In the Shadow of Blackbirds (31 page)

The window cracked, shocking me out of my convulsions.

The shaking stopped.

The room fell silent.

Aunt Eva thumped against the floor. Gracie’s skin turned a seasick green, and she swayed like she’d also faint at any minute. She gripped the table’s edge and lowered her forehead to the surface to keep from toppling over.

I didn’t blame either of them. I nearly fell unconscious myself.

For Stephen’s voice hadn’t burned against my ear or emerged from the air a few feet away from my head. His shouts weren’t something for me alone to hear in the private confines of my brain.

His voice—his actual deep voice—came directly from my mouth.

I WAITED ON THE COLD FLOOR OUTSIDE AUNT EVA’S ROOM
with my face pressed into my sweating palms. Gracie had helped revive my aunt and steer her to bed, but after that she simply shut down, as if someone had closed up shop inside of her. She wandered from our house with an empty stare.

Waves of dizziness threatened to knock me over, but I kept my wits about me and tried to fit Gracie’s account of suicide into Stephen’s blackbirds story. Did he shoot himself because he was convinced birds from the battlefields had followed him home to haunt him? If that was the case, why did both Stephen and Mrs. Embers insist poison played a role?

“What if his mother killed him to put him out of his misery?” I asked myself aloud.

The echo of my theory banged around my brain until a vein in my forehead pulsated. I fidgeted with guilt for even considering the possibility. But, still … what if Mrs. Embers didn’t want her son to suffer? Perhaps that’s why she had to be taken away after his death. Maybe Stephen’s mind transformed his mother into a monstrous creature to protect him from the truth.

A HAND NUDGED THE BACK OF MY ARM. “WHO ARE YOU
right now?”

I blinked away my drowsiness and found my aunt standing over me with her crucifix in her hands like a baseball bat. The lengthening shadows of late afternoon stretched outside her bedroom door behind her.

“You’re not going to hit me with that, are you?” I asked.

“Are you Mary Shelley?”

“Yes, it’s me. Please put that down.”

Her arms relaxed around the cross, but her face remained tense. “I don’t want you out here.”

“Do you feel better?”

“Go to your room and lie down. I’m fetching a glass of water for myself. I’ll bring one to you in a moment.”

“All right. Thank you.”

I made my way to my room and flopped facedown on the mattress.

Aunt Eva went downstairs and made a commotion in the kitchen, slamming cupboard doors and yelling about the
crack in the window. She thumped back up and plunked herself down on my bed with enough force to rock me back and forth. “Don’t ever talk like him again.” She set a glass of sloshing water on the table beside me.

I buried my face in my goose-down pillow. “Grant looks strong enough to be of use to someone trying to get rid of an embarrassing family member.”

“Stephen took his own life. You heard what Gracie said—his mother found him holding the gun. I’m sure it’s hard to fathom the boy you knew doing something like that to himself, but it sounds like he wasn’t even remotely the same person by the time he got home.”

“I don’t believe he committed suicide. I think they killed him.”

“People don’t commit murder because of embarrassment.”

“They didn’t know what else to do with him.” I turned my head to the side to look at her and her cross. “Do you think a mother could be capable of killing her own son to put him out of his misery?”

“No!” Her eyes got huge. “That’s a horrible thought. I’m sure Mrs. Embers held hope in her heart for Stephen’s recovery. Please, Mary Shelley, I don’t want him to keep coming to you. Tell him to stay away. Tell him if he has any decency left, he’ll leave you alone.”

“I can’t let him go until I find out why he’s still partway here.”

“It was as if the devil himself possessed you.”

“That wasn’t the devil.”

“He was no angel.”

I exhaled a long breath through my nose. “Do you know what my father told me about monsters and devils?”

She shook her head. “I almost hate to think what your father’s opinion on that subject would be.”

“He said the only real monsters in this world are human beings.” I licked my parched lips. “It was a frightening thing to learn, but it makes so much sense. We can be terrible to one another.” I dug my cheek deeper into the pillow. “And do you know the oddest thing about murder and war and violence?”

“Oh, Mary Shelley, please stop talking about those types of things.”

“The oddest thing is that they all go against the lessons that grown-ups teach children.
Don’t hurt anyone. Solve your problems with language instead of fists. Share your things. Don’t take something that belongs to someone else without asking. Use your manners. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Why do mothers and fathers bother spending so much time teaching children these lessons when grown-ups don’t pay any attention to the words themselves?”

Aunt Eva nuzzled her chin against the crucifix. “Not every grown-up forgets those teachings.”

“But enough of them do. If someone killed Stephen, they didn’t treat him as they’d want to be treated. And those men who arrested my father punched him in the gut before they hauled him away. The Espionage Act already allowed them to
take him away from me, but they also hurt him to teach him a lesson. He sank to his knees and couldn’t breathe after they were done with him.”

“Wartime isn’t like normal times.”

“But that’s the point. We wouldn’t even have wars if adults followed the rules they learned as children. A four-year-old would be able to see how foolish grown men are behaving if you explained the war in a child’s terms. A boy named Germany started causing problems all over the playground that included beating up a girl named Belgium on his way to hurt a kid named France. Then England tried to beat up Germany to help France and Belgium, and when that didn’t work, they called over a kid named America, and people started pounding on him, too.”

