Blackbird

by Averil Dean

Funny, now that she thought of it, how like her father Julian was. Same dark hair, the big lazy smile. But underneath was something cruel. Julian had the same habit of looking down his cheek at her, fixing her with one dark brown eye, smiling in a way that made her unsure what he really was smiling at.

  The carnival image shifted. Julian’s face, where her father’s had been. Julian’s voice saying, “Don’t let him up.”

  And Eric, whose face and words stood out in sharp detail: “You’re a cheap girl, baby. You’re a carnival prize.”

  Eric had been strange ever since he returned from Alaska. Off his meds, asking for weed, talking too fast and with that prickly, wiry energy around him that hadn’t been there when he left. He said he was worried. He talked about the plumber who’d killed his wife, later staring at Rory across the dinner table as Julian drew out the details of Rory’s daring rescue of the skier on the cliff. Right after Eric had said that he hadn’t skied the Isthmus.

  Julian had made sure Eric always had someone to compare himself with.

  I’ve seen a lot of skiers in my day, and I’ve come to think physical courage is a good measure of the man. You have that...

  For a long moment, Celia didn’t breathe. The story played out in her head from Julian’s point of view. A hundred small interferences. Lifting Rory up, smacking Eric down. Putting distance between them where before there had been none.

  Or had the distance been there always? Had Julian, with his uncanny nose for weakness, deliberately exploited their differences in order to drive them apart?

  Why would he do that?

  She remembered the way he had waited beside the swimming pool, taunting her, insisting that she acknowledge the reasons she always avoided him.

  She had thought herself clever, standing in front of him with the water streaming down her body. But didn’t it feel good in exactly the way he’d predicted? Wasn’t there also that fiendish rush of attraction underneath her annoyance as he turned her around? Jesus, baby, and I thought I was competitive...

  Well, he was right. He’d thrown down the challenge right from the beginning, and she took it up without stopping to consider the stakes.

  She set the gun on the desk and rubbed absently at the blood on her hands.

  What would Rory and Eric want her to do about Julian? Julian hadn’t killed them, after all. He had only talked. If she waited, she would kill him, too, and that would be murder.

  She thought about Julian, lying dead in the kitchen beside Rory, or outside in the snow with Eric. It would feel wonderful to kill Julian and if they were anywhere else she would do it. But not here, not inside the Blackbird Hotel.

  Besides, Rory wouldn’t want her to be a murderer. And Eric would have a better idea.

  Next to the gun was a pad of paper. Creamy, beautiful pages with a tracing of ivy in silver around the border. Eric had found it at a shop in Vegas and said it reminded him of her.

  “You can write me a love letter, Celia,” he’d said. “Full of pretty words.”

  Well, she had tried. But language had never come easy to her, and in the end she’d given up.

  She wasn’t like Julian, who understood the power of words, who tossed them around as if they were coins from a bottomless purse. He’d spent a lot of them on Celia. He had annoyed her and teased her and fed her ego, dropping thousands and thousands of words—trying in his poisonous, destructive way to give her something she couldn’t get from Rory or Eric: his undivided attention.

  The afternoon light was fading. In the distance, she could hear the rusty shriek of a crow. There wasn’t much time, Julian and Kate would be back soon. What would Rory and Eric want her to do?

  The clock sounded downstairs, a chime for the quarter hour.

  She reached for the paper, drew it toward her, took up a pen and began to write.

  Julian

  I know what you did.

  Maybe this was the end you imagined. Maybe it just got out of hand. Or maybe you’re like the rest of us, giving and getting the wrong kind of love. I could wait, I guess, and ask you. But it doesn’t seem to matter now.

  I only wanted to tell you that I was wrong about the sparrow. He looked dead but he wasn’t. I can hear him now by the window. He’s out there in the snow, singing...

  August 2014

  KATE VAUGHN STOOD at the edge of the Ridge, looking down. No blood on the river rocks, no body tangled in the deadfall. Julian must have landed in the steep brown tumble of water and been swept away.

  She wrapped her hand around the pine bough as Julian had done, her heart pounding in anger like a cheated child’s. She had been watching minutes ago when Julian launched himself from this spot, arms outstretched and reaching through the hazy air as if trying to catch a bird in flight. She’d been watching, too, the night before, from an upstairs window, when Emma flew out the front doors and tripped across the lot to Julian’s car, looking over her shoulder the whole way like she thought he was going to chase her down. Kate wondered what had happened between them—whether Emma had seen that ghost she was looking for, or something even more terrifying in Julian that had sent her over the edge.

  Kate had been startled herself at the change in him. His face had broadened over the years, his eyes rolling deep in their sockets, alighting ponderously around the room as if dragged along by the turning of his head. It reminded her of the way Eric looked, just before that sudden explosive movement when he heaved himself out of the chairlift and fell into the whiteout: haunted, hollow, as though you could scream into his mouth and hear your own voice echoing back.

  She gripped the rough branch, scanning the riverbed. On the rocks below, five feet down the embankment, her eye was drawn by a scrap of white paper, too clean to have been there very long. She worked her way down, careful of her new suede boots, until she could pluck the paper from the thorny brush and clamber back to solid ground.

