He heard—and sensed—Malin behind him. Her pacing on the living room rug had ended and, as the tiny hollow sprinkles of water quit making sound in the bottom of the metal sink, he caught the minute padding of her shoes on the tile floor of the foyer, just in front of the stairs. There was another sound then, as well: Tinktink-tinktinktink.
That noise was outside, on the other side of the window. He glanced up and, through the glass, he saw a small yellow crow, bright like a highlighter marker, cocking its head this way and that. The bird moved tenderly on the metal railing of the deck which started at the back door and ran around to this, the west side of the cabin. His claws on the cold metal were distinct and apparent.
The look on the bird’s face was empty, but then, do birds really have differing looks? Differing moods? Transposed on the sight of the bird was a vision of Malin behind him. On the glass her dark hair was a sheet standing out against the whiteness of the trees and the yard and the little yellow harbinger. Her arms looked like they were raised—
Faraway, faraway, faraway. Sonofabitch. Like the lock of a door clicking into place, Zeb’s mind fell across sick-inducing realization.
The gut, Malin herself had said, was more right than wrong. More correct than the head, a lot of the time.
Without even thinking, without even putting the pieces together in their entirety, he whirled around. That kettle, half-full of bottled water, swung into the air in a wide arc. It clanked across Malin’s scalp—the Druid’s scalp—and those sunglasses flew off, hitting the front of the stove and then falling to the floor.
She let out a holler and the half-empty bottle of water fell from Zeb’s hand into the sink’s basin: plop-glug-glugglug. He saw her eyes for the first time since she had arrived, and they were, he already knew it, not hers.
The tea kettle clanged on the floor, with the frayed cord trailing it down. The collision of it on the tile sent a spray of water up across his arm’s old scar and across his face. Both the sound and the sensation of the cold spurt of water were like an instantaneous wake-up call. They were the snap of reality hitting his mind, the realization that this was all happening. Zeb, in that instant of epiphany, was past her as she cringed back from the blow, falling.
He had his hands on the BMW’s keys which had been sitting on the kitchen table, but arms like tentacles wrapped around him and he felt himself shoved forward, past the front oak door, spilling the keys on the tiles. With a new weight on top of him, he fell forward to the carpeted threshold of the living room with a padded thump. Here the light was faded further than even a few minutes before.
Malin was on top of him and her latch around his midriff felt impossibly strong. She screamed at the room, screamed that her chin dimple was gone and that it was never coming back. Then she started muttering, mocking, low, like the sardonic growl of a wild dog: —like a little piece of me is in everything you do—like a little piece of me is in everything you do—like a little piece of me is in everything you do you do you do YOU DO—
With sweating hands and face, he tried pulling away from her, letting out a grunt of effort. Her breath was on the back of his neck like a shallow escape of gas from a sewer. It was hot and nothing like he had felt it before. This was not Malin.
He reached out with desperation, looking back only once on those empty eyes. And then, trying to pull himself forward, away from her, he caught sight of those two living room windows, the sickly one and the healthy one which was shadowed by the triplet pines. Beyond them was a white front yard of snow, scoured in dark bodies of birds.
Crows. Hundred of crows.
They were mulling about, flapping wings and moving among one another. Some swooped up into treetops, others swooped down. They lined the front deck’s railing, the deck itself, the hoods and roofs of the Beemer and of Malin’s rental car in the drive. They went outwards from the front of the house, fanning like a concentrated sheet of black particles, writhing and moving on an underlay of white softness, finally seeming to dissipate near the gate and the water’s eventual edge.
But they were silent. Zeb heard no squall of dueling caws, and no troubled cries from the front sprawl of land. Only some odd, intermingled wing-flappings, and those were deceptive among the brushings of carpet and the grunts of he and the Druid.
