The Telling (24 page)

Rusty shoves off the railing with a moan.

“I mean, it's gone,” Duncan says, loud and frustrated. “Whoever killed the dogs killed this creepy-ass bird, took its beak off, and got the hell out of here.” He waves indicating the unlatched side gate.

“You don't know that someone did this,” Rusty says. “You don't know that for real, man. Those dogs were vicious.” He points a shaky arm at them but can't look their way. “They could have attacked that bird, chewed its face off, and then . . . and then . . .”

“Spontaneously croaked?” Duncan says, rubbing a fist in one eye, then the other.

“Maybe the bird's poisonous? Bro, I'm saying
holy fuck
, rosary peas turned out to be toxic.” Rusty pulls his baseball cap from his head and replaces it backward. His eyes bug out from his head. “We can't jump to conclusions saying someone did this, is all I'm getting at.” His chest is heaving, and he forces his hands still by shoving them into his board shorts.

“Did you call the cops?” Josh asks.

“I called 9-1-1 and they chewed me out. The woman was all, ‘Call
a veterinarian, the police are busy with actual crimes,' ” Rusty says. “Becca was losing her shit, crying about Maggie's killer being angry with us for finding her body. She kept wailing about this being revenge, and we hadn't even told her about Ford yet.”

“Where is Becca now?” I ask

“Upstairs with Car,” Duncan says.

Josh pulls his cell from his pocket. A moment later he's telling his mom as much as we know. Once there's a job to be done, he takes over. This is who Josh is: the protector of the core; older brother; consoler and spokesperson.

I inch closer to the bird. Its feathers are scruffy, their quills crimped. There are red puncture marks all over its back. “Those are bite marks. Maybe Rusty is right and the dogs caught it and killed it?” I say. I would prefer this explanation. Minutes ago I was hoping my dead stepbrother had poisoned Maggie and Ford because it meant he'd found a way to be on this island. And if Ben were here at all, able to poison and kill, then couldn't I talk to him? Couldn't we drive to his favorite taco truck or play Scrabble or roast marshmallows at midnight? Wouldn't it mean that he'd forgiven me for not going after him that night? For not saving him?

Duncan nudges the bird with his shoe. The bird rolls to face me. There's a red sore like a blister where the beak should be. The edges are clean, not ragged, as if the beak was removed with precision. Its black eyes gleam blindly. Its scaly black claws—four toes on each foot—are curled in on themselves. They look prehistoric, a remnant of what should no longer be here. I don't want this bird to be connected to Maggie's or Ford's death because I don't want Ben to have had a hand in this.

“Are
blackbirds poisonous to dogs, like some prey are poisonous to their natural predators?” Duncan asks.

“Blackbirds?” I murmur.

He squints up at me from where he's kneeling and examining the bird. “My little bro Jeffrey's favorite book is one with all these sick nursery rhymes.” There's a lag between Duncan's lips moving and his voice reaching me. “This looks like the blackbirds that broke free from a pie.” Those disembodied words paint vivid black forms, flapping their wings in the air. They beat harder until their wings splinter and break against their bodies. I remember Mom's voice, rich and velvety:
four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie
.

The sun's voltage is hiked up. I shade my eyes, shake my head, and mutter I'm not sure what to Duncan. I imagine a wriggle under my flip-flop and I jump back, seized by the fantasy that it's the blackbird's beak, cawing for help. Dismembered and chirping.

There were blackbirds in one of Ben's stories. Correction.
Beakless
blackbirds. And the beakless body on the terrace is an echo of that long-ago childhood tale. I reenter the house. The present has a twilit feel, eclipsed by a bright long-ago moment. I can't stop hearing it, seeing it,
replaying
it.

The pink floral blanket was a canopy above eight intricately carved dining chairs. The floor was covered with brocade throw pillows that made irresistible scratching posts for Basel, some of their tassels frayed and bitten.

“You ready for a story?” Ben asked, propping a bowl of popcorn on the belly of my giant brown plush bear. The stuffed toy wore a circus collar that I eventually cut off because I couldn't stand how comical it made him seem. I nodded. “It's a bloody one,” Ben warned. I grinned wider.

