Devil and the Bluebird

by Jennifer Mason-Black

  When Blue finished the song, Roe touched Willy’s hand. “You can’t know anything about him at this point except what someone else tells you, and that’s a shame. He was a damn good guitar player, and he had a voice like . . . I don’t know how to describe it. Huge and rough. He told me a thing or two about how I play my drums.” She grinned. “He helped make me a better drummer.”

  She glanced at Blue. “And I can tell you that he probably never listened to Dry Gully, but I have. That’s her guitar, isn’t it? Clare Riley’s? Let me guess. You’re her daughter.”

  Lots of words floated around Blue’s head, such as How and You’re kidding me. Maybe they weren’t floating so much as racing around and around, a little racetrack going nowhere. She’d have to leave. Roe couldn’t know her name, but it didn’t matter, did it? Knowing who she was had to count the same as knowing she was Blue Riley.

  Roe continued. “They were killer. You sound more like the other one, Tish Bellamy.”

  It was one small step from knowing who her mother was to knowing what her name was. All it would take was five minutes online. She’d have to leave. She had to, anyway—she didn’t have that much time left to find Cass. But right then staying by Willy’s bedside seemed more important than anything else she might ever do.

  She began to play again. Nothing of her mother’s, nothing of Tish’s or anyone else’s. She played the music that had first come to her in Beyond. She could almost hear all the words, and they helped move her fingers, told her where the accent points fell and when to back off. She could hear everything in it: her entire story.

  “Nice,” Roe said at the end. “Better if you had a bit of backup. You ever play with a band?”

  Blue shook her head. Beside her, Willy kept on breathing, softer, louder, sometimes stopping for an agonizing stretch before returning to his work. Lynne had told her and Cass that it was okay to talk when they sat with Mama, but they’d been too scared. Lynne had a friend who came to help, though, and the two of them did talk. Not about important things, even, just stories from when they were all younger, or what they’d been doing that week, or what the weather was like. She supposed she was doing that, only with fingers and strings.

  She kept playing. Roe left after a while. Yarrow poked her head in at one point, but she didn’t stay, either. There were just Blue and Willy and the guitar, and the rain that had started up again and streaked the windowpanes.

  After a long time she wasn’t even playing songs, just following chords around and around, her fingers wandering the strings. It wasn’t until she heard the silence beyond the music that she stopped.

  Willy wasn’t breathing.

  Finally, a breath came, slow and shuddering, sliding out like the sea on the sand.

  Then a space, longer, longer, longer, before he breathed again.

  Willy was dying, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

  Her hands stilled. Not her heart—it beat fast inside her. The urge to run was so strong, and yet . . . her boots said nothing. No ache, no pressure. This was where she was meant to be.

  She watched Willy as if to blink would be a betrayal. The way she should have watched Mama. So intent that she didn’t even notice the figure until the smell came to her. Oranges, whole, fresh, in the middle of winter; a warm fire on a cold day.

  She was a tall woman. Beautiful—not like a model; like someone who had lived a long life, had seen everything there was to see and had found enough to make her happy. Her skin was darker than Willy’s, her hair collected on top of her head by a deep red scarf. She bent beside the bed, never once looking at Blue.

  Another breath, dragged up from the bottom of a very deep well. The woman touched his cheek. “I know,” she said. “I’ve heard it all, Willy. I know you always stayed true.”

  She leaned over him and touched her lips to his. As she pulled back, something silver stretched between them.

  No. Blue stared, afraid of teeth, afraid of tearing and chewing and suffering. Something different happened, though. The silver thread stretched, thinned, a water droplet between the two of them, until, with a final sigh, Willy’s chest sank down completely. The thread vanished.

  The woman stood. She laid one hand on Willy’s chest and sighed out a long, slow breath. Guitar music shivered through the room. Blue could hear the squeak of strings as fingers ran along them. The song spiraled around her, around the bed and onward, past the room, dissolving into chords as it spun out into the world.

