by Averil Dean
I get to my feet.
“Are you leaving?” Amanda asks, disappointed.
“Yeah.”
She holds out the kitten reluctantly.
“I can’t keep him,” I say. “He should stay with you.”
A flicker of hope crosses her face—and longing. It’s a look no mother could refuse. Especially not the kind of mother who plants petunias in the front yard.
“I have to ask my mom,” she says.
But I’m already walking away.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
One day as Jack and I are leaving the farmers’ market, we see a strange black cloud moving like oil across the horizon. The cloud rolls and condenses, flattens out, trails off and thickens again, quickly and without apparent regard to the direction of the wind. Jack sets his basket in the bed of the truck and shades his eyes with one hand.
The farmer’s wife looks up, as well. She shifts the pumpkin she’s carrying and gives it to Jack, then rests her forearms on the side of the truck next to mine. Her fingers, curled around her elbow, are knotted and gnarled with age, and the skin on the back of her hands slips across the bones beneath it like a threadbare blanket over a row of sleeping children.
“Starlings,” she says, whistling over the consonants.
“What, a flock of birds?” Jack says.
“A murmuration, that’s the name for it.”
Murmuration. The word slides into my mind and I am back again to a snowy field on the other side of the island, the starlings unfurling like a black ribbon through the fog, and Michael’s cold hand in mine as we retraced our steps through the feathery white flakes that melted and dripped between our fingers.
We paused at the front door, looking back. The sky had lowered a veil to mask our leaving, which Michael saw as a sign. Vashon wanted us to go, he said, and on the other side of the water, the sun would be shining. It was our time.
We went inside to pack.
My duffel bag was half-filled when I heard the silence begin to break on the other side of my bedroom door. Verity’s voice, sleepy at first, then rising in pitch, slurred and garbled with last night’s wine.
“Where’s my money?”
I couldn’t hear Michael’s response. His voice was a murmur drowned out by hers.
“You owe me rent, you owe me for food. I had almost two hundred dollars in my purse and it’s gone. Where’s my fucking money?”
I had wanted to leave without waking her, just pack our bags and go, but Michael said he couldn’t do that. Verity had been good to us. We couldn’t leave without saying goodbye.
“Fuck you,” she said. There was a hard thump, like something had been thrown against the wall. “Self-righteous little prick.”
My face had begun to sweat and itch, and my neck crawled with angry hives. Anxiety swarmed like an anthill behind my rib cage. I imagined Michael with his suitcase lying open across his bed, warding her off, trying to calm things down.
But he was a kid. A broken kid and not the man this situation demanded.
“You can call Carla,” he said, and I heard the bewilderment in his voice. “Have her send someone else. Or I’ll call her. I’ll tell her you’re great—”
“Fuck Carla! You think I’m going to let her bring some other crackhead whore’s kid into my house?”
There was a silence. Then the sound of Michael’s suitcase shutting.
Hurry. Hurry, hurry.
I grabbed up my notebooks and shoved them into my bag, then my shoes and hairbrush and my kit, where I’d hidden the money I’d stolen from Verity. I snapped it closed and stood there listening, sweaty and panicked.
“You like that tight young pussy? You take the tricks I taught you and use them on that skinny little bitch? Hey, hey, I’m talking to you.”
“No, you’re done talking to me.”
They were in the hallway. I grabbed up my duffel bag and opened the door.
“Alice, wait—” Michael put up his hand.
“Oh, Alice.” Verity’s face was a mask, a parody of itself. Her eyes were wide and wild, filled with a lemony light. “Alice, what a sweet girl.”
She rushed at me with her hands stretched out, this sudden chaotic force, all hair and teeth and long purple fingernails. Michael dropped his suitcase and tried to restrain her, pushed his hand against that gaping mouth, cursing when she bit him.
“Alice,” he said. “Get in the car.”
He caught her arm and twisted it back, and I shoved past them through a rain of blows from her feet and her one free hand. Her nails raked my cheek and sliced like a knife down the side of my neck. But I kept going, the duffel bag banging at my shins, down the stairs and out the front door. I hit the rickety porch steps at a run, and they gave way as they had long threatened to do, with a brittle crack that sent me tumbling into the snow. I scrambled to my feet and kept going down the snowy driveway, skidding to my knees beside Michael’s car.
I ripped open my bag and began to claw through it for my kit. I would throw the two hundred dollars back at her—no matter that I’d earned it, no matter that I thought it was mine. I’d give it back and stop her yelling, and Michael and I would get the hell out of there.
The house was suddenly quiet. I waited, the bills clutched in my fist. Overhead, the starlings poured out of the clouds, necks outstretched, their wings beating hard against the sky. Then the front door sprang open and Michael shot through it and across the front porch, leaping past the broken steps to the sidewalk. He was empty-handed, and distantly I registered the alarm in this. He would never have left his bag behind; it was everything he had in the world.
Then I saw his face. My breath and heartbeat and the thumping of his feet seemed to lift away, and the moment hung in place where I can see it still: Michael moving toward me with his hands outstretched as if to pull me up. His eyes open wide. So terrifyingly aware. So alive.
