In the Shadow of Blackbirds (11 page)

“I’ll make sure we contact her. Stay here and rest. The doctor will see you soon.”

The nurses pattered away in their soft shoes, leaving me alone with the toe-tagged foot, the darkness, and the macabre chorus of drowning flu victims echoing off the walls.

“WHERE’S MY NIECE? MARY SHELLEY! MARY SHELLEY
Black!”

I blinked my eyes open and saw Aunt Eva storming toward me in her greasy work clothes, blond hair flying, glasses shoved up on her nose, flu mask swelling and deflating from violent breaths. Anger radiated from her in pulsating waves, and strangely enough, I could taste her rage—hot, metallic, like a fork that’s been heated in an oven.

She gripped the side of my gurney. “My sister didn’t die bringing you into the world just so you could take yourself out of it. How dare you spit on your mother’s memory?”

“I’m sorry—”

“I’ve spent day and night worrying about you dying from the flu, and then you go and stick yourself in the middle of a lightning storm.”

“Stop shouting.”

“I will
not
stop shouting. They told me you died for several minutes. Someone at the front desk just showed me your blackened clock-gear necklace and those stupid goggles—”

“Please. Sick people are trying to sleep.” I grabbed her hand with my undamaged one.

The effect my touch had on her was immediate.

The metallic taste faded and transformed into a flavor sweet and light and airy, like whipped cream when it’s reached its point of perfection. Her shoulders lowered. She studied my fingers surrounding her flesh. I could see her hazel eyes watching my hand through her spectacles.

“What is it?” I asked. “Why are you looking at my hand that way? That’s not the one wrapped in bandages.”

“It’s nothing. I …” Her eyelids closed, and a blissful sigh escaped her lips beneath her mask, as if I’d given her a sedative. “I just don’t want you to die.”

I chewed my dry and cracking lip and tried to figure out how to tell her what had happened when I
did
briefly die.

“Is the library still open during the quarantine?” I asked.

Her eyes opened. “Why on earth are you asking about books? All you should be thinking about is healing.”

“I wonder if there are any books that discuss returning from the dead.”

“You shouldn’t read horror novels at a time like this.”

“No, not a novel, a textbook that discusses what typically happens when people die for a short while like I did. I’m curious if what happened to me is normal.”

She lifted her eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

“I need to tell you something, Aunt Eva, but you have to swear you won’t bring up Julius’s spirits.”

She nodded as if she wanted me to continue. “Go on.”

“Do you swear you won’t mention his name?”

“I swear.”

I swallowed, which made my parched throat ache. “I left my body and sat on the branch of your eucalyptus tree for a bit. I saw myself down there, with my clothes smoking and the neighbors gathering around me. It didn’t feel right, like I was stuck between life and death, and I wasn’t sure where to go.”

“You mean … you were a spirit?”

“I’m still not saying I believe in all that.”

“Was Wilfred there? Or your mother?”

“I didn’t see anyone. An ambulance showed up, and I decided to push myself back into my flesh, which hurt like mad.”

She squirmed with excitement. “We should tell him.”

“Don’t say his name. Don’t you dare compare what happened to me to those photographs.”

“He should know you’ve been to the other side. Oh, Mary Shelley, can you imagine what he’d photograph now if you posed for him? Do you realize how much serenity your body is emanating? I can feel it in your touch. It’s like you’re partially still in the spirit realm.”

“Don’t say that.” I snatched my hand away from hers. “I’ve had a hard enough time fitting into this world without thinking I’m only halfway here.”

“That’s what it feels like.”

“Stop.”

“Oh, Mary Shelley.” She clutched my arm. “What an opportunity you’ve been given. You’ve gone somewhere the rest of us have only dared to imagine, and you’ve brought a portion of its wonders back with you.” She removed her glasses and wiped her watery eyes with the back of her wrist. “This is going to change everything. I just know it.”

I studied the hand that had soothed her and tried to figure out if I looked or felt any different than before. My trembling fingers still seemed to be made of flesh and bone. No heavenly glow surrounded my body. Spirits didn’t huddle around my bed and try to make their presence known.

But she was right. Something had changed.

THE HOSPITAL RELEASED ME AS SOON AS I COULD STAND
up on my own. I wasn’t gasping for my last breath; therefore, they didn’t have any spare time for me. Nurses were tying toe tags around flu patients who hadn’t died yet, so I made no complaint about vacating my dark corner.

My head still throbbed, as did my fingers wrapped in bandages, and my back was sore from being thrown to the ground by the force of the shock—not to mention the bruises sustained during that ambulance ride. Aunt Eva hired a taxi to take us home so I wouldn’t have to walk.

I stared at the back of the driver’s black cap and balding head through the window of the enclosed passenger area.
“My father goes on trial in December,” I told my aunt. “Uncle Lars sent a telegram.”

“He did?”

“I dropped it on your front lawn. I don’t know if it’s still there.”

“It’s on my front lawn?” Aunt Eva clutched her handbag to her stomach. “It doesn’t mention the word
treason,
does it?”

“No. But Uncle Lars said Dad could be sentenced to twenty years.”

“Twenty years?”

I tried to nod, but the movement hurt my head. “He shouldn’t even be in jail.”

“Do you know what he did up there, Mary Shelley? Do you know his crimes?”

I wrapped my arms around my middle. “I believe he helped men avoid the draft.”

