Black Feathers

by Robert J. Wiersema

  Cassie jumped and felt her face flame, glancing hurriedly into the restaurant to see how many people were looking at her.

  But the restaurant was empty, except for Ali, behind the counter at the far end, and one of the other waitresses sitting at a table close by the kitchen door, half-hidden behind a massive plate of food.

  “That was quite an entrance,” Ali said. She didn’t need to raise her voice—the restaurant was tiny, a handful of tables crowded into a shoebox-sized room.

  “Sorry,” she said, smiling in relief. Her face cooled as she tugged the door closed.

  “It happens,” Ali said, coming forward, wiping her hands with a white cloth. “This corner is like a wind tunnel. Slightest breeze and—boom!” She clapped her hands with the exclamation and Cassie jumped again.

  “I’m sorry,” Ali said quickly, taking Cassie’s arm. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  Cassie shook her head. “That’s okay. I’m just a little jumpy, I guess.” Ali’s hand was warm on her arm. Soft.

  “And cold, I’m guessing,” Ali said. She squeezed Cassie’s arm slightly, then released it. “Let’s get you some food. Is up here all right?” She pointed toward the front table, right in the window.

  Cassie took a half-step back. “No, that’s okay. I can sit in the corner.”

  “You need to warm up,” Ali said, pointing at the grey box tucked into the corner. “And that’s where the space heater is. Besides, it’s not like we’re turning people away.”

  Cassie didn’t move.

  “Seriously,” Ali said, nudging her. “Sit down. I’ll bring you a hot chocolate.”

  Cassie did the math quickly in her head. “No, no. Just water will be fine.”

  Ali looked at her for a long moment. “I’ll bring it out. Have a seat.”

  Cassie tucked herself into the corner chair at the front table. The space heater was to her right, and her body began to relax in the warmth.

  She felt bad about coming in with barely any money, but the restaurant was one of the only bits of warmth she had found since coming to Victoria the month before.

  Well, not just the restaurant.

  She looked deeper into the room, at Ali behind the counter, her head down slightly as she focused on what she was doing, her neck taut and pale.

  Cassie had found the restaurant on one of her first days in town. She had arrived with virtually nothing, save her CD player and CDs, her wallet, Mr. Monkey, her journal and a few books, everything she had been able to grab in the fire. She had come up the street from the thrift shop, and she had stumbled across the restaurant in Chinatown. She was drawn in by the handwritten sign advertising their lunch special. She was watching every penny, stretching her money while she looked for work, but she had to eat something, right? And a choice of three items from the list for $6.99 was about as good a deal as she was likely to find.

  The tall, thin waitress with the short, dark hair, the tiny diamond stud on the left side of her nose, had seated her at a table for two near the back. After taking her order and bringing her food, she left Cassie alone with her book and her Discman, a Sarah McLachlan album lulling her away. When she looked up next, more than an hour had passed. The table had been cleared, and her bill was in front of her, under a plastic-wrapped fortune cookie.

  She hurried to the counter, bill in hand. “I’m sorry for taking so long.”

  The waitress smiled. “You looked like you were really enjoying that book.”

  It was an Anne McCaffrey Dragonriders book—Cassie had stuffed it hastily into her backpack. She nodded and fished a ten-dollar bill out of her pocket. “I’m sorry, though,” she said, handing the bill and the money across the counter. “I shouldn’t have taken up your space for so long.”

  “That’s all right,” the waitress said, handing back her change. “Anytime you like.”

  Cassie felt herself starting to blush. “Thanks—” She glanced at the waitress’s black T-shirt, looking for a name tag. There wasn’t one.

  “Ali,” the waitress said. “You can call me Ali.”

  Cassie dumped her change on the empty table and hurried out of the restaurant. But she had come back the next day. And the day after. And the day after that.

  Each time Cassie had come, Ali had greeted her with a smile that seemed to brighten the whole room.

  “You haven’t been in for a while,” Ali said as she set the tall glass of ice water on the table and laid a menu in front of Cassie. Her arms were pale and smooth.

  Cassie hadn’t been into the restaurant since her last day at the hostel, when her money had been running too low for her to afford anything more than day-old bread at the hippie bakery. That was before the shelter. Before the concrete. Before the camp.

  “No,” Cassie said. “I’ve been busy.”

  “Oh yeah?” Ali clearly didn’t believe her. “I was worried about you.”

  Cassie started to say something, but Ali had already turned back toward the kitchen. Cassie watched her walk away, a pale line of skin showing between the bottom of her black T-shirt and the top of her black jeans.

  She returned less than a minute later carrying a huge plate of food in one hand and a steaming mug in the other. “Here,” she said, and as she lowered the plate, Cassie hurried to move the menu. She set the mug down beside Cassie’s water glass: hot chocolate. Full to the brim.

  Cassie looked from Ali to the plate and back as the smell and the steam enveloped her face. “I didn’t—”

  “No,” Ali said. “I thought I’d take the liberty. This is what Hong is feeding us girls for lunch.”

  Cassie thought about the meagre handful of coins in her jeans pocket. “But I can’t—”

  Ali shook her head. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “No,” Cassie said. “I can pay. I just—”

  “You don’t need to,” Ali said. “It’s on the house.”

