Before Wings (2 page)

A rock flew by on her right and skipped twice before sinking. Adrien turned to see a dark-haired boy her own age sitting on the ridge, hunched in a blue lumber jacket and covered in a smattering of mayflies. Her eyes narrowed, but he didn’t glance at her, so she turned back to the lake without speaking. Another rock flew by, and another.

“You’re Erin’s kid?”

“I’m not her kid.”

“You look just like her.”

Everyone said this. It was ridiculous. Adrien’s eyes were hazel, her hair a long frizzy blond-brown. Her aunt’s hair was wheat blond, straight and cut like a boy’s.

“Yeah, like a truck looks like a Honda.”

“Which one are you, the truck or the Honda?”

“I’m the one with the flat tires.”

The boy’s eyebrows lifted, then his face lapsed into moodiness and he threw more rocks. Adrien watched them soar and drop into the water. Down, down—she was being pulled down with the rocks, the day darkening, the air growing thick. Bubbles left her mouth, rising to where other people breathed, effortless and free.

“You’re dying,” said the boy.

It took a moment to clear the water from her brain. When she turned, the ridge was empty, the tall line of grass along its edge bending before the wind.

“There was a boy hanging around the lake this afternoon.” The large room rounded and deepened Adrien’s voice. Perched on a stool, she watched Aunt Erin make supper for two in a kitchen designed to feed hundreds. She supposed her aunt was pretty. She had the kind of face that drew eyes, but it was remote and alone like a profile carved into a rock cliff. Aunt Erin spoke to people out of necessity, and then she was done with them.

“That’d be Paul Marchand. Lives near here. Does maintenance for me.”

“He’s weird.”

Aunt Erin gave her a pale blue look. “Got a sixth sense. It’s a burden and don’t you forget it. Carries it well.”

Adrien pushed out the words in raw heavy chunks. “He told me I was dying.”

Aunt Erin stopped moving and stood with her head down. “Well, and isn’t that what you’re always telling people?” She reached for the salt.

Adrien flushed, her heart jerking unsteadily. “But I didn’t tell him.”

Aunt Erin pushed through another slight pause. “Probably picked up on your thoughts. The boy reads minds. Hardly have to speak to him some days, just knows what I want done. How many cobs of corn?” She lifted the lid off a pot of boiling water.

Without answering, Adrien pushed back her stool and went over to a window. Her heart was a dark door, slamming in the wind. She put out a finger to trace the coolness of the glass and felt nothing. Outside, rain fell steadily. “D’you think he’s right?”

Aunt Erin closed the pot lid with a clank. “Like I said, picking up on your thoughts. Walk around in a storm cloud like you do, you broadcast loud and clear. Hamburgers are ready.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Suit yourself.” Aunt Erin pulled a stool to the main counter and began to eat in silence. Adrien’s heart slowed. Rain slid every which way down the other side of the glass, collected in small pools.

“I think he’s weird.” She spoke emphatically. “I’m not talking to him.”

“Don’t have to talk to anyone you don’t want.”

Adrien sat down and picked up a hamburger. “I like cheeseburgers.”

“Cheese is in the fridge.”

Her mother would have
asked
if she wanted cheese. Sighing heavily, Adrien took a bite and began to chew.

The rain continued. After cleaning up, Aunt Erin asked if she wanted to walk to the corrals to see the horses, but Adrien headed for her cabin. She knew she was tired, but when she made her bed and lay down, exhaustion poured through her. There was something about the huge, windy, spruce-scented air of this place. At home, her parents main
tained a cheerful static, quickly covering her comments about death and doom as if her words were blood—when she made a wisecrack about dying, she began hemorrhaging and they had to staunch the flow, shut her up.
Shut her up.
Sometimes she screamed, “I could die, you know, I could die”—anything to cut through the loving crap. Silenced, her parents would stare helplessly. Once she had yelled, “Why don’t you have another kid, just fucking conceive!” Her mother’s face had crumpled, her father had gone white, but they hadn’t said what they were thinking.
We want to give you all our love until you’re gone.

It was Aunt Erin who had suggested Adrien work at Camp Lakeshore for the summer. She had called her niece directly and invited her. “Can’t pay you much, won’t be a millionaire. Just working in the store, nothing too strenuous.”

