Mockingbird (18 page)

  By the time she makes it upstairs to find Tavena White's cubbyhole, the girls have started to spill out of the dormitory wing to get ready for class.

  There, by the water fountain, is Tavena White.

  Hair still an inky scribble. Eyes big and expressive.

  Talking to a group of friends.

  Miriam doesn't know why she's nervous. Shades of her own school experience haunting her at an inopportune moment.

  She walks up to Tavena.

  "Hey," she says. Waving her little folded-up note like it's supposed to mean something.

  "Uh, hey," Tavena says, and the other girls all give her the stink-eye. Realization blooms then in Tavena's eyes. "You're that woman from the cafeteria."

  "Nah, must've been someone else." Miriam tries to hand her the note. "Here. I wanted to give this to you."

  But Tavena doesn't take it. She and the other three girls pull away. Miriam sees that she's trying to give the girl a note with her bloody hand. Oops.

  Tavena starts looking around like she needs someone to rescue her.

  "Just take the note," Miriam says, forcing a smile and a chirpy laugh. "This isn't a stranger-danger moment. I'm just a friend passing along a message. That's not blood on my hand. That's paint. It's paint. Just paint."

  Tavena's eyes flash like pennies. "My mom always told me, don't talk to strange white women."

  "Your mother knows of what she speaks. Good think I'm one-sixteenth Cherokee," Miriam lies. "Here, I just need you to have this note–"

  Tavena sees someone behind Miriam. "Miss Caldecott, Miss Caldecott–"

  Miriam turns. Sees the school nurse approaching, hands clasped at her front.

  "You little snitch," Miriam grumbles.

  "Miss Black, isn't it?" the nurse asks. "Here I hoped we wouldn't have to meet again."

  "What can I say? I'm like a cold sore. I just keep popping up."

  "Run along, girls."

  Tavena and the others high-tail it. With Miriam still holding the note.
Damn.

  "Can I go too?" Miriam asks.

  "I'm beginning to grow concerned over your fascination with our girls."

  "Nothing to worry about. I'm harmless."

  "First I see you bothering Lauren Martin. And now Tavena White. Is there something you'd like to talk about?"

  Miriam says nothing.

  "Your hand is bleeding. We could go down to the nurse's station. I could take a look at it for you."

  "So you can call the cops on me while I wait? I don't think so." Miriam starts backing away, confident this old woman can't take her. "Nice school you have here. But I gotta run."

  "There will be trouble if you come back," Caldecott says.

  "I won't," Miriam lies. "Cross my heart, hope to die."

  She even makes the motion – two swipes of the finger over her breastbone.

  Besides, she has some work to do.

 

In any town, in any city, the bus is like the filter in a filthy swimming pool: It catches the dregs, the rotten leaves, the dead toads, the used rubbers. This one's no different. The guy at the front smells like piss and Doritos. He's dressed in the latest
hobo chic
, though whether he's homeless or just a incontinent hipster is unclear.

  Then there's the emo kid with more metal than face: He doesn't just look stoned, he looks like he stood under a drug bomb, a real bunker buster, and took the entire blast right to his slack-jawed, hazygazed face.

  Behind him, the doofy dude in the side-cocked trucker hat who must have taken a bath in Drakkar Noir. He bobs his head to music nobody else can hear.

  Across from him, a morbidly obese house-cow, her graying hair shoved under a shower cap like a tabby cat trapped in a plastic bag, talking on her cell phone
super-loud
about her Valtrex prescription.

  And then Miriam.

  Sitting in the back.

  Earlier, after the school, she waited at the bus stop. Just making phone calls. Tattoo parlors and artists all over the tri-county area. From Bloomsburg all the way down to Harrisburg.

  Every call, the same question:
You ever give someone a swallow tattoo?

  Turns out, the answer was yes. Dozens.
Hundreds
. The swallow tattoo? Hugely popular. Totally common. Sailor Jerry, they say. Ed Hardy. Suddenly it's not a needle in a haystack: It's a needle in a basket of needles. Shit.

