Mockingbird

by Chuck Wendig

  Miriam runs away into the woods.

  Jack cries after her, "Better not tell your mother about this!"

  FORTY-NINE

  Birds of a Feather

  Tap tap tap.

  Miriam struggles to find air. Submerged in shadow.

  A thundering rush of noise, like white water, like the crash of the ocean surf or the muddy churn of the Susquehanna.

  Tap tap tap.

  And above it all, that noise.

  Tap tap tap.

  Hands hold her beneath dark water. Cold water.

  She reaches. The shadow has shape. Her fingers curl around it. A rope.

  It slips from her grip and again she's gone beneath the surface, sinking once more into those wintry depths – the sound of the water mimicking the sound of the blood in her ears, a sound like someone breathing sharply through clenched teeth as a drum beats in the distance.

  But there: the rope once more. And she grabs it and pulls, pulls until every synapse in her brain fires in a twenty-one-synapse-salute, white lancing needles of light arcing through the know-nothing void–

  Tap tap tap.

  Her eyes bolt open.

  Above, a square of gray light. A smeary water-slick square.

  Rain thunders against the skylight.

  A raven stands in its center, the glass separating Miriam's world – a world that feels oddly warm, curiously cozy – from the cold rain of the outside.

  The bird bangs its black beak against the skylight glass.

  Tap tap tap tap tap.

  Then it takes flight, a flurry of inky wings gone in the downpour.

  Miriam sits up. It takes all her energy to do so. Pain shoots through every limb and muscle. Everything feels like a bolt tightened too hard. All her screws, stripped.

  What she sees, she does not expect.

  She's on a bed. Queen-sized. White sheets and a white down comforter – she knows it's down because one of the feathers pokes through and sticks her in the hand.

  A hand swaddled in gauze. She pushes her feet from the bottom of the blanket and sees those, too, are gauzed. Fresh gauze. Not from the hospital.

  A fat-bellied iron pellet stove sits in the corner, a fire glowing bright behind its door.

  A nice rug. Dark walnut wainscoting. Everything, clean lines. Not a speck of dust. The one outlier is the painting that hangs opposite the bed.

  It's one fucked-up piece of art.

  An old man – naked, by the look of it, his shriveled wormy genitals barely covered by a sweeping black cloth – holds a screaming infant in his hands, a boy, and he bites the child's breast, a swatch of the boy's flesh in his teeth.

  "It's the original." A woman stands in the doorway.

  Her.

  The nurse. No – not just the nurse. The matron of the school.

  Eleanor Caldecott.

  "What?" Miriam asks, her tongue sharper than she'd like. But she's a tooth rubbed raw of its enamel, a fraying exposed nerve. Everything hurts, and it feels somehow pertinent to hurt everything right back.

  "The painting. It's Peter Paul Rubens' original Saturn Devouring His Son. Better than the Goya, I think. The Goya is, to me, derivative."

  "Well," Miriam says, taking a thumb and rubbing circles in the space between her eyes. "Whoever painted it, it's really quite lovely. And by 'lovely,' I mean it makes me want to throw up all over these very nice sheets." Thread count: three million.

  "I could have it covered up," Caldecott says, bringing over a tray.

  "Don't make the effort. I'm just being melodramatic." Suddenly, a familiar smell sneaks up her nose and activates all the pleasure centers in Miriam's brain. Bacon. Eggs. Coffee. Breakfast. "If that's bacon, then I am prepared to hug you, and I assure you, I am not the hugging type. For bacon, however, I will radiate a force field of pure unadulterated love."

  The nurse – dressed not in her school garments but rather in a simple white blouse and ankle-length black skirt – sets the tray down. "Enjoy the food, Miss Black."

  Miriam wastes no time. She can't remember the last time she's eaten a proper meal. The bacon goes into her mouth with a gulp of coffee. Best thing she's ever tasted. Her knife and fork scrape against the fine china. She chews noisily. Makes mmm, ah, oh sounds.

  "You were hungry." Caldecott watches her.

  "Starving. Starving. It's been a… bad couple of days." She swallows a throatful of molten hot eggs, not caring that it scalds her windpipe all the way down. "So what? You found me on the gym floor and now I'm your patient? Do all your patients get the royal treatment?"

  Eleanor smiles. "You're not my patient."

  "Well, what am I, then?" Coffee. Coffee. Best thing ever. If only she had a cigarette. And a little Irish whiskey to pour in there. That's how she knows she's not dead: If this were heaven, she'd have those things right at hand.

  "It remains to be seen what you are," Caldecott says. Rather icily, to Miriam's ear.

  "Oh yeah?"

  "You will have a choice this morning. We make our own choices in this world, and it will fall to you to make yours."

