Blackbird

by Averil Dean

  “Like what?”

  “Like using up your life’s experiences too fast. And then the years just go on and on, with nothing to look forward to.”

  He brushed his hands together, but still could feel the ghostly weight of the bird in his palm.

  “It’s a young person’s world, Celia. After forty you begin to disappear. Like that bird of yours—you’re not real anymore.”

  She frowned. “But you are real. You’re here in the world, with the sun on your face and the ground under your feet. You’re alive. You could be dead right now, with all the things you’ve done.”

  “Easily,” he agreed.

  “Then why—”

  “Don’t you get it? I wish I had been killed sometimes, in a blaze of glory and preferably within sight of the cameras. Now it’s too late. I’ve outlived my relevance.” He shook his head at the blankness of her expression. “You’re too young to understand. I forget, sometimes, how young you are.”

  “But why should you need to be relevant? Why not just live?”

  He caught his breath at the simplicity of that.

  “Maybe I phrased it badly. Maybe I’m frustrated because all my wishes were granted before I really knew what to wish for.”

  He heard the awful, spooky weakness creep into his voice. Immediately she withdrew and turned to hang the last of her laundry.

  “Maybe you’ve gotten into the habit of wishing for the wrong things.”

  “Yeah? I thought I’d finally figured it out.” He stepped closer. “I’d take you anywhere, you know, anywhere you want to go. I’d give you anything.”

  She picked up the laundry basket and settled it on her hip. A rummaging breeze stirred the clothesline.

  “I have everything I want,” she said.

  “Do you?”

  She started past him to the kitchen. He caught her by the elbow. Her feathery hair looped around his fingers.

  “You don’t want me, Celia? I think you do.”

  Her face in profile was distant.

  “It seems like I already have you.”

  She left him standing there, shutting the door gently behind her.

  A cruel girl. A strange, cruel girl.

  He looked down now at the jumble of clothes beside the washing machine. Under a sky-blue shirt he saw the strap of Celia’s underwear.

  Reduced to this, he thought.

  But he bent down, tugged the underwear out of the basket and shoved them into his pocket. As he straightened, he saw Kate pass by in the kitchen. His heart did a guilty stutter-step. But she didn’t glance his way or slow down.

  Surely she hadn’t seen him.

  * * *

  Upstairs he closed the bathroom door and turned the lock. He pulled Celia’s underwear from his pocket.

  The cotton was soft in his hand—a tiny triangle in front, a slightly larger one in back, and in between the fabric had creased into a slight V shape. He ran his fingers back and forth over the point of the fold. The fabric held just a trace of her, some wheaty residual warmth. The scent quickened his blood, a visceral snap that got him instantly, painfully hard. He unzipped his jeans and let them fall to his knees, pumped out a palmful of lotion.

  His mind’s eye turned to a girl he had known at a tennis camp in upstate New York when they were both fourteen. At the end of a summer’s worth of increasingly desperate machinations, he found himself finally on a bed of hot sand, the girl lying over him in a spindly, sun-warmed embrace, the scraps of their summer clothes creating pockets of inaccessibility between them. His fingers slipped along the dewy channel of her spine, all the way to her nape and sneakily down, every time a little farther. Her hair fell around them, collecting their breath and the wet suction sounds of their mouths, and as his fingers slid finally past the cottony folds of her bathing suit and right around her ass, she squirmed in his arms, sighing, the sultry air thick with anxiety. A sound came up her throat:

  Naghhhhh...

  A no, meaning yes, meaning she wouldn’t, but oh, if she could...

  Then, as now, the sound engendered in him not longing but a gnashing rage. He had upended the girl, left her flat and startled on the beach, and stalked away. In another bathroom, which he remembered now for the infuriating height of the sinks, he had rid himself of her in a few quick strokes, spit her right down the drain.

  If only he could be so easily rid of Celia Dark. She had beguiled him somehow, imprinted herself inside his eyes, laced her scent through his mind like a madness.

