Murder of Angels

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “I know the things you dream about,” she says. “I know you see things too, even when you’re awake.”

  Daria stands up, stands staring at Niki, the panties in one hand and she rubs at her forehead with the other.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “You know what it means,” Niki says and turns back to the child and his dog because it’s easier than the bright flecks of anger and resentment in Daria’s eyes. The dog is definitely looking at her, stealing glances at the high bedroom window whenever it knows for certain that its boy won’t notice.

  “No, Niki, I don’t. That’s probably why I asked you.”

  “You try to be just like everyone else, like you don’t know better. You want me to believe you don’t know better.”

  Daria sighs loudly and clicks her tongue once against the roof of her mouth, but Niki doesn’t turn around. The child throws the Frisbee, and it sails twenty or thirty feet before the dog leaps into the air and catches it.

  “I know you feel alone,” Daria says, and Niki can hear how hard she’s trying not to get pissed off, the fraying calm in her voice. “I understand that it would probably make you feel better if you were right and I did see these…these things. But I don’t, Niki, and I’m not going to lie to you and say that I do.”

  “You have dreams,” Niki says, sounding defensive and wishing that she didn’t.

  “Yes, I have dreams. I have nightmares, and sometimes they’re really fucking awful, but what the hell do you expect?”

  “You were there,” Niki whispers, close to tears again, and she’s sick of crying, doesn’t want to start crying again because Daria will only think it’s a trick to get her to listen, to get her to stay. “You were there, and you saw what happened in Spyder’s house.”

  “She hung herself, Niki. That’s what I saw that night. That’s all I saw.”

  “I know you’re lying to me, Dar,” and now she is crying, and Niki smacks the window once with her bandaged hand. The glass quivers in its frame, but doesn’t break, and the noise makes the dog and the child pause and look up at her. “You’re scared to death and so you pretend it never happened, that you never saw anything you can’t explain away or—”

  “That’s not true, Niki.”

  “Yes, goddamn it, it is true,” and Niki turns to face Daria, speaking through clenched teeth, and both her hands are balled into small, hard fists. “It’s true and you know it’s true. And no matter how many therapists you send me to or how many pills I take, it’s still going to be true. Spyder didn’t kill herself, and you know that as well as I do.”

  “I’ve heard enough of this, Niki. I have a plane to catch,” and Daria stuffs the panties back into the overnight bag and zips it shut. “Some of us have to live in the real world.”

  “Fuck you, Daria,” and Niki wipes her nose with the back of her bandaged hand. There’s a small, dark splotch of blood seeping through the gauze where it covers her palm, so she knows she’s ripped the stitches loose.

  “You can’t stop me from going back,” she says. “Not if I mean to.”

  Daria picks up the bag and glances at the clock beside the bed, the clock and the vase of lilies, then back at Niki.

  “No, you’re wrong about that, too. I could stop you. You’re not well, and if I thought it was the right thing to do, I could stop you. You’d still be in that fucking hospital, if I’d let them keep you. But I couldn’t stand that, knowing you were locked up in there like some kind of a lab animal.”

  “I have to go back,” Niki says, and she knows she’s fucked it all up again, too late to even hope that Daria will listen to anything else she says, too late to stop her from walking away. Walking out, and now she’s pleading, the fury drained from her as quickly as it came, and she wishes that her hand didn’t hurt so damn much and then maybe she could think more clearly. “I don’t want to, but I have to. I don’t ever want to see that place again, I swear to god.”

  “You’re a grown woman, Niki. You have to make your own decisions. I love you, but I can’t play these games with you, and I can’t spend the rest of my life trying to be sure you never hurt yourself again.”

  “I don’t want to go,” Niki says, and when Daria turns away from her, heading for the bedroom door, for the stairs and the airport, she jumps to her feet, and “Please,” she begs. “Please, Daria. I don’t want to have to go back there alone. I don’t think I can face it alone.”

  “Then stay here. I’ll be back in two weeks, and I’ll call you when I get to the hotel.” Then she takes her bag and leaves Niki standing by herself in the bedroom.

