In the Shadow of Blackbirds (23 page)

He grabbed both of my arms and lifted me to my toes. “You try living with your brother’s ghost and sending your mother away half out of her mind. You try growing up with a
stepfather who loved your brother more than you and tell me you wouldn’t touch one speck of a substance that takes away the pain.”

“You’re hurting me.”

“Don’t ever accuse me of being an addict and a fraud again.”

“Let go of me.”

“I came to you for help.” He shook me. “I came to you as the brother of a boy who loved you.”

“Let go of her!” Aunt Eva ran up behind Julius and pulled on his shoulders.

“Leave me alone, Eva.”

“What are you doing to her?”

“Leave me alone you stupid, clingy woman!” He let go of me and shoved my aunt to the floor.

The room fell silent, aside from my rapid breathing and the clicking of Oberon’s talons as he paced his perch.

Aunt Eva slowly propped herself up on her elbows. She was wearing a brown silk dress, and she smelled powdered and perfumed. Little tortoiseshell combs dangled from stray blond strands. Her glasses hung cockeyed on her nose. She wasn’t wearing her flu mask.

“Get out of my house.” She pushed herself up to a standing position and straightened her spectacles. “I don’t ever want you near my niece again.”

“No—I can’t. I need her to help me!”

“I said get out.” She charged at her wall of photographs,
yanked down the picture with the white-draped figure and me, and pitched the frame at Julius’s head. He deflected it with his arm, and the frame crashed to the wooden floor in a shower of glass.

He backed away. “You’re crazy.”

She grabbed the framed article with his soldier spirit photos and threw that at him as well. He jumped away and let the glass shatter at his feet.

“I’m calling the police if you don’t get out of here this minute!” She pulled down another photo—the one with Uncle Wilfred’s spirit. “I’m sure Mary Shelley has marks on her arms from your fingers.”

The third frame whacked him in the temple. She then pelted him with his hat.

He grabbed the fedora, yelled obscenities I’d never even heard before, and bounded down the hall. He must have swung the front door closed with all his might, for the house shook and the rest of the photos on Aunt Eva’s living room wall were knocked crooked.

Aunt Eva exhaled in a way that sounded like a sob. She put her hands on her hips and hung her head, taking deep breaths that wheezed from the depths of her lungs.

I hesitated between comforting her and cleaning up the glass.

“Are you hurt, Mary Shelley?” Her voice turned choppy. “Do you need a doctor?”

“No. You got to him before he could hurt me too badly.”

“I can’t believe—I don’t understand.” She tromped out of the room and into the kitchen.

I followed after her.

With her back to me, she opened the surface of her tan cookstove, lit a match, and stirred up the smoldering coals like she was jabbing the poker into Julius’s heart.

“I can cook, if you’d like,” I said.

She kept digging at the coals.

I rubbed my arms, still feeling Julius’s finger marks throbbing beneath my sleeves. “I’m sorry about what he did to you.”

“I wasted nearly a year of my life wanting that man. I spent Wilfred’s last months hoping Julius would be my chance to have someone who wouldn’t waste away and die on me. I had no idea he thought so little of me that he could come over and bully us like we were nothing. Why was he hurting you?”

“We were arguing about Stephen.”

She shook her head and slammed the stovetop closed. “It’s my fault for always pushing you at him. It’s my fault for allowing you to see your childhood friend again. I could have saved us both so much heartbreak if I hadn’t been swept away by—” She wiped her wet cheeks with a dishcloth. “And here I am, twenty-six years old, with no husband or children of my own.”

“I’m surprised you’d still want children after dealing with me.”

She sputtered a small laugh. “But I do. And I—I lost my husband just as I was starting to age. I’m not pretty like you and your mother. I’ll never find someone to love me again.”

“You are pretty, Aunt Eva, even though you never seem to think so. And you’re not old. My mother didn’t give birth to me until she was thirty.”

“But she died when she gave birth to you.”

