Black Wings

by Megan Hart

  “So, you want to take it away from her.” Another shift, another twinge. Marian squeezed her thighs tighter.

  “Yes.”

  “I need to use the restroom,” she said. “Can we finish this after I do that?”

  “Of course, of course. You’re welcome to use the staff restroom rather than the one the kids use. It’s out the door, down the hall to the right. Next to the library. I can walk you, if you want.” Garrett stood.

  “No, I can manage. I’ll be fast.” She wouldn’t have a choice to be anything else, not unless she wanted to embarrass herself by leaving a puddle beneath her seat.

  Marian found the bathroom without a problem. The relief of releasing her bladder was so deep that she had to bite back a groan that would have echoed in the tiled room. She went, then waited a minute without getting up, then went again in another short burst.

  Welcome to pregnancy.

  By the time she got back to Garrett’s office, she knew she was going to have to go again, and soon. She didn’t take a seat once inside, even though he clearly was expecting her to. She picked up her purse, instead.

  “Dr. Garrett, you’ve given me a lot to think about and a lot to talk about with my husband, for sure. I’ll make sure we discuss this religious stuff with Briella. But as for the project, I don’t really know what to say. If you think it’s best she be redirected to something else, I’m not going to argue with it.” Marian drew in a breath. “I want what’s best for my daughter.”

  “Of course you do, Mrs. Blake. Nobody here doubts that. I’m sure that despite some recent insecurities, Briella knows it, too.”

  “She’s so smart.” Her voice trembled. “Scary smart. I have to tell you, I really don’t know what to do with her. She used to be this happy little girl who could also just…you know, recite the alphabet backwards and give you a ten-minute lecture on facts about the states. She was figuring out the tip on restaurant bills when she was four. It was like…” Marian fought to keep her voice from trembling. “It was like she could do tricks. That’s all. Fun tricks, things we could be proud of her for.”

  Tricks are behaviors learned to gain rewards.

  Briella had told her that.

  “You can still be proud of her, Mrs. Blake. I don’t want you to think anything less of her. When I said Briella was an exceptional child, I meant it.”

  Marian wanted to tell him then, about the weirdness. The bad moods, the secretiveness. Her daughter had gone from being exactly as she’d just described to something else. Something much darker, and if Marian had not known why or how or what had prompted the change before today, everything Garrett had told her was shining a light into those shadows.

  But what would he do if Marian revealed to him that she was starting to believe she’d lost all control of her own child? That it had nothing to do with there being another one on the way and Marian’s exhaustion or the hormones or her preoccupation with being pregnant and what it was doing to her body? What would he do – what could he possibly do – if Marian told him the truth she had not dared to say to anyone else, not even Dean?

  Briella was becoming someone different, and if she’d started an obsession with angels and the afterlife and the existence of the soul, it might be, Marian thought reluctantly, because the kid herself did not seem to have what anyone might consider to be one.

  Marian couldn’t tell him that. She could never admit aloud that although she’d given up her faith a long time ago, she still remembered what it was like when she had believed. She couldn’t tell anyone that she feared something had sneaked inside her daughter and started to take over. Marian would sound insane, and what would happen then?

  They’d take Briella away, first of all. They might take Marian’s baby away from her after that. They might even try to put Marian herself away.

  “Mrs. Blake?” Garrett looked curious and concerned.

  “Nothing. I’m sorry. Just…pregnancy vapors, as my mom would have said.” Marian made a show of fanning her face and putting on a smile that hurt her cheeks to make. She lifted her chin, meeting Garrett’s gaze. Giving away nothing.

  “Do you need to sit down? Some more water?”

  “No, thanks. I should get going, if that’s okay.” Marian held her smile with the emotional equivalent of hanging on to a ledge by her fingernails.

  Garrett nodded. “Of course. Thanks for coming in. I’ll walk you to the front.”

  Marian didn’t protest, although all she could think about was getting out of the office and behind the wheel of her car. She needed another bathroom stop. She needed a drink. She needed a nap. She needed to be anywhere but here.

  At the school’s massive front doors, she gave him a nod and a handshake, already halfway down the concrete steps before his voice called her back.

  “Oh, Mrs. Blake! I forgot, there’s one more thing we need to talk about!”

  She turned, wishing she could pretend she hadn’t heard him. “Yes?”

  “It’s about the bird,” Dr. Garrett said. “Onyx.”

  Chapter Thirty

  “You lied to me, Briella. What have we talked about with lying?” Marian’s voice sounded tight and controlled, although she felt anything but.

  Briella had just gotten out of the van and had made as though to go right to her room, a habit she’d been in for the past couple weeks. Marian had stopped her at the foot of the stairs and ordered her into the kitchen to sit at the table. The girl had admitted immediately that the bird had been spending time at the school, caged in the lab they’d given her to use. She’d also admitted to telling her teachers that the bird had been a pet for years and that she’d had full permission from her parents to bring it in. Not for experiments. Just as a pet.

