Black Feathers

by Robert J. Wiersema

  Cassie had no idea what to say. “Thank you,” she said, hesitating. “For the bath. And the clothes. And the toothbrush.” She smiled, and Ali smiled too. “And the food at the restaurant. And the couch.”

  “You don’t have to thank me,” Ali said. “I mean, you’re welcome. But really, you are welcome. Here.”

  “I really appreciate it.”

  “I like to think that’s just what people do for each other.”

  Cassie thought of the past few weeks. “No,” she said. “Not most people.”

  Ali looked down at her wineglass again and unfolded herself from the couch. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m being an awful host. I’m drinking away”—she lifted her wineglass in a half-toasting gesture—“and I haven’t offered you anything.” She stood up and edged past Cassie, setting her wineglass on the table next to a magazine. “What would you like?”

  Cassie turned on the couch so she was facing into the kitchen.

  “I’ll have whatever you’re having,” Cassie said.

  Ali nodded, reached into her cupboard and set a wineglass on the counter. “Red okay for you?”

  “Sure.” Cassie had no idea. Her experience with wine was limited to small glasses at Christmas and New Year’s, and the couple of times that Laura had broken into her parents’ wine rack and they had split the—

  No.

  She shook her head. Heather. She and Heather had stolen a bottle from their parents’ wine rack. They had taken it out to the woods to drink it. Heather had thrown up.

  Why had she thought of Laura?

  Why had the memory been so vivid? It was like it had really happened: she could remember them in the hayloft of Sullivan’s barn, leaning back against the bales, prickly and rough, passing the bottle back and forth.

  But that had never happened.

  She had only met Skylark in Victoria; why was she dreaming of her in Pressfield?

  “It’s not just what people do, no,” Ali said, jarring Cassie from her thoughts.

  She looked into the kitchen; Ali was looking back at her.

  “I had a friend,” Ali said, looking down at the wine bottle. “In junior high. A good friend. She …” Ali shook her head, still looking away. “She didn’t get in trouble, but that’s what everyone at school said. It was easier than saying that she had come out to her parents, and they had thrown her out.”

  She looked up at Cassie, then quickly away again.

  “I didn’t … I was fourteen, maybe fifteen. I had no idea what to do.” She twisted the cork, pulled it out of the bottle. “So I didn’t do anything. I didn’t say anything.” She shrugged. “What could I say?”

  It seemed like she might be expecting Cassie to answer, but she didn’t leave her any time.

  “She dropped out of school. Just disappeared. I didn’t see her again for, I don’t know, months.” She tilted the bottle toward the two glasses on the counter in front of her. “Then, I was downtown, and I saw her.”

  She set the bottle on the counter. She had filled only one glass.

  “She was panhandling. Begging. She didn’t …” She shook her head again, clutching the neck of the bottle as if for support. “I pretended I didn’t recognize her. I was with some friends, and I just—”

  “Pretended she wasn’t there.” Cassie hadn’t intended the words to sting, but Ali flinched.

  “I pretended I didn’t hear her when she called after me.” Lifting the bottle, she filled the second glass. She took a sip, set it down on the counter and filled it again.

  “I went back downtown, by myself, to look for her. But she was gone.” She forced the cork back into the bottle. “I never saw her again.”

  Cassie started to speak, but Ali shook her head. “Anyway,” she said. “That’s—No, people don’t always do right by each other, but … I’m trying.”

  A hot wetness filled Cassie’s eyes. “You’ve always done right by me.”

  “Well, thank you for saying that,” Ali said, picking up both of the glasses.

  “No,” Cassie said. “Thank you.”

  Ali shook her head sharply, wiped the corner of each eye by leaning in to the shoulders of her T-shirt.

  “Here,” Ali said, passing her the wineglass by the stem as she shuffled past. With her own, she settled back into the far end of the couch.

  The bowl of the wineglass was half-full: the wine caught the light, glowing red and warm.

  “I guess we should have a toast,” Ali said, leaning toward Cassie. “What should we toast to?”

