The Blackbird Season

by Kate Moretti

  Bridget hiked her purse up onto her arm and pressed her mouth closed, her lips dry, her tongue sour. “And what if she can’t?”

  • • •

  “So that’s it, then?” Tripp stood next to his truck in the parking lot, the sun bouncing off the gleaming red paint, a blind spot in Bridget’s eye.

  “Not for me. For you?” Bridget squinted up at him and he looked around the lot, his blond hair reflecting light like his truck. He toed the dirt like a teenager.

  “I don’t know. I can’t go off half-cocked like you can. I have a job to protect here. You get that, right?”

  “Yeah.” She did get it, but she felt deflated anyway, the pinprick of disappointment in her gut.

  “It’s too hot for May,” Tripp said, suddenly changing the subject. They’d settled it then, sunk to talking about the weather, the hotness, the sweat. Even the dust seemed wet with humidity. Tripp pointed to the back lot, toward the diner, The 543, the letters blinking. Bridget nodded and they walked, wordless, the gravel kicking up at her feet, and she marveled about their comfort level, how easily they’d slipped into friendship.

  Inside the diner, seated, they ordered dessert and coffee, sharing a quarter of an apple pie off the same plate, talking very little while Bridget tried to think of what to do next, but it felt easier than she remembered, being with a man. Tripp didn’t press her to talk, like even Alecia did sometimes. Then again, Alecia had known her when Bridget herself avoided silence, filling the hole with endless chatter. Alecia still thought of her as that person. Tripp hardly knew her at all.

  “I think I need to talk to Nate. Any idea where he is today?” Bridget asked. “I have to show him the broadcast. He’s going to flip, I think.”

  “Why?”

  “Andrew Evans is his golden child. His star baseball player. The Evans family has supported Nate, one of the only ones who have.” They’d been at the original pavilion meeting after the story broke. Bridget remembered the way Mrs. Evans nodded, her head bobbing like a puppet. The way she didn’t speak, her teeth working the soft skin of her lip.

  “I think he’s home. He sleeps a lot when I’m not around. When I’m home, he goes out. I think he avoids me.”

  “He won’t take my calls. I’ve tried twice. I still don’t know what to say to him.” She shrugged, pressed her finger to the crumbs on the plate and then stuck it into her mouth, thinking. “I haven’t talked much to Alecia, either. A few times. She’s coming undone, but I don’t know how to fix that.”

  They finished the pie and the waitress ambled up, her apron sagging below an ample bosom, her hair slicked back into a tight bun. She had a red, wintry face, bursting and shiny. “I know y’all, don’t I?” Her neck wobbled as she nodded. “You’re that teacher, the one who’s friends with Winters. Y’all think he didn’t diddle that girl, his student.” She spat the last word out like it was a cuss word and Bridget found herself shaking her head. “I saw you at the meeting a few weeks back. And now she’s missing. You still think that?” Her apple cheeks huffed with the effort, her fingertips with bright red nails flitting in their direction as she pulled out the pad to write up the bill. “My cousin, she goes to that school. She’s a senior. You know her? Ashlee Williams?”

  Bridget nodded. Ashlee was a quiet student, a cheerleader with a clique of friends that was neither cruel nor kind but rather just there. She was rounder than the other cheerleaders, her hair frizzy. She’d always slipped her way into the right crowd, a good student. “I know her. Nice girl, cheerleader, right?”

  The waitress nodded and tore off the top sheet, ripping halfway down the page, her nameplate blinking a silvery Misty. “Tell you what, if Winters did that to my cousin, I’d castrate him.” She pushed the bill down on the Formica with a thick finger and gave them both a wide smile. “Y’all have a good day now.”

  • • •

  Night came, hard and quick, and Bridget’s house was dark when she got home, as though the day skipped entirely over twilight and sunset and went right to midnight. She wandered to the kitchen, the pie still on her tongue, not knowing if she was hungry or thirsty, but instead made tea. Her phone trilled from the table, and when she picked it up, there was a waiting text from Tripp: Sorry again about Misty. Call me tomorrow.

  She texted back: It’s okay. Not your fault. This town . . .

  I know it. I live it, he replied.