“That’s right. Uncle Lars said your father was running some sort of group out of the back of his grocery store. Do you know how much trouble the rest of us could be in if anyone learns we’re related to a traitor?”

“Don’t call him a traitor. He’s a good man.”

“Then why are you a thousand miles from home, sticking yourself in lightning storms, winding up half-dead in a hospital? If he was so good, why didn’t he worry more about keeping his own daughter safe?”

I leaned back against the padded taxi seat and clenched my jaw, unable to come up with an answer.

BACK AT HER HOUSE, AUNT EVA TUCKED ME INTO BED
and told me to push aside all the unpleasantness that had coaxed me out into that lightning storm.

“Your job right now is to heal,” she said as she pulled the warm sheet up to my chin. “Don’t use your brain to do anything else.”

So heal I did.

I lay there in bed with my skull splitting in two and my fingers burning and itching inside my bandages, but I refused to take any medicine to kill the pain. I wanted to be able to think without any substances blurring my mind. While Oberon chattered downstairs and Aunt Eva divided her time between the shipyard and me, my body repaired itself. All the tiny cells, nerves, and tissues worked like an efficient machine below the surface of my skin, and I longed to learn more about anatomy and physics and lightning and to listen to music that would challenge the recovering synapses of my brain. But the schools remained closed, and my body continued to stay stuck in a bed with springs that sounded like an accordion, my head and arms surrounded by bags of garlic-scented gum. Aunt Eva insisted the bags would chase away the hospital’s flu germs. She also made me wear a goose-grease poultice on my neck and stuffed salt up my nose. I felt like she was preparing
me as the main course for a dinner party instead of protecting me from an illness.

Stephen’s photographs watched over me from beyond the foot of the bed the entire time, their presence a source of both comfort and anguish. Sometimes, when I let my body relax and my mind go numb, I almost believed I saw him standing there, directly in front of his photos. I almost believed the lightning had indeed brought me in touch with the spirit world.

And sometimes, when I was feeling strong enough to lift my head, I investigated another odd new phenomenon I’d discovered shortly after Aunt Eva first put me into that bed. It involved Uncle Wilfred’s brass compass in the wooden case, which I kept on my bedside table.

The needle no longer pointed north.

It pointed to me, even if I moved the compass around. It followed me.

“Holy smoke,” I whispered every single time I saw the needle swing my way.

I was now magnetic.

ONE WEEK INTO MY CONVALESCENCE, WHEN I WAS ABLE
to sit upright without feeling like someone was whacking my spine with a sledgehammer, Aunt Eva came into my room with a forced smile on her face. “I’ve sewn a covering for Oberon’s cage to keep him quieter during the day while you
recover.” She carried a long beige cloth as well as a white envelope.

I tilted my head for a better look at the envelope. “What’s that?”

She drew in her breath. “It’s from your father.”

“My father?”

“I forgot to look at yesterday’s mail. I just found this below the bills.” She gave me the letter. “I’ll let you read it in peace, but try not to get agitated by whatever he has to say. Let me know if you need me to come back.”

I nodded, and murmured, “Thank you.”

She left me alone to stare at the top line of the return address—the name of my father’s new home:

PORTLAND CITY JAIL

Those three brutal words churned up all the hurt and rage from the night he left me—the night before I climbed aboard that train crammed with paranoid passengers bound for San Diego.

I remembered the two of us huddled around the kitchen table, finishing a bland meal of rice and beans and dry bread made of cornstarch instead of wheat. Dad ran his fingers through his whitening brown hair and told me, “Mary Shelley, if anything happens to me—”

“You’re not going to die from a measly flu germ, Dad,” I said.

“I don’t necessarily mean dying. If something—”

“What? What’s going to happen to you?”

“Shh. Let me speak.” He wrapped his sturdy fingers around my hand. “If something happens, I would like you to go straight to Aunt Eva’s. The weather’s not so cold there. You’d be more likely to survive the flu with open windows and sunshine. And we’d keep the Oregon side of the family out of trouble.”

“What type of trouble?”

He avoided my questioning stare.

“Tell me, Dad.”

He cleared his throat. “Trouble that comes from doing the right thing, even if it’s not safe. That’s all I’m going to say about it, because I don’t want anyone pressing you for information.” He swallowed down a sip of coffee. “Eva’s been living all alone in that house ever since Wilfred succumbed to his illness. I’m sure she’d be grateful for the company. Pack your bags after supper, just in case.”

I glared at him, my nostrils flaring.

“Mary, please don’t ask any questions. I’m not going to give you answers.”

He only dropped the second part of my name when he was deadly serious.

I jabbed at my food with my fork until the tongs screeched against the porcelain and made him wince, but I didn’t ask anything else. There was no point. If he didn’t want to elaborate, he wouldn’t. He was as bullheaded as I.

And here I was, more than a thousand miles away, all alone except for a jittery aunt, a chattering magpie, a broken heart, and an envelope with the words
PORTLAND CITY JAIL.

I inhaled a calming breath and ripped open the paper.

October 20, 1918

Dear Mary Shelley,

I hope you are safe. I hope you are healthy. I hope you can forgive me for what I have forced you to endure. You may not be able to understand the reasoning behind my sacrifices, but one day when you’re older and your anger at me has diminished, perhaps you will see the two of us are alike. We have a great deal of fight inside us, and sometimes our strength of spirit forces us to choose truth and integrity over comfort and security.