Goodnight Blackbird (27 page)

"I would have liked you very much."

Her gaze fell on the glowing white window, but she didn't seem to be seeing it. She may as well have been looking at a brick wall.

He held his hand out for her.

After a moment, she took it and he helped her to her feet, and he hugged her, breathing in her floral shampoo and soap-scented skin. Darren wondered what was on her headstone. Whatever was there was most certainly inadequate. She had saved his life; she had protected him. He didn't think any woman had ever or would ever do as much for him, Jacqueline included.

"You probably wouldn't have wanted anything to do with me," he said. "I'd have been just another creepy older guy hitting on you."

She laughed.

His fingers entwined with hers. "But maybe I would have worn you down."

Her wet eyes were spilling tears again, and Darren felt her thoughts pushing into his mind:
I love you I love you please don't leave me don't leave me don't leave
.

"I heard you were a good dancer," Darren said.

"Who told you that?"

"Maybe I can read your mind too." He held her small right hand aloft in his left hand and fixed his right hand to her side. One of the virtues of growing up with a sister was that he had learned how to dance—not well, but enough to keep from looking like an idiot. He led, taking Rachel with him on a nimble circuit of the bare room. Rachel's face lit up with surprise.

"You're very good," she said.

"It's better with music."

She supplied it by humming. The tune was easy for him to recognize—"When Will I See You Again," by the one-hit wonder Three Degrees.
Is this my beginning
, the song went,
or is this the end
? Darren danced with her for a few moments and they drifted into and out of the pools of white light on the carpet. Her eyes were moist, and though she still smiled, the smile kept faltering. She stumbled once but Darren caught her. She looked tired.

She rested her head on his shoulder and held onto him.

And for a moment or two he found himself seeing out at himself through her eyes, his mind filling briefly with the riotous collage of her memories, like a drawer full of photos being dumped out by a thief in a hurry—hopscotch games in the driveway under cloudy skies, running with her handful of friends on the playground after school, the eerie familiarity of the same elementary school classrooms Darren had sat in a decade before (different color schemes now, yes, but God, that was the same elm tree outside the library window!), getting braces at eleven with her father trying sweetly but ineptly to comfort her when she cried about how ugly she was. There were more images of Jerry McAvoy, sitting morosely in the kitchen with the lights off and Rachel coming downstairs, too timid to ask him what was wrong, too fearful that his answer would be too big and dark for her to handle, the way her parents' stormy arguments were too big and dark for her to comprehend... those ugly, adrenaline-filled nights when she heard them going at it in the kitchen or the living room, the shouting and screaming and, worse, the crying, her dad crying and saying things like
I'm a failure and you enjoy seeing me like this, don't you
, and her mother saying
There's nothing about you that I enjoy anymore
, no sympathy there, just disgust and exhaustion and the batten-down-the-hatches instinct for self-preservation that some people could mistake for callousness.... Rachel's heart clenched in sorrow for all the times she hadn't gone to her father in the days afterward to try to cheer him up, offer him some sort of comfort, what kind of daughter was she, why couldn't she have made even the slightest attempt instead of scurrying by him like a terrified mouse, he was her father, for God's sake, and sometimes in the summer he'd take her for an ice cream at Dairy Queen when he got home from work, and they'd be sitting there in the booth, she and her balding, nervously smiling dad, always older than the other dads, with his clumsy too-big hands, neither father nor daughter knowing quite what to say to one another until her dad started talking about
his
dad, Rachel's grandfather, who had owned a landscaping business and had taken Jerry McAvoy along with him during the summers to various jobs. There in the Dairy Queen, Rachel could feel the nervousness and tension slide away as her dad reminisced about going with his dad to some rich person's house out in Chardon or Shaker or somewhere and walking down the aisles of an immaculate garden full of colors, and once there was this person's garden that was nothing but roses, the owner was in love with roses, and Jerry and his father wandered among the bushes and trellises just teeming with the blood-red blooms, each a velvety, mystical swirl of folds, heart-shaped (not like a cheesy valentine heart but a real heart), a thousand hearts all around them, not beating but still living nonetheless. Rachel remembered her dad's soft, pleased voice telling her how beautiful it all was.
It's important to have a memory of something really beautiful in your life
, he said.
When you see something beautiful and it touches you, it's like the world itself is saying, "I love you." It may not make your life any easier, but at least it'll remind you that beautiful things are possible.
She was about fourteen when he said this.

Oh God, Daddy, I'm sorry I didn't comfort you, I'm sorry we weren't enough for you, where are you now, are you in the light?

