The Darling Songbirds

by Rachael Herron

  Well, he didn’t want to answer that. He shouldn’t have said anything.

  But she was waiting now. She wasn’t looking at him, but he could feel her focus on him as clearly as if she’d touched him. Heat slid up his neck. ‘What do you mean, why?’

  ‘What did Hugh do for you? I guess – I haven’t put that piece of the puzzle together yet.’

  He spoke into his beer. ‘Just … he believed in me.’

  ‘Oh.’ Adele looked into her own glass. ‘He was good at that. One of the best.’

  Nate’s mother had always thought he wouldn’t graduate high school, let alone college. She’d been too drunk to come to either graduation. And he’d never even known who his father was – Donna always got confused when she was asked about that time in her life.

  ‘What were you doing before you came to Darling Bay?’

  Before a then-stranger named Hugh Darling called to tell him his mother was in the hospital for yet another alcohol overdose? ‘Working. Saving. I was out of college, trying to make a go of it.’

  Adele nodded. ‘What did you major in?’

  ‘Social work.’ Nate missed it sometimes. The simplicity of working the suicide hotline. It had been stressful and sad sometimes, sure. But mostly, people called to talk. He was good at listening, always had been. Way better at listening than talking, that was for damn sure. As long as he was putting cards on the picnic table in front of them, he might as well lay a couple more out. ‘And Hugh always made it clear that if I worked for him long enough, and kept saving my money, that he’d sell the place to me. I mean, if you girls didn’t come home.’

  Adele remained quiet. She didn’t meet his eyes.

  So Nate went on. ‘I was just a stray, you know? But Hugh took me in.’ Good old Hugh, the only man who fully accepted Donna as she was – a drunk who never wanted to stop but who needed a job, a purpose. Being behind the bar gave her an excuse to put off drinking till closer to the end of the night, and that was a small mercy in and of itself.

  Nate hadn’t understood this, not at the beginning. That first call he’d gotten from Hugh, a stranger to him: ‘Your mother’s in the hospital.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Darling Bay.’

  ‘Where the hell is that?’

  ‘Five hours north of you, son.’

  He’d gotten there from Fresno in four hours flat, driving north on the winding, narrow two-lane highway that led to the ocean and then north some more, till there were wind-scoured rocks to his left, and high stands of redwood and eucalyptus on his right. Darling Bay was barely a bump in the road, a tourist trap, a place to buy ice-cream and kites on the family’s road trip.

  His mother had been pale and skinny in the white hospital bed. You shouldn’t be here. They were her first words to him in three years. But she’d clutched his hand and held it tighter than he’d ever seen her hold a bottle.

  In the Darling Bay hospital hallway, he’d yelled at Hugh Darling. ‘You gave her a job? In a bar? You did notice she’s an alcoholic, right?’

  Hugh had shrugged his bear-like shoulders. ‘That means she’s gonna drink.’

  ‘Oh, right. You own the place. You just keep them around to make money off of, huh? You know she doesn’t have money, right? Never has, never will.’

  ‘I give her money, because she works for me. Does a good job, too.’

  ‘You give her money to drink.’ Nate thought he might punch the man, right there, just smash him in the middle of the face. ‘You pay her to keep drinking.’

  Hugh had swatted at his eyebrow as if it itched. As if Nate were an irritating fly. ‘I pay her ’cause I care about her. She’s good people. And if she’s gonna be in the bar – and we both know she is – then there should be someone who cares about her close by to get her to the damn hospital when she needs to go.’

  Nate opened his mouth, wanting to swear or yell, but he found he had no words. No one had cared about Donna Houston in a really long time – no one but Nate – and Nate hadn’t ever been able to help her, anyway.

  ‘Now,’ said Hugh, rubbing his back against a doorjamb, ‘you want to get a sandwich? The cafeteria has pastrami, but it’s like rubber. I do not recommend it. I swear by their peanut butter and blackberry sandwich, though. Got a place you can stay if you want to hang out in town with her a while.’