Like Nana, sailing down the steps.
“She’s g—”
A shot cracked the air. And Michael was gone, instantly gone even as he fell, gone even before the blood hit my cheek. As if his spirit was suddenly too full to be contained, one small prick of a bullet sent him rushing from his body like the air from a torn balloon.
The world collapsed into two dimensions, images flipping past. The mud in a frozen crust around the fender of Michael’s car. The tire, half-moons of ice inside the hubcap. Michael’s scarf flung out across the ground, and next to it, three red spots like strawberries in the snow.
As I crouched beside the car, a small hole appeared in the door. I never heard the shot, though, and I never looked back. I left him where he lay, left Michael alone and seeping into the ground, and as the starlings retreated into the thick white sky, I started to run.
A third bullet was fired that morning, the one that killed Verity Cruz. But by then I was long gone.
Now the cloud of birds glides toward us, a slow undulating mass, then a quick pivot as a school of minnows will do when chased by a shark. The murmuration seems to be one entity, a single, liquid consciousness, but I imagine each quick-winged bird fluttering inside the cloud, a tiny busy heart thrumming in its breast.
“How do they all move at once like that?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “Each bird is watching the one next to it, I suppose.”
It’s an unsatisfying answer. She feels that, too, I think.
As we watch, a larger bird appears, diving through the clouds. Its wings tuck and expand and its body swivels, adjusting, but its eyes are locked on a single starling that trails behind the rest—struggling, wounded, or maybe just distracted.
“Hawk,” Jack says.
The murmuration is almost directly overhead. A long ripple passes through the flock, and the cloud of birds divides and reforms behind us, while the last starl
ing, sensing danger, plunges toward the mass of black bodies. But it’s too late. The hawk’s wings open wide and the starling is plucked from the flock. Its wings flap desperately and we hear a small, shrill cry.
The starlings glide away, and the hawk sinks with its prize into the trees.
“Poor thing,” the farmer lady says.
Jack turns to me, a strange half smile on his lips.
“The hawk has to eat,” I say, and hand my basket to him.
* * *
The scent of Jack’s house has become as familiar to me as my own: coffee and soap and wood glue, warm linen sheets and the earthy musk of Jack’s muddy leather work boots, the astringent scent of his rosemary shampoo in the bathroom, a trace of last night’s weed from the pipe on the mantel.
I lie next to him for an hour or two before he leaves for work in the morning, watching his chest rise and fall, listening to the clean sweep of air that fills his lungs and empties in a long steady draft, tickling across my skin. My head fits into the dip between his chest and shoulder, and I nestle into the warmth of him, the lid of his chin on top of my head.
After he leaves, I sleep for a while, then get a shower and something to eat. Sometimes I vacuum or do the dishes while the coffee is brewing, or toss an armful of laundry in the washing machine; a month ago, in a fit of activity, I dragged his leather rag rug outside, draped it over a tree branch and beat the dust out of it with a wooden broom, then scrubbed it down with a dry brush. When the rug was clean, I laid it back in the living room, opposite side up and turned ninety degrees to the fireplace. I expected Jack to correct it and was surprised to find the rug lying the same way for a week, before eventually I moved it myself.
Neither of us comments on this increasing domesticity, the roles we are beginning to play.
Today I notice that the Ansel Adams calendar in the kitchen needs to be advanced. I flip the page and realize the date is something of an anniversary: a year ago today I learned about Jack and set this plan in motion.
No, that’s not exactly true. I had been watching the gray house for years, whenever I could get to Vashon Island from whatever foster home I was living in at the time. Most of those homes were in Seattle, so I would sometimes skip school and take my bike on the bus across town to board the ferry. I always went straight to the Red Ranger in the tree. I would sit gazing up at it, thinking that if only I could figure out how to separate the metal from the hemlock, everything else would seem easy.
And leaving the tree, I would visit the gray house.
In the early days, I would circle behind the yard and watch from the shelter of the woods. I never saw much because the curtains were usually closed, but the slices of life I did witness were enough to feed my obsession. There were a lot of women at the house. I saw one scurrying through the rain to her car in the morning, another propped inside the dark rectangle of the door frame with a cigarette dangling from her fingers and a phone pressed to her ear. I once saw a pale face at the window, on the inside looking out, her fingers twitching along the edge of the bedroom curtain; years later, when I was old enough to venture there alone at night, I found that window belligerently open with a woman leaning over the sill while a man who was not Ray fucked her from behind, her arms clutching at the window frame and a strange rapt expression on her face.
It was around that time that I decided to go inside. If there was a reason in my mind to propel me over the threshold, I’ve forgotten it now. Getting in just seemed necessary. Logical, as a step along a given path, a paving stone set in the grass. I needed to get inside the gray house, and I knew it would be easy; the key was still under the crumbling flower pot next to the gate.
I went in by the side door and passed through the laundry room, stepping over piles of crumpled T-shirts and stiff socks, and one nauseating pair of gray underwear with tracks in the crotch. The laundry room led to a small dark hallway.
