In the Shadow of Blackbirds

by Cat Winters

  I lifted my face. “How did Julius feel about that decision?”

  “Well …” Gracie sniffed. “He said he didn’t like it, but Stephen didn’t make any noise during the first week. None of Julius’s customers knew he was up there. Julius told us to keep saying Stephen was still overseas. This was all around the time Mother died from the flu, and I didn’t know what to do. Julius said if Stephen got bad enough we should just tell people he’d gotten shot in combat and put him away.”

  A profound sadness settled in my bones. I wanted to lower my head and cry for everything I’d ever lost in my life, but I pushed my arms against the table, elbows locked, to keep myself upright. “What happened after the first week? Did he start making noise?”

  “Yes.” Gracie sniffed again. “He started to wake out of his fog a little. He wasn’t yet talking, but he started yelling whenever he heard certain noises—the buzz of the doorbell, the telephone ringing, the flashlamp, the Naval Air Station planes. Anything loud and sudden panicked him. He even kicked his mother in the stomach once when one of the planes flew over the house. Julius had to take her to the hospital to make sure she didn’t have any internal damage.”

  “That was the day we were there for my most recent photograph,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see Stephen when he was up in his room?”

  “No, I stayed away from him. I didn’t want to see him that way.”

  I rubbed my eyes, which throbbed and burned with phantom smoke. “Stephen says he often sees creatures watching over him while he’s strapped down. No one tied him to his bed, did they? Either in that East Coast hospital or at home?”

  “Oh, heavens. I don’t know. He may have been chained to that hospital bed. I didn’t ask Aunt Eleanor how they were keeping him calm after he kicked her.” Gracie tugged my hand away from my eye with a firm grip. “Is he here? Does he know what I’m saying?”

  “I think he’s trying to come, but I don’t want him to get any closer until you answer the most important question—the one that may help him rest in peace.” My throat and mouth ached from the smoke and the fight to hold back tears. I realized the cause of his death, spoken aloud, might make him disappear from my life, so selfishly I let a few more seconds tick by before I asked my question: “How did he die, Gracie?”

  Gracie’s face contorted again. She tried to hold on to my hand, but her tears ran down to the bodice of her black dress at such a rate, she had to let go to wipe them. My aunt just sat there, stunned and mute.

  “What happened?” I asked. “Please tell him. He needs to know.”

  “Stephen …” Gracie lowered her eyes. “My poor cousin … You shot yourself.”

  My head slammed against the table. My neck simply refused to hold up my skull any longer, and I found myself lying there with my cheek pressed against the wood. A terrific headache erupted in my left temple.

  “Are you all right, Mary Shelley?” Aunt Eva grabbed at my shoulders. “I told you not to do this. Sit up. Sit up, and tell me you’re all right.”

  “How did he get a gun?” I somehow found the strength to ask.

  “Julius kept one to protect the house from intruders,” said Gracie.

  “Where was Julius?”

  “He slept at our house that night. He rode over from Coronado on the last ferry and showed up at our door after getting a drink in the city. He said he needed a break from taking care of Stephen.”

  “What time was that?”

  “I don’t know—maybe eleven o’clock. He’s always coming over to stay the night so he can be in the city.”

  “And he was there all night?”

  “Well … he was in San Diego all night, I know that for sure. I went to bed shortly after he arrived, and I found him lying on our living room floor early the next morning. He was … he and Grant … they sometimes …”

  My eyes widened. “They sometimes what?”

  “They sometimes go to—please don’t tell Grant I’m telling you this …”

  “Where do they go?” asked Aunt Eva for me. “Please just tell her so she’ll sit up and act like a normal person again.”

  “I’ll wake up in the morning,” said Gracie, “and find them passed out in various parts of the house, and their eyes don’t look right. They’re like pale sleepwalkers who can barely move. Grant says he’s only been smoking pipes in that den with Julius since our mother died—he says it helps him with his grief. Please don’t call the police on him. I know it’s opium, but he’ll stop using it soon. I swear he will.”