His face was filled with fright, fury, and confusion. The processing of too much information and no outlet for comprehension. He strained forward, further into the room, still with the Druid—Malin creature attached to him, trying to scrape her way further on top of him. An arm reached out, his, flailing for the leg of a chair or the couch but he came up short, groping awkwardly instead on one of the two-by-four legs on his makeshift easel. Previously a soft blonde and now a bright putrid yellow, it toppled backwards resting on the couch which lay under an equally vile-shaded drop-cloth. The sheet that Zeb had pulled over the canvas fell away, revealing the finished portrait of Malin. The surprise was ruined, but the Druid’s eyes didn’t even find it, didn’t even care. Zeb looked back and saw those eyes that were not hers. Her tormenting mutters had turned to screams: —You love me—And that means I can get away with anything—You love me—I CAN GET AWAY WITH anyTHING—
Near the spot where the easel had stood, Zeb’s palette knife fell to a rest on the carpet. It had been sitting on the lip with the canvas and had been knocked loose. He reached out for it, snagged it, then thrust back with an uncomfortable and hesitant swipe of its dull blade. Not meant for cutting anything, but only scraping paint in a flat draw across a surface, the thrust did hardly anything. But it did draw blood from a blunt slash on the Druid’s arm. She flinched back, her screams gone from the air, and that was enough for Zeb to pull free and squirm to his haunches further away from her. She got to her feet in a more controlled motion than his scramble and she was now in the middle of the room facing Zeb with a ready-stance that made her look like she would leap at him any second. Both Zeb and she were conscious of the crows’ thousands-strong shadows thrashing against the light on their faces and the walls behind them. Even the painting of Malin’s beautiful face was a swarm of otherworldly movement.
The instinct to flee was rising. But he held on to that palette knife with a hand that trembled in a tight, moist fist. Maybe she can still come back. Maybe she’s not really gone. Maybe Malin is still in there somewhere. His thoughts were a scourge of desperation, making the idea of bursting forward and slashing her skin further seem impossible. He just couldn’t.
With his palette knife arm outstretched he encircled her, around the back wall of the living room where the couch was. Towards the stairs. Once there, he didn’t know what he would do. Lunge forward to the door, bend down and pick up the keys? But that would give her the opportunity to dive at him again. And he knew the Druid to be irrational.
Resting his fisted right hand on the newel post, he contemplated how hard that movement would be: moving forward, reaching down to snag the keys that he could almost now see on the floor by the door, then turning the knob, then pulling it open and thrusting out onto the deck, down the steps, and to the car. He would never get there before she leapt on him again. It seemed illogical.
Their eyes were locked. Down her cheek, from a spot nestled in her dark and shiny hair, there was a line of blood which caught the stray light. His body was drained of power and he felt shaky, hesitant of any movement he might try, sure that his body would give way when he tried to grab those keys. He could see the tips of them now, as his point of view rounded the corner of the door’s threshold. He was at the stairs, unsure of where she was going to go. Her weight was shifting and her face was strained. Her look changed. Her eyes left his. She caught sight of the painting across the back of the couch.
She screamed, and that made him flinch enough to abandon his plan and scramble up the stairs, sure she would be on him, clutching his legs as soon as he made his attempt.
But she didn’t move.
She kept screaming.
And the screams turned to giant, wrenc
hing sobs.
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Nevermore is what’s in store.
Sadie Nadine stood at the blobby, misshapen left-hand panel of glass in the living room. She stared beyond her own reflection towards the closed gate and the lake water where her husband Oliver and the other men were trawling away from the edge in a path of white wake.
The window’s dribbling pattern laid intricate line work across her troubled face.
Bending over the sink, after Oliver had left, she had simply let loose and wept. Her tears had fallen into the sink’s basin, a tinkling pattern of hollow metal pattered by rain. At their hog farm, north of Edan, her own mother, Bea, used to have a saying that she would repeat aloud as she wet a rag with her spit and pressed it to Sadie’s brow or Sicily’s cheek, or her own black eye. This was after Pop-Sammy had thrown a punch or a saucer from the kitchen table. She wanted to leave more than anything, Sadie knew, but she never did. Couldn’t, Sadie supposed. Just couldn’t get the courage to walk on. And instead, Beatrice died on the same day as her husband—in his house and while his breakfast sat burned on the stove top.
