Black Wings

by Megan Hart

  “You come back and stay with me again,” he told Briella. To Marian, he added, “You too.”

  It took a short trip in a Ryde to the bar parking lot to get her car. Briella buckled herself into the backseat of Marian’s car without a word. Marian looked in the rearview mirror, trying to catch her gaze, but Briella was staring out the back window.

  “Are you tired, Bean? Did you and Grandpa have a good time? Did you stay up too late?”

  “Yeah. We did.” Briella yawned. “I love Grandpa.”

  “Me too.” They drove a little farther before Marian added, casually, “Did he talk to you about anything you want to talk about with me?”

  Briella looked up and met her mother’s eyes in the mirror. “Like what?”

  “Like anything.”

  They drove a little longer, turning onto their street. Briella said nothing. Marian didn’t ask again until they’d pulled into the driveway. She shut off the car and twisted in her seat to look back.

  “Did he talk about…angels? Tapping at the windows? Or singing?”

  Briella laughed. “There’s no such thing as angels.”

  “Bean…did Onyx come to Grampa’s house last night?” Ice crystallized in Marian’s chest as she waited for Briella to answer her.

  “No, Mama. Onyx didn’t come to Grandpa’s house.”

  Marian looked hard, but if Briella was lying, she’d at least learned to do it better.

  Chapter Twenty

  Marian was suspicious about a school like Parkhaven having ‘show and tell’. She was still having trouble logging in to the parent portal – no matter how many times she changed her password, it never seemed to stick – but there’d been an email reminder about the upcoming event, so she guessed it was legitimate. She’d suggested Briella take in one of her music boxes from the collection Marian had started before the girl was born, but that idea had been met with a rolling of eyes and a huffed breath.

  “I’m going to take Onyx.”

  The kid still fed the damn bird dinner scraps and spent time every evening talking to it. As far as Marian could tell, it still brought her trinkets, but as November got colder, Briella spent less time outside with it. Marian had started hoping it was the end of what had been an odd obsession, replaced with whatever it was Briella was working on at school, whatever she was filling notebook after notebook figuring out.

  Marian sighed and shook her head. “Briella, you know you can’t.”

  Briella put her hands on her hips, looking startlingly like Marian’s mother. The kid was a chameleon. “Why not? Onyx’s really awesome, and Braxton D. brought in his baby sister last week. Alicia brought her new puppy.”

  “It’s not a pet. Or a baby. It’s a wild animal. How would you even get it there?”

  “I’ll just tell him to meet me at school and wait until it’s time for show and tell. Then I’ll open the window, and he can fly in,” Briella said.

  Marian’s eyebrows lifted, but she thought of the day at the frog pond. “That would be a good trick, wouldn’t it?”

  “I haven’t been teaching him tricks.” The girl had tomato sauce from their ravioli dinner, eaten an hour ago, clustered in the corners of her mouth. Her hair had been done up in a couple of cute ponies for school that morning, but they’d come half-loose now. Her pale pink shirt was filthy with smudges. One nostril was rimmed with dried snot that turned Marian’s stomach.

  She grabbed a paper towel and dampened it. “Wipe your face, please.”

  “Tricks are behaviors learned to gain rewards.”

  “So what are you teaching it, then?” Marian turned back to the counter to finish wiping it down. The worn pattern on the Formica reminded her of a fifties sitcom, but here in this kitchen, there was no laugh track to remind her that this argument could seriously be a comedy.

  Briella snorted under her breath. “I’m not teaching him anything. He already knows how to do everything.”

  “And you really think you can just tell him to show up at school tomorrow?”

  “I can tell him to do anything,” Briella said. “He’ll do it, because he’s my friend. But I won’t tell him to do something bad, Mama.”

  Marian turned to look at Briella’s wide-eyed and forcefully innocent expression. “Why would you?”

  “I won’t,” Briella insisted.

  “What bad thing have you told it to do, Briella?”

  A silence fell between them, tense and twisting. Marian had spoken too sharply. Too accusing. In the face of Briella’s blankly cheerful expression, she felt ridiculous.

  “Nothing,” Briella said. “I’m just going to go tell him to come to school for show and tell. That’s all. Can I give him this piece of garlic bread?”

  “You know I don’t like you wasting food on the bird,” Marian said, but relented because although Briella wasn’t going to eat it, she’d already put her dirty fingers all over it and it was only going into the trash, anyway. “Fine. But you have five minutes, that’s it. It’s dark outside.”

  Cold, too. Autumn had been unusually warm, but winter was coming on hard this year, and Marian shivered as she pulled her oversized cardigan closer around her. The wind from the open back door tickled her under the chin.

  On the back porch, Briella whistled. “Onyx! C’mere! I have a treat for you!”

  Briella held up the piece of garlic bread. She called again for the bird. Marian stepped closer, getting in range in case something happened.

  “Close the door,” Marian said sternly, but too late. The bird was in the house, flapping its enormous wings and landing neatly on Briella’s shoulder.

  “Briella,” it said. “Hello, Briella. Give a treat, please. Give a treat.”

  The look her daughter gave her was purely smug and somehow adult. It pushed Marian back a step. Where had her little girl gone?