“Because of severe bleeding that had nothing to do with her age. There’s still time for children. Isn’t it amazing that right now you have the opportunity to head downtown in trousers and short hair to build ships—to join in some of the same adventures as men?”

She blew her nose into the dishcloth. “A job doesn’t hold you when you’re lonely. It doesn’t comfort you when a killer flu comes barreling into town.”

I walked over and placed my hand on her smooth, silk-covered shoulder. “I’m here for you, though. We’ll take care of each other.”

At the hospital my touch had soothed her, and again she relaxed under my palm. She faced me with eyes swollen with tears. “Are you really communicating with Stephen? Did you honestly hear him and feel him in that séance room?”

I pursed my lips and nodded. “Yes.”

“Are you sure you’re not just imagining him? I know you’re desperately lonely, too. You have no friends here. You have no father and no school, which I’m sure can cause—”

“It’s truly him, I swear. He seems to need my help in understanding his death. Otherwise, I doubt he’ll ever rest.”

Her mouth quivered. “Do you believe he’s been with you anywhere else besides that séance room and his funeral?”

I lowered my eyes.

“Mary Shelley, where do you think you’ve encountered him?” She gulped. “In this house?”

I nodded and met her gaze. “He comes to me at night. I’ve seen him. I’ve felt him. I think someone did something terrible to him.”

A deep groove of concern formed above the bridge of her nose.

“Don’t be afraid of him,” I said. “He doesn’t seem to want to do any harm. He’s just scared. I think between the war and the flu, no one’s going to escape getting haunted. We live in a world so horrifying, it frightens even the dead.”

She left my side and grabbed an onion and her knife from the worktable. “Go clean up the broken glass while I fix supper. Let’s put the subjects of death and the Embers brothers to rest for the evening. I’ve had enough for one day.”

I did as she asked, for the kitchen was drenched with the taste of heartbreak, and I could barely breathe.

I BROUGHT
THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND
TO BED WITH ME THAT
night. My room sweltered with a heat unthinkable for an Oregon girl in fall, so I wore my sleeveless summer nightgown made of batiste and embroidered lace and stretched out on my bed beneath the oil lamp’s light.

Part One,
I read silently to myself,
Dropped from the Clouds.
Jules Verne and his brilliant writing transported me into a hot-air balloon that careened toward a South Pacific island on the winds of a catastrophic storm. The lingering pain of finger marks on my bare arms faded the further I dove into the story, and the ache of missing Stephen and my father softened to a point I could almost tolerate. Warmth spread like candle wax through my blood. I fell asleep ten chapters
in, with Stephen’s book squished between my cheek and the pillow.

An awful dream visited me. A crow as large as a bald eagle sat on my chest. I pushed at its lung-crushing body to get it off me, but it cawed and flapped its black wings and sliced my skin with its snapping beak.

“Don’t!” I yelled with enough force to pull myself out of sleep.

My eyes opened.

I gasped.

Stephen was on me—not a bird.

I regained my wits, pushed him off, and crawled backward to the corner of my bed. “Stay back. Don’t come any closer.”

He lunged toward me, so I stood upright on the mattress and shoved my spine against the wall. “Get back, Stephen!”

“Don’t push me away.” He clutched my hips and tugged me down.

“Let go of me! You can’t get close to me the way you did last night.”

“I need you, Shell.” He pulled me to my knees. “Come closer.”

“No.” I shoved him with enough fear-fueled strength to send him falling backward on his elbows. “You’re pulling me into your darkness when you get too close.” I stood again. “You have to stay back if you want me to help you.”

He remained on his back and watched me with eyes black and fearful. He wore that white undershirt again, and I could see an unhealthy thinness in his arms and stomach.
His cheekbones had become more prominent since April.

“I see red marks on your arms,” he said. “They’re killing you, too.”

“I’m all right, Stephen. Just scoot back a few feet so I can think clearly.”

He kept staring at Julius’s marks on my skin.

