Goodnight Blackbird (26 page)

Darren lay down on the couch. His arms were sore. He hadn't gotten much sleep last night and now the fatigue was catching up with him. He fell asleep.

He opened his eyes.

I'm dreaming
, he thought—which was unusual, because in a dream you typically had little awareness that you were, in fact, in a dream.

This seemed to be one of those ultra-vivid dreams that feel so detailed and clear they create a disarming, counterfeit reality. The details were surprisingly prosaic—he was still on the couch, he was still in the house. But a brilliant, soothing white light poured in from every window, making the drapes and the blinds glow as if the house were a movie set being lit from outside with megawatt carbon-arc lamps. He had to squint every time he looked toward the windows.

Another startlingly realistic detail was the hissing sizzle of eggs cooking in the kitchen. He heard the metallic clatter of a spatula on the iron skillet he rarely used.

He wandered into the kitchen and was unsurprised to see a plump, middle-aged woman making scrambled eggs. It took only a moment or two for Darren to match her with the black and white picture from the newspaper.

"Hello," Shannon McAvoy said, polite but distracted. "Would you mind handing me the pepper?"

He found the pepper grinder in the cabinet. The light streaming in from the kitchen windows was breathtaking. It was as if the world was being consumed in white fire.

"Rachel's favorite," Shannon said. "She always loved breakfast."

"You're dead," Darren said.

She gave him a strange look as if to say,
Well, duh
.

"I don't come here very often," Shannon said. "It's Rachel's house now. But sometimes a child needs her mother."

"Where is... your husband?"

For several moments she said nothing, concentrating instead on the eggs. At last she said, "He doesn't come here. He's too ashamed."

Darren wasn't sure if he should pursue this line of questioning, but he was curious. "Do you forgive him?"

Shannon glanced at him. "Yes."

"I don't know if I would be able to."

"One thing I've learned is that we don't know as much about ourselves as we think."

Darren looked at the glowing windows. "Why did he do it?"

"He said it's better to be dead."

"Is it?"

"It is, if you're finished with life." She gave him an odd, almost condescending look, as if she were being asked to explain calculus to a fish. Save your questions, the look said, you wouldn't even understand the language the answers are written in. Shannon turned back to the stove. "We keep trying to get her to go outside. But she just won't go. I'm at my wit's end."

"Who's 'we'?"

"There are others. It doesn't matter. Kids can be so stubborn. When she was a little girl, she actually refused to let Jerry take the training wheels off her first bike, even when she didn't need them. You should have seen how she cried."

"It's hard to let go sometimes."

Shannon put her head in the living room. "Rachel," she called. "Breakfast. And you have a visitor."

From upstairs came the dull thud of a teenager running.

Darren watched as Rachel McAvoy hurried downstairs. Her eyes widened when she saw him. Her face lit up with a goofy, embarrassed grin. "Hi!" she said.

"Hi."

She wore jeans and a plain purple t-shirt and she suddenly seemed to find her hair a mess. She kept trying to smooth out the frizzies. She blushed. "God, I look terrible. Mom, why couldn't you warn me?"

"Eggs are almost ready," Shannon said.

"I'll eat later, okay?"

"You specifically wanted me to cook for you, honey."

"Mom. Darren's here, okay?"

Shannon smiled at Darren. "This is what it means to be a mother. You're a short-order cook, valet, psychologist and bank teller. And you do it all for free."

"Mom,
please
."

When Darren looked back at Shannon McAvoy, there was no Shannon McAvoy to look at. She was gone, as was the skillet full of eggs. For some reason Darren felt this was not unusual.

Face to face with Rachel, Darren couldn't help staring. Here she was at last. Darren felt disoriented and mildly disappointed... much the way you'd feel if you met God and found out He was a harassed-looking guy in a grey flannel suit. Rachel was a tall girl and she had an animated, expressive face that reminded Darren of silent movie actresses who are trained to telegraph their emotions, subtlety be damned. The emotions Rachel telegraphed now, it seemed, were excitement and first-date anxiety. She had difficulty meeting his eyes, and she kept putting stray strands of her dark hair behind one ear. "Well," she said.

