Low Red Moon (8 page)

The bedroom is empty, just like the living room, no furniture and nothing on the stark white walls. The newly refinished hardwood floor glints wetly in tiger stripes of sunlight getting in through the plastic slats of brand-new Levolor blinds covering the big windows. A chintzy ceiling fan, the closet door standing wide open and it’s very dark in there. The faint mildew smell from the foyer is stronger in here.

Narcissa shuts the door and thinks briefly about closing the blinds, too, wiping that ugly chiaroscuro pattern from the floor. But the voices haven’t found her yet, and she doesn’t want to encourage them; they’ll track her down soon enough—they always do—and right now she needs to think, needs her head clear to consider the work and the days ahead. She sits down on the floor and undoes the straps and buckles on the leather satchel, folds it open and removes a thick sheaf of papers and spreads them out in front of her. There’s also a new box of thumbtacks in the satchel and she takes that out, as well.

“‘Poor fragments of a broken world,’” she whispers and smiles vacantly, stray line from an old poem she memorized as a little girl, words meant to console herself, but they never do, never any consolation anywhere except the grim, violent work, and already last night seems like something from months and months ago. The skinny, tattooed kid with the skateboard that she picked up in a park just after sundown, the one who told her his name was Soda. Narcissa closes her eyes tight, remembering his fear, the musky taste of him, the way his lips kept moving long after she’d slashed his throat. Thin, pale lips to shape a silent prayer or curse or plea for mercy.

Shit, maybe the stupid motherfucker was just pissed at me for killing him.

She opens her eyes, takes a deep breath, and slips her pistol from its shoulder holster hidden beneath her jacket, checks the clip, the safety, and then sets it down beside the satchel. There’s a red Sharpie pen in her jacket, and she takes that out, too.

Narcissa selects a dog-eared, photocopied map from the careless scatter of papers on the floor, Birmingham with its roads laid out neat as a game of ticktacktoe, the grid of streets running northwest and southeast, avenues running northeast and southwest, but everything getting warped and tangled when it reaches the foot of Red Mountain, ancient topography to foil the contrivances of men and their machines. She pulls the cap off the Sharpie and draws a very small red circle around the spot where she killed the boy named Soda. A circle at one apex of the nearly perfect diamond she plotted on the map the day before, sitting in a Southside diner drinking coffee and chain-smoking, waiting for the sun to set, reworking her plans again and again in her head.

“That’s one,” she says, because the first two Birmingham kills don’t count, not really, only rehearsals, and she uses the Sharpie to carefully trace over the line leading from the circle she’s drawn to another corner of the diamond. “One for sorrow,” and Narcissa snaps the cap back on the pen.

“Two for mirth.”

Outside, a sudden breeze rattles all the bright, dry leaves that haven’t fallen to the ground yet, this slow Southern autumn so strange to her, and Narcissa turns her head and watches the restless limb and branch shadows.

Only the wind. Nothing out there but the wind.

“Three for a wedding,” she says, speaking low just in case the voices have slipped in on the breeze and are listening. If walls have ears, if plaster and lath and paint could talk, and the wind subsides as suddenly as it began.

Narcissa opens the box of thumbtacks and uses one to pin the map to the closest of the white bedroom walls. Then she sits cross-legged on the floor and gazes out the windows at the trees, the red-gold-brown leaves, the shifting swatches of sky, and “Four for a birth,” she whispers. All the long months since she left Providence, all the roads and cities and empty rooms leading her here, all those other circles she’s drawn on other maps pinned to other walls. How many sides, if she were to add them up, how many dimensions necessary to accommodate that polygon? Geometry of blood and time, pain and misdirection, but
this
is where it ends, where it all begins itself over, and Madam Terpsichore and her Benefit Street lapdogs will never laugh at her again.

There’s a bird on the windowsill watching her intently with its beady yellow eyes, a big gray mockingbird staring in through the blinds like she has no business being here. Narcissa picks up her gun and aims it at the bird, but it doesn’t fly away. So many spies to take so many forms that no one could ever keep count, and so it’s always better to be safe than sorry.

Someone will hear,
a voice mumbles from the open closet, voice like someone talking with his mouth full, and it’s a wonder she can understand a word he says.
Someone will hear the shot and call the police.

“I’ll say it was an accident. I was cleaning the gun, and it went off.”

You think they won’t ask to see a permit? And what if they run the plates on the car? What if they look in the trunk?

The mockingbird cocks its head to one side, and she knows damn well that birds can’t fucking smile, but maybe this one’s smiling at her, anyway. And all she has to do is pull the trigger and there won’t be anything left of it but a sticky spray of blood and bone and feathers that will never go peeping in windows at anyone again.

“It’s just a lousy bird,” Narcissa says, because whether she believes it or not the words feel good to say, and the mockingbird bobs its head and hops a few inches along the sill, taps once at the glass with its beak. “I’m not blowing out that windowpane over a goddamn, stupid bird.”

Remember the crows in Philadelphia?
a woman’s voice asks her from the closet.
Remember that black dog outside Richmond? What were they, Narcissa?

“Shut up,” she says, and the mockingbird taps at the window again, harder than before. In Philadelphia, crows watched her for days, dozens of them following her through the city, perched on sagging power lines or watching her from the lawn of Logan Circle, always there when she looked for them. She’d killed the black dog and left it hanging from a highway sign.

