Stony River (4 page)

FOR TWELVE YEARS
Miranda has viewed the World through the attic's streaky half-moon window, seeing half a tree, half a street and only the birds and clouds that passed by her scrap of sky. Being at one with nature is our birthright, James said. Depriving her of that pained him. Daylight makes her eyes water. And the smells! She feels dizzy.
Focus, James would say. Imagine yourself the circus tightrope walker he described seeing as a child—taking slow, deliberate steps, placing one foot carefully before the other.

She wants to touch the tree whose branches scratch the roof. She wants to hug the earth. But Nolan leads her steadily to a black car with two white doors.
Car
is from the Celtic word for wagon, James says, but then James believes you can trace anything to the Celts. Believed. James believed.

Miranda balks as Nolan opens a door for her. Is the car any less a cage than that holding Nicholas? Then she recalls the professor's nephew who was afraid to enter the volcano at first, nearly missing out on that incredible journey to Earth's core. She ducks her head inside. Cian squeals when the engine erupts but bounces excitedly on her lap as they pull away. Twisting to see through the rear window, Miranda watches the home she hasn't seen from the outside since she was three shrink and grow faint.

TEREZA HACKED OFF
two more punks and handed one to Linda. “If you smoke it down to the end,” she said, “sap will fizz up into your mouth.”

Linda screwed up her nose as if Tereza had farted. “Revolting,” she said.

Tereza turned away and studied the old house with new eyes. No sign of Crazy Haggerty. Plus the dog was gone. If the house turned out vacant for sure she'd come back and prop a window open in case she needed to get in someday. She was feeling better and better about Stony River. One of the first things she always did in a new town was suss out possible hidey-holes. Bordering the neighborhood were the river, a farm and the highway her family had taken all the way from their last place in Florida. In the middle were
houses, empty lots and trees. The farm had a haystack big enough to hide a girl, but a vacant house would be better when the weather turned cold. Across the highway were a zillion other possibilities. Right now, though, Crazy Haggerty's house was boss. She'd sneak back to it after dark.

TWO

AS THE CAR GATHERS SPEED
, a hot breeze from the open windows lifts the ends of Miranda's hair and slides under her dress. Curious wonders pass by so quickly they become blurs of color: so many shades of green, yellow, brown, blue and red. Cian, frightened and delighted at once, clings to her neck with one arm. He points with the other and babbles, attempting to name all he sees. Each dog is “Nicko.” Closing her eyes when sights overwhelm her makes Miranda queasy. Fixing her gaze on the back of Nolan's head helps, but even so she's nauseated and disoriented by the time they arrive at a building Nolan informs her is the hospital.

Dunn deposits them at the entrance. Carrying Miranda's valise, Nolan leads them through a door made of glass (imagine!) into a large room with sofas, chairs and illuminated ceilings. Someone approaches them. A woman, Miranda realizes with a thrill. A woman who rises on the toes of her flat black shoes and kisses Nolan on the cheek.

“Thanks for being here,” he says to her. “Where's Carolyn?”

“With Mom. She'll keep her as long as we need.”

“Ah, she's a peach.” Turning to Miranda, he says, “My wife, Doris.”

Doris has tightly curled black hair and a swollen stomach under a long white shirt: a mother goddess at full moon. Her black trousers stop mid-calf. Doris captures Miranda's free hand with her two small
ones. Her smooth hands are pink against Miranda's candle-white skin, her pursed lips painted the color of fresh blood.

“I am so sorry for your loss,” she says.

Panic flaps its wings inside Miranda's chest as Nolan excuses himself to check on arrangements for viewing James's body. She no longer wants to see a corpse. About her come and go more people than she's ever seen. Voices from nowhere say words she can't decipher and invisible chimes go
bing-bing
. She misses the slow, predictable rhythm of the house, wants to chase after Nolan and ask would he take her home. But Doris, smelling like dried wildflowers, steps even closer and shines a smile on Cian.

“What's your name, little guy?”

Miranda answers for him.
Cian
isn't one of the five words he can say.

Doris mispronounces it as a single, reverent syllable: “Keen. That's a new one on me. How old is he?”

“One year and four months.”

“I would have guessed younger.”

Miranda lays a hand on Doris's melon-hard stomach.

Doris quicksteps back then seems to catch herself. She smiles. “Three more months.” She extracts a red tubular object from a large blue-and-white-checked cloth bag. “Say, Keen, do you like kaleidoscopes?” The lad frowns and sniffs it, puts his tongue on it. She laughs. “No, no. Look into the eyehole. Here, let me show you.” Softly, almost mouthing the words, she asks Miranda, “Can he understand?”