  She unfolded the paper and caught her breath.

  The note was unsigned. The words went all the way to the bottom and right off the edge of the page. But the handwriting was unmistakable, slanted and generous, with curvy marks like commas where the dots should go.

  Kate read the note.

  And smiled.

  Stupid Celia.

  Celia thought what happened was Julian’s doing. Julian, playing on Eric’s insecurities, convincing him to stop his meds. Julian building Rory up even as he tore Eric down. Julian driving a wedge between the three of them by finding the cracks in their relationship and pounding in the chisel.

  Hell, Julian even blamed himself. He was so caught up in his game that he never stopped to notice who was jerking the puppet strings.

  Cute little Katie. Always such a sweetheart, taking it down the throat and up the ass for Julian. And the ego of him to think she liked it! That he was her first choice!

  The thought of Julian brought a fresh surge of anger. Kate ground her teeth, staring down at the note.

  Maybe this was the end you imagined.

  Well, it wasn’t the end Kate had imagined. What she had in mind involved a fight, maybe, some final and unrecoverable rift between Celia and Rory and Eric—with herself and Rory starting over again, far away from Jawbone Ridge.

  She had tried many times before to break him away from Celia. Ever since that afternoon at the Nugget Theatre, when instead of saying hello and taking a seat beside them, she remained slumped under her hood in the back row, staring in a dumb paralysis at the shadowy heads in front of her. Celia had always seemed so vague, unphysical; that faraway look in her eyes had made her seem like a very young old maid. But there she was in a public theater with her feet propped wide apart on the seat backs, both boys turned sideways in their chairs, small sighs and a scuffling sound when the action of the movie lifted away. And Rory—Rory!—kissing Celia, his face only a smudge in the darkn
ess but clearly leaning in and over, dipping in a slow rhythm above her.

  It was disgusting. They were practically brother and sister! Yet even with the fury the memory inspired, Kate found herself thinking of that night all the time. Of herself, in Celia’s place. Eric’s hand between her legs, and Rory—big, golden, beautiful Rory—leaning down to kiss her, her face lifting to his. She had dreamed herself into that chair a thousand times, imagined what it would be like, as in her wide iron bed she let her hand slip down and stroke the fantasy to life.

  It should have been easy to do something with the story: You wouldn’t believe what Jenna Martin said about Celia and Rory. So gross! And totally not true, I can’t believe she’d even say something like that... The rumors ignited easily and raced through the school, but by that time Rory and Eric were gone, and Celia, with that peculiar immunity to public opinion, had simply drifted out the end of the corridor and never returned. And her leaving seemed to have little to do with the rumors. Her mind was simply not there.

  Kate had tried again. After high school she went straight to college in Vegas, where Rory had been working in his uncle’s construction company. Finally, she thought, she’d have him to herself. She imagined a life for them—dating, making love, moving in together. Maybe getting married one day. Kate was a catch. Rory used to tell her so all the time: “Pretty little rich girl, you’ll have pretty little children and a house on the hill.”

  But he was gone before she even got to Vegas. He’d gone back to Celia.

  Celia, who never left Jawbone Ridge. Who never even tried.

  In a way Kate understood his fascination. She’d been mesmerized like everyone else as Celia—that strange, awkward girl—grew into her strangeness, cultivated it, the way a homely child will sometimes grow into its face and become striking as an adult. Celia was like that. Her kaleidoscopic appeal became more and more surreal as she got older—you almost couldn’t believe the way the angles and planes of her face could arrange themselves so beautifully one second and could utterly repel you the next. You had to keep looking, to know which way she was going to be. You hated to miss the shift.

  Even Julian, as self-centered and egotistical a man as Kate had ever met, had fallen under her spell. Julian, who was supposed to belong to Kate. Not that she wanted him, exactly, but she sure as hell did not want him loving Celia, along with everyone else.

  Or hating her. Really, it was impossible to tell.

  She wasn’t sorry that Celia was gone.

  But Rory...

  Big, beautiful Rory McFarland. Dead. His body lying heavy and ungraceful on the floor, his mouth half-open and full of blood. She still could taste the sickness rising up her throat, with no nausea even to warn her—just a complete and terrible emptying, the bitter taste of bile mixed with the tannic scent of his blood. She was sure she could smell it sometimes in the kitchen of the Blackbird Hotel. She would be going about her business and then—a smell, a presence, as if someone were hiding just around the corner, watching her through a crack in the door, and she would suddenly be bitterly cold—not from outside, not the ghostly chill you’d hear about, which turned your breath to fog, but the kind that crept from the pit of your stomach and spread like ice through your limbs.

  She’d rush from the room and into the sunlight, backing across the parking lot as if the Blackbird itself was giving chase, and she’d stand there in a shivery sweat with her heart hammering. But the sun never truly warmed her. The cold had settled in her bones.

  Kate shuddered.

  Maybe it was the Blackbird, warping her perceptions. The hotel had been making Kate definitely twitchy. A warped, freaky little place, with that long row of doors and the gnarled staircase. Alone in the hotel, she had clung to a fragile bravado, fortified by hot swallows of brandy that seared her throat but seemed to freeze once the liquor reached her stomach. She couldn’t trust herself, couldn’t trust the walls almost, to stay upright, or the doors to stay closed. She’d more than once caught a flash of movement, a shadow pouring from the corner of her eye—

  Jesus. Here we go again.

