Someplace to Be Flying (41 page)

Zia clapped her hands. “Oh,
good
idea.”

The two of them came up on either side of him and kissed him on the cheek, one on the left, one on the right.

“I do like this new skin of yours,” Maida said.

Then they were rising on black wings, soaring high above him before gliding down toward the tenement building where the other corbæ were meeting.

Ray stood by the car where they’d left him. He held the ball Maida had tossed to him, watching until they vanished, one by one, through one of the building’s broken windows. Absently, he bounced the ball against the pavement, caught it, bounced it again.

For the first time he found himself wondering what it would be like to fly. Wishing he could. And that only made what had happened to his daughter all the harder to bear. He hadn’t known Nettie was kin then, but he’d heard the story. Everybody had. Only now he finally understood why she’d turned to the cuckoos when no one else would—or could—help her.

She hadn’t had a choice. Flying wasn’t something she’d ever have been able to do, it wasn’t in her blood. But she’d had to try.

September 3

First thing Tuesday morning, Kerry got up early, washed and dressed, and was ready to leave for the university by eight. Her first class wasn’t for another two hours but she wanted to go early to orient herself to the campus. At least that was the plan.

It looked to be another unseasonably hot day so she was wearing her coolest dress—a short-sleeved cotton flower-print, one of only two dresses she owned—and had done her hair up so that it would be off her neck. She had no idea what styles were in fashion on campus and hoped she wouldn’t look too out of place. What if they were all into really trendy stuff? Tattoos and body piercings and elaborate makeup?

She’d half-expected one or both of the crow girls to show up while she was having breakfast, but the house seemed very quiet this morning. There’d only been the usual rumbling sound that, when she’d asked Rory yesterday, he’d explained away as their mysterious landlord making his way across the apartment upstairs. From the way the house creaked and groaned, it was more as though there was an elephant moving around up there. She couldn’t imagine how big a person would have to be to make that sort of a noise when they simply went from their bedroom to their living room.

“Oh, he’s big all right,” Rory had told her yesterday. “I don’t know how he ever got through the doorways in the first place, little say up all those stairs to the third floor.”

“But doesn’t he ever go out?”

“I’ve never even seen him move. I’ve only heard him cross the apartment, twice a day. So far as I can tell he’s completely catatonic the rest of the time. When you’re in the room with him, his eyes don’t even track your movements. Chloë acts like he communicates with her, but I’ll bet she’s the one who really runs this place, not him. Even if he is the landlord.”

From Rory’s descriptions and what she’d seen herself so far, she guessed they were all a little strange in this house. Maybe that was why she felt so comfortable here. It was almost like being back on a ward. She grinned. That’d make the crow girls the nurses doing checks.

Well, that was pushing things, maybe, but otherwise … A catatonic upstairs. The agoraphobia Chloë seemed to suffer. And that scene in the front yard yesterday afternoon. It wouldn’t have been out of place at Baumert, except it wouldn’t have gone on for as long as it had. A nurse would have been telling them to “stop acting out” almost as soon as it had begun and hustled everybody back inside. It was hard to fault them for that at Baumert. Things could get out of control very quickly. As they almost had here.

That crazy red-haired man. Ray. What had he been thinking? That she’d simply jump into the car and drive off with him? Like she’d just go along with someone she’d never seen before in her life. Except Maida had said he was her grandfather.

Her grandfather …

She paused in the middle of packing her knapsack and set it down by the window. Going into the bathroom, she studied her face in the mirror. She raised a hand to touch her cheek, to finger her hair. She had his dark complexion. The same fox-red hair.

Suddenly it was hard to breathe.

She remembered yesterday morning, Maida telling her that her mother was red-haired. But that wasn’t true. She didn’t take after her parents at all. Both of them were dark-haired and pale-skinned. Brown-eyed.

She’d had a little fantasy during those first years in Baumert. That her parents weren’t really her parents. That her real parents were going to show up one day and take her away. Out of the institution. Away from the ward and all it entailed, into the loving embrace of a family unit that she’d only ever been able to experience in books, or seen in films and TV shows.

