Nightingale, Sing

by Karsten Knight

  “Baking cookies,” I replied, at the same time that Jack said, “Filing taxes.”

  He tucked the fleece blanket up around Echo’s neck. “I have to get going now, kiddo. But I’m sure Sabra will be happy to read you more ancient smut when you’re feeling up to it.” As he stood up to leave, he glanced at his watch and I caught a disconcerting gravity in his eyes, something brooding that I’d missed while he was reading to Echo. When he realized I was studying him, he flashed me a smile that was unmistakably forced.

  I followed Jack as far as the door, where I snagged him by the elbow. “Everything alright, Jack?”

  “Yeah, fine,” he said absently, almost by reflex. “Hey, so Dad’s birthday is Sunday. You going to visit him?”

  “Dunno,” I replied. “What am I going to do, slide him a cupcake between the prison bars? The warden will probably cut it open anyway to make sure we didn’t bake a shiv into it.”

  Jack feigned a laugh, but his eyes darted to his watch again. I punched him on the shoulder. “You got a hot Friday night date that we’re keeping you from?”

  “I have to make it over to the Museum of Fine Arts before it closes,” he said. “This history course project is going to be the death of me.”

  Then he slipped out into the foyer. I watched his blurred outline through the opaque glass window, until I heard Echo speak behind me. “Sabra, will you read me another story?” she asked weakly. “Just one more and I think I’ll be able to fall asleep for good.”

  I plopped down at the foot of her bed and picked up the leather-bound book. Echo offered an encouraging smile, so I flipped to a random page and began to read. “There once was a king named Midas, and all that he touched would turn into gold …”

  Long Wharf

  I stood at the wharf railing, gazing out over the dark harbor waters. October had only begun, but I knew that winter was already well on its way into Boston. I could feel it in the extra bite in the wind coming off the sea. I could see it across the now empty Harborwalk, which normally bustled with visitors soaking up the sun and drinking margaritas during the warmer summer months.

  Winter signaled more than the death of beach weather, though. In a matter of weeks, the pedicab business would go into hibernation as the temperatures continued to fall and the baseball season rolled to an end. With my bike parked in a garage for the long, temperamental New England winter, I would lose the one outlet that had carried me through the last six months.

  The streets of Boston were my fortress, my escape when the weight of everything pressed down on me—the one place I could draw a deep breath when I felt as though I’d hit rock bottom.

  But on days like this, when Echo seemed to be losing the fight against that bastard illness, I realized I hadn’t really hit rock bottom yet at all.

  There were fathoms of hell I had yet to experience, and might still before the year was even over.

  My cell phone vibrated in the pocket of my bicycling pants—I had a nightly alarm set to remind me when it was time to catch the last train home out of South Station. It was only as I heard the ringtone, the 1812 Overture, that I realized it was my brother calling.

  I leaned on the Harborwalk railing and pressed the answer button. Before I could greet Jack, his voice anxiously spilled out through the speakerphone:

  “Sabra, you need to listen to me carefully. Before I lose consciousness.”

  My throat instantly constricted. I raised the phone closer to my ear. Jack’s words were slurred and breathless, and I was having trouble hearing him. “Jack, what’s going on? Why do you sound like you’re drunk?”

  “Listen,” he repeated, and now I could hear something else—hard, uneven footsteps against concrete. Jack was running. “I did it for Echo. I thought … I thought I could save her. But he figured out what I was up to.”

  This time I froze. I had no idea what Jack was babbling about, but it made my hackles rise. Then there was the fact that Jack, the good egg of the bunch, had never touched a drop of alcohol in his life as far as I knew.

  “Just tell me where you are,” I urged him. “You can explain everything to me then.”

  There was a pause, and his footsteps slowed on the other end. Finally, he mumbled, “Seaport … You’ll never make it … to me in time … before they do.”

  The Seaport? I directed my gaze across the water to the southeast, where the old piers jutted out into the harbor like broken teeth. It couldn’t be more than a mile on foot to the Seaport district.

