by Averil Dean
“I’m he-ere,” she sang.
But the Blackbird was gruff, unwelcoming, as if it knew it was a hazard to children and was trying to protect her by holding itself aloof.
“You’re not fooling anybody,” she told it.
She walked around the corner to where the boards had been pried loose from one of the windows. Teenagers, she thought briefly. A chunk of tree stump was lying under the window. She dragged it a little closer and climbed up to peer through the gap. Blinded by the sunlight, she could make out only the outline of the windows across the room and the shape of the banister against the light. She climbed through the window, scraping her belly, and landed with a hollow thud on the wooden floor.
She rose to her feet, wiping her hands on the seat of her pants. Rods of sunshine fell through the boarded-up windows, leaving streaks of dust-sparkled light on the floor and walls. Ghostly humps of sheeted furniture rose from the shadows, and as her eyes adjusted she could make out the shape of the hearth across the room, gaping as if startled in the middle of a yawn.
Celia turned in a slow circle. The shuffle of her feet was a heartbeat, a sign of life in a lifeless place. It excited her, to think she’d brought that noise to the Blackbird, had generated movement and life and sound inside this shell of a place.
Then she stopped, her heart leaping into her throat.
A beastly face leered at her from the shadows, its lips drawn back from a set of jagged teeth. Its desiccated eye stared at her through the swirling dust motes.
A cougar. A stuffed cougar, its head mounted on the wall. Its fur looked dry as autumn grass, and the dust was thick over its glass eye. She licked her thumb and reached out, meaning to rub the eye clean. But she couldn’t bring herself to touch it.
Poor thing. Beheaded and nailed to a wall. And underneath, a spray-painted arrow and the words, “Got paws?” The ultimate indignity.
She crossed the room and mounted the curving staircase, stepping cautiously with her hand trailing along the dusty banister. The upstairs windows had been left uncovered, and the hallway glowed with afternoon sun streaming through the bedroom windows and the wide-open doors.
She walked to the end of the hall and through the last door.
The room had two wide windows looking over the ravine to the valley below. Groves of aspen lined the hillside in wide swaths of green and gold, shimmering in the afternoon sun. This was the opposite view from her bedroom, more expansive and magical than anything she had ever seen. She could see their house, slightly back from the edge of the ridge, and her room at the top with its triangular wall of windows. As she watched, a shape moved inside her room. Her heart lifted. It was her father! Home! Now he would explain where he’d been and why he hadn’t been able to say goodbye. (He was a secret agent, he’d been kidnapped, he had amnesia, he’d taken a fall!) Tonight they’d make supper together, shrimp and grits. All her plans to sulk and keep away and demand an apology dissolved in an instant, because her father was home and he was looking for her already.
But as she watched, she saw his arms and legs slip through the window, shimmying down the tree as she had done, and realized it was only Rory. Her father was dead and he’d already come home, in a box, which was buried deep underground and miles away.
Even now, almost a decade later, she sometimes forgot. Literally forgot that her father was dead. She’d catch herself on the verge of asking after him and feel her face go hot and cold with the shame of forgetting, as if his death had left no impression on her mind.
She lay back against the cushions, mesmerized by the dancing light. A rush of longing swept through her, settling like a large hand against her breastbone. She saw the rooms transform in her mind’s eye: the walls smoothed, the banister polished, splintered wooden floors like satin underfoot. Every room lit with candles and fairy lights, and the big friendly kitchen painted a particular shade of blue, its massive range chugging heat into the room. The windows would be scrubbed clean, each one offering a slice of this view: the snowy mountain valley in the wintertime, brightening to green for the summer, and the doors open wide to the pine-scented air.
No one would leave a house like this.
Rory and Eric were still batting words around, but their energy had grown nervous in spite of the weed.
“...windows.”
“We’ll have to get the range working...”
“And sweep the chimneys.”
“The structure is sound,” Celia said. “All it needs is love.”
Eric sang the line back to her. “All it needs is love, love, love is all it needs...”
“Don’t we all,” Rory said. He reached out to trail the back of his fingers down the inside of Celia’s arm, back and forth across her palm. His blue eyes had gone dark, his pupils wide, the light in his gold hair like a halo around his head.
Eric lifted his shoulder to bring her mouth to his, his lean warm tongue tracing the edge of her teeth.
Little sister, they called her. They wanted it to be that way, incestuous and twisted. They loved the things she’d let her brothers do—all those childish tight-lipped kisses and sticky fumblings, the dark closet where they’d crouched behind her stepmother’s clothes, where she’d clutched at the hangers as they’d rubbed against her with cheeks as smooth and round as her own, where she’d first felt their eyes on her body and nearly fainted at the sudden onrush of feminine power.
Dizzying, terrifying. This need of theirs to feel her body, the distant blankness in their eyes as if the sight of her bewitched them.
Let us see, they used to whisper. Celia, just let us look.
And she had; she did. They played games and sought out corners where, out of summertime ennui or defiance or simply out of the boredom that came from living in a small mountain village, they would exchange a series of terrified, breathless caresses, each of them following a pattern of advance and retreat like the whole thing was subject to a rule book that no one could locate.
