Lost Boys

by Darci Bysouth

  The moon wanes and I forage, my ribs as bare as branches, my wrist bones as sharp as sticks.

  The mother of the disappeared children is found sprawled on the bathroom floor of their new house. Her skin is as mottled and cold as the marble beneath her. Grief, says her husband when he talks to the police, dry-mouthed and trembling and scratching at his arms. The police look through each of the many rooms, noting the parcels still in plastic, the metallic stink of new electronics. Their boots sink into plush pile and they say nothing. It could have been grief, for these people who have lost so much. It could have been that, an overdose of grief.

  I have no regrets. I give them what they want. If they never know what they need, it is not my concern. The moon passes overhead regardless, its pale eye opening and closing in a slow wink.

  The moon disappears entirely one night. By now, I’m stuffing lichen into my mouth and brewing soup out of twigs. Still, I hum as I stoke my oven.

  They stop on the same dark stretch of road as the news team. There’s a slam of Range Rover doors this time.

  “It’s dark, Daddy,” says the girl.

  “Don’t call me that,” he says.

  “I’m not going in there, Mommy,” says the boy.

  “Don’t fuss, darling,” she says. “It’s the right thing to do.”

  Her hair has grown back, thick and lustrous and naturally blonde. Her skin is luminescent and plump, her eyes shine as they did when she was seventeen. Her husband simply can’t keep his hands off her. He smiles more now, and his bite is perfectly symmetrical.

  “Look, kids,” he says. “I’ve brought donuts.’ He shakes the bag out on the ground and a few rings roll into the night. The children scrabble after them.

  The Range Rover drives away, its engine purring.

  It’s too dark for stars, too dark to find a trail of crumbs by their light. The children hold hands and sniffle.

  I can see the glitter of sugar on their white teeth.

  PETEY

  PETEY WAS BROUGHT HOME in a shoebox stuffed with grass. There were dandelion petals scattered over him like a child’s idea of a funeral, and from that alone I should have known. I should have asked. But I did not. I was too glad for the smile on Lily’s face, the first I’d seen since the accident.

  “I saved him,” she said, “He was floppy and he didn’t say anything when I picked him up. But he wasn’t dead.”

  “His name is Petey? Did someone tell you that?”

  “No, Daddy. It’s just what he’s called.” Lily was seven, at that age when whimsy weighed as much as fact, and wishes were a kind of truth.

  We found the old cage in the basement and we lined its tray with newspaper. Lily’s mother had kept a canary once. It never sang; something about moulting or poor genes or mistakenly being a female. The canary disappeared when Lily was born. The feathers and shit were supposed to be respiratory irritants. Lily’s mother had been good at identifying irritants and ridding herself of them. Or leaving them behind . . . she’d packed her bags before Lily had said her first word.

  Lily let me pick Petey up from the bottom of the shoebox. He didn’t struggle. The weight of him was unsettling, and the way he spread into my palm like a squashed toad was repugnant. The dirt clung to his feathers and I could smell him, damp and faintly rotten. I dumped him into the cage and he crouched at the bottom, staring up at us with one beady eye. I wondered if he was sick.

  “He’s someone’s pet,” I said. “They might want him back.”

  “He’s mine,” said Lily. Her fingers clenched around the bars of the cage, and Petey’s beak popped open, exposing a ruby-red tongue.

  “Weeep,” he said.

  I filled the water tube and poured a cup of canary seed from the bag I’d found in the basement. It was probably stale or rancid, or whatever canary seed becomes after seven years. Maybe it would polish Petey off. We could bury him Irish-style, with singing and dancing and toasting to the health of the living. I had a bottle of Jameson in the cupboard just waiting. I put the shoebox near the cage and hoped for the best.

  But Petey lived through that night and the next, eating and shitting and chirping his views. I threw a towel over his cage before I went to bed, where I dreamed of shattered glass and splintered bone. My foot would be kicking a phantom brake when I woke.

  Sleep was a bastard since the accident.

  The counsellor had suggested herbal tea. I preferred to pour myself a whiskey and stand in the door of Lily’s room. I’d listen to her breath whisper in and out and inhale the milky stink of her sleep and, after these small comforts, I would sit in the dark of the living room.

