In the Shadow of Blackbirds (10 page)

I watched him with horror and realized,
We’re all simply waiting to be killed. All that’s left is blinding sorrow and a painful death by drowning in our own fluids. What’s the point of being alive?

I couldn’t breathe. I turned to face a sandstone wall, removed
my mask, and gasped for air. I gulped and gulped until I swallowed as much of the tuna-scented breeze as possible, even though the odor made me sick. Everything made me sick. Why wasn’t I the one to get killed by germs or bombs? Why was I standing alone in the middle of a deserted city? Why did a bright and talented boy have to go and do a stupid thing like enlist?

Unable to divine any answers from my empty street corner, I trudged on like a sleepwalker, my feet as thick as sandbags. My erratic breathing mutated into hiccups that stabbed my sides.

In the residential district I spied—and smelled—from across the street an undertaker’s clapboard house with a grisly scene in the front yard: stacks of pine caskets, piled two to three high. Even worse, four little boys climbed over the coffins as if they were playing in a wooden fortress. They chanted a rhyme I’d heard at the beginning of the school year, when the flu first raised its monstrous head:

I had a little bird,
Its name was Enza,
I opened the window,
And in-flu-enza.

“Hey, get off there!” I yelled at the children. “You’re climbing over dead bodies. Can’t you see the flies? You’re going to get sick.”

The leader of the group—a brown-haired boy in knee pants—balanced his feet on the teetering wood and called out, “It’s the Germans, boys. Shoot ’em!”

The other chubby-cheeked kids leaned over the caskets and fired rounds at me from invisible rifles.

“Where are your parents?” I asked.

“Keep firing, men. Show the filthy Boche what you’ve got.”

They continued to attack me with pretend ammunition, with no sign of leaving their disgusting playground. A rumble of thunder in the purpling sky to the west set off a series of delighted
oohs
and wows from the boys.

“That’s the blast of our cannon, Boche,” said the leader. “You’re going to die.”

“You’re going die if you keep playing there, you stupid kids. Get out of there.” I marched up the low slope of the yard, into the thick of the stench and the flies, and grabbed the brown-haired boy by the arms. “I said get out of here.”

“Let go of me.”

“No.” I gripped him with viselike strength and dragged his flailing body off the undertaker’s property.

“Let me go!”

“Go back home to your mother.” I pushed him away down the sidewalk. “I don’t want to hear about any more dead boys.”

“You’re crazy, you know that?” He glared at me over his shoulder and wandered away. His friends fell into place behind him, snickering.

Before I could get to the end of the block, the brown-haired
boy shouted from down the street, “For your information, my mother’s lying in the hospital with the flu. I
can’t
go home to her.”

I rubbed away tears with the back of my hand and kept walking.

Three blocks later I arrived at Aunt Eva’s yellow house and discovered someone had parked a bicycle next to her roses. A lanky boy no more than twelve, in an official-looking cap and black tie, waited on the front porch with an envelope and a clipboard. He saw me making my way up the path and came toward me at a brisk gait. I braced for more bad news.

“Hello, miss.” The boy’s voice sounded muffled inside his mask, which looked as if it were tied tight enough to hurt. “Are you Mrs. Wilfred Ottinger or Miss Mary Shelley Black?”

“I’m Miss Black.”

“Please sign here.”

The words he directed my way on the clipboard blurred together in my tired eyes. All I could make out was
WESTERN UNION
at the top. Someone had sent us a telegram.

“Oh no.” I shoved the clipboard back at him. “I can’t take another death today. Don’t give it to me. Don’t tell me my father’s dead.”

“I don’t read the messages, miss.” He pushed the board my way. “Please sign it. I can’t leave without delivering the telegram if someone’s home.”

I wobbled and had to clutch the boy’s arm to avoid passing out.

“Please, miss. It’ll be all right.”

