Blackbird

by Averil Dean

  I’ve eaten them curried with rice;

  I’ve eaten them baked, in their jackets and boots,

  And found them exceedingly nice.

  But now that my jaws are too weak for such fare,

  I think it exceedingly rude

  To do such a thing, when I’m quite well aware

  Little boys do not like to be chewed.

  Her father used to read to her from this book; when he got to the line about little boys being chewed, he would change the words to “little girls,” and he’d bury his face at the side of her neck, making loud snuffling, chewing sounds. Celia would squeal and laugh so hard that he sometimes had to read the poem a second time, so she could play her part the right way and lay her head on the pillow at the end.

  He was gone now. One morning, gone, and all their life before wiped cleanly away as if it had never been.

  “He would have come back,” Darlene said. “Eventually.”

  Celia knew that wasn’t true. It was something her stepmother said to be kind. The truth was something else; Celia could see it tugging at the faces of Rory and Darlene, in their shoulders that stiffened when anybody mentioned her father’s name.

  Always Celia looked away in a panic. You couldn’t un-see something; she knew that now. She’d barely glanced at her father’s lifeless face, yet she still could see the row of tiny stitches under his eyelashes, his puppet-hands lying wooden and inanimate, folded on his chest. For months she had spent her allowance on NyQuil and cough syrup, a dizzying circular quest to get herself back to the time before this time, the vast lazy whiteness of the not-knowing. Her drugged-up mind grew sluggish, even in the bustling school hallways, where the shrieks and chatter only served to punctuate her own interior silent befuddlement.

  Rory had put a stop to that. She had watched in a sullen misery as he upended the bottle and poured the cherry-red liquid down the bathroom sink.

  “No more,” he said.

  And that was all. But he opened his strong, thin boy’s arms and she walked into them, and found herself crying. Finally crying after all those months, in big messy sobs and gulps and shudders that racked her body like an exorcism.

  Afterward he handed her a wadded-up handful of tissues.

  “Well,” he said, and the inadequacy of that stung them both with a bout of semihysterical laughter. They sank to the floor, shushing each other, blotting the tears off their faces.

  Three words, she thought now. Three words from Rory and she was out of the fog.

  And so I contentedly live upon eels,

  And try to do nothing amiss,

  And I pass all the time I can spare from my meals

  In innocent slumber like—like this.

  At the end of the last verse, she turned her head, listening, and pressed her fingers flat to the strings.

  Rory and Eric. She heard them on the path above.

  Their voices had changed over the past year, as if the source had sunk from the top of their throats to a hollow cavity deep inside their chests. The sound had gathered resonance, she could feel it behind her own breastbone when they spoke. She imagined their voices as tracings, needles on paper making long deep waves of sound, and her own barely visible, a narrow blip lifting off the page.

  They had followed her, far up the river from where they usually met, out of sight and earshot from Jawbone Ridge and anyone who might report the truancy, collect Celia and put her back on a bus to the Telluride Middle School, where she was supposed to be making up a math class in hopes of improving her grade. She didn’t need the class for credit, but Darlene said she could do better than a D+ in algebra and she should take it again over the summer.

  Her stepmother was right, of course. Celia could do better.

  But not today. Today she’d packed a bag and hid it behind the ski shed, then circled back to retrieve it after Darlene had gone inside. She slung the strap over her shoulder and started up the riverside trail, around the point of the ridge where the Blackbird cleaved to its perch, overlooking the town. There, at the base of a tall slab of granite, was a pool of still water: the Palm, named by some long-ago generation for the columns of cracked stone that resembled fingers, so that from the top of the ridge, the pool appeared to be cupped in a giant hand.

