The Blackbird Season

by Kate Moretti

  “Goddamn it, Alecia, just shut the hell up. For once.” He slammed the beer bottle down on the counter and it shattered, the glass slicing through the palm of his hand. His anger seemed so sudden, so intense, Alecia wondered if she’d said what she was thinking out loud by accident. “Fuck!” Nate grabbed a dish towel and wrapped it around his palm until it stained red. He panted hard and stared at her, his face pinched and twisted.

  He’d never been mean before. Told her to shut up, called her a bitch, called her any names at all. She was the nasty one. He was mostly apathetic, intent on keeping the peace, willing to go along to get along. Didn’t he ever get sick of it? She wanted to push him; her anger flashed, hot and quick under her skin.

  “Fuck you, Nate,” Alecia said quietly, something she’d never said before, either. The blood dripped on the brown linoleum. The colors blended together and she couldn’t tell where the circular, dirty-water pattern ended and his blood began.

  He laughed again. “Fuck me?” He shook his head, flicked the bloody towel at her feet, and pushed past her. “Nah, that’s not a thing you do anymore.”

  • • •

  No matter how brutal their fights, Nate always dropped off to sleep like falling off the side of a building, hard and fast. Alecia lay in bed and listened to his even breathing, her heart pounding. By the time she’d shoved the bloody towel into the garbage, collected herself, and found her way upstairs, Nate was out. It felt like a deliberate affront.

  His phone blinked on the nightstand, splaying blue and green on their ceiling, waiting notifications, text messages, or emails. His phone was a constant, always buzzing and binging. It felt like a living thing in his hand, between them. She’d successfully banished it from the table, but it still blinked and beeped from its nested spot in the basket on the counter. Someone always calling him, needing him, wanting him, to make a decision, or just simply make him laugh. She’d be lucky to have so many friends. Nate’s friends were her friends by default. Even Bridget was Nate’s friend first; how could you not be?

  Alecia remembered a time when Nate’s popularity was a draw. The blond boy with the smiling eyes had picked her in the hazy North Carolina sunshine. His rich, northern roots, his baseball uniform blue and shiny like the cloudless sky. He’d plucked her, like peach off a tree, right out of the baseball crowd, surrounded by her sorority sisters, friends she’d paid for because she was too angular, too type A, too held together to make friends on her own. She’d never had the nerve to ask where the good parties were. Greek life seemed easier. But she sat on the grass watching the game and he’d picked her. A lean and mean second baseman with a quick mind and an even quicker heart. She’d hardly met anyone who didn’t love Nate, even back in college. She got used to his flirtation, the way he touched other women, just a shoulder here, the tender square on the spine, the tingly place that men touch when they want to get laid. She tried to tell him women love that, be careful. He’d always laughed at her and shrugged, like it didn’t matter.

  His heart was as wide open as his laughing mouth. He fed stray cats; they collected at the back door of the baseball house, meowing all hours of the night until the guys threatened to kick him out. Tucked bills into beggars’ caps. Volunteered for United Way school campaigns. He wooed her with his goodness, his round face wholesome like a chocolate chip cookie. Alecia had never known such virtue, like the universe had delivered her own private Boy Scout. Her mother and father would have never put themselves out for anyone. Not that they were unkind, they just weren’t giving people.

  They went to a wedding once, for a distant cousin of Alecia’s. They were all distant. Hers was a holiday, wedding, and funeral family: polite and thin lipped. A woman at their table, maybe a cousin, Alecia couldn’t remember, held a red, angry infant, screaming and punching into the air. Beads of sweat rolled down the mother’s forehead as she longingly eyed the door. Nate had laughed, taken the infant from her arms, and walked the baby around the perimeter of the room, patting his diapered end, whispering and smiling. Alecia watched him in awe, because who takes a stranger’s baby away? The mother never even looked to see where he went.

  Alecia found him outside, the baby’s eyes wide and blinking under the fluorescent parking lot lights, quiet and not quite cooing, but calm. Nate was pointing at the stars, talking, his voice low, about Orion and the Seven Sisters, the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, all things Alecia had no idea about. She’d called him a good politician and he laughed, not understanding what she meant.

