“I —”
Why was she hesitating? A moment ago, all she had wanted was to leave. But Morgan: she was the last person Ondine expected to see.
“I saw Nix leave,” Morgan said smoothly over her silence, then looked over her shoulder, coldly, at Moth. “He left with Neve.”
“That’s what —” Ondine broke off. That’s what Viv said, she thought, but didn’t say it aloud.
Morgan’s eyes returned. “Ondine? Honey? Let’s just go, okay?”
She wanted to say yes. But more than that, she wanted Morgan to tell her why she was here at the gathering. Who had told her, though she already knew. All Morgan said was, “Neve looked pretty trashed, and Nix, well, he seemed to really want to get her into his car.”
“My car,” Ondine whispered.
“What, sweetie?”
“Let’s just go.” She started walking in the direction of the forest she and Nix had come through earlier, stopping to tie a shoelace that had come undone in the chaos. She heard Morgan tell Moth and Viv that she expected a complete reckoning when they got back to Portland.
“What’s your last name?” Ondine heard Morgan say, presumably to Viv. The woman laughed. “I think you know you won’t find me in the phone book.”
Then she felt Morgan’s tense little arm guiding her back up the hill, through the forest. Ondine let herself be led. It had gotten dark; the only light came from the moon.
“Waxing crescent,” she heard herself say.
“What?” They had passed out of the clearing where she and Nix had first settled when they arrived. The tent was gone. Nix must have packed it up. How thoughtful.
“Waxing crescent,” Ondine repeated. She made a vague motion toward the sky. “The moon.”
“Oh,” Morgan replied. “Right.” Then she did something strange. Something Ondine had never seen Morgan do in the half year she’d known her. She stopped and turned toward Ondine and took her hands in her cold smaller ones, squeezing, and said, “I think we shouldn’t talk about this for a while. I think we should wait till we get home to do anything.”
Ondine swallowed. She waited for an explanation but none came. Given a choice, she would’ve preferred that this night had never happened. But laws were laws and someone had died. She had been a witness. To have Morgan request a silence — Ondine didn’t want to use the word “suspicious,” but Morgan’s hands were squeezing hers harder now, and she felt that if she didn’t agree, the girl whose hair was so dark it seemed to grow out of the sky would squeeze her hands until the bones crumbled.
“Okay,” Ondine whispered, forcing herself not to yank her hands from the girl’s grip.
“Okay!” Morgan repeated brightly, squeezing one more time.
With that the two girls exited the first line of trees and headed toward Morgan’s black Lexus, which beeped comfortingly when she clicked her key ring, as if the car had been waiting for them. Otherwise the lot was empty. The headlights cut a narrow swath through the darkness, and Ondine kept her eyes focused on the bright part and ignored the blackness that pressed in all around. When Morgan said, “You wanna listen to the radio?” Ondine jumped a little in her seat and bit back a scream.
“Okay,” she said, and kept her eyes on the hard light in front of her.
III
CHANGELINGS
CHAPTER 13
NEVE CLOWES SLEPT THE WHOLE WAY back to Portland, her forehead forming a filmy spot of warmth and grease against the Masons’ Jetta window. Nix zipped up the jacket — Dr. Mason’s — he’d given her and covered her cold hands with socks, making sure her boots were laced and her cuffs were rolled down. His gestures were tender, and with each he thought of Ondine, whom he knew he had abandoned. She’d have to understand. He’d explain everything later. Now he needed to help Neve — and Jacob.
Nix didn’t actually think the words “He needed to help the humans,” but they were there anyway.
He tried to give Neve water, but it just dribbled out of the side of her mouth, coiling around her bare neck like a translucent snake, and she coughed and sputtered, not really waking up. Nix wiped the water from her mouth, making sure her nose and her throat were clear. He’d learned to do these things from Finn at the squat. It was how people choked, Finn told him. How they most often died when they were OD’ing. Doing these things felt good, or at least real.
The moon at the lip of the window, the low music he was playing (a Bill Evans CD was still in the car, from Mrs. Mason): these things made him feel grounded, actual, intact. Nix even found himself tapping one of Evans’s silky melodies on the steering wheel, keeping time with the clicking orange road markers and an occasional pine outlined against the black-blue sky.