  I tried to piece the timeline together in my head. “So … after you found Julius on the floor that morning, Grant must have driven him home to Coronado. Aunt Eva and I saw Grant drop him off when we were waiting to pick up my picture.”

  “Yes.” Gracie nodded. “Then Grant drove straight back to our place. Julius didn’t feel like opening the studio that day.”

  “Why not?”

  “More and more people were hearing Stephen upstairs. Customers got frightened. Some of them left before sitting for their photos.” Gracie pressed her handkerchief over her eyes and exhaled a long sigh. “Julius telephoned—later that Monday morning. He was in tears. He said their mother had found Stephen, dead, with the gun in his hand, and there was blood everywhere. The police had to come. My aunt hasn’t been the same ever since.”

  I massaged my temple and kept going. “Where is Mrs. Embers now, Gracie?”

  “In a local sanitarium … one of those health resorts with fresh springwater and relaxation treatments. She probably needs more care, but we couldn’t imagine putting her in an asylum. Not after she fought so hard to keep Stephen out of one.”

  “Is she any better?” asked Aunt Eva, now clinging to my shoulders as if her safety depended on it.

  Gracie shook her head. “I’ve gone to visit her every day. She grabs my hand and mutters something about poison and a gunshot and her strong sleeping pills. Other times she’s quiet and looks like a lost little girl. I wish I could help her. I don’t know what I can possibly do to make her come back to us.”

  I knitted my brow. “Why is she talking about poison?”

  “I don’t know.” Gracie mopped her face with her cloth. “Maybe Stephen tried poisoning himself first.”

  “You’re sure no one else was in the house when Stephen died?” I asked.

  “I’m positive. Grant and Julius were in San Diego.”

  “They couldn’t have gone to Coronado after you went to bed?”

  “No. The ferries were closed for the night, and the drive around the bay is too long and risky in the dark. The peninsula leading to Coronado is just a thin strip of land.” She wiped her tears again and knocked her wig off center. “The police confirmed it was a suicide, but Julius paid them to keep quiet so he could keep insisting Stephen had been in France the whole time. The undertakers were so overwhelmed by the number of funerals for flu victims that we delayed his burial by more than a week. That allowed Julius time to tell people we were waiting for Stephen’s body to come home. It was all so horrifying.” Gracie balled her cloth between her hands. “To lose a loved one at such a young age is unthinkable, but then to have to lie about the circumstances and watch his mother go out of her mind with grief … I don’t know what to do, Mary Shelley. Is Stephen here yet? Will he speak to me and forgive me for going along with the war hero charade?”

  I closed my eyes and drew in a deep breath of the smoke working its way into my lungs and under my skin. An exhausting weight curled around my back and pressed against my spine.

  “Stephen,” I whispered to him, feeling my aunt’s fingers pull away from my shoulders. “I know this all must be disturbing for you, but now you know what really happened. Is there anything else you need us to do to help you rest? Is there anything you want me to tell your cousin before—”

  Rage singed my tongue. Without warning, violent tremors seized my torso and legs, and the window behind me rattled in response to my movements. Every obje
ct hanging on the walls—from the cuckoo clock to the spice rack—soon clanked and shuddered and sounded like a living creature struggling to break free from its nails, and there was nothing I could do to stop the shaking.

  Gracie whimpered. “Stephen?”

  “I don’t believe it,” he growled, so close to me—so very, very close. “And I know exactly why my mother’s talking about poison.” His anger churned in my veins, and his voice took on a raspy tone that didn’t even sound like him. “The blackbirds pour it down my throat.”

  “Stop it, Mary Shelley,” begged Aunt Eva.

  “Stephen?” asked Gracie. “Stephen, I’m so sorry we couldn’t help you. I’m so sorry.”