  Now I had company. The cage bounced on its spring as Petey jabbed at something beneath the towel thrown over him at night. The rustling stopped abruptly when I swatted at the cage. I took another swallow of whisky, liking how it burned my throat. These small things reminded me I was still among the living.

  The counsellor had said that Lily should return to school as soon as possible. That a car crash, on top of a maternal desertion, was tearing a hole in Lily’s sense of security. That security was the thing I needed to provide, regardless of how I was feeling myself. That it was my responsibility to keep things normal.

  So Lily went back to school. I drove and my hands didn’t shake too much. When I dropped Lily at the school gate, she made me promise to take care of Petey. I said I would. Of course I did.

  The first thing Lily did when she got home was take Petey out of his cage and cradle him, crooning endearments. The bird sat in my daughter’s little white hands, blinking slowly and gaping.

  “Something’s wrong,” Lily said. “He’s not talking to me. It’s like he’s still sleeping.” She cast a glare in my direction. “Do you talk to him? Do you say his name? You need to say his name before he’ll answer you.”

  “Yes. I talked to him this morning. I said Petey, bro, how’s it hanging? And he said he misses his family and he wants to go home.” I was sick of that raw red mouth, of how it gaped open every time my shadow passed.

  “His family dumped him,” said Lily. “They don’t want him no more, they don’t even believe in him. That’s why he’s ours now.”

  It was irrefutable. Petey was a reject and he belonged with us.

  I threw the towel over the cage earlier every night, and started on the whisky while the rustling and twitching came from behind the bars. More often the cage was dead silent. I had the sense of Petey behind the terrycloth, his beady eyes open and glassy.

  My dreams worsened. There was the blinding white screech of tires and the silence after, then the feeling of floating above it all. The sense that this was inevitable and what I deserved: the final fuckup, what everything always comes to in the end. There was the moment I looked down and saw Lily’s hand lying boneless between us and I could not reach it, and there were the desperate bargains I made then. There was the sound that Lily made when the saw cut metal and she woke, and her hand grasped for mine. Daddy daddy daddy.

  Daddy. That hand, spread like a starfish. Don’t leave.

  I wasn’t going anywhere. Work didn’t want me back until my leave of absence was used up and they could fire me properly. I hoped they would have the grace to wait for my next screwup; if not, there were plenty in the past to choose from. I was home, and so was Petey. We didn’t talk much. Petey seemed in a permanent stupor. Maybe the birdseed had some kind of hallucinogenic mould on it. The only time he came to life was when I stuck his cage on the kitchen counter in order to clean it. Then he would squawk and batter himself against the bars as if he couldn’t believe he was still alive and was testing his luck.

  It was bound to happen, with him flapping against the cage door like that.

  I stared at the bundle of sunny feathers on the kitchen floor, and prodded it with my toe. Petey blinked and gasped. His neck was wrenched at an odd angle and his wings were spread limp as a crucifixion. It would be a pity to leave him that way. It would be cruel.

  My slipper has a
hard sole, for comfort and support. I did not enjoy what I did next, not quite. But my slipper came out clean enough when I wiped it with the dishcloth and we still had the shoebox. I buried Petey in the garden.

  “Sweetie,” I said when I picked Lily up from school. “Sweetie, something’s happened.”

  “No,” she said, with her bottom lip out and her eyes threatening tears. “No it hasn’t, Daddy.”

  A shoebox showed up at the foot of my bed the next morning. There were smudges of dirt on the cardboard, a damp patch on the lid. It had rained during the night.

  My head floated and I seemed to be looking down from a great height. I wondered how much I’d had to drink the day before. I wondered if I was still slightly drunk.

  The shoebox rustled. “Weep,” came Petey’s voice.

  Petey was back in his cage by the time I made Lily her breakfast. Scrambled eggs, with a squirt of barbecue sauce, the way she liked. My hands shook but I didn’t puke. We did not discuss Petey.

  Lily turned to me when I dropped her off at school. “Remember to talk to him. He likes it when you’re nice to him.”