“And why wouldn't he?”

“Well, I wasn't sure, given his condition.”

“There's no want in him,” she says, just as James answered her when she wondered if the lad was like other children. James said naught about a condition.

Doris succeeds in getting Cian to peer into the tube and hold it
by himself. “Nifty, isn't it?” She sets her bag on the floor and opens it wide. “I have more toys. Want to see?”

“See,” Cian says. Miranda sets his bare feet on the floor. He toddles to the bag and reaches in as though he's done it forever. He pulls out a block with the letter Y.

Nolan returns and says to Miranda, “Whenever you're ready.”

Doris bends her head to touch Miranda's: a silent benediction. “Go on,” she says, her voice as soft as dusk. “He'll be fine with me.”

THEIR FOOTSTEPS RESOUND
as Nolan leads Miranda through double doors and down a hallway smelling like pinecones. At the end, a blue door opens to a narrow windowless room with a red floor and a yellow chair beside a gurney. Her toes in the open shoes recoil at the cold. The rest of her body shudders.
All the dark was cold and strange
.

“It's called the cooler,” Nolan says. Another word for her journal.

They move from doorway to gurney. Tightrope walking again, a thunderous pounding in her head. She stares, unseeing, at the white tiled wall before her. Nolan says, “Jeez, they usually clean them up.” He guides her to a spot in front of the chair. Asks for “a positive eye-dee.”

She slowly lowers her gaze and sucks in a breath. The body on the gurney is rigid, its face and neck the color of moldy bread, the mouth frozen into an O, the eyes open as in surprise. The carapace of a life reborn in the Other Life.

So this is what death looks like.

She finds the frigid chair with the back of her legs, sits herself down and says, “Aye, 'tis James.” She knows that shiny black suit with the satin lapels and frayed cuffs, the theatrical red shoes. His Mad King Sweeney outfit, he called it.

He'd make his hair and eyes wild and say, “Tell me, is this a look that would sour cream?” He wanted people to think he was gone in the head so they'd stay away from him and not find out about her.
“We are the gods' hidden children,” he'd say, his voice defiant and proud.

The suit is wet in spots, as though he's leaking. His cheeks have sunk into his face. Terrible strange flecks lodge in his moustache and beard. She studies his chest, half-expecting its rise and fall. Sees her child self crawl into his lap and fall asleep to his thumping heart.

Nolan says, “I'll be right outside.” The door closes on the silent cold.

She reaches out and lightly touches a hand, bloodless on top, deep purple where it rests on the gurney. The fingers are curled under as though they died scratching the earth. His skin is as alien as the chrysalis he once carried home to demonstrate that life follows death as surely as morning, night. “One day I will shuck this shell,” he said that day, “and emerge on the other side fluttering and swooping among flowers so beautiful they forbid themselves to grow here.”

She wept at that, unable to imagine life without him. Being human is incomplete, he explained, disappointed she couldn't see that. He could leave his body at will, but a craving for whiskey held him back.

Until now.

She swallows a deep breath, holds and releases it, trying to channel his energy. She drinks more air, holds and releases it. She listens with ears and heart.

She never matched his concentration, never lifted the physical veil. Someday she'd summon the will to let the power enter her, he said. When she did she'd be ready to accept the legacy of her grandmother and great-grandmother, who taught him to call forth summer and winter on the harp he was to have played for her this day of Summer Sun Standing.

She rises from the chair and sniffs the length of him. Unwashed hair, stale sweat, urine and feces: the smell of a body abandoned and
a vow forsaken. He's left her alone to care for the child; she and the lad were no longer enough to tether him to the World.

“Could you not wait?” she cries out. She hugs herself to stop her arms from shoving him off the gurney and squeezes until she feels the pulse beneath her fingertips. She empties herself of tears then leans over him until her swollen eyes are level with his deflated ones.

He isn't in there.

She whispers what he had her say each morning: “I am the same and not the same as I was before.”

“As tonight's moon will not return tomorrow,” he'd say, “you will emerge altered after each night's sleep, after each book you read, after each moment you experience.”

She tugs out a strand of his ginger hair for herself and removes the red shoes for Cian. Gives thanks for the hallway's warmth and Nolan leaning against the wall.

“Shouldn't he be buried in those?”

“A butterfly won't be needing shoes.”