Only somewhere along the way, they had grown up. The stubble at the edge of Eric’s lips burned like sandpaper now, and Rory’s hands were strong and clever, long past the point of fumbling as he unfastened the buttons of her blouse, his fingers slipping in and out of the buttonholes with a businesslike efficiency. The fabric dropped away and a breath of cool air swept across her skin.
Let me see, come on now, baby, there you go.
Rory stroked her bare chest with the flat of his hand, settling his palm over her thudding heart while Eric’s mouth played decoy, busily opening hers as he turned his body sideways to settle her head on the pillow. So smooth, they were, the two of them, barely a word spoken and they had her half-naked and afire with longing, her neck straining upward and both hands lying limp upon the blankets.
They were reaching for her skirt, gathering slow bunches of fabric in their hands.
Let us see, come on, Celia, just a peek...
Just a peek, just a touch.
Where was the harm in that?
* * *
She wondered sometimes, under the amplified swell of their attention, how the transformation had occurred. Her peripheral vision filled with the shapes of them, wrapped in a nebulous light, graceful and quiet and distant, as if their everyday selves had stepped out of the room and left three wraithlike replacements locked in a carnal dance. Someone’s fingers in her hair, someone whispering her name. It didn’t seem to matter who was giving or receiving, who spoke or didn’t speak, or on what side of the line they were treading. They were simply gone, all of them, to the far reaches of their minds even as the physical boundaries between them dissolved.
How had they come to this? Was it a choice she had made or one that had been made for her? Tendrils of memory drifted through her mind and faded. After all, what did it matter now? The past was gone and the future was a shining ribbon unwinding at their feet. It woul
d start for them here.
Inside the Blackbird Hotel.
* * *
Untwining, they dropped back to the cushions almost as they had started. Rory and Eric pulled on their jeans, but Celia lay naked on the tangle of her clothes. Eric lit a cigarette and Rory reached for the pipe, and they all three gazed at her body as if it were a TV screen during the commercial break.
“You’ll have some papers to sign,” Eric said eventually.
Rory exhaled a lungful of smoke.
“I don’t know, man. It still feels wrong to share the ownership. I mean, it’s your money.”
Eric waggled his eyebrows, one hand on Celia’s thigh. “You think I don’t know how to share?”
“Listen,” Celia said. “Rory and I will still be here. Nothing will change, whatever the paperwork looks like. But the property should be yours.”
Eric’s smile faded. He dragged on his cigarette and turned to tap the ash into the empty bottle of champagne.
“The Blackbird is as close to marriage as the three of us are ever going to get. If we’re in this, really in this, we need to do it right. We need to own the place together, all three of us equally.”
His face worked anxiously. Maybe they really didn’t understand.
Then Celia sat up and kissed him full on the mouth.
“Where do we sign?”
January 2003
CELIA WAS DREAMING.
She lay in a state of boiling half consciousness, ripples of dreams in a wonderland mixed with reality, impossible to separate.
Their kitchen at home. She was standing at the counter on the little yellow footstool her father had made for her. She could feel its smooth paint under her feet as she watched the knife flash in her father’s hand. A whole onion exploded over the cutting board, bursting into tiny cubes that glistened like broken glass. Steam rose from a pan on the stove. Her father’s voice drifted through Celia’s mind: Careful, chère, don’ get too close. And she saw that it wasn’t a knife in his hand at all, but a fishing rod. Rory was there, too, and now they were in a small boat on Copperhead Lake, all of them fishing. The sky around them was a sheet of pewter, the water dark as oil. Celia’s rod began to bend—a fish! She cranked the reel. Nothing. It was only a weed. Her line had gotten tangled, and no matter how she pulled and jerked, the hook would not come loose. Cut it, Rory said. You have to cut the line. Celia’s father took the rod from her hand and worked it. His hand flashed in the sunlight, whipping the rod back and forth. Rory’s voice had grown insistent, and Celia began to feel afraid, as if there were something dangerous just beneath the surface of the water. Cut the line, cut the line. Her father’s hand was moving strangely, faster and faster, his lips curled back in a terrifying sneer.
In the dream she was suddenly awake, lying on the living room couch in the eerie glow of the TV across the room. Her father was standing over her with his hand moving fast between them.
Rory’s voice screamed from inside the TV.
Cut the line! Cut the line! Cut the line!
* * *
She woke from the dream in a clammy sweat, in a darkness so complete she wasn’t sure at first that her eyes had really opened. She swung around, disoriented, reaching for her bedside lamp even as reality came rushing back, along with the realization that she was not at home.
She found the light at last. She lay in its sour glow, curled around her arm, as her heartbeat gradually slowed.
Room 114. The Blue Pine Motel, just off the I-70 in Grand Junction.
“You might cramp a little,” the doctor had said. She was tiny and deft, with thin white hair like dandelion floss and a gentle Southern drawl. “That’s normal. And you’ll bleed a bit more than you usually do.”
She had patted Celia on the shoulder and called her honey. She was very kind.
