Daughter of Hounds

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “I think Deacon might be better off with me living in New York, too. That’s one of the reasons I’m considering it. I didn’t want you to find out later and think I was keeping it a secret.”

  “Does Deacon think he’d be better off with you living in New York?” Emmie asked, though she was pretty sure that Sadie hadn’t yet said anything to Deacon about leaving, which meant she was keeping it a secret.

  “We still need to talk about it. I wanted to talk to you first.”

  “Don’t you think that’s kind of backwards?”

  And then Sadie just stared at her for a moment, the same way her second-grade teacher had stared at her when Emmie had memorized the entire multiplication table in one afternoon, the same way that her father had stared at her when he discovered that she knew how to play the piano even though she’d never had lessons. Emmie didn’t like that stare. It had always made her feel like something in a jar.

  “I don’t know,” Sadie said at last and looked away again, the shadows hiding her face once more.

  “He loves you,” Emmie said. “He’d do anything for you. He told me that he would.”

  “He won’t stop drinking for me. He won’t do it for you, either.”

  And Emmie didn’t argue, because she knew that was the truth, and there was hardly ever any point in arguing with the truth.

  “You’re going to divorce him?”

  “That’s not what I said,” Sadie replied. “I just don’t think it’s good that we live together anymore.”

  Maybe this is the dream, Emmie thought. Maybe this is the dream, and it’s being awake that isn’t very interesting. She wished that could be how it was, that it could all be as simple as her getting turned around inside her head, and in the morning she’d wake up and tell Sadie, and Sadie would tell her what a very silly dream it had been.

  “I won’t leave him,” Emmie said. “If that’s what you came to ask me, I won’t.”

  Sadie took a deep, hitching breath and wiped at her face with the front of her T-shirt. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s what I thought you’d say.”

  “Then why’d you have to wake me up, if you already knew?” Emmie asked, feeling suddenly more angry than sad or confused, and not caring if Sadie knew.

  “I needed to be sure; that’s why.”

  “You can’t make me leave him either, Sadie. If you did, he would…” And she paused, not sure if she wanted to say what she was thinking, afraid that saying it out loud might be enough to make it so. But holding the words back was like being sick and trying not to vomit, and they came anyway. “He would die, if we both left him. He wouldn’t have anything if we were both gone.”

  Sadie was crying now, and she shook her head. “I would never do that, Emmie. I’d never force you to come with me.”

  “But you want me to. You think that I should.”

  “I love you, sweetie, and I want what’s best for you, that’s all. But I’d never make you come, not if you want to stay.”

  “He’s my father,” Emmie said and sat up, pushing back the covers. “He’s my father, and this is my house.”

  “It’s my house, too,” Sadie said, almost as though it was something she’d forgotten and was trying to remember, and she wiped her nose again. “Jesus, I’m sorry, Emmie. I promised myself that I wasn’t going to cry.”

  “I think that was probably a dumb promise,” Emmie said. “I don’t see the point in making yourself dumb promises you know you can’t keep.”

  “I can’t stand the thought of being so far away from you,” Sadie said, almost whispering now.

  “Then don’t leave us,” Emmie replied, hearing the bite in her voice, the recrimination, and feeling only the smallest bit guilty about it. “Nobody’s making you go. No one said you should.”

  Sadie took another deep breath and held it for what seemed like a very long time before Emmie finally heard her exhale. “This is hard, and you’re not making it any easier.”

  “I’m not supposed to, Sadie. I’m just a kid, and you’re my mother. I don’t care what’s best for your writing, not if it means that you’re leaving me and Deacon alone.”

  Sadie turned back towards Emmie, and now her blue eyes were even brighter than before, bright with tears and anger and frustration and things that Emmie hadn’t yet learned words for. Emmie flinched, as though her stepmother meant to strike her, as though something had been thrown. She almost called out for her father, but then the Patty Duke song ended again, and in the moment of silence before it started over, her panic dissipated, fading away like the red, used-up air that had spilled out of Sadie’s nostrils.

  “My writing pays the bills, little girl,” she said. “My writing keeps your father in beer and whiskey and…” And then she held her good right hand up almost like a crossing guard, a gesture that Emmie understood at once—stop, don’t go any farther, don’t say another word, shut up—though she wasn’t sure whether it was intended for her or for Sadie.