Of course it never happened. How could it? But what if it was true? What if she really
was
a displaced child who had somehow ended up with the wrong family? She’d always tried to be a good daughter, to love her parents, to believe that they wanted the best for her, but that got harder and harder to maintain until finally it was impossible to keep up the pretense. The longer they kept her institutionalized, the more she felt estranged from them, and that only made her feel more guilty and confused.

But now …

She had to sit down. She backed away from the mirror, found the toilet seat behind her with fumbling hands, and lowered herself onto its porcelain lid. Closing her eyes, she tried to visualize the light that Maida had called up inside her yesterday. She thought of candles, of a soft glow that grew bright and strong when you paid attention to it, pushing back the encroaching dark.

It was easier than she’d thought it would be. After a few moments, the tightness eased in her chest and she could breathe again. She leaned her elbows on her knees and cupped her chin, thinking.

“Ray,” she said, trying out the name.

Could he
really
be her grandfather? Was that why he’d been so concerned about her? Was that why he’d expected her to go away with him?

It seemed so improbable—but no more improbable than him showing up the way he had, pulling out that old-fashioned gun. Or Maida being able to cure her panic attacks with moistened fingers.

The world outside Baumert was proving to be even stranger than living on the ward had been. The difference was that there they had medical terminology to explain everything, drugs and treatments and therapy to make the strangeness go away. Out here you were on your own.

She got up and splashed some cold water on her face, patted it dry with a towel. Her first day at the university was going to have to wait. Until she got some answers, all she’d be doing was going through the motions of attending classes and interacting with her fellow students. She even knew who to ask: this storyteller named Jack that Annie’d talked about yesterday. The one who lived in a school bus on the edge of the Tombs.

According to Annie, she was supposed to wait for him to come to her, but she was tired of waiting, of reacting instead of acting. She was long past due taking up responsibility for her own life. Dealing with Dr. Stiles as she had, leaving California, coming here to attend Butler were all good steps, but they weren’t enough. They didn’t tell her
who
she was, where she’d really come from.

She collected her knapsack and left the apartment, hesitating in front of Annie’s door. There was no sound from inside, no hint that Annie was awake.

And considering how evasive Annie had been yesterday, it would probably be a waste of time to ask her even if she was awake.

So she’d ask Rory for directions, because from what he’d been saying yesterday, it sounded as though he knew this Jack as well.

“You can’t possibly go up there by yourself,” Rory said.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s dangerous. The only people living in the Tombs are the desperate and those who just don’t care anymore. You’re liable to get mugged, if you don’t get your throat cut first.”

“I don’t care. I have to go. I have to talk to him.”

“Why can’t it wait? Annie said he’d come to you.”

Kerry sighed. “You know who you are, don’t you? Who your parents are, where you came from?”

“Well, sure.”

“I don’t.”

Rory looked confused. “But yesterday you told me—”

“I’m beginning to think it was all a lie,” Kerry said, cutting him off. “The only person in my family that I resemble is my grandmother.”

And a strange man who showed up yesterday who tried to make me go away with him at gunpoint, but she left that unsaid.

“And that makes me feel totally ungrounded,” she added. “It’s like I don’t even have the basic facts of my life the way everybody else does.”

“So what are you saying? That you were adopted?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that Jack is supposed to have the answers, so I need to talk to him. I don’t want to have to spend any longer than I already have not knowing who I am and where I come from.”

“Okay,” Rory said. “I can understand that. But Jack … he’s a storyteller. He exaggerates everything and tells really tall tales. You’re not necessarily going to find out anything useful by going to him.”

“But Annie said—”

“Annie was being particularly cryptic yesterday—I mean, even for her.”

“I still have to try,” Kerry told him.

“I understand, but—”

“And if you won’t give me directions, then I’m just going to have to go up there and try to find him by myself.”

She turned from his door and started for the porch. For a moment she thought he was just going to let her go, but then he called after her.