  Briella stepped out onto the back porch and put the garlic bread on the railing. The raven hopped from her shoulder onto it and pecked at the food. It paused to tilt its head, one bright and unblinking eye studying Marian before it went back to eating.

  “You’ve been teaching it more words?”

  Briella shrugged. “Ravens are really smart. I told you that before. Like as smart as chimps, and chimps are as smart as little kids. I mean, Onyx’s probably smarter than Toby Patterson.”

  The bird had finished the garlic bread. Now it ruffled its feathers while burbling something incomprehensible. There were words, but Marian couldn’t make them out.

  “Onyx, you should come to school with me tomorrow. I’ll go in the white van. Okay? You follow the van, and you come to school with me. Good night now, Onyx. Good night.”

  “Good night, good night.” The bird’s beak only barely opened with the words, but its throat worked before it flew away.

  “Ravens don’t talk like people do,” Briella said as though Marian had made a comment about it. “They don’t have lips like ours. Their vocal cords are different. But that doesn’t mean they don’t understand what they’re saying.”

  “It’s just mimicking.”

  Briella shook her head and allowed her mother to draw her back inside. “Nope. He understood me. He’ll go to school with me tomorrow. You wait and see.”

  Marian had a hard time believing that, but there was no point in arguing about it. “You know, there are other birds that can learn to talk.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “If you want, we could get you a parakeet or something. A pet you could keep in the house. Wouldn’t you like that better?”

  “Right,” Briella said in a voice dripping with scorn. “Onyx would probably peck it right in the face!”

  Marian flinched, then frowned. “What does that mean? It would peck it in the face? Is Onyx nasty like that?”

  “Everyone’s nasty like that,” Briella said under her breath.

&nb
sp; Marian put a hand on the girl’s shoulder to turn her. “What does that mean?”

  “Just that people are horrible.” Briella shrugged off her mother’s grip.

  “Is someone being mean to you at school?”

  Briella looked surprised. “At Parkhaven? No.”

  Marian took another damp paper towel and gripped Briella tighter to keep her still while she wiped her face clean. When she’d finished, she put both hands on Briella’s shoulders. Looked into her eyes. Looked hard.

  “You know you can talk to me about anything. Right?”

  Briella nodded. “Yes. I know.”

  “If you have something bothering you. If something is upsetting you. If…” Marian cleared her throat, uncomfortable. “If you’re still having trouble with feelings, or like your brains are too full.…”

  “No, Mama. Not anymore.”

  “Good.” Marian hissed out a sigh of relief. “That’s good. I love you, Bean.”

  “Love you, too, Mama.” The kid hugged Marian hard enough to cause a little oof of breath to come out of her.

  Marian closed her eyes and held her daughter tight. Tighter. She thought of what her father had said, twice now. “We’re all going to be fine.”

  We’re all going to be fine.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  It had been a while since Marian had run the vacuum upstairs. Hauling the heavy machine up the narrow staircase was a pain in the ass, and with Dean sleeping during the day, Marian usually tried not to make too much noise. Today, though, it was time. With Briella putting herself to bed, it had been weeks since Marian had been upstairs, but last night she’d taken up some laundry and noticed the rugs were gritty with dirt. The hardwood floor wasn’t much better.

  Briella was supposed to keep her room at least tidy – toys and books put where they belonged, clothes in the dresser or the closet and not on the floor, the bed made. Marian had low expectations of how competently any of these tasks were completed, but she did expect some kind of effort.

  What she’d walked into this morning was a disaster. It hadn’t been such a mess even the night before, but now Marian had to actually pause in the doorway to make sure she was seeing things right. The entire room had been trashed.

  “Damn it,” she muttered.

  Briella had been late coming down for breakfast. Marian had needed to call her several times before she did. What the hell had she been doing up here this morning? Or, Marian thought with a slow spiral of unease uncoiling inside her, all night long?

  Had the girl looked tired at breakfast? Marian had been too concerned with the tangled mess of her hair, the fact she was refusing to wash her face or brush her teeth, that she was trying to get away with wearing a dirty uniform instead of the clean one Marian had directed her to. All of that had taken Marian’s attention, but if she thought hard, hadn’t it seemed like Briella was more than just reluctant to obey, but working against exhaustion?

  She looked around the room again. It was easy to imagine Briella roaming the room all night long, destroying it. What Marian could not imagine was why.

  She didn’t want to imagine why. Instead, she focused on cleaning up the mess. One thing at a time. Dirty clothes into the hamper. Books lined up neatly on the shelf.

  Under the bed, Marian found a cardboard box that she recognized as one she’d tossed in the garbage a week or so before. With a mutter, she pulled it toward herself. It clattered as she did. She found the earbuds she’d been missing for a few months, the rubber coating stripped off to expose the wires beneath. Also a few rectangles of metal and plastic that said ‘USB flash drive’ on them, but which she’d never seen before. Small screws, tiny enough to be used in eyeglasses, along with a screwdriver small enough to fit them. Other bits of metal and wire she didn’t recognize, all of it jumbled together as messily and without care as the rest of Briella’s belongings.

  Also, an inky black feather.