  “Christ,” her stepmother muttered, biting at her lower lip and shaking her head, and then she looked away from Emmie, staring down at the rumpled comforter instead. “I don’t believe I just said that. I’m sorry, Emmie. That sounded like something my mother would have said.”

  “Maybe that’s important,” Emmie told her and scooted a few inches closer to her stepmother, close enough to be hugged if that’s what Sadie needed to do next.

  “Maybe so,” Sadie agreed and then didn’t say anything else for a couple of minutes, long enough that “The World Is Watching Us” ended again and started again. “But I’m still sorry. You should be asleep.”

  “I have school tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, you do. I shouldn’t have awakened you. I shouldn’t have brought this up in the middle of the night.”

  “I won’t say anything to Deacon,” Emmie said, hoping that Sadie wouldn’t either. Hoping that by morning Sadie would have decided moving to New York was a ridiculous idea, that leaving them wouldn’t help her writing at all.

  “Thanks, pumpkin.”

  “Just don’t give up on us yet,” Emmie said, and Sadie did hug her then, held her tight and promised that she’d never give up on Emmie, no matter what, which wasn’t particularly reassuring, since it still left the possibility that she might give up on Deacon and leave them anyway.

  And later, after Sadie had left the room and there were only the outside noises and Patty Duke and all the strange creaks and thumps that an old house makes at night when it thinks no one is listening, Emmie told herself a story to make her sleepy again. It was a new story, mostly, not one she’d made up earlier or heard or read in a book. Sadie was in the story, but she was much younger, hardly more than a girl, and she hunted sea monsters with a pirate ship stolen from the Barbary Coast. Her bad hand had been replaced with a shiny mechanical contraption of cogs and gears with a timepiece set conveniently in the palm, and she searched the far horizon with a long brass telescope that had been given to her by the court astronomer of one sultan or another. The stolen pirate ship was called the Harbinger, because it was a word that Emmie loved and used whenever she felt using it was appropriate.

  “Then turn not pale, beloved snail,” the Sadie in the story howled boldly up at the fearsome Atlantic sky, “but come and join the dance!” (And Emmie had reluctantly stolen that part from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, because she was too tired to think of anything better.)

  She kept meaning to put Deacon in the story somewhere, because, as Sadie had taught her, telling stories was a sort of magick, a powerful sort of magick, and maybe doing so would help keep Sadie in Providence with them. But then the Harbinger suddenly ran aground on an island that was really the shell of an enormous man-eating turtle named Archelon, and by the time the giant turtle had been vanquished and the ship was on its way again, racing across the frigid Labrador Sea in search of seals and yetis and polar bears, she was falling asleep, sliding easily from the story into her dreams.

  There were no pirate ships in her dream
, or sea monsters, and Sadie didn’t have a robotic hand, but her father was there, and her mother, too—the tall, plain woman who’d given birth to her, whom Emmie had only ever seen in photographs, because Chance Silvey had died the same day Emmie was born. She met her mother in dreams, sometimes, and sometimes they talked, and this time she told Emmie not to worry, that Deacon was a whole lot stronger than she thought. “He’s slain dragons,” her mother said, and smiled, and Emmie smiled, too, knowing it must be true, and the dream rose and fell like a French brigantine lost on the vast and briny deep, taking her places, and then on to other places, towing her soul slowly towards the dawn.

  Sadie and Emmie take a cab from Pennsylvania Station, because Sadie said that she wasn’t in the mood for the subway, and that was fine with Emmie. It was always much better to be aboveground, with the noise and movement of the city pressing in all around her, than stuffed into some dingy subway car hurtling headlong through the oily dark with no idea what might be going on overhead. The driver is a black woman with a thick Caribbean accent, and she asks Emmie how old she is before starting the meter. Then Sadie’s cell phone rings, and she promises Emmie that it will take her only a second, just a minute, that it’s someone from her agent’s office, so she has to take the call. But Emmie knows that it always takes more than a second or a minute, and that’s fine, too. There are far too many wonderful things to see, and if she talks to Sadie she might miss something. She’ll have plenty of time to talk to Sadie later. So, the driver drives, and Sadie talks to the phone, and Emmie sits with her nose and lips against the cold taxi window and watches the city as the woman with the Caribbean accent navigates the crowded, steaming roads.

