Plumage (16 page)

“Truth? What's so damn true?” Racquel stumped off.

Sassy stood where she was, her lips parted, hearing her own heartbeat in her ears—it sounded like a washing machine on the heavy-load cycle. While uninterested in the philosophical ramifications of Racquel's existential bleat, she stood enthralled by other thoughts. Possibilities. If she looked in the pool, might it show her her true self? Instead of a blue budgie, might it reflect her own familiar Sassy-face, wrinkles and wispy hair and the hint of baby-fine mustache on her upper lip and the skin tabs growing on her eyelids and—good, bad, all of her? Her gut went watery with yearning at the thought. Even if it was just for this one time and never again, she had to see.

She turned. The pool lay glassy still again, showing nothing of its own depths, offering a glinting image of nodding narcissus flowers and treetops and a glimpse of azure sky, as if waiting for a god to look down from the latter and ask, Water, water in a pool, who's the very greatest fool?

Trembling, yet smiling at the same time, Sassy knelt on the smooth flat pastel-colored rocks at the verge.

She looked.

She gasped.

Paprika-freckled, Frederick smirked back at her from the surface of the water.

He smirked, and then he grabbed her. Sassy screamed as everything toppled into an eddy of blackness.

Racquel whirled when Sassy screamed, catching just a glimpse of the arm snaking out of the water. Sort of like the lady of the lake except the hand looked kind of hairy for a lady and it held no sword; instead, it seized Sassy by her limp gray hair. Before Racquel could react except to scream in his turn, there was a splash and Sassy was gone.

Yelling, Racquel ran to the pool and dived in after her.

The shock of the cold water turned everything black for an instant, and in a crazy flash he thought he was dead, he had broken his fool neck against the bottom of the pool without noticing—then his vision cleared and he found himself swimming along its stone-cobbled belly. Finding Sassy should have been easy; this was a pool only a bit larger than your average hot tub, and its water was glass-clear. But Racquel found only a few bored-looking koi down there. He surfaced, gasped for breath, and dived again, unwilling to believe it. He swam underwater the short length of the oval twice before he could encompass the truth: Sassy was quite simply not there.

Streaming water, he scrambled out, hyperventilating, cold to the heart, yelling “Help!”

How anyone could help, he had no idea.

“Help, somebody! She's gone!”

What happened next he would remember unto the final moment of his life.

He stood amid broken white flowers, crying out for a miracle, and upon shining wings it came flying down.

Racquel stood in abeyance of all functioning, his soul open as wide as his mouth and eyes, his knees weakening, watching it swoop down out of treetops as distant as heaven and condescend to him. It had the human form of a skinny young woman with a great-eyed, heart-shaped gamine face—but she could not be human; she was too ethereally beautiful, and she had pearly rainbow wings worthy of an archangel. She was all flutter and flow, Rapunzel masses of auburn hair, gossamer gown flowing down—even in his extremity of wonder, Racquel noted that floating gown and wished he had one like it to wear with great wings like a cape and damask Victorian slippers. But he saw no shoes on this being. No feet, either. Either the gown hid them, or she had none. She did not stand on the ground; she hovered in front of him, scanning him up and down.

She said, “Your dress is hanging oddly in the front.”

“Huh?” Racquel regained his functioning to some extent and looked down at himself. “Shit.” He had lost his boobs. Expensive custom-made silicone black-boy boobies, they were probably lying at the bottom of the pool. Where Sassy should have been but wasn't. What the hell was going on? Utter confusion supplanted much of his panic, because—

“Sassy?” he whispered to the apparition bobbing in front of him. “You—you're dead?”

“Do I look dead?” she retorted with more spirit than Sassy ever showed.

“But you—you're an angel.” She looked like Sassy with wings. She
was
Sassy, ineluctably she was Sassy, although she appeared several decades younger and dynamite good-looking.

“Hell, no. I'm no angel.”

Sassy never swore. Boggled, Racquel blurted, “You—you're not her? Are you Sassy?”

Her tone quieted. “I'm all the Sassiness she's lost. Poor Pavlovian wimp.” As she spoke, her great wings gently fanned to keep her steady. “It's about time she came looking for me.”