“Nevermore is what’s in store,” Mum had used to say as she would wet that old standby rag, one which had long before been permanently stained pink. And in the kitchen across from Lake Charlemagne, under her breath, Sadie repeated her mother’s mantra through a set of stiff lips. But she was thankful it had only been a whisper when she heard the front screen door bang behind her. She quickly wiped at her wet face and turned about to find Daniela had come in looking for Zeb.
The girl’s arrival was like a nail in a coffin, but in Zeb who still stood half concealed in the bathroom off the kitchen, the black shingles of anger were gone. Sadie couldn’t even bring herself to be angry. She was worn, weathered, and resigned.
So all she did was move further passed Daniela who stood looking startled. Sadie passed the threshold and went into the living room. Here she was, looking out at the flat-deck boat with its fading trail in the water. And she raised a tentative arm to wave back at her husband while her other arm tenderly laid across her stomach.
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The Druid fell to her knees.
The streams of sobs came like rancid poison pouring from the corners of her eyes. A painting is like a living breathing beast; it goes where it wants, it becomes what it wants. Zeb had known this for years but the Druid was just discovering the form’s secret. In this portrait of Zeb’s she saw herself, or rather Malin Holmsund, the Druid’s most recent quarry.
But beyond that, she saw the eyebrows and eye line of Malin’s father fused with her own now grown-up features. For the Malin-part of the Druid it was the first time she had seen such a similarity with her father, though she had stared at her own face for years and wished for his strength and for any hint that he was still with her.
It wracked her with guilt and sadness. And she remembered the terrible end they had come to, both her parents. The Druid couldn’t help it; she was simply struck down by the hallucination contained on the brightly painted canvas. The face stared up at her and it became her father. He tried to speak and in her head, in a squall of countless voices, she heard it, distinct and prickly with clarity. Time for the news, baby daughter. Gather ‘round. Time for the news.
Her sight was hazy, her arm stung where the palette knife had drawn a dull and thick slash. Her head ached at a dry point of throbbing where the tea kettle had struck her. But she didn’t feel that. Only this. Only the voices in that image on the painted surface.
It became several things then, one after the next, without warning, like a living slide-show she never thought she would have to suffer through again.
All these lives in her head, all these people, they all babbled, squirmed, and bled together, like the oil color had come alive. It was a mortal being, flowing with undrying wetness, never solidifying. It was an unrelenting countenance, a set of successive and terrible reminders of all she had seen and tried to push past.
The picture was the girl who used to ride on the back of Clutch’s motorcycle along stretches of California beach. The roar of the engine was in her eyes and her hair was tousled by the coastal breeze. It was a wife and daughters in Stoughton where thirty wonderful years of life in a new land had come...and passed. It was Malin’s mom and dad, in their house in Stockholm and it was Will Nash’s two little boys with golden hair like cherubs. As evening light surmounted that of the day, they were swinging in the yard on the store-bought set their new father had put together for them.
And then the painting was her own little girls; the two princesses asleep on each other’s shoulders in the back of the shiny chrome and yellow Thunderbird. It was their mother too, with dark eyes and knowing smile. It was her with rounded belly ready to bring a third daughter into the world. It was her...
The shadows of a thousand dark-feathered birds thrashed and volleyed across her and the room’s walls deformed and became maligned by the spider-glass of a dying window pane, but she saw none of it. She had fallen to the living room floor, unaware of everything except that full and vacant world inside the liquid paint. The bawling came and came and the Druid couldn’t stop it, not even as Zeb found his way up the stairs and away from her.