  And she wasn’t even beautiful. With those crooked teeth and the bizarre clothes—she couldn’t even be bothered to wear makeup. She wasn’t even trying, a fact that made him angrier than almost anything else about her. Her rejection would be so much easier to accept if she were beautiful, or rich, or famous, or otherwise unattainable. She was none of those things. Why let himself act the fool for this girl when she was so monumentally unimpressed with him? He had Kate, who was pretty and fun, who wore skimpy clothes and would accept whatever he wanted in the bedroom. He could have any number of women and all of them would be more beautiful and accessible and fuckable than Celia Dark.

  But his mind circled relentlessly around her. Those wide-open eyes and crooked mouth, that slim body swaying mysteriously under her clothes, the tawny mass of her hair. She’d been fucked hard, of course she had, but still there was something untouched about this girl. She was the dark virgin princess in a nightmare castle on the hill: wicked, aloof, catastrophically vulnerable. He didn’t know whether he wanted to rescue her or rape her.

  His teeth snapped together as he came in the bathroom sink.

  * * *

  “What do you think about this place?” Kate said.

  She rolled over and lit a cigarette, leaned back on the pillow and sent a smoke ring floating toward the ceiling.

  Julian lay back on the rumpled sheets, hollow and sluggish after the last retreating waves of orgasm. He closed his eyes and laid his arm over his forehead. Unsatisfied, even now. Like he was suffering some painful, insistent itch that was always just beyond his reach.

  It was unfair, he knew. Kate was passionate, she was pretty and, the point was, she was here. Love the one you’re with, he told himself.

  With some effort, he pulled himself into the conversation.

  “Unique,” he said.

  “Yeah. I wasn’t sure what Celia was trying to do at first, but now it’s starting to feel like a gypsy caravan, with all the cushions and candles and everything low to the floor. It makes the place feel—”

  “Warm.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Not a bad thing after a day of skiing.”

  “No, but I wonder whether we like it so much because of Celia, because of all of them. Do you think it will work as a B&B, with strangers coming and going?”

  “Why wouldn’t it?”

  She reached over and tapped the ash off her cigarette. “It’s just that it’s all so personal. I feel like I’m sleeping in her bedroom.”

  He saw what she meant. Every object in the room had been found and brought here by Celia herself. The moss-green wallpaper had been peeled from the wall in strips, then sanded and waxed so that the remaining patches of paper and the wall behind it took on a lustrous glow by the light of the antique chandelier and the candles around the room. The Oriental rug, polished dresser, the drapes made from heavy scarves that hung from pegs over the window—all blissfully dim and comforting after a day on the icy-bright ski slopes. All intensely personal.

  He thought of Celia’s underwear, now crumpled in the corner of his drawer.

  “Again,” he said. “Not a bad thing.”

  Kate nodded. Her voice dropped to a low musing tone.

  “Everybody loves Celia.”

  He rolled over, propped his head
in his hand.

  “What was she like as a kid?”

  Kate paused a moment before answering.

  “Not that good as a playmate, to be honest. She’d do anything you wanted and she was always really sweet about it, but she would never really throw herself into a game. I always got the feeling that she liked being kind of outside, watching everybody else but staying out of it. The girls at school hated her. They were vicious. But the boys...” She inhaled and blew a chain of smoke rings at the ceiling. “When we were in middle school, this older girl named Marcie called her out and they got into a fight. Girl fight, you know? But Celia was too bewildered to do much more than cover up and wait for it to be over. I don’t think she even knew what it was about. Afterward she had a black eye—seriously, a shiner, like someone had thrown a glob of purple paint at her face. And it was the weirdest thing, the way all the boys came around her then. Boys who had never talked to her before. They would follow her and circle around, really quiet, like they’d found the Virgin Mary or something, like they were in a church.”

  Julian tried to imagine Celia as a child, drifting through the corridors, distant and alone with a cloud of silent boys trailing after.

