Hollow

by Rhonda Parrish

  “I . . .” He pauses, looking around the abandoned hospital. “I believe you believe that.”

  I laugh without humour. “Let’s go. There’s nothing here.”

  “Okay.”

  As we turn to leave I catch movement out of the corner of my eye and turn to see a magpie, the magpie. It’s perched on top of the scorched doorframe to the left of the nurse’s room. It looks at me, its beady eyes holding my gaze, even when it twitches and tilts its head. “Kek kek kek,” it says, then wipes its beak on the door frame. “Kek kek kek.”

  “Cool magpie!” Sevren breathes and I smile. I’d halfway begun to think it was a ghost. Having Sevren see it makes me happy . . . and sad. It might have been nice to have something that was mine alone. Something like a ghostly magpie as a pet or guardian.

  “Kek yek,” it says.

  “Yeah, he’s pretty cool all right.”

  “It’s almost like he’s talking to us. Are you talking to us, Mr. Magpie?” Sevren says, taking a step toward the bird. The bird ruffles his feathers, plumping up to about twice his usual size and making a cooing-gargling noise deep in his throat. Sevren laughs. “It is like he’s talking to us. That’s pretty fun.”

  “Yeah,” I say, thinking back to all the times I’ve seen it. “Maybe it’s trying to communicate.”

  “In that case,” Sevren says, “do you think it wants us to go through the doorway, or stay away from the doorway?”

  “How should I know?” I ask, a little more sharply than I’d intended. “I don’t speak magpie.”

  “Kek kek kek!”

  “What’s that, Lassie?” Sevren says, taking a step toward the bird. “Timmy’s trapped in the well? Is that it, boy?”

  I roll my eyes. “Really?”

  Sevren laughs again. “Sure, why not?”

  “Well, because—” Something prickles my brain. Lassie. A kids’ show. Damn it, Amy! “Shit!”

  Sevren frowns and looks at me. “Well, I hardly think it’s worth swearing about—”

  “No, not you, Amy.” I check my phone. It’s almost noon. How has so much time passed already? It doesn’t seem possible. “Shit. I am a terrible sister.”

  “What?” The look on Sevren’s face might be funny if I were in a different state of mind. “Because you don’t speak magpie? Amy’s not a magpie.”

  “Ha ha. Very funny. I was supposed to take her to a movie this morning. One that started forty-five minutes ago.”

  “Oh. Oh. That’s not good.”

  “Right?”

  “But mistakes happen. You can tell her that your magical camera made you for—ow!”

  My fist hurts a bit from where I punched Sevren in the shoulder. I hope his arm hurts as much. “I’m not in the mood, huh?”

  “Fine.” He rubs his shoulder, looking at me with a grumpy expression on his face. “You could have said. There’s no need to hit me. Gawd. I’m sure Amy will understand.”

  “I don’t think so,” I say, turning back to the staircase down into the basement. “She’s been trying to get my attention a lot lately, but I’ve been . . . well, like you said, dealing with stuff.”

  “Look, Morgan.” Sevren’s hand on my arm stops me and I turn to face him. I can see the magpie walking along the top of the door frame over his shoulder. “You’re already late. We might as well see what’s going on beyond the doorway. Lassie wants us to, can’t you tell?”

  “I—” I chew my lip and then shake my head. “I can’t. I want to, but I can’t. If there’s more than one room back in there I can’t stay to find it. I promised Amy I’d take her to the movies. If I hurry maybe we can catch the next show, or something.”

  “You’re the one who brought me here in the first place.” Sevren’s voice has an edge to it I’m not used to hearing. “You’re the one who wanted to explore—”

  “Dude, I think this place is starting to get to you. I have to go make this up to Amy, but if you want, we can come back. We can totally come back. Maybe we can even bring the camera with us next time, but I’ve got to run.”

  “Fine,” Sevren says, though his brows remain furrowed. “Let’s go.”

  He stomps out of the main holding area and down the stairs. His shoulders are tense and his back unnaturally straight as we walk.

