In the Shadow of Blackbirds (27 page)

I am healthy and safe, Dad. Please keep yourself the same way.

Your loving daughter,
Mary Shelley

My hand cramped from the tension coursing through my fingers. I had kept the tone of the letter somewhat optimistic for Dad’s sake, but I longed to say so much more. Penning the words
Portland City Jail
on the envelope made the muscles burn even worse.

I set Dad’s letter aside and fetched the stack of Stephen’s envelopes—the ones he had addressed to me—so I could read words written by the boy whose mind was still intact. What could his voice from the past tell me?

At the bottom of the stack lay the very first letter Stephen had written after he moved to California. I opened the blue envelope and pored over his message.

June 21, 1914

Dear Mary Shelley,

We finally unpacked enough for me to find my writing paper and pen. The house is just as I remembered from when I visited my grandparents: large and drafty, with the wind whipping through the boards at night, making the walls creak.

The house faces southwest, with a view of the wide-open Pacific. L. Frank Baum wrote the last books of his Oz series when he wintered down here, just a few blocks away from where I’m sitting right now. If I ever see him walking down the street, I’ll tell him I know a crazy girl up in Oregon who’s read all his books at least five times apiece.

Glenn Curtiss, the aviation genius, owns a naval flight school on North Coronado Island, and his airplanes buzz over our house and rattle the china cabinet several times a day. My mother worries that all the plates and cups will shatter from the ruckus. It scares her something awful. I’ve seen Curtiss’s flying boats, which are normal biplanes with pontoons attached to the bottom. They take off from the Spanish Bight, the strip of water that separates the two Coronados, and the pilots circle them over the Pacific outside my bedroom windows (yes, windows, plural—you should see this place, Shell!). Imagine what it would be like to feel that free, flying through the air, gazing down at the earth like a seagull. Maybe one day I’ll join the navy and learn how to fly. I bet you would, too, if they allowed women. Better yet, Curtiss would hire you to work for him, and you could lecture him about all the ways he could improve his engines.

Are you lonely up there without me, Shell? I already miss our chats. I genuinely doubt I’ll find any girl around here who spends her spare time fiddling with clocks and poring over electrician’s manuals. Have you read any good novels I should know about? Is it still raining in Portland, or did summer weather finally arrive? Summer lasts year-round here. While you shiver up there this winter, I’ll be swimming in the ocean and basking in the sunshine on the beach. I’ll send you a sand crab.

Write soon.

Your friend,
Stephen

I sputtered up a laugh and remarked aloud, “I remember telling you
exactly
what you could do with your sand crab.”

I laid the letter next to the lamp and sighed into my hands, my elbows digging into the table. “Are you in the room with me right now, Stephen? Can you hear me?” A quick check with the compass told me I was the only magnetic force gripping the atmosphere at the moment. “Why can’t you come when I call you? Why do I have to be half-drunk with sleep for you to completely show up? In fact …” I stood. “I’m going to bring a chair upstairs so I can sleep sitting up.”

After the long day at the Red Cross House and all the bickering with Aunt Eva, my arms shook with exhaustion as I lugged a dining room chair up to my bedroom. Aunt Eva’s door was shut, the space beneath it dark, so she didn’t have to witness my preventive measures against waking up with a boy or a bird on my chest.

I sat on the scratchy needlepoint cushion and attempted to get comfortable. “All right.” I nestled my head against my arms on the table. “Come if you can, but don’t scare me.” I closed my eyes.

At first only the soft whisper of the oil lamp’s flame met my ears—a soothing nothingness. Minutes later an entire brigade of sirens tore through the streets like an invasion of wailing banshees. Their cries made the hairs on the back of my neck bristle. I must have drifted off counting how many ambulances there were—at least four of them—while the oil lamp turned the backs of my eyelids orange.

A dream ran through my head: I lay on my back somewhere outside and watched the blackness of the nighttime sky dissolve into a milky shade of white. A gunshot hurt my ears. Streaks of red splattered across the heavens.

I awoke with a gasp, fear blazing across my tongue and static snapping in my hair. I heard another gasp, and Stephen thrust his arms around my waist and buried his cheek against my stomach as if I were a life preserver, his face pale and damp in the lamplight. He shivered against me.