He steadied me, and with shaking fingers I scratched a sloppy version of my signature. I took the tan envelope, tore it open, and read a short message from Uncle Lars in Portland:

THEY’RE HOLDING HIM WITHOUT BAIL.
TRIAL SET FOR DECEMBER.
POSSIBLE 20-YEAR SENTENCE.
KEEP M.S. WITH YOU.

L.

Twenty years.

If a jury decided that fate for my father, he’d be sixty-five at his release. I’d be thirty-six. And all because Dad hated war.

The message fluttered out of my fingers to the sidewalk. I marched a dirty footprint across the paper on my way into the house and slammed the door behind me with enough force to rattle windows. Oberon squawked from his cage. That Western Union boy probably jumped out of his skin and pedaled away as fast as his bony legs could take him.

I thumped upstairs to my room and yanked off my mask. Stephen’s photographs still hung on the gilded wallpaper, teasing me with memories of a time when he was alive and my father wasn’t rotting away in jail. I paced the floor and pulled at my hair until my scalp ached. “Get me out of here.
Get me out of here!
”

A low boom echoed in the distance. My eyes shot to the window. I held my breath. Ten seconds later, the menacing clouds to the west flashed with light, followed by another crash of thunder.

A lightning storm.

I pulled up the window’s sash and felt the tiny hairs on my arms bristle with static. Lightning ignited the air, and I wanted its bolts to shock me out of my nightmare world and send me back into my old reality.

I scrounged around my room and found the makings of a kite—the parcel paper from Stephen’s package for the body, wire coat hangers for the frame, and a rope of hair ribbons for string. My clock-gear necklace would act as my conductor. I slipped my aviatrix goggles out of my leather doctor’s bag, fitted them over my face, and hurried downstairs with my creation.

The claps of thunder now followed the lightning by two seconds. The wind whipped my hair across my face, while fresh-smelling rain streaked my lenses and soaked the string of ribbons, rendering them useless. How stupid to have thought the fabric wouldn’t get drenched and heavy. The parcel paper would never soar. My name written in Stephen’s handwriting bled into black smudges, gone forever.

Lightning shot across the sky in an erratic streak more blinding than Julius’s flashlamp. Thunder reverberated against the soles of my boots a mere second later. The storm gathered overhead. My blood craved the buzz of electricity to replace
the poison of the world. I wanted to touch it. I
had
to touch it.

I grabbed the clock gear and held it in the air with my bare fingers.

Another streak of light illuminated the front yard. A roll of thunder clapped overhead, and a slight shock of static zapped the tips of my fingers.

But that was all.

“Come on!” I yelled. “Give me something I can feel.”

Someone shrieked from across the street, distracting me enough that I turned my head, but then the world went yellow and crashed against my ears. Electricity burned my hand, threw me backward to the ground.

And killed me.

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD HELPED ME COMPREHEND THAT
I was no longer alive.

First you formulate a question:
Am I dead?
Then a hypothesis:
If I’m sitting up here in Aunt Eva’s eucalyptus tree, looking down at my own body sprawled across the grass in the rain, then I must be dead.
The test:
A redheaded woman in an apron runs across the street, sees my smoking clothing and my lifeless eyes staring through my goggles, and tries to shake my limp body back to life—to no avail. “Oh, dear God, she’s dead,” she yells to another woman sprinting across the lawn. “The lightning struck this poor girl dead.”
The conclusion:
Mary Shelley Black is indeed no longer alive.

Oh, God,
I thought.
What did I just do?

I looked up: a black cumulonimbus cloud bellowed around the eucalyptus like a seething beast. A siren cried out from somewhere nearby. Neighbors in flu masks gathered below me.

“What did I do?” I called down to the people, although no one seemed to hear. The version of me that sat in the tree looked solid and mortal, in my opinion, but I feared I was little more than a mirage up there. “This doesn’t feel right. What am I supposed to do?”