  I took off running down the wharf, my feet slapping against the wooden boards. “I’m coming for you, Jack,” I promised.

  “No!” he half-slurred, half-growled into the phone. “I’m not important … anymore. Only … Echo is. You need to … find the next journal page … even after … I’m gone.”

  “Listen to me, Jack: If someone is after you, you need to hide until I can find you. But please, stay on the phone with me. Stay conscious and stay with me.”

  The receiver grew quiet once more, and at first I thought I’d lost him already to whatever poison was in his veins. But then Jack drew in a deep, resigned breath and said as clearly as he could:

  “I sent you a postcard. Don’t call the police and don’t let them catch you. And tell Echo”—another labored breath—“tell her to hold on.”

  The line went dead.

  I cursed and picked up speed. I sprinted down the sidewalk as taxis zipped by me on Atlantic Avenue. Both of my frantic attempts to redial Jack went to voicemail.

  Finally, I reached Seaport Boulevard and took a hard left onto the Moakley Bridge. Between the misty haze that lingered in the air from the earlier rain and the ghostly glow of the streetlights, the bridge looked ethereal at this time of night. In another hour, it would briefly fill up with patrons stumbling home from the waterfront bars, but for now, it remained nearly empty of any traffic.

  Halfway across the bridge, I saw him.

  To anyone else, he might have looked like a crazed man, but I could recognize my brother even through the thick shroud of sea mist. He was running with an exaggerated limp. I screamed out his name, and when he spotted me on the opposite sidewalk, he stumbled out into the street.

  I intercepted him in the middle of the road, catching him by the shoulders right as he fell. While I cradled him, he blinked up at me, the light behind his eyes dimming. “Jack!” I cupped his face in my hands. “Please, stay with me. I’ll get you help.” I tried to pry the cell phone out of my pocket.

  “The postcard,” he whispered. “I shouldn’t have sent it. They’ll just find you, too. Then I’ll have lost … both my sisters.”

  I had only started to dial 9-1-1 when headlights illuminated the fog around us. The tuned-up engine of a car roared through the quiet night, and I looked up to see a silver Ford Mustang rocketing down Seaport Boulevard, heading for the bridge.

  In a panic, I slipped out from under Jack and stood between him and the oncoming car. “Help!” I screamed, while frantically waving my arms over my head. I lit up my cell phone, praying that the driver would see the glow of the screen through the mist.

  Instead, the driver accelerated. The Mustang reached the head of the bridge and I froze as the blinding twin headlights zeroed in on where I was standing.

  No signs of braking.

  No signs of veering.

  The car was headed straight for us.

  As time slowed down in that instant, I caught a glimpse of the driver inside, her smile gleaming with victory. And maybe it was a trick of the light playing over the windshield …

  … But I swear I saw two silvery horns spiraling out of her head.

  It was the devil, come to collect.

  Powerful arms shoved me from behind—Jack’s. The hard push propelled me into the opposite lane where I hit the ground hard.

  In the moments when I was tumbling to the pavement, I heard four things.

  The final demonic crescendo of the Mustang’s engine.

  A fleshy thump.

  T
he smash of something hitting the windshield.

  A second, wetter thump.

  By the time that I had righted myself, Jack lay in a mangled lump in the middle of the bridge, unmoving, while the Mustang zoomed off, disappearing into the entrance to Interstate 93.

  Even as I screamed and ran to Jack’s side, blood was already pooling in the street. I flipped Jack over, praying it would be just like the first time I caught him. He’d blink his dazzling green eyes up at me and everything would be okay.

  Instead, those same eyes gazed lifelessly through me into the starless city sky and I knew that Jack was gone.

  I tilted my head back and wailed into the night, a tortured, banshee scream, before I blacked out with my brother’s broken body still cradled in my arms.

  Jack was gone, but the fog that had descended over the Seaport the night he died stalked me wherever I went.