  “You lied to me,” Briella answered, sounding sullen. “You told me that stick was nothing, but it meant you were going to have a baby. I asked you in the bathroom what it was, Mother, and you lied right to my face.”

  Mother. Briella had never called her that. Marian’s chest constricted. She hadn’t started calling her mom “Mother” until her teen years, but she’d done it with the same level of scorn.

  Marian’s fingers tightened, but she made sure to let them fall open, loose. Not making fists. Trying hard not to be confrontational. She remembered how it had been to battle with her mom over things that now, looking back, had been so stupid. But she remembered how important they’d felt at the time. “That was different.”

  Briella’s lip curled. “It’s not okay when grown-ups don’t tell the truth, not if it’s not okay for kids to do it. But grown-ups lie all the time, and they’re allowed. So why isn’t it okay for kids to do it?”

  “Because it’s not. Because there are things adults can do that children cannot, and that’s just the way the world works!” Marian gave in to the shout, hating the way the kid recoiled but finding a certain grim satisfaction in it, too. It felt good to yell. To be angry.

  It was better than being terrified.

  “Like swears,” Briella said.

  “Yes. Like that. And other things. You’re right. Lying isn’t okay. But sometimes not telling the whole truth is necessary for…reasons.” She’d started to run out of steam. “But you flat-out lied to my face about that bird.”

  “I didn’t,” Briella said after a moment. “You asked me if Onyx came to school with me for show and tell. And he didn’t. He came to school with me to help me with my project. That’s totally different. You never asked me again.”

  “You know I would have wanted to know about it. You knew that’s why it wasn’t coming around after dinner anymore, because you had it locked up in a cage at school.”

  “Not always. He’s not always locked up. I let him out sometimes.”

  “You should have…damn it, Briella. Why lie? What’s so special about this goddamned bird?”

  Briella was silent for a long time, so
long that Marian thought she wasn’t going to answer. Marian was too tired to fight now. Dean had left already for work, picking up extra hours to support this little family, which was starting to fall apart. And whose fault would that be? Marian’s, of course.

  She was the mother. She should have paid more attention. She ought to have known something was up with the kid, her child.…

  “He’s smart. Like me,” Briella said finally.

  Marian turned. “What?”

  “Onyx. He’s really smart. Ravens are smart, but Onyx is extra smart. Like me. That’s why I like him. He’s different. Like I am. I love him!”

  All of Marian’s anger and frustration fizzled away, leaving her bone-tired and aching with her own emotions. She could blame it on hormones, of course, but if she couldn’t control her own feelings, how could she expect her daughter to?

  “Being different isn’t a bad thing, you know,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Tell me about your project, Bean.” Marian sat down across from her at the table.

  “You won’t understand it.”

  “I want to know about it. I want to listen to you. Even if I can’t understand everything about it, I want to try,” Marian said.

  Briella’s face twisted. “Mrs. Addison said there’s no way to prove the existence of souls. It’s just something you have to believe, or not.”

  “What do you believe? I know you told me you think there’s something else, after we die.”

  Briella hung her head and shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Talk to me, Briella. Please,” Marian pleaded. She reached across the table to put her hand over her daughter’s. It was still so small. She was still so small, even with the inches she’d sprouted since the beginning of the school year. She would be eleven just after the baby was born. Her body was changing. She wasn’t going to be Marian’s little girl much longer.

  “You must believe in your project, right?” Marian asked.

  The girl looked up. Her eyes were alight. Her mouth wet and slightly slack. She hadn’t pulled away from Marian’s grasp, but now she turned her hands over to take her mother’s. Squeezing.

  “What is a soul?” Briella asked. “It’s something nobody can see, right? But people have believed in it since…well, since forever. Nobody can see it or feel it, but we know it’s in there, because it’s what makes us people. Duncan MacDougall was a doctor in 1907, and he weighed people who were dying. He discovered that at the moment of death, people got lighter. They lost twenty-one grams of weight. That’s the weight of the soul.”

  “Okay,” Marian replied, because what else was there to say?

  Briella went on, her expression becoming animated. “But what is it? What makes us who we are? It’s our personalities. Our experiences. It’s everything we see and hear and smell and taste and do, it’s everything that happens to us. It’s why nobody is the same, not in our heads and hearts. We’re all different. Because nobody has all the same experiences, and that’s what makes us who we are.”

  “And you want to record memories so they can be downloaded.” Marian thought about the papers Garrett had shared with her. “Like on a disc?”

  “In a chip,” Briella said. “You’d connect it to your brain, through your spine.”

  Marian pondered this for a moment. “And then what?”

  “Then you could be inside anyone you wanted,” the girl said. “You would never, ever have to die.”

  “What would happen to the person you went into?” Marian’s voice scratched but stayed steady, her throat so dry she had to swallow over and over just to get the words out.

  The girl did not answer. The light in her gaze did not vanish, but her demeanor changed. Became secretive.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  A rushing buzz threatened to overwhelm Marian, filling her head until she sipped a few breaths of air while struggling to keep her expression completely neutral. “How were you planning to figure that out?”

  “By testing it, of course.”