They all were. The women at the clinic hadn’t pushed when Celia said she didn’t know who the father was, but that he wouldn’t want this baby; there would be no one to help her care for it. Everyone understood and seemed to agree that Celia was acting wisely. They called it a procedure and told her what would and wouldn’t hurt, and they set her up with the pill. Under the sympathetic gazes of the doctor and staff, it was easy to pretend the procedure was nothing more involved than a Pap smear.
“Lie back,” the doctor said. “Try to relax.”
Celia tried. Awash, snugly sedated, she let her legs open, let her eyes slide out of focus, trying not to think about what was being sucked into the little vacuum canister beside the table. Someone had decorated the ceiling in an underwater scene, with taped-on mermaids and dolphins, whales, tropical fish and bejeweled sea horses unfurling their tails. She could saddle one, she thought, like those on a merry-go-round she’d ridden as a little girl, with her father beside her. She still could feel the wind on her face, the cool painted neck of the bobbing sea horse under her hands.
“Hang on, darlin’.” The lights on her father’s face had flickered pink and yellow, flashing on his teeth and his soft black hair.
But Celia liked to fly. She spread her arms and let the sea horse swoop her up and down through the autumn air.
“Look at me, Daddy, look!”
Always Celia was trying to get her father to look at her. She loved the lazy swing of his attention, like a warm sun behind a veil of skidding clouds.
He was smaller than most other men, but more handsome and much more ready to smile. He had a deep drawling voice and spoke a secret language only Celia could understand. Darlene called it swamp slang and tried to discourage him, saying that they weren’t in the bayou but Jawbone Ridge, Colorado, and he should try to speak so that other people could understand him.
“Ah, now,” he said. “You can take the man out the bayou...”
But Celia was glad for the bayou. She loved her father’s drawl, his thin cotton shirts with the mother-of-pearl snaps on the pockets, the acidic scent of his skin and the oily gleam of his cheek after he’d shaved. She could read things in his face that taught her about the faces of other men: if they were puzzling things out slowly or leaping to conclusions, showing signs of impatience, or were pleased and didn’t want to show it.
He wasn’t impatient at the carnival. They had all the time in the world. When the ride was over, he unbuckled the strap around her waist and helped her off the sea horse, and they strolled together through the crowd, his calloused hand enfolding hers.
At the entrance to one of the big striped tents, a sign read the flying trapeze, in old-timey red-and-black letters. Her father bought two tickets and some cotton candy and they went inside.
Celia had read about the circus. In books it sounded like a magical place, full of wonder, bright and colorful as Disneyland. This circus wasn’t like that. The tent was disappointingly dingy, set right on top of the cracked blacktop with the remnants of the parking spaces showing through. The music sounded tinny and exhausted. Everything was crammed in; even the men at the top of the trapeze seemed too big for the space.
But it was date night. Time for just the two of them, and it didn’t much matter where they spent it. Celia nailed a smile on her face and clapped extra hard as a small dark girl danced into the spotlight. She was older than Celia, maybe fourteen, with a narrow, supple body and a leotard of spangled purple. Her lips and eyes were painted, and on each cheek was a rosy circle sparkling with glitter. She climbed the ladder and took her place on the tiny platform near the top of the pole. She waved and posed, took the trapeze in her hands and started to swing. Back and forth, passing between the two men in a series of gymnastic flips and somersaults, her body curling up and snapping open, sequins flashing in the spotlight.
Celia glanced at her father. His eyes slid from side to side, tracking the girl on the trapeze. He was smiling to himself as if he was thinking of something else, as if he’d noticed something
Celia hadn’t. His fingers encircling hers had grown tense. He wasn’t squeezing, exactly, but Celia’s eyes began to burn and a fat lump formed in her throat.
He gave her a quick tight hug.
“You wanna fly like that, pop chock? Wan’ be up high, swingin’ on that trapeze?”
Celia nodded. She didn’t want to swing on the trapeze, but he seemed to think she would and she didn’t want to disappoint him.
“Want Daddy to catch you?”
“Yes.”
He tweaked her nose, his teeth winking in the light.
The show ended to a ripple of applause. Celia wanted to get out of the tent, go back outside where the Tilt-A-Whirl and cotton candy were waiting. But her father led Celia toward the thready crowd of parents and children waiting to get the circus girl’s autograph.
“You are sure a brave girl,” her father said when it was their turn in line.
She looked up at him unsmiling, the pen and circus flyer in her hand. Up close, her spangled leotard was not so pretty; the shoulder had a line of uneven stitches at the seam and some of the sequins were missing. Celia noted this with grim satisfaction, eyeing one of the last loose threads that seemed to be holding them together.
“You been swingin’ on that trapeze for a while?” Daddy said.
“Since I was four.” Her voice was thin, with a slight lisp.
Like a baby, Celia thought scornfully.
“Four years old!” Her father beamed down at her. “Cho! Just a lil bitty thing. You gon’ be in town tomorrow, darlin’?”
“All week,” she said.
“Good, good. I’ll maybe come back this way—”
He stopped midsentence. The big circus man had materialized at the girl’s side. His dark eyes glittered from beneath heavy brows. He said something to the girl in a guttural language Celia couldn’t understand. The girl handed the flyer to Celia and darted away.
