by Ania Ahlborn
Michael missed the turkey. As the flock squawked and dispersed, Michael screwed his nose up in disappointment and sulked. That was the start of his dry spell. It was as though Ray’s presence had cursed the young hunter to return home empty-handed day after day, resulting in Michael going to bed earlier so he could get up sooner. By the fifth unsuccessful day, Michael turned in before the sun set, pulling his blanket over his head to block out the light. It amused Ray how affected Michael was by failure. He found solace in the idea that, despite being in Wade’s favor, Michael may have been a disappointment after all.
On the sixth morning of Michael’s dry spell, Ray woke to the sound of his adopted brother stumbling around, getting dressed in the dark. Ray rubbed his eyes and waited for them to adjust, but Michael didn’t notice that he was awake. He simply pulled on his pants, stuffed his feet into a pair of pip-squeak-size shoes, pulled a tattered Salvation Army sweater over his head, grabbed his gun, and slid out the door as silently as he could.
Ray sat up in bed and yawned. It couldn’t have been later than four in the morning. If Michael thought he had a better chance of shooting something because of the hour, he hadn’t considered that he wouldn’t be able to see a damn thing as soon as he stepped into the cedars and elms. But Ray was intrigued. He rolled out of bed, sidled up to the window, pushed the curtain aside, and watched from above. The back porch light eventually clicked on, illuminating a good part of the yard with a dull yellow glow. Michael wandered across the property, his steps a bit wobbly, still groggy with sleep. He took one step into the forest just beyond the yard and stopped, seemingly struck by something he hadn’t considered. Ray’s blank face shifted into a mean-spirited grin when his little brother veered away from the dark and scary woods.
Stupid kid, Ray thought. Idiot forgot he’s afraid of the dark.
Michael vacillated along the border of trees. He marched up and down their perimeter, waiting for the darkness to lighten with the onset of morning. Or maybe he was trying to make some momentous decision with his mushy six-year-old brain. Ray was about to collapse back onto his bed when Michael started to make his way back toward the house. Something about the way he was walking made Ray hold his post in front of the window for a beat longer. The way Michael had angled his chin down against his chest sent weird, long shadows across his face. Despite his age, he looked crazed, like something out of a movie. Like those freaky glowing-eyed kids from Village of the Damned.
Michael was making a beeline for Lauralynn’s rabbit cage. When Ray realized what was happening, he shook his head in the dark.
He don’t have the guts, he thought. He wouldn’t. She’ll know.
But Michael was really going to do it. He unlatched the door of the cage, reached in, and drew out a white rabbit that Lauralynn had named Snowball. Ray’s pulse quickened. He pressed himself against the glass as he watched with wide, disbelieving eyes. Michael latched the door, then thought better of it and left it wide open before turning his back to the house. With Snowball tucked against his chest, he walked back to the trees.
Once he got to the forest’s perimeter, he crouched down, placed Snowball on the ground, and swung his rifle from his back to his front. Snowball just sat there. He looked like a tuft of lint on an otherwise pristine swath of black silk. Michael watched the animal through the scope of his gun, standing not more than six feet away. Eventually, Snowball hopped a few steps deeper into the woods. Michael stepped in behind the rabbit, and though his figure faded into the shadows, Ray never completely lost sight of his brother.
A muffled pop rang through the early morning silence; not loud, but enough of a report for Ray to know Michael had gone through with the deed. He expected to be outraged, pissed enough to march downstairs and beat the living hell out of the kid for doing something so heinous, especially when it came to Lauralynn. She’d be devastated as soon as she realized one of her babies was missing. She’d cry and cry, and Ray’s heart would twist at the sound of her sobs. And he’d be partly responsible for her pain, because he had seen the whole thing. Instead of opening the window and yelling that Michael better not even think about it, Ray had simply watched. He had let it happen.