  The Palm was a local place—no one’s favorite swimming hole because it was so hard to get to, the water mountain-cold even in the middle of summer. The path had never been fully formed, so the past twenty yards was a fight through a patch of thorny scrub, then a long clamber up and over the clutch of boulders at the base of the Palm before coming to the tiny waterfall that filled the pool. There Celia had cleared a small patch of prickly grass and furnished it with a fat disc of pine trunk and an old tin pitcher she’d dragged from home. Sometimes she’d fill a backpack with linens and iced tea, candles and books and fruit, and she’d decorate the clearing as if it were a room, with beads draped over the aspen and her guitar propped against a tree.

  She had started coming here the previous summer, just after her father left. At first, she was sure he’d come home and didn’t want to be there when he did. Being at the house when he got back would have signaled a forgiveness she didn’t feel. Let him come. She wouldn’t be there. And if, walking up the road for home, she saw his truck in the driveway, she’d run to Eric’s house instead. Her father would have to come find her, and when he did, when he stood at Eric’s door asking had anyone seen her, Eric would stand very straight in his path and tell him no, and who did he think he was to leave without a word and then come strolling back into their lives like nothing had changed?

  Get off my step, Eric would say. Celia isn’t here.

  But the truck never did come. Only a message, delivered by Darlene, saying Celia’s father was dead. And later his body, dry and inert as a length of cut wood.

  No closure, Eric said, as if diagnosing an illness, and Celia imagined a circle with two loose ends flapping, unable to connect.

  Behind her, his buzzy new voice rang out as the two of them thundered around the boulder at the end of the path.

  “Dude, you said the same thing last time you wore those shoes.”

  Rory threw down his canvas bag and dropped to the ground beside it. He kicked off his rubber flip-flops and crossed his leg to examine his toe.

  “Why didn’t you remind me?” he said.

  “I’m not your mother.”

  Celia strummed a chord on her guitar.

  Eric did a mock double take, one hand over his heart.

  “Why, Celia, what on earth are you doing here?”

  He put his hands on his hips, palms facing out, like Mr. Welding in fourth period. His voice rose to a trilling falsetto.

  “This is highly irresponsible, young lady. Highly irresponsible. You know your mother paid good money for you to learn the quadratic equation. I will not have you show her such little respect.”

  “I don’t have a mother,” she said.

  “His mother, then, impudent wench.” He hooked a thumb at Rory, then resumed his normal voice, muffled for a second as he peeled off his T-shirt. “You’re gonna be toast, you know.”

  “Yeah, the school called,” Rory said. “Mom sent me out to find you.”

  “And look, here you are.” Eric kicked off his shoes. He put a toe in the water and shivered. “Shrinkage. Maybe I’ll work on my tan.”

  But Rory had pulled off his shirt and he ran at Eric headfirst. They tumbled into the water and exploded back up, howling.

  “Jeeeeesus,” Eric said. “I think my balls are tonsils now.”

  Rory grabbed him by the knees and they rolled in the river, dunking each other beneath the surface, spluttering up and flinging the hair out of their eyes so that it stood out from their heads like the crests of embattled birds. Their arms locked and they spun in place, Rory’s
wide brown shoulders swinging them around, Eric’s narrow and paler, shadowed with yellow-green bruises like faded ink on his skin. They would bloom again in a few weeks or a month, round and purple as tulips, clustered around his shoulder blades and down his ribs.

  He would grin sometimes at Celia’s distress.

  “Don’t worry about me. I have a plan.”

  “What kind of plan?”

  “I’m going to take him by surprise. He’s forgotten I’m a growing boy. One day I’ll be bigger than him, and then...”

  And he’d smack his fist into his palm. Or a wall, or a door.

  “I’m gonna knock out all his teeth and wear them on a chain around my neck,” he said. “Swear to God, Cee.”

  She could smell the excitement on him, acrid and metallic like the scent of wet pennies.

  “You don’t think I’ll do it?” he said. “You think I’m a pussy?”

  “No.”

  “But you don’t think it’ll happen.”

  “You won’t hurt your dad. You’re a good person, Eric. You won’t want to hurt someone you love.”