  Bridget thought about what Harper said, the heroin problem. Lenny, his oil-slick hair and purple bulging arms, pocked with whiteheads and scabs, the veins running lines down his cottony white skin.

  She thought about Tripp, the way the hair on his calf tapered to a smooth ankle. How he smelled, clean yet boyish, a hint of saltiness, like jeans left an hour too long in the washer.

  What if I wanted to try it? she texted on a whim and then instantly regretted it, biting her lower lip so hard her eyes stung.

  Heroin??

  She rolled her eyes. No. Dating. You said I should try it.

  There was two minutes of nothing then, which seemed more telling than any response, and Bridget was typing never mind, forget I said anything when the text finally—finally—came back.

  You let me know. I’m here for you. She laughed, and it seemed enormously loud in her empty kitchen.

  • • •

  Later, in bed, she pulled the student journals out of her bag. She skipped the pink ones, the brown leather Moleskines, and went right for the black bound with the gold stitching, the outline of a raven on the front, its beak sharp and pointing to the left, the one smooth eye looking toward the horizon. She paged through it, the edges gold and gilded. How could Lucia have afforded such a thing? It was incongruous. When she fanned through the pages, they smelled musty. Old.

  The entries were no less erratic than she remembered: drawings of birds, tarot cards and long rambling descriptions of self-readings, bare trees, pencil and a few charcoal sketches, no color whatsoever. Some poetry entries, some written out like love letters. Scraps of thought, raw and quick, like to a lover.

  Don’t you just love Nietzsche? I feel like you mock me when I talk about this. I’ve been obsessed with Our Virtues, the idea that those who are exceptional are hated. The idea that knowledge is self-torture, a quest for knowing a form of the spiritual cruelty. I can hear you saying shut up. But it’s true. Everyone wants to pretend we’re this upper echelon, but really, we’re just part of the food chain. We’ve usurped our role but only by luck, by chance. I look at Lenny and all I see is how lucky he is, he’s so stupid, still an animal, then. I look around and all I see is animals. Stop laughing.

  The thing is, you looked at me so strange the first time I said that, like you were seeing me for the first time. No one ever has. I’m not sure that anyone has ever seen me for the first time. I’ve been seen forever by everybody as the same person: The bitch, the witch, Lulu (but only from Taylor, always, always Taylor—I’m reminded of the quote about there being some madness in love, but always reason in madness, and with Taylor, I’m not sure that’s true, but we’ll get to that), the fucking idiot (by Lenny the fucking idiot, of course, who else). But with you I am just me, and everything I say or do is new or surprising and you act like no one has ever said it or done it before, which is utter bullshit, I know, but when I say that you laugh.

  I try too hard to make you laugh.

  • • •

  When we were nine, you bought me a licorice whip from the QB before it became the QB, while it was still sometimes okay that we rode our bikes there and before it smelled like piss and sex. When we were eleven, your mom gave me money for the Bronx Zoo, over fifty dollars, and I’d never seen a bill with a fifty on it, I didn’t even know they made them. But then I could go on the class trip instead of sitting in the gym with the fourth-graders. When we were fifteen, maybe sixteen, you gave me your heart—the day you danced in the fountain, remember now?— and said it was forever, but now I’m not so sure.

  People change, we both said, but you
, you can be cruel and you don’t even know it. You can’t see your own meanness, it’s all a justification. I’ve never known a time when you didn’t own me, when I wasn’t yours.

  You’ll be gone soon, which is sad and good, but mainly only good for you. I’ll be here. I’ll always, always be here, your Lulu.

  Have you ever wanted to just hurt someone? How about me, have you ever wanted to hurt me?

  Bridget ran her thumb over the page, a small silver-plated plastic heart taped to the inside. She pried it off the page, the tape coming up slightly fuzzy from the paper, and could see the broken plastic on the back, like it had been attached to something: a pendant or a ring. She gently pulled the tape away: BE FRI.

  She could see the other half in her mind: ST ENDS. The two pieces together making a whole heart. A cheesy, cheap novelty.

  It was amazing, really. Something so plastic, so fragile could be holding it all together.