  Marian let her dry tongue scrape along the roof of her mouth. “How would you test it?”

  No answer but a shrug. She was only ten, Marian thought frantically. Only ten years old.

  “Did you test it on frogs?”

  A flash of something like guilt or fear lit in Briella’s eyes, gone in an instant. She gave a derisive snort. “Frogs aren’t smart enough.”

  “Did you test it on Onyx?”

  “Parkhaven doesn’t allow us to experiment on animals,” Briella said at once. “They even want us to be vegetarian.”

  Marian sat very still. “You said that exact thing before. Those exact words.”

  “Well,” Briella said, “they do.”

  “Would you test it on yourself?” Marian asked. “Promise me you wouldn’t test it on yourself. It sounds very dangerous, Briella, and to be honest, I’m not surprised they don’t want you to keep working on it at school.”

  “What?” Briella jerked her hands from Marian’s grasp. “They’re going to make me stop?”

  “Bean.…”

  “Why are they going to make me stop? Mrs. Addison said that even if projects don’t work, it’s important that we learn from our mistakes! They’re going to make me stop it?” Briella’s voice pitched high and higher, strident enough that Marian wished she could cover her ears against the stab of it into her eardrums.

  She couldn’t do that, of course. She could not cover her ears to stop herself from hearing. She could not cover her eyes to stop herself from seeing.

  “Was it Mrs. Addison?” Briella demanded.

  “I spoke with Dr. Garrett today. But yes, Mrs. Addison suggested you find a new project.”

  Briella’s fury did not fade. It went…invisible. Her shoulders squared. Her chin lifted.

  “Oh,” she said. Then, her tone frostbitten and rimed, she added, “They’re going to make me send Onyx away too, aren’t they?”

  “You’re going to have to let him go back to the wild. Yes.”

  Briella drew in a hitching, sobbing breath.

  “You shouldn’t have lied,” Marian told her, even though it wasn’t really the lies that had brought them to this point. “This is the consequence of your actions. You need to take responsibility for that, Briella.”

  The girl looked up into her mother’s eyes, her smile bright and sunny. Sharp and brutal as a serrated knife. “It’s okay, Mama. I’ll find another project to do. There are lots of things they like us to do at Parkhaven. I’ll be able to get something else started. It was a dumb project, anyway.”

  “It wasn’t a dumb project,” Marian began, but stopped herself. Gold stars for showing up, she thought. Keep their self-esteem, no matter what. Shield them from the world, turn them into people who had no idea of what it felt like to fail. Create a generation of monsters.

  Briella shook her head, keeping that same cheerful tone, the fake, plastic brightness. The voice of a much younger child, fitting to her small stature, perhaps even her maturity, but not her intellect. “Yes, it was. I’ll find something better. I love Parkhaven, Mama. There are lots and lots of really neat things I can do. I can grow soybeans or figure out how to filter dirty water and make it clean. Something good for the environment.”

  “Those all sound like terrific projects.” Marian was ashamed at the relief in her voice. Shamed by her own desire to put this all away from them.

  “I know. I’m sorry I lied to you. I knew you’d be upset about Onyx. I shouldn’t have kept it a secret.” Briella got out of her chair to come around the table and give Marian a hug. She felt bony and lean beneath the white polo shirt of her Parkhaven uniform. The knobs of her spine ridged under Marian’s palms, but in the front, small breast nubs had started to form.

  Marian found this more alarming than the girl’s skinniness. Marian had star
ted her period in sixth grade. It would happen soon for Briella, she knew that. But she wasn’t ready for it. She wasn’t ready for any of this.

  She held Briella tighter again for a moment or so before letting her go. She put on her ‘mom’ voice, the no-nonsense and matter-of-fact tone that was supposed to make them both think she had all this shit under control. “There are going to have to be consequences, Bean. No tablet for a week.”

  Briella took that news with a nod, as though she’d expected it. It was the first time Marian had ever really needed to discipline her that way, and she’d expected more of a fuss. Briella hugged her again.

  “Can I go upstairs and read?” the girl asked.

  “Yes. Wait, Bean….” Marian called after her as the kid headed for the stairs. Briella looked at her, expression neutral. “I’m sorry I lied to you, too. You’re right. If it’s not okay for kids to do it, it’s not okay for grown-ups, either. I don’t want the bird in the house, but if you want to play with it outside…that’s okay.”

  “I forgive you, Mama,” Briella said, turned away then looked back over her shoulder. “And please don’t call me ‘Bean’ anymore. I’m too old for that.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Tommy’s mother passed away at the beginning of March, weeks and weeks beyond how long they’d believed she would last. He called Marian in the early afternoon on a Wednesday. She’d been checking out her reflection in the bathroom mirror, monitoring her bump, but at the sound of his rasping, grief-laden voice, she let the hem of her shirt fall down.

  “The funeral is tomorrow,” he told her. “I thought you might like to know.”

  She would have liked to know last week and not last minute, she thought, but could not let that irritation show in her voice. “Of course. I’m so sorry.”