A few hours and it had been strenuous, all right. Some weird boy telling her she was dying. Aunt Erin treating her like a mental deficient. The wind moaning in the trees, opening up places in the air, calling spirits.

Since her aneurysm, Adrien had seen spirits. Perhaps her brain circuitry had altered, or the worlds had rearranged themselves to give her a taste of the afterlife. She didn’t see them constantly, but there was often the hint of something smudging the corner of a room, shifting behind a tree, wailing across a lake. This didn’t frighten her, just made it difficult to focus on the here and now. It was like being pulled in different directions. She was standing in a shadow land between two worlds and was being asked to choose, but didn’t know how to take those steps toward the humans reaching out to her, their voices calling, “Come, come.” Their
smiles were too vivid. She kept fending them off.

Aunt Erin and the weird boy didn’t play the game of life, pretending there was hope. Paul Marchand was right. She was dying. Maybe not at this very moment, but it would come. The blood vessels in her brain were weaker since the aneurysm—they could tear at any moment, rip the life out of her. Her body would drop, her spirit rise ... to do what? Float endlessly in a gray smudge through rooms, watching the living go on without her? Join that line of spirits howling across the lake? What was it they had been calling, over and over?

Adrien slipped on her raincoat and made her way toward the water, looking down to keep the wind out of her face. The mayflies had been grounded by the rain, and a cold aloneness spread out on all sides. Why had she come to this place where no one knew her, no one loved her? She was an aneurysm victim. Didn’t Aunt Erin know she had to be careful not to get upset, not to exert herself, not to stress her blood vessels? Adrien reached the ridge and was about to follow the path down to the shore when she saw her aunt standing on the beach, unmoving, her hood down, yellow jacket flapping in the wind. Out on the lake, the spirits moved in a restless line, a gray glow that was easy to distinguish in the dark—the vague shapes of five girls moving in and out of themselves, grieving like smoke.

Aunt Erin was watching them. Unaware of her niece, she stood staring directly at the spirits. There was no doubt about it, they were as clear to her as they were to Adrien.

Abruptly, Aunt Erin turned and came up the path. Startled, Adrien stepped back. As she peaked the ridge,
Aunt Erin looked straight at her and Adrien saw her aunt’s face split wide with sorrow. Without speaking, the woman passed by, walking across the lawn toward the dining hall, while Adrien stared after her, tasting her aunt’s loneliness, a heavy salt in her throat.

two

She slept heavily, through dreams of heaving water and a night sky coiled with clouds. Formless voices called through slow chaos. When she woke, she was sweating, her scalp soaked, even though the cabin held an early morning coolness. The rain had stopped. It took a few minutes to place the unfamiliar bed, the rough blankets, the pillow that smelled of closed-in places. The room danced with a rustling emerald light. For a brief moment, she was sure she had stepped through to one of her dreams, waking in another life where she could be free of wondering if something was about to tear open inside her head.

The snapping of branches brought her bolt upright. Suddenly Adrien realized she was alone in a cabin, and something was moving against the outer wall. Wrapping
a blanket around herself, she crept to the window, but saw only the lift and toss of easy green trees. More sounds came from the cabin’s other side. She slunk down the narrow hall and peeked into an empty bedroom. Something shadowed the window, and a face peered in.

“Close the window and I’ll take out the screen,” Paul said. “I’m washing windows.”

“I was sleeping.”

“Close the window,” he repeated, holding up a squeegee.

“Close your own window.” She turned to leave.

“I’ll have to come in.”

“Go do another cabin first.”

“This is the last one.”

“So wait
five
minutes while I get dressed. What time is it, anyway?”

“Eight-thirty.”

“Most people start work at nine.”

He retreated and she decided she had won. But what if he snuck around the cabin and watched through the window while she dressed? Or came inside? She locked the bedroom door and pulled down the blind before changing into jeans and a T-shirt. Then she washed her face, brushed her teeth and carefully combed her hair. Make the prophet of doom wait. When she finally emerged from the cabin, he was sitting on the front steps, smoking. As she stepped off the side of the small square porch into a flurry of mayflies, he turned to look at her, his face as expressionless as yesterday, except for his eyes.