  “I—” Cassie tried to think of something. She wanted to be profound, or at least thoughtful. Or funny. Funny would be good too. Especially now.

  “How about ‘to winter’?” Ali suggested.

  “To warm houses,” Cassie countered without thinking. “To warm houses in winter.”

  She held her breath, hoping she hadn’t said something stupid.

  Ali smiled. “I like that,” she said, and Cassie exhaled.

  “To warm houses in winter,” Ali said, extending her glass.

  Their wineglasses tinging together brought Cassie a small shiver.

  The mere act of holding a wineglass, of sipping from it, made her feel grown-up. She could picture her parents, toasting in front of the fire …

  She had to suppress a shudder.

  “How’s that?” Ali asked.

  “It’s good,” Cassie said, taking another sip.

  “Good,” Ali said. “I’m glad.” She shifted on the couch, drawing her legs up to her chest. “Can I get you anything else?” she asked. “Is there anything you need?”

  “I don’t think so,” Cassie said, looking at the glow of the light in the wine. “I’m okay. I’m liking just … being here.” She didn’t know if the words sounded as significant as they felt.

  “It must be so strange,” Ali said thoughtfully. “Never knowing … well, like, never knowing where you’re going to sleep …”

  Cassie flinched at the thought of the concrete, the cold, her heart thrumming suddenly in her chest.

  There was a rush of heat where Ali touched Cassie’s arm. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean—”

  Cassie hurried to shake her head. “No, it’s all right.”

  “It’s just … I can’t even imagine what it must have been like.”

  Cassie sipped her wine.

  “It’s a world I just—”

  “No,” Cassie said. “I can’t even really explain what it’s like.”

  Ali’s lips parted as if she were about to speak.

  “So many things to remember, places you can go, places you can’t go, people to keep away from. So many rules.”

  “Rules?”

  Cassie nodded, took another swallow of wine.

  “Yeah,” she said. “That friend of mine, Skylark? One of the first things she ever told me was to keep my name to myself. Not to tell anyone. That if they didn’t know my name, they couldn’t hurt me.”

  She should have been expecting it, but she wasn’t: the thought of Skylark, that first day in the park, brought tears burning in the corners of her eyes.

  “Oh, Cassie,” Ali said gently, touching her knee. “I’m sorry.”

  Cassie tried to smile. “I just miss her.”

  “Of course you do.”

  Cassie could hear the kitchen clock echoing through the small apartment.

  Ali broke the awkward silence. “So, all the people living … out there.” She stumbled, clearly uncomfortable saying things like “living on the street” or “homeless.” “They all use different names?”

  Cassie nodded. “Street names,” she said.

  Ali stretched her arm out along the back of the couch, lowered her head into the crook of her own shoulder. “Did you have one?”

  Cassie nodded.

  “What was it?”

  Cassie leaned against the back of the couch, her face just inches from Ali’s fingertips. “Dorothy.” She tried to make it sound exotic, mysterious.

&nb
sp; Ali smiled. “Dorothy? Why Dorothy?”

  Cassie felt the heat rising in her cheeks; it was almost too silly to say out loud. “From The Wizard of Oz?”

  A huge grin spread over Ali’s face. “That’s one of my favourite movies,” she said, an excited, girlish trill in her voice.

  “Mine too,” Cassie said, a strange sort of excitement bubbling up from her belly. “My dad and I …”

  The bottom fell out of the world, and she was suddenly tumbling into the darkness. She straightened up, cleared her throat, as it all came rushing back in: The smell of kerosene. The fire. The basement.

  Daddy.

  The basement.

  She shook her head. “My dad and I used to watch it,” she said, forcing herself to speak. “It’s one of my favourites.”

  The air in the room was suddenly still.

  Ali tilted her head slightly to one side. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Sure,” Cassie said, and swallowed the rest of her wine. “Why?”