  Nate never left. He quit his job at the counselling hotline over the phone and had a moving company box up his apartment for him. He stayed at the Spike until he bought the boat where he lived until he’d gotten so close to buying the property he could taste it. He’d found a home, and a mentor. Hugh had been the only father figure he’d ever had. If only he’d been able to let go of his dream of his Songbirds coming home, if only he’d sold to Nate years ago. All this time, Nate could have been using his own money to fix up the place, rather than having to keep his dollars safe in the bank, ready for the purchase that still hadn’t come.

  ‘Yeah, that sounds like him.’ Adele looked over her shoulder at the apartment door. ‘I think that’s where he got all that stuff that filled his apartment. Strays. Orphans. He never could stand to see someone leave a magazine on a bus stop, you know? He had to take it. He had to read it and make it feel wanted.’ She paused. ‘It got worse, though. So much worse. When we didn’t come home.’ Her voice trailed off.

  Nate opened a bag of the chips, but he didn’t feel hungry. ‘You should let me help you. It’ll go faster.’

  She straightened, visibly rallying herself. ‘It was fine. The Post brothers were great.’

  He hadn’t been needed – that’s what she was saying. ‘You’re not done already, are you?’

  ‘Almost totally done. I was going to hire a cleaning crew to come in, but Jack said he and John were as good at cleaning as any maid service, and he was right. I bought the supplies. I did most of the kitchen, but they did the rest.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’ They’d only been working, what, three days? Total?

  ‘We even pulled up the carpet in the bedrooms and the parlour. That was how the dumpster got filled yesterday.’ Her eyes closed as if suppressing a shudder. ‘I’ve never smelled something like that. It was awful. But the floors underneath are hardwood, and with a couple more moppings and a final polish, they’ll be gorgeous. There’s a problem in the bathroom with the showerhead, but it shouldn’t be a big fix.’

  ‘Can I see?’

  She blinked. ‘Of course.’

  They left their pints behind. She went in first, and then spun, spreading out her arms. ‘Isn’t it amazing?’

  And God help him, even as dirty as she was, covered head to toe in grime, as she turned in place, giving him that delighted smile, he wanted to kiss her again so badly that he had to shove his hands into his pockets to keep from reaching for her.

  He barely looked around at the apartment. All Nate could see was her. ‘Amazing,’ he agreed, his voice rough. ‘Fucking amazing.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  It was a good answer, and she was happy to hear it, even though Nate didn’t even seem to be looking around.

  ‘I mean, no one could have lived in this place just days ago. Right?’

  Nate shook his head as if either agreeing with her or trying to clear it. ‘Well …’

  ‘Does it still stink like bleach in here? Because I think I’ve become immune to the smell of it. I may have burned off the inside lining of my nose. I’m not sure.’ She knew she was babbling. ‘I guess I shouldn’t say that no one could have stayed here. I know Uncle Hugh did, but a sleeping bag in a corner of the parlour doesn’t really count.’ She deliberately ignored the fact that Nate had allowed Hugh to live in a place like that. It was obvious Nate had done his hellfire best. No one had ever been more stubborn than Uncle Hugh. ‘And I’m not ready to trust the mattresses – I have someone coming to pick them up tomorrow. We didn’t find many bugs, mercifully, but just thinking about everything that was piled on those beds makes me feel itchy.’ Beds. She was talking about beds to Nate.
‘Speaking of itchy, I think working with Jack Post has infected me. I’m talking like him. Do you think I’m talking like him?’

  Nate shrugged. A smile slid halfway onto his face. ‘You haven’t thrown in enough non sequiturs. When you start jumping topics from pencil erasers to shrubbery, then you’ll sound like him.’

  ‘Lion tamers on the television?’

  ‘There you go. Now you’ve got it.’

  Seeing Nate’s full-on smile, Adele almost felt giddy. It was probably just the half-beer doing it. She ignored the heat she felt in her face. ‘Come see the parlour.’