  “But …”

  “On the house,” Ali repeated. “Now eat up. You look hungry.”

  She couldn’t have known how right she was.

  As Ali turned away, Cassie picked up her chopsticks and, after a momentary fumbling, attacked the plate.

  The food was like nothing she had ever tasted; she wanted to savour it, but her hunger was too strong to fight, and she devoured mouthful after mouthful.

  When she was finished, she pushed the empty plate away from herself and took a long swallow of water. Wiping at the table with her napkin, she pulled her journal out of her backpack and centred it in front of her, where her plate had been.

  She had been keeping a journal for as long as she had been able to write. Longer if those old sketchpads with the soft grey newsprint counted.

  She still drew. She liked to write and draw in sketchbooks, plain white pages, heavy paper, flat black covers. For her fourteenth birthday, her mother had given her a brown leather cover that slid over the hard backs of the notebooks, so the journals always looked comfortingly the same. Over time the cover had taken on grooves and marks from carrying it in her backpack and school bag. Back home she had made a point of using it every day, even for just a few words or a quick sketch.

  But she hadn’t opened her journal since she’d left the hostel. She had kept it buried deep in her backpack at the shelter, not wanting anything to happen to it, and she hadn’t had a chance to sit with it in front of her for so long.

  It felt like she had been missing a part of herself.

  It took her a moment of searching in the front pocket of her backpack to find a pencil.

  She flipped first to the last partly filled page, but she decided to start on a fresh white sheet.

  I haven’t written here in so long … Too long! So many things have happened … I don’t know if I’m going to be able to remember everything. I don’t think I really want to, but I’ll try.

  Drawing a line under the words, she started to make a list.

  Hostel.

  Shelter.

  Men in stairwell.

  Fi
rst nights on street.

  Friendly cop.

  Skylark.

  Home?

  She looked at the list for a moment. A few days, that was all. Less than a week since the last night in the hostel and everything that had happened since: two nights at the shelter, then the streets. A lifetime.

  Using the words as a guide, she began to write.

  As the warmth flooded through her, moving down from her belly, up from her legs by the heater, she stopped thinking about what her pencil was doing, lost in the words, in the warmth, in the slow, steady comfort of a full belly.

  After a while, she found herself doodling in the margins, so she set the pencil down and took a sip of her hot chocolate, now barely lukewarm. She looked down at the page and felt her face start to burn.

  She had scrawled Ali’s name in the white space next to the list, the letters tall and dark against the paper.

  “Can I take that for you?”

  Cassie glanced up and slammed the book shut. Ali was standing at the end of the table, reaching out for the empty plate.

  “Sure,” she said. “Sure. Yes. Thank you.”

  How much had the waitress seen of the sketches that edged the pages? The curve of a back, bending over a table, the pale line of skin between T-shirt and jeans. A hand, holding a plate. An eye, sparkling as it looked out from under floppy bangs.

  She wondered if Ali had seen her name.

  Her face burned even hotter.

  Arching her bum off the chair, Cassie dug deep into her front pocket and began pulling out the small handful of change, which she deposited on the table next to her journal. She got most of the change out on the first few tries, but she made one last attempt, twisting slightly to retrieve one last dime that was buried deep.

  “I don’t think I’ve got enough,” she muttered as she started sorting the coins into stacks of a dollar each.

  Ali laid her hand over hers. “What are you doing? I told you—it’s on the house.”

  “But—”

  “No, seriously.” She let go of Cassie’s hand as she pulled one of the other chairs away from the table and sat down across from her.

  Cassie forced herself to look away.

  “I can’t just take—”

  “You’re not,” Ali said. “We’re giving. Look, Hong?” She gestured back toward the kitchen, where Cassie got a glimpse of a middle-aged man with a greying hairstyle that reminded her of Elvis in those old movies she had watched with her dad. “He noticed that you were coming in pretty regularly, and when you stopped …” Ali looked down at the table. “He asked if I knew what had happened. He thought that maybe”—she took a breath—“things weren’t going well.”

  Cassie shifted in her chair.

  Ali looked out the front window as she spoke. “They’re not, are they?”

  When she turned back, Cassie looked quickly away. For a moment, Cassie was tempted to lie. It was instinctive, a reflex, but for some reason, she couldn’t.

  “No, they’re not.” She looked down at her journal.

  Ali’s hand moved on the table. It was barely noticeable—a slight twitch, a movement toward Cassie, stifled almost before it happened.

  “It’s nice to be warm,” Cassie added. Now that she had broken through that wall, there was no need to pretend. “And full.”

  Ali nodded slowly. “I was wondering about that. So where are you staying now?”

  Cassie looked away. “Here and there,” she said, studying the soy sauce container, the scratches on her water glass, the tree outside the window, looking at anything but Ali’s face. But Ali saw through it.

  “Oh, God,” she said, and this time her hand did move, sliding across the table to cover Cassie’s again. “That’s … Have you thought about a shelter?”