I wrapped my arms around his head. “Are you all right, Stephen?”

He didn’t answer. He could barely breathe.

“It’s OK. I’m here. You’re safe. It was just a dream.” I lowered my right hand to his shoulder and found the wide cotton strap of the sleeveless undershirt he was always wearing. To soothe him, I ran my fingers down the curve of his bare arm, meeting with cold flesh and scars that reminded me of the barbed-wire wounds on Jones’s hand. I puzzled over Stephen’s lack of a proper shirt. “Where were you when you put on these clothes?”

I bit my lip in anticipation of his answer. The question seemed like a stroke of genius for the five or six seconds after I asked it.

He didn’t respond—he just quaked and panted—so I elaborated. “You’re wearing a sleeveless undershirt, a brown pair of pants that look like civilian trousers, and gray socks without any shoes. Do you remember where you were when you put
on this clothing? Do you remember why you’re not wearing a regular shirt?”

He slowed his breathing enough to answer. “No.”

“Are you sure? Please think hard, Stephen. Think back to the moments before the birds arrived. Where were you?”

“I don’t know.” He closed his eyes and tightened his grip around my waist. “I just remember it being hot. There was too much sunlight. Too many windows. I didn’t like wearing sleeves.”

“Were you in a hospital?”

“Maybe. I just …” His eyes opened wide. “Oh …” He exhaled a sigh heavy with remembrance.

My heart raced. “Oh what?”

“I just remembered something.”

“What?”

“I think I hurt her.”

“Her?” I swallowed down my jealousy. “A girl was there?”

“The Huns flew over us. Their planes were practically right on me. The bombs were about to drop. I don’t know why she was there.”

“Who was there?”

“My mother.”

“Your mother?”

“She was reaching over me, and I kicked her so hard she stumbled several feet backward and landed on the ground. I heard her cry out in pain.”

“Your mother was in a hospital with you? Is that what you
mean? Or was there a nurse who looked like her?”

“It was her. She said my name.”

“But—that can’t be.” I shook my head.

“She was there. I was panicking about the plane, but she was there, and I hurt her.”

“Wait a second … wait …” The little clock gears inside my head clicked into place. “Oh, God.” My diagram of the events leading up to his death repositioned itself in a brand-new order in my mind. A sentence from Stephen’s letter sitting right there next to me on the bedside table leapt off the page:
airplanes buzz over our house and rattle the china cabinet several times a day …

“Oh, my God.”

I remembered back to the day I posed for that second spirit photograph in the Emberses’ house—the biplane soaring over the roof, footsteps scrambling across the room above our heads, dust shaking loose from the beams, Mrs. Embers tearing into the studio, saying,
I need your help, Julius. I’m hurt.
She had grabbed her stomach as if she had just been kicked, and Julius shouted,
Christ! Get them out of here, Gracie.

It wasn’t a ghost that made everyone stare up at the ceiling with whitened faces. A spirit didn’t somehow hurt Mrs. Embers.

It was an eighteen-year-old boy, deep in shock from the war, reacting to a sound that reminded him of battle.

“You were still alive that day.” I grabbed the sides of Stephen’s face. “When Julius took my photograph and Gracie
gave me the package, you were living and breathing in the bedroom directly above my head.”

He scowled and shook his head. “I’m still alive, Shell. Stop saying I’m not.”

“You came home, Stephen. You’re not still in the trenches.”

“But the minute you let me go, I’ll be back in the mud and the dark and the shit and the blood. I hear them whispering right now.” He peered over his shoulder. “Don’t you hear them?”

“What are they saying?”

“All sorts of things. One of them wants to know how long it’s going to take.”

I pulled his head against my stomach and buried my face in his brown hair. “Tell them to go away. Tell them you haven’t been on the battlefield for a long while. Tell them you came home.”

His fear seeped inside me, pounding in my pulse and drumming against my ears. Our breaths blended into a staccato beat. All I could think about was Julius standing next to his camera while patriotic music blared from the phonograph to cover the bangs and thumps from the room above the studio.

“What happened to you?” I asked. “Did someone do something to you in your own house?”

“They’re killing me.”