  I fed him and watered him, but I needed a fistful of Glenlivet before I could start a conversation with Petey.

  “Music,” I told Lily, “that’s what we talk about. Petey likes dubstep.”’ I pronounced my sibilants with care.

  And I dreamed. Of choking on blood and the bright white light and Lily’s hand clutching for mine. How I reached and was grateful.

  The next time I cleaned Petey’s cage, I left the wire door open. There was a fluttery feeling in my stomach like dread, or perhaps anticipation. Petey scrabbled across the countertop and cocked his head, looking up at me. There was no fear, nothing at all in his black eye. Then he fell to the floor. He huddled, stunned, and began to drag himself along to my slippered foot almost like he wanted something from me. I watched my foot recoil, then snap forwards. There was a solid thonk. Petey slid down the kitchen wall, leaving a smudge of feathers in his wake. I stared at the slumped pile of yellow. It might have happened by accident. I would get Lily a hamster as an apology.

  Then the neck unkinked and the feathers fluffed. Petey blinked at me.

  “Weeep,” he said.

  I talked to Lily that night. I was firm. I told her that Petey would have to go; he had a family elsewhere and he belonged with them. His feathers made me sneeze. His crap could give her pneumonia. He wasn’t happy with us; he never sang and he barely moved. Lily listened to each of these reasons with admirable stoicism. Or that’s what I thought.

  She helped me pin posters to the streetlamps outside our house. She even seemed cheerful about it, and I wondered if Petey had outlived his appeal for her. Maybe she was ready for a hamster or a rabbit, something fluffy and bland, and easy to pick up from the pet store.

  Of course no one called. I went out one night to pick up a six pack from the 7-11, and saw that the posters were gone. A few tattered strips clung to the tape, resistant to the wind perhaps, or just out of reach for a small hand.

  I wanted to question Lily, but when I looked at her over a plate of Kraft Dinner, I saw the hollows marking her face, the paleness of her skin. I saw how her eyes followed my movements around the kitchen and how she wouldn’t eat until I sat down and cracked open a can of beer. Petey stared at us from his perch, still as ever, looking for all the world like a taxidermist’s specimen. I decided to try a different tack.

  “Sweetie, I know you love Petey. I know you want the best for him and you’d never want him to hurt or suffer, right?”

  “He isn’t hurt. I saved him.”

  “I know that. But he doesn’t really act like a normal bird, does he? He doesn’t sing or chirp or peck at his cuttlebone. He doesn’t bounce around or flutter at his bars. He doesn’t even seem to like us.”

  Lily’s lip trembled. I felt like a shit.

  “Sweetie, listen. I think Petey is sick. He might not live very long. I want you to know that, and not be very sad if he dies.”

  Lily pushed her chair back from the table. Later that evening I found the door of Petey’s cage open and Lily kneeling on the floor. She had the bird cradled to her breast, her lips nestled in his feathers. I remembered the rotten meat smell of him and felt my stomach churn.

  “Petey, Petey Pete,” she was crooning, “you can’t leave. I won’t let you.”

  The next time I cleaned Petey’s cage, I wore my workboots. He scuttled across the counter and I swept him to the floor, quick and casual, before I could think about it. My foot pumped up and down like easing a brake, and I didn’t stop until the bones snapped and the feathers floated. Silence, except for my rasping breath. I would need to look, to make sure. I would need another shot of whiskey. I downed my glass and lifted my foot. A few feathers stuck to my sole and the rest fanned out from what was left, like a lunatic garnish on a plate of mashed beets. Then one feather lazily twirled towards another, and another, until there was a mass of them knitting together like a film run backwards. The ribcage formed under the pulsating yellow, the chest plumped out and quavered as the pea-sized heart began to beat. Petey’s red mouth gasped and I scooped him into his cage, winding the towel tight around the bars so I didn’t have to see his eyes.

  At night I dreamed of the crash and the light. I felt my ribs splintering and my lungs filling and my heart stuttering, the profound snap as I let go and floated above it all. I felt the pull of Lily’s hand and turned to look at her. Daddy daddy daddy, she said, you can’t. I won’t let you. Her eyes were a beady black.