  She tried to describe it.

  She told them it was plain. Nothing fancy. Mostly just the shape of the bird – like a silhouette with the eye cut out. Inked on a man's chest. Not above some girl's tit. Not on some flabby bicep.

  No, they said. Nothing like that.

  But then she talked to Bryan. Guy who ran a joint called Ink Monkey. He said he'd done some like that. Real simple. He echoed her words:
nothing fancy.

  She hung up with him.

  Then she got on the bus.

  The thing is, this guy's tattoo studio is in a town called Ash Creek.

  Miriam knows that town. Because it's where she grew up. Or, rather, just outside of it – but Ash Creek was their mailing address.

  That's why everything's starting to look familiar.

  The bus drives past an old farm stand, The Honey Hole! She knows that stand. She used to walk there sometimes – she'd bring a buck, drop it into the box, and take a few honey sticks.

  The stand was once brick red, red like a freshly painted barn. Now it's got a rotten cock-eyed lean. Paint's peeling and most of the color is gone. The letters of the sign have faded. Now it just says,
he Honey Ho.

  
Get your head in the game, Black.

  The feeling inside is tight, like her internal organs have been cinched up in a series of binding knots. A breeding ball of snakes.

  Someone tries to sit next to her. The bus hasn't even stopped but someone's jostling for a new seat. Skinny bitch. Probably forty, looks sixty. Crazy cat lady. Or maybe an art teacher. Or both. Big earrings. Tie-dye frock.

  Miriam flicks open her spring-loaded blade, begins using it to pick at her fingernails – makes sure the woman sees what she's doing before planting roots. Miriam adds, "If any part of you touches me, I'll cut it off."

  Skinny Bitch hovers but doesn't sit. She flees to find another empty space.

  Outside, everything's coming together. She knows these trees. These mailboxes. Close now.

  "No, no, no," she tells herself. "Don't you even think about it."

  But she's thinking about it.

  Not just thinking about it.
Doing
it.

  In the battle of fate versus free will, she's not sure who's doing what or whose side she's even on; all she knows is she's standing up.

  Reaching up.

  Grabbing the emergency brake cord.

  And giving it a hard yank.

  The bus brakes. Everyone lurches forward.

  Don't do this, don't do this, don't do this.

  She walks to the front. The bus driver is looking at her like she's got a third eye, one arm, a pair of tits on her chin: freak, mutant, disruptor.

  "I need to get off," she says.

  "What?" the bus driver, a big black dude with liver spots on his shorn head, says.

  "Open the fucking door!" the hipster-hobo with the piss-and-nachos scent shout-mumbles.

  Miriam scowls. "You heard the… whatever that guy is."

  The door hisses open.

  And Miriam steps out into the rain.

 

Dark Hollow Road.

  A long, single-lane road. Halfway down, it turns to gravel.

  Miriam stands at its mouth. Staring down its length she sees a long asphalt tongue pitted with holes and plastered with leaves, the trees bending over it like they're trying to smother it, rip it apart, erase it from the world. From here she can't see any homes – this never was a road with many people on it – but she'll see them soon enough, old farmhouses like hard white teeth, windows like eyes, all ready to swallow her up and spit her out.

  The rain has upgraded itself – no longer a curtain of mist, it's leveled up into a deluge. Wouldn't be the first time she's looked like a soggy dog.

  As she walks, she hears footsteps to one side or the other.

  Leaves, usually. Falling. Scraping across the ground in the wind before finally being pinned to the road by rain.

  Another time it's just a squirrel: a gray flash of fur across open ground and up a tree. Shaking his tail at her as though to threaten her, or warn other squirrels away.

  Then she looks and there he walks. Hands stuffed in his pockets.

  Ben Hodges. The back of his head blown out, a red gummy crater. Skull bone like a broken cereal bowl.

  "No bird picking at your brains this time," she says, speaking over the shushing rain. A small act of defiance.

