Blackbird

by Averil Dean

  “I’m sorry,” Celia said. “We’ll talk about it. Rory, don’t—”

  “What did I fucking say.” Eric’s eyes were wild; his eyebrows jerked up his forehead. He rushed at her, his hands stretched open. He caught her by the shoulders and slammed her against the wall.

  This time Celia’s cry was more pain than surprise, a bleat of distress as if from a small animal. It severed the last thread of restraint holding Rory in place. He sprang across the space, hauled Eric upright, drew back and swung hard for his jaw. The blow landed with a wooden snap, and Eric careened backward. His flailing arms swept the dishes off the counter as he fell. They tumbled to the floor with a deafening crash.

  Rory charged after him. The weight in his arms had suddenly lifted, and his fist rose and fell as though rebounding from a single impulse. He couldn’t feel the impact of the blows or hear the thud of Eric’s head against the floor. The explosive force of his fury held him in a state of suspended, almost orgasmic release.

  From a distance came the wail of Celia’s voice.

  “Rory! Rory! Stop stop stop!”

  She was on him now, her arms wrapped around his chest, head tucked between his shoulder blades trying to pull him off.

  “Please, Rory! Rory!”

  He staggered to his feet, legs splayed, reaching with one hand for the countertop to steady himself. The blood rang in his ears. His hand throbbed with pain, but he felt it only dully, a twinge that warned of some deeper injury he might discover later.

  Eric crawled to his knees. Blood dripped from his nose and lips, landing with thick wet plops on the pine floorboards they had refinished together only weeks before. After a moment, he struggled to his feet, shrugging off Celia’s hand. He lurched from the room, feet clattering through the broken crockery on the floor. His footsteps thundered up the stairs and went quiet.

  Celia whispered his name, like she had when they were children and she was at his bedroom door, scared of a thunderstorm or just afraid to be alone in the darkness. Her face was greenly pale, her eyes huge and glassy with shock.

  His anger drained away. In its place came an agonizing guilt. Why hadn’t he chosen another time to talk to her, bitten his tongue and waited for his need for her to subside? He had spoken at exactly the wrong time, and now everything they’d dreamed of and worked for was gone.

  A tide of nausea rocked him. He rushed across the room and vomited in the kitchen sink.

  Above them, a thump of boots in the hallway. A door opening. Something heavy hitting the floor.

  “It will be okay,” Celia said behind him.

  Rory splashed his face with cold water and dried himself with a dishcloth. He leaned against the sink, dragging deep breaths into his lungs.

  He turned to face her.

  “It will, it will be okay.” Her gray lips barely moved over the syllables. “Right?”

  He pulled her into his arms, swayed her back and forth as he stroked her hair. At the back of her head was an egg-shaped knot that brought another twinge of sickness up his throat.

  “No,” he said. “This is over.”

  From behind him came a loud mechanical click. Celia’s body stiffened in his arms. He felt the air leave her body in a rush.

  Eric was in the doorway. His face was smeared with blood and his left eye had begun to swell shut. Dimly he registered the flatness of Eric’s expression, that uncanny glint in his eye.

  By the time Rory saw the gun, it was pointed straight at him.

  * * *

  In the second it took for Eric to pull the trigger, Rory remembered a story they had watched on TV years before. A woman was relating the experience of being shot, describing how she was able to trace the wavering spiral of the bullet on its trajectory. She knew she was being shot, she said, because she could see the bullet’s nose heading straight for her, during which time she had an entire conversation with herself about how it couldn’t be happening.

  A lively debate had followed in Eric’s living room, with Rory arguing strenuously against the possibility of such a thing and Eric in strident support of the science behind it.

  “It could happen,” Eric had said. “The human brain is a trip, my friend, never doubt it.”

  Now, as a tiny puff of smoke popped from the gun, Rory realized Eric had been right. The space between trigger and impact widened to a cosmic expanse. In it was their whole story. Action and reaction, decision and responsibility. An accumulation of events leading finally to the only possible outcome.

  And he thought, with a tiny inner shrug to concede a lifelong argument:

  That bullet is definitely wobbling.

  * * *

  Finally, impact. The world tipped abruptly sideways and upside down. Time recoiled. Rory landed half inside the pantry and lay staring at the ceiling, disoriented, trying to puzzle it out: How had Eric punched him from clear across the room?

  That couldn’t happen. It must be a dream. All of it, the whole surreal series of events. He must be really in his bed back home, waiting in a twilight sleep for the scent of pancakes and bacon to come wafting under his door, for Celia’s childlike voice to call him down. He could hear her now: “Wake up, Rory! Rory, wake up...” Soon he would get out of bed and shuffle downstairs, and they would all sit down at his mother’s yellow Formica table for breakfast. Later he and Celia would take the Wasatch Trail alongside Bear Creek, where Eric would be waiting with an extra fishing rod and three peanut butter sandwiches, and Celia would stretch out on a sunny rock with a book and a can of ginger ale, smiling gently at her story, at the sunshine, and at them.

  The weight was pouring from his body. He felt the rushing tow of some thick watery force that had caught him in its current and was bearing him steadily upward.