“What?” she snapped, flushing.

He shrugged.

“Isn’t it against the rules to smoke at Camp Lakeshore?”

He shrugged again.

She hesitated. “So, can I have one?”

He gave just the hint of a smile as he pulled a pack from his shirt pocket and tossed it to her. She missed and had to bend to pick it up. So what, she couldn’t be expected to be an athlete these days. A yellow lighter was tucked into the left side. She lit and inhaled deeply. This was one thing she hadn’t fully considered when she had agreed to come for the summer, but then she hadn’t known about the no smoking rule until Aunt Erin sent the long list of
Rules for Staff
, one week after the phone call. Not that it mattered on an official level—she was underage and Aunt Erin was hardly likely to sell them to her at the Tuck’n Tack store—but none of the other staff would be carrying any for an easy bum. After thinking through all the ways she could get caught smuggling in a carton, Adrien had decided this would be the perfect opportunity to quit. Perfect as in no two ways about it.

“Thanks.” She started picking mayflies off her T-shirt.

He returned the pack to his pocket. “Any time, Angel.”

“My name’s Adrien.”

He looked directly at her. “I know.”

The opportunity was wide open. She had been poking and prodding people for two years, looking for this moment, and here it was. She gulped air. “How come you said I was dying?”

His eyes didn’t leave her face. “Aren’t we all?”

She dragged on her cigarette. “Yeah, but I
am
. Did my aunt tell you?”

He dropped his stub and ground it out, then slid it under the porch. “Erin doesn’t talk about people. She’s good that way.”

“So how’d you know?”

He linked his hands behind his head and stretched, cracking bones all over his body. “I’ve dreamt my own death a hundred different times. A hundred different ways. It never quite gets me; I always wake up just before.” His eyes narrowed and he stared off. “It’s always the same day, the same place, but each time it happens a different way.”

“They can’t all be right.”

“No, but why always the same time and place? I figure I choose the way it gets me, that’s all.”

She forced a laugh. “You’re nuts.”

“Then why’d you ask me?”

They watched each other in the quiet morning air.

“You still haven’t told me how you knew I was dying.”

“Just a feeling.” He picked up a bucket and turned to go.

“Hey,” she called after him. “Can you tell when it’s going to happen ... to me?”

He looked back at her. “It’s not clear.”

“So, when’s your big date?”

“Want to watch?”

“Just wondering.”

His face intensified. “You’ll be there. I’ve seen it. Hide the butt, eh?” A silvery swarm of bugs rose as he pushed into the bush at the back of the cabin. She listened to the squeegee swish in the bucket, then drip as it rose. Paul swore.

She took one last drag at her cigarette, ground the butt and slid it under the porch.

“Hey Angel, would you
please
go inside and close the windows?”

Her lips twitched with the hint of a smile. Surrounded by sunlit bug wings, she followed the path through the trees toward the dining hall for breakfast.

Three women in polyester uniforms stood at the kitchen’s main counter, opening large boxes of canned food. Their voices could be heard from the dining hall’s main entrance, interrupting one another, breaking into volleys of laughter. No English. Adrien peered cautiously into the kitchen. They didn’t look like aliens, just three middle-aged women, bulging at the sides and wearing orthopedic shoes. Hairnets and weird words.

One woman saw her and broke into English. “You’re Adrien, right?”

Adrien smiled with relief.

“Such a pretty girl. Looks just like Erin, eh?”

The hairnets nodded enthusiastically.

“Um, could I have breakfast?” Adrien asked.

“Breakfast?” The first woman rolled her eyes dramatically. “Maybe you could show up before noon?”

“Just bread and water?” Adrien hedged.

The women whooped. Corn Flakes, milk and bread appeared and she ate, listening as they lapsed into their weird language. Why didn’t they speak English if they understood it? She tried to guess what they were talking about. The old country? Their children? Husbands? Sex? Adrien almost laughed out loud. Maybe they were discuss
ing their latest Pap smears. Cancer—did the hairnets ever think about death? From their whoops, giggles and snorts, it didn’t sound like it. As Adrien finished her cereal, the first woman returned to English. “Just leave your dishes in the sink. We’ll get them later.”

“Um,” Adrien asked, “where do you come from?”