  “Tell her, Shell,” said Stephen over the cacophony of rumbling glass and gas pipes groaning at their seams. “Tell her I didn’t kill myself. Tell her someone pours poison down my throat. They’re killing me. They won’t stop killing me.”

  The window cracked, shocking me out of my convulsions.

  The shaking stopped.

  The room fell silent.

  Aunt Eva thumped against the floor. Gracie’s skin turned a seasick green, and she swayed like she’d also faint at any minute. She gripped the table’s edge and lowered her forehead to the surface to keep from toppling over.

  I didn’t blame either of them. I nearly fell unconscious myself.

  For Stephen’s voice hadn’t burned against my ear or emerged from the air a few feet away from my head. His shouts weren’t something for me alone to hear in the private confines of my brain.

  His voice—his actual deep voice—came directly from my mouth.

  I WAITED ON THE COLD FLOOR OUTSIDE AUNT EVA’S ROOM with my face pressed into my sweating palms. Gracie had helped revive my aunt and steer her to bed, but after that she simply shut down, as if someone had closed up shop inside of her. She wandered from our house with an empty stare.

  Waves of dizziness threatened to knock me over, but I kept my wits about me and tried to fit Gracie’s account of suicide into Stephen’s blackbirds story. Did he shoot himself because he was convinced birds from the battlefields had followed him home to haunt him? If that was the case, why did both Stephen and Mrs. Embers insist poison played a role?

  “What if his mother killed him to put him out of his misery?” I asked myself aloud.

  The echo of my theory banged around my brain until a vein in my forehead pulsated. I fidgeted with guilt for even considering the possibility. But, still … what if Mrs. Embers didn’t want her son to suffer? Perhaps that’s why she had to be taken away after his death. Maybe Stephen’s mind transformed his mother into a monstrous creature to protect him from the truth.

  A HAND NUDGED THE BACK OF MY ARM. “WHO ARE YOU right now?”

  I blinked away my drowsiness and found my aunt standing over me with her crucifix in her hands like a baseball bat. The lengthening shadows of late afternoon stretched outside her bedroom door behind her.

  “You’re not going to hit me with that, are you?” I asked.

  “Are you Mary Shelley?”

  “Yes, it’s me. Please put that down.”

  Her arms relaxed around the cross, but her face remained tense. “I don’t want you out here.”

  “Do you feel better?”

  “Go to your room and lie down. I’m fetching a glass of water for myself. I’ll bring one to you in a moment.”

  “All right. Thank you.”

  I made my way to my room and flopped facedown on the mattress.

  Aunt Eva went downstairs and made a commotion in the kitchen, slamming cupboard doors and yelling about the crack in the window. She thumped back up and plunked herself down on my bed with enough force to rock me back and forth. “Don’t ever talk like him again.” She set a glass of sloshing water on the table beside me.

  I buried my face in my goose-down pillow. “Grant looks strong enough to be of use to someone trying to get rid of an embarrassing family member.”

  “Stephen took his own life. You heard what Gracie said—his mother found him holding the gun. I’m sure it’s hard to fathom the boy you knew doing something like that to himself, but it sounds like he wasn’t even remotely the same person by the time he got home.”

  “I don’t believe he committed suicide. I think they killed him.”

  “People don’t commit murder because of embarrassment.”

  “They didn’t know what else to do with him.” I turned my head to the side to look at her and her cross. “Do you think a mother could be capable of killing her own son to put him out of his misery?”

  “No!” Her eyes got huge. “That’s a horrible thought. I’m sure Mrs. Embers held hope in her heart for Stephen’s recovery. Please, Mary Shelley, I don’t want him to keep coming to you. Tell him to stay away. Tell him if he has any decency left, he’ll leave you alone.”

  “I can’t let him go until I find out why he’s still partway here.”

  “It was as if the devil himself possessed you.”

  “That wasn’t the devil.”

  “He was no angel.”

  I exhaled a long breath through my nose. “Do you know what my father told me about monsters and devils?”

  She shook her head. “I almost hate to think what your father’s opinion on that subject would be.”

