We don't talk for a time, just watch the shadows grow, wait to see what the twilight brings.
"Come back to the house with me," Nettie says after a while. "Let me make you some dinner."
I know I should leave, follow the road away from her again, but I can't. I've had this taste of her company now, and after all these years, it's too little.
"Sure," I find myself saying.
She tucks her arm in mine and we go ambling back through the woods, following a familiar route that takes us out above the wildflower field that sides the old yellow farmhouse the Beans have lived in for a half-dozen generations.
I don't want to pretend it was all her doing, that I had no hand in what happened that night. I'm just as guilty as she is for how we end up together in that big four-poster bed of hers on the second floor, except she doesn't feel guilty and that's the problem.
"I'm not a child anymore," she says. "You think I don't know that was the issue? Of course I was too young for you back then. But I'm a grown woman now."
I shake my head. "That's only partly it."
She sits up against the headboard, a sheet covering her breasts.
"Goddamn it, Jack," she says. "I'm a woman, you're a man, and we love each other, so what's the problem?"
I realize then that she still doesn't get it. Everything we talked about in the hollow this afternoon, and later, sitting together in front of the fire downstairs, sipping coffees laced with whiskey … none of it ever really sank in. Corbae is just a word to her. She's seen us in more than one skin, the crow girls, Jolene, Crazy Crow, and all. She knows we live in the woods and wild, that we're older than she can ever begin to imagine. But none of it's registered where it counts—in her heart, where belief doesn't just happen, but settles down into the bones and can't be denied.
"I'm not a man," I tell her. "I'm a corbae. A jackdaw."
"You're a jackass."
"Maybe so, because this should never have happened."
She always had a temper and I can see it smoldering now, a storm cloud on the horizon of those blue-sky eyes.
"Are you telling me you don't love me?" she asks.
"Not even close."
"So you're telling me you didn't enjoy yourself?"
"That's not the point."
"So what is the point?" she asks, her voice gone dangerously soft.
"The point is, I do love you, but I can't stay—it's not in my nature any more than it was in yours to give up your art and the hills for Randall Miller."
"I didn't hear anyone asking for some lifetime commitment here, Jack."
I won't get pulled into that.
"So my being here in your bed makes me no better than Ray," I say. "Here for a few hours, then gone again by morning. You deserve better than that, just as your mammy deserved better than what he gave her."
"I don't think my mammy ever regretted that night. I know I sure don't because otherwise I wouldn't ever have been born."
"I'm not explaining this right."
"That's an understatement if I ever heard one." She shakes her head. "I've been waiting my whole life for what we had here tonight, Jack, for what I thought this was the start of, and now you're making me wonder what the hell was wrong with me for doing that."
"That's what I'm trying to tell you," I say. "It's not right. Bad enough you've got the fox blood in you, making you restless in human company. But then you've had this yearning for something that's never going to happen between you and me, and that's not only making you restless, it's pushing you right out of any hope you could have for a normal life."
"I've told you before," she says with a hardness in her voice. "Don't you go deciding what's best for me. I can make my own decisions on that count."
"And if you're making a mistake?"
"Then it's my mistake to make."
I sigh. "I can't stand back in good conscience and let you do that," I say. "I love you too much."
"I don't think you ever loved me at all."
I look at her, see she believes it, like she won't believe what I am, like she won't believe the fox blood in her, or that there's such a thing as corbae in this world with her.
"I think you better go," she says.
I want to make things right, but I don't even know where to begin. And she's not about to give me the time to work it out.
"Just get out of here," she tells me. "I ever see you creeping around here again and I'll take the shotgun to you."
Those blue eyes of hers are brimming with tears, but she's keeping them in check. The mad she's got for me is that much stronger.
"I mean it, Jack."
Maybe it's better this way, I find myself thinking as I get up from the bed. Maybe it's better that she sends me away, that she hates me instead of loves me. Maybe she'll be able to get on with her life.
But I've got feelings, too. I've heard some say that that's all we are, pure feelings. I'm sad, but I'm hurting, too. No one likes being misunderstood. So I do a stupid thing. For the first time in all those years we've known each other, I shift skin in front of her. One moment she's got what she thinks is a man standing naked at the side of her bed, and the next she's got herself a black-winged jackdaw. I make one circle of the room, then I fly right out the window, tearing through the screen like it was tissue paper, and the night swallows me.
But not before I see the look on her face. Not before I see that she finally understands what I've been trying to tell her. In that one moment, she believes—not with her head, but right down into the marrow of her bones.
I leave her crying, crying with the same hurt that's burning in my own chest, but I leave her scared, too. Leave her staring at the window where this thing she's taken to her bed turns out to be everything it said it was. Leave her with her world changed forever.
I leave her with something else, too, but it'll take a few months before it starts to showing and nine months all told to come to term, but I don't know that then. I don't hear about that till a long time later.
5.
