If These Wings Could Fly

by Kyrie McCauley

  I think of the crawl space in the basement.

  We need to get out.

  “Girls, I have to get Mom,” I say. I don’t know what I’m doing, I just know I need to move. It’s always the waiting that gets to me.

  “Please, Leighton,” Campbell says, and her voice cracks. I don’t think any of us could explain it. We just know how bad this might get.

  Boom!

  I walk over to the window as another firework goes off, and I jump at the noise. It shoots into the night and breaks across the sky. Brilliant streams of red and yellow spill down toward earth. The outline of crows shimmers in the bright light. They are moving.

  I send the girls to the armoire, and kiss them.

  “I’ve got to get Mom, and then we are leaving,” I tell them, hoping my voice sounds assured and confident.

  I make my way downstairs. They are in the dark living room, sitting on the couch.

  “Mom?” I ask. She looks up. I can’t tell anything at all about her expression. But I feel the hairs at the nape of my neck prickle to attention. He stands, and I see it in the dark. His gun.

  I retreat, slowly, one step at a time. Mom rises from the couch, too. Follows him as he comes closer to me.

  “Is this what you guys wanted? Is this what you fucking wanted?” he asks. I stop moving.

  I’m silent, staring at him. Anything I say right now would be the wrong thing to say. I don’t blink. I don’t move.

  And then I hear that telltale creak of my bedroom door. This house that has healed itself a hundred times over, but not that creak, and thank God, because it’s how I know the girls are in danger. Campbell and Juniper are at the top of the stairs. Every curse word I’ve ever heard streams through my brain as I try to think of a way to get them to go back into that room.

  I don’t think they can see him from where they are, and even if they could, they wouldn’t see the gun, which hangs limp in his hand. Now I’ve stopped breathing, too, and it’s like I’m already practicing for death.

  Campbell must know something is deeply wrong. Maybe it is the rigidity of my body. My unwillingness to face her. It is my unmovement that turns her away. Whatever it is, it works. Their dark shapes at the top of the stairs retreat back into the room. I hear the faintest creak of the door as it closes.

  I breathe.

  I blink.

  I’m still here.

  “Come talk to me in the kitchen,” Mom says.

  She moves, the smallest, most calculated of movements.

  Then she takes a step. I know what she is trying to do, how she is moving tiny degrees at a time. Until she is between me and the gun.

  My heart shrinks, withers, dries up inside of me. The fear in my chest isn’t rattling in its cage anymore. It sits quiet, beaten into submission. It knows that I cannot afford to listen to it.

  Mom is in between us now. She reaches over, puts her hand on my arm.

  “Go upstairs, Leighton,” she says. Her eyes never leave the gun. “I’ll be right up.”

  No, you won’t.

  I know I should go. He would probably let me right now. But my feet won’t listen. They weigh a thousand pounds each, held down by every memory of my mother holding me and kissing my forehead and making everything better when I was sick or hurt. My mother staying in my bed when I couldn’t sleep, reading her book by the dim hall light for hours and showing by example that books give comfort when all else fails. Even when homes feel broken and treacherous. My mother putting her body between me and the gun. My mother, the most beautiful creature in the world, telling me she loves me, she loves me. She is gravity and I’m the world, and you can’t just make it stop. It’s physics. It is a force unto itself.

  She loves me. She loves me. She loves me.

  There.

  These words have meaning.

  I know that I can move now, so I do. I move, but it’s still like gravity, and I can’t control what pulls me.

  I can’t control it, but I can recognize that it is very, very stupid.

  I reach for her.

  Chapter Seventy

  THE FIRST THING I NOTICE IS the smell of smoke. Which doesn’t make any sense. Guns don’t start fires.

  Boom! A firework.

  Crack! A gun goes off.

  In a town already so loud that no one could possibly notice.

  I’m pushed back against the stairs, with Mom over me.

  “Leighton, are you hurt? Oh my God, Leighton,” Mom says, running her hands over me.

  “No,” I say, turning. It’s just the house again.

  The wall next to me is the wounded one. It’s been shot, and it’s bleeding.

  Someone needs to help it.

  “Shit,” he says. “Shit.”

  He backs away from the stairs. He doesn’t even check the wall.

  “Keys. Where are the keys?”

  And then there is a familiar sound, feathers on air.

  Joe flies into the living room through one of the open windows, landing on his shoulder.

  I think of the Morrigan, predicting the fates of men.

  “What the—” But before he can react, the crow moves, crossing to the coffee table, knocking the vase down, and it shatters against the floor. There are little blue marbles rolling everywhere. There are pennies and paper clips. The gifts left for Juniper. And in the middle of them, the keys to the truck, shining in the moonlight. Juniper must have hidden them inside. Another firework flares in the distance, and for a moment, everything is bright and clear and illuminated.

  And then Joe’s claws close over the keys, and he takes off again through the open window.

  Chapter Seventy-One

  SOME OTHER LEIGHTON BARNES DOES NOT survive this night. In a parallel universe, it is the end of the night, and the end of the year, and the end of her. I feel the truth of it in my chest, where the wild, caged thing is still living. It’s been spared, when a bullet should have found it.