These and a thousand other memories. Trips to Cedar Point in the summer, her parents actually getting along and joking quietly with one another on the ferris wheel while Rachel sat between them, gazing out over the midway and feeling that combination of vertigo and joy at being so breathtakingly high above everything. Buying CDs at the mall with her friend Tracy Stolar, who was cross-eyed, wonder what she's doing now, does she even remember me. Getting straight A's in tenth grade. Mr. Lancaster's English class. Dancing in the gym, God that was fun; the crushes that never went anywhere (one boy she liked even called her "shit-face" behind her back); how she cried when they had to put her cat Clayton to sleep when she was ten. And of course that night before she died in November, when her dad came into her room while she was doing her homework, and how awful he looked, and how he sat on the edge of her bed and said,
Do you ever wish you could just fly away to someplace where it's easier
, and she just stared at him, and he said,
Someplace where you don't have to struggle anymore. No more problems. No more homework. Or tests. Or feeling not good enough
. And of course she sometimes wished for that but the way he said it made her insides curl up in dread because there was that look in his eyes—that glazed, inward, collapsed look, like he wasn't seeing things in the here and now, he was looking at the blasted landscape of his mind, where he was a failure and had used up all his chances and everyone had abandoned him. She knew he was having problems at work ("I'm the world's worst salesman," he had once said, with a weird trace of pride) and he just seemed to be getting sadder and sadder, but she couldn't even bring herself to say,
Daddy, what's wrong with you
, what a coward she turned out to be, but before he left he answered the question she couldn't bring herself to ask—
I'm just having a real hard time holding it together, punkin
—and his eyes welled up with tears and this scared her, scared her and made her feel miserable because she didn't know how to help, she would've helped him if she knew how; and then, that final evening when she heard what sounded like someone slamming an empty pot with a metal hammer (it's a gunshot my God that's what a gun sounds like) and she ran downstairs and simply froze there on the landing because her dad was standing there, his face sagging and vacant (
his soul has flown away
, she remembered thinking for some idiotic reason) and he was looking at her and holding the gun down by his side and then he held up the gun and she was hyperventilating drowning gasping no air oh God Daddy why what's happening this is a dream a bad dream I'm going to wake up I will wake up.

A quiet, colorful hurricane of memories, surging and swirling—for a moment Darren saw them all. Then they were gone, scattered like petals in a gust of wind, goodbye, Rachel. A few final petals of thought were left hanging in the air, twisting this way and that—
why'd it have to end this way, I didn't get my chance to be loved, not fair not fair
. Then they too were gone. Darren was alone in the room, holding nothing in the white light.

When he awoke, it was still dark. He was still on the couch. His watch said 5:09 a.m. His head throbbed as if he had had five glasses of wine.

He sat up and put his head in his hands, trying to recall as much of the dream as he could before it dissipated into the ether the way that dreams do. If it was indeed a dream.

When I wak'd/I cried to dream again.
Was that Shakespeare?

He went up to the spare bedroom. It was empty. There were no roses there.

He drove back to Jacqueline's house in darkness. She met him at the door and hugged him, a long hug that seemed as much an expression of relief as of greeting. She asked him no questions.

On Sunday evening, Darren and Jacqueline returned home around ten p.m. from dinner with Khabir and his girlfriend Isabella Esquivel to find half a dozen messages on Jacqueline's machine. Jacqueline played the messages while Darren went to the bathroom.

When he came out, Jacqueline was standing there looking stunned.

"It's Miriam," she said. "And the police."

T
he house had burned through much of the evening. When Darren and Jacqueline got there the two fire trucks were still parked out front. The front of the house glistened with the thousands of gallons of water that had been sprayed on it. Water dribbled from the blown-out, soot-blackened windows. It looked as if 1661 Shadeland was crying.

"Oh Jesus," Darren said. "Oh, Jesus."

From the front, the damage didn't look too bad, although the smashed windows and the smoky blackness of the rooms beyond were a cause for concern. When Darren went around to the back, though, he knew the house was lost. The bank of kitchen windows was gone—the result of either an explosion or firefighters doing their work—and so was much of that section of the structure. He stepped over a twisted ribbon of half-melted siding. The skin of the house had been savagely torn open, exposing blackened studs and soggy pink tendrils of insulation. The roof over that corner of the house had caved in.

The house wheezed dusty, sepulchral gasps of smoke and dust.

Darren put his hands on top of his head like... well, like a man who has just seen his house go up in smoke. Half the neighborhood was watching the evening's unscheduled melodrama from their porches and the street.

