Nothing to Devour

by Glen Hirshberg

  Kaylene rolled her eyes. One corner of Rebecca’s mouth curled. The frayed edge of her old smile, the one only Joel, and then—very briefly—Jack had ever dragged all the way out of her, back in their Jack-and-the-’Lenes days. Especially toward the end of those days.

  Sweet, grinning Jack.

  “A squirrel Joel killed himself. With his fists, and some pine needles.”

  “So we’re having barbecued chicken? Again?”

  “I’m going to get Trudi,” said Rebecca, and left.

  Rebecca always went to get Trudi. She was the only one who could. Kaylene wished that the critic-brat from The Stranger could see this little drummer woman, who’d frightened him so badly, do that.

  “Mom,” she said into the phone, glancing once more out the window at the fog forming in midair as the dark deepened. The chill made visible. That was another major difference between the San Juans and New Hampshire, and a major part of what she loved here: when the cold came—and it always came—you could see it. She rushed the words past her lips before her brain could stop her. “How about you and Dad come here for Thanksgiving?”

  This time, there was no squeal. Kaylene gave her mom credit for that, for recognizing the moment. They’d both progressed. One more life-reclamation checkpoint passed.

  “We might just do that,” her mom murmured, so carefully that Kaylene burst out laughing. Her mom laughed, too. Carefully. For the thousandth time, Kaylene opened her mouth to explain, to try to find words for why it was good, better, to live here, for at least a little longer.

  All that came out, though, was, “Good. Bye, Mom.”

  “See you soon, hon,” her mother said, still holding in her sob. She didn’t even yell for Kaylene’s father to get on the line so he could hear the news; she just hung up.

  Placing the phone on the windowsill, Kaylene leaned into the glass and was surprised yet again by the damp that seemed to surface in anything she touched here, indoors or out—trees, tabletops, telephone poles, pens—at the second she touched it. As though everything on this island were alert, curled up inside itself, rising to each moment of contact like a cat rubbing its scent on you. Reassuring itself, and you, We’re alive. We’re alive, we’re alive, we’re alive.

  To her parents, Kaylene knew, what had happened in the Halfmoon Lake woods had driven their daughter to the other side of an impenetrable wall, behind an iron curtain of grief and horror and sorrow. They still thought that was why she couldn’t talk to them about it.

  What they’d missed—what Kaylene couldn’t articulate aloud, even now—was that to her, they were the ones behind the curtain, cut off from critical information about the world as it actually was.

  Either that, or Kaylene had somehow strayed from the path her parents had so carefully laid out for her from the moment she was born. She’d found a magic wardrobe and teleported into fairyland, where whistling monsters in sombreros shredded people like string cheese, and bald eagles and barred owls rode arctic winds into the firs and twisting madrone trees, and killer-whale pods huffed in coves and sea caves, and fog came cold and open-armed. A place where Kaylenes and Rebeccas become regional rock stars. Where survivors and refugees holed up in a hundred-year-old A-frame on a grassy hillside with a windmill in the backyard and became … not a family, exactly. Not even a pod.

  But a colony, maybe, founded less on love, whether felt or expressed, than shared solitude. Shared meals. A teenager and a toddler to protect and raise. And, yes, a grief and horror so deep and black that it seemed, constantly, to be streaming off one or another of them, or all of them at once, as though they were all brand-new creatures. A freshly evolved species that had just crawled up from the abyss—or out of the woods—onto land, into life.

  Which, now that Kaylene thought about it, probably made them more like every other household in the world than she’d thought.

  Maybe they were a family after all.

  With a last, lingering glance through the glass at the oncoming evening, Kaylene knelt, rummaging behind her shoes and the box of college textbooks she hadn’t so much as glanced at since arriving here, and came up, finally, with the rumpled canvas bag she’d shoved back there five years ago, and never once touched since.

  What had even made her take this? When and why had she hidden it?

  For a few seconds, she stayed on her knees, holding the bag, feeling its barely there weight. The thought of opening it—of actually enacting this particular bit of stagecraft—curled around her windpipe, wormed between her ribs and seized her heart.

  Her boldest act of life-reclamation yet. Maybe the last one she or Rebecca would ever need.