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Daniella’s legs were long and white. She rested the back of her hip against the tailgate of the Ford truck, only the bed of which remained, and those legs had a wet, smooth shine on them. Like they’d been shaved that morning, or freshly waxed.
Her eyes were on Zeb as he, under a mat of messy little-boy hair that fell in his eyes, bent down and traced a finger through the dirt, twigs and scraggly grass carpet bed of the clearing.
“What do you drawing?” she asked him, crossing her bare arms against her chest and the white top she was wearing.
“Your name.”
A breeze came, through the trees and through the girl, as Zeb finished the last stroke on the a. She stiffened, and Zeb saw a sheet of gooseflesh rise on her perfect white legs as he got up from his knees and dusted the filth from his hands. “Do you ever miss home?” he asked her. “Your real home. Where you come from. Ever miss it?”
“Yes,” she said. “And no.”
She tightened her arms against her breasts, the chill moving up to her bare shoulders now too. She searched her limited vocabulary. “I miss my mum and dad...sometimes.” Her English was passable but coarse at points, jerky. “But...what is that ex-pression? The Here...and...The...Now? One must concen-trate...on the...present. Correct?”
“Yeah...” Zeb said, looking past her at the multitudes of waxy green and dark khaki leaves rustling in the trees, having heard that expression somewhere before: The here and now.
That sound, of the wind in his ears moving through the leaves like that, was so lonely sounding to him. He squinted his eyes. She watched him and then spoke again, after formulating the sentence in English in her head.
“Do you have...dreams?”
“Naw, not really...”
“But...you think about the...fu-ture? Do you have those dreams?”
“Never really thought about it.”
“This is why I come. This is why I...am...here. For my dreams. Here...in this country...you can ‘Do Anything. Be Anything’ you...dream. No?”
Her face was immediately strained and he said to her, “You look mad.”
“No. Only worried...” Her eyes left him. “Mum used to tell sister Calita and me...we each were to given gifts from God. The gift to Calita given was hope. To Daniela, mum said, was given worry...She always would laugh to that...What is that expression? “The cross that I bear?” That is my worry: a gift and...a cross.”
Zeb smiled at Daniela, not really understanding, but he saw that her eyes matched the sky past the treetops surrounding their clearing. She smiled back and, no longer shivering, she joined him on the narrow path back to the cottage.
<> <> <>
Zeb launched upwards, skipping steps, winding around the corner at the top of the stairwa
y like a top. He moved down the narrow hallway towards his parents’ bedroom thinking that neither upstairs room had a lock on its door. But his parents’ room contained a small vanity set—a low table and a chair. He swung the door shut behind him, and with a hand steadier than he thought it should be, he propped the chair’s back under the door knob. For the time being, he was sealed in.
The crying from downstairs had faded sometime in the last few seconds and now he was unsure where the Druid was. Still in the living room, near the painting? For a second, he fought the desire to flop on the bed and try dreaming this all away. He remained standing, legs crooked, listening. Waiting for darkness to sheath him had never worked before. And now the Druid was a part of Malin. She was not coming back. And for that, Zeb wanted to let loose and bawl.
He half expected her to explode against the bedroom door with the same force as the dark-skinned stranger had in his father’s bedroom in Vaughan. Maybe she had already crept up the stairs after her tearful ruse. Maybe the thin door would be dealt a blow and the guarding chair propped under the knob would snap like a model made of toothpicks. Then the panels of the door would burst into soft wooden splinters of off-white and blonde. Cedar flecks would catch in his hair and on his clothes. And then, through the fluttering storm of wood flakes, the Druid—inside Malin—would barge into the room, snap him up and take what she wanted.
Wishing that he would have had the nerve and presence of mind to dive forward and snag the car keys from the tile floor instead of retreating backwards up the stairs, he finally sat on the edge of the bed, a tensile creature ready to spring up again. Adrenaline was pumping in his veins and he felt like, if the Druid did ravage the door, he would at least put up a fight.
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