  Cassie shook her head. “No,” she snapped, but she softened at Ali’s response. “I’m sorry. I was at a shelter the first couple of nights after I left the hostel.” She shook her head again. “This way is better.”

  Ali started to say something, then stopped, the tip of her tongue pressing against her lower lip like she was frozen in mid-word.

  “It’s all right,” Cassie said, not really sure if it was. “I’ve met some people. There’s this—”

  “In Centennial Square.”

  “—community,” she finished, then nodded. “Yes. How—”

  “It was in the paper,” she said, gesturing toward the back of the restaurant. “Are they all right? Is it okay?”

  “It seems okay. I haven’t been there long.” She picked up her cup, willing her hand not to shake, and drank the last of her hot chocolate. “I only met them yesterday. They’re not a cult or anything.”

  Ali’s expression of concern shifted to mild bemusement. “Well, if you say so.”

  It was nice to have someone worried about her.

  “What were you drawing?”

  The question seemed to come out of nowhere, but Ali pointed down at Cassie’s sketchbook and pencil: “What are you working on?”

  “Oh.” Cassie felt herself starting to blush again. “It’s just my journal. I haven’t … It’s been a while.”

  “You were pretty focused on it. Like that day with the book.”

  Blushing more now, hearing that Ali had remembered. “Yeah.”

  “I tried keeping a diary when I was younger. A few times, actually. But I never stuck with it. Does it help?”

  Cassie took a long moment to answer. “Yes. It does.”

  Ali stood up. “I’ll leave you to it, then. I’ll be back with some more hot chocolate in a bit. You take all the time you need.”

  Cassie just smiled. “Thank you.”

  Leaning back over her journal, she began to flip through the pages, the echo of Ali’s question still reverberating in her mind.

  Yes, it helped. It helped in so many ways. The journal kept her grounded, reminded her of who she was, her true self, no matter how far things drifted.

  It was all her, all right there.

  She turned to the first page, the first writing in the new journal she had started in the hospital the month before.

  She stared at the words, her truth, her self.

  November 15, 1997

  I killed Daddy last night.

  PART TWO

  Scientists believe that light can be both wave and particle. Not that light exists in different states at different times, the way that water can be ice or steam with the application or reduction of heat, but that light exists as both a wave and a particle at the same moment. It is not either/or. It is both/and.

  This is also true of the Darkness.

  It exists not within paradox, but as a paradox itself.

  It is both energy and form.

  Both without and within.

  It moves within us and outside us. Like a man and like the arc of electricity.

  I knew this from the moment the Darkness first came to me.

  But even that is wrong. The Darkness was always within me. It is always within all of us. But even though it was within me, it came to me too. I could feel it moving over me, brushing across my face and watching through my eyes as I held the kitten in the kitchen sink, as I turned the water on and let the basin fill.

  I could feel the Darkness within me, my Darkness, growing as the kitten struggled, and I could feel the Darkness outside looking on, watching me and watching through my eyes.

  The Darkness within me grew with every desperate attempt the kitten made to escape. And the Darkness outside fed off the kitten’s death, and from every scratch it inflicted on me, every drop of my blood it spilled in its dying.

  The Darkness fed from both of us. And fed. And fed.

  As she opened the door from the restaurant, the cold wind was like a slap in the face, stinging and sharp. Cassie took a startled breath that burned all the way down, and stopped short to shift her scarf up over her mouth and nose. It took only seconds for her to feel like she might never be warm again.

  And she had been so w
arm.

  It was like waking into a nightmare.

  Hunching her shoulders forward, she turned away from the wind, ducking her head. As she scurried past, she caught a glimpse of Ali standing in the window, watching her through the half-steamed glass.

  The snow had started to stick, a brittle skiff on the concrete that crunched under her feet. The wind sliced up the gap between her shoes and pants, chilling her lower legs.

  The sidewalks were nearly deserted, and none of the people she passed even noticed her. Their own heads were bent, their eyes focused on the snowy ground.

  It was getting dark, but unlike the day before, there was already a crowd in the breezeway next to City Hall, small clusters of people hunkered out of the wind, wrapped in threadbare blankets, huddled together for warmth. Standing in the shadows of Centennial Square, Cassie scanned the area slowly for Skylark. She looked again and again, even as the snow whipped around her.

  “Why don’t you come in?”

  The voice was soft, but Cassie jumped and turned.

  Brother Paul lowered both his hands slowly, palms down. There was something in the simple action that was soothing, and it took Cassie a moment to recognize: it was the same movement the minister at home used to signal the congregation to take their seats.

  “You don’t have to stand out here in the cold, you know,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “I was—”

  “Waiting for your friend.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t you come in,” he repeated, opening his arms, gesturing toward the camp with his right, lifting his left as if he meant to guide her with a touch on her back.

  Cassie took a half-step away.

  “The Outreach van will be here soon. And I’m sure Skylark will be back.” He paused. “Ah …” He nodded toward the breezeway.

  The volume of murmuring from the camp rose as Skylark moved from group to group, embracing people, laughing, talking loudly.

  “Blessed be, Dorothy,” Brother Paul murmured as he drifted away.

  Watching Skylark in the distance, Cassie barely heard him.