  Always her favourite room in the building, the parlour’s clean-out was her proudest achievement of the last few days. When they were kids, she and her sisters had liked to lie on the floor, pressing their ears to hear the music from the saloon below. On busy nights, they’d hear the yips of the dancing cowboys, hear the high, trilling laughter of their dates. When they couldn’t see into the saloon, when they could just imagine it, it was full of turn-of-the-century dancers and gamblers. Uncle Hugh had promoted this flight of fancy. He’d come up and tell them tall tales of the gunslingers below, how they’d tied up their horses at the hitching post out back. ‘No, sugar, it’s too dark to go out there. Besides, you wouldn’t want to get in a gunslinger’s way, would you? They’re quick to the trigger, and old Doc Ramsey is out of town birthing another Ingalls baby.’ To Adele, who worshipped the Little House on the Prairie books, his words were good as gospel. And when Molly and Lana stood out on the small porch that hung over the street, singing along to ‘Achy Breaky Heart’, she would put her fingers in her ears and hum ‘The Streets of Laredo’, the only song she thought a cowboy might know.

  The old spinet piano had been the first thing she’d uncovered. Her mother had loved that thing. Uncle Hugh had known it and back then he’d kept it polished just for her. When they came into town, he’d have a vase of fresh wildflowers sitting on top. Adele’s father had teased him for having a crush on his wife, and Uncle Hugh had always pleaded somewhat guilty. ‘You got the best one. Why would I bother looking for someone when she was already taken?’

  So many memories in this old room. Once she’d gotten the carpet out and all the books were sitting in boxes outside, once the furniture was visible again, Adele could almost hear her sisters laughing in the back bedroom. Soon they would run in, soon her mother would come in singing, soon her father would thump indoors, pretending to grump when his girls launched themselves at his knees. Earlier, after the Post brothers had left, Adele had been unable to stop herself from crying. She’d lain on the low sofa which had always been their father’s favourite place to nap. The crying jag had left her cheeks sticky and the backs of her legs covered with sofa dust, her heart just as empty.

  God, she missed them. All of them.

  Their mother, gone to cancer, so long now. Adele had been only sixteen when she’d died. Their father, gone to the heart attack. Her sisters, gone to the fight that had followed their father’s death, the one that ripped the band apart and sent them to different corners of the world. Sure, she talked to Molly, but she hadn’t been in the same room with her for more than three years. She hadn’t even talked to Lana since the break-up. So long ago now.

  And Uncle Hugh, the glue that had brought them back to Dad’s hometown, year after year of their childhood, was dead.

  Adele was the only Darling left in Darling Bay. It didn’t feel right.

  Her eyes still burned from crying, but if Nate said anything about how red they were, she’d blame the bleach and the dust.

  ‘This is the way it used to look.’ Nate blinked and turned to look behind him. ‘I’d forgotten all of these.’ He leaned forward to the black-and-white photos hanging on the wall. The biggest one, in a cracked walnut frame, was a picture of Adele’s great-grandfather Riley, back at the turn of the century. He stood in front of the saloon, a shovel in one hand, as if to symbolise the fact that he’d dug the very foundation of the building. His clothes were dark, as was his hat and the dirt of the ground at his feet, but the wall of the saloon behind him was bright in the photo – obviously newly whitewashed. His face was proud. Next to him hung a framed photo of the hotel, also brightly white, and the café, with its black-and-white striped awning clean and new.

  Nate pointed to the one next to those. ‘Your great-granddad, right?’

  ‘Yep. Riley Darling.’ She’d never known him. She barely remembered his son, her grandfather Charles – he’d died and left the property to the brothers before she was even five.

  ‘He built the place.’

  She nodded, feeling pride in the accomplishment of a long-dead man. Strange, how family worked. ‘A saloon went up in the gold rush, but it had burned down by the time ol’ Riley got here. The town was almost dead when he built the Golden Spike. Gold was played out, and the miners were a dying breed. But then came the fishing and the logging boom and it turned out he was in the right place at the right time.’

  Nate nodded and moved to look at another picture. ‘And here’s Hugh and your dad.’

  ‘I love that one.’ In an obvious replication of her great-grandfather’s pose, they both stood in front of the saloon holding shovels. Their faces were straight, like the original photo, but Adele could see the laughter almost ready to burst out of them.