He recounted the story he titled, “The Lovely Scarecrow.” Not all Ben's stories had names, and most I wouldn't remember if they did. This one made an impression.

A half man, half demon lived in a bank of mist in the land next to the kingdom of death. He hated girls. I can't remember why—doesn't matter, though, does it? He rode around on a mule and sheared off the noses of blackbirds to toss at the girls. Lana the brave made him pay—can't remember how. I bet he lost his nose. I remember clapping and jumping to my knees as Ben shared the grotesque ending.

People think girls aren't supposed to crave violence like boys do. Video games and toy soldiers weren't supposed to be for me. Here's a secret, though. I was hungry for the violent stories, the sheared-off body parts, the vengeful heroes, as much as any boy could have been.

The dead birds and the poisonous rosary were threads of Ben's imagination, and now they've been spun into reality. The marauding villains of Ben's stories weren't born out of air. I asked him where they came from, more than once.
Where did your stories start?
He sidestepped. He pleaded imagination. He went silent, stood up abruptly, and left me in the blanket fort. Stories have beginnings, origins. But what do they matter? They aren't real. Real is Willa's arm, hot on mine. Real is Ben, who invented heroes and villains and the means they'd fight and die by.

Soon Karen arrives from the firehouse. She brings another firefighter with her, and they're all business. Josh says that Becca's mom is on her way from work. Willa ducks into the bathroom to call her own mother. I should call Dad, but I glide up the stairs
instead. Becca and Carolynn haven't come down.

The second story is wrong. Stuffy. There's a heady, nostril-burning scent I can't place. I expected to hear Becca's baying or Carolynn talking her calm. There's nothing but a white band of light under Becca's bedroom door in the dark, long hallway. I don't knock.

I should have.

The scene is jarring. Becca's in a sunshine-yellow bra and underwear. She sits on the edge of her bed, facing the door, with her fingers laced in her lap. Other than the almost nakedness, she sits prim as she would in class. Her hair has a lank, painted-on look. Water drips from the tapering ends, a scatter of spots on the silk duvet. Her bra is see-through.

“That better not be Duncan,” Carolynn yells from Becca's bathroom.

I open my mouth to say it's me. I don't get that far. There are what looks like self-inflicted scratches on Becca's forearms. Three each. “Hey, Lan,” Becca says. Her voice is detached and airy as a floating balloon.

“Hi,” I croak.

Carolynn pops her head out of the bathroom. “Is it just you?” she asks. Her hair is wet and sticking to one side of her face. I nod and she ducks away.

I let myself slowly onto the bed. The room stinks of rubbing alcohol and the cake-frosting candle on the desk. The ceiling fan is whirling it up into a sickening-smelling twister.

Becca catches me looking at the red lines. “Don't worry,” she says. “Car cleaned them. I went a little mental.” She laughs softly. “I get a pass.”

Carolynn's
wrapped in a towel. “Showers are second only to Xanax,” she says, crossing to the closet.

“Do you need something?” I ask. “Water? Josh?”

Carolynn stops pushing aside hangers. “He doesn't need to see this,” she says. “Will you find B a long-sleeved shirt to wear?” She points at the dresser under a mother-of-pearl-inlaid mirror on the wall. Carolynn yanks a sundress from a hanger and wriggles it over her own head.

Dressing Becca is a lot like dressing a life-size doll. She doesn't help as I worm her noodle arms through sleeves and scrunch the fabric up so her hands pop out.

“My babies loved you, did you know?” she asks with an off-putting cheerful smile. I shake my head. She doesn't acknowledge that I'm dressing her. “You should take that as a major compliment, since they only tolerated pretty girls. I think they remembered your smell from when I used to go over your house when we were little.” She rubs the heel of her hand at her temple before her arm thuds back into her lap. “Isn't that so funny?” I incline my chin. Suddenly, her eyes are swimming in tears. Her shaking fingers tuck a piece of hair behind my ear, and her wrist brushes my cheek. “You get that I'm super sorry for everything, right?” she whispers.