  Another creature in another world wouldn’t be so lucky.

  But here, tonight, this bullet doesn’t split my skin or crack the bones of my chest or nick the small, soft wall of an artery. It just skims across my ribs, so close that I feel its heat, and buries itself in the wall of this house. This house that hides his violence.

  This time I watch it happen.

  It’s like the sliver of broken glass in my bedroom window. The vase on the table and the frames on the wall. The plaster where he struck the walls in anger. The black crack in the wall where I pressed the heels of my feet too hard because I was scared, opening the house and revealing its dark insides. This house built by anger.

  The kind of rage that pulses like a living thing and was poured into the concrete, nailed into the wooden beams that form the foundation—down deep in its guts. A house haunted by the things it refuses to let go of.

  The wall is moving. A gleam of black metal as the bullet falls out. The plaster shifts, dust like an imploding cloud coming back into place. The shattered pieces come together. And it’s this—the house fixing his violence again—that makes me realize we still aren’t safe. From him or this house or its strange, dark magic.

  This night isn’t over.

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  MOM LIFTS ME TO MY FEET and pushes me.

  Why do I smell smoke?

  “Leighton, go,” Mom says.

  He’s still holding the gun, staring at it like he only just realized it was in his hand. His hand closes over the gleaming metal. Squeeze. Relax. Weighing it. Weighing something. Realizing he cannot run away. His keys are gone.

  We have to go. But the only way to go is up. To the girls.

  “Go, Leighton.”

  I crawl up the stairs, hand over hand. I’m not hurt, but I’m tired. Like a hundred years just passed in the blink of an eye. Forever can exist in a moment. In the crack of a firework. The pull of a trigger.

  And then I don’t just smell smoke. I see it, coming from my room, and I know it’s the lantern, and I know it’s the girls.<
br />
  But how? I always hide the lighter. They don’t know where I keep it.

  Mom and I fall into my room, and she locks the door behind us.

  I don’t see Campbell or Juniper.

  The lantern is spilled, burning. As I watch, it catches the curtains of my window, the edge of my quilt.

  The book of matches that Joe left me is on my bedside table, open. Missing a few matches.

  Smoke starts to fill the room, and the girls are—

  I hear a muted scream. The armoire.

  I run across the room and bang on it. It’s locked. I hear Campbell coughing, Juniper sobbing.

  I pry at the locked doors with my fingernails. Panic swells inside of me. The girls. The flames grow into a wall of heat beside me, and I’m coughing so hard I can’t catch my breath. I scratch at the door until my fingers start to bleed. Why is it locked? My fingers slide over the keyhole, and it’s burning hot.

  The keyhole.

  I run to my dresser while Mom takes over prying at the armoire’s door. I grab the rusted key that Joe left. The key we thought was lost years ago, tucked into a safe place by a worried grandfather.

  At the armoire, the key slides right in, and turns.

  The doors swing open, and the girls fall out. Their skin is hot to the touch. Shiny tracks of tears mark their flushed cheeks.

  Mom lifts Juniper into her arms.

  “Leighton!” Cammy says between coughs. “Are you hurt? We heard the gun.”

  “No one is hurt,” I say. “You started a fire?”

  “You’re bleeding,” Cammy says.

  I look down at my hands. They are covered in blood, but I’m not hurt. The house is hurt. And now it’s burning.

  Something slams into my bedroom door. Shit.

  Mom understands before I do. We are trapped.

  “We can’t put it out,” she says, coughing through every word. “We have to go.”

  Another slam on the door, and the lock shifts.

  We usher the girls to the window.

  Boom! Fireworks light up the sky outside.

  We make it onto the roof outside of my room, but it isn’t far enough. I hear another slam of the door inside. Wood splinters but holds.

  “Keep going,” I tell them, and we shuffle along the roof until we are outside of Mom’s bedroom. We are out of the smoke, for now.

  Higher, something in me screams. The creature. Fear. It knows where I need to go, and I know to listen. No sooner does the thought cross my mind than something breaks inside the house. He’s in my room. But at the same moment, I hear another sound—the front door. I look over my shoulder and see he’s out of the burning house, but only for a moment.

  A chaos of crows descend, and they drive him back.

  They force him into the house.

  And I see them at every window, cawing and diving. Making it impossible for him to leave, even as smoke billows out, choking everything in its path.

  I hear sirens in the distance, but they sound so far away. Too far.

  The smoke thickens, but we can’t go back, so instead we lift the girls, cupping our hands under their feet, pushing them onto the highest part of the house. Mom helps me next, and then I pull Mom up. Smoke streams out of the bedroom windows, burning our eyes.

  I hear the glass of the window shatter, and outside of my room, something emerges—but it isn’t him. It’s a shadow, moving across the roof of the porch. It’s some part of this house, breaking out, coming after us. A shadow in the shape of rage.

  We’ve gone as far as we can. I hear a noise behind us and shift, careful to balance. At the far end of the roof, half hidden in smoke, the figure rises. It’s on the roof with us. It is little more than a silhouette moving toward us. Still, it comes. It hurts to look at it—it pulses with anger. All the rage he ever felt, detached from him, unleashed on us. And here we perch, with nowhere to run.