Miriam was in the backyard, babbling to a fire chief and a pair of uniformed cops. "... and the open house ended at five, I locked up and headed back to my office. Nothing was wrong, I didn't leave any lights on, there wasn't anything burning."

"No candles or anything like that?" the fire chief said. "Like those scented candles?"

"There were no candles. I don't use those things at open houses. And even if I did I sure as hell wouldn't leave them lit."

"How many people were here today?"

"Not many. Five. Wait, no. Four."

"Any of them turn on the oven?"

Miriam raked her fingers through her red hair. "They might have, I don't remember. Some of them were trying the appliances. That's what people do at these things."

The cops looked at Darren. "Mr. Ciccone?" one of them said.

"Yeah."

"We got a hell of a mess here."

The officer explained the sequence of events as best as he and the firefighters could determine it. Around eight p.m., Darren's neighbor, Barb Winkowski, heard what sounded like a car crash. She saw nothing outside her front window, but a few minutes later she looked out of her back door and saw tongues of fire licking the air from Darren's broken kitchen windows. She called 911. The culprit seemed to be the mangled, exploded mass of steel and iron that had once been 1661 Shadeland's twenty-year-old stove.

"Our guys smelled the gas even after the fire was put down," the fire chief said. "Looks like the stove was on, the pilot light was probably out and the oven door was open. A spark must have sent the whole works sky-high."

Darren barely heard him. He was distracted by one of the cops badgering Miriam with questions about a young dark-haired woman at the open house who may have lingered long after Miriam had left.

"Not possible," Miriam said. "There were four people. Two couples. One of the couples was in their forties. The other couple was younger but neither had dark hair."

"You sure there was no one else?"

"There was no one in the house. Before I locked up, I went into each room and killed the lights. No one was there."

"What's this about a dark-haired woman?" Darren asked the cop.

The cop nodded at the Winkowskis' house. "Woman next door and her husband went outside to watch the fire and wait for the trucks. They called out several times to see if anyone was in your place. The woman says she thinks she saw a woman in the kitchen. She can't swear to it, though. And we didn't find anyone inside."

Darren and Jacqueline looked at one another.

"I need to call my insurance company," Darren said finally. A few ashes danced in the air, spiraling upward like birds taking flight.

The next morning, Darren and Jacqueline returned to the house to pick through the wreckage. Two fire inspectors were already there. "The stairs are okay," one of them said, "but I'd stay out of the upstairs bathroom if I were you." He pointed at the kitchen ceiling, where the fire had eaten a hole the size of a big-screen TV through the studs and linoleum. Darren could see the toilet from where he stood.

The living room had been turned into a blackened cave. There were puddles on the hardwood floor. Darren touched the seat of his couch. It was soggy.

Jacqueline squeezed his hand. "Honey" was all she could say. Darren couldn't blame her. What could you say?

Darren salvaged some old family photos, a few piles of smoky clothes and a few CDs (The Who, Nox Arcana, the soundtrack to
The Natural
). He spent a frenzied fifteen minutes digging through singed drawers and shelves before Jacqueline asked him what he was looking for. Darren then remembered that Kat still had the mix tape from Rachel.

He stood in the middle of the charred living room, almost in a trance.

"Do you want to leave?" Jacqueline asked quietly.

"Do you think she crossed over?"

"I don't know."

He couldn't feel her around him, but that didn't mean anything. He hadn't been able to sense her even when she was here.

Jacqueline went to the car but Darren lingered.

Rachel's headstone in the cemetery in Mentor bore only her name and her dates of birth and death. According to Darren's research over the last few months, it was Shannon McAvoy's older sister, Noreen Webber of Cincinnati, who had handled the family's burial arrangements. She and the McAvoy family had not been close.

Darren visited the grave twice, once in November, once in December. Dry-eyed, he stood there, strangely impassive. He did not feel her. It was just a name laser-etched on polished stone, familiar but no more pregnant with soul than your name on a form letter from the government.

Rachel's stone was flanked on either side by markers for her parents: a family reunited in the clean abstraction of stone.

That evening, he was lying on the scorched hardwood of 1661's living room floor when he heard Jacqueline's footfalls on the porch steps and then in the kitchen.

"Thought I'd find you here," she said. "You're gonna get soot in your hair."

"Did you know that houses have heartbeats? Every time the furnace whooshes on, you hear that low rumble for a few minutes. Then it switches off, and a half-hour later it whooshes on again. Two beats an hour."

"I thought you turned off the heat and power."

"I did."

"So the house is dead," Jacqueline said.

He said nothing.

"I'm sure she crossed over, Darren. If you keep waiting for a sign you're gonna drive yourself crazy."