  Chapter Seventeen

  BY THE TIME we get outside again, Sevren seems much more himself, and when he turns to look at me, flipping his bangs out of his eyes, his face is relaxed, his posture the right amount of slouched. “We good?” he says, his eyes flitting back and forth, scanning my face.

  I nod. “We’re good. I’m happy to go back later—”

  “Sure, I mean, I’m sorry about that. I wanted to see what was behind door number three.”

  I nod. “Tomorrow? Right now I’ve got to go beg forgiveness from a seven-year-old.”

  “Sounds fun.”

  “Wanna come? There’s always room for one more in the doghouse.”

  “No, no, I’m good.”

  As I jog back home, I hear the distinctive gurgling noise of the pale magpie and look up to see it watching me from a nearby tree branch. It tilts its head to look at me, then spreads its wings and flies off, back toward the hospital. The sunlight shines through the white of its wingtips, giving it an even more ethereal appearance than usual.

  “I’ll go back,” I say to its retreating tail, “just not right yet.”

  Then, feeling silly for talking to a bird, not to mention believing it’s trying to communicate with me, I take a deep breath and go inside my house. “Amy?”

  I stand in the kitchen, ears straining for a reply. There is none. I can hear Mom moving around in the living room, so I peek around the corner. The light in the house is much dimmer than outside and it takes my eyes a moment to adjust. Unfortunately, a moment is all it takes for Mom to start. “Morgan. Where have you been?”

  “Out. I was out with Sev—”

  “Your sister was looking for you. She was very upset, said you promised to take her to the movies.”

  “I did. I didn’t mean to be gone so long. Where is she? Maybe we can make the next show if we hurry.”

  “Your father took her.” Mom’s expression softens a bit and I brace myself for the guilt train I know is about to run me over. “Morgan, she was crushed. She’d been looking forward to going—”

  My chest feels constricted, like a giant fist is closing around it, not letting me breathe right and pushing my lungs up into my throat. My eyes burn with guilty tears as I nod. “I know. I didn’t mean—”

  “I know you didn’t, but you’re her big sister. She looks up to you. She wants to spend time with you.”

  Guilt nibbles at me like a rat with cheese, but the way Mom is looking at me flavours it with irritation. “It’s not like I don’t know that already,” I think bitterly. “You don’t need to make me feel worse about it.” But I don’t say it. None of it. I swallow the words, like I always swallow the words, and nod. “I forgot,” I say. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “That won’t make her feel better.”

  I don’t know what to say anymore, so I don’t say anything. Instead I turn on my heel and stomp to my bedroom. “That won’t make her feel better,” I mimic under my breath as I cross the living room in record time. “Gee Mom, thanks for pointing that out.”

  I storm into my bedroom and slam the door. It stirs up a breeze which lifts the bottoms of the posters on my walls and releases them to flutter back down.

  Then I see it.

  My vanity mirror is covered with pictures I’ve acquired over the years. Pictures of me and Sevren, me and Amy, me and Aric. Even pictures of landscapes I’d thought were pretty. Some of the pictures are actual photographs but many are images I’ve ripped from magazines. I’d turned the mirror into a giant collage of all the people and things I love. All but the very centre of it, so that when I needed it there was a mirrored surface for me to see myself in. But there, in the very centre of the vacant spot I’d left in the mirror, is a photog
raph.

  I pull it off the glass. It had been stuck there with a glob of pink bubble gum. The gum isn’t totally hard yet, and it sticks to the picture when I pull, stretching and leaving long strings in its wake.

  It’s a photograph of Amy. Amy with sad eyes and her tongue jutted out angrily. The background is my room, and the paper it’s printed on identifies it as having come from the camera I’d found in the hospital.

  Nice camera, she’d scrawled on the white border at the bottom of the photograph. Maybe if u have a pic of me u wont forget me nxt time!!!

  I feel stretched as thin as the gum Amy’d used to stick the photograph to the mirror. Like, if one more bad thing happens, I’ll snap. Pop like a bubble.

  I sit on the edge of my bed, feel the springs give beneath my weight. Under my fingers, the familiar textures of my patchwork quilt. I grab a fistful of it, will myself to find some comfort, some serenity in it, in the quilt I’ve had as long as I can remember, the one my grandmother sewed for me, but there is nothing there.

