Mockingbird (6 page)

 

She does a Russian kick dance against the bathroom door. Water suddenly seeps out from under it – brackish and murky, like the birth water from a swamp monster's womb. It's cold on her bare toes. It stinks, too. Stagnant. Funky. Fungal.

  Ah. Yes. This. A dream. A vision. A something.

  The door opens, and a woman steps out. Hair matted to a bruise-purple face. Weeds braided in the sloughslick hair. She opens her mouth, and a waterfall of muddy runoff splashes onto her dead bare chest.

  "You," Miriam says.

  Maggots do squirming laps around the corpsewoman's ruined gray nipples.

  "Me?" she belches, more mud-water splashing over her rotten lips.

  Miriam snaps her fingers. "Yeah. You. You're supposed to be Louis' dead wife. I get that. I have whatever… prerequisite dream knowledge I need to figure that much out. But I don't know what she looks like so you're just some… face playing the part."

  In response, the face changes. Bones and skin to liquid and back to bones and skin. From a dead white woman to a dead… Latina woman? The face darker, grayer, deeper striations like poison ivy threaded beneath the skin.

  Then it shifts again. A black woman with shadowdark eyes. A white woman with blonde ringlets gummy with algae. All drowned.

  Then one more change.

  The face becomes Miriam's own.

  Hair dyed with river water. Capillaries burst in yellow eyes.

  "Cute," she says. But it's not cute, and the space between her heart and her stomach goes sour, a caustic curdled pocket.

  Her cadaver-self looks old. The wrinkles are from the water, like the way fingers look after spending too much time in the tub. Just the same, those ancient creases do little to ease the rotten knot in her gut.

  "You're on the right path," Corpse-Miriam coos. "The path to the river."

  "I can tell," she tells her dead self. "If there's one way to make a person feel reassured it's to appear to them in a dream as a drowned dead woman."

  "This is a warning."

  "A warning. Fine. So warn me."

  "You're not alone."

  "I'm not alone? What's that even mean? Is that the warning?"

  Corpse-Miriam smiles. Slime slides from between her teeth. She opens her mouth wide, wider, widest – the jaw cracking and snapping and then her mouth becomes a howling tunnel, and in that tunnel Miriam sees onrushing waters, a river-tide of poison. An acid flume like heartburn shoots up her own chest and into her mouth and she tastes vomit and blood and mud and then the dream dissolves like sugar poured into hot coffee.

  A whisper, then, as the dream falls apart: "The river is rising, Miriam."

 
 
 
 

 
 
 

The School of Broken Dolls

 

 

"So not only is this an all girls' school," Miriam says, one leg dangling out the truck window, toes constantly adjusting and readjusting the passenger side mirror, "but it's a school for
bad girls
."

  Louis grunts. That's been his response for the last couple days while they've been holed up in the Sugar Sands Motel. They camped out there while he waited for Katey to return his call. She did. School's in session. She's back at Caldecott and eager to meet Miriam.

  Beyond the disinterested caveman noises, Louis isn't saying much.

  Miriam fills the silence.

  "Listen to this," she says, the mailer splayed open in her lap. She reads from the book: "
Some girls benefit from a New Beginning
– New Beginning, that's capitalized, by the way, and you know something's important when needless capitalization enters the picture –
a New Beginning away from family and friends. How do you know if a girl will benefit from a New Beginning at the Caldecott School?
Okay. Checklist time.
Does your daughter: act out in defiance of accepted social norms? Believe that consequences do not apply to her? Become angry and defiant without warning? Engage in wanton promiscuity?
What a great phrase. Wanton promiscuity. If it's so bad, they shouldn't make it sound so interesting. It almost sounds like an appetizer. Won-Ton promiscuity. That's a dude fucking his soup. Just going to town on it. Sure, he's scalding his gonads, but that's the price of forbidden love. Am I right?"

  Louis stares out at the road ahead. A grim-faced cyclops.

  She poked the bear too hard this time. The wife is a pressure point and she didn't just push on it – she hit it with a fucking sledgehammer.

  "Whatever. Anyway." She turns back to the mailer. "They list a number of disorders they try to help 'curtail' – another great word, 'curtail'. A cur's tail. Huh. Anyway. They list, let's see, depression, manic-depression, bipolar disorder, ADHD, anxiety, oppositional defiant disorder – whatever the hell that is – borderline personality dis–"

  "It's oppositional defiant disorder." It almost startles her it's been so long since Louis has said more than three words to her. "It's a sign of someone who doesn't play well with authority. Doesn't like being told what to do. Angry, resentful, argumentative. Usually in some kind of trouble. Often does the opposite of what they're told just because that's how they are."

  "Ugh." Miriam wrinkles her nose. "Bet those kids are fun to be around. Like hanging out with a cat."

  It's then she sees Louis looking at her. That one eye firing a concentrated laser beam of scrutiny, slicing her apart and inspecting the remains.

  "What?" she asks.

  "Nothing." He goes back to driving.

  "You trying to say something?"

  "I'm not."

  "I know what you're saying." She gets it now.

  "Do you?"

  "I don't have oppositional defiant disorder."

  Grunt.

  "I don't. That's crazy-talk. I was a good girl once. And it's not my fault I'm surrounded by idiots and lunatics half the time. I just go my own way on things. That's what an independent woman does. Right?" She scowls. "Just keep that one eye of yours on the road."

  Then, just to tick him off, she cranks down the window, pops a filterless cigarette in her mouth, and brings a lighter flame to its tip. Puff, puff, puff. She blows a jet of cancer outside.

  She picks a nit of tobacco off her tongue, flicks it out the window just as they pass a highway sign.

 

SELINSGROVE, 5Mi

SUNBURY, 7Mi

 

  A hard knot like a calcified clump of hair forms in her throat. "We're in Pennsylvania."