  All the songs, even the forgotten ones, swirl in the air to become part of what’s to come.

  Willy’s.

  Mama’s.

  Even though they were gone.

  Blue didn’t start to cry until after Fray had come in and done what he needed to confirm what she already knew. Once the tears started, though, they didn’t want to stop. It was as if she’d tapped into a secret well, and it might take the rest of her life to empty it. She refused to move from her spot, to do anything other than cry over a small, elderly man whom she’d never known, who’d died so quietly in front of her.

  But she did know him. She knew what she’d heard—the song the woman in the red dress had drawn forth from him.

  Tish was right. She’d never understood who her bargain was really with.

  When Yarrow and another woman came in with washcloths and bowls of warm water, Blue returned the guitar to its case and stumbled out of the room. She ignored Yarrow’s call, instead continuing down the hall until she came to another open door. This one led into a large room. Windows covered the far wall, looking out onto the yurt; the sky was already darkening again. Night had arrived so soon. Had she spent the whole day in Willy’s room?

  A series of mismatched couches made a horseshoe around a TV. Two women looked up as she entered, then returned their attention to the screen.

  “Not sure our boy has a chance.” One of the women shook her fist at the TV, exposing a hand with just three fingers. “He made it all the way to the finals, but these things are rigged.”

  Blue sank into the couch. She felt as though part of her had stayed in Willy’s room, that even now she was sitting in the silence there. A familiar logo bounced in the corner of the TV screen: a hot pink musical note in a blue box. Major Chord. Jed and Jill belonged to another lifetime now—one where women didn’t take their children to live in tunnels, where predators didn’t lurk, feeding on the lost wandering the streets.

  “You gotta admit, that boy and girl in that band, they’re real cute together. She don’t look stuck up, not at all. Can’t imagine that Mr. Rick Rafael is gonna give them the time of day, though. No, not him.”

  Rick Rafael? She could see him in her mind, black leather and spiky hair and mascaraed eyes. She could imagine Mama, too, her bracelets jangling as she embraced him.

  Where would Cass have gone?

  Inside Blue was sinking and rising simultaneously, her heart beating out a rhythm that could have been fear or triumph as she stared at the TV, her feet beginning to ache in her boots. Three finalists: a short African American man with a shaved head and gold hoops in his ears; Lost Highway, Jed and Jill holding hands and looking at each other with fake devotion; and a woman, C. R. Smith—immaculate hair, deep red lips, mascaraed eyes so similar to her father’s.

  Cass.

  I have to get to L.A.!

  Dill stared at her blankly. Roe took the note from his hand, nodded her head. “Cool. How fast?”

  The entertainment news had said the taping of the final show would be on Thursday. It was Tuesday evening already. She held up two fingers.

  “Two days? Wait, Interstate, you’re just going to take off? I thought,” Dill paused, glanced at Roe. “I thought I was going to show you around.”

  Good-bye notes had become second nature. Leaving someone in person was so much harder.

  I have to go. I can’t explain it in a way you’d understand, but after I’m finished I’ll tell you all about it. Or come with me.

  Once finished, she’d have
a home, a sister . . . a voice. No more notes, ever. She touched her throat.

  “But—”

  “Dude.” Roe slid off the kitchen counter she’d been sitting on. “The girl needs to get to L.A. The only correct response to that is ‘How fast?,’ not all this ‘But you promised’ crap. Promises are stretchy. Not every train runs on the same schedule.”

  Dill looked back and forth between them. “I can’t go. Dad’s counting on me.”

  “It’s okay. I can go. Haven’t been to La-La Land in a while.”

  Blue could have argued. Would have, but for a clock ticking inside her. It wasn’t herself she was saving now. Cass was the one who’d signed with the devil.