My aunt lowered her cross to her lap. “It’s not that simple. Africa and Russia are involved, Germany and England were competing to build bigger navies, the Serbs assassinated Archduke Ferdinand—you can’t break down the causes in a child’s terms. And you better not say those things in public. That’s exactly why your father went to jail.” She leaned forward. “You have to realize, he was once like Stephen. That’s where his anger comes from.”

My arms and legs went cold. “What are you talking about? How was he like Stephen?”

“They called the condition names like soldier’s heart during the Spanish-American War, this thing they’re saying is shell shock nowadays. The unexplained effects of war upon a person’s
mind. Your father still had it when he met your mother.”

I lifted my shoulders and head. “Are you sure? He’s never shown any signs …”

“I remember him coming over to visit your mother when I was about seven. We’d all be talking about something that didn’t even have anything to do with the war, and he’d sort of drift away. He’d look off into the air in front of him and not say a word for at least five minutes. Your mother would take his wrist, check his pulse, and call his name, and eventually he’d shake out of it and ask what we were just talking about.” Aunt Eva sat up straight and put the cross aside. “My parents worried about my sister’s relationship with him. They thought she was confusing concern for a sick man with love, and they feared she considered him the ultimate test of her skills as a physician.”

“But they did love each other, didn’t they?”

“I’m sure they loved each other. Your father gradually got better, and they seemed happy enough. His own father worked him hard in that store to make sure he kept up a routine in his life. The marriage lifted his spirits, certainly. But I didn’t stop seeing those fading-away episodes until after you were born. Maybe he realized you were too important to lose.”

I sighed in disbelief and sank my head back down on the pillow. “Then if Stephen’s family had just given him a chance and found him help, he might have eventually recovered, too.”

“His family didn’t kill him.”

“But—”

“No.” She pressed her hand against my back. “He’s dead because he wanted to be dead. There’s nothing you can do for him. I know it sounds cruel, but he chose to leave. And he should stay gone.”

I NAPPED FITFULLY AFTER AUNT EVA STOPPED RUBBING
my back and left me alone in the room. I kept dreaming about that bloodstained sky. A gunshot would ring through my head, and the world above me would be splattered in the darkest red. I’d awaken with the sensation of a bird pressing down on my lungs, yet nothing was there but the taste of smoke and copper and Stephen’s photographs staring at me from the wall beyond the foot of my bed.

Those photographs.
Mr. Muse
and the mysterious
I Do Lose Ink.

“I Idle Nooks,” I murmured, trying to decipher the lightning bolt’s anagram to keep my mind from drifting back to blood. “In Kilo Dose. Oilskin Ode … No, that doesn’t sound like a title at all. None of it makes sense. Nothing makes sense. I’ve got to work on my diagram again …”

I’d fall back to sleep, and the nightmare would haunt me again, like a motion picture running on an endless loop.

When darkness swallowed up daylight and I couldn’t stand the thought of any more dreams, I pushed myself upright, lit the oil lamp, and shook the sleep out of my head.

“Think, Shell, think,” I told myself in my own clear voice. “Put together a new set of notes. You can do this.”

I grabbed a fresh sheet of paper from the drawer and went to work.

Saturday, October 19

1. Stephen panicked about an airplane and kicked his mother during my 10:00 a.m. photography appointment.

2. Julius was so worried about Mrs. Embers’s injury that he risked taking her to a hospital during this plague. (I wonder, did he want Stephen to leave the house more than ever after Stephen harmed their mother?
)

Sunday, October 20

1. Julius showed up at Grant and Gracie’s house, around 11:00 p.m., saying he had first stopped for a drink after taking the last ferry.

2. Between approximately 11:00 p.m. and the following morning, Julius and Grant presumably visited an opium den.

3. Meanwhile, Mrs. Embers was in her bed in Coronado, having taken a sleeping pill.

Monday, October 21

1. Gracie found Julius lying on her living room floor in the morning.

2. Grant drove Julius home.

3. Julius handed me the “spirit photo” and told us Stephen died a hero’s death.

4. Mrs. Embers screamed Stephen’s name upstairs.

Key Observations/Questions:

1. Did Julius prepare the photo before Stephen’s death, knowing Stephen would either be killed or taken to an asylum after their mother’s injury? Gracie said Julius wanted to start telling people his brother was dead if Stephen got bad enough.

2. Why were Mrs. Embers’s pills so strong that night? Did someone give her an increased dose?

3. What did Mrs. Embers hear or know about a gun and poison? Was she on her pills in her room, or was she there with Stephen?

And at the bottom of the page I wrote the one question I’d been asking all along but still couldn’t completely answer, which frustrated me to no end:

HOW DID STEPHEN EMBERS DIE?

AFTER A SILENT SUPPER OF ONION SOUP WITH AUNT EVA,
I returned to my bed and read Stephen’s Verne novels until my eyes no longer stayed open.