  “I don’t want to,” she says, after Daria and Marvin have stopped talking downstairs, after the sound of the front door opening and slamming closed again, whispering the words for herself because there’s no one to hear her now except the ghost of Danny Boudreaux smirking from a corner. A few drops of blood have leaked through the gauze and dripped from her hand to the hardwood floor; in a little while she goes back to the window seat, and the boy with the Frisbee and the dog have gone, if they were ever there at all.

  And later, two hours, two and a half, and by now, she thinks, Daria’s plane is probably in the air, somewhere high above the clouds over Arizona or New Mexico, winging its way far from Niki and everything she represents. And in the big house on Steiner Street, Niki has finished packing her own suitcase, has only left the bedroom once on a quick trip down the hall for the stuff that she needed from the bathroom—toothpaste and her toothbrush, maxi pads and deodorant, a bottle of shampoo—and she’s trying to remember anything she might have forgotten, anything she might possibly need, when Marvin finally comes upstairs to check on her.

  “Hey there,” he says. “I would have looked in on you sooner, but Daria said to give you some time alone.” And then his eyes are on the open suitcase instead of her. “You’re really serious about this, aren’t you.”

  “I already called the airport. I couldn’t get a flight out until almost nine tonight.”

  “She told me not to stop you, Niki.”

  “I don’t think she gives a shit what I do, as long as I stay out of her way while I’m doing it.”

  “You don’t believe that. I know you don’t believe that,” and he comes in, sits down on the bed beside the suitcase. Niki closes it and the zipper sticks twice before she gets it to work right.

  “Whatever. It doesn’t matter.”

  Marvin scratches at his chin, and “Jesus,” he sighs. “Can we please just talk about this for a minute. Maybe Daria has decided it’s a good idea to let you go wandering off alone—”

  “I’m not ‘wandering off’ anywhere. I know exactly where I’m going. When I’m finished, I’ll try to come back.”

  “What do you mean, you’ll try?”

  “I mean I’ll try, that’s all,” she says, then wrestles the heavy suitcase to the floor between them and sits down on the edge of the bed next to Marvin. “In the kitchen, I told you everything I could, everything I know for sure.” But the way Marvin’s looking at her makes her feel like she hasn’t tried to tell him anything, like she’s holding back, even though she isn’t, and she wishes he would stop.

  “This is so totally fucked up. You know that, right? I mean, yesterday you almost died on us, Niki.”

  “I feel better now.”

  “You look like Death with a hangover. Daria must have been thinking with her ass, taking you out of the hospital like that.”

  “Look, I asked you to help me, and you said that you couldn’t, so the least you can do is lay off. I know what I did, Marvin, and I know what I look like. All I said was I feel better.”

  Marvin kicks once at the suitcase, halfhearted kick with the toe of his right sneaker and the bag rocks back on two of its small plastic wheels, but doesn’t fall over.

  “I’ll be okay,” Niki says. “I’ll let you know when I get into Denver.”

  Fresh confusion on Marvin’s face to make her flinch and “Denver?” he asks. “
I thought you said you had to get to Birmingham.”

  “I have to go to Colorado first. I have to see Mort and Theo, and I have to look for something I left there.”

  Marvin glances up at the ceiling, white paint and plaster and a jagged, hairline crack from an earthquake last spring that no one’s gotten around to having repaired. He closes his eyes and Niki wonders what he’s been taking to stay awake.

  “I want to believe you,” he says. “I’m sure you probably think that’s a load, but it isn’t. I want to think this isn’t all some twisted fantasy bullshit your brain’s spitting up because it isn’t wired the right way or it’s not getting enough dopamine or whatever. I’m trying so hard, Niki—”

  “Don’t, Marvin. You can’t force yourself into belief. I never should have told you. I should have kept my mouth shut. None of this even has anything to do with you.”

  He opens his eyes, clears his throat and turns towards her. “Before, the girl I was taking care of before you…” and he pauses, standing here at the brink of some confidence because he thinks he owes her one, tit-for-tat, reciprocal confession, and I should stop him, she thinks. I should stop him now before this goes any further and it’s too late to go back. But he’s already talking again, and she doesn’t have the courage to do anything but sit on the bed and listen.