  “Kissing babies?” she asked. “You never heard that expression? Shaking hands and kissing babies?”

  “Like I’m doing it for show?” His eyes crinkled up.

  “Maybe?” She traced the top of the baby’s head, the soft triangular fontanel pulsing like a heart under her fingertip. “Because you can’t be for real.”

  “You think I’m trying to trick you into something?” With his free hand, he yanked on her hair softly. “Ah, you’ll marry me anyway.”

  She was shocked then; they’d never talked about marriage. They’d only been dating for six months, still in college. Still spending Saturday nights at keg parties in dank basements, draped across wet plastic beanbag chairs.

  “Are you proposing?” She covered her discomfort with coyness.

  “Not yet. But I will, you can count on it.” He kissed her forehead and slapped her bottom with his free hand, walked away laughing, to take the baby back to his mother now that it was calm and gurgling. She followed him in, found the mother at the table, her hair tucked back into place, smiling, nursing a glass of wine. The woman fawned all over Nate and he let her, winking at Alecia the whole time. “See?” He whispered later as they danced, his arms crushing her against him, stealing the air from her lungs until she felt like she would burst. “Everyone loves me.”

  Even ten years later, she wondered how much of Nate’s smile, his seemingly wide-open heart, was real. She would have thought she’d know by now.

  Alecia pulled back the covers and quietly crept from the bed. There was no reason to take such care to be quiet. Nate slept hard, his breathing slow and even, often waking in the same position he’d fallen asleep in. On his side of the bed, she detached his phone from the cord with a quick flick of her thumb and took it into the bathroom. Sitting on the closed toilet seat, she clicked through his Facebook. She’d resisted social media—who had the time?—until a year or so ago. When Alecia had first joined, she was assaulted by pictures from high school friends: kids with gap teeth, climbing onto school buses for the first time, shopping, eating at restaurants, gourmet meals they made at home, stylized with photo filters. All the glossy facade breaking her heart slowly, immeasurably, a hairline crack at a time. She unfollowed all of them and her feed had become a carefully culled collection of parenting websites, autism communities, special-needs moms groups.

  Nate’s newsfeed was old college buddies, colleagues from the high school, students, coaches, parents, his cousins. It was loud, like a virtual fraternity party. So little of it represented his actual life. One slightly grainy, blurry picture of Gabe that she had tagged him in a few months ago.

  She clicked on his messages and scrolled through quickly. Parents, coaches, a few students here and there asking homework questions. His Twitter was all Philadelphia sports. Alecia knew that Nate used social media to keep an eye on the students. The drama that played out in school was set up the night before, he always said. He knew where to be to break up a fight, when to intervene, and when to let it play out.

  She opened Snapchat but he had no stories, no pictures. His account looked vacant. Which seemed weird. Why have the account?

  She clicked the Instagram icon and scrolled through the feed. Stylized perfection seemed so far out of reach, so unattainable, that even thinking about it made Alecia tired. The girls were oversexualized, tinted yellow or blue or with the right amount of blur to appear “artsy,” all this manufactured beauty in a perfectly cropped pixelated square. Long legs a
nd newly painted toenails (#pedi!) announced the excitement of spring; girls trying on prom dresses (#prom, #spring, #seniors) and taking diagonal selfies in dressing room mirrors; kissing photos, the boys appropriately stubbled and the girls heavy lidded with half-parted lips (#bae, #love!). Out of curiosity, she clicked on Andrew Evans’s profile. A few unsmiling selfies; him and a tall, bony boy she recognized as a Tempest at a baseball game; a group shot: Andrew, two boys she didn’t know, smiling, glossy girls, thrown together on a couch, their legs intertwined. One of the girls was Jennifer Lawson’s daughter. Taylor, was it?

  She barely understood what it all meant, her mouth woolly and dry. What did Nate think about when he looked through these pictures? These girls, barely eighteen, some even younger, with their big glossy mouths and long hair, edited and cropped and filtered to perfection. Tan and tight squares of flat tummies (#abworkout!), perfect little bodies, twisting around each other, tangles of arms and legs. How could anyone live up to this? How could Alecia?

