Blackbird

by Averil Dean

  Look at me, she thought fiercely. Do I have your attention now?

  They had grown deliberate, all of them. She felt their eyes on her face, her bare legs. And between her legs, where a dense pulse struggled under Eric’s fingers.

  “You want him to stop?” Rory said.

  His eyes were fever-bright and his cheek glowed red from the screen. The theater was filled with the sound of the character’s breathing, a pause in the action. Her answer slid into the silence through her clenched teeth.

  “No.”

  Eric slipped his hand inside her underwear. Stealthy at first, an exploratory maneuver, as a young boy will do across a school-yard boundary. Then a second time, and a third, slippery and emboldened.

  Rory frowned in disbelief, his eyes flicking over her face. He slipped his hand around the inside of her thigh and pushed her skirt up to her hips—like a challenge, like a dare he was sure she’d refuse, that would snap her out of whatever spell the darkness had cast. She stared back, holding his gaze as she had when they played together as children, nose to nose on the living room sofa: Who will blink first?

  She let her thighs move farther apart.

  Rory’s eyelids fluttered and his hand grew tense and heavy around her knee. She shifted in her seat, her nails biting into the armrests. The small movement lifted her to Eric’s hand and sent a ripple of impatient desire through her body.

  “Don’t.” Rory’s voice was hoarse.

  Don’t what, she wanted to say. Who was he talking to?

  Don’t let it happen, maybe. Don’t let us get carried away. Eric, don’t touch my sister, my little sister. Who the hell do you think you are...

  Anger roiled in Celia’s chest.

  Don’t?

  Watch me.

  Rory’s gaze broke from hers. He stared into the shadowy place between her legs where Eric’s fingers dipped and sank inside her.

  A boy will do whatever he can.

  Do it, then. Who’s stopping you?

  She hunched down farther in her seat. Eric lifted his hand and pushed his damp fingers into her mouth. She curled her tongue around them, tasted her own fluids, salty as tears. He was staring at her mouth. They both were staring, their lips parted in surprise. The expression in their eyes was intoxicating, the gesture so needy and erotic that she could no longer be still. When Eric’s hand returned to her lap, she began to move with him. He curled his palm and she pushed back, grinding against the heel of his hand.

  Beside her, heavy and slow as if in a dream, Rory dragged his gaze from Eric’s hand, drew her face to his and kissed her.

  A surge of emotion rose through her body, settling hot and thick inside her throat. Rory was her brother. Present in her earliest fragment of memory, chasing her lost balloon. It’s gone, Cee-Cee, far away gone... His sturdy legs churning, arms reaching to catch the ribbon even as the balloon bobbed into the vast blueness, shrinking to a dot as though the whole sky were pulling away from them. Far away gone, Cee, you can have mine. And the gladness of her own response—that he would give up his balloon for her. For her! It was impossible to imagine loving a person more than she had loved Rory in that moment. He had been there always, her brother in every way that mattered, yet always with this kink of genetic distance between them where the craving had taken hold. And now, in the space between two breaths, he was kissing her like a jealous lover, lips parted, his tongue pushing hard into her mouth as Eric’s fingers slid inside her.

  Slut, she thought, gripping the armrests.

  I don’t care! I didn’t start it.

  A car chase had erupted on the screen. The theater thundered to life, flogging the air with drumbeats and the petulant squeal of tires. The movie would be over soon. She imagined them sitting this way when the lights came up—Eric turned sideways, his hand between her legs, Rory looming over her with his mouth open on hers, now with his hand pressing at her breast. And herself between them, her feet on the seat backs, letting her legs slip apart like she didn’t know any better than to let herself get finger-fucked in a middle of a matinee.

  “This is what you want.” Eric’s lips were next to her ear, his voice seeping through the rising tide of music. “Come on and take it, then.”

  The movie would be over soon. Tomorrow they’d be gone, gone, gone.

  A crackling fullness gathered in her belly. A swelling impatience, some nameless dread.