It was a familiar feeling, this getting used to things. He had done it many times before. Even as a child, when he first started having his visions. It was the perpetual truth of his existence, the one thing he could count on. Eventually he would take in stride whatever strangeness the world threw his way.
The Evans CD came to an end. Nix was still tapping. He thought about Ondine. She knew him. At least one person understood a little of what he had experienced. Ondine, he trusted. Now to find himself locked in this situation with her, and — he almost tripped on her name — Morgan D’Amici of all people. The girl’s intensity threw him. How unlikely that the three of them would be bound together here, in Portland, in this place, next to these hills.
The mountains. What is in them? He recalled again what his grandfather had communicated silently to him those days on the water. They rose up black and still in the moonlight, massive and ancient, surrounding Portland. He thought back to something he remembered the woman in the black coat saying: We inhabit the Ring of Fire, and Nix knew instinctively that she meant these mountains. But who was “we”? And what, exactly, did “inhabit” mean? He shouldn’t have left so early, but he had to, for Neve’s sake.
He had heard one name just as he left, Novala. Was it a place? An actual place, with a geography, yet unmapped? Or was it a place like in that children’s book about the lion and the closet, where only the border was important? At the gathering, the trees at the edge of the parking lot had marked a line. Once he’d stepped past it, everything had felt more solid; sounds had rung clearer; Neve’s body had been heavier. Was that Novala, too?
Even if it were a hallucination, Nix felt the loosening of all of this thinking work its calming effects on his brain, and for a while he was happy to just sit there, music-less, Neve’s head bobbing to the beat of the ruts in the road. He started to replay the little he’d seen. There was the girl on the stage … then the lightning struck … the boy … then the woman in the black coat … and Bleek … and the bird.
He felt gravel and rocks under the Jetta just prior to hearing them. Neve moaned, and his hands responded to the wheel even before his mind did. Nix braked, hard. He must have fallen asleep. They were on the shoulder, a few feet from the trunk of an oak. He glanced at Neve. She was drooling, the seat belt across her chest splitting one small, perfect breast from the other. She was safe.
His hands trembled on the wheel, and his second thought, after Neve, was, So we can feel fear. If not for ourselves, then at least for humans. He took a breath. They hadn’t run into anything. The relief made him drowsy and he realized how long he’d been on the road that day, then out in the rain. Weeks of staying up with Ondine had caught up with him. He was tired and confused. It was late. Neve was still sleeping, her breathing more regular now. He needed to get her home, but a quick check of the dashboard clock told him that there were another two hours to drive, and as the moon was just setting, it would only get darker.
He’d deal with Jacob in the morning. Now he needed sleep. Nix looked behind him on the road. No cars approached and he was off the shoulder enough to be safe. He’d just rest till dawn, then get back to Portland, where for once, everything might turn out fine.
MORGAN AND ONDINE WERE QUIET MOST OF THE WAY HOME. Ondine stared out the window; Morgan played the radio: an oldies
station, something Ralph Mason would have chosen. Almost as if she knew it would relax the girl beside her. In fact, Ondine realized, as she ran through the little things that Morgan did during the drive, they all seemed chosen, calculated, to please her: the relaxing oldies station with its repetitive commercials for weight-loss supplements; Morgan asking her more than once if the temperature was all right, even turning on the seat warmers. Ondine fell asleep, and when she awoke they were in the parking lot of a gas station. Morgan had left the car — gone to the bathroom, probably — and sitting in the holder was a Styrofoam cup of hot chocolate. Ondine drank it, realizing the last thing she had eaten was Nix’s PB&J in the tent the previous morning. That is, if you didn’t count the dust she’d licked off a stranger’s palm. The memory of her eagerness, her idiotic abandon, shamed her.
Morgan came back a few moments later, coffee in hand, the car beeping softly. She had locked Ondine in. “How are you?” she asked, devoid of her normal irony. “You fell asleep for a while. That’s good.”
Ondine nodded into her hot chocolate. She couldn’t look the girl in the eyes. She felt embarrassed even sitting there with her.