"Well."

"I knew you'd come back." For a moment her eyes met his. The pure joy in her expression made his heart hurt. Had anyone ever been this glad to see him?

"I came to say goodbye," Darren said. This time he was the one avoiding eye contact. "I'm leaving, Rachel. I'm going to Portland. Jacqueline and I... we're getting married."

Like a low-pressure system brewing a tropical depression over the ocean, Rachel's face bubbled with the formation of other, darker emotions. "I don't know why you want to marry her. She'll just get tired of you and divorce you like she did that other guy. And I won't even bring up the other stuff."

"The other stuff doesn't matter."

"You love her."

He said nothing.

The tropical depression was swirling, forming a hurricane. Rachel's eyes briefly filled with tears but she blinked them away. "You know that we're better together. You
know
that. It's like we have this connection. You're the kind of guy I always dreamed of. And I know you like me too."

She had put an ominous emphasis on those last few words, her voice edging into stridency, and Darren found himself face to face with the searing, piano wire-sharp anger that was an integral thread in the Rachel McAvoy fabric. "I do like you," he said.

"I know you're not the kind of guy who goes to bed with someone he doesn't care about. You don't have that kind of cruelty in your heart."

The cool challenge in her eyes made him look away.

A determined smile appeared on her face and she grabbed his hand. "Come on, I want to show you something."

She led him upstairs, bouncing with that irrepressible energy of youth. In her bedroom, a vase of red roses sat on the nightstand by the window. The white glow from the window created a halo around the blossoms, making them translucent. "My mom keeps bringing me flowers," Rachel said. "Like I'm an invalid or something. You only bring flowers to sick people. Or to dead people."

"Or to people you love."

Her face became an expression of grim resentment. "She knows I like the white ones better. She never remembers."

"Why do you like the white ones?"

"When the light shines through them it's like you're looking at something holy." In the blink of an eye the red roses became white. "I used to have this crazy thought that when I graduated college or got married or something there'd be a big shower of white rose petals. Like, hey Rachel, congratulations, it's your time to be happy now. Guess there's no chance of that happening now." The grimness deepened on her face, making her look older. "Mom thinks I'm sick. Everyone thinks I'm sick." She shook herself from the momentary funk and sat cross-legged on the carpet amid a pile of sheets of notebook paper, each one carefully inscribed with her large, looping script. She patted the carpet beside her. "I wrote you some poems. Some of them are pretty good, too. Here."

Darren tried reading them but it was almost impossible because of the moistness in his eyes. "They're good," he said. He cleared his throat. "I'm sorry you died, Rachel. I wanted you to know that."

She methodically smoothed out one of the wrinkled sheets of paper on her thigh. She was suddenly shy and sullen. "Thanks."

"Your mom says you won't go outside."

"Everyone's trying to make me go. Even you and that other girl. That stupid blonde." Her voice rose. "You know, this is my house. I don't see why I have to leave if I don't want to."

"There isn't anything here for you. Outside is where you belong."

"If I go, I won't be able to see you anymore."

He did not reply.

She stared at the poems in her lap. "You don't want to be with me."

"I want what's best for you. Staying here isn't it."

"I just don't get it. How come I didn't get a chance? How come everyone else gets a chance? You were married once. Now you get a chance to be married again and I never even got my first chance. I never even had a boyfriend. I never got the chance to go to college or have a baby."

"I'm sorry."

"And now everyone wants me to go outside. So sorry, Rachel, thanks for playing, we have some lovely parting gifts for you. Everyone says it's what's best for me now. Well, you know what would have been best for me? If I hadn't gotten shot. See this?
Look
at it." Her voice had reached the level of a quavering near-scream. She pointed at the puckered, dime-sized crater at the hairline above her left temple. He hadn't noticed it before. There was a thick crust of dried blood around the hole. Darren had watched enough cop shows to know that the black stippling on the skin was burned flesh from the gun going off so close to her head.

Then the wound was gone.

He was about to say
I'm sorry
again, but the words felt so threadbare now.

