Daughter of Hounds

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Don’t talk to people you don’t know.”

  “Even the steward?”

  “No, Emmie, not even the steward.”

  “But what if she’s strange?” she asks, still watching their reflection in the round mirror on the wall.

  “The damn train’s late,” Deacon says, though Emmie’s pretty sure it isn’t. She knows it means he doesn’t want to talk about strange people anymore.

  “You’re gonna miss me,” she says. Deacon shrugs his broad shoulders and takes another swallow of Diet Pepsi, then wipes his lips on the back of his left hand.

  “Yes, you will, too,” she tells his reflection. That other girl’s lips move in unison with hers, the girl with the same yellow eyes and shoulder-length black hair and the same new pink-and-white, zebra-striped fur coat as Emmie. Maybe it’s not a mirror at all, she thinks. Maybe it’s a window. That’s an old thought, one that she’s never even told Deacon about, that mirrors might really be windows, that there might be some other world with some other her, and every now and then the two of them just happen to pass by the same windows and see each other and play this mocking game.

  “You got the money I gave you?”

  “Yeah,” Emmie replies, suddenly bored with the mirror and looking down at her shoelaces instead. “I got it.”

  “And your cell phone’s charged?”

  “Mostly. It’s charged enough.”

  “When you get back,” her father says, setting the empty can down on the station floor between his feet, “we’ll bake some of those snickerdoodle things you like. I’ll take a day off and we’ll see a movie or something like that. Maybe we’ll drive out to the Beavertail Lighthouse and watch the waves. What do you think?”

  “Sure. I guess so,” Emmie sighs, not bothering with the least bit of enthusiasm because she’s never thought watching the waves out at Beavertail Point is even half as much fun as her father seems to think it is, and she kicks at her backpack with the toes of her boots. “I think the train’s late,” she says.

  “No, it’s not,” her father tells her, but he checks the clock on the wall anyway. “It’s not quite time yet.” Then he tugs at the zipper of Emmie’s coat and smiles. “How’s the new coat working out for you?” he asks. “Does Santa Claus have good taste or what?”

  “I know all about Santa Claus,” she says, and a small brown bird lands on the window ledge, flutters its wings, and then pecks at the sill.

  “Do you now?” Deacon asks, and he cocks one eyebrow and rubs at his chin, rubbing at the rough and mostly gray stubble growing there because he hasn’t shaved for a few days. She knows that he knows she doesn’t believe in Santa Claus anymore, and that he isn’t really surprised, but she doesn’t say so. She smiles for him and kicks her backpack again. “Well, hell,” he says. “I guess you also know all about getting too old for presents and toys and such, then, right?”

  “No. I’m still a kid,” she replies. “And kids get toys on Christmas, whether they believe in Santa Claus or not. It’s a rule.”

  “A rule? Now, I don’t know about that.”

  And then the train’s pulling into the station, right on time, give or take a minute here or there, and the woman behind the ticket counter is talking loudly over the PA, reciting destinations and train numbers. Some of the people in the waiting room have started getting to their feet, shuffling their bags about, talking among themselves the way people talk whenever something’s about to happen. And others, the ones who were already standing, are moving out onto the platform, out into the freezing Rhode Island morning. Emmie looks at the window again and realizes that all the noise has frightened the bird away.

  “I don’t have to go,” Emmie says, turning away from the window and towards her father. “I could stay with you.”

  “What’s wrong now?” Deacon asks her, the lines on his forehead wrinkling so she knows he’s worried or confused or both. “You’ve got your ticket, Emmie. And Sadie’s expecting you. All I’ve heard out of you for the last two weeks is how much you want to go to New York and see Sadie.”

  “But I could stay,” she says, glancing back at the window, the place where the bird had been. “I could stay if you wanted me to.”

  “Are you sick?” he asks and presses a palm to her forehead.

  “No. I’m not sick, Deacon. I’m fine.”

  “Then you’re being silly,” he says and picks her backpack up off the station floor, lifting it in a very decisive, end-of-discussion way. “I’ve got a lot of work to do this week. You’d have to spend half your winter break hanging around the shop with Jack.”

  “I like the shop,” she says so softly she’s almost whispering, wishing the bird had picked a different windowsill to land on.