  Alecia studied the feed, a dark black heart under each picture to indicate likes (117 likes for the blonde with the gauzy cleavage in a meadow (a meadow!). She wondered if Nate interacted, if he commented or hashtagged (#teacher4life!) or even liked any of his students’ pictures. She wondered how she could know so little about his online world, thriving and thick with life. Alecia tapped the heart under a picture, an innocuous cup of coffee. She watched it turn red, tapped it again, and it returned to white.

  Alecia opened his account settings and saw it: Posts You’ve Liked. She clicked it. There was nothing, only a blank screen, white. Innocent.

  She clicked to his profile. No pictures. Nothing posted of his own.

  She closed his apps, absently opened his photo gallery, scrolled through his pictures. Nothing but baseball images: games, a cracked bench in the dugout, practical, economical things. She imagined him texting the cracked bench to the athletic director, angry, demanding repairs.

  She opened his Facebook account. Nothing posted on his own profile. No profile pictures, just the white outline of a man, like a ghost. This is how he watched them: ethereal and fleeting.

  In his gallery, something caught her eye: Screenshots. It was a folder, the Instagram logo barely visible, but a glimmery flash of peach and cream. She opened it, her hands clammy.

  The girl with the white hair, the girl he helped. The troubled girl. Red lace, bursting cleavage, blur to cover the rest. Her white hair cascading down over even whiter breasts. Her face turned down, her lips dark as blood. What was her name? Lucia.

  And Nate’s solid red heart, stuck there, long after it was undone, frozen in time.

  When I think of childhood, it’s shiny, like a new penny. When Jimmy still worked at the mill. We were seven? Eight maybe? Everything was good. Not perfect, but not terrible. You were there, remember? We rode our bikes from my house to Mr. Tibbs’s store, all our quarters weighing down the pockets of our jeans. If you got there on a Friday afternoon, you could snag those giant deli pickles just as they replaced the jar. We used all our quarters for that, right? You were still hungry, so you, you idiot, tried to get away with stealing chips, like a whole bag. All that crinkly foil. Mrs. Tibbs knew right away and she grabbed your arm so fast. No one stole from Mrs. Tibbs. You got all the money in the world, she said. Remember? She was right. That was so stupid. You could have just run home, asked your mom and rode back. Easy peasy. But no. You spit at her! Spit at her. Do you remember this? Who does that? Anyway, she was such a bitchy old hen. She said, I’ll tell your mama, I know just who you are! You said, Then who are we? Did you really think she was lying? She called you out so fast. Taylor Lawson, she said, and then she looked at me, like she’d never seen me before. Lulu something, she said. You nearly died laughing.

  You’ve called me that ever since. Sometimes I still think about that.

  CHAPTER 9

  Bridget, April 3, 2015: Three weeks before the birds fell

  In the beginning of spring, sixth period, immediately after lunch, always dragged on forever. Something about the last of the melting snow from a late winter storm, the rising temperature combined with the rain. Everyone yawned, huddled deeper into their sweatshirts, their heads popping out like turtles. No one listened. Teachers gave quizzes just to keep everyone awake.

  Bridget had gone to the office in the morning, her fingers scanning the attendance sheets until she saw the name Lucia Hamm in the absent column. The girl was inches away from truancy and no one seemed to care.

  Bridget cleared her throat at the administrative assistant, a dandelion-puff head of a woman, who grumbled and grouched at Bridget no matter what she did anyway. “Did anyone call Lucia’s house?”

  Bridget studied the small flower arrangement on the desk in front of her. A coffee mug, a ball of daisies and carnations like a scoop of strawberry ice cream. Nate’s scrawled handwriting on a rectangular card. To Ginny, Happy Birthday. We’d all be lost without you! Nate.

  Bridget forgot her name was Ginny. To be fair, Ginny had started last year, right before Bridget’s leave.

  Ginny reached out, her long red fingernails snatching the coffee mug back, out of Bridget’s reach and tucked it behind the desk. “We haven’t had a phone number for that girl since she started high school and her father disappeared.”