  Don’t stop, oh please, please don’t stop...

  They could feel it coming for her. They’d been bringing it on, hoping it would overtake her, pushing and pulling for as long as she could remember. She still could see their faces when their cheeks were as smooth as hers. Sidelong glances, plucking at her clothes, teasing in girlish voices but with a masculine persistence that frightened and compelled her.

  A boy wants to touch. But, oh, the feeling of being touched. The winding tightness. The overwhelming sensation of both of them looking, watching, waiting. A wave of furious pleasure surged upward through her body and set the tops of her thighs ablaze, turned the air to fire in her lungs. She clutched at Eric’s wrist.

  “Oh yeah,” Eric said.

  He caught her climax in the palm of his hand, two fingers buried inside her. She tried to pull away to catch her breath, but Rory wouldn’t let go. His kiss had grown brutal, teeth clacking against hers, his tongue stiff and angry. He clutched at her breast. He sucked away her air, swallowed up her cries.

  At her shoulder she could feel Eric softly laughing.

  The speakers around them went quiet, a vacuum of silence as though something vital had been sucked from the room.

  Rory blinked. He leaned away. In a daze he stared from Celia to Eric, three fingers rubbing his lips.

  Eric smoothed down her skirt, flashing a Cheshire grin in the darkness.

  “Let’s go to your house,” he said.

  * * *

  No one said a word on the ride back from the theater. No one turned on the radio. Celia sat on the seat between Rory and Eric, her knees pressed together, breathless and shaken with her heart banging against her ribs. Next to her, Eric hummed a tune she couldn’t catch over the growl of the engine, and on the other side Rory’s hand gripped the wheel so hard that the tendons stood like wire under his skin. She felt an odd pressure to make conversation, to thrust something sharp into the bubble of silence, but could find nothing at all to say.

  They walked silently from the truck into the empty house. Up the front steps, through the living room strewn with everyday debris: Rory’s cast-off sweater, a half-finished puzzle on the kitchen table with Darlene’s coffee cup beside it, a book of Celia’s lying spread-eagled over the arm of the blue denim couch. A bowl of apples. An old notepad next to the kitchen telephone, littered with phone numbers and scraps of paper that had torn off inside the spiral binding. The ordinariness of the house seemed incriminating, as if the objects had been arranged by their morning selves in evidence against them.

  They walked up the first flight of stairs, switchback, up the second set. The walls were lined with pictures of Rory and Celia, straight-ahead school mug shots against backgrounds of mottled blue. Rory’s big engaging grin, chin up, nose crinkled with laughter. Celia, wide-eyed and unfocused as if startled by the camera.

  At the end of the second-floor hallway, she pulled down the ladder and climbed up, passed through the silk curtains and into the golden light.

  Rory and Eric followed, blinking. Their hair and eyelashes gleamed. Even the stubble on Rory’s jaw caught the light, a scattering of hard bright glitter on the crescent of his chin. Shadows lay in streaks under their cheekbones and the hollows of their throats, but their eyes glinted with the miniature, triangular skyscape of Celia’s window.

  A tangible buzz filled the room, like the electric field around a convergence of power lines.

  You can still
back out, Rory’s face said. You can still say no.

  Eric inched toward her, creaking the floorboards.

  They were waiting. Expecting something from her.

  Celia reached up and began to unravel her braid, separating the strands of hair and combing it through with her fingers. She searched the room for something to listen to, but could hear only the dry sweep of their communal breath, the whump of her heartbeat and the endless sighing river far below. She peeled off her T-shirt, stepped out of her sandals, tugged the skirt down her legs and let it fall in a pool of cottony blue at her feet.

  Her reflection flashed in the tiny mirror on the wall, revealing fragments of the scene she was standing in, her body slipping across the surface of the glass.

  * * *

  Eric left when Darlene came home, and Celia went to take a shower. She turned on the water and let the steam erase her reflection.