  "I don't know what you're talking about," he says, but then he smiles. And it's Ben's smile through-andthrough. It's like an arrow through her chest, the shaft broken off at the breastbone so the pointed tip stays forever lodged. "Oh, don't look so sad. It's not your fault I killed myself. Not
all
your fault, anyway."

  Her jaw locks. "Don't fucking pretend you're really him. You're not."

  Another smile. "No, I suppose I'm not."

  "So. What now? Why are you here on this perfectly lovely not-yet-autumnal day?" As though to answer her compliment, the sky grumbles with distant thunder – like the sound of a tractor trailer bounding over a bump in the interstate. "You here to kick my ass again? Break a coffee table? Carve another bird into my other hand?"

  "Nah, I just thought you looked lonely. You're so close now. But this going home thing, it's just a distraction. Why bother?"

  "Fuck you. I want to."

  "Do you?"

  She doesn't answer. She doesn't know.

  "You know, you could just tell me what to do." She hurries in front of him, walks backward as he walks forward. She offers him an open palm. "Put a name in my hand. On a slip of paper. Give me the address, since you're Mister All-Knowing Trespasser. Point me towards the killer and I'll go give him a stern talking-to."

  "Talking won't do it. And I don't have a pen. Or paper."

  He smiles. Now she sees the worms winding between his teeth.

  In her head, the cries of a whimpering infant.

  Another arrow in her heart.

  "So
manifest
one," she snarls. "You're not real anyway. Reach into your gooey brain pocket and pull one out. Or have a bird bring it to you."

  "Doesn't work like that. I don't know any more than you do."

  "You lie."

  He shrugs. "Do I?"

  Fuck it. She takes a swing for him – but her fist finds open air. She hears the rustling and flapping of wings, as though a whole flight of birds just took off – and the sound grows louder and louder until it's a deafening roar – and yet she sees no birds, no birds at all. She spins, looks up, looks around, but all that's here is the rain and the leaves and yet that noise won't stop, and her ears are ringing and–

  It stops. Gone. The sound doesn't fade away – it just hits a wall.

  And when she turns around, she sees where she is.

  She's home.

  Jesus, the house looks like hell.

  It's an old farmhouse – a narrow two-story stone home, the outside with four corners but the inside with countless more, all tight channels and odd turns and what Miriam used to call little gnome doors.

  Once upon a time her mother kept the place impeccable – come autumn she'd have pumpkins and gourds on the front stone steps; she'd have mums in all colors potted in baskets. Birds would play at the feeder. The shutters might get a fresh coat of paint. Everything in its place. A speck of rogue pollen would hit the ground and there would come Mother with a pair of tweezers, ready to pluck the invading tree-sperm from her immaculately groomed property.

  It's an exaggeration. But only barely.

  Now, though…

  No flowers, no feeder, no mums. No pumpkins, no gourds, no nothing. The shutters don't look like they've seen a coat of paint in years. A couple of them hang from their moorings below the windows to which they belong.

  The stone steps are crumbling around the edges. A few pots sit off to the side, all broken and cracked.

  Weeds have claimed this place for their kingdom. Agents of entropy, these plants – committing a tireless assault on this old house, breaking the stone walkway, creeping up through cracks in the steps and slowly but inevitably widening the fissures. Fingers of ivy threaten to pull the place down. Not now, not soon, but one day.

  Gutters, rusted. Stuffed with leaves and nests.

  One window, cracked.

  The mailbox, a downward-facing dog. Sad Snoopy nose pointed toward the earth.

  In fact, the whole building seems to have a slight lean to it. As though it's creeping toward collapse, toward what passes for a house and home's demise.

  Miriam thinks,
Just walk away. Now you've seen. Now you know.

  But there's more to know isn't there?

  Just another ten feet to get onto the porch. A simple knock would suffice.

  
You can see your mother again.

  And that's the problem.

  Does she want to? Is she ready? Will it be worht it?

  The phone rings. Katey's cell.

  A blocked number.

  Fuck it. She answers.

  "Hey, Mom," says the voice on the other line.