  "Choices," Miriam says, rolling that word around her mouth. Suddenly the breakfast doesn't taste so good. She almost laughs, and even almost laughing hurts her whole body. "Lady, we don't get as many choices as we think we do. The world doesn't work like that."

  "It does for you."

  "Does it now."

  "And it does for me, too."

  Miriam's about to ask just what the hell that's supposed to mean, but then someone else appears at the door.

  No.

  She grabs the knife – just a butter knife, but a knife all the same – from the tray, gets her back up against the headboard, and hisses like a cat. Miriam waves the silverware in front of her like a weapon. Making sure he sees it.

  "Come near me and I start stabbing."

  Eleanor Caldecott doesn't seem fazed. "So you remember my son, then."

  Beck Daniels stands in the door. Clean shirt. No blood. Smiling softly, like nothing's wrong, like he didn't just beat the piss out of Miriam and choke her out on a gymnasium floor. After he murdered a security guard with her knife.

  "Miss Black," Beck says, offering a gentlemanly head nod.

  "Your son," Miriam seethes.

  "Hello, Mother," Beck says.

  "Good morning, Beckett." Eleanor turns to Miriam. "We don't share the same last name. Nor do we publicize the fact that we're related."

  "It's a secret," Beck says, finger to smiling lips.

  Miriam feels like an animal trapped in a corner. Desperate for an escape route. Beck stands between her and the door. She's got no way to Batman up to the skylight. A window sits off to her right.

  That might be the way out.

  The knife pivots in her hand. She turns it from blade-out to blade-in so that it's less about the thrust and more about the stab. Miriam makes a show of it. She has to.

  Her fingers tighten so hard around it the blood drains from her knuckles.

  "She's a fighter," Beck says to his mother.

  "She's more than that," Eleanor says.

  Miriam snarls. "I'm in the room. I can hear you."

  "Look at the way she holds that butter knife," Beck says, pointing at her.

  Eleanor nods. "And she's eyeing up the window."

  "Fuck the both of you. Twisted fucks."

  "Miriam," Eleanor says, "I understand if you're upset. Anybody would be. You've been through a lot. Before you make any ill-considered moves, I feel obliged to mention two things. First: We have the girl. We have Lauren Martin."

  Miriam's bowels clench.

  "I'm willing to discuss the girl's fate with you, but only if you're kind enough to hear me out. And that brings me to the second thing: If you do something drastic now, you may not be afforded the privilege of discovering what's really going on. What's really going on. And we will not be able to guarantee the safety of Lauren Martin. Further, you won't be privy to my offer."

  "Stick your offer up your s
on's ass. Preferably with a fist wrapped in barbed wire."

  "You won't sit for a story, then?"

  Miriam says nothing. She just hunkers there against the headboard like a feral child.

  Eleanor smiles. "I'll take your silence as acquiescence. Let me tell you about the time I was raped by Carl Keener."

  FIFTY

  Eleanor's Story

  I was not a good girl.

  My parents came from wealth. My mother had ties to the steel industry and, before that, shipping. My father came from the Ivy League and flourished there, learning and teaching across an array of subjects. I was expected to make someone a very happy husband, and at the time it was de rigueur to attend a woman's college – to learn how to be refined, intelligent, a capable wife for a deserving man of proper breeding.

  But I was not a good girl.

  Yes, I was on the sailing team. The equestrian team. I did theater and sang in choir. I also drank a lot. And smoked marijuana. I tried LSD and magic mushrooms, and though I did not try it, I knew girls who procured heroin from black gentlemen in the ghetto.

  I was what one would call a "loose woman."

  I was a disappointment to my parents. A fact of which I was quite proud. I had no interest in appealing to them. My mother was a secret drunk. My father distant and icy. I had no brothers, no sisters, and so all the attention fell to me, and I was happy to abuse the spotlight in whatever way I could.

  Word got around. As it does with girls like me. I did things.

  I had pregnancy scares. Had abortions.

  I got blackout drunk one night and almost fell off the roof of one of my classrooms.

  Another night, I raced around town with a pair of boys from one of the Catholic colleges. They were drunk. I was stoned. They were driving a cherry red Buick Riviera. They took a curve the wrong way and flipped the car down an embankment – over and over and over again. The one boy broke his collarbone, the other his leg. I had only bumps and scratches, a few unsightly bruises. Bruises perfect to show my mother.

  Word got around.

  One night I was in the basement of the Troxell building. Our dormitory. I was down there in one of the supply closets, waiting for a group of girls to come meet me with – well, I don't quite recall what they were bringing me. Drugs of some kind. I had a little cabal of girls, you see, who would do what I wanted. But these girls were late. No matter, I thought. I was having a fine time by my lonesome, drinking rye whiskey from the bottle and smoking cigarettes and just not giving one care in the world.