  What had happened changed nothing. Rory and Eric would leave tomorrow. They would be gone and might never come back, like Kate’s cousin Garrett had done. He’d gone away to college and no one had seen him since, or heard anything more than the occasional online comment or phone call to his parents, asking for money. He just went away and never came back.

  Like her father had done when Celia was twelve years old. One night they were watching a movie on the couch, the next morning he was gone. Impossible to imagine that anyone could go so utterly absent in such a short space of time. Gone, with no explanation, as quick and complete as if he had died right then instead of six months later under some stranger’s house in Boca Raton. Afterward she felt as if she’d been watching a stage performance in which the actor had walked off in the middle of the second act.

  It should be easier to see Rory and Eric go. No surprises, no drama. But Celia was plagued by a deep, sickening rage, directed mainly at herself; even knowing their leaving was imminent, she could find no words to begin the argument that might keep them in Jawbone Ridge.

  Passing Rory’s room, she felt already the emptiness of the days ahead. His walls were bare, everything boxed and cased. He was leaving her behind.

  She was a fool to hope that he would stay. There was nothing holding him here and a world beyond the mountains to explore and inhabit. That was the natural impulse, everyone agreed, but if so, it was lacking in Celia.

  She went upstairs and sat cross-legged on the bed. A sharp moon had risen, casting a thin white light over the Ridge. Her body felt mangled, hot, an uncomfortable afterburn like a seltzer between her legs. But when she closed her eyes, she could see the way Rory had looked at her and feel again the thick weight of Eric, pressed against her thighs. The memory sent a pulse through her body like a ripple in still water, a memory of the cresting wave that had overtaken her when Rory pulled her knee over his hip and sank inside.

  She heard a heavy step on the ladder and a couple of raps against the floor—it was how Rory always came in, a polite request for entry. But it seemed out of place now, and she didn’t respond. After a moment, he put his head through the curtains.

  “Hey,” he said.

  She motioned him in with one hand.

  He dropped down next to her on the bed. He was silent at first, kneading the pad of his left hand with the fingers of his right. She’d been watching him do that since they were little kids. A pang of loneliness tightened her throat.

  “I shouldn’t have let that happen,” he said finally. “None of that should have happened. I’m supposed to be looking out for you.”

  “You’re always telling me we aren’t kids anymore.”

  “That doesn’t mean you don’t need looking after.”

  “Maybe. But it’s a little late for chivalry.”

  He nodded, staring at his hands. Then he got up and bent to kiss her forehead.

  “Anyway, you’re leaving tomorrow.” Her throat was scratchy, and the words sounded strangled and thick.

  He stroked her cheek with the back of his curved fingers. “Not for long. We won’t be able to stay away now. You played it pretty well, Cee.”

  She caught his hand and pushed it away.

  “I didn’t start this.”

  “No?”

  She turned away, staring out the big open window to the scattering of lights in the town below and the shadowy Blackbird perched above. Her eyes burned, and the landscape rippled like a dark sea.

  “It’s the three of us now, Cee. It’s done.” He pushed through the curtains at the top of the steps. “And you still haven’t thought this through.”

  “Thought what through?”

  He paused to look back.

  “How it will end.”

  November 2001

  ERIC HAD THAT light in his eyes. They could see it through the icy windshield as he pulled his SUV to a stop beside their house, where Celia and Rory were waiting at the end of the driveway.

  “He’s in the zone,” Rory said, and she could hear the lift in his voice even as her own stomach swooped and fluttered in response.

  Rory opened the passenger side door.

  “Look who’s rocking a new set of wheels. I hardly recognized you, brother.”

  Eric hopped out and let down the rear door. He took Celia’s snowboard bag and stowed it with the others behind the backseat. His dark hair curled around the bottom of his knit cap, tipped with airy snowflakes that drifted through the rosy glow of the taillights.

  “I still can’t believe the old man coughed it up,” he said. “Thought I’d be getting a matched set of SAT study guides for my birthday.”