  Dill borrowed Yarrow’s aged Volvo to drive them to the highway early the next morning. He stopped on the side of the road and got out of the car with them. Roe had insisted he couldn’t stay while they waited because no one would stop for the three of them. He’d reluctantly agreed. The sky overhead was heavy gray, but beside them stood a tree covered in the silver green of newly fledged leaves, and a bird sang from the top. Dill hugged Roe, then stopped in front of Blue.

  “I’ll see you again, right? This isn’t just ’bye?”

  She was almost finished with good-byes. One quick touch—her fingertip on his cheek—before pressing her lips against his. It was the closest thing to an answer she could offer. Her boots were telling her it was time to go.

  Roe had said that getting rides would be no problem, and she was right. Once Dill left, the second car to pass by stopped for them. The middle-aged man driving took them all the way to the California border. By the time he dropped them at a highway truck stop, it was midafternoon.

  “It’s not always easy to pick truckers,” Roe said as they looked in the plate-glass window of the diner. “First of all, they’re not supposed to pick up hitchers. Second, lots are either religious nuts or looking for sex. Third—”

  Blue hit her arm and hurried for the front door. The hair on the woman’s head wasn’t black anymore, it was flamboyant red; but the face was the same.

  Lou!

  She scrawled it quickly once she reached the booth, then held it out, sure the woman wouldn’t recognize her. For a long minute she thought maybe she was wrong and it was just some other woman sitting by herself, cracking peanuts from a bowl and drinking bottled water.

  But Lou’s face broke out in a big grin. “How the heck are you? No way I expected to see you again, let alone all the way out here. Figured you’d settle yourself down in Massachusetts somewhere, get your life straightened out.”

  Nope. I’m here.

  She felt inordinately pleased. Queen of the Roads, that was her.

  How ya been?

  “I’ve been just fine, thank you. I changed things up a little bit. New hair. New traveling companion. Took on some western runs for a bit. Felt like it was time to try out something new, you know. ’Course you know. You know all about it, don’t you?” Blue nodded and allowed herself to return Lou’s smile.

  Her eyes shifted over Blue’s shoulder, to where Roe stood. “Looks like you got a traveling companion of your own.”

  Just for now. Headed to L.A.

  Lou looked concerned. “Now, hon, you’re not doing something stupid, right? None of this ‘I’m going to be a star’ foolishness? I thought you’d know better than that.”

  No way. We’re

  . . . what? How could she explain it?

  going to see my sister. She’s a finalist in Major Chord.

  “Is she now? Music runs in your family, I guess.” A glance at her watch. “Look at the time. I need to get moving. Got to get this load all the way to the border.”

  “So you’re going through L.A.?” Roe nudged Blue.

  Lou studied Roe. She must have looked at Blue the same way, once upon a time. Blue had looked at others that way, too—watching for the little clues, the ones that didn’t even register as thought but traveled as electrical impulses, raising the hair on her arms or easing the muscles in her shoulders.

  Finally, she nodded. “Yes, I am. I take it you want a ride?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Roe pressed her chin into Blue’s shoulder.

  “Come on, then.”

  Lou’s new companion turned out to be a German shepherd. “Ladies, this is Lola. She’s a good girl, long as no one bothers me. She’s only got three legs, but she gets around just fine without the fourth.”

  Lola disappeared behind the seats, only a disdainful sniff in their direction to let them know she’d seen them. Roe and Blue followed her back, only to have her leap forward to claim the passenger seat.

  “So you hitched with her before? Crazy kind of luck for you,” Roe whispered. Lou had turned on a lecture, a man talking about the history of humans in the Arctic Circle, loud enough to drown them out.

  Blue shrugged.

  “That’s what you’re doing? Going to see your sister? She know you’re coming?”

  She shook her head before settling back, guitar between her knees. Only five unused pages remained in her notebook.

  She ran away. I haven’t seen her for two years. More like 2½.

  “Sucks. Your parents no good or what?”

  My mom died. No dad. My mom left Tish when she got sick.

  “Why?”

  That was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it?