  It really could be. If she could actually bring herself to do it.

  She wanted to call Rebecca up here, try it out with her or at least warn her. She knew she should.

  But she couldn’t risk her bandmate’s reaction. What if Rebecca decided she wasn’t ready, or got furious? She’d become so much less predictable behind that gentle, remote Rebecca-face these days.

  No. Already, Kaylene felt she’d waited too long. She’d let the monster of Halfmoon Lake steal far too much, from all of them, for far too long.

  “Asshole,” she whispered.

  Carefully, as though unpicking stiches, she curled a finger through the drawstring at the mouth of the bag, tugged it open, and pulled out the Whistler’s hat.

  6

  Halfway across the yard, right at the lip of the advancing shadows of the hemlock trees, Rebecca stopped as she always did and stared past Jess’s windmill shed into the forest. She wasn’t looking for anything, or at least, she wasn’t expecting to see anything. This was simply something she did, now, and would for the rest of her life when confronted with clusters of trees: watch to see if anything stepped from them; listen for whistling.

  She heard none and saw no one. But the feeling had her now. It had come almost nightly these past weeks. There was comfort in that feeling, or familiarity, anyway. Automatically, Rebecca attached words to it, the ones she’d somehow learned way back before she’d even come to Halfmoon House and met Amanda. Back in her foster-care days, or more specifically the weeks, usually months, between foster-care days. Between new homes. Days when she was nowhere, or nowhere she was staying. She chanted the words silently now, not even moving her mouth. The orphan’s catechism.

  Something is starting. Something is ending.

  Hands in her pockets, bare arms bristling in the misting damp, she flicked her eyes back and forth from the windmill shed to the house. Jess’s windmill. Jess’s house. Jess’s home, which apparently just unfolded off her back and locked into place around her, no matter where she went or what she lost. Or whom she lost. It was simply part of her. Or, it was her. Like a carapace, with room for anyone she’d collected along the way, for as long as they could make themselves stay.

  Something is starting. Something is ending.

  Upstairs in the shed, drapes twitched. As usual, Trudi—the most orphaned of them all—was still in her room. That seemed only right, or at least as expected. Trudi was a hermit crab, same as Rebecca, rattling around in a shell she’d borrowed. Except Trudi had made herself a second shell out of her room, and she rarely came out by choice except to take the ferry to the mainland for school, or else when it was time for someone to lure or coax or drag her out for dinner.

  Someone meaning Rebecca.

  Shivering in the grass after a last scan of the trees, Rebecca glanced back toward the house. There, upstairs at her window, Kaylene stood in her stripy dress, staring over the forest toward the Strait as she fended off her mother for yet another phone call. For so many reasons—because bandmates, because they’d lived across a hall from each other for five years and shared orcas and otters and Jess’s moods and Benny’s not-squirrel dinners, most of all because they were the last ones standing—Kaylene had come to mean even more to Rebecca than she had back in East Dunham. She was no longer just Rebecca’s friend or even her best friend, but her only peer. Sister. Cocomp
oser. Onstage shrieking partner.

  The last ’Lene.

  Returning her attention to the windmill, Rebecca caught a glimpse of Trudi, who’d possibly been eyeing Rebecca but was more likely hunched over some new windowsill diorama she’d crafted out of the junk she gathered like a squirrel stocking up for winter.

  For the first time in days—briefly, tonight, with its claws retracted—that other feeling brushed over Rebecca. The one that had been with her ever since the night of the massacre. She still didn’t have words for it, no catechism to direct or dispel it. Suddenly, for whole breaths at a time, she simply wasn’t her.

  Mostly, when this happened, she was Oscar, the UNH-D groundskeeper she’d befriended. He’d been the first of her friends to meet the whistling man and the first to die, before Jack, Marlene, Amanda, and Danni. She’d find herself breathing Oscar’s cigarette smoke and missing his daughter, whom she’d never met, never known, and hardly even known about until the last night of his life. The trees around her were no longer Pacific Northwest hemlocks but the black gums that lined Campus Walk at UNH-D. The windows she peered through were no longer Trudi’s but those of the basement Crisis Center. Through them she saw herself, that long-ago Rebecca, answering phones. Helping people. Back in the days when she did such things, when she was just an orphan, already a survivor but not so unlike everybody else.