  For a whole week, I merely existed, a hollow vessel sailing through an endless mist with no captain and no destination. I loathed myself for not feeling during the times of numbness, but then prayed for the numbness when the harsh pain arthritically settled back into my bones. I stumbled through seven days of meetings with the police and arrangements with the funeral director and finally the funeral itself. My father howled loudest of anyone there, until the corrections officers escorting him had no choice but to drag him out of Saint George’s and back to his cell at Cedar Junction.

  Then there was Echo. My mother and I alternated shifts by her bedside, each of us taking the other’s place when the grief overwhelmed the brave masks we wore to spare her from seeing us in agony. There had even been talk of whether we should conceal Jack’s passing from her for the time being, for the sake of her health, but she was far more observant than the average third grader. We had to tell her.

  Echo was the only thing that kept me going that interminable week. I feared that Jack’s death would steal that last strand of vitality that my sister, my soldier, had clung to these last few months. So I watched over her every minute that I could, a stony gargoyle keeping sentry over the one life I treasured most.

  The day after the funeral, while Mom watched Echo, I drove out to Cape Cod to visit Jack’s favorite beach in Chatham. He always loved coming here in the fall, when the cool air and autumn storms had shooed the tourists and seasonal residents away until next summer. Jack had taught me to swim on this beach when I was five. At first I had refused to even set foot in the ocean, terrified of being carried out to sea by a swift rip current—ironic for a girl whose last name is “Tides.” Jack, a patient and understanding old soul even when he was in first grade, had scooped up a handful of sand and slipped it into the back pocket of my shorts.

  “What was that for?” I’d asked him.

  He’d smiled at me. “If you take the beach with you wherever you go, you can never really drift away from it, can you?”

  As I now stood at the water’s edge, the dusk wind billowing my hoodie around me, I flung a message in a bottle out into the Atlantic and watched it slip soundlessly into the waves. It contained a short poem by Walt Whitman that I’d found framed on Jack’s desk at home:

  Keep your face always toward the sunshine

  And shadows will fall behind you.

  Before I left, as a tribute to Jack, I gathered a handful of the Cape Cod sand and stuffed it into the pocket of my jeans.

  That lump of sand somehow gave me courage later that day as I walked into the police station in Government Center. An officer escorted me to a spare, forgettable room with cinderblock walls. I’d made an appointment for two o’clock, but it wasn’t until an hour later that someone finally entered to greet me.

  The detective couldn’t have been older than forty. Between his thinning, close-cropped hair and general air of sternness, my first impression was that he must be ex-military. Instead of police blues, he sported a button-down shirt and tie, with freshly pressed slacks. He might have been a day trader if it weren’t for the gun holstered by his suspenders.

  He reached an enormous hand across the table and shook mine with a rock-crushing grip. “You must be Sabra. My name is Detective Louis Grimshaw.”

  I studied him warily. “You’re in charge of my brother’s case? I feel like I spoke to just about every other officer in the city last week—except for you.”

  “I took an active interest in the incident,” he replied, settling into the chair. “Before we talk about anything else, I want to say how sorry I am for your loss.”

  The pleasantries of bereavement meant little to me. I’d heard nothing but how “sorry” people were for seven days now. What I really wanted were answers. “I don’t want to waste your time, Detective, so I’ll get right to it,” I said. “I’m not here today to give a new statement. I’m here to address the final report that one of your officers released about …” My mind flashed back to the fog, the bridge, the Mustang. I swallowed hard. “… about what happened to Jack.”

  Detective Grimshaw flipped open the manila folder in front of him and thumbed through the papers until he found the summary in question. “I wrote that report myself, and I promise I was remarkably thorough with the information that I collected. Did you feel like something was missing?”

  “How about the truth?”

  He gazed over the top of the folder. “Care to elaborate, Ms. Tides?” In an instant, the compassion and patience he’d shown a minute ago evaporated.

  I softened my tone. “The police log said that he was killed in a hit-and-run, most likely by a drunk driver who fled the scene of the accident when she realized what she’d done.”