  From somewhere below him came a silvery ringing, like the Christmas bells on Mike Bonner’s horses as they pulled a load of tourists up the streets of Telluride under a bowl of glittering stars. He lay back in the bed of the wagon, his body rocking gently, a slow coldness seeping into his limbs. Someone was calling his name, but he was too entranced by the star-field to answer.

  A milky light came into his eyes. Through it he could see that the stars were moving. Swirling past his eyes, like the jar of fireflies he’d set at Celia’s feet on some long-ago camping trip. The insects rose like sparks around their faces. He moved closer, ran his thumb over her eyelids and upturned brow, her lower lip, the slim column of her throat. Her eyes held his, unblinking, points of light skating across their surface. Then she was running down the hill with the jar in her hand, spilling the last of the fireflies in a sparkling trail behind her.

  He could see them now. So many of them, a shower of darting white lights so thick they had coalesced into a single pulsing orb. Its warmth beckoned him like a friendly sun.

  Celia, it’s beautiful. Come with me...

  * * *

  The gun fell at Eric’s feet with a heavy thud. His hand, his whole arm was suddenly light, as if it could float up from his body like a balloon, tethered at the shoulder. The sound of the gunshot rang in his ears.

  He closed his eyes. Blinked open, disbelieving the scene in front of him.

  Celia was on the ground next to Rory. Glancing up, screaming something Eric couldn’t hear. Her face was horribly twisted, her lips snapping open and shut. Her hands were slick with blood. There was blood on her jeans and bare feet. The end of her braid was a paintbrush, dipped in red. She bent over Rory, her mouth on his, and their faces were bloody now, too, and here she was trying to lift him with both arms around his chest, but his head and arms drooped heavily back to the floor, as from a far-off distance he heard her voice rebounding to his ears like an echo:

  Ror-reeeee...

  Over and over, like it was the only word she knew or had ever known.

  Eric clapped his hands over his ears a
nd rushed from the kitchen, across the great room and out the other side. He burst through the door and slammed it behind him.

  Here it was quiet. White. The world was a vacuum, devoid of every color and every sound but the rasping, drowning gulps of air that clawed at his throat. The flakes were floating straight down from the sky, spinning past the smudged shape of the hotel behind him and the ravine below.

  A movement from the corner of his eye. His stomach lurched. It was his father, through the window. Inside the Blackbird Hotel! His face was bloody, the way it had been on the night Rory swung on him and knocked out a tooth. He remembered the way Rory had rushed forward, impatient with Eric, a huge unstoppable force while Eric stood with his knees locked, stunned and humiliated in front of Celia. His father had replaced that tooth afterward, but the false one never quite matched, so that when he smiled, the tooth gleamed whitely inside his left cheek, drawing Eric’s eye like a beacon.

  That was Eric’s fight to finish, but Rory had taken it away. He’d always said that Eric would settle things with his dad in his own time; one day he would feel the power surging through his arm and he’d let it fly and would never be beaten again. None of that had happened, because of Rory.

  A ghostly pain stabbed in his jaw. He saw Rory’s face again, demented with rage and righteousness, his arm flying up and down like an overwound toy. The sickening snap of bone. The pulpy rhythms of impact.

  The figure in the window raised a hand to his face, and Eric realized with a shudder that he was staring at his own reflection.

  The silence bloomed around him.

  What had Rory said, at the end? Standing with his arms around Celia, then turning, his gaze locked on the gun. A quick spin to push Celia behind him. And then the bullet struck and Rory fell, his eyes wide-open all the way down, not even surprised but with a look of bemused resignation on his face like he and Eric had been arguing about music and he’d finally surrendered the point.

  Rory must have known they were coming to this. Celia’s personality was too fluid ever to hold up her end of the three-legged table they had built. It had been up to Rory and Eric to find a balance between them, and Rory must have realized from the start that it didn’t exist.

  This is over, Rory had said, and that was true. They had finished it, both of them, all of them, together.

  The door opened. A shaft of warm light burst through the snow, turning the snowflakes a pale gold. Celia came out and stood on the step. Her sweater was splotched with circles of poppy-red blood, and her bare feet left two crimson stains in the snow. Ribbons of steam rose from the hot wet blood on her cheek and hair and her bloody fingers, curved around the butt of the gun. She came down the steps. Her feet crunched in the snow, leaving a trail of pinkened footprints behind her. As she reached him, she started to shake. Violent tremors tore through her body and tightened her neck so that the cords stood out like rope beneath her jaw. He waited for her to raise her arms, wrap them around her body to warm herself and stop that awful trembling. But she just stood there with her arms straight down at her sides like she’d forgotten how to use them.

  He took an automatic step toward her, as if he still could offer comfort.

  “Celia,” he said.

  The gun swung up, weaving at the end of her arm. At the businesslike clack of the hammer, he felt the numbness split by a first blade of fear.

  “Why?” she said. “Oh, God...”

  She raised her face to his. The two halves had come undone, with one half drooping and inanimate as if after a stroke, the other drawn back from her teeth in a horrible grimace.

  “He was going to leave us, Cee.”

  “No.”

  “He was breaking us—he was pulling it all apart.”