  Back before she’d killed anybody.

  Memories engulfed her, the way they always did. This tsunami just kept coming, pouring in, driving her back five years to the night that had started with her friends dying and ended with her repeatedly smashing a shovel into another woman’s face. Through it, probably.

  Say her name, Rebecca snapped inside her own head. Then she did say it. Mouthed it, anyway.

  Sophie.

  The person she’d obliterated.

  In fairness, Sophie’s face had been inside another face at the time. Inside the face of the asshole in the sombrero who’d murdered her friends. Sophie had, in fact, been eating the monster from underneath, from the back of his skull forward. Also, by her own admission—assertion, actually—Sophie hadn’t much qualified as a person anymore, anyway, by that point. Not a human one, anyway.

  But she’d helped kill the monster, and she’d been a living thing. Someone’s daughter. Blond-haired, doe-eyed, with a smile stunning mostly for the way it bloomed on her face and just kept spreading, as though her mouth couldn’t get wide enough to let all that laughter out or joy in.

  It took several minutes—less than it once had, but not much—for Sophie’s smile to subside back into its permanent place on the mantel atop Rebecca’s memories. Rebecca would keep it there for the rest of her life. She owed Sophie that much. Whoever and whatever the hell Sophie had been.

  “Rebecca!” Benny called out the kitchen window, waving a spatula in one of his white-gristled yeti paws. “Dinner. Get that kid and come on!”

  Waving, Rebecca started forward again. She lifted a fist to knock on the windmill door, but only as a courtesy. Even if Trudi heard, and even though she’d know full well who was knocking and why, she wouldn’t answer. She’d make Rebecca come get her. It was part of their ritual: Trudi refusing to come; Rebecca acknowledging her right to refuse, then cajoling and teasing her out of her cave, across their little inland sea of grass and into the main house to join the rest of the survivors for dinner.

  On impulse, Rebecca stepped back from the door and gazed up again at Trudi’s window. Trudi was no longer visible, but Rebecca knew she was in there. From the woods she really did hear whistling, chattering, and shrieking. Just birds. Owls and eagles. Swallows and wrens. A thousand creatures living their lives, while Rebecca moved beneath and beside them.

  Same as always. Same as before the Sombrero Man came, even. What had she really lost, anyway?

  A could-have-been boyfriend; a not-quite-mom; a not-at-all little sister-orphan she’d never come close to reaching except right at the end; a lonely groundskeeper she’d considered a friend yet barely known and said maybe five hundred words to, total, over the course of three years. A ’Lene.

  Stooping, she felt around in the wet grass and came up with two pinecone chips, an acorn, and a single pink pebble or splinter of shell. Plenty.

  Stepping back, Rebecca held up one of the acorns, took aim, and couldn’t help noting her own arm. It looked so solid, all of a sudden. A branch to perch on. A club for beating the shit out of unsuspecting drums. She could practically feel her sticks in her fists already, see the skin of her snare dimpling and denting as Kaylene shimmered purple and red at the edge of the spotlight at the front of the stage, strummed hard to make herself heard over Rebecca’s clamor, and wailed. Not a single one of those sensations would have been imaginable to East Dunham–Rebecca. Sometimes, playing drums made her feel as though she were stoking a steam engine, propelling the rocketing, shuddering thing that was Sock Puppet. Which was a thing you could hop as it hurtled by, if you dared, but you couldn’t stop it. Nothing could stop it.

  Trudi should come to the show, Rebecca thought, and not for the first time. Trudi should join the band. She could do her sock puppet dance. Pummel a tambourine.

  Right as she threw the acorn, whacking it off the windowsill overhead, the door to the main house opened behind her. Rebecca glanced that way just long enough to see Jess looking around the yard, moving slowly in Rebecca’s direction. Through the sliding glass door behind her, Rebecca saw Joel setting the table. That was the sort of thing Joel did these days: set tables, fold towels. Instead of play with Eddie or hound Trudi out of her room into the world with some godawful, impromptu song or ridiculous Joel dance. Once—not so long ago, though very far away, in a different life—he had been the person Rebecca trusted most. Her late-night online anagram-Smackdown competitor and Google Chat companion. Her music supplier. Almost her dad.