  The detective blinked twice. “And?”

  “And if you’d listened to any of what I told the investigators, you’d know that this wasn’t an accident at all.” The detective looked ready to interrupt me already, but I soldiered on. “Look at the evidence. When my brother called me, he was clearly being pursued by someone who wished him harm. In fact, he was running with a limp, which means that he must have escaped an attack when I got the call. Then there was the car itself.” I counted another piece of evidence on my fingers. “You say it was a drunk driver? Then why did she speed up when she saw me? Why did she aim the car for us? The report claims that the Mustang lost control and veered into our lane, but I was there. The driver was in complete control the whole time.”

  “Ah, yes. The driver who you observed had”—Grimshaw glanced down at the file—“devil’s horns?” The corner of his lips twitched. Was he trying to suppress a smile?

  I refused to be bullied. The fog that had surrounded me all week had suddenly lifted. Every detail from that night reemerged. “What about the brake marks?”

  “There were no brake marks,” Grimshaw replied quickly.

  I pounded my fist on the table. “Exactly. Try to put yourself in the brain of a drunk driver. You’re three sheets to the wind, your reflexes are slow, and your vision is swimming. Even if you somehow didn’t see us in the path of your car until it was too late, what would be the first thing you’d do after that body struck your windshield?” I waited, hoping that the detective would answer for me, but he remained silent. “You’d hit the brakes, Detective Grimshaw. You’d hit them hard. Even if you then decided to jet off onto I-93 northbound to save your own ass before the police responded, for a split second, your brain would succumb to pure reflexes—and reflex says your foot goes straight for the brake pedal. There. Were. No. Brake marks.” I tapped each word with finality against the wooden tabletop.

  Grimshaw made a steeple with his fingers. “So you’re saying that the absence of brake marks is concrete proof that your brother’s hit-and-run was intentional?” His voice was flat, patronizing. “While I admire your deductive reasoning skills, drawing a whole bunch of ill-founded conclusions based on the intoxicated ravings of your brother and some theory about brake marks isn’t ‘evidence,’ as you called it. It’s conjecture.” I opened my mouth to interrupt, but this time, Grimshaw cut me off. “Furthermore, as for your brother’s ine
briation and the injury he sustained to his leg, those can all be explained. Another witness came forward.”

  I squinted at Grimshaw. “What other witness?” Had they been purposely withholding knowledge about my brother’s whereabouts that night from me?

  The detective seemed to be considering how much to divulge. “A bartender who was on duty at the Nightingale, a nightclub in the Seaport, on the evening of the accident.” He stressed the final word like he was trying to stick another dagger through my heart. “Apparently, your brother snuck into the Nightingale with a fake ID and went on quite the bender. Downed a few too many shots of bourbon, started throwing pint glasses at the bartender’s head. Two bouncers had to drag him out of the place, and when he took a swing at one of them, they tossed him out into the street, where he busted his knee. As for his raving about being pursued …” Grimshaw shrugged. “Probably paranoia that the bouncers were following him.”

  “What’s the bartender’s name?” I demanded.

  “Why, so you can harass my witness? Fat chance.”

  “Because my brother was a saint and everyone knows it.” I had raised my voice enough that a female officer walking by the room’s solitary window stared in at me. She could come in and taser me for all I cared. “Tell me how a straight-A history dork goes from spending his nights researching obscure Revolutionary War texts to getting completely hammered, tearing apart a bar, and brawling with bouncers.”

  “Pull the wool off your eyes,” Grimshaw barked. “The pressures of college, a deadbeat father doing ten-to-fifteen in max-security, a sister who’s battling cancer, and a mother who’s probably not around all that much? I’ve got no doubt in my mind that your brother, as angelic as you thought he was, finally hit his breaking point. People have snapped for less.” He closed the file in front of him. “It’s perfectly natural for someone in your position to look for meaning in a senseless tragedy. But the real tragedy is that sometimes there’s no meaning to be found.”