The house stank of cigarette smoke and moldy carpet. It was worse in the living room, which was furnished as if for a cheap rental, with a sagging tweed couch and tables encased in peeling, grainy veneers. The dining room table was chrome, the chairs plastic, the miniblinds crimped and covered with oily dust. There were fast-food wrappers everywhere I looked, and beer bottles, and ketchup-crusted paper plates. On the wall hung a picture of Jesus in a gold plastic frame.
I opened the door to the master bedroom. Like the rest of the house, the bed had an unwashed look about it. Tan sheets, flattened pillows. A black comforter, pilled with tiny balls of lint. A couple of discolored blankets. The dresser still took up most of the back wall, its surface covered with junk and a thin fur of dust. I stopped in front of it, opening and closing the drawers. At the back of the lowest drawer was a shoebox. I took it out, set it on the bed and lifted the lid.
The box was mostly full of debris. Receipts, a couple of old lighters, a pad of rolling papers, a faded Polaroid of a nude woman I didn’t recognize, who sat open-legged on the edge of the bed, pressing her breasts together as she simpered for the camera. Nothing in the box about my mother. Not a photo, a note, a matchbook with her name on it. Nothing. It was as though she’d never been there at all.
But I did find something else.
A small, folded square consisting of two newspaper photographs. The first was a business portrait of a confident young man standing in front of a construction site, one hand in his pocket and the other holding a rolled-up blueprint. In the second, the same man, clean-shaven and unsmiling behind his heavy-rimmed glasses, sitting at the defendant’s table with his head bent as his lawyer spoke in his ear.
Now I imagine a third photograph, as if from a video surveillance camera. That tall young man with a knife in his hand, kneeling beside a kitchen chair.
I go to the ship room to gather up my work. There are some notes I’ve left at home, the framework for a couple of new scenes that need to be finished, and a DVD Jack said he wanted to watch tonight. As I sit down and put my legs under the table, something flops onto my knee. At first it seems that I’ve dropped some papers, but when I reach to collect them and put them back on the table, I realize this is something else. I scoot my chair back to take a look. A large manilla envelope is taped to the underside of the table, and on one side, the tape has come loose. I pull the whole thing out and set it in my lap.
The envelope is filled with pages. My pages.
I once found Carla reading my journal. She’d clearly been unhappy with the way our conversation with the rag doll had gone and was looking for some kind of toehold, something to explain my moody silence and reconcile it with whatever information she had gathered elsewhere. And although on some level I understood her frustration, when I replayed the incident later it had shrunk to a still-frame of the foolish look on her face with the journal laid open across her knees. The memory exists for me now as an indignant, half-finished sentence in my mind: Of all the people...
I no longer keep a journal, but Jack has been undeterred. The hidden envelope is thick with the scraps on which I have scribbled and discarded odd bits of writing: paragraphs from my work in progress, notes about characters, meandering plot ideas, failed poems. All collected by him, carefully smoothed and pressed flat and gathered into this envelope that has finally become too heavy for the tape he used to hide it. Some of the pages have Jack’s notes in the margins, question marks and cryptic queries; some are stained with coffee or smeared from rainwater. He’s even found a paper deli bag with a half-finished verse from a poem I’d been working on. All the pages are dated in fine blue ink at the upper right-hand corner. At the bottom of the stack is the page I wrote and crumpled at the coffee shop, the prompt about faceless men. I took that home, I remember, and threw it away. He must have gotten it from the trash can outside my house.
These are my failures, my saddest attempts at transforming thought into workable writing, my unguarded descriptions of places and people—of Ja
ck. Over and over, though never by name, the phrases and quotes and scraps of erotic imagery clearly allude to him. Reading them now feels strangely voyeuristic; though the papers are covered in my handwriting and I recognize some familiar fragments of language, the writing voice and the depth of the author’s obsession seem to belong to some other woman, having nothing to do with me. I’ve delivered the accumulated evidence of my own infatuation into his hands, but for me, this stash is all about Jack.
As I spread the papers out before me, a strange mix of sensations creeps up my breastbone: dismay, at first. Then a thrill of pride, swelling in my throat. A freakish enchantment.
He has taken me over. There is nothing left of me that does not belong to him.
* * *
When he comes home hours later, I am still at the table, gazing out the rain-smeared window with the pages in my lap and scattered across the table. The front door opens and closes, and there is a familiar swish as he hangs his nylon jacket by the door, a harder brushing sound of his boots on the sisal mat, then his footsteps on the floor and his voice calling my name.
He stops at the door, his grin fading as he sees the envelope in my hands. His gaze flickers from the table to my hands to my eyes and back again to where I’ve spread the papers around me as if sorting evidence. I keep my expression impassive. I want to see what he’ll say.
He crosses the room in three strides, gathers the pages from the table and pulls them from my hands.
“Been snooping again,” he says.
I shrug. I’ve searched his house many times. Every drawer, cabinet, cubbyhole. I’ve hacked his computer and his phone. I’ve been through his truck, his garage, his closets. The fact that I found these pages after I’d given up is irrelevant—and since we are both guilty of the same crime, it seems pointless to argue.
He straightens the papers, shoves them back into the envelope. He won’t look me in the eye.
I rise to my feet. “I was just leaving. I need to get home.”