  “You’d be bored out of your skull, and you’d drive him crazy in the bargain.”

  “I said I like the shop, Deacon.”

  “You like New York, too. And that’s where you’re going. I know how much you’ve been looking forward to this. You and Sadie both.”

  “Yeah,” Emmie sighs, admitting defeat, reluctantly admitting that Deacon’s right, but also starting to relax a little. Seeing the bird there she felt confused, trying to clearly recollect something that she’d spent a lot of time trying hard to forget, and then, remembering, she felt angry and guilty and scared. She wanted to go back home with Deacon and lock herself in her room, wanted to forget about trains and New York City. But now the small brown bird is gone, and it seems to have taken all those bad feelings with it, and she can look forward to the trip again. Now she feels silly, just like her father said, and she smiles up at him and points at the door to the platform.

  “I got a train to catch,” she says, just like someone in a movie would say.

  “You sure?” Deacon asks uncertainly. “If you really don’t want to go—”

  “I’m okay. I was worried about you, that’s all.”

  “Yeah? Well, don’t you do that. I’ll be cool as a moose, kiddo. I always am.”

  “Okay,” she says and smiles for him again. Emmie resists a last glance at the windowsill and lets Deacon lead her out into the cold, out onto the platform with all the other people.

  She was almost seven when the thing with the bird happened, the thing that there was no way to take back and, she’d discovered, apparently no way for her to forget about, either, no matter how hard she tried. Deacon said that’s how it always worked, that the harder you try to not remember something, the harder it is not to remember. “Just try not thinking of a white elephant sometime,” he would say, like she was supposed to know what he was talking about. It hadn’t been a white elephant. She’d never even seen a white elephant and thought he might have made them up. It had been a starling, a starling on a Saturday afternoon in October, the scraggly remains of the autumn leaves clinging stubbornly to the trees up and down Angell Street, all their bright colors turned dark and dull by the cold. Listening to the way they rustled against one another in the wind, Emmie imagined that’s what beetles would sound like, if beetles ever learned to talk.

  The big rhododendron bushes growing around the front of their house were still green, though the ferns were turning shades of yellow and brown and dying back for the winter. She was playing on the porch while her father watched television, and at first she mistook the sounds the bird was making for the dry, rustling noises of the dead leaves. She had brought all her dinosaurs, the ones that Sadie had sent her, down from upstairs, and she’d lined them up on the porch rail—the Styracosaurus and Triceratops, the Parasaurolophus and spiny Edmontonia, the Tyrannosaurus rex and the Apatosaurus rearing up, enormous on its hind legs. She wasn’t sure exactly what the dinosaurs were about to do, because she always liked it to be a surprise, whatever happened next, but she knew that there would be trouble. There was almost always trouble when she let the Tyrannosaurus too near the plant-eating dinosaurs.

  And then Emmie noticed the starling, lying in the grass not far from the bottommost step. It was watching her nervously w
ith its tiny black-bead eyes, and its breast feathers shimmered in the sunlight like oil on the road after a thunderstorm. Right off, she could tell that there was something wrong with it, the way the bird was holding its left wing crookedly, the way it was just lying there, watching her.

  “Fly away, bird,” she said, but it didn’t. She tried to ignore it and go back to playing with her dinosaurs, moving the Triceratops in between the Tyrannosaurus and the other herbivores. The meat-eater was huge and his mouth was filled with teeth like knives, but his belly was soft, and he was afraid of the Triceratops’ long horns. The frustrated Tyrannosaurus hissed, and the Triceratops let out a throaty bellow to say it wasn’t going away, and if the Tyrannosaurus wanted something to eat, it would have to look elsewhere.

  Down in the yard, the starling ruffled its feathers and hopped clumsily once or twice, then lay still again. Emmie looked over her shoulder at the front door and the living room window. She couldn’t see Deacon and thought that he might have gone to the bathroom or to get something from the kitchen. He’ll be back in a second, she told herself, and tried to concentrate on keeping the Tyrannosaurus from sneaking past the Triceratops.

  The starling ruffled its dark and speckled feathers again, flapped at the air with its right wing, and made a hoarse sort of whistling whooee sound.