  I think she felt like she’d made bad choices. She thought leaving would make us make better ones.

  Roe laughed. “That worked out well.”

  It could have been funny, had it not been for the years without Mama or Tish. Or for all the ways she and Cass hadn’t fit in Eliotville, no matter how they tried.

  Dill’s your brother?

  Roe shrugged. “Yeah. Not by blood. I was adopted when I was two.”

  You remember your parents from before?

  She didn’t know if that was the wrong kind of question.

  “My birth mom, yeah. She was on drugs, and she knew she was going to lose me, so she asked at Willow Wind if they would take me in. Natalie, our mom, said yes. When my birth mom got clean, finally, a few years back, we started meeting again.”

  What’s that like?

  “Okay. It’s kind of tough. I was really angry at first, and she’s HIV positive, which made me angrier. You kind of want a mom to be the person that does everything right by you, you know? But lately I’ve been thinking she did what she could at the time, held it together enough to put me someplace where I had the whole frigging village to raise me. I have a mom who loves me, and I have this other woman, who I’m learning to be friends with; and that’s the way my life looks.”

  A memory came to her, of Mama and Tish, Mama’s feet in Tish’s lap as they lounged on the couch. Happiness cocooned around them all, sturdy and safe and permanent.

  At least, it had felt that way.

  So what are you doing?

  Roe gave her a funny look. “Going to L.A.”

  After that?

  Another page gone. She needed to be more careful. With no money and time running out, finding a new one wasn’t a priority.

  “Who knows? I was trying to get my band hooked up again, but we pretty much define that whole ‘irreconcilable differences’ thing. Like, Lucy and Cam think we’re way back in the nineties. Gotta take some time and think about that whole ‘Who am I and where am I going?’ piece.”

  How old are you?

  “Eighteen.”

  At nineteen, Dill was traveling alone and studying communities and helping homeless families. At eighteen, Roe had already had one band and was thinking about what to do next. Their lives looked nothing like those of the kids Blue had gone to school with, the kids she would have been graduating with, had she not left Eliotville. There were so many more choices in the world than she’d ever realized. The trick was to know when you were running away from something, and when you were running to meet it. Telling people that Mama and Cass were the only real musicians in her family—that had been running away. Same
with trying to keep everything the same with Beck and Teena, even though it felt like she’d been still. What kind of running was the deal she’d made at the crossroads?

  Who was she?

  Nine years ago, she’d been a scared little girl whose mother was dying. Nine years from now, she’d be twenty-six, old enough to have gone through college and graduated and found a job. Or not. She remembered the feeling of playing with Tish in the bar, of Barn Magic, of music and of feathers growing through skin, and the words that kept coming to her even when she tried to ignore them.

  She scribbled the words down and held out her notebook to Roe.

  Know anything about songwriting?

  They reached L.A. close to eleven. Lou looked the two of them over again, shook her head a little. “You look a little harder than when I picked you up in Maine, but not mean. The road’s just burned away your baby fat, hasn’t it?”

  Blue nodded. It was true in a literal way: Javier’s belt was loose enough these days that she could slide it over her hips on the smallest hole. But the other way was right, too. The road had stripped away all her unnecessary pieces.

  “You sure you’re okay? I hate to leave you in this city without knowing where you’re going.”

  We’ll be OK. Thank you.

  Blue wrote on the back cover of the notebook, every page filled. It was okay. If she was right, she wouldn’t need it much longer.

  “Okay, ladies. You be careful, then. I hope your sister does real well.”

  Lou honked as she pulled away, the dog smiling from the passenger’s seat. The last time Blue had watched her go, she’d been scared. This time Blue felt like a torch: not yet lit, but so close to the flame and so ready to burn.

  “What do we do now?” asked Roe.

  Blue looked around her at the lights, the streets, the cars, so different from Maine. It didn’t make a difference. All it took was the intersection of two paths.

  We need a really good crossroads.

  “You’re crazy,” Roe yelled.