  Curl up and cry, a voice in my head says. My voice. But another voice, equally mine, gets angry at that. You’re stronger than that, it says, and I want to believe it. I want to believe it but people have been telling me how strong I am ever since the accident and I’ve never once felt it.

  What I wouldn’t give to have Aric here right now. He always seemed to sense when something was wrong, and he’d come over, put his pudgy arms around me, and say, “I love you, Morgan” like they were the easiest words in the world to speak, and then he’d scamper back off to whatever he’d been doing, like nothing had ever happened. But I always felt better for it. Always.

  But he is gone. And it’s my fault.

  I never do anything right. I want to scream it, to stomp it, to cut it into my skin, but I do none of that. Instead I sit here. Hollow. My thoughts and emotions whirl around and around, filling the shell of my body.

  I don’t know how much time passes like that before I think to call someone. To talk to someone so I can still the hornet’s nest inside me. But who? Sevren would be the natural choice but he doesn’t believe me about the camera, so he’ll think I’m over-reacting to Amy’s picture. And maybe I am, but I don’t want to hear that right now.

  I could call Marcus. I haven’t seen him since he left on Thursday. If I call him and he’s friendly and normal, maybe I can convince myself I’m wrong about the camera, but if he’s not?

  I stare at the camera. It stares back, unblinking from the middle of my dresser. Suddenly, I can’t stand the sight of it anymore. I jump up from the bed and cram it into my backpack. But I don’t want to even be in the same room with it, so I stomp out to the back door and hang my backpack on a coat hook. At least it will be handy for when Sevren and I return to the hospital.

  “Honestly, Morgan—” Mom shouts from behind her closed door. “You sound like a herd of elephants.”

  I bite back a response that would be sure to get me grounded, slam my bedroom door behind me, and lie face down on my bed.

  To hell with everything, I think, and lacking a better plan I try with moderate success to lose myself in games on my phone until dinnertime. Anything to try and distract myself, to escape the panic I can feel growing within me. What has happened to Amy?

  Chapter Eighteen

  IT SHOULD BE nice. Fun even. We so rarely get to eat a meal together, all four of us. Dad has the evening off and Mom feels up to joining us at the table rather than having dinner in her room. It should be a joy, but it’s not.

  My parents are struggling to bring Amy and me into the conversation, and their awkward attempts to engage us make the tension at the table even more obvious, if that’s possible. Amy is shoving her peas around on her plate, mushing them into her mashed potatoes, and only looking up to shoot venomous darts at me with her eyes. For my part, I can’t stop watching Amy, trying to figure out how much of her attitude is because I forgot our movie date and how much, if any, could be blamed on the camera.

  Amy is angry, that much is clear, but so far she hasn’t done anything but glare at me. She hasn’t taken even a single veiled jab at me, and when I apologised for missing the movie all she did was shrug.

  I don’t know what I was expecting exactly, but it wasn’t that. Not by a long shot.

  “So, how was the movie?” Mom asks, looking across the table at Amy.

  Amy looks at me, her eyes narrowed, brow furrowed, and lips tense. When she shifts her gaze to Mom, her features relax and her lips curl up into a smile that wouldn’t fool anyone. “Good. It was really good.”

  “Your dad liked it too, maybe we can all go watch it again—”

  “No thanks,” Amy says, looking back down at her plate and pinning a stray pea beneath her fork. She presses down on it slowly, as though testing it, and then with one violent motion, smushes it. Pea guts press up between the fork’s tines, ooze out from the edges.

  “I think—” I start, but I don’t get to finish my sentence. Everything Amy has been holding in chooses that exact moment to burst through. Explode.

  “You think?” she yells. Her face is twisted up into something that looks like a feral version of itself. Crumpled, red, and wrinkled. Flecks of saliva fly from her lips and a vein throbs at her temple.

  She’s too young to have a visibly throbbing vein, I think irrationally as Amy shoves her chair back from the table.

  Everything is happening in weirdly slow motion, like watching a movie frame by frame. Like my nightmares about the accident.