  “The girl before you, I lost her. She was only fifteen, and she’d already tried to kill herself four times. She said she saw wolves whenever she was left alone—not real wolves, but that’s what she always called them because she said there wasn’t a word for what they were. She told me they’d come after her because she was really one of them, but she’d been born wrong. That’s exactly the way she put it. ‘I was born wrong.’

  “I hadn’t been with her a month when she broke a mirror and slashed her throat. Her parents were both at work, and I couldn’t keep pressure on the wound and reach the fucking telephone. So this fifteen-year-old girl bleeds to death right there in my arms. And the whole time, I could see how scared she was. I knew, I fucking knew she thought the wolves were coming, that she could see them coming, and this time it didn’t matter if I was there or not.”

  He stops, breathless, his Adam’s apple and a spot beneath his left eye twitching, and Niki realizes that he’s holding her hands now; Marvin holding both her hands in his like he’s about to kiss her or get down on one knee and propose marriage. Like he’s afraid of losing her, too, the same way he lost the girl who saw wolves, the same way she lost Spyder and Danny, and maybe if he can just hold on to her long enough it doesn’t have to happen.

  “I’ve never seen wolves,” Niki says uncertainly, all she can think of, and the silence between them so absolute it’s starting to hurt, starting to embarrass, and now there are tears leaking from Marvin’s eyes and winding slowly down his stubbled cheeks.

  “I know that, and maybe that other girl, maybe she never saw any wolves either, but that’s not the point. She believed she saw wolves, Niki, and in the end that’s all that mattered.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Niki says, thinking of the things Spyder thought she saw, not wanting to see him cry, and he squeezes her hands tighter. It hurts, but she doesn’t say so; she squeezes back instead, gazes past Marvin at Danny Boudreaux staring at them from his corner. Some wild expression stretched like a latex Halloween mask across his cold and irrefutable ghost’s face, jealousy or hope or a wicked, secretive smile, no way for her to be sure, and then he’s gone and there’s nothing but a smudgy bit of shadow left behind.

  “I can’t believe what you told me, Niki, so I’m just gonna have to take your word for it. If I can’t see what you see, then I can at least trust you. I’m not going to let you do this alone.”

  And when he finally lets go of her hands, releasing them slowly like he’s afraid she’s going to run, all the dark blood that’s leaked through Niki’s torn stitches and raveling bandages spills out between their fingers and trickles onto the bed. Marvin’s face goes slack, then taut and sick, realizing what he’s done to her, horror vying with apology for control, and he opens his mouth to say something, but “No,” she says, places her good hand over his lips and smiles a smile she doesn’t have to fake. “I’m okay. It doesn’t hurt all that bad. I think I’m going to be okay now.”

  While Marvin packs and calls the airline, Niki goes back to the upstairs bathroom to look at her hand. Down the hall, past the room where Daria keeps her record collection and her guitars, and the bathroom is big and white and smells faintly of Dow Scrubbing Bubbles and strongly of the bowl of lavender potpourri on the back of the commode. Clean smells, and Niki wonders how the bathroom would smell if Daria hadn’t hired Marvin. The lion-footed, cast-iron tub and all those little hexagonal tiles on the floor, a narrow, stained-glass window above the tub so she can see the last of the day, and she sits down on the toilet seat and begins unwrapping the gauze. Marvin wanted to do it, but she refused, so he fussed with the bloody bedclothes instead, carting them off to the laundry hamper and apologizing over and over even though she asked him not to; the stitches torn before he squeezed her hand, anyway, and it’s something she wants to do herself.

  The entire palm side of the dressing is stained, some of the blood already gone dry and stiff, and she unwinds it slowly, winces when she gets near the end and some of the gauze has stuck to her skin, stuck to the crusty edges of the hole in her hand. Niki lets the bandage fall to the floor, a sloppy pile of crimson and maroon and white at her feet. The stitches have come loose, all eight of them, and she knows that Marvin’s probably going to insist she see a doctor again before they leave town. Niki stares at her hand, trying to remember exactly what did and didn’t happen in the restroom at Cafe Alhazred: the swelling and whatever grew inside it, the thing that had burrowed into her flesh, Danny, and then someone shouting and pounding angrily on the door.