  Celia climbed into the backseat next to Kate. They had all been there yesterday when his father handed Eric the keys. They’d run out after him to see what was waiting in the driveway, had witnessed the shy disbelief in Eric’s face when his father said he’d earned it and heard the abruptness of his father’s grunted laugh, as though he was as surprised as any of them that he’d finally done the right thing.

  Celia saw the whole scene again as a blissful afterimage: Eric, arrow-straight against the sun, his hand on the hood, puddles of light on the bright blue paint. It felt like a new start for Eric and his father, a shift in their relationship.

  In the seat next to her, Kate yawned.

  “It’s so early,” she said. “Do you know how hard it is to attach a set of falsies in the dark?”

  “No,” Celia said.

  She handed Kate a thermos of coffee.

  “You’re a saint,” Kate said. “Java juice?”

  “What else?”

  Celia had been working almost a full-time schedule at the Java Hut. She went straight in after school each day and stayed until closing; the scent of coffee clung to her through the frigid walk home, too pervasive to be scrubbed clean by even the sturdiest winter wind. At night, her body falling away from her into sleep, she would sometimes catch that chocolaty bitterness on the sheets and twitch awake.

  It was the same for Rory, pulling early hours at Clark’s, where he stocked produce. I swear, Cee, I spend half my REMs sorting apples. Old ones up, new ones in back. Like counting sheep, only redder. One morning she had come in to find him at the kitchen table, leaning forward with his head on his arms like a child, fast asleep. She sat at the table with him for a while, watching him breathe. Then she rinsed out his half-eaten bowl of cereal and made him a plate of fried eggs.

  A day at Crested Butte was exactly what they needed. Celia could feel the energy pouring into her limbs. As they pulled onto the road, she turned to watch the town disappear around the bend. The old Blackbird Hotel huddled unlit on its perch at the end of the ridge, its profile rising dark against the purple sky.

  Rory cranked the music. To wake everyone up, he said.

  “Wake us up with something good, though,” Eric said. “What is this?”

  “The new Torey
Graves. It is good, listen.”

  Eric listened for about two seconds. “Yeah, no.”

  “Come on, now.”

  “The problem with you is that you like everything.”

  “Not true.”

  “Really. Name one song you don’t like.”

  Rory paused. “Give me a minute.”

  Eric hooted with laughter. “There you have it. I can tell you ten songs I hate in ten seconds.”

  “Bullshit. You can’t even come up with ten songs, period, in ten seconds.”

  “You’re on. Loser buys pizza.”

  Rory looked at his watch. He raised one finger and let it fall.

  “Go.”

  “‘Like a Bird.’ ‘Jet.’ ‘Pretty Good.’ ‘This Is Real’ (which, for the record, one hundred percent sampled). ‘Faded.’ ‘All for You.’ ‘Run.’ ‘Love Ain’t Free.’ ‘I Will.’ And anything by Chrissy Hinden.”

  “Damn,” said Rory. “You had two seconds left.”

  “‘Irresistible.’ ‘More Than Me.’ ‘Drowning—’”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “You gotta know what you like, brother.”

  Rory just shook his head.

  Eric could go on this way for weeks at a time. Speed talking, wired, the words zinging out of his mouth with a nervous sharpness that rendered his mind in a sort of auditory Technicolor. His energy flooded the space and lifted them along with it, better than the best weed on the planet.

  “I got my SATs back yesterday,” Kate said, with an air of serene indifference.

  “Well?”

  “High sixes.”

  Celia gave her a round of applause, muffled by her knit gloves.

  “Did you hear that?” She shoved Eric’s seat with her knees. “Katie murdered the SATs.”

  “Congrats, Kate.”

  “Right on,” Rory said. “Not that it’s a surprise, obviously. You still thinking UNLV?”

  “Yeah. My dad says he’ll set me up at one of our properties if I get a degree in hotel administration.”

  “Sin City. I’ll be there, too. My mom’s sealed it up for me to work in her brother’s construction company. If Eric gets in, we can all hang out.”