  “I don’t care what you think!” Amy screams, pointing a trembling finger in my face, then she stands, whirling to direct her words to Mom, then Dad. “Or you! Or you! I don’t care what you think. I don’t care what anyone thinks!”

  She pulls her other hand from her pocket. It’s curled into a fist, and I know, I know without understanding how, what is going to happen next. I can see it unreeling before it does but I can’t do anything to stop it. I sit there and watch it happen. Helpless. Helpless and responsible. After all, it’s my fault in the end. I’m the one who brought the camera home. I’m the one who forgot my promise to Amy. Me. All me. Always me.

  Tears run down Amy’s cheeks. Angry tears which inflame her face and streak her eyes with red. “I.” She raises her fist above her head as she screams the word. A sentence in a single letter. “Don’t. Care!”

  Pronouncing the final word, she throws the button down onto the table. The button she always keeps in her pocket, to worry when she’s anxious, sad, or depressed. The button that had come off Aric’s sweater, that I’d cut from it for Amy to keep on the day Dad had piled all Aric’s clothes into bags for Goodwill.

  The button, thrown with as much force as Amy can muster, hits the table edge first and bounces. It bounces up, way, way up, and flies over my head toward the living room. I hear it ricochet twice more before it hits Aric’s photograph on the fireplace mantle.

  I know that’s what it’s done without having to turn around. Know from Mom’s intake of breath at the sound of breaking glass, from the way the blood drains from Dad’s face, and even the look on Amy’s face. A look of satisfaction.

  I turn, and though everyone else seems frozen in place, I’m not, so I stand and cross the distance between the table and Aric’s shrine.

  The picture has been knocked over by the force of the button, and the glass in the frame is shattered, a giant spiderweb of lines which disguises his smiling face completely. I pick it up and shards of glass fall from the frame, tinkling against one another and landing on the mantelpiece.

  The sound is like an infant version of the noise from the car accident. The frame a miniaturized version of the windshield Aric had been thrown from.

  I can’t stay here. Not another minute. My parents are still locked in place at the table, as though under some sort of spell, and Amy, when I look back at her, stands staring at me, her hands on her hips and a smug look on her face. The house is silent but for the heavy ticking of great-grandmother’s clock and the
strangled sound of my breathing in my ears.

  “I can’t—” I shake my head, drop Aric’s photo back where the button had sent it, and run toward the back door. Dad rises as though he means to stop me, but too late and too slow. I reach the door, grab my backpack, heavy with the weight of the camera, and bolt out into the twilight.

  I run straight for Sevren’s. Now he’ll see, he’ll understand. When I tell him about Amy’s behaviour, about the smirk on her face, her meanness, the unspoken violence, he’ll have to understand. He’ll have to believe me.

  Boris looks happy to see me as I come through the gate, so I scratch him behind the ears while his whole back end wiggles with delight, then I pat his sides to signal I’m done and he dashes off into the shadows of the backyard. It’s surreal. A little piece of normalcy pasted over my fucked-up day, like a bit of colour in an otherwise black and white photograph. My throat tightens up and I swallow hard. I can’t start crying. Not now. I need to find some of that strength people keep saying I have.

  The light is on in Sevren’s window and I squat in front of it and knock. I always sort of envied him his basement bedroom, especially in the summer when mine was hot and stuffy, but Sevren says I wouldn’t be able to handle the frequent visits from spiders. He might be right.

  His curtains move and then his face appears. He takes one look at me, holds his finger up to indicate I should wait, and disappears again.

  I stand, and Boris runs over to drop a nasty-looking tennis ball at my feet. I smile at his goofy dog-grin and pick up the ball. It’s wet and gritty, and when I throw it into the darkened backyard, it slips awkwardly from my grip. Boris doesn’t care. He is off like a rocket after it and I lose track of his shape as he tears into the shadows.

  Sevren is there before Boris returns. “Quick,” I say. “If we’re not gone before he gets back he’ll want me to touch that nasty ball again.”

  I’m aiming for levity but my shot falls way short of the mark, landing somewhere much closer to bitchy.