  “Shut up, bird,” Emmie said. “Shut up and fly away.” The Triceratops lunged at the Tyrannosaurus, but her fingers slipped, because the starling was distracting her, and she knocked the horned dinosaur off the railing and into the ferns and rhododendron leaves below. “Shit,” she hissed, hissing like the hungry Tyrannosaurus, cursing the way Deacon does when he can’t find the remote control or whenever a lightbulb blows.

  Whooee, the starling whistled.

  “That’s your fault,” she scolded the bird, then looked again to see if her father had come back. He hadn’t, and now she’d have to go down the stone porch steps and dig about in the bushes for the escaped dinosaur. Now she’d have to walk past the starling.

  Whooee, it whistled, and then it made an anxious clicking sound and fluttered its right wing.

  “If you were a smart bird,” Emmie said, starting down the steps, “you wouldn’t fly into windows. If you were a smart bird you wouldn’t make so much noise.” As she got closer, the bird tried to hop away, but kept tumbling over in the grass and weeds. It was easy to catch the starling, and Emmie knelt in the shadow of the house and stroked its back with an index finger. The bird stared up at her with its black eyes and trembled in her hand. She could tell that its left wing was broken, and probably one of its legs, too, and there was blood and bird shit matted in its feathers. It was warm, and she could feel its heart beating, beating so fast it should burst.

  I ought to tell Deacon about you, she thought. Deacon would know what to do with a hurt bird. But the words in her head felt more like something she’d thought a long, long time ago than something that she was thinking right then. She’d forgotten all about the lost Triceratops; it was getting hard to think about anything but the way the bird’s heart was thumping against her palm, the fear in its glistening eyes, the way it trembled more when she touched it than when she didn’t.

  Gently she began to lift the wing that looked as if it might be broken, the left wing hanging limp and seemingly useless, but suddenly the starling stabbed at her hand with its sharp yellow beak. Emmie cried out, though she was more startled than hurt. Where the bird had pecked her, near the base of her thumb, there was blood, a single crimson drop welling out of her, growing larger and larger, and soon it would be running down her wrist and dripping onto the grass. She pictured the horns of the Triceratops piercing the leathery flesh of the Tyrannosaurus’ belly, gouging wounds to drive it away and maybe even kill it, because, she thought, if you kill something, it can never try to hurt you again.

  Deacon would know how to help you, bird.

  The bird’s heart was beating so fast now that Emmie couldn’t tell where one heartbeat ended and another began. They had blurred together into one seamless sensation traveling out of the injured starling and into her. She felt a little dizzy, a little sick to her stomach, but she felt something else, too, something that felt good. Something that made her heart beat faster, and all at once the rustling of the dead leaves and the faded colors of the trees and the smell of the autumn day—everything—grew so perfectly clear, it was as though she’d never heard or seen or smelled anything in her life, nothing before that moment but the dim shadows of things and never the things themselves.

  The front door creaked open, and she heard her father’s footsteps on the porch, and Emmie almost turned to see, almost turned to hold the bird and her bleeding hand out for him to fix, but the starling pecked her again, harder than before, drawing still more blood.

  And that’s when she closed her fingers tight around its body and squeezed. Her heart was racing, beating almost as fast as the bird’s had beaten, and the yard and Angell Street and the sky beyond the trees, all of it was so very loud, so vivid, so perfectly defined, that there was no room left inside her for the things that Deacon was saying. They were only another part of the whole, only splinters that would distract and ruin if she let them, splinters that would draw her back to that place where there was nothing but shadows waiting for her. Emmie squeezed even harder, breathless now at the ease with which the starling’s bones snapped in her hand, at the contrast between cool, dry feathers and the warmth and wet leaking out of the bird.

  Somewhere Deacon was telling her to drop it, drop it, drop it now over and over again. And then his hands were on her shoulders, pulling her up off her knees, shaking her so hard that her teeth clacked together and she bit her lip. The blood tasted almost as sweet and rich as chocolate syrup.

  And then it was over—just like that—and Angell Street was only a street again, and there was nothing at all remarkable in the sound of passing cars or a leaf blower or the wind whispering through the maple tree outside her house.

  “Drop it!” Deacon shouted again, and she did.