  The door opened, and there he stood. Carl Keener.

  He was my age, roughly. Two years older.

  He had dark eyes, like smoldering coals. He was strong, wiry, with a strong jaw and a cruel smile.

  I'd seen him before. He was the night janitor. On loan from Naval Supply. He had, unbeknownst to me, gotten into some trouble there – fights with senior officers and other indiscretions – and they decided to loan him to the college for a few nights a week. That was a practice, back then – naval officers were thought to be good, honorable men. More to the point, they were thought to be safe around fragile, impressionable girls.

  I told him to get out. I didn't like him. I didn't like the way he looked at me.

  He said, no. No, he wouldn't. He wanted a drink, he said. And a Pall Mall.

  And then I thought – well, what's the harm? Wouldn't it make Mother burn if she knew I was cavorting with a common janitor, naval officer or no?

  We sat and drank there in the supply closet, our backs to the metal shelves, the smoke between us an eye-blistering haze, and I said that it might be time to air out the closet and go for a walk.

  He said, "No, I want to stay here. With you."

  Then he planted a rough hand on my hip. I wriggled away but the closet was barely big enough for the both of us – and he was between me and the door.

  He did it again. And I let him. Just to see.

  The hand crawled up my side. A rough touch, like a clumsy child petting a disinterested cat. The way he laughed: a low chuckle, like he was in on a joke that nobody else understood. His hand did not linger on my chest – to my surprise.

  Rather, it went to my neck. And tightened. Not enough to choke me but enough to make the blood throb in my head.

  And again I told him, no. It was time to stop.

  I tried to push past him, and he picked me up and slammed me back.

  I started to cry then. No matter what I'd done so far, I'd never had anyone be like this with me. Boys had become improper with me before. But they backed off when they thought I'd scream or realized I wasn't playing some foolish girl's game.

  I pushed him again and his response was to–

  Well. He grabbed a fistful of my hair and smashed the back of my head against the metal shelves. Bottles of floor cleaner and rolls of brown paper towels fell to the ground. I started to cry out, and he punched me in the mouth.

  He… turned me around. Pressed my face against the shelves. The edge of the shelf bit into my lips, cut my cheeks.

  Carl took a swig from the bottle – a long swig, finishing it off. Then he hit me in the back – between the shoulder blades – with it.

  Then he lifted my skirt and…

  It was over faster than I probably realize. In some ways it was worse than I could have imagined, in some ways better. It hurt, but only a little. He was rough, but not so rough anything was damaged. The pain was inside. Not just physical pain but rather the pain of knowing that this was where my life had led me. The pain of realizing that I was a girl of good breeding and fine stature and my choices put me in a supply closet with a thick-skulled, dim-witted brute – a cruel man of the sort to pull the wings off flies. He was slow and mean and it seemed we deserved each other.

  The girls who were supposed to meet me finally did.

  They found me alone in the closet. Curled up on the ground. Mouth bleeding. Head bleeding. Bleeding down there. Half naked. Traumatized.

  The girls did what they could. They took me to the nurse. The nurse got the assistant dean involved. No police, of course. Back then, that simply wasn't proper.

  I told them about Carl and they would have fired him but it didn't matter – he never came back to work after that night.

  The administration contacted my family.

  My father, then teaching at Princeton, came home.

  They pulled me out of school for the rest of the semester.

  Then came the discovery: I was pregnant.

  My father, who I loved as much as I hated, told me then that the Caldecotts do not abide slights against our bloodline, nor do we absolve anyone of their responsibility to our family.

  Carl Keener, he said, had a responsibility.

  My father and my two uncles went and found Carl. They waited for him to leave NAVSUP and head off to his new job – as a janitor at another school north of Chambersburg – and they threw a bag over his head and tossed him into the trunk of Father's Lincoln. They brought him to the estate – this estate – and they beat him half to death. Then they beat him another halfway. And halfway again. Zeno's paradox writ in blood and bruises – I remember my father saying, if you beat a man halfway to death every time, you will never quite kill him.

  I don't know how they entreated the Navy to stop looking for him. Money, I assume. That and Carl had a list of offenses dogging his every step – fights with other sailors and harassment accusations. They were happy to be rid of him, I suspect.

  We kept him.

  Like a pet.

  A damaged pet.

  He lived in the greenhouse. Tending to plants.

  And we were married two nights before I gave birth to my first son, Edwin, in that very same greenhouse.

  FIFTY-ONE

  Bad Touch

  Miriam's thumb runs along the edge of the butter knife. It's not sharp. The faint serration might hurt somebody if she had time to hold them down and saw away at their body like they were a piece of steak.

  Just the
same, she holds it out in front of her. Twirling it.

  She needs them to see she has it.

  Rain continues to hammer the skylight.