  "You were asleep when we crossed through Philadelphia."

  Susquehanna River Valley. Three counties. All around the river.

  The river is rising, Miriam.

  But it's not that. Or not
just
that.

  If they're near Selinsgrove, then that means right now, at this very moment, they're only thirty minutes north of where she grew up. Where her high school boyfriend blew the roof of his skull off with a shotgun. Where the boyfriend's mother beat Miriam half to death with a snow shovel. Where her baby died inside her.

  Where her own mother still lives.

  Miriam hasn't seen the woman since she ran away. Almost a decade now.

  
Maybe she's dead
, Miriam thinks. Once she discovered she had the power to see how people were going to die, she never again touched her mother. By the next morning, she'd already bolted.

  Ghosts, restless and sad, stir inside her.

  It takes all her effort to tamp them down with a hard mental boot.

  She clears her throat.

  "Did Miss Katey get my rider?"

  Louis grunts. An affirmative sound. Miriam already knew the answer to the question. They stopped off at a Kinkos to fax Miriam's handwritten list of rock-star demands to the school for the teacher.

  "Fine," she says. "Good. Great. Let's go to school."

  She flicks the cigarette out the window, half-finished. It just doesn't taste good anymore.

 

Rain hammers the phone booth.

  Miriam, sixteen, holds the receiver against her ear. Her jaw shivers.

  It rings and rings. She doesn't want anyone to answer.
Go to the answering machine
, she thinks. It's like a prayer. A mantra.
Go to the answering machine. Go to the answering machine. Go to the answering machine
. It starts to sound absurd in the echo chamber of her own head.

  Click.

  "Miriam?" her mother's voice. Small and afraid. She's never afraid. It's like something's been stolen from her. And maybe it has.

  "The baby's dead, mother."

  "I know. I know." Of course she knows. She was there at the hospital. "God will take care of him now."

  "Mother–"

  "Where are you?"

  "God can't be real," Miriam says, throat raw, eyes puffy. Every part of her feels like a tooth that's been cracked in half, the nerve ending exposed.

  "Don't you say that. Come home to me."

  "I can't. Something's wrong." Something she doesn't understand. The baby died inside her but something remained. Some little ghost, some little demon, fragile like the skeleton of a baby bird. It's changed her. Turned her very touch into a sponge, a sponge that draws poison. A sponge that soaks up death the way a gauze soaks up blood.

  She doesn't understand it: Every time someone touches her – one of the nurses, a doctor, the security guard outside the hospital – she sees the most awful things. Visions of how they die. And when. They can't be true.

  But they feel true.

  All the more proof her mind is lost. It's like a moth – touch a moth and a powder comes off the wings, and once that powder's off, the moth can no longer fly.

  The powder, she thinks, is off her wings.

  "Just tell me where you are. I'll come get you."

  "I'm leaving."

  "Please, Miriam. God will protect us. He'll help us get through this."

  "This. This? This is all proof he's just a… a bedtime story, Mother. To make you feel better about the way you are." She wants to tell her mother how horrible she is, how she's just a bitter pill, a mean little rodent, but she can't muster the words. She wants to yell about how her mother was never nice to her, not until she got pregnant – which means now that the baby's dead the old ways will return, the dismissals and the insults and God's love blinding her like the beam of a too-bright spotlight. By now, Miriam's crying again. She can't believe she has more tears, more spit, more snot, but here it comes, just as the pain of unstoppable grief is again hitting her in the chest like a sledgehammer. She doubles over. "I won't. I won't go back. I won't come back."

  "Miriam, I'll do better."

  And then she says the final words: "No. You won't. Because I won't give you the chance." She slams the phone down. With her back against the inside of the booth, she slides to the rubber mat and huddles next to the cigarette butts, the candy wrappers, the dead moths.

  It's there she stays until morning.

 

The gates – iron, each spiked at the top with a
fleur-de-lis
– look like teeth to Miriam. A hungry mouth with black metal canines. Probably what the Gates to Hell look like. The Devil's own maw. Chompy-chompy, all you sinners, all you dirty-birdy bad girls.

  Louis pulls the truck up. A guard at the gate – an old black dude with eyes pinched tight behind rolling slugs of skin and cheeks sprouting a wan, wire-brush beard – gives a palms-out wave. "As I live and breathe. If it isn't Mister Truck Driver, tumbling in off the road after a long haul."

  "No long haul this time," Louis says, leaning out the window. "How you doing, Homer?"

  The guard gives a dismissive wave. "I could complain, but nobody'd want to listen. Who you got in there with you? Late admission?"

  Miriam scrambles up over Louis and thrusts her head out the window. "Do I look like a student to you?"

  "Shoot, I dunno."

  With one of his bear paws, Louis urges Miriam back into her seat. "This is Miriam Black. She should be on your list there. She's here to see Katherine Wiznewski."

  Homer looks over a clipboard, squinting even harder. So hard his eyes all but disappear and Miriam's not sure how he can see anything at all.

  "Uh-huh, uh-huh. Here you go. Miss Black to see Miss Wiz. You hanging around, Louis? Almost lunchtime."

  Louis shakes his head. "Just dropping her off."

  "Wait, what?" Miriam asks. This is news to her.

  He turns. "I have a job."

  "Yeah. To be here. With me."

  "A real job," he clarifies, the phrase a barb, a thorn, a needle. "You'll be fine. You're meeting Katey out back at the picnic tables. It's all set."

  "And then what? Do I go sleep in the woods? How long do you think this is going to take? I'm not harvesting corn. I touch her. I get a vision. I tell her about it. Thirty seconds. Game over. I've spent more time smoking a cigarette."

  "You don't want me there."

  "No," she says. "
You
don't want you there."