They know your every move, Narcissa,
the woman’s voice says.
Every breath, every step, every time you take a shit, they’re watching you. They can take you any time they want.

“Then why the hell haven’t they?”

Soon now,
the woman whispers.
Soon they will.

The smiling mockingbird taps at the glass, and Narcissa fixes it in the pistol’s sights. Fuck the windowpane, fuck the noise. No one’s going to hear it and even if they do, who’s going to give a shit? No one ever wants to get involved, and if they do, so what? It’s not as though she hasn’t dealt with cops before. Cops are easy. Cops are a fucking walk in the park.

The wind rattles the leaves.

“Say bye-bye, you nosy little shit,” and she pulls the trigger, but there’s only the sharp, metallic
thunk
of the Colt jamming. The bird taps on the glass one last time, taunting her, and then it spreads its wings and flies off in a blur of gray-white feathers.

“
Shit!”
Narcissa growls and hurls the pistol at the window. It tears through a couple of the plastic Levolor slats and disappears from view; the sound of glass breaking is very loud in the empty room.

Behind her, one of the voices from the closet begins to giggle hysterically to itself, and she gets up and slams the door, then opens it just for the pleasure of slamming it again.

You’re so close, Narcissa,
a voice that almost sounds like her dead grandfather says.
So goddamn close now. You gonna throw it all away over a bird? That wasn’t a spy. Keep your head, girl.

“Why don’t you leave me alone? Why don’t all of you please just leave me the hell alone? Let me finish this.”

You wanted our lives,
and this voice could be the hitchhiker from Atlanta, or the waitress from Myrtle Beach, or someone that she’s forgotten altogether. Narcissa knows it doesn’t matter anyway, one ghost as good as the next, all of them buried deep in the soft convolutions of her brain to drive her insane before she can finish, all of them spies.
You wanted our lives, and now you have them. You took us inside you, digested us, made us a
part
of you, and you’ll never be rid of us.

“Yeah, I know,” Narcissa says, and she nods her head and stares at the white closet door; all the voices have fallen quiet now, and in a few minutes she goes outside to find the gun.

From the first night that she read her mother’s diary, first night that she held it in her hands, Narcissa knew there were missing pages. Ragged bits of paper left behind to show where they’d been torn out, whole days skipped, entries that ended or began in midsentence. All these evidences to prove the point, but easy enough to imagine that Caroline Snow had written things she’d come to regret. That she’d ripped those pages out herself, and for years the only thought that Narcissa ever gave the matter was to wonder what confidences had been lost to her, what might have been said on those missing pages.

Sometimes Narcissa made up stories to fill in the gaps. She’d peeled off strips of wallpaper and pulled up loose floorboards looking for places where her mother might have hidden the missing pages, but she never found anything but silverfish and dust and spiders.

When she was twelve, she awoke one muggy July night to find Aldous standing over her. His cloudy yellow eyes glowed softly in the darkness. He held something clutched in his right hand that reflected the scraps of moonlight leaking through the rotting drapes.

“Grandfather,” she said, and he sighed then, a drawn-out, ragged sound as if he’d been holding his breath for a long time, suffocating, waiting for permission to breathe again. “Is something wrong?”

“I thought they would come for you,” he said, something in his voice that could have been either disappointment or anger, a little of both, maybe. “I’ve kept you for them, and taught you things, because I thought they would want you. They never wanted me or your mother, but I thought they would want you.”

“Who, Grandfather? Who did you think would want me?” and she spoke calmly and kept her eyes on the silvery thing glinting cold moonlight in his hand, the same knife she’d used years ago on the beach dog, the knife she’d used on so many other things since. The carving knife from her bureau drawer.

“I
gave
you the book…a year ago. But you still haven’t read it.”

“I still can’t read French.”

And then he slapped her so hard that Narcissa’s mouth filled with blood and her ears rang. His ragged, thick nails tore a deep gash in her right cheek, and she scrambled to the far edge of the bed, just barely out of reach, ready to run if that was what she was going to have to do.

“You fucking cunt,” he growled, rabid dog growl from his old throat, and his eyes flashed in the dark. “Don’t you
ever
talk to me that way again. You hear me?”

“I hear you, Grandfather,” Narcissa replied quietly, a salty-warm trickle of blood leaking from her mouth, her voice still as perfectly calm as it had been before he struck her.

“We are damned, Narcissa.”

And then he leaned across the bed, moving faster than she would have ever thought he could, and held the blade of the knife against her throat. He smelled like sweat and aftershave and the faintest hint of rot on his breath.

“If I
truly
loved you, I’d kill you now and get it over with. I’d save you from the shit you’re going to have to try to live through. I’d be doing us both a favor. Yes, little girl, I’d be doing everyone a favor.”

“Why are we damned?” Narcissa asked. She thought briefly about the ice pick she kept hidden underneath her pillow. “What does that mean, Grandfather?”

“I’m not your damned grandfather,” Aldous said and took the knife away from Narcissa’s throat. Her skin stung slightly and later she’d find a shallow cut just beneath her chin. “Don’t you ever call me that again, because it isn’t true, and I’m sick of lies.”

“Why are we damned?” she asked again.

“Read the book, Narcissa. That bitch-cur, my
mother,
” and he laughed then and turned to stare at the window. “We’re mongrels, child, and we can never be anything else.”