Her bottom lips quivers, and I think about that scared little girl on the swing next to me when we were small. I used to sing really loud to drown out her parents' fighting. Their voices echoed over the water and boomeranged back at us. “Sorry for what, B?” I ask.

She shrugs a shoulder. The neckline of her shirt is askew, and I go to fix it. She grabs my wrist hard. “Listen,” she pleads. I wait. “I'm sorry for . . . like, for telling all the girls when we were in sixth
grade that you had really rank BO and that I stopped going to your house because you were a smelly lesbian who wanted to make out with me and you wore a sports bra because you didn't have two boobs, just one, like a boob Cyclops.” She sniffs. “They were going to invite you to sit with us at lunch, and I didn't want them to because I thought . . .”

I'm standing. All I see is Becca. Her wet hair is tucked in the neck of her shirt and her lips are curling nervously. I'm light-headed. “You thought what?”

She drags the back of her hand across her nose messily. “That you'd blab about my parents and them fighting and my dad sleeping with his yoga instructor and how I cried and everything you heard them yell. They said really embarrassing stuff.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know”—she waves a hand in the air—“all our family dirtiness. If you sat with us to eat and got invited to sleepovers, I worried you were going to spill.”

I've stopped breathing. “I wouldn't have.”

“I know that now. Obviously.” She starts to roll her eyes but stops midway through. She exhales loudly. “I just didn't know it then. I was
only
eleven.”

“ ‘I was
only
eleven.' ” I touch my collarbone. “Girls have called me Uni-Boob since. Do you realize that? I thought Carolynn was some teasing mastermind and told them to. I couldn't understand why out of nowhere she made it her life's mission to torture me.” There's a snort from behind me.

Becca lifts her hands, her fingers splaying. She isn't shaking any longer. “What do you want me to say?”

“What else?”

“Huh?”

“What else did you say about me?”

Her eyes run over the room. Nothing's changed about Becca's appearance, and yet she doesn't look like a fragile doll to me anymore. She looks like a spoiled, selfish child a minute away from stomping her foot and demanding that she get a lifelong pass for cruelty.

“Car?” Becca whines, making her eyes big and innocent.

Carolynn's reclining on the window seat. “This isn't my thing, B.” She shakes a bottle of nail polish. It rattles. She unscrews it and removes the brush. She begins to meticulously paint her nails while pointedly avoiding eye contact.

“Fine,” Becca says with a huff. She closes her eyelids briefly, and raps gently on her forehead with her fist. “So there was the whole sports bra thing, and I told them you wore those gross pads that look like diapers because you peed like an old lady when you laughed. It was so stupid.” She giggles under her breath.

I am motionless. “What else?”

She busies herself strapping sandals on her feet and glances at me like she was hoping I'd vanish. “That was enough for girls not to want you in the lunch circle. I mean, there was high school, and I said a lot of nasty things about tons of girls. I had the crappiest self-esteem in the universe.” Her butt bounces once on the mattress, and she shrugs. “I was insecure, so that's like a pass, you know?”

“No,” I say, “that is not a pass. You do not get a pass. What
specifically
did you say in high school?”

She chews her bottom lip, and I cover my mouth when the urge
to gag becomes so strong I need to hold it in. This girl. I let her dote on me. I binged on her compliments. I let her make me glow. I
wanted
to be her friend even after she ditched me. Even though it was obvious that Becca had a talent for excluding the many and including the few.

“You have to swear not to stay pissed.” She speaks quickly, and her tone is equal parts irritated and hopeful. “But I told a few girls that I saw you and Ben
doing it
on your terrace. I said I could see your deck from mine, which I can't because of my mom's hedges, but they didn't know that. It was awful and shitty of me and it was freshman year and there were some new girls and I wanted them all to want to be my friends. Can you blame me? They were all checking out the older guys at lunch and Ben walked by, and I don't know, he was the dark horse of hotness, and they were all gushing about him and it just flew out. It was like this one thing that I knew—well,
said I knew
—about the guy they all wanted. I don't always act like a good person.” Her sooty lashes flutter shut with the admission.

“That's because you're not one,” I say without skipping a beat.

She nods, relief bowing her lips, happy to be understood. “No, not always.”