“All right. Just tired. I want to get home.”
Morgan hadn’t said anything. She regarded Ondine in the semidark and smiled. Then she rested her hand on Ondine’s knee, a startling gesture coming from a girl who rarely touched anyone. They started off and, despite herself, the gentle rocking of the car and the familiar crackling of the AM oldies station lulled Ondine back to sleep. She awoke in her driveway on N.E. Schuyler. Morgan was already out of the car, stretching. The sun was rising and everything was a little pink.
Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky at dawn, sailors be warned.
It had come to Ondine unconsciously, the aphorism. She didn’t even know where she had picked it up. She shook it out of her head and watched Morgan stretching, lifting her bony arms into the air. Skin showed where the girl’s shirt separated from her jeans and Ondine had shivered, as if she, too, were standing in the cold morning air.
“You’re up.” Morgan smiled, opened the door, and ducked her head in to look at Ondine, who felt embarrassed to have been watching her. She fumbled for her bag in the backseat and stood up too quickly, hitting her head on the roof of the car as she emerged.
“Ow.” She touched her crown and laughed nervously. Morgan, draping her forearms across the top of the Lexus, rested her chin in her hands.
“Long night.” She squinted and cocked her head. “You okay?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Ondine rejiggered the knapsack on her shoulder. “Just … out of it.”
Morgan nodded, her eyes serious. “Me, too.”
Ondine had not known what to say then. Everything felt reorganized; the slight edge she had always had with the other girl, she realized, was gone. Even the way Morgan was shrugging now, rubbing her shoulders to warm herself — a familiar gesture from afternoons spent walking around the track at school, talking — had taken on a new confidence. She felt silly and small. She didn’t know what to do with her hands, so she tucked them into her still-damp jeans and looked at the ground.
“Well, I’m gonna go in. So …” She turned on her heel. “I’ll call you. We have to —”
Her words came out stiffer than she intended, and Morgan acknowledged this, yet so subtly Ondine wasn’t sure if she was imagining the minute shift that had taken place between them.
“We’ll talk.” Morgan looked away, out into the street and then back again. She smiled. “K.A.’s coming back tomorrow.”
“Oh, good. Good. That’ll be good.” Ondine panicked. What had happened to her vocabulary? And K.A.? What did K.A. have to do with any of this?
She remembered Neve Clowes. Neve had been at the Ring of Fire, too, with Tim Bleeker. A known drug dealer. Probably already a felon. It all seemed too complicated. Too messy and screwed up. Ondine had been there, too, had willingly taken dust. Had even believed that she was there to learn something, to find something out about herself, like the rest of them. Was she an accomplice? Could she be arrested? She felt weak and scared and hoped it didn’t show. She didn’t trust Morgan D’Amici, she realized. Never had.
The last words came out in a rush. “Anyway. I’ll call you later.”
“Yeah, yeah — okay.” Morgan waved brightly and Ondine felt released. She turned and walked toward the gate leading to the back door. She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t gone in the front door, as she usually did. It was almost as if she were a guest now.
Just as she started to turn and raise her hand to wave, she saw Morgan in the car, staring at her through the windshield. The girl smiled. No. Had already been smiling. Sitting in her Lexus, beaming. She believes this. Fear seized Ondine’s body, gnawed at the delicate unity of her mind. She forced herself to wave. Morgan waved in return, glanced behind her, and pulled out. Neither girl looked back.
CHAPTER 14
DAWN CAME EARLY ON THE DAY fate had marked Jacob Clowes to die.
The sun climbed above the Columbia River valley and spread its rays across the Willamette, infusing everything in Portland with a pinkish orange glow. Jacob Clowes liked this time. He was at work early during the summer. Everything was twice as busy and people liked eating pizza for breakfast — post-club, pre-crash snack — so early morning, six, seven AM, was the only time he had to himself.
The Cloweses lived up at the base of Forest Park, amid a tangle of ivy and blackberry. Their house was a ramshackle white affair built during the late twenties, and eighty-odd years later it still possessed a wide-open view of downtown. The view was probably the finest thing about the place: despite the fact that Jacob seemed perpetually to be fixing it up, the Cloweses’ house was the least fancy on their road, now mostly populated by whatever it was dot-commers called themselves these days, as well as a few people whom his daughter referred to as “cool parents.” He thought he was one.