“Um, she's not looking for you,” Racquel babbled before his stunned brain could unfreeze itself and stop him. “She's looking for a parakeet.”

“A pair of
what
?”

“A, um, a bird.”

“Huh. Well, screw her.” She scanned him again, noting the way the wet dress clung in all the wrong places, and mischief sunrose in her eyes. She said, “I should think poor old Sassy would be past that by now.”

“No! I—she—” Racquel felt himself reddening and took refuge in the immediate. “Look, something pulled her into the pool.” He pointed. “But she's not there.”

“I didn't think she was fool enough to dare the pool!” The winged one's eyes widened with a sort of respect. “Or gutsy enough.”

“I drank from it and it didn't hurt me.”

“Well, ain't you the doo-doo.” She gave him a bored look and started to turn away.

“Wait! What are we going to do about Sassy?”

“When she thinks to look for
me
, she'll be back.” The Sassy-bird turned her lovely back and soared away.

Racquel bawled after her, “But what
are
you?”

“What the hell do I look like?” Her scorn floated back to him. “I'm a freaking bird of paradise!” She disappeared into the stained-glass mist above the treetops.

Racquel stood for what might have been a moment or an hour gazing after her.

NINE

Sassy staggered to her feet and found herself, dripping wet, up to her knees in one of the goldfish basins at the Sylvan Towers, with koi nipping her ankles and a number of hotel guests staring at her through elevator glass.

This would have been distressing enough, but as her eyes focused behind her bleared glasses and her mind found a take on the situation, it got worse. Life tended to do that, in Sassy's experience; whatever would be least bearable in any given situation was most likely to happen. Murphy's Law, thus:

Just beyond the rim of the basin, dapper in a suit from Sears, stood Frederick.

With his hands in his trouser pockets, he rocked on his heels in a manner he had always considered fetching. “Sassy!” he said with a nervous smile. “I, um, good to see you again.”

It was such an awful moment that Sassy could only stare at him.

“The cops called me down here,” Frederick explained. “When I found out you were missing, I was
concerned
.”

Deep within her gut Sassy felt a sluggish anger stir. He was concerned about her? How nice. Where was his concern for her when they were married?

“I was
quite concerned
,” Frederick iterated earnestly, with a touch of martyrdom because he was not getting the desired response. “Are you okay? What are you doing standing in that fishpond?”

Sassy's entire body clenched like a fist and went arctic cold. With her arms wrapped around herself, she began shivering so hard her teeth chattered. Like a squirrel she gabbled, “Whu—whu—whuuu—”

Frederick removed his suit jacket and with exaggerated tenderness placed it around her shoulders. His touch made her gut stir again, queasy. She flinched away from him.

“Whu—what did you grab me for?” she cried.

He stepped back and eyed her cautiously. “I didn't grab you, Sassy. I just put my jacket on you. You're cold.” His helpful, explaining tone made Sassy want to scream. “You need to get out of that fishpond,” Frederick continued, speaking slowly and carefully and clearly as if to a lunatic. “Get into some dry clothes.” He started to offer his hand, then appeared to think better of it, as if she might bite.

Sassy thought of diving into the knee-deep water to get back where she had come from, and if she had thought it might work … but she knew better. She would just traumatize the fish and break her fool neck. The situation was beyond redemption, at least for the moment. She sighed, stepped out of the fishpond and stood dripping on the floor. She wondered whether her car was still in the parking lot. Where were the keys? She couldn't think.

“So where have you been?” Frederick asked.

She stared at him without answering.

He waited a while, then said, “Well, you can't just stand there. And you can't go outside like that. You used to work here, right? Is there somebody you can borrow dry clothes from?”

She watched his mouth move as if she were observing a museum exhibit, something alien feeding, a starfish, a sea urchin. She heard his words only as background noise.

“I think the cop is still interviewing downstairs,” Frederick said. “But maybe not.”

It all felt like a bad dream. Maybe it was. Sassy closed her eyes, took a deep breath and opened them again, but—damn—everything, Frederick was still there.