Darren looked again at the poems in his hands. Most of them were nothing but random words, many of them disjointed bursts of profanity. FUCK YOU DADDY FUCK YOU KILLER OF CHILDREN. Another page said PLEASE TELL ME WHERE DO I GO FROM HERE, over and over again, the words gouged into the page so viciously the paper was torn at some points. His stomach turned over.

"Why did he have to kill me?" Rachel said, her voice rising hysterically again. "Why did he have to kill Mom? It was just a job. He could've gotten another job. Why did he have to hurt us?"

"I don't know."

"They keep telling me I have to let it go, but they don't understand:
this was my life
. It was
my
life."

The naked outrage and violation in her voice silenced the pathetically small words of comfort Darren had at the ready. She was beyond comfort. The heart wasn't breaking, it was broken, smashed.

He slid a hand across her back and within moments she folded herself into his arms, weeping until she wept herself into a sullen calm. The feeling of her body was solid, real, warm. Alive.

"It's not fair," Darren said. "I know. But in here you're going to be alone. Out there you won't."

"I'll be alone either way. You won't be there."

"Rachel, why do you like me?"

She stared at him. "Because we're the same." She touched his chest. "In here." She touched her temple. "And in here."

"I'm a lot older than you. We're very different."

"Why? Because you grew up with different music than I did?"

Because you're dead, he almost said. "It's not just that."

"I think it's more important that two people want the same things in life. I want the same things you do. And you know what? I understand you better than she does. They keep telling me I'm not supposed to peek into people's minds but I'm sorry, sometimes I can't help it. Know what I saw when I peeked into yours? I saw me." She stared deeply into his eyes. "I know you've been lonely. I can fix that. I can be everything you want me to be. You'll see."

"And we can just stay here in this house forever and ever."

"Don't make fun of me."

Another uncooperative strand of hair fell away from its place behind her ear and Darren put it back where it belonged. He wasn't looking at a teenager anymore. Time no longer applied to her. She had been expelled from time and was ageless. She'd never go grey or develop arthritis in her knees. She'd never be twenty pounds heavier and pushing forty with a divorce in the rearview mirror and lowered expectations ahead, like the skyline of a second-rate city.

You will always be perfect, he wanted to tell her.

She stroked the side of his face. "Don't worry about your job. Or the house. Or anything." She drew a finger across his lips. The touch was like the brush of a feather. "It's easy." Her voice was little more than a whisper. "So easy. I can stop your heart. You don't know what I can do."

Her finger left his lips, slid down his chin and neck and stopped at his heart.

An image came to his mind: He would take her hand, and suddenly the room and the house would disappear, and they would find themselves walking along a beach, bathed in that impossible white light. Summer without end. It would almost be like going back in time to when he was Rachel's age. When he was seventeen it really did seem like summer could last forever.

"And ever," Rachel said.

"You want me to stay with you."

Her voice was a silky murmur. "Yes."

"No. You don't."

Rachel's eyes narrowed.

"If you did," Darren said, "you wouldn't have stopped me from pulling the trigger that night. When Sam came over. We could have been together that way. But you knew it would have been wrong."

Rachel's lips pressed together in a tense line.

"You saved my life," Darren said. "I love you for that. But I have to leave."

She said nothing.

He stood. "I don't think it's really me you're holding onto. It's this world. Which I don't understand. Why would you cling to a world that treated you the way it did?"

Rachel looked at her lap full of desperate poetry. She turned her face away, her shoulders rising and falling as if she were laughing. But she wasn't laughing. "I just want to go home," she said, her voice breaking, and Darren understood that
home
didn't mean this nondescript Ohio house with its Home Depot carpet and leaky bathroom sink. It also didn't mean her ultimately fatal life with her mom and ruined dad. Home just meant someplace where there was love, safety and the possibility of a future. Maybe it was just the place where the hurting stopped.

"What would have happened if I lived?" Rachel asked when she got herself under control. "I think about that a lot. How I would have turned out." Again, she had trouble meeting his eyes. "Do you think you would have liked me?"