Jacob had bought early, when you still had to dodge sleeping bums along Burnside. The only people who came to his new pizza shop then were the hippies and gay boys that lived in Northwest; the proto-punkers (Theatre of Sheep, Poison Idea and the Rats); and a shy, friendly guitar instructor with curly hair named Ritchie, who said his girlfriend’s Mormon grandmother had written that druggie book Go Ask Alice.
Jacob had loved the roughness of Portland then. Not as rough as the New York he’d left behind, which he appreciated, but rough enough to be … what? Unformed. Maybe a little haunted, if you could say that in 1976. Portland in the year of the bicentennial still had the air of a nineteenth-century city, a place where a man had to live by his wits. A bet had given the city its name: One of its early American residents had been from Boston, the other from Portland, Maine. They tossed a coin; Maine won. And it was another country then, teeming with loggers and wayward Forty-niners; Indians; sailors; and Chinese railroad workers; salt dogs and rascals; men with names like “Bunco” Kelly, who, it was said, passed a wooden statue of an Indian through the Shanghai Tunnels to a waiting captain desperate for one last man.
A century and a half later, hobos still came to town in boxcars, but the “hippies” showed up in Mini Coopers and BMWs spackled with SCREW BUSH bumper stickers and, as far as he knew, liked dust more than pot. “Hipsters” — whatever those were — and yuppies were Jacob’s mainstay now.
Portland had softened a tough Brooklyn kid, and though it was the Brooklyn in Jacob that had said, “What kind of redneck do you take me for?” when his best friend had invited him to a barn dance of all things a year after he’d moved, it was the Portland boy who trimmed his beard and put on his lucky underwear and went anyway.
Of course this was a barn dance Portland style. Most of the dancers were wearing overalls, but without shirts underneath — or bras, for that matter. Jacob would freely admit to not knowing much about the modern world, but he was sure nuder was always better, so when the wild-haired woman with the ear-to-ear smile told him the price of admission was his shirt, who was he to say
no? Three years of slinging pies had not yet had the expansive effect on his stomach that it would later, especially after Neve was born. Jacob still looked damned good with his shirt off in 1979, or at least he thought so.
More important, so did Amanda.
She was the strongest woman he’d ever met. She’d had three miscarriages in as many years, which made the first years of Jacob’s marriage both the happiest and saddest time of his life. It turned out she had a heart-shaped uterus, and despite the heartache it caused them, there was some part of Jacob that loved the fact his wife’s womb was made that way — kind of like how Amanda said she liked Jacob’s pizza gut (well, maybe she’d said “didn’t mind”). Reaching over a sleeping Neve to rub his softening stomach in bed — after three false starts they’d been too spooked to buy a crib, and so Neve ended up in bed with them for the first year of her life — Amanda said Jacob was a big man, inside and outside. The less romantic way of looking at it was that Jacob didn’t have the willpower to stick to a diet, whereas Amanda had the strength to go under the knife, and, with more courage than he could fathom, have the corrective surgery that eventually brought them Neve. Jacob didn’t even like to go to the doctor for his physical, for god’s sake. He’d managed to miss his appointment for the last three years. Amanda would pin the card to the bulletin board over the phone, and Jacob would somehow “accidentally” cover it with an invoice for firewood or a sauce-spattered business card from some guy who said he could fix that leak in the kitchen for cheap. If Amanda reminded him, Jacob would mutter something about still being a young man, and he’d find some yard work to do. He didn’t need a physical every single year. He wasn’t even fifty yet. If it was true what they said about parents — that you’re only as old as your youngest kid — then hell, he was still a teenager.
Neve was why Jacob was up now. Not the beautiful morning. Not puttering around the kitchen making coffee. Not reading the paper, or staring out the window wondering if next week was the week he’d start running again, or filling the hummingbird feeder like he used to, or weeding the garden, or splitting firewood (there was just something about swinging an axe). No. This morning Jacob was cutting the grass.
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