A black police ambulance drove into view. The neighbors waved it down with frantic arms. Men in uniforms jumped out of the vehicle and grabbed a stretcher. I could still see my prone, empty body, with its singed fingers and gray face, and no one, not even the men from the ambulance, could revive me. One of the men pushed my goggles to my forehead and pulled my eyes shut, and my skin looked cold and hostile and ugly. The idea of dropping back into that lifeless flesh sickened me, and I guessed the landing would be excruciating. But sitting in a tree above myself wasn’t right, either. This wasn’t at all the way death was supposed to be. There were no angels, harps, or pearly gates—just me staring down at my corpse, not knowing what to do.

Go back,
I told myself when the officers lifted my body onto the stretcher.
It’s clearly not your time. Quick! Before it’s too late.

I pushed myself off the eucalyptus branch, and down I plunged into that unappealing shell of a girl with the torturous
sensation of falling into a pool of arctic water. Every square inch of me stung. I gasped for air like a dying fish and heard a pair of doors slam shut near my feet.

My arms and legs sank deep into a canvas bed in the back of a dark compartment. I had entered the too-small skin and bones of a freezing-cold girl made of lead, whose skull throbbed and right fingers burned with a pain more intense than anything I’d ever experienced. Beside me, a person gurgled and wheezed, sounding like he was drowning. The automobile’s motor vibrated against my vertebrae.

A few minutes later, we careened around a corner with a squeal of tires, and the wheezing person and I slid to the right, where my knee and elbow hit a metal wall.

A pothole threw me into the air and slammed me down again. The brakes screeched to a stop and I skidded toward the front of the compartment. More metal banged against me. Doors slammed shut. Footsteps scrambled around the vehicle.

A gangly man in an olive-green police uniform opened a set of doors just beyond my feet, blinding my eyes with the glare of the sunlight that must have followed the storm.

“Holy—” The policeman’s round eyes widened above his mask. “She’s alive!”

“What?” A plumper male face popped up beside him.

“The girl with no pulse. She’s alive.”

“But—”

“Look at her.”

They stared at me as if they were witnessing a foul and bloated corpse rising from the grave.

The gurgling person beside me gasped once more and then fell silent. A whisper of a breeze shivered across my skin, drifted to the top of the ambulance, and passed through the roof, where it disappeared in a flood of yellow warmth.

“The person beside me just died,” I found myself saying.

TWO MASKED NURSES IN HATS LIKE GIANT ASPIRIN
tablets wheeled me on a gurney through the hallways of a stark white hospital. Cots crowded both sides of the passageways—temporary beds for shivering flu victims who curled on their sides and coughed up blood. I saw cheekbones covered in mahogany spots and entire faces an unnatural reddish purple, which, like black feet, signified the end. The scent of antiseptic cleaning solutions burned my nostrils.

The stockier, white-haired nurse peeked over her mask. “Put your head down. You’re lucky to be alive, young lady. Let’s keep you that way.” Fatigue rolled off her body, exhausting me. “We’re in the middle of a plague, sweetheart, and you better heal up quick before this hospital kills you.”

They maneuvered me into one of the examination rooms, but a beady-eyed man in a white coat flailed his arms and shouted, “We’re out of room. She needs to go in the hall.”

“She got hit by lightning,” said the stocky nurse. “It’s not the flu.”

“There’s no room. Put her in the hall.”

The nurses swiveled me out the door and around the corner, and I gripped the sides of the gurney to make sure I didn’t slide and bruise like during my ambulance ride. More flu victims trembled on all sides of me. A rotten flavor lined my mouth. We seemed to travel down those writhing, wheezing, rancid corridors for a good five minutes.

Finally the nurses shoved me in a dark corner. I could see a black foot with a toe tag on a neighboring gurney, but the lack of light kept me from making out the rest of the body.

I grabbed a nurse’s cold hand. “Is my aunt here?”

“I don’t know, dear.”

“Please find her. Her name is Eva Ottinger. She works in the shipyard.”