He got his cold, stiff body into a sitting position. His head hurt, and his hip ached. He felt ashamed of himself, but Jacqueline was looking at him kindly.

The fire department's official report was issued the day before Thanksgiving. The fire was ruled accidental, no traces of any accelerants were found on-site. The following Monday, Darren's insurance company officially informed him that the house was unsalvageable.

Two weeks after that, his claims adjuster, Henry Ulander, called him at work. "Christmas comes early for you. My office is going to messenger over a copy of the settlement check. The real one's already been deposited in your account. All that's left to do is settle up with your mortgage company and you're as free as a bird. I gave you the forms, right?"

Darren retired the balance of his mortgage that week, which was his last week at Northeast Aerospace. He was left with close to $31,000—more than enough for a down payment on a little house somewhere.

Tonight your life begins again, he thought, but he felt like crying.

He kept it together for a while, until three days before Christmas, when he, Jacqueline and Khabir went to a jazz club downtown to hear Khabir's girlfriend Isabella perform a set. Jacqueline had never been more beautiful—she wore an elegant black gown and her lipstick was the lurid crimson of a campfire's last ember. Khabir even looked dapper in his wrinkled sportjacket. He bought the drinks and made elaborate toasts to Darren's and Jacqueline's new life in the land of perpetual rain. Darren kept it together through most of the set—Isabella had a soothing, husky alto, and in defiance of the season she was doing a set of downbeat but sexy standards—but then she got to "Someone to Watch Over Me" and a slowed-down rendition of the Beatles' "Blackbird" and maybe it was the smoke in the club or the lighting but Darren's eyes watered and he had difficulty breathing. Soon he was locked in a stall in the cramped, piss-stinking men's room, weeping to the point where he felt like throwing up, weeping as if someone had died. Well, someone had died. Rachel. At seventeen.
I never even had a boyfriend. I never got the chance to go to college or have a baby.
The shotgun blast of sorrow he felt was frightening, asphyxiating. It was what the period at the end of a sentence felt like. Something beautiful had been taken out of the world, and it would not be coming back.

He would call Bethany and tell her he had reconsidered. He'd talk to the bank. They'd think he was nuts but so what—what would be the big deal about buying the same house twice?

When he emerged from the bathroom, Jacqueline was there by the door, searching his eyes and not buying it when he said that he was okay.

"I just can't leave if she's still there," he said.

She put her hand on his cheek. "Are you turning into me now? Darren, you have to let her go."

He could've laughed.
You have to let her go
. It was like asking him to move the moon.

Isabella had joined them at their table, and though Darren was quiet everyone else had a lively talk about Portland. Isabella told them that she and her combo had played a gig in Portland a few years ago. She liked it, liked its coffeehouses and its rainy feistiness. "And it's the city of roses, did you know that? It's the city's motto or something."

"That's lovely," Jacqueline said. "I think that's just beautiful."

The next afternoon he stopped by 1661 to pick up his mail and walk through the house yet again.

You know, you could've had the post office forward your stuff here,
Jacqueline had said to him a couple weeks ago, referring to her house.
It would save you the back-and-forth.

He hadn't filled out the form.

He stood in Rachel's bedroom for a while, watching the snow fall beyond the window, but the only thing he felt or heard was his own heart beating.

He left.

On the way to his car he flipped through the few pieces of mail. A bill; a Visa credit card offer. An actual letter, from R. Lancaster. Inside was a photocopied page from another Brush High School literary journal. An attached Post-It note read:
Mr. Ciccone—Was cleaning out my den in preparation for some new carpeting and came across another poem she wrote. It's from the spring 2001 edition.

The Art of Letting Go

by Rachel McAvoy

Suddenly your hand wasn't there

On the back of my Schwinn

Training wheels gone, I wobbled—

I weaved—I tottered—I wept

I FLEW!

Down the uneven summer sidewalk

Yet still I cried

At the growing distance between us

At the receding shadow of you

This is the price of flight

You touch the sky, but you do it alone.

There was something else in the mail—a wrinkled, torn and faded post office change-of-address form. The form itself was blank, but on the back was a childishly lopsided ballpoint circle. But as he stared at it for a while he realized it was a heart. Below it was the scribble of a V. He didn't understand this at first, but then it occurred to him that this was how kids often drew birds in flight.

It was snowing harder, and Darren put his face up to the bleak sky. He felt that sorrowful tightness in his chest again but he was also smiling. He could almost believe the large, heavy snowflakes pouring down were white rose petals, a silent celebratory storm of them. A nice poetic image. Rachel would have liked that.

— The End —