Newford, Winter, 1973
I'm passing through Newford one winter and stop in to see Chloë and the others at the house on Stanton Street. Annie and Brandon don't live there yet. Nor does Rory. Margaret's living in what'll be Brandon's apartment, but she's out of town. I just ran into her a couple of weeks ago in Texas. Paul's still alive, but he's out of town, too. Nadine's living across the hall and we pass a few words, me coming in as she's going out the front door. The Aunts smile and nod hello, but they don't have time for me—too busy making up their plans for next year's garden, their kitchen table covered with watercolor sketches and scraps of paper scribbled with dense notes.
A couple of students are renting what'll be Rory's apartment and I meet them briefly. Dawn and Salinda. Neither of them's hit twenty yet, a pair of shy doe-eyed girls, talk in whispers, but they're friendly. "Alberta's kin," Chloë tells me and I nod. It's easy to see the deer blood in them.
We go up to her place and there's Raven, sitting by the window like an enormous black Buddha, looking at who knows what. He doesn't register my presence—Chloë's either, so far as I can tell. It makes my heart ache to see him like this.
"Is he ever coming back?" I ask.
Chloë shrugs. "It's hard to tell, not knowing where he's gone."
The crow girls troop in as soon as Chloë has tea and biscuits on the table, but they get bored quick and I can tell they want to go looking for something a little more exciting than the slow talk that's stretching out at Chloë's table.
"We have to go," Zia says.
Maida nods. "We're working on a surprise for Margaret for when she gets back home."
"Do you know where we can get a thousand spiders?" Zia asks.
They've each had two cups of tea with more honey than tea in each cup, biscuits slathered with jam.
"What's going to happen to all those spiders after you've finished your trick?" Chloë asks in a patient voice. I can remember a time she'd be out helping them round up those spiders, but
that was before Raven went away. "You can't let them go—they'd freeze outside."
The crow girls look at each other, then back at us.
"Puh-leeze," Maida says.
Zia rolls her eyes. "We meant plastic spiders."
Chloë and I sit there for a long time after they're gone, drinking tea, switching over to whiskey in the late afternoon.
"You hear about Nettie?" she asks after a while.
I'm filling my pipe, tamping the tobacco down until it's just right, and look up. "I don't want to hear about her."
But she just goes on like I didn't say a thing. "She had herself a little girl about a year and a half ago now. Red-haired like her grandfather Ray, but there's corbae blood in her, too. Jackdaw, I'd say."
All I can do is stare at her with my mouth hanging open.
She was supposed to have twins is what Chloë tells me. All the signs pointed to it and there was no doubt in anybody's mind—at least not among our people—but when her time came, just the one baby girl was born, six pounds, seven ounces, blue-eyed like her mother, with that red fox hair and a healthy set of lungs. Sweetest child you ever saw, by all accounts. The name on her birth certificate was Kerry Jacqueline Bean. Father, unknown.
It was different, this time, from how it had been with Lilah. Nettie loved this daughter and the child took right to her, but Nettie couldn't shake the understanding that there was supposed to be two of them, that she'd known, the way a mother knows, that she was carrying twins. She went a little crazy, trying to find the missing child—said she could hear her crying at night, outside in the woods, crying for her mammy. Came to the point where Social Services was ready to take away the daughter that wasn't lost, but then Lilah stepped in.
Lilah was married to her real estate man by now, that Stephen Madan fellow, and they adopted Kerry. Considering what his kind was doing to Nettie's beloved hills, clear-cutting the old timber stands, parceling up the family farms and selling the lots off for housing developments, I'd have guessed Lilah married him just to spite her mother, but Chloë says there's a real affection between them. Like attracts like, I'm thinking.
I don't know why Lilah wants to raise her half sister like Kerry was her own daughter. It just makes no sense to me.
"I'd say it's her way of putting a claim on that Bean land," Chloë says. "We fixed it last time so that neither she nor that no-good father of hers could get their hands on it. This time we had a hard time just keeping Nettie out of an institution. She was in a bad way, running around the woods night and day, looking for this child that never got herself born. Best we could do was let Lilah and her new beau adopt Kerry and be the girl's trustees if anything should happen to Nettie before Kerry comes of age. It was that, or let the government raise her."
I can't believe what I'm hearing. "You think Lilah was the better choice?"
"I don't see there was much else we could do, one way or another. You ask Paul what it's like to grow up in an orphanage in those hills."
Paul got himself lost once, fell asleep like we've all done from time to time, except he fell asleep in the skin of a little boy and the state raised him, up there around Hazard. Life's hard enough in the hills as it is; without kin it can be pure hell, because then you've got nothing. You've got nobody.
"I'm going up there to talk to Nettie," I say. "See if I can't fix things somehow."
Chloë shakes her head. "You'll do no such thing."
Now I really can't believe what I'm hearing.
"I'm that girl's daddy," I say. "And if Nettie—"
"Nettie's just starting to do fine," Chloë says, cutting me off. "She's finally laid off searching for that unborn child and is putting her life back in order again. She's even got visiting rights. They're making out that she's Kerry's grandmother—not that the girl's old enough to know much more than that she loves Nettie, heart and soul. If you go up there now, you'll just set her off again."