  CHAPTER 30

  Nate, Tuesday, May 12, 2015

  When Nate was a kid, his dad, the late, great Bob Winters, was a man of few words. A mill supervisor during the day, but a baseball coach to Nate at every stage of his life, until the day he keeled over on shift while fixing a gasket on the Fourdrinier table. Bob was in maintenance, could tell you just about anything regarding water corrosion and rust, paper making and humidity. One day he just sat right down with his left hand on the still conveyor belt, his right hand clutching a wrench, and went to sleep. They said it was an aneurysm, but all Nate knew for most of his life is that the paper mill killed his father. He didn’t feel anything about it, he wasn’t angry about it, it was just plain as fact to him. Unlike Vi, who thought the “fumes did him in,” never mind how many people told her that the chemical was harmless. She knew, deep down, that the paper mill killed Bob. The thing is, though, Bob wouldn’t have said that. He wouldn’t have harbored anger about it, that is, if one can harbor anger about their own death. He would have shrugged, the way he always did about everything, and said something vague and mumbling like, the only thing you can’t outrun is your own skin. Not death or taxes or the mail. Just your skin.

  Nate never knew what that meant.

  If either Nate or Bob had been deep, pondering kind of men, they might wax philosophical about consequences and how the decisions made in your life either help you or hamper you, but no matter what, they’re yours to keep. But Nate wasn’t this kind of man. Mostly he thought Bob was simple, and maybe a bit thick in the skull.

  Until now.

  The phrase came to him in the early morning, the reddish haze, sun behind closed but awake eyelids: you can’t outrun your own skin, and Nate sat up, heart thudding, and it occurred to him that he was trying—desperately—to do just that.

  His hiking boots sat in the corner, mud caked, from his long walks through the forests he’d long forgotten about, his thigh muscles out of practice, straining under the long treks. Hours he’d be out there, sometimes, even in the same section of woods he’d tried to find Lucia in.

  He wasn’t looking for her, he would have insisted to anyone who found him, and it would have been true. He was mostly just trying to pass the time doing something he remembered enjoying when he was younger. The smell of damp dirt and rotting vegetation was the perfume of childhood, wet and clinging to his skin and erasing troubles with a muddy thumbprint just as easily now as it did then.

  He couldn’t have explained to anyone how hard it was not to have a purpose, or rather to have your purpose be yanked from you as quickly as a magician’s tablecloth, and to still be able-bodied, able-minded, just empty. He couldn’t have talked to anyone about how he was shelled, hollowed out in the middle, and wandering, because then people would say but what about the girl? Like he was a monster and how dare he think of himself.

  But when you’re alone, you can’t help but think of yourself.

  He thought of Alecia, her anger lighting a fire under his skin until he pushed her out of his mind. He thought of Gabe, his warm, smiling little boy, the feel of his arms around Nate’s neck, the smell of his hair, slightly damp, slightly sweet, a little boyish smell, a sticky sourness in his neck.

  He spent precious little time worrying about Lucia, and he admitted only to himself that he wished he’d never met her, even though for months prior, he’d spent more time than he’d ever admit preoccupied with her. Worrying about her, wondering if she was all right, thinking about her awful, deranged brother, even once following Lenny through the mall, in and out of Rubic, a well-known head shop, to his truck—the one he and Lucia had shared—until he got in and drove away.

  Something about the way her mouth would twist when she said certain things, a whisper of a confidence, the shy duck of her head when she admitted anything at all about herself, like she had no right to do so. She stayed later in his classroom than she needed to, her feet propped up comfortably on the desk in front of him, a ratty, secondhand platform heel bouncing, the skin on her thigh rippling so slightly with each bounce, her legs bare. He didn’t look too hard at her legs, in fact, avoided looking at them. He did like making her laugh, a high feminine tinging that tickled the back of his brain.

  He couldn’t have explained all that. She laughed so little, that was all. Her life seemed like such a shabby confusing mess to him that he worked really hard for those laughs.

  She’d say these wild things—throwing broad proclamations at him, just to see how he’d juggle them, and it was this reckless flinging of her soul that he found so intriguing. He wasn’t even sure what parts of her ramblings were true. I can walk on my hands. It’s true, my mother was in the circus and she taught me before she had to go away. I’ve been reading Jung, you know he’s full of slightly less shit than Nietzsche. She was like a constantly streaming ticker tape of isolated statements, fact and fiction tangled together, indistinguishable.