But rather than rage, Ray pressed himself against the cool window and smiled. The feeling of vindication was something new, something that made him feel so alive it was almost electric. Because Lauralynn deserved it. She had abandoned Ray. She had replaced him with that stupid kid. And now she was going to get what was coming to her.
Michael eventually surfaced from the shadows of the forest carrying an animal that was no longer fluffy and white. His rifle was slung across his back again, and a skinned rabbit hung from his small right hand by its long, powerful back legs. He was bringing it home for dinner. And Lauralynn would eat her precious pet as punishment for what she’d done.
Ray stepped away from the window and paused at the sight of his own reflection. He was no longer grinning—he was leering at the idea.
It was perfect, so damn perfect it was almost poetic, and he had that stupid little shit Michael to thank.
13
* * *
REBEL SLID OUT of the Oldsmobile, slammed the door, and marched up the embankment that would take him to the hill that overlooked the little green-shuttered house. Michael rolled the window down, allowing the sound of songbirds inside the car. He leaned out the window and inspected his busted lip in the side view mirror. It had healed enough over the last few days that the swelling and the purple color were nearly gone, but the cut was still visible—a deep burgundy line that ran from the bottom of his lip to inside his mouth. It was scabbed over, glued shut on the outside, but it still stung where it rubbed against his teeth, and it tasted like blood when he tongued the laceration. He frowned at his reflection and tried to think up a convincing story to tell Alice when she asked about it. Falling down the stairs seemed too obvious, not to mention too embarrassing. He could say the rifle kicked back while he was hunting and he took it in the mouth like some amateur marksman. No, he decided. Don’t bring up hunting. Killing was the last thing he wanted to discuss.
Rebel hopped back into the Delta a few minutes later. Gray clouds were rolling in, thundering overhead, threatening to tear open and pour. Despite being winded by his quick trek, Reb was in a relatively good mood. Michael hadn’t seen much of him in the last seventy-two hours. As expected, he had locked himself away in his room and busied himself with his freshly pilfered booze. He was going through the bottles, Michael assumed, the way a fat man went through hot dogs at an eating contest—one by one, with hardly a break in between.
Michael rolled up the window and patted his lip with a fingertip. “What do I say if she asks about this?”
Reb gave Michael a look as he guided the Oldsmobile down the winding road toward Dahlia, then stared out the windshield in silence as he mulled it over. “Tell her you fell down the stairs.”
“But that sounds fake, don’t it?”
“Tell her you got into a fight with your boyfriend.” Reb cracked a grin at his own joke. “Shit, I don’t know—just tell her I popped you in the mouth for being smart. You think she’s gonna care?”
Michael hoped she would, but he didn’t say as much.
“You ain’t gonna be weird again, are you?” Reb gave Michael a once-over. “You’ll freak her out if you’re weird, you know. Freak a girl out good enough and she might never wanna see you again.”
The idea of their outing being a date sent an electric thrill through Michael’s limbs. But it also turned his stomach inside out.
“It’s gonna ruin the whole point,” Reb continued. “I don’t even wanna see this flick, but chicks dig these kinds of movies. They like bein’ scared. It gets ’em excited, and excited is good.”
“I’m not gonna be weird,” Michael said, but he sounded less than convincing. He’d never been to an actual movie theater before, and he was genuinely excited to see a new release. But the idea of doing it all with Alice at his elbow turned him into
a nervous wreck. What if he said something wrong? What if she asked too many questions that he couldn’t answer . . . wouldn’t answer? She’d get suspicious. She’d know something was off.
Reb parked the Delta in what had become their standard spot in front of the Dervish, and Michael stared ahead at the record store a few yards away. Its melted-ice-cream paint scheme made his heart thump a little faster. It looked oddly bright in the setting sun, but those joyful sugary colors now only made his stomach churn.
When Michael and Rebel stepped inside, Alice was at the register closing out the day. Lucy was nowhere in sight. Alice smiled at them from behind the counter, motioning to the hallway when Reb gave her a questioning glance. “She’s in the back,” Alice said. “Getting ready.”