  But even as she said it, she wasn’t sure. She never could be sure of Eric.

  She set the guitar aside. In bare feet she padded to the river’s edge and straight into the water like a baptism. Her yellow sundress billowed out. Her hair, now grown to shoulder length, swayed as she slid under the water. Rory and Eric’s splashing grew muffled, almost silent. Surfacing, she could hear their voices, playful as ever, but distorted by the new sharp depth. As if they were grown men pretending to be boys.

  The water was too cold for a long swim. They climbed out of the pool and stretched out on the flat boulder at the base of the Palm, their heads propped on bunched-up towels and T-shirts, limbs woven together like a mat of intertwined roots.

  Gradually the heat of the rock warmed them. Celia sank into a honeyed drowsiness, the drone of locusts in her ears.

  “I’m going to marry you someday,” she said.

  The words lay, blurry and directionless, under the blanket of heat they were sharing. A sparrow began to chirp and a crow answered back, screeching from the top of the pines. She watched it dive out of the trees, its wings like an arrow against the sky.

  Eric turned and laid his hand on her chest. His palm was cool and solid over her heart.

  “But you’ll always love me best,” he said.

  January 11, 2009

  4:38 p.m.

  ON JULIAN’S LAST DAY on a pair of skis, he was thinking of his brother, Tony. Two years older than Julian, stocky and barrel-chested, with thick limbs that never seemed to fully straighten and flat, oar-like feet, his brother had the build for skiing and took to it right away. His turns were artless and brutal, but it hardly mattered. Tony Moss simply pointed his ski tips downhill and crouched over them, grinning and screaming threats at the skiers in his path. He was heavy and cumbersome as a snowmobile. He expected everyone to get the fuck out of the way, and mostly they did.

  Julian disapproved. His turns were elegant, graceful, even for a downhiller. The fastest way down would always be over the snow, not plowing through it. He skied with a clean snap off the edge, right back to the flat of the skis. It was about balance and common sense. You didn’t have to shove the whole goddamn mountain out of the way.

  He paused at the top of the run to check his watch. One of the diamonds was coming loose at three o’clock, but it had been that way for decades, since the day his father had given it to Tony.

  Tony. Tony again. Kate had been asking questions lately about Tony’s accident. How had it happened, and what became of him afterward?

  “What became of him?” Julian said. “Nothing at all.”

  “But where is he now?”

  “Right where he has been, at my mother’s house. He gets physical therapy, some nursing care, but basically my mom takes care of him.”

  “Doesn’t your dad help?”

  “Can’t help. He’s dead.”

  “Oh.” And after a moment, “How did he die?”

  “Heart attack, the summer after. Or, as my mother would say, his heart broke.”

  “Your poor mom.”

  “It’s her choice, though,” he said. “Being with Tony. She could put him in a home, I’ve told her that a hundred times. It’s not like he knows the difference.”

  Kate had looked at him sideways. “She would know the difference.”

  There was a sound of judgment in that statement. As if Julian were missing the point. As if it were his fault, somehow, that his mother had adopted this maddening, almost Catholic attitude of penance in refusing to leave her home. She wanted to be with Tony, she said. He needed her, she couldn’t leave him. And no amount of persuasion could shift her. Eventually Julian stopped trying.

  Let her stay there, if that was what she wanted. It had nothing to do with him. Nothing at all.

  He pulled his glove and the cuff of his coat over the smooth golden disc and pressed his goggles more firmly against his cheeks. In good weather he would be seeing the distant outline of Jawbone Ridge, meandering at the edge of the ravine and half-hidden by a rise in the hill. But today he could see no farther than the smudged gray shapes of the pines that lined the run. The snow had been coming down all night and day and lay now in foamy sheets that disguised every edge and erased all the shadows. The white sky seemed part of the mountain, everything condensed to a foggy swirl that made it difficult to find the horizon and read the texture of the snow. A dangerous light for skiing.