  Ali’s eyes tightened: she wasn’t just looking at her, she was scrutinizing her. “You just … When you started talking about your dad …”

  Cassie shrugged and shook her head. “I think I’m just tired,” she said.

  Ali nodded slowly, clearly not believing her. “Cassie,” she said, her voice serious and slow. “Did something happen with your father?”

  “My father’s dead,” she said.

  The day filled Cassie with a sense of grim foreboding. It wasn’t anything outside: even early, the sun was high and warm, the corn rising and green in the fields along the lane.

  But inside Cassie it was grey, all grey.

  Heather had left early. She had waited until Cassie had gone upstairs to brush her teeth and get her stuff, and she had left, without a word to her.

  Cassie didn’t run, didn’t call after her, didn’t try to catch up. She knew what was happening; she knew there wasn’t anything she would be able to say to make it better.

  Nothing made it better.

  When she came around the corner, Heather was already at the bus stop, standing with the Harkin kids from up the road.

  “You got ahead of me,” Cassie said, dropping her backpack to the ground with a heavy, satisfying thud.

  “Yeah,” Heather said.

  There was a wall up between them. Heather didn’t say anything else, didn’t meet her eye. As the Harkin kids pushed each other around, shrieked and laughed, neither of the sisters said anything. Cassie looked off into the distance at the fields across the road, the small mountain just on the other side of the railroad tracks.

  When the bus came, a flock of crows lifted from the field, blackening the sky.

  “Hey,” Laura said, shuffling over in the seat to allow Cassie to sit down.

  “Hey.” Cassie was focused on the back of Heather’s head, her hair bobbing six or seven rows ahead.

  Laura waited. “So …,” she said slowly, drawing out the word, trying to get her attention.

  “The algebra?” Cassie asked.

  “Did you finish it? I had problems”—Cassie was already opening her bag—“with a few. Aw, thanks, C, you’re the best.”

  Cassie turned her attention back to Heather as Laura started to fumble through her binder. One of the Harkin girls was talking to Heather, but Heather seemed to be staring straight ahead. Her head wasn’t moving at all.

  Cassie could remember those days all too well.

  “Cassie?” Laura said, and Cassie turned at the confusion in her voice. She was flipping through Cassie’s binder, glancing between her and the papers. “Where’d you put the homework?” The bus lurched as it turned onto the highway.

  “What do you mean? It’s right at the end—” Cassie broke off as Laura tilted a blank page in her direction. “No, before that.”

  “That’s yesterday’s,” Laura said, angling the page of problems toward her.

  “Maybe I missed a page,” Cassie said, reaching for the binder.

  Laura held on to it, flipping slowly through the pages. “I’ve gone all through,” she said.

  “Here, let me.” Cassie grabbed the binder and started at the beginning, looking carefully at each page as she flipped past.

  All of the pages were carefully marked and dated, all in order. She flipped through to the last sheets, but the homework wasn’t there. The notebook ended with the work from the day before.

  “Shit,” she muttered.

  “What?”

  She tried to piece it together: she had done her homework at the kitchen table while Mom got dinner ready. Dad had come in partway through, hanging his jacket on the back of the chair next to hers.

  She could picture it all so clearly: the pages of the textbook, the numbers she had written on the page …

  “Did you leave it at home?”

  “I don’t think so,” Cassie said slowly. “I mean, I wouldn’t have taken it out of my binder, right?”

  She took a deep breath.

  “I’ll redo it at lunch,” she said, trying to seem calmer than she was feeling. “No big deal. I did it once, I can do it again.”

  When she saw how Laura was looking at her, she wondered what sort of questions she must be thinking to give her that strange expression.

  “No, really. I’ll just do it at lunch.”

  The strange expression on Laura’s face didn’t fade.

  It continued through the morning. Cassie would look at her in class or pass her a note or roll her eyes at something Miss Purser said, and Laura would respond the same way she always did, but there seemed to be a moment of hesitation, the slightest, stuttering gap before the response, and Cassie could see that look of puzzled confusion.