Reb breezed past the counter and stalked down the hall, leaving Alice and Michael alone at the front of the store.
“Hi,” she said, giving Michael a meek sort of smile.
“Hi,” Michael echoed, his guts seizing up with sudden realization. “Shit.” He had meant to whisper it, but the curse came out louder than he had intended.
“What?” She angled her head toward one of her shoulders.
“I forgot the record.” It was still in Misty’s room. After what had happened between him and Misty and Ray, he was afraid to go and retrieve it. And since he had no way of listening to it without Misty’s record player, there hadn’t been much point.
Alice dismissed his worry with a wave of her hand. “Forget it,” she said. “Unless you didn’t like it.”
“No, I loved it,” he told her, his response a little too quick.
Alice gave him a look, her mouth turned up at the corners. “So you’ve got some taste after all,” she said with a wink. “Good to know. Though I already suspected that.” Her gaze drifted to the storeroom door, and she gave a quiet laugh. Michael didn’t get the joke, but he liked the sound she made—airy, light, carefree, like a perfect summer evening. “What happened to your lip?”
“Um . . .” He touched the cut, looked down to his feet then up again. “Me and Reb got into it a few days back.”
“Reb?”
“Ray,” Michael corrected himself.
“What’s Reb stand for?”
He cleared his throat quietly, then muttered “Rebel” beneath his breath.
Alice cracked a wide smile, as if attempting to hold back a laugh. She shifted her weight, her forearms sliding across the countertop. “Come over here,” she said, nodding for him to get away from the front door and close the distance between them. He hesitated but did as she requested. “Got into it about what?” she asked. The bridge of her nose wrinkled in what he assumed was innocent curiosity—just something to talk about, that’s all. She wasn’t trying to corner him; just keeping the conversation afloat.
“Just stuff.”
“Stuff.” She didn’t look satisfied with the answer.
“Family stuff.” He lifted his shoulders up as if to say it really wasn’t that big a deal.
Alice pinched her eyebrows together as she sorted through receipts, her smile fading while she jotted down numbers in a green-sheeted ledger.
“Does that happen often?” She tipped her chin down in a way that brought her to eye level with his still swollen lip. “Does he have a temper or something? Should I be worried about Lucy hanging out with him the way she does?”
You should be more than worried, Michael thought. You should never want to see either one of us again.
“No,” he told her. “He’s okay.”
“So you’re saying you provoked him?” Before Michael could answer her, she cut him off. “You don’t seem like the type.”
Michael’s gaze drifted across the counter. He was suddenly uncomfortable with the conversation. He was eager to find something else to talk about, wondering what was taking Rebel so long. His eyes stopped on a spiral-bound notebook, but the pages were blank rather than ruled. Three equally sized squares were drawn lengthwise across the page. The beginnings of a sketch decorated the inside of the first, so faint it was nothing but a ghostly trace of graphite.
“What’s that?” he asked, forcing himself out of his shell enough to steer the discussion in a safer direction. Alice pulled the notebook toward the center of the counter and flipped the page, the previous sheet of paper decorated with a carefully drawn comic, like the Garfield one Reb had ripped up and made him bury. The panels were pictures of a girl who looked just like Alice—short hair, almond-shaped eyes, dark clothes.
“It’s my life,” she said after a beat, as though stopping to consider whether putting it so plainly made her seem lame. “Or at least I hope it will be.”
In the panels, the girl was sitting at a counter that looked just like the one Michael was standing at now. The girl slouched behind it, her chin in her hand, a look of bored desperation across her face. The panels were identical to one another save for a single detail. The second square had a thought bubble filled with nothing but three dots in a row. The third had the same thought bubble, but words replaced the dots: I SHOULD REALLY QUIT MY JOB.
Michael looked up from the drawing to Alice, then back to the animated girl on the page.
“You don’t like it here?”