  “Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he,” Sadie laughs, but not the sort of laugh that means she thinks something’s funny, and then she digs about in her purse until she finds a yellow pack of Juicy Fruit gum. She gives a stick to Emmie and takes one for herself. “No, I’ve got my step-daughter down for a few days. He’ll just have to wait until next week. They already said that I had until March, didn’t they?”

  The cab turns south onto Broadway, and Sadie laughs again and says good-bye to the person on the other end of the phone call. “I’m turning this damned thing off,” she says, pressing a button on the cell phone and dropping it into her purse, then zipping the purse shut. “Now it’s just me and you, pumpkin.”

  “We should get some pizza,” Emmie says hopefully, reluctantly turning away from the smudgy cab window, from all those people and the other automobiles, the trash blowing along the sidewalks and the stunted little trees huddled in the lee of the tall buildings, the storefronts and restaurants. They’ve just passed a big yellow sign promising Ray’s Famous Pizza, and Emmie wonders if the driver would go back if Sadie paid her extra.

  “Pizza?” Sadie asks and wrinkles her nose. “You sure you want pizza? I thought we could get some sushi after we dropped your stuff at the apartment.”

  “I’d rather have pizza,” Emmie replies. “Sausage pizza with lots of green olives. We can have sushi later, I promise. We’ll have sushi tomorrow.”

  “I know you never get it, that’s all.”

  Emmie smiles and starts folding the strip of silver foil from her piece of Juicy Fruit, working it nimbly between the tips of her fingers. “I don’t eat raw fish,” she says, lowering her voice, imitating her father. “You can get goddamned tapeworms eating raw fish. You want a tapeworm, Emma Jean Silvey? You want a tapeworm long as your arm?”

  And then they’re both laughing so hard that Emmie drops her bit of foil and has to scrounge around on the floorboard behind the driver to find it again.

  “You’re going to get filthy down there,” Sadie tells her. “You’ll probably get a tapeworm long as your arm.”

  “Nope. I found it,” Emmie says and holds up the foil so Sadie can see. Then the taxi hits a bump, and she almost drops it again. “Tapeworms hate pizza, by the way.”

  “Fine, you want pizza, then we’ll get you some pizza.” And Sadie sees that Emmie’s almost finished folding the strip of foil into a tiny bird. A couple of months ago she sent Emmie a book on origami. Last time she spoke with Deacon, he complained that Emmie had folded a twenty-dollar bill into a kangaroo.

  “Can I have that one?” Sadie asks, and Emmie nods her head.

  “Sure,” she says and gives the foil bird to Sadie.

  “You’re getting good at this.”

  “Yeah. I found more books in the library,” Emmie tells her. “It’s easy, once you get the hang of it. I’m teaching some kids at school.”

  “You are? How’s school been working out these days?”

  “Better,” Emmie says, and then she catches the driver watching her in the rearview mirror.

  “Just better?”

  “Boring,” Emmie adds, keeping her eyes on the driver’s reflection. “Math is boring, history is even worse, and I hate playing goddamn volleyball.”

  “Everyone hates volleyball,” Sadie says, still inspecting the precise angles of the origami bird. “That’s why they make you do it. What about English? What are you reading?”

  Emmie wishes that the driver would stop staring at her, wishes that Sadie would notice and make the woman stop. It’s just my eyes, Emmie thinks. She’s noticed my eyes, and she’s never seen a girl with yellow eyes before. And that makes her think about the woman on the train again, Saben White and the star tattooed on the back of her hand. Seven points, even though Emmie could only see six. She starts to tell Sadie that the driver’s staring at her, but then the woman with the Caribbean accent looks away, her eyes darting back to the road in front of them, back to the Manhattan traffic.