  The Blackbird was only a building, a motley construction of timber and brick. There was nothing to be afraid of. But somehow, in the empty rooms of the old hotel, she never could be comfortable. It was like living inside a desiccated corpse.

  Her gaze slid uneasily along the ravine.

  The smoke had almost died out. The Blackbird was gone, Julian was gone, and, though she’d brought him here with some notion of meting out his share of the guilt, he’d done her one better. He’d burned the damned place to the ground.

  A nervous elation swept through her. She could leave now—she was free!

  She would travel. She’d get far away. Her mind ticked through the possibilities. What she needed was a change of scenery. Well-lighted corners, where the buildings sat on the desert floor and were sturdy and brand new. The lights of Vegas flickered briefly in her mind, a street where she’d sat in her car outside Rory’s apartment, long after Rory had left it...shadows moving behind the curtains...of strangers, living where he used to live... She gave herself a mental shake. Not Vegas, no. She’d go to the other side of the world, Australia or Brazil, someplace where the earth was flat and sunny, where she could get tan and laid and drunk and forgetful, and she’d leave this whole smoldering mess behind.

  Carefully she pressed open the note. Its creases were soft, and the paper bore a slight curve as if Julian had been carrying it in his wallet all this time.

  She wouldn’t be like him, dragging this story around for the rest of her life. It wasn’t as if she’d done anything wrong. Committed a crime, for God’s sake. She had talked, and that was all, and the rest of it could not be laid at her feet.

  She held the note ready to tear apart, her fingers poised at the edge of the page. On impulse, she lifted the paper to her nose.

  Even now, Kate could smell her. That smoky-sweet scent of her hair, the warm hint of vanilla on her skin. Celia’s face had faded in her mind. She remained as an afterimage, some shy luminosity, a swirl of flaxen hair through a narrow patch of sunlight.

  Kate ran her thumb over the paper.

  Somewhere, Celia and Rory and Eric were together as they had been that day at the Palm, when she had stood not far from where she was standing now, looking down at their intertwined limbs and the water stains drying on the rock. Somewhere they were dancing to music only they could hear, while she and Julian, for all that they had longed to be part of the circle, could only stand on the outside and watch.

  She thought again of Julian’s leap from the ridge, graceful and unguarded, almost joyful, his arms outstretched, then sweeping back like the wings of a diving bird.

  Julian flying, then falling...

  His body was somewhere down the ravine, a soft torn husk washed up on the river rocks.

  Empty. And alone.

  The wind sighed, pushing through the leaves and late summer grass. Down the ridge, the last of the smoke had cleared, leaving a strange hollow spot on the skyline where all her life Kate had been seeing the Blackbird.

  She folded the note along its familiar creases. The paper curved into her palm like an empty seashell, but it felt heavy somehow, as if the fibers were shot through with lead or steel and would resist if she tried to tear them. She imagined the page ripped to pieces, drifting on the summer breeze. But her fingers refused to carry out the act.

  Later, she thought. Later she would rid herself of this. She’d take it far away, to the other side of the world where the paper would be light and irrelevant and easy to destroy. There was such a place. There had to be. She only had to keep moving until she found it.

  With the note in her pocket, tapping gently at her thigh, she turned and started down the crumbling road for Jawbone Ridge.

  * * * * *

  Acknowledgments

 
Deepest thanks to my editor, Michelle Meade, who gave me the freedom to find this story and whose wisdom and careful attention helped bring it to life, and to everyone at MIRA who turned it into something beautiful. Thanks as well to Jeff Kleinman, agent and mensch, and to the circle of writers who inspire me every day with their intelligence and generosity. You are all, in all ways, the very best of friends.

  THE

  UNDOING

  AVERIL DEAN

  Reader’s Guide

  Questions for Discussion

  Rory, Eric and Celia view their relationship as a true, big romance. How did you view their relationship? Do you think it could have survived if not for the interference of Julian and Kate?

  As we learn more about Eric’s past, we realize he’s long been struggling with a history of abuse and mental health issues. How do you think his emotions and actions are affected by this history?

  Celia and Rory describe Eric’s manic episodes as him being “in the zone.” Discuss how their concern for him in these moments is at odds with the exhilaration and desire they feel when he is crackling with dangerous energy. What effect does this have on their relationship?

  Julian’s obsession with Celia is immediate and extreme, and her disinterest in him only intensifies his desire for her. What do you think is the reason for his fixation? In what ways do the other characters play into it—either purposely or unintentionally?

  Celia refers in her note to all of them loving each other the wrong way. What does she mean by that?

  Kate, at the end of the novel, is the last one standing—not even the Blackbird escapes a tragic end. Yet, just like Julian, she isn’t able to destroy Celia’s note. Why do you think that is? What do you think will become of Kate?

  Why do you think the author chose a backward-moving timeline to tell this story? How did the unusual structure affect your understanding of the characters and their relationships?