“Would you like it here?” she asked, a moody scoff crossing her lips.
The truth of it was, Michael would love working at the Dervish. It was new and exciting and mysterious, and there were thousands of album covers to admire and just as many records to play. It smelled like a distant land, like Caterpillar pipe smoke must have smelled, as Lauralynn had described. Those stories—told from memory—enchanted all of them back then, even Reb. And the glossy patchwork of posters that covered every inch of the shop walls made Michael feel like he was in some magical den, a place like Wonderland, where everyone was happy and nobody got hurt.
“It don’t seem so bad,” he confessed.
“I guess it isn’t that awful.” Alice seemed to be trying to convince herself. “I just . . .” She paused, shook her head, looked up at him, searching for answers. “I need to get the hell out of West Virginia.” She broke eye contact, looked down to her hands. “I just feel like I’m suffocating. Don’t you ever feel like you don’t belong somewhere, like you’re out of place?”
Her question left him breathless. It was as though she had reached inside his head and pulled out his thoughts. As though they had appeared in a thought bubble like the one in her comic, and she had plucked them out of the air and stuck them in her mouth, talking them back to him as her own ideas.
“But don’t you got family?” he asked. The question was automatic, the importance of family beaten into his DNA.
“I’ve got my mom, but we aren’t close. She’s always had this . . . thing. Depression, you know? I can’t really remember a time when she was actually happy.”
“Not even on holidays?”
“Especially not on those, and especially not after my dad died. She likes to wallow in it, I guess. You know what they say—some people get addicted to feeling bad because whenever they feel good they feel guilty. I’m pretty sure that’s her deal.”
“What happened to your dad?”
“He was a miner, died about five years back, in the Scotia Mine disaster out in Kentucky. There was an explosion—over twenty men died, and he was one of them. After a while, my mom just got hard to look at, so I moved in with Lucy.” Alice nodded down the hall, Lucy’s and Reb’s voices were muffled in the distance. “I felt bad about it for a while, visited three times a week to make up for it, but it didn’t really seem like she cared. We’d just sit around the living room and watch TV without saying anything, so I stopped visiting. We live less than ten miles apart and we talk maybe once or twice a month. Last time I was at the house was on Christmas . . . and I know she’s trying. I mean, I can tell something’s different, you know? This past year it seems like she’s really tried to fix herself up, but I don’t know.” She shrugged, laughed a little, shook her head, and slid a pair of fi
ngers across her mouth, as if surprised by how much she had just revealed.
Michael liked hearing her talk. It was nice to know that despite the storybook picture inside his head, Alice didn’t dance with the bluebirds after all. It was comforting to know that she was a real person, that she had her own problems, that maybe she had her own secrets. Not on the level of Michael’s, but secrets nevertheless.
“What about you?” Alice asked. “If you got into it with Ray . . . or Rebel, or whatever, does that mean you two live together?”
Michael gave her a faint nod. “With Momma and Wade and Misty Dawn.”
“Is Misty Dawn your sister?”
Another nod.
“And Wade?”
“That’s my dad.”
“Then why do you call him Wade instead of Dad?” she asked, and honestly, Michael didn’t know. Reb had never called Wade by anything but his first name. He wasn’t sure he had ever heard Ray or Misty call Wade Dad at all. But he imagined that if he ever tried to call Wade Dad or Father or even Pop, Reb would just about kill him for it. Wade was safe. Dad was too possessive, too close.
“Where will you go?” Michael asked, changing the subject for a second time.
“Hmm?”
“You said you don’t wanna live here . . . so where are you gonna go?”
“Oh.” She snorted. “You mean where won’t I go. God, anywhere. . . . I’d say New York City, but that sounds so, I don’t know, like . . .” She lifted a hand, looping it in the air. “Everyone says New York City, you know? It’s a fantasy. New York is so cramped with dreamers, it’s a wonder they aren’t crawling out of the sewers like rats.”