by Alan Cumyn
They saw through her. She had no power against them.
Shiels said, “I believe I am responsible in large part for what happened today. For both tragedies. That boy who got hurt. The other boy in jail.”
“The one in jail is not a boy,” her mother replied. “He’s a pterodactyl. And you’re in love with him. You’re trying to go save him.”
The three of them in the foyer made a sharp-edged triangle. Shiels had a sense she would cut herself no matter what she said, what she tried to do.
“If Daddy were alone in jail because of something you’d done,” she said to her mother, “wouldn’t you try to save him?”
“But what’s your part in this?” her father asked.
“I got him into the game. It was my idea. I didn’t know what I was doing. When all those Wallin players came at him, Pyke just reacted instinctively. He thought they were trying to kill him. I should’ve known. If it weren’t for me, he wouldn’t have been there in the first place.”
“And where was Sheldon?” her mother said. “He should’ve known. He bears some responsibility, surely!”
“Oh”—Shiels could feel the clay of her insides turn wobbly—“Oh, Mom!” she said, before the sobs came burbling out, hot and bitter, seeping between her fingers as she held her face in her hands.
• • •
What to do? What to do now?
At her desk in her bedroom, with her mother sitting by her side, Shiels worked on her entrance application for Stockard College. As if nothing else in the world mattered at this particular moment. Her phone sat on her bed, turned off, as her mother had insisted. No distractions until they had a presentable draft.
As if they lived in a bubble protected from the chaos out there.
“If you’re going to be a doctor, you will have to learn how to focus no matter what else is going on around you,” her mother said.
So Shiels sat still, her fingers poised at the keyboard.
Pyke is in jail in part because of me, she thought. He is trapped in a steel and concrete cave while I write off for early acceptance to an elite college I don’t even want to attend.
“What is it you have always dreamed of doing with your life?” Shiels’s mother asked.
“I have that,” Shiels said, meaning those sentiments. She showed her mother the opening paragraphs she had written some days before.
“But you have the whole essay here already!” her mother said. “Let’s have a look!”
Shiels closed the file and then deleted it.
Her mother grasped Shiels’s wrists. “What are you doing? What—” Shiels became limp, like a doll. “You’ve never behaved like this before,” her mother said.
Shiels sat staring at her wrists until her mother removed her hands.
“I don’t want to be a doctor,” Shiels whispered.
“You’re too young to make that decision,” her mother said quickly. “Once you get to the college, once you’re surrounded by like-minded people, you’ll realize how much you fit in, and how much you have to contribute. You have gifts, Shiels. You have a razor-sharp mind and formidable will. Don’t let your quite natural rebellion against me cloud your judgment!”
“I don’t want to be a doctor,” Shiels said again. She looked at the strain lines in her mother’s face—those etches bracketing her downward mouth. She looked into her mother’s incredulous eyes.
“You’ve never expressed this before,” her mother said.
Shiels glanced at her silent phone on the bed. Things were happening out there in the world. Someone she loved was this instant trapped and surrounded by hostile forces. And she was doing nothing. Nothing!
“I’m expressing myself now.” Somehow Shiels stayed small despite the collision of emotions inside. Her mother wanted her to crack again, to spill her guts, to become malleable like she always did.
She wouldn’t.
Not this time.
“I have thought about this,” Shiels said. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I didn’t want to disappoint . . . disappoint you both. Maybe Jonathan could become a doctor.”
Her mother’s eyes briefly doubled in circumference. Shiels wanted to smile, to make a joke of it. Jonathan didn’t have the grades. He wasn’t, as far as anybody knew, anywhere near doctor material.
“We’re not talking about Jonathan here,” her mother said. “We’re talking about you.”
“Well, here’s my dream,” Shiels said. “Lorraine Miens teaches in the graduate studies program, political anthropology, at Chesford University. You know I have been reading her, like, forever. She has lived an epic life. Her mind is molten. And she takes a handful of undergraduates each year. I’d like to be one of them. I want to study men and women as political animals. I want to know how things get done in society. Really, at a human, personal level, what goes into political decision-making? How do ideas and events change nations? How does the unexpected, the unbelievable even, change all of us? Lorraine Miens has dedicated her life—”
“I thought you had gotten over your fixation with Lorraine Miens,” her mother said. “Honestly—that woman is a complete radical head case!”
“She’s a freethinker,” Shiels said. “On so many issues she sees clear to the core of—”
“She’s been divorced half a dozen times! The New York Times did a feature on her last month. The leading program in political anthropology in the country right now is being run by one of her former students who can’t stand her anymore. Are you sure—”
Shiels knew all about the former protégé. What did Lorraine Miens call him in Depression’s Laughter? “An intellectual earthworm.”
“I would rather be Lorraine Miens’s lapdog than fixating on my own daughter’s menstrual cycle. I will not turn into you, no matter how hard you try!” Shiels slammed her laptop shut and bit her tongue—literally, by mistake, a pain she almost relished. Is this what growing up was all about? Shouting out the unforgiveable until your parents screamed for you to move away?