  When I poured my first shot of whiskey later, I lifted the towel from the cage. Petey crouched on his perch and his gaze mocked me.

  That same black eye glared at me from the bottom of a Ziploc bag the next morning. I dumped the bag on the kitchen floor and took the mallet to him, the one I used to crack walnuts and flatten chicken breasts, and I didn’t stop until the plastic glistened with something like the seeds of a pomegranate. I crouched, nauseous, and waited.

  Not a flutter, nor a twitch.

  I dumped the bits under the apple tree.

  “Please,” I said to Lily, “you have to let him go.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “He’s mine.”

  I thought of the counsellor, peering over her gold frames and lecturing me about my responsibilities. Security, normalcy. Such small things, really.

  I dreamed of dirt that night. Of rich brown dirt swirling and squirming into ridiculous forms, like a child’s drawing of the Creation; a spotted sponge in unlikely neon, a beetle with a flowered shell, a toad smiling toothlessly before it sprouted canary yellow feathers.

  There was a shoebox at the bottom of my bed that morning. Poppy petals this time; it was June and the neighbour’s garden was in full bloom.

  I spread clean newspaper at the bottom of the cage, and filled the drinking tube with fresh water.

  “Weeep,” said Petey, and I did. I did.

  I talk to Petey when Lily is at school. I don’t think he cares much for my opinions, but he doesn’t hold a grudge.

  I sit in the living room at night, nursing a whiskey or two. Never three. I don’t want to fall asleep. I’m afraid I might dream of the crash and Lily’s hand reaching, of my ruptured cells plumping while my bones knit together.

  The whisky doesn’t wash the taste of dirt from my mouth. Petey’s cage bounces and I raise my glass, glad for his company. My old pal Petey, the one I knew first. The rest of them rustle and creep around in the dark: a nestling robin bald and bulging-eyed, a clutch of moths and beetles, a cat that crouches flat-eared. There’s even a raccoon. He sits on his haunches and stares at his paws, like an old man studying his hands for answers. I hardly notice the smell now. I catch it coming off my own skin sometimes.

  It’s companionable enough, this sitting in the dark. This waiting for Lily to wake.

  LOGGING THE BLACK SPRUCE

  MY DAD LOGGED THE BLACK SPRUCE. He wore a cruiser vest, drank Black Ice warm and told ghost stories to hard-knu
ckled men. So maybe he scared the hell out of us when we were kids, but he was a favourite at the camp. That was something.

  He’d come back on a Friday night smelling of pitch and engine oil and rank hair grease. We’d watch him dunk his head under the mudroom tap and scrub his face and hair and forearms with bar soap. Mom put out the flowered towel especially for him, but he wiped himself with his jackshirt and left it balled up on top of the washing machine. He’d stomp past us in his boot socks, whistling loud, thumping his high tight belly with the flat of his fist while he ranged around the kitchen.

  “Hey Donna? Hungry as a bear, whatcha got going?”

  He liked meat. Not deer or moose, not even elk, none of that backwoods poverty crap. Beef: bright red slabs of supermarket steak mom would buy with the last of the weekly cash and marinate in a bowl of jug wine and vinegar. She’d offer him the thickest cut and he’d mop up the blood with spongey white bread and throw the crusts over his peas, and clunk his spoon off our heads when we did the same.

  I’m making him sound like an asshole. He wasn’t. He had big hands, scored with splinters pushing their way out in pus, but all his fingers were still there. That was something, considering his work. I remember hockey night on Saturdays after supper, and if the Flames were nailing it, a big hand would drift down and rest on one of our heads. We’d square up best we could under the weight.

  The stories came at bedtime. If we were quick to scrub up, if we passed by mom first and breathed toothpaste fumes into her face.

  “Yah, okay, minty fresh,” she’d say and swat us away. “Ron? You tell them something nice this time; I’m not washing the sheets all over again.”

  Dad would fix us with his bear-eyed glare, but he’d clamber into bed between me and my brother and clamp our heads with his meaty paws. We’d settle into his chest and listen to the growl and echo of his voice. It was something, that voice.