“Scoot back if you want to stay with me,” I repeated. “You need to listen to what I say so we can keep each other safe. Do you understand?”

He edged backward a foot.

“Do you promise not to come any closer? Look me in the eye.”

He did as I asked, and a small spark of the old Stephen inhabited his brown irises again. I could still see the handsome boy I loved inside that changed, haunted person.

“Will you stay right there?” I asked.

He nodded.

“You promise?”

He nodded again.

“Talk to me, Stephen, so we can make sense of the ugly things and send them away.” I swallowed. “Tell me about France.”

He dropped his gaze, and his photographs behind him shook with an unnerving
tap, tap, tap, tap, tap
against the wall.

“Last night at the séance you asked me to stop you from going either there or to your house,” I said. “What parts of the war do you experience?”

“I’m not talking about France.”

I lowered myself to a kneeling position. “I need you to tell me what happened so I can help you get some rest. What do you see?”

The picture frames trembled harder.

“Tell me, Stephen.”

“Trenches flooded with rainwater. Mud. Filth. Gas masks.” He sat upright and pulled his knees to his chest. “Blood-soaked bodies hanging on barbed wire. Artillery shells whistling and screaming overhead. Rats the size of cats crawling over me. Flashes of light that bring out the huge, dark birds.”

My flesh went cold. “Tell me more about the birds.”

“I don’t know where they come from.” He buried his face against his knees. “But they’re like no creature I’ve ever seen. I can’t tell how many there are. They show up, and I expect them to peck out my eyes, but they just keep watching me and killing me, and they never go away.”

“How are they killing you?”

His body shook as if something cold had surrounded him. “It’s dark and shadowy. I’m struggling too much to see them through the smoke and flashing lights. My wrists are tied to something. They stick the tube of a copper funnel down my throat and gag me.”

“Were you tortured over there? Did the Germans capture you?”

“I don’t know.”

I inhaled a gust of fiery air. “The air burns whenever you’re
with me. What do you smell when you’re with these birds?”

“Fire, yes. And those goddamned flashes of light explode over and over and over and over.”

His lightning photograph whacked against the floor, saved from shattering by the braided rug.

I heard a movement in Aunt Eva’s bedroom down the hall—a squeak of her mattress. I held my breath, counted to twenty, and turned my attention back to Stephen. My voice dropped to scarcely above a whisper. “What do you see when you’re in your bedroom?”

He lifted his face, his eyes dim and weary. “A bloodstained sky.”

“In your bedroom?”

“Yes. And the closed door and windows that won’t let me out.”

“You feel trapped in your bedroom, then?”

“Yes.”

“Is your brother ever there?”

“No, just the birdmen, when it’s dark.”

“Birdmen? They’re part man?”

“I don’t know. It’s dark. They’ve got hands and beaks.”

“You see them in your room? Not just on the battlefield?”

“I don’t know if it’s my room or not. It’s hot from all that light …” He brought his hand to his left temple.

“Are you all right, Stephen?”

He winced. “It hurts my head.”

“What does?”

Mr. Muse’s
frame banged hard enough to make a dent in the wall.

“Oh, God.” He opened his eyes. “I want to shoot them.”

“Please stop that knocking sound. Aunt Eva will hear you.”

“You’ve got to keep them from getting at your eyes.”

“There aren’t any birds here, Stephen. Listen—your brother gave me some of your books, and I can feel the warmth you experienced when you read them. I wonder if going inside your house and touching anything left over from your time in France—”

“No! Stay away from that house.”

“I can’t go to France, but I can get into your bedroom.”

“No. Don’t go anywhere near there. If they’re there, they’ll take your beautiful eyes.”

“How am I supposed to help you, then?” I raised my voice. “Tell me. What am I supposed to do?”

I heard Aunt Eva running across the floor of her room. I turned toward my door and heard the second frame clatter to the ground. By the time I leapt over to the pictures to hang them back on the wall, Stephen was gone.