I want to argue, but I know she's right. I can't even pretend to myself that I'd get any kind of a welcome. It's so clear in my mind, it could almost be yesterday, the night she ran me off. I can still see that look in her eye, hear the hard promise in her voice as she shut me out of her life.
I ever see you creeping around here again and I'll take the shotgun to you. I mean it, Jack.
And then I had to do that damn-fool thing and shift skins right there in front of her. If she thinks of me at all now, she'll be thinking of some monster. That might even be half the reason she let her child go. She wouldn't want to be raising the offspring of that monster. Bad enough she ever welcomed it into her bed.
"What can I do?" I ask, hating the helplessness I hear in my voice.
"Same thing we always do," Chloë says. "We carry on."
"I don't know that I can do that again."
Chloë looks at the far side of the room where Raven sits staring vacantly out the window.
"There's your other choice," she says.
TARNISHED MIRRORS
I would say that I'm madly polishing this unbelievably tarnished mirror and hoping something shines forth.
—Loreena McKennitt, from an interview in Network, (April/May 1994)
1.
Newford, Labor Day, 1996
If Lily had hated the flight back to Newford, she hated the walk from the terminal to where she'd parked her car even more. It was a long hike in the relative dark—three lots over, with too much space between the lampposts so far as she was concerned. Hundreds of vehicles, row on shiny row of them, but not many people. If there was trouble, if that cuckoo rose up from behind some car, who was going to help her? Though maybe the worst thing, what kept her nerves jangling raw and too bright, was that he didn't even have to be hiding. The way he and Margaret had stepped into thin air back there in the Tucson airport … didn't that mean they could probably step right out of it again, too? So you couldn't know where they might be, waiting for you. No place was safe.
She hadn't been too scared in the plane. It was a full flight and hopefully too public for anyone to consider assaulting her while they were in the air, though she couldn't entirely dismiss her fear. How badly did these cuckoos want her? The airport seemed safe as well. Brightly lit, too many people milling about, too many uniformed men and women. Police, airport security. But out here in the parking lot, weighted down with her backpack and dragging the wheeled hard-shell case that held her camera equipment, she felt far more vulnerable. Her hands were shaking so much by the time she reached her car that she could barely get the key into the lock of the trunk.
Stowing away her luggage, she shut the trunk and leaned on it for a moment, gaze darting nervously about. If only she'd arranged for someone to meet her at the terminal. Rory. Or Hank. Maybe she should have taken up Sharon's offer of a lift and come back to get her car tomorrow. Right now she'd readily welcome the woman's barrage of conversation if it meant she didn't have to be alone.
She was sure she was overreacting, but the fear wouldn't go away. The memory of the cuckoo's assault in the alleyway a few days ago had stopped slipping and sliding away from her, and the strange calm following the incident fled. Now the attack sat foremost in her mind, firmly ensconced, reminding her of just how frail she was. When the cuckoo had attacked her she hadn't been able to do a thing to stop his assault. She'd survived that night by luck, pure and simple. She couldn't count on a Hank to show up out of nowhere, on crow girls to drop from the sky.
Straightening, she moved around to the driver's side of the car, carefully peering into the backseat before she unlocked the door. When she got inside she immediately locked all the doors, then pressed her head against the top of the steering wheel, weak with relief at having gained this much safety. Now all she had to do was drive home.
I can't live like this, she thought, finally sitting up to fit the key into the ignition.
Who could? Nobody chose to be a victim. Nobody chose to be assaulted in an alleyway, stalked in an airport …
Starting the car, she pulled out
of her spot and drove toward the exit. She had another bad moment when she had to open her window to pay the attendant, searching the lanes between the parked cars and the faces of the other drivers as she waited her turn in the line of exiting cars. The parking lot attendant gave her an odd look when she handed her money over—God, I must look like a wreck, she thought—but she managed to get through the transaction and leave the airport without incident.
Once she was on the parkway, she drove in the right lane and far too slowly, constantly checking her rearview mirror and the cars that passed her, expecting someone to be following her, to run her off the road, to pull up beside her and point a gun at her face. When she finally reached her exit and got off the parkway, she had to pull over to the side of the road and park—just to unclench her hands from the wheel for a few moments and try to ease the knotted muscles in her neck and shoulders. But simply sitting there felt too vulnerable and a heartbeat later she pulled out once more, cutting off a vehicle because she hadn't thought to check if the road was clear. The blast of the other driver's horn startled her so badly she almost lost control of the car and she had to pull over again.
The drive from the airport to her house was a familiar one. On an evening such as this, with little traffic, the trip would normally take about forty minutes. Tonight it was closer to an hour and a half before she was finally turning onto McKennitt Street. She knew one moment's relief at being so close to home, back in familiar territory, before she realized she'd be alone in her apartment.
She almost kept on driving right past her house, but she didn't know where to go. Rory's perhaps. Or somewhere busy with people, crowded. What stopped her was the squat bulk of Hank's cab parked at the curb in front of the house and Hank himself, sitting there on her steps, easily recognizable in the yellow wash of the porch light. Pulling into her lane, she shut off the car's engine and let relief wash over her.
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