“Oh, hang on, Kerry. If you’re that determined, I’ll take you up to see him.”

She looked back at him and gave him a smile. “I’m not usually so pushy,” she said, “but this is really important to me.”

Rory returned her smile. “Yeah, I got that impression. Just give me a moment to get my keys.”

* * *

She thought he meant his car keys, but it was his apartment keys he was fetching. They took a crowded bus north to Gracie Street, transferring once. Twenty minutes later they’d left the downtown rush hour behind and were standing at the edge of a no-man’s land, looking out across Gracie Street at the abandoned buildings and overgrown lots that made up the Tombs.

“Oh, crap,” Rory said. “I forgot. Chloë wanted me to call Kit first thing this morning.”

“Who’s Kit?”

“My friend Lily—I just call her Kit because her last name’s Carson.”

Kerry smiled. “I saw some phone booths back down the block.”

She followed him down the street and waited while he made his call, too nervous to be by herself anywhere in this area. While she was waiting for him, she started counting all the blackbirds she could see from where she was standing. There were so many of them—as plentiful as pigeons. But unlike pigeons or gulls, they didn’t seem so much interested in handouts as in looking for something.

Rory wasn’t on the phone long.

“She was out,” he said when he rejoined Kerry on the pavement. “I had to leave a message.”

“Was it important?”

Rory shrugged. “With Chloë, who knows? So what do you think?” he added as they crossed the street to where the Tombs began in earnest.

“It’s so big,” Kerry said.

Which was an understatement. From what she could see of it, the Tombs went on for block after block, a desolate landscape, like the images of bombed-out cities that showed up on the news to accompany reports on the war in Bosnia and the like. Except here it was neglect that had finally left this part of the city so ravaged. It was so much more expansive than she’d thought it would be. And rougher.

There were few people to be seen from where they stood, but those she could made her glad that Rory had come with her. A trio of grizzled men sat on what was left of a stone wall, sharing a bottle despite it being barely nine o’clock. Some street toughs were lounging farther down the block, giving them the eye. Maybe even Rory’s being here wouldn’t be enough, she found herself thinking. She’d almost decided that perhaps they should beat a strategic retreat, maybe she should just wait for Jack to come to her, but then Rory started walking toward what looked like a junkyard and she fell quickly in step with him.

“Yeah, it’s big all right,” he was saying. “And it’s spreading like a disease.” He waved a hand to the other side of Gracie Street where many of the storefronts were boarded up. “It wasn’t so long ago most of those places were still open, but now look at them.”

“It’s pretty depressing.”

He nodded. “There’s no excuse for letting things get as bad as they are now. I used to think they could still make a go of a lot of these places—I mean, there’s a lot of history here and it’d be a shame to lose it. But now I just wish they’d bulldoze it all and start over again. We’ve already lost the history. Now we’ve got to cauterize the wound before it spreads anymore.” “What about the people who live here?” Kerry asked.

“Nobody lives above those abandoned stores,” Rory said. “And as for the Tombs, the people squatting there will just move on. Or we could build some decent housing for them.”

Before they reached the junkyard, he cut into an empty lot. They took a winding path around the mounds of rubble and low walls that had once been buildings, aiming for a bright yellow school bus that stood at the far end of the block. Crows rose from the roof as they approached, scolding them. Three large unidentifiable dogs lunged to their feet and began to bark. Lying on an old beat-up sofa in front of the bus was a pretty, but tough-looking Oriental woman in T-shirt and jeans with intricate tattoos running up and down the lengths of both arms. She hushed the dogs, but showed no sign of welcoming them. The barking of the dogs subsided into low growls, rumbling deep in their chests.

Kerry moved closer to Rory. The stiff-legged advance of the dogs made her nervous. The crows still winging overhead seemed ominous compared to the small flock that roosted on Stanton Street—why were there so many of them in this area anyway? But the woman scared her most. As they were first coming up, Kerry had gotten the sense that she’d recognized them, had maybe been waiting for them to arrive, but then her face closed down into a mask and her dark gaze regarded them coldly.