  And sometimes she’d stay late and perch on the edge of his desk, his arm brushing up against her leg until he moved his chair a few inches away. He was careful to keep the distance, but he can’t say he didn’t notice. He can’t say only now, and only to himself, that she’d tongue-tie him, his throat dry. And then the kiss, the thing that should have ended all their talks and he probably should have blown her off after that, or least discouraged her in earnest, but he didn’t. He didn’t think about the kiss, the way her fingers sought his skin between the buttons of his shirt, the warmth of her skin, the confusion in her face that he’d turn her away—she’d been so sure he wouldn’t. No, he avoided the corner of his own brain where that kiss stayed, wedged between his first blow job (Melissa Kinney, seventeen, on the railroad trestle) and his last sexual encounter before meeting Alecia (in the bathroom at the QB and all he remembered was her legs wrapped around him, her back against the stall door—he couldn’t have even told you if it was the men’s room or not). It shone there in that corner, bright like the sun, only ever to be examined in periphery.

  Then she came back one day like it never happened, asking him, did you know that Nietzsche died because he saved a horse? And hanging on his answer like he had any idea what the hell she was talking about and they were back, the way they were before the kiss.

  She made him feel.

  It was this admission that pushed him into the woods, plowing through the underbrush, the thickets stuck to his pants, his legs, the way he plundered the depths of his mind, wondering if what everyone was saying about him was true. Sometimes he’d stop, his hands on his knees, and suck wind, his lungs bursting, and wonder if that was actually the thing. He wasn’t guilty of the things people said he was, but he wasn’t not guilty, either.

  Except he didn’t kill her.

  He was thinking about this, his guilty-but-not-guilty acts, when he saw a flash of something in front of him. A quick but deliberate movement, that of a person, not an animal in the thick, off to the left. He pushed his way through a wild, sticking raspberry bush, his neck suddenly sweating. He hadn’t come into the woods to find her. But he hadn’t considered what wo
uld happen if he did.

  Would he call the police again? He stopped, considering. How would it look? What would she say? What would she do?

  He heard a loud snap then, and a low rumbling groan.

  Tentatively, he called out, “Lucia?” his voice shaking and wobbly. God he was so stupid, everyone would think so. How do you explain to people that growing up in the woods meant the woods became your only safe haven, the sounds of birds and the smell of far-off babbling creeks, the dew condensing on all the green leaves and the late afternoon sunlight filtering through the canopy of branches were things that felt like home, when home wasn’t a place he could go. He was safe here.

  Except when he wasn’t.

  Another snap, another voice. He picked up his pace, pushing at the brush in front of him. He arms being scratched by pricker bushes as he pushed into a clearing, then instinctively ducking back.

  He expected to see her, her white hair, her black jacket, that pale skin. Instead he saw a man, crouched on the log, a knife in his hand, skimming across something in his lap, the blood running down his shin. An animal. A fish. A process Nate knew on instinct, and if he kept going, behind the man, behind the log, he’d bet he would find a campfire. He was cleaning a fish for dinner.

  Nate pushed his back up against the tree, his hands cold, his heart thumping. He peered around the trunk again. The man looked familiar, older, dirty, his head bowed so low Nate couldn’t see his face. Nate crouched down, a stick cracking under his boot, and the man’s head snapped up, swinging side to side, his eyes almost meeting Nate’s, and Nate felt himself suck in his breath. Suddenly, he recognized him.

  It was Jimmy Hamm.

  • • •

  He was making a sandwich in Tripp’s kitchen when he heard the front door bang shut and Tripp’s quick steps cross the living room into the kitchen.

  “Hey,” Tripp said, pausing in the doorway like he was the guest, and Nate waved back awkwardly. He never knew what to say to Tripp; it had been days since they’d seen each other. The investigation was ongoing, especially now with Lucia missing for a week. Nate hadn’t asked about it, and even if he did, Tripp surely wouldn’t talk about it, so typically they fell into talking about baseball or something else utterly inane.