  She stared at it for a half a minute, not wanting to touch it even to push it aside to see what else the box contained. When she did, the stiffness of it scratched the back of her hand. Distaste curled her lip. Beneath it hid more assorted bits and pieces of what looked like garbage to her. A tangle of wire caught her attention. The ends of it were a different color than the rest, dark and coppery. When she scraped at them with her fingernail, the darkness flaked off. Rust, she told herself and let the tangle of metal fall back into the box. Or dirt.

  Finally, the small notebook caught her eye. She still saw Briella using the big notebook the girl had been scribbling in for years, but this smaller one was unfamiliar. It was about the size of her palm, with a flip-top cover. At least half the notebook was filled with tight lines of writing. Some of the pages had been crossed out, others torn jaggedly, leaving behind only scraps. Equations, numbers, an indecipherable mess of code. Marian couldn’t understand any of it, except for several notations of numbered experiments. So far, only two of them.

  Over the years, she’d found plenty of Briella’s ‘spearmints.’ This was more of the same. A box of junk that Briella would insist was important, and to her, it would be – at least until the next idea hit her, and she moved on to something new. Marian was tempted to toss the entire box, but she didn’t. Her own mother had once gone through her room and thrown away all the ‘junk’ Marian, for whatever reason at the time, had wanted to save. She’d never forgotten the sense of betrayal and grief, even if now as an adult she couldn’t recall why those broken bits and pieces of things had meant so much. Instead, she pushed the box back beneath Briella’s bed and resolved to ask her about it.

  When Marian’s phone hummed from her pocket, she pulled it out to look at the screen. “Hey, Tommy. What’s up?”

  “Checking your Thanksgiving weekend plans.”

  Marian paused and sat on the edge of Briella’s bed. “I’ll be cooking at my dad’s the way we always do for Thanksgiving. Not much going on the weekend after. Why?”

  “I was hoping to take the kid,” he said. “To my parents’ house.”

  Marian thought about this for a minute, reluctant to agree but knowing if she didn’t, she’d be the hypocrite. “The whole weekend?”

  “Or only Friday to Saturday, if that’s better.” His voice lowered. “I’m trying, like I said I wanted to.”

  “I’ll have to check with her, but yes. I think that will be fine.”

  He sounded happy when he answered. “Great. Terrific. Thanks, Mare.”

  “Sure.” She looked around the room at the mess and nudged the box with her foot. “Tommy, remember that time you tried to build a time machine?”

  “Yeah.” He laughed.

  “What made you think you could get it to work?”

  “Umm…a fuckton of weed and Coors Light.”

  Marian smiled. “You worked on it for a couple weeks straight.”

  “Never got it to work, though. Maybe I should’ve been drinking Bud.” Tommy laughed again. “Why’d you bring that up?”

  “Just thinking about our kid and where she gets stuff from. I just found a box under her bed full of what looks like trash. It reminded me about how you always thought you could build things.”

  “She’s a little young for weed and shitty beer,” Tommy said.

  “I don’t think she’s smoking or drinking. I think she’s just…smart,” Marian said after a moment.

  “I guess she’d get that from you, then.”

  Awkward silence descended.

  “Just let me know about next week,” Tommy said, breaking it.

  “I will. I think it’ll be fine.”

  They disconnected. Marian finished vacuuming the room. She didn’t look again in the box under the bed. In fact, she put it out of her mind. They’d all be fine, she reminded herself. All of them.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “Don’t worry about her,” Dean said as he kiss
ed Marian’s temple and laced his fingers together at the small of her back. Keeping her solid and steady. He’d met her at the front door and hadn’t let go of her since. “He’ll take care of her.”

  Marian sighed. Her agreement to let Tommy take Briella for the weekend felt too hasty now that she’d dropped the kid off at his parents’ house. “He’s not reliable, Dean. No matter what he says about wanting to be different, I know he’s not.”

  “First of all, you know exactly where she is. His mom and dad are both there, so it’s not like he’s got to do the whole parenting thing all on his own,” Dean said.

  “That makes it worse,” Marian said. “His parents…ugh. Just because his mother has cancer, that doesn’t make her a good person.”

  Dean didn’t reply at first, although she could see him chewing on his words. He’d heard stories about her former mother-in-law, but he hadn’t really had occasion to see the woman in action. His own mother had been as close to a saint as a woman could be, much like Marian’s own. She knew that Dean believed her when she told him Tommy’s mom was a bitch and a half, but Dean was…Dean was good, Marian thought as she watched him struggle with what he wanted to say. He was good, and therefore it was hard for him to imagine that not everybody was.

  Instead of speaking, Dean kissed her mouth. She melted a little bit under that embrace. When he made as though to pull away, she grabbed him. Held him close. She breathed him in. Cologne, soap, laundry detergent, an organic, earthy scent from him raking leaves, machine oil. Under everything else was Dean’s own particular smell, the one that had driven her crazy from their very first date. Their chemistry had always been out of control and had never faded. Even now, she loved to press her face to the furriness of his armpit and breathe him in, over and over. Yes, she knew that was sort of weird and a little gross. Still, she couldn’t get enough.