  “He said the only real monsters in this world are human beings.” I licked my parched lips. “It was a frightening thing to learn, but it makes so much sense. We can be terrible to one another.” I dug my cheek deeper into the pillow. “And do you know the oddest thing about murder and war and violence?”

  “Oh, Mary Shelley, please stop talking about those types of things.”

  “The oddest thing is that they all go against the lessons that grown-ups teach children. Don’t hurt anyone. Solve your problems with language instead of fists. Share your things. Don’t take something that belongs to someone else without asking. Use your manners. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Why do mothers and fathers bother spending so much time teaching children these lessons when grown-ups don’t pay any attention to the words themselves?”

  Aunt Eva nuzzled her chin against the crucifix. “Not every grown-up forgets those teachings.”

  “But enough of them do. If someone killed Stephen, they didn’t treat him as they’d want to be treated. And those men who arrested my father punched him in the gut before they hauled him away. The Espionage Act already allowed them to take him away from me, but they also hurt him to teach him a lesson. He sank to his knees and couldn’t breathe after they were done with him.”

  “Wartime isn’t like normal times.”

  “But that’s the point. We wouldn’t even have wars if adults followed the rules they learned as children. A four-year-old would be able to see how foolish grown men are behaving if you explained the war in a child’s terms. A boy named Germany started causing problems all over the playground that included beating up a girl named Belgium on his way to hurt a kid named France. Then England tried to beat up Germany to help France and Belgium, and when that didn’t work, they called over a kid named America, and people started pounding on him, too.”

  My aunt lowered her cross to her lap. “It’s not that simple. Africa and Russia are involved, Germany and England were competing to build bigger navies, the Serbs assassinated Archduke Ferdinand—you can’t break down the causes in a child’s terms. And you better not say those things in public. That’s exactly why your father went to jail.” She leaned forward. “You have to realize, he was once like Stephen. That’s where his anger comes from.”

  My arms and legs went cold. “What are you talking about? How was he like Stephen?”

  “They called the condition names like soldier’s heart during the Spanish-American War, this thing they’re saying is shell shock nowadays. The unexplained effects of war upon a person’s mind. Your father still had it when he met your mother.”

  I lifted my shoulders and head. “Are you sure? He’s never shown any signs …”r />
  “I remember him coming over to visit your mother when I was about seven. We’d all be talking about something that didn’t even have anything to do with the war, and he’d sort of drift away. He’d look off into the air in front of him and not say a word for at least five minutes. Your mother would take his wrist, check his pulse, and call his name, and eventually he’d shake out of it and ask what we were just talking about.” Aunt Eva sat up straight and put the cross aside. “My parents worried about my sister’s relationship with him. They thought she was confusing concern for a sick man with love, and they feared she considered him the ultimate test of her skills as a physician.”

  “But they did love each other, didn’t they?”

  “I’m sure they loved each other. Your father gradually got better, and they seemed happy enough. His own father worked him hard in that store to make sure he kept up a routine in his life. The marriage lifted his spirits, certainly. But I didn’t stop seeing those fading-away episodes until after you were born. Maybe he realized you were too important to lose.”

  I sighed in disbelief and sank my head back down on the pillow. “Then if Stephen’s family had just given him a chance and found him help, he might have eventually recovered, too.”

  “His family didn’t kill him.”

  “But—”

  “No.” She pressed her hand against my back. “He’s dead because he wanted to be dead. There’s nothing you can do for him. I know it sounds cruel, but he chose to leave. And he should stay gone.”

  I NAPPED FITFULLY AFTER AUNT EVA STOPPED RUBBING my back and left me alone in the room. I kept dreaming about that bloodstained sky. A gunshot would ring through my head, and the world above me would be splattered in the darkest red. I’d awaken with the sensation of a bird pressing down on my lungs, yet nothing was there but the taste of smoke and copper and Stephen’s photographs staring at me from the wall beyond the foot of my bed.