  “I don’t understand, how does a student just skate through the system like this?” Bridget slapped the attendance sheet on the counter and Ginny rolled her eyes.

  “She’s eighteen now.” As if this negated the need for help, as if seventeen was a world away from eighteen. As if overnight, they were no longer children.

  Bridget still held out hope that Lucia would show up to seventh-period creative writing. Ask for help, admit to needing someone, anything. She’d never known her to.

  Bridget texted Tripp. She’s not in school today.

  If you can’t find her by 6 p.m., we’ll file a report. I’ll go back to the mill today. Tripp’s reply was immediate, like he’d had his phone in his hand, waiting. Then another quick buzz. Are you ok?

  Bridget was so used to people asking her this question, or subtle variations of it: Are you ok? How are you doing? Do you need anything? Often the question was accompanied by a casserole, a bottle of wine, an edible arrangement delivery. Bridget was grateful, but sometimes being on the receiving end of everyone’s pity was grating. Today, the question, framed by a new situation, felt fresh, almost thrilling.

  Fine. She hit send, then texted a smile emoticon. He didn’t write back.

  At least now, she had a purpose, something to keep her busy besides her frozen dinner and her red Solo cup of cabernet.

  Seventh period passed, as did eighth, and then the final bell. Bridget closed the door to her classroom and waited for the commotion in the halls to die down. Her feet bounced as she sat, restless, and her heart pattered irregularly.

  She checked her phone a hundred times between four and five o’clock; nothing from Tripp. The minute hand inched toward the twelve as she waited for the buzz of an incoming text, Tripp telling her he found Lucia or, alternately, to meet him and they’d file a report together, but nothing came. She’d stayed late to read journals; she’d fallen behind with the craziness of the past few days. They weren’t hard to keep up with, just a check to make sure the students were doing them—class topic assignments and a few sentences, at least three days a week. Generally, they wrote much, much more.

  The one black-and-gold-trimmed journal flashed at her from the bottom of the pile. She pulled it out and fanned the pages, the smell of smoke and must wafting up. Bridget’s thumb ran along the edge of the pages until she found the latest:

  I can’t ever go back to that hell. He is such a useless prick, a fucking tool. He’s so high he doesn’t know I’m his sister or he doesn’t care and now all I can think of his breath that smells like garbage close to my face, so close I can’t breathe, and he’s so heavy. I’ll have a scar forever, on my neck for the whole world to see. I hate it here. I h
ate this town. I hate everyone.

  I will never go back there, no one can make me. I have nowhere else to go.

  Underneath the entry was a drawing, a delicate, finely drawn wrist, with a lotus flower tattoo. A black raven resting in the outstretched hand, the feathers black and wispy, its head turned. One exquisite eye seemed to watch her from the page. A large disembodied hand clamped down over the forearm, above the tattoo but below the elbow. The knuckles were knotted and the fingernails ratted and torn. The smaller hand, delicate and drawn with a pencil, the fingertips curved up gracefully, cupping the bird under the tail feathers, its claws hidden from view. The fingernails were shaded in, but not black, and they were elegant, manicured. The large hand looked quickly sketched with charcoal, the lines thick and smudged, like maybe it was drawn later. Underneath, quickly scrawled: wrist to floor, hand like an ape.

  There was no date at the top, but it was the last entry in the journal, handed in two days ago. Bridget thought of Lenny, his hair slick with grease, those dark marbled teeth, and felt her stomach turn. She wondered what it all meant. Did her brother abuse her? Hit her? She fought back, got away. And then went where, to the mill?

  She stood, reaching her hands high above her head, raising her chin to the ceiling in a long-forgotten yoga pose. When Holden was alive, she used to go to class late in the afternoon, stretching her muscles, her long legs to the sides, up to the ceiling, feeling the expansion of big breaths in her chest. Sometimes she thought the only time she could breathe was in that class.

  The clock above her desk clicked to six fifteen.

  A trip to the bathroom, then she’d leave. If Tripp didn’t call her before then, she’d decide what to do. Her stomach rumbled and she clicked her dry tongue against the roof of her mouth.