Interpreting her silence as incomprehension, he expanded—literally; under his cheap white shirt his chest puffed, lifting his wide tie, paisley, like big blue sperm swimming around. “They
thought
maybe I could help them find you,” he declared, “and I
did
. We'd better go tell them. Come on.” He turned away.

She stumbled after him. Years of conditioning made her follow even as she thought
I want to go home
. But how? Clothes soaking wet. Car probably towed. Sassy opened her mouth and tried to ask about the car, but all that came out was a wordless bleat.

Frederick turned back to peer at her with freckled benignity. “Is something wrong?”

She spoke with sudden clarity. “Nothing you'd understand.” He seemed to think that he had wandered by and found a madwoman standing in a fishpool, but Sassy knew well enough what had happened. When she had seen his face in the water, he had seen her, and there she was. It made sense. She had always been his good little reflection.

Racquel stood shivering in his wet dress, thinking of throwing himself back into the pool permanently, with a rock on his chest, when the feather floated down like a silver sword of Zorro slicing a long, lazy zigzag in the air.

Silver? No, not silver but all the pearly colors of dawn. Gawking, Racquel suspected he knew whence that foot-long pinion had come, and he forced his gaze away from the feather to stare up at treetops and distant deep sapphire sky. But he saw no sign of her.

Then the feather halted at the level of his chest and just out of his reach, wheeling like a weathervane—no, a feathervane. Ha, ha. And he had no one upon whom to inflict the pun, damn it. Where was Sassy? What was happening to her?

The feather pointed away from the oval pool, up the slope of the dingle and into the forest.

Racquel had a feeling that if he left this place behind he might never find it again. And it was his only link to Sassy—but there was nothing down there except koi and two chocolate-colored silicone boobs like giant Hershey kisses out of the wrappers, and he was not going to dive for them because he was too cold and bummed and it was all too goddamn weird and he had no clue what to do to get Sassy back.

The feather bobbed on air, waiting for him.

Goddamn helplessness, anyway. “Lead on, Macduff,” Racquel grumbled, and the luminous pinion apparently did not mind being so titled, because it did lead on, and he followed.

Through greenshadow, over mossy boulders and through icy trickles of water, through rifts of mushrooms the colors of wild rose and wisteria and tamarind the thing led him. It seemed to be a kindly feather; it waited for him when he followed too slowly, which was most of the time. For what might have been hours or a few minutes he faltered after it, limping until he stumbled. After a while the ambient light turned all the colors of the mushrooms and then some; the shadows grayed into twilight. Something as gray and silent as the shadows ghosted past; owl. There on a low branch sat another one, perched fluffy as a feather duster. Sassy would know what kind. Probably some damn extinct or endangered owl. Spotted owl, maybe. Cute little thing—until it turned its weird ring-gold eyes on him. Then he shivered, cold in his wet draggle of dress. Birdsong quieted into twitterings and owl call; night was falling. In the dusk the feather shone like sterling silver.

“I can't make it much farther,” he told it. He could see the feather, but not his footing, and with every step his feet hurt like very hell.

The feather jiggled in response and darted on. Racquel sighed and slogged after it.

Just as dusk became dark and he really could not go on much farther, he saw the light ahead, a modest amber glow tucked down into a cup of the forest. Campfire. People. Food, maybe. Rest. Without reasoning any farther, without considering whether these putative people had ever seen a black guy in draggled drag before, he staggered toward the firelight.

In the lower-level men's room, Sassy swabbed johns in an incandescent fury, hating herself for wearing once more the decent and obeisant poplin uniform of a maid, hating herself for meekly stepping back into this—this—she could not think words bad enough to describe this job that involved cleaning up unknown men's bathroom mistakes and the occasional flaccid condom. At first when they had offered her “another chance” at the job, she had said no thank you. Just wanted to go home, wet clothes or no wet clothes. Leaving Frederick still looking for a cop to brag to, she had gotten as far as her car, which was glory hallelujah still there in the employee lot—but no key. Duh. Not thinking real clearly. Back inside, hiding in the maids' locker room, she had phoned her landlord to beg a ride.