For once, her mother was speechless.
Shiels would not apologize. She wouldn’t say anything else just to unstrangulate this moment.
Finally her mother stood. “I don’t want you to be me. Of course not,” she said with quiet severity. “But I can see that you and Lorraine Miens could well deserve each other.”
XXI
Down the stairs in her yellow shoes, her mother trailing.
“Where are you going? Shiels—”
Shiels did not pick up her warm coat, which was still lying on the floor.
“You’re not leaving the house tonight, young lady! You are not—”
Shiels lurched for the door, her mother’s hand on her arm. For a second Shiels thought of Pyke with that Wallin player grabbing his wing. Trying to tear it off.
She almost, almost turned to wrench her arm free. Instead she stopped and stared at her mother’s hand. “Just let me go,” she said, her voice burning the back of her throat.
Her father now was standing by them. “Let’s talk this out,” he said. And Jonathan, suddenly, was there as well, his phone out. “You won’t believe what’s going on! There’s a rally at the police station—”
Shiels’s mother dropped her hand for a moment. Shiels flung the door open and sprinted into the cold night. Her mother screamed at her, but she did not stop. She cut across the yard, then climbed the fence the way she used to as a girl, not so long ago, and jumped down like someone in an action movie. Maybe adrenaline was kicking in. She felt no pain on landing. She ran across the ditch, then into the Willmers’ and past their swimming pool, covered now for the season. Their dog started barking, but she scrambled over another fence and into somebody else’s backyard. Through two more yards then, before she stopped in the cover of a shadowed hedge. Her heart was hammering, but she wasn’t breathing hard. If someone was following her—her father maybe, under orders from her mother—she’d lost him for the time being.
A rally? Without her? Who the hell was organiz
ing it?
She would stay off the major roads. Probably her father would be out in the car, trolling around, looking for her in her yellow shoes.
He wouldn’t find her.
Not until she was ready to be found.
• • •
Clip-clip, clip-clip. Arms working, legs steady, huh, huh, huh, huh, breathing like a machine. Does a machine breathe?
A balanced body. Purpose built. Shiels felt her focus merge into one task—step upon step, balanced and precise: deliver herself to the authorities.
Sheldon was right. He was right, right, right. She could have nothing to do with any rally. It was time to turn herself in, to take responsibility for her own actions. She was the cause of the entire debacle. She had set into motion a chain of events. She might as well have slashed that Wallin boy herself.
And until she made a clean breast of it—her breasts bounced roughly, reminding her with every step that she was no Jocelyne Legault—until she owned up to her leadership role, she would never amount to anything as a human being.
She cut across the Winglefield neighborhood, not a direct route at all. Her father would never suspect her of going that way.
I want to amount to something as a human being, she thought.
I haven’t been doing such a good job of it so far.
I take credit for things other people do.
I follow my own urges and then can’t even remember what I’ve done.
I use people. I put them in danger.
I am confused about whom to love.
The wind had died down, but a deep chill had settled into the air. Her lungs ached with cold. Good. It felt good to ache this way.
She was going to turn herself in.
Down through Winglefield, then across to Bairnesly and onto the eastern edge of downtown, essentially approaching from behind. She felt as calm, as true, as right as she had ever felt in her life. It helped that it was all downhill, that the neighborhood of Vista View had been aptly named and everything else was below it. She was not running quickly. But her mind was set, her will firm.
Her mother was right. Shiels had a formidable will. When she knew what she wanted.
When she knew the right thing to do.
• • •
Shiels heard the shouting before she could see the police station. There was no public entrance in the shadows where the off-duty police cruisers were parked. She had to go around front, and that was when she saw them, hundreds of Vista View students gathered together with signs:
FREE OUR PYKE!
ACCIDENT OF THE GAME!
IF YOU CAN’T TAKE A HIT, DON’T SUIT UP!
“We all know what happens in the clutches of the police!” a voice said, over a speaker system—a girl’s voice. There she was, on the steps leading to the public entrance: Melanie Mull. Shiels stopped for a moment, had to adjust her eyes. The same girl as always: blond, small, pretty enough. Next year’s student-body chair. Stepping in, publicly, at precisely the moment when Shiels vacated the podium . . .
“Pyke was just defending himself in a dangerous game. Don’t punish the pterodactyl! Don’t punish Pyke!”
Melanie’s calls turned into a chant:
“Free our Pyke! Free our Pyke!
Don’t you hold him overnight!”
The crowd screamed it. Melanie Mull seemed to be a natural. Shiels was looking at herself replaced and forgotten in the space of a few hours.
In the dark, in the bustle, Shiels could’ve been anyone, a freshman even. She could’ve been unassuming Melanie Mull from just yesterday.
She spied Sheldon standing near the back, not chanting, not holding any sign, just watching. But he was leaning into Rachel Wyngate and she was leaning into him, his arms around her. They looked natural and happy together. They looked like lovers.
Shiels imagined Sheldon’s parents at Sunday morning pancakes saying, “Good morning!” to Rachel Wyngate as she came down the stairs and brushed her hair, still damp from the shower, away from her forehead.