  But he’d dealt with much worse. He pushed off confidently from the lip of the run, pounding straight down the face, his upper body quiet while his knees folded and unfolded like shock absorbers, following the bumps. No wasted motion, that’s what he’d been taught. Take only as big a bite of the edge as you need to maintain the line. It took courage to point the skis downhill, to really ride the snow. Courage and arrogance, to think you were never going to fall.

  Tony had that. It helped if you were not the contemplative type.

  Don’t think about it, Jules. You pussy...

  And he’d tear off down the hill, singing louder every time Julian asked him to stop.

  Ten whores a-leaping, nine ladies drinking, eight midriffs showing, seven hoodlums stealing, six girls a-laying, five gooold teeeeth...

  An obnoxious, nasally repetition, setting Julian’s teeth on edge.

  Tony was singing that last morning on the banks of Long Lake. It was the day after Christmas and the lake had frozen over, apparently solid and smooth, with a lattice of earlier skate tracks carved through the snow-dusted surface. In the distance, Julian could hear the shouts and laughter of their friends, their bodies like small birds darting across the whiteness.

  Tony tucked in his laces and stepped onto the ice.

  “Hurry up—I’ll race you,” he said.

  Julian didn’t answer. Everything was a race with Tony. Just eighteen, he had started training a few months before with Gustave Pollan, who said that Tony was one of the most gifted downhillers he had ever seen. Tony had the build for it, the temperament, and even the mantra.

  Don’t think about it.

  Tony skated backward onto the ice, grinning.

  “Come on,” he called. “If you beat me, I promise not to sing for the rest of the day.”

  “Thank fuck,” Julian muttered as he got to his feet.

  “But if you don’t...” Tony spread his arms wide, singing at the sky. “Five gooooold rings—”

  The air was split by a sudden loud crack. Tony disappeared into the lake as if a trapdoor had opened at his feet. For a moment there was silence. Then he came up spluttering.

  “Shit! Julian!”

  Julian gathered himself to spring forward and skate to his brother’s side. But somehow he wasn
’t moving. Only his heartbeat accelerated, preparing his body for a command from Julian that never came.

  He would always wonder what might have happened if Tony had been closer to the shore. If Julian hadn’t been at his wits’ end over the singing, if his father hadn’t given Tony his own gold watch that Christmas—the watch he had promised Julian, that Julian had admired aloud again and again. If Julian hadn’t so far to go before he reached the hole in the ice.

  Because somewhere in the space between the shore and his brother, a tiny warmth was smothered, like an ember blinking out and finally turning to ash. The future arrowed out and away from him, with some version of himself on the other side, looking back. And it looked good. Life without Tony would be quieter (thank fuck, that godawful singing); it would be calmer without that jangling presence in the house. No more stone-knuckled charley horses, no more of Julian’s girlfriends being more impressed with Tony than they were with him. He’d have his parents’ money one day. All of it. He’d have his father’s undiluted attention.

  Tony was trying to pull himself from the water, but the ice kept breaking out from under him.

  Julian stood transfixed, watching his brother struggle.

  “Julian! Get a branch!”

  But Julian didn’t move. He felt his organs pulling inward, sucked to the center of him and then vacuumed away. His body was hollow. His mind watched impartially, from some faraway point, unconnected to the scene before him.

  This wasn’t his fault. He hadn’t pushed Tony; he’d never raised a hand. The big dumb ox had strayed onto the thin ice all on his own. Showing off. Singing (that godawful racket!), maybe ignoring the warning snaps of the ice. It was his own damn fault. Julian could not be blamed.

  The seconds ticked by. Tony’s voice grew hoarse, constricted by the cold. His wet lips darkened to a violent blue. His eyes rolled upward in their sockets.

  “Jules...”

  Far in the distance he saw their friends approach. They must have seen the commotion, or heard Tony’s cries for help.

  Julian dropped to his knees and eased forward. He reached down.