“I know.” I kissed the top of his head through his smoke-laced hair. “I know.”

He breathed into the folds of my nightgown. “Keep me with you.”

“I’ll try.”

“Keep me close.” His lips kissed my stomach through the airy fabric—a flutter of pleasure that penetrated the pain. “I want you so much, Shell.”

“I want you, too. More than anything else.”

The room trembled with frustration and longing until even the curtains swayed, and my mouth filled with the rich flavor of a feast I could only taste but never, ever consume.

“I wonder what would happen if you pushed the darkness out of your thoughts.” I drew in a deep, quivering breath. “If you remembered the parts of your life that had nothing to do with death. I wonder what it would feel like if you moved closer to me without those suffocating memories weighing us down.”

He looked up at me, his eyes dark and curious.

“I wonder …” I pushed myself off the chair and grabbed his hand to help him to his feet, even though my own legs shook. “Can you stand up with me?”

He rose up above me, and we stood face-to-face for the first time since the morning we held
Mr. Muse
between us in his house. I cupped his cool cheek and guided him toward me by his waist. His hands ran across my back and seemed to grow warmer against my fabric. For a moment, the fear throbbing through him faded to a mere whisper of trepidation, barely there, like a weak heartbeat.

His attention switched to the ceiling. He tensed against me and held his breath.

“No, come back.” I grabbed both sides of his face again. “Come back to me. Think of something good. Think about kissing me in your house. Do you remember that?”

His eyes wouldn’t leave the dark air above us, and I, too, heard the flapping of restless wings.

“Think about how it felt when we kissed with your photograph tucked between us. Do you remember that?” I lowered his face until his forehead bumped against mine. “Did your heart beat as much as mine did, Stephen? Do you remember your lips on my mouth and neck? Do you remember the way you made me breathe?”

He closed his eyes with a sigh that shuddered straight through me.

“You remember, don’t you?” I whispered.

“Of course I remember.”

“I’m here now.” I brushed his lips with a kiss that tasted far less like smoke than the other night. “Stay with me. Don’t think of anything else. Not a single thing. Let’s see if I can keep you with me.”

He caressed the back of my neck, and we kissed again. The sensation was stirring and sweet. The closer we got, the more the feeling bloomed into a rush of pleasure far more delicious than even the bliss of flesh against flesh. My head clouded over with a dizzying sense of exhilaration. My legs lost their ability to stand.

“I need to sit down.” I pulled away from him but grabbed his arm so he wouldn’t disappear. “Come with me.” I guided him back toward my bed with careful footsteps. “Are you still with me?”

“Yes.”

We sat on the edge of the bed, and our mouths returned to each other. His fingers explored the curves of my body from my neck to my chest, and down to my waist. Lovely breezes shivered across my skin. He slid my nightgown up past my knees and kissed the small of my throat.

“Is this all right?” he asked. “Can I pull your skirt up farther?”

I nodded, and he kissed my neck again with a touch that melted straight through me. His hands edged my nightgown up to my hips.

I lay back against the cool quilt and allowed him to climb on top of me.

His lips warmed my chest through the nightgown’s fabric. “For some reason, Shell, I can’t ever take off these clothes. I don’t know why.”

“It’s all right. Just be close to me.”

“I want to be as close as I can.”

“We’ll make the best of it.”

I held on to his back and felt him push against me with a sigh that traveled deep inside my own lungs. I still wore my cotton drawers, and he kept his trousers buttoned, but an electrifying current pulsed between us.

“See,” I murmured, “we’re even closer than we could have been before.”

Energy coursed through my blood and brought a smile to my face, and I could tell by the way Stephen breathed and lowered his eyelids that he was experiencing the same rapture. We toyed with the provocative sensation, his trousers brushing against my legs in a hushed rhythm, until he broke the silence with another whisper.

“This is the way Julius told them he found us.”

“No—don’t bring up anything upsetting right now.” I gripped his arm to keep him from slipping back into the darkness.

“I was just going to say I sometimes wish he had actually found us this way.” He eased himself all the way on top of me and breathed into my hair. “Even though it would have been wrong and it could have led to trouble, it would have been nice to have felt that with you, even just once.”