  By the end of third period, just before lunch, she forced herself to stop looking at Laura. She stared straight ahead at the blackboard, wrote notes in her social studies binder and kept her head down when Mr. Phillips asked for answers, waiting for the bell to ring.

  “So, Lakeview?” Laura asked, as if nothing was wrong.

  Cassie shelved her binder in her locker. “What?”

  “Are we going to the Lakeview for lunch?”

  There seemed to be something missing. Had they talked about going out for lunch? Had she forgotten? “I don’t—”

  “I figured you wouldn’t want to get busted, us doing homework in the library or the caf.”

  The pieces tumbled into place. “Oh,” she said, grabbing her algebra text. “You mean, you copying my homework?” She tried to make it sound like a joke, and when she closed her locker and turned to face Laura, her friend was smiling.

  “I’ll buy you some fries,” Laura said.

  Cassie shook her head. “Do you really think I’m that cheap?”

  Laura’s smile was huge. “Most days, you do it for free.” She smirked. “Come on.”

  No one really knew why it was called the Lakeview Diner. There was no lake. The closest body of water was little more than a pond, a slough, miles away, nowhere near the restaurant.

  In fact, all you could see from the cracked vinyl booth where Cassie and Laura sat down was the four-way stop, the thrift shop and one corner of the school field.

  They were less than a block from the school, but eating at the Lakeview still felt like a big deal. Only juniors and seniors were allowed to leave the school grounds at lunch, so it had only been—

  Cassie froze. How long had it been?

  She couldn’t remember. What was happening to her? How could she not know what month it was? It had been cold, but not too cold. Warm, but not too warm.

  She took a deep breath, struggled to answer.

  She just needed to sleep, that was all. Too many nights, too many dreams: of course she was exhausted.

  She took another deep breath.

  “Do you want menus?”

  There was acid in the waitress’s voice, and she was looking at the two girls with unveiled contempt.

  Laura glanced at Cassie. “No, I don’t think so.”


  “Right,” the waitress said. “Of course you don’t. You know you’re supposed to wait to be seated, right?”

  “There wasn’t anyone sitting here,” Laura said innocently, though they both knew the rule.

  “Not right now,” the waitress said. “But we’d rather give real customers the best seats, not kids.” The waitress tucked her dark hair behind her ear and stood there like she was daring them to argue with her.

  “Well,” Laura said, a trace of haughtiness creeping into her voice, “we’re going to order, okay?”

  The waitress pursed her lips, pulled her order pad out of the pocket of her apron. “All right,” she said. “What’ll you have?”

  “I … I’d like a hot chocolate,” Cassie said.

  “And a coffee,” Laura added.

  The waitress looked at them over the order pad. “Food?”

  “Fries,” Laura said, nodding her head as if she had just won some sort of victory. “And gravy.”

  The waitress didn’t even bother writing it down. “So, a hot chocolate, a coffee, two orders of fries and gravy.”

  “No,” Laura said quickly. “Just one order of fries and gravy. We’re going to share.”

  The waitress looked at them for a moment, then shook her head and turned away before she said anything. Cassie watched her as she walked back toward the kitchen, the narrow flash of white skin between the top of her black jeans and the bottom of her black T-shirt, the very edge of a tattoo.

  Something opened up inside her, and the world jittered, blurred, shifted out of focus. She could only hear Laura like she was at the far end of a tunnel, laughing lightly.

  “Alicia Felder, working at the Lakeview,” she said. “Wait till I tell Cheryl that I ran into her big sister.”

  Alicia.

  Cassie fell into the black.

  Cassie’s breath tore at her throat. The covers fell away from her as she sat bolt upright on the couch.

  Everything snapped back into focus: the couch, the coffee table, the grey square of light over the kitchen window.

  But none of it seemed real.

  Or it seemed too real.

  She didn’t know.

  Her heart was thundering in her chest, and her breaths were ragged, short.

  Focus on your breathing. In two three four. Hold two three four. Out two three four.