  “The girls left her alone after that,” Kate said. “Until the end of high school, anyway. Rory was, as you might imagine, insanely popular and no one wanted to piss him off by talking about his kid sister. But after he and Eric left, the rumors started up that the three of them had been sleeping together. I’m not sure how much of that she took on board—I was wrapped up with this boy I was seeing, so Celia and I weren’t hanging out much at the time. I’ve always felt bad about that. I didn’t even notice when she dropped out. One day she was just gone and didn’t come back.”

  “She left because of the rumors?” Julian found this hard to believe. Celia’s eccentricity made her seem impervious to public opinion.

  “I don’t know,” Kate said. “Maybe not. I didn’t know her that well, not well enough to ask. I was more Rory’s friend.”

  “A childhood romance?”

  “Yeah, definitely. I adored him, in a puppy-dog kind of way. He’s a year older than most of my friends, so automatically he was higher up on the kiddie social ladder.”

  “And Eric?”

  “Not much to look at when we were kids, if you can believe it. If I’d known how he was going to turn out, I’d have put my dibs on early.”

  “Ah, but then you’d have missed out on this fine opportunity.”

  He expected her to laugh and agree that it would have been a loss. But she was following another train of thought.

  “The three of them didn’t really get close until her dad died.”

  “When was that?”

  “Seventh grade, I think. He was already gone by then—”

  “Gone?”

  “Yeah, he’d moved out a few months earlier.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “Moved out is maybe too strong a descriptor. Really he just left one morning, packed a suitcase and booked it out the door. He didn’t even say goodbye.”

  “Had a fight with his wife?”

  “I doubt it. He was a happy-go-lucky kind of guy. I can’t think of anyone who didn’t like him. But one day he just walked away.”

  “Another woman,” Julian said. “Obviously.”

  “You would think. But where he’d have hidden her in this town is anyone’s guess. Anyway, he always seemed like more of a family man to me. Really devoted, you know? He was always taking them fishing, camping. He used to make these elaborate family meals—Cajun food. You could smell it all the way down the street. He’d feed anyone who happened by.” Kate shook her head. “A sweet man. And funny, with that accent. It made everything sound like a joke.”

  “So what do Celia and Rory say? Surely they know something about it.”

  “I don’t think Celia has a clue. And if Rory knows, he’s not telling.”

  “Hmm. And then her father died?”

  “He was working in Boca Raton as an exterminator in the crawl space underneath some old lady’s house and hit a live wire. The lady who lived there couldn’t get him out, and by the time the ambulance got there, he was dead.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Mmm-hmm. Anyway, after that, Celia and Rory went everywhere together. I think he felt responsible for pulling her through it. He never let her out of his sight.”

  “Yeah. You know, I’ve always found that a little odd.”

  “Odd how?”

  “That it’s still going on. That Eric puts up with it. Seems like he’d want his chick to himself once in a while.”

  “Oh, no. No. Rory and Eric are like brothers. They love each other more than either of them will ever love Celia.”

  Kate stretched lazily, and the sheet slipped down past her bare breasts. She went on in that same musing tone.

  “Though it is strange, in a way. Rory’s been one-upping Eric his whole life. And Eric’s a pretty insecure guy. You’d think at some point he’d have gotten tired of always being upstaged.”

  Julian looked at her. Something in his mind shifted, the first glimmer of light over a river of cracked ice. An image of his brother, Tony, snapped to his mind: Tony’s face when it still had been animated, when Julian had been the one at the bottom of the slope, hearing the applause and hoots of approval and none of it for him. The gnawing jealousy, the wish to clamp his hands over his ears to drown it out.

  Eric’s a pretty insecure guy...

  He rolled forward and kissed Kate, drew the back of one finger down the center of her body and under the sheets. She sighed happily.

  So easy to read. Sweet little Katie.

  “Keep talking,” he said. “I like the sound of your voice.”