  ‘And these. I haven’t seen these in years.’ Nate paused in front of the first official Darling Songbird band photo. They’d been dressed in vintage Old West women’s wear, wide hoop skirts and beribboned hats. Luckily, they hadn’t kept that up, being happier in western shirts and jeans than the vintage dresses their mother had put them in for their first few gigs. The photo was black and white, to match the rest of the framed photos, but Adele could almost feel the blue of the sky above them, could almost hear their father’s whoop of delighted laughter as the professional photographer (their first) clicked his camera.

  ‘Yeah. I should get them digitised. Send them to my sisters.’ She said it like she’d know where to send them mail. She didn’t.

  The tired ache started again behind her eyes.

  Nate straightened, sticking his thumbs into the front of his jeans pockets. He looked relaxed here, like he fit. Adele realised he’d probably spent more time at the Golden Spike, cumulatively, than she ever had.

  ‘What else needs to be done, besides getting new mattresses?’

  God, why did it seem like he was asking her a different kind of question? Heat hit her belly as his gaze tangled with hers. What else needed to be done? So much. Why couldn’t she think of a damn thing?

  ‘Um.’

  ‘You said the bathroom?’

  ‘Yes! The water runs into the bathtub, but I think the shower might be broken somehow.’

  He rocked back on his heels slightly. ‘You want me to take a look at it?’

  ‘I’m pretty good with pipes, actually.’ She was. She’d found out a long time ago that you could learn how to fix almost anything by looking it up on YouTube.

  He nodded. ‘Didn’t mean to imply you’re not. Just offering. In case you want another pair of eyes on it.’

  His eyes, he meant. Those changeable eyes (they were slate right now); those eyes that were doing things to her spinal column, making it feel all melty, like chocolate left in the sun.

  ‘Sure. Give it a shot.’

  The bathroom was big and egregiously pink. Hugh had painted it when the girls were young, when they’d begged him to. They’d never thought he would do it, but one summer they’d returned to find the room transformed – pink walls and ceilings, a candy-bright shower curtain hanging in the enormous pink clawfoot tub. He’d even made pink curtains by hand using old sailcloth dyed with Kool-Aid.

  They’d loved this bathroom as girls. Adele still did. She looked out the window over the tub – the night sky was streaked with clouds so pink they could have floated in and been at home on the bathroom ceiling.

  ‘I can’t believe what you did in here.’ Nate glanced around. ‘This is
crazy.’

  ‘Almost a real apartment again. It wasn’t as dirty as it looked, honestly. It wasn’t Hoarders-level bad. We found a dead mouse in a kitchen cupboard, but that was the only deceased critter, and it probably would have happened anyway.’ She caught sight of herself in the mirror. ‘Okay, I take that back. It was dirty. And it all landed on me, apparently.’ She was disgusting. How was she even talking to another human being looking like this? And why did that human being have to be someone as naturally hot as Nate? It wasn’t fair. He probably woke up hot. She looked like she’d been wearing the same clothes for a week.

  Nate did all the things she’d done to the pipes, pushing and pulling the same levers. ‘This is the one I think is broken. Here, take a gander.’

  She peeked over his shoulder. ‘Yeah, that’s what I thought. I was going to turn the water off and then pull that out. It’s loose if you wiggle it. Like a tooth.’

  Nate wiggled it.

  And a wide jet of water shot straight out the hole at them.

  Adele screamed. Nate jumped backward and then forward again, all the way into the tub, pressing his hands against the now-exposed pipe in the wall. ‘Go turn off the water main!’

  ‘I don’t know where it is! I just said I hadn’t tried turning it off yet!’

  ‘Get in here.’ Nate jerked his head. ‘Cover the water, and I’ll go turn it off.’

  She clambered over the bubblegum-pink cast-iron rim. ‘Move over.’ There wasn’t room for both of them to kneel in the tub, and her wet body was pressed against the side of his. She crouched as close as she could get to the faucet.

  ‘Here. You have to push hard. It’s going to get us as soon as we make the switch, but okay, go, go!’

  Nate was right, the water shot out again, soaking them further. Adele made another sound that was part-laugh, part-scream. ‘Go! Go! Hurry! I got it!’

  He stood and swung his leg out of the tub, putting both of his wide hands on top of her shoulders as he did so. ‘I’ll be fast. Hang on.’