  She wanted to tell him that she was sorry, because she was, because the starling was lying dead at her feet, as broken and empty as anything she’d ever seen, and she’d done that. She needed him to understand that she’d only wanted to help the bird, that its wing was broken, and it couldn’t fly, and she’d wanted to find Deacon so that they could fix it. But her father was too busy cursing and dragging her up the stairs to listen, too busy to hear what she couldn’t quite remember how to say. He dragged her past the dinosaurs, across the porch, and into the house. She almost tripped going over the threshold, but he caught her. He slammed the front door, and the lock clicked like breaking bones between his strong fingers.

  He’s going to kill me, she thought, certain that’s just what she deserved for murdering a poor crippled starling, an eye for an eye, like she’d once heard someone say on TV, but then they were moving again, all the way down the hall to the bathroom. Deacon made her sit on the toilet seat while he ran hot water in the sink and found a bar of Ivory soap and a washcloth and a bottle of peroxide, and by the time he turned back to her she was crying.

  He told her that he was sorry, held her and said that he hadn’t meant to scare her, that he was frightened, too, and didn’t understand. He was afraid, he said, and she needed to explain what had happened. But Emmie was sobbing too hard to talk, and after a little while Deacon stopped trying to make her. Instead, he used the soap and washcloth and hot water to clean all the blood and bird shit and feathers off her sticky hands, then cleaned out the places where the starling’s beak had torn her skin, dabbed at the cuts with the peroxide, and that made her cry even harder. He put two Band-Aids on her hand, one across the other, hiding her wounds.

  Later, after Emmie had stopped crying and he’d scrubbed her face and helped her change her clothes, after he’d brought her dinosaurs inside (except for the Triceratops, which had still been hiding in the bushes) and put the dead bird inside a green garbage bag, there was a tri
p to the emergency room and a tetanus shot.

  “Birds and people can get a lot of the same diseases,” he told her while they were waiting to see a doctor. “You should always leave them alone, especially the sick ones.” And he did one of his magic tricks for her, the one where he pulls a nickel out of Emmie’s ear and then puts it in his mouth and spits out a quarter.

  That night she lay in bed, her arm aching from the tetanus shot, the Band-Aid cross gone and her hand wrapped up in gauze like an Egyptian mummy’s, and she listened to Deacon talking on the phone downstairs. She knew that Sadie was on the other end, even though she couldn’t make out many of the words. The words didn’t matter. She could tell from the tone of his voice. Emmie lay there, listening, waiting for sleep and not wanting it to come, afraid the dead starling might return when her eyes were shut. It would get out of the green garbage bag and sit on her windowsill, pecking at the glass, watching her while she slept. It would call out, Whooee, whooee, so all the other starlings in Providence would come and do the same. If it could, it would change her dreams and make them into nightmares instead. It would haunt her, so she wouldn’t ever be able to forget what she’d done. She listened to her father on the phone and waited for the birds. And the last thing Emmie heard before finally falling asleep was Deacon crying, and part of her wished that the starlings would come, that their hard yellow beaks would shatter the windowpane, and the birds would carry her aloft and away somewhere she’d never have to hear that sound again.

  It’s only been a short while since the train left Kingston when Emmie Silvey first notices the woman watching her, the woman seated on the other side of the aisle and one row forward. Emmie’s been staring out the window, saving the book in her backpack for later on, when she gets bored with Connecticut. They’ve just passed the Mystic station, a handful of white sailboats bobbing listlessly in the little harbor, a few fishing boats moored at weathered piers, the wide gull-littered sky stretched out like a painting above the water and the shore. She’s sitting on the landward side of the car and was glancing across the aisle for a better view when she caught the woman looking back at her. Not merely in her direction, and certainly not at anything behind her, but directly at her. When the woman sees that Emmie’s caught on, she smiles and doesn’t look away. The woman has curly brown hair tied back in a long ponytail, and she’s wearing a black leather blazer with a gray turtleneck sweater underneath. Emmie’s close enough to see that the woman’s eyes are a pale hazel-brown; she doesn’t return the smile, but goes back to looking out the window, wishing that there were someone sitting in the empty seat next to her. A big man with a red beard and wind-chapped cheeks, perhaps, or an old woman who might once have been a schoolteacher or a librarian, someone like that in the vulnerable space between Emmie and the brown-eyed woman.