  “Is something wrong?” Sadie asks, and Emmie almost tells her about the driver, and about Saben White as well. She knows that’s exactly what her stepmother would want her to do, what Deacon would want her to do. Deacon almost got in a fight once with a guy on Thayer Street who was staring at Emmie’s eyes, not just staring but pointing and making jokes about her. She remembers her father grabbing the man by the collar of his shirt and telling him that if he didn’t apologize he’d be picking his teeth up off the ground. The man apologized, though Emmie had secretly wished that he wouldn’t, had wanted to see Deacon hurt him for embarrassing her. Everyone on the street had stopped whatever they’d been doing and looked at them, looking at her, all those curious, peering green and brown and blue eyes brushing against her like dirty hands.

  If I tell her, things will only be worse, she thinks, and so Emmie keeps it to herself for now and tells Sadie about her English class, instead, about Gulliver and To Kill a Mockingbird and a long poem by Robert Frost. Sadie gets her to recite part of the poem, the part that she remembers, and in a few more minutes the taxi is turning off Broadway, and the ride’s almost over. When they reach St. Mark’s Place, Sadie leans forward and tells the woman that this will do, this is fine. Emmie gets out and stands on the curb while Sadie pays the driver, stands staring up at the wintry slice of afternoon sky above the rooftops, and Emmie imagines that her eyes are that same color, like broken shards of china. There’s an airplane up there, a black dot trailing white smoke, and as long as she’s pretending, she makes it a spaceship on its way back to a planet where everyone has eyes like hers.

  TWO

  Soldier

  “I ’m asking you nicely—you need to stop staring at that damned watch of yours,” Odd Willie Lothrop grumbles, plucking an unlit Winston from his thin lips. “You’re making me jumpy.”

  “She’s late,” Soldier says for the seventh or eighth time since Saben failed to show for their two-o’clock. That was almost thirty-five minutes ago now, and the Bailiff’s already called twice to see what the hell’s going on, why the three of them aren’t on their way from Cranston to Woonsocket. She’s made Odd Willie take both the calls because she doesn’t like talking to the Bailiff when he’s pissed off—nobody does—but Soldier knows the next one will be for her, for her personally and no one else, and she’ll have t
o come up with some sort of halfway credible excuse to cover Saben White’s ass—again. This will make twice in one month, and Soldier doesn’t know why the bitch hasn’t already been handed her walking papers, why someone hasn’t put a couple in her skull and left her floating facedown in a marsh somewhere.

  “Jesus God, I fucking hate Woonsocket,” Soldier says and takes another sip from her third cup of coffee, which has started getting cold and isn’t doing anything at all for her hangover. “I don’t know why this one couldn’t have gone to Kennedy. He’s sure as hell got a lot more experience up there than I do.” She stares out the tinted, fly-specked plate-glass window of the Dunkin’ Donuts at the squalor scattered up and down the gray asphalt strip of Warwick Avenue. Soldier only ever comes this far south when the Bailiff says that she has to, when he consults his tea leaves or his crystal ball, or whatever it is he uses to make up his mind, and picks a meeting place down here. Then she has no choice but to leave Providence and make the crossing into Kent County over the poisonous, filthy waters of the narrow Pawtuxet River.

  “Kennedy’s a nebbish,” Willie says.

  “And I’m up shit creek,” Soldier replies and checks her watch again; Odd Willie shakes his head and puts the Winston back between his lips.

  “Maybe she got stuck in traffic,” he mumbles around the filter, and Soldier wants to hit him in the face. She takes another sip of coffee instead, something almost as bitter as her mood, and thinks about stepping outside for a smoke.

  “You always been this high-strung?” Odd Willie asks. “I mean, were you this way before the wingding with Sheldon and Joey Bittern?”

  Soldier sets down her cup and stares at Odd Willie across the tabletop; he knows better than to start talking shit about Sheldon Vale, especially when she’s sober and her butt’s on the line. His shiny coal-black hair is slicked back into a crooked sort of duck’s ass, his dewy sage-colored eyes peering out at her from beneath the place his eyebrows would be if he didn’t shave them off once a week. He has a silver tooth right up front, and his cheekbones are so high and hollow, his face so pinched and drawn in on itself, Willie could easily score some extra cash renting himself out on Halloween. But pretty hasn’t ever been very high on the Bailiff’s list of desirable qualities in his underlings.