  She shook her head, a loose little series of shakes, swaying on her feet.

  “He didn’t want this anymore, you heard him. Look at me—look what he did. It was supposed to be the three of us, it was supposed to be the Blackbird. I was protecting us. I was trying to save us. Cee, you believe me?”

  She had stopped listening. She frowned, in that strange way she had of staring right through him and out the other side. The shivers stopped abruptly. Her head swiveled toward the hotel, as if she’d heard a faint sound in the distance.

  “We have to catch up with him.” She swiped at her face with the back of her hand, leaving a streak of blood on her cheek. “We have to hurry.”

  Fear crackled at the nape of his neck. He turned to where she was looking, half expecting to see Rory on his feet, smiling, beckoning with one hand as if at the start of a difficult run. Come on, man. What are you waiting for? Last one down’s a rotten egg...

  Celia looked up at him with wild, faraway eyes.

  “It’s today,” she said. “Imagine. Even when we woke up this morning. Did you know?”

  “No, no, listen.” He took her face in his hands and kissed her. Her mouth was salty with blood and tears. Hot things, but her lips were very cold. “It was an accident, Cee. I swear. You don’t have to do any of this. We can hide him—we can run away.”

  “From the Blackbird?” she said. “Oh, no. No, we can’t do that.”

  The gun nudged hard against his chest. He dropped his hands and stepped back. His heel struck the rocky half wall at the edge of the property. He glanced back to the ghostly chasm below.

  “Celia, don’t—”

  “But I promised. You didn’t want to live alone, you said. You told me this was too big a love to lose. You made me promise to save you from the afterward. And you were right. That’s why we have to hurry now and catch him. Just close your eyes, and I’ll close mine—”

  An icy terror rinsed through his limbs. His voice shook in a peculiar way, as though all the air in him was gone. “I don’t want to die, Celia, please.”

  “Shh, you’re not. We’re just going to find Rory. You’ll see. I know the way from here.”

  “Celia, Jesus, don’t—”

  She leaned closer, pulled his head down so her lips were at his ear. The barrel of the gun was a hard little pebble against his chest.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Count your breaths, like Dr. Paul says. That’s the trick. In and out. I’ll do it with you, deep, deep breaths.”

  “Please, Cee.”

  Her urgent whisper rushed at his ear. Her arm went around him, cold fingers like a talon at the back of his skull.

  “Shh...”

  “Please! Celia!”

  “One...two...shh, three...”

  Counting his breaths now. In and out, lungfuls of cold fire, deep as he could hold them. And Celia’s chest expanding in time, her breath crackling along the hot tear tracks on his cheek.

  “It was him,” Eric cried. “All along.”

  “No, shh, I was only ever helping...I’ll help you find him now, shh...seven...eight...”

  He counted six more breaths before Celia pulled the trigger.

  * * *

  Eric had known dozens of constellations by heart. Romantic names they had, too, Orion and Pegasus and Andromeda. In the summer, the three of them would lie in the bed of Rory’s pickup while Eric pointed out which clusters to look for and how not to be fooled by a passing satellite. He said all stars were ghosts, that you could never really see them. The most distant stars were billions of light-years away and had long since burned out. Only the light remained.

  People lived with ghosts every day, Eric said. “Even if the light has to travel only a foot between you and me, what you see around you has already happened. I’m a ghost, even as you see me. We’re always operating on separate planes of existence, then and now. We only think we’re really together.”

  Celia never liked the sound of that. She had stretched out her arm and stared at her hand, outlined against the starry sky. There was distance even between her eyes and finger
tips.

  “How will I ever know where I am?” she said.

  * * *

  She stood now at her bedroom window. Through the snow she thought she could see a faint smear of light from the house across the way, where she and Rory had lived as children. Another family owned the place now. The house looked almost exactly the same as it had in their day, but it felt altogether different. It had moved on without moving at all.

  Houses were smarter than people that way. People carried the past inside them; houses simply emptied and refilled again with other lives, maybe with a fresh coat of paint or a new front door, but looking more or less the same on the outside. With people it was the other way around.

  She pressed her hand against the window, wondering what would become of the Blackbird after they were gone. Tonight the rooms would be filled with men and women in uniforms, the flashes of photographs, people gathering in the snowy parking lot to whisper about what might have happened inside the hotel. And afterward...

  Afterward the Blackbird would look exactly the same.

  She turned from the window. Her feet were shot through with the white-hot needles of retreating numbness, but her arms felt as if they’d been severed at the shoulder. She looked without interest at the gun in her hand.

  Julian’s gun.

  It felt like years had passed since Rory first came into the kitchen. She sat down at her desk, staring at the wall as she tried to remember what she had wanted to say to him. It had seemed so important at the time.

  Julian. Something to do with Julian.

  An image came to mind, of her father and herself at a long-ago carnival. She was standing with a huge mallet in her hand, three rows of holes in front of her out of which the head of a rubber mole would pop up and down. The idea was to smack the head with the mallet before it went back inside the hole. She hadn’t been very good at the game but had fallen about laughing as her father teased her: Choo-eee, that critter gettin’ confident, chère, smack him now, soon as he pops him’s head outta there...