  December 31, 2007

  WHEN JULIAN INTRODUCED himself to Celia Dark, he pretended not to recognize her. Yet he’d seen her three times before since arriving in Telluride for the holidays. He noticed her first from the window of his hotel room, as she jogged alone down the snowy sidewalk, past the colorful speckled Christmas lights and the long golden windows. Her hair, oddly light, floated out behind her like a bride’s veil. A strange, thin girl, long legs encased in tight black running pants, fists clenched and her breath rising in thin plumes of steam around her face. He’d been nervous, watching her. He expected her to slip and fall. Everyone else was walking in measured steps along the sidewalk, their hands out a little to the side, just in case. This girl didn’t seem to notice the ice. She never skidded and she never slowed down. As she bobbed around the corner and out of sight, Julian felt the tension uncoil from his body, as if he’d been watching a gymnast or ski jumper having successfully stuck the landing.

  A few days later he saw her again. He was riding up on a lift as she passed beneath him—bundled and obscured by layers of clothing, her face blotted by heavy sunglasses. But that hair of hers was hard to miss. And there was something, too, in her movement, some elasticity in her hips, an unworried connection to the ground that reminded him of his brother, Tony. She skied like she was swimming, with long, languid strokes pushing through the powder.

  Julian was not the kind of man to turn around and ogle a woman. But he remembered her, was half-consciously looking for her when, the following night, they ended up together on the corner of a sidewalk, waiting to cross the street. The sun had slipped behind the horizon, leaving the sky purple and close, animated with snowflakes that drifted through the squares of window light and the teardrop lamps along the sidewalk. She wasn’t dressed for sport this time, but was wrapped in a thick woolen shawl, her feet swallowed up by a pair of fleece-lined UGGs. Her hair hung in a shining braid over her shoulder, with a white feather tucked into the end. As Julian hesitated, trying to decide what, if anything, to say, a thick-wheeled SUV roared up the sloppy road, picking up speed as it passed them, swerving at the last seco
nd to splatter them both with filthy snow.

  Julian yelled after it, furious, smacking the snow off his coat and jeans.

  “Did he get you?” he said to the girl.

  “Oh,” she said, as if it had just occurred to her to check. “Maybe.”

  She swiped vaguely at her shawl. There was mud in her hair.

  “What a dick,” Julian said.

  “Yes,” she said, and that was it, and she was gone.

  Julian stared after her, surprised. Not because he’d been rebuffed—which was not entirely without precedent, even for him—but because he hadn’t been noticed at all. She’d barely glanced at him, was looking into his face and straight through as if he were a window, some transparent barrier to the scenery.

  As he stood there, a feeling swept over him of déjà vu. He had been here before. He knew this girl. She was going to round the corner and go up the steps to the wine market, through the glass door on the right, and as she passed through she would be looking right at him. The image was strong as a memory. Her shawl would catch on the door handle and she’d laugh with someone inside as she freed herself.

  He stood there waiting, absolutely certain the scene would play out the way he’d imagined. For a moment, his life unfurled before and after this point in time as if he’d lived it already, had punched through some invisible membrane that separated past and future so that the present seemed to stretch infinitely onward like the reflections in a pair of facing mirrors. And, yes, there she went, up the front steps, her hand on the door. She was looking at him. Laughing, tugging at her shawl.

  The déjà vu faded. Julian pulled his coat around him and continued on to the pub. Odd, the way the universe toyed with your head. Like everything was preordained, and you were just riding through life on a track you had already laid in the snow. Now and then you could look up and see the pattern of the landscape, the terrain at the edges of your vision, and know that you’d traveled this way before.

  * * *

  By eleven o’clock on New Year’s Eve, the 760 Bar was wall-to-wall, a bobbing mass of sunburned faces, spilling out to the lobby of the Adelaide Lodge. The music throbbed in Julian’s ears as he shouldered his way to the bar with Zig running interference just ahead.