  I grip Campbell’s hand on one side and Junie’s on the other. Mom stands on the other side of Juniper. Soon they’ll see the shadow emerging from the smoke.

  But when I look from side to side, their eyes aren’t on the figure in the smoke. All three are calm, looking straight ahead.

  I follow their gaze.

  The crows are coming.

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  I DID NOT SET THE FIRE, but I might as well have. I could tell you that I didn’t mean for this to happen, but that would be a lie.

  I didn’t set the fire, but I willed it. I dreamed it. I harbored the ill wish deep inside of me. It was nestled in my stomach, feeding on all the fear that I’ve swallowed living here. Burn, baby, burn.

  I did not set the fire.

  But I wasn’t about to put it out once it finally began.

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  FALLING IS LIKE THIS.

  You take a leap of faith in the dark. The sky is on fire above you, and the house is on fire below. You feel the roof beneath you start to give, and there is nowhere to go but out, into the night. I know it’s Joe out there. I know they will save us from this, even as an inferno opens under our feet.

  So we jump.

  And they are there—cawing, clawing, and covering us in feathers.

  They catch us.

  Off the burning home and away from the burning night, we are carried by the crows.

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  THEY SET US DOWN ON THE other side of the road.

  Before even a moment passes, Campbell takes off toward the house.

  Mom screams, reaching, her fingers barely catching at Campbell’s shirt, but it’s not enough. Campbell pulls free. And I realize she’s going after him, in the burning house. She’s going to save him from the fire she set, and I wish more than anything that I’d started that fire so the guilt would be mine, because I think I’d let him burn. I know I would.

  But not Campbell.

  I race toward the house. The crows don’t guard the door anymore, and when I get inside, I see why—he’s unconscious on the floor. Campbell is straining to pull his heavy weight toward the door.

  My lungs are on fire, choking on the black smoke filling the room.

  “Campbell.” I gasp for air, but just cough harder. “Go. Go!”

  She refuses, pulling, crying and sobbing and coughing violently. So I reach out and grab his shirt, pulling with her. It’s the only way to get her out. Flames flicker up the doorway to the kitchen, and I feel them catch on the hem of my dress.

  Campbell smacks at them, putting them out.

  We pull, and once we are at the door, we roll him out, over into the yard. Mom and Juniper run forward and help us pull him across the street.

  We hear a crunching sound. At first, I think I feel it underneath me, like the whole world is about to split open, but it’s really the house, folding in upon itself.

  It holds for a heartbeat. Two.

  Shudders.

  And then it collapses.

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  WE HUDDLE IN THE STREET, TOES numb and hearts unsure. The EMTs examine us while we answer the police officer’s questions. Mrs. Stieg brings us blankets and brews coffee for Mom, the officers, and emergency responders.

  An oxygen mask is placed over Campbell’s face, and my dress is cut open over my ribs, showing a bloody track where the bullet grazed my side. I guess the blood was mine.

  At some point, Bill DiMarco arrives, and begins to say words we’ve waited for—like arrest warrant. He tells us the violation of the order, the endangerment of children, the gun being fired, and the injuries we sustained will all make jail unavoidable.

  But I step away from him and get as close to the remains of the house as the fire chief allows.

  I think about that shadow that followed us. How close it came to claiming us. How easily we could have been consumed by whatever evil thing it was.

  A legacy of anger. An inheritance of fear.

  But this time, the house won’t erase his violence.

  Its ashes are as dark as a crow’s wings.r />
  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  WHEN THE SUN BEGINS TO RISE, so do the crows in our yard.

  The crows in the tree follow.

  There’s a flash of gray amid the black, and the three of us look up.

  “Bye, Joe,” Juniper whispers.

  The birds flock, building momentum. Like dominoes falling, but in reverse, each following the last up into the dark sky, until there are thousands of crows above us. And then tens of thousands. The sunrise is crimson, reflecting off the black feathers until it looks like the crows are burning as they rise, like a hundred thousand phoenixes soaring over Auburn.

  It is a new day. A new year.

  It is like ending a nightmare and waking up to a new world.

  Campbell and Juniper come to stand on either side of me, each slipping a hand into mine, and I feel something shift inside of me. That winged thing in my chest settles. Silent. Safe.

  We’re home.

  Auburn, Pennsylvania

  January 1

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  Acknowledgments

  Just a short time ago, this was not a book. It was only book-shaped. And it would have stayed as a book-shaped thing (and not a real book) if not for the help of some incredibly talented and gracious people. Time is precious, and they spent a great deal of theirs reading and advising me on how to make this messy work-in-progress into a story. I’m so grateful for each read-through, every note, every suggestion that made a lightbulb flicker on for a part of this story that was missing or dark.

  First, a heartfelt thank you to the entire team at Pitch Wars, who make writing dreams come true. It’s a first stepping stone, but it’s a huge one, and I’ve met so many wonderful people through the community you’ve created. Thank you to the 2017 Pitch Wars group, which feels like home. It’s the place I come back to when I’m feeling lost (and when I’m lost in my feelings).