  Now he was no one’s dad. Without Amanda to reprimand him, to remind and reassure him of his role in the lives of the children they’d always surrounded themselves with but couldn’t have on their own, Joel seemed to be melting into his own shadow. Of the six survivors inhabiting the Stockade (which was the name he’d given to Jess’s compound), Joel was the one who’d recovered least. Every sight of him stabbed at her, like those tire shredders at the edges of parking lots.

  Do not back up. Severe damage …

  God, when was the last time she’d played 2 A.M. Smackdown with Joel? Had they tried that even once since coming to this coast? What did he even do in his basement room, after dark?

  Not sleep, Rebecca was pretty certain.

  Shaking her head as if this time that might actually help, Rebecca sorted the debris she’d scavenged and selected the shell fragment. It was hardest and smallest, the most likely to rouse Trudi without breaking her window. Behind and to her left, Jess moved off the patio and closer to the woods, peering into them with an intensity Rebecca didn’t even want to acknowledge, let alone explore. And yet, here she was opening her mouth.

  “Jess? Are you all right?”

  The answer came slow and quiet. Pretend-casual. “Have you seen Eddie?”

  “He’s out again?”

  “Probably down at the cove. I think his okras have come back.”

  “Then his okras will protect him,” Rebecca said, immediately wished she hadn’t, and was surprised when Jess glanced her way. She was even more surprised to see Jess smiling.

  “His okras,” she murmured.

  If she’d been nearer, Rebecca would have hugged her. That was something they’d taken to doing, Jess and Rebecca, just sometimes. Like sisters. Like mother and daughter. Almost.

  Rebecca let her own smile out, just for a second and too late. Already, Jess had returned to watching the woods. So Rebecca returned to her own task. Cocking her arm, she reared back, was about to let fly when Trudi’s window popped open.

  “Are you throwing shit at me now?” the girl said, glaring, her kinked hair raked and gathered atop her head in that way only Trudi could manage,
like a clump of pine needles.

  “Rapunzel,” Rebecca called. “Rapunzel. Let down your hair.”

  Trudi snorted. “I don’t want to crush you, ant.”

  “Aunt.”

  “You’re not my aunt.”

  Rebecca waited for the window to slam shut. When it didn’t, she said, “There’s squirrel for dinner. Benny said to tell you.”

  “Benny’s squirrel can go fuck itself.”

  “Watch it,” Jess said from across the yard, not loud.

  Trudi knew better than to backtalk that. Defiant, terrified, pissed, and lonely she might be. But stupid, never.

  “Sock Puppet show tonight,” said Rebecca, eyeing Jess briefly. For permission, she realized, which was silly. Wasn’t it? “You could come, Trud. I’d take you along. You should come. We’re loud. You’d like it.”

  Trudi held up her left hand. The yellow sock draped over her fingers was so threadbare that Rebecca could see the girl’s skin through it, even from down here.

  “I have my own Sock Puppet show every night,” Trudi said. “And I never even have to leave the room.”

  Rebecca sighed. “Sometimes I think I’m your sock puppet.”

  “Those are your smart times.”

  “I think I feel your hand up my butt right now.”

  “Then why aren’t you dancing?” Trudi held up her other hand, waving it back and forth in the air as though trying to drag Rebecca into motion.

  Rebecca actually thought about dancing, and also about laughing. In the end, she just said, “Are you coming? Puppet master?”

  “In a minute, I guess.” She didn’t even slam the window when she shut it.

  Still gazing down the dirt path that led through the trees and along the cliff toward Eddie’s okra cove, Jess moved to Rebecca’s side. She’d exchanged her customary dinnertime sweatshirt for a paisley sweater and a long denim skirt that brushed the tips of the wet grass. The skirt was old and faded in patches, and so looked the same changeable blue as the sky on hazy days. She’d let her hair grow long so it spilled down her back, unstyled, lustrous and dark, with barely a hint of gray. The color of this island’s earth, Rebecca realized. Jess belonged here.