  Niki reaches for a coral pink washcloth hanging on a rack near the tub and wraps it around her hand, squeezes it and grits her teeth against the pain.

  Was any of it real, the squirming, transparent child of her infection, something she saw or only something that she thought she saw?

  Do you really think there’s any difference? and she hopes that voice is only hers, her own voice from her own sick head, because she honestly isn’t in the mood for Danny Boudreaux right now. No time for anything that might slow her down, no hope but movement, and she stands up and goes to the sink, twists one of the brass knobs, and in a moment hot water is gurgling into the porcelain basin.

  “You wanted her, and now she has you, forever,” exactly what Danny said at Alhazred, and that’s what the face in the mirror says when she looks up from the sink. But it isn’t her face in the glass, and it isn’t Danny’s either, this haggard young man with eyes like stolen fire, eyes like the last breath rattling out of a dying man’s chest, but then he’s gone, and she’s staring into her own dark and frightened eyes.

  Niki raises her left hand and cautiously places her fingertips against the mirror, half expecting her hand to pass straight through, nothing solid there to stop her. But it’s just a mirror, and the silvered glass is smooth and cold and reflects nothing but the lost girl she’s become, the lost woman, and she looks back down at the water filling the sink.

  “All I have do is make it to the airport,” she says, wishing she were already in Boulder, and so many opportunities to back out had come and passed her by; over the Rocky Mountains and safe for a while with Mort and Theo before she has to see this shit through to the end. Niki shuts off the tap and lowers her right hand slowly into the clear, steaming water; it doesn’t hurt half so much as she expected, and she wonders whether that’s good or bad, watches with more curiosity than concern as her blood starts to turn the water red. Just like Moses, she thinks, and it annoys her that she can’t remember which number plague that was.

  “How are you doing in here?” Marvin asks, and she turns her head towards the bathroom door, making sure he’s really there and really him before she answers.

>   “I think I’ll live,” and he comes closer, then, scowls down at her hand, and by now the water looks more like cherry Kool-Aid.

  “Damn. You realize we’re going to have to get that stitched closed again before we leave.”

  “That’s what I thought you’d say,” and she lifts her hand out of the water so he can look at it more closely.

  “Yeah, well, bleeding to death would probably be a lot more inconvenient. God, Niki, how did you even do this?”

  “I already told you that,” and she did, but Marvin shakes his head anyway.

  “Well, at least it doesn’t look as if there’s any infection setting in,” and he opens the medicine cabinet, his own little ER stashed away in there, and takes out a sterile gauze pad and a roll of surgical tape, a plastic bottle of hydrogen peroxide. “This will probably do until we can get you to a doctor, if you’ll go easy on this hand.”

  “The flight’s at nine,” she reminds him.

  “We’re not going to miss the flight, and if we do, we’ll get another one.”

  “I want to ask you something,” but then he pours the peroxide over her hand and it stings, foams the ugly color of funeral-parlor carnations. “Shit, Marvin,” she hisses and tries to pull her hand away.

  “Don’t be a pussy. What do you want to ask me?”

  Niki waits until the stinging starts to fade, until he’s rinsed her hand and dabbed it dry with a fresh washcloth and has started bandaging it again.

  “It’s kind of personal,” but he only shrugs.

  “Sex, drugs, or politics?” he asks, and “Neither,” she says, and he glances up at her.

  “Then it has to be religion, right?” and Niki nods. “I was Catholic,” he continues, “once upon a time. Ancient history.”

  “So you don’t believe in God anymore?”

  “I believe we’ll find out when the time comes,” he says and takes a small pair of scissors from the medicine cabinet to snip the sticky white surgical tape. “Whether we want to or not.”

  She doesn’t say anything for a moment, watches him working on her hand while she weighs words in her head, words and their consequences, and she can tell it makes Marvin feel better that there’s finally something he can do for her.