he says. “The dumbest reason. Somehow Lyle and his whole four brain cells figured it out –”
“ – not so somehow. There’s a resemblance.” A miracle that Charlie didn’t see it, but thankfully he’s still enough of a teenager for any perception beyond his own. Kids his age are self-absorbed to the point of psychopathy, but with a bit of luck he’ll grow out of it. The way West never did.
“He was jealous,” says West. “See? I told you it was dumb. Lyle was born on third base; he’s got the big house, the skinny wife and the fat baby. And the kid? Can’t fucking stand him. It’s hilarious to watch. Every time he tries to pick it up it screams like it’s on fire. The brat’s like four years old or whatever – at that age Daddy should be the center of their little universe – but not Lyle’s kid.”
She remembers him standing over Charlie’s crib and her heart skips a beat. There’s more he’s not telling her, but she’s afraid to ask, knowing it was more than just jealousy. People disappear in threes up north, and usually when the moon is full.
“And the rest?” she says. It’s now or never. “There were people going missing up there. Swamp wolves, I heard.”
It’s an excuse, but she can’t help throwing it out there. Give him a single out to see if he’ll compound the sin by lying to her. Yael’s still lurking behind the fridge, hushed now and sick somehow, like a drunk who’s been on a tear for so long that he ca
n no longer stand the smell of liquor.
“Well, yeah,” says West. “I guess they got a taste for it.”
Gloria lets out a breath she didn’t even know she’d been holding. Swamp wolves eat their own, as a rule. Now and again they’ll butcher an outsider to make a point, but church lady Sandra Dean was no outsider. Neither was the Mackie boy or unlucky Lupe Gonzalez. Besides, swamp wolves aren’t that dumb, even if the bones they found tossed beside the highway had scrape marks, like someone had pulled the flesh from the bone.
Yael sneaks up, whispering treason, trailing the obscene taste over her tongue. It’s so like salty pork that you wouldn’t even know it was forbidden unless you knew what you were eating, but she does. She raises a hand to her lips before she can stop herself and he sees the horror in her eyes all too clearly.
And he looks guilty as sin.
The worst part is that he looks as sly as he did when a chicken got killed ‘by accident’, or when she found what was left of the cat. But it’s nothing more than the guilty face a boy might show to his mother when he’s caught with his hand in the cookie jar or his own underpants.
“It’s you,” she says. “Isn’t it? You’re the one they’re calling the Keys Cannibal.”
He reaches for another smoke, taps it on the table before lighting it. And he doesn’t answer, because even he has the sense to know she doesn’t want or need to hear him say yes. Instead he just looks tired.
Told you so, says Yael, and if he had an ass Gloria would kick it right now. Punt him clean out the door.
“So,” says West. “You gonna turn me in, Ma?”
She shakes her head and watches the smoke rise. His expression shifts to something like desperation, and he peers at her through the clouds of tobacco.