It was like seeing a dream of her life going on without her.
She felt strangely removed, even happy. Was that possible?
Sheldon had his phone out. He was texting someone. Probably Shiels. Probably telling her to get herself down to the police station, that a rally was happening without her, that she might want to be part of it after all.
She didn’t even have her phone with her. She didn’t want to be part of this organized confusion.
But she had to get past the speaker on the stairs if she wanted to turn herself in to the authorities.
And so she pushed through, calmly. At first it was a struggle, but then people saw who she was and made way. Quiet infected the rally. Even Melanie Mull stopped talking. When Shiels reached the steps, Melanie motioned to the microphone, ceding her place.
It was just because no one else was speaking up, Melanie Mull’s eyes seemed to say.
Shiels was sure her feet were going to continue to bring her into the station. That she would pass up the chance to say anything—what would she say, anyway?
But she found herself heading for the spotlight. Maybe her father was here? He would have guessed where she was going. But she couldn’t see him. The microphone was suddenly in her hand.
She glimpsed Sheldon. His arms still around Rachel Wyngate. His eyes big. Worried for her. She felt the wave of it from across all those bodies. And: he was going to have a good life. She felt that in an instant too. A happy, loving life.
Without her.
She fiddled for a moment with the switch on the microphone. Was it on? Off?
Someone in the crowd—Robbie Lewis, enormous in the back—yelled out, “Free Pyke! Free Pyke!” But the chant died soon after, when Shiels stayed silent.
They were all waiting to hear what she had to say.
On.
Off.
On. A little red light on the microphone handle. Proceed with caution!
“I’m sorry,” she said simply. “I’m sorry for everything I’ve done.”
And then she walked into the station to give herself up.
XXII
Inspector Brady, Shiels’s interrogator, had the hands of a cement factory worker: thick fingers, stuffed tight like sausage flesh. She imagined him reaching across the little table in the airless room she now shared with him, those hands around her neck, how small her own hands would feel, gripping his meaty wrists while the life drained out of her.
She imagined Pyke bursting through the shut door, freeing her with one swipe of his deadly beak, and then the two of them flying off . . . somewhere. Somehow.
But she was here to save Pyke, not the other way around. And Inspector Brady was staying on his side of the table, scratching his biceps stuffed into the rumpled gray suit that looked as though he’d been wearing it since early in the week.
“I just want to be clear with you that you have waived your right to have a lawyer present, or a parent, for that matter. And if you do so agree, then please sign here to that effect.” He pushed across a single sheet of paper filled with writing. Shiels felt like she was signing away permission for doctors to take whatever organ they thought necessary.
But she was doing this to save Pyke.
“You will let me see him after I give my testimony,” she said, pen poised.
They had already agreed on all of these details.
“In all likelihood,” Brady said. His sad eyes were red-rimmed. Shiels had a sense of him toiling around small print and hardened criminals for years upon years.
“Right after we talk,” Shiels said. “You’ll take me to see Pyke right after this.”
“Sign first. Tell me what you know. I’ll do my utmost after that.” He had loosened his tie, yet she still wondered if enough oxygen was reaching his brain through his thick, bulging neck.
“You told me just a few moments ago that I would definitely be able to see him.”
“And you will. Definitely! I haven’t been a cop for twenty
-two years without having people trust me.” He widened his eyes at her, flexed his fingers, opened his palms.
Shiels signed the paper.
“It was all my fault,” she said. “Pyke is in no way to blame for what happened. I am the one who—”
“Just a second, please, Ms. Krane. Shiels, is that your name?”
She nodded impatiently. If she wasn’t able to confess soon, she might lose her nerve.
“Is it a short form? I’ve never heard of it before.”
“It’s short for Sheila Marie. Which I hate.”
“Then Shiels it is.” Inspector Brady placed a digital recording device on the table between them. When the red light came on, he said his name and hers, the date, and read into the record the fact that Shiels had waived her right to have either legal counsel or her parents present for the testimony. It was as if he were rubbing it in. So Shiels said loudly into the recorder, “And Inspector Brady has promised that I will be able to meet with Pyke right after this interview!”
Brady blinked wearily. “What is the nature of your relationship with the pterodactyl-boy who goes by the name of Pyke, Ms. Krane?”
Shiels examined her fingernails—short and serviceable. “I don’t see what relevance any of that would have—”
“Just answer the question, please.” He was smiling, but his voice weighed upon her.
“I’m his elected representative at the school. I am indirectly responsible for his being in the game. I was the one who got our quarterback, Jeremy Jeffreys, to throw a football to him during a public assembly, knowing that the principal, Mr. Manniberg, would take advantage of Pyke’s phenomenal ability to catch just about anything, to change the tenor of the meeting, which I have to say was going badly at the time—”
Brady cut her off. “Are you aware of the existence of a video showing you apparently engaged in an intimate, sexual form of dancing with the pterodactyl-boy?”
Shiels felt like bricks were being stacked, quickly and efficiently, around her as she sat trying to do the right thing.
