Swansong (23 page)

“I’ll try not to change,” Azel says.  “If you’ll do the same.”

I can’t imagine wanting to be me.

If he wants me to be me, I guess I can try.

* * * * *

Walking home from school is a pain without Kory, who, for whatever reason, has decided to take the dive and join the astronomy club.  Why an astronomy club meets during daylight hours is beyond me, but it’s probably best not to ask.  Azel lives farther east than the both of us and has to drop by the grade school to pick up his little sister.  That means I’m alone today; and the route through The Spit is oddly disconcerting.

I walk past the ruinous apartment projects with their archaic, peeling banners.  If I think about it, I haven’t traversed the city on my own ever since the car accident.  Whether Judas or Azel or Kory or even Annwn, I’ve always had someone at my side.  Maybe I’m a coward.  I know I’m a coward.  At least it wasn’t conscious.  Cowardice is never conscious.

My head feels light by the time I reach the overpass.  I round the corner.  I start down the block, past the wide drugstore parking lot where the mean-looking boys from Pacific West get together to play football.  I hear their scuffling sneakers, their shouted expletives.  I walk faster.  I don’t make eye contact.

The Fifth Fourth Bank looms at my side like a jailhouse, giant and steely, windows barred shut to meticulous detail.  Why bother having windows if you’re going to treat the windows like they broke a law?  Money means more than human life.  You don’t see apartment buildings safeguarded like their contents are precious.  Only two people on this planet are required to care about what happens to you.  It’s weird.  Both of mine are gone.

I sit down on the curb.  It might not be the best idea, but my head is throbbing with pain.  I cradle my head between my hands.  I rub my temples with my fingertips.

The charm bracelet.  It’s missing from my right wrist.

“Not again,” I mumble.  I can’t bring myself to panic.  This is reality now.  I lose things.  I forget things.

Except I didn’t.  The charm bracelet jingles quietly around my left wrist.  I see it when I turn my head, the swan hanging safely from the silver-gilt chain.

To begin with, I’m left-handed.  I can’t think of many things I can do properly with my right hand.  Clasping a bracelet shut isn’t one of them.

Maybe the bracelet fell off my wrist sometime during the day.  Maybe someone—Kory, Azel—picked it up and put it back on for me.  That’s the type of thing I would forget.  I forgot meeting with Jocelyn’s parents after she died.  I forgot the accident that killed her.

The swan’s wings are spread out in flight.  Not folded.  Not tucked in at her sides.

I fumble for the cell phone in my pocket.  My skin slicks in a cold sweat, the pain in my skull quickening, tightening.

No.  I take my hand out of my pocket.  Jude’s off work today.  I’ll see him when I go home.  Only two blocks now.  I only have two blocks to walk.

I stand.

The bracelet’s on my right wrist.  The swan’s wings are folded.  Her neck is arched.

The city spins around me, taunting and cold.

I break into a run.

* * * * *

“Jude,” I say, throwing open the apartment door.  “I think I’m really—”

Jude stands in the sitting room with a woman I don’t remember seeing before.  Both turn around at the sound of my arrival.  I step inside the apartment, skittish.  The lock clicks shut as the door swings closed behind me.

“Hey,” Judas says.  “Parole officer stopped by.”

“Oh.”  Oh.  I start to relax.  “Right.  I—”

I step into the sitting room.  I reach out to shake the woman’s hand.  She grasps my hand with a quick, dark grin.  She lets go.

“Marguerite Modesto,” she says.

“I’m Wendy.”

She looks out of place in her neat gray suit.  She looks like she’d be more comfortable in a nightclub, in fishnets, her hair purple and spiked.  She—

She looks so familiar.  A twinge of weak pain dances behind my ears, across the tip of my spine.

“I’m just gonna have a chat with your brother,” Modesto says.  “That okay?”

“Of course…”  But didn’t we—?

“Good girl,” Modesto says.  She claps me on the shoulder and I jump, caught unawares.  She laughs at my reaction, her teeth gleaming and white.

They’re kind of sharp, I think.  They remind me a little of a shark’s.

* * * * *

“What were you saying?” Judas asks.

We congregate in the kitchen once his parole officer leaves.  It’s almost four o’clock.  I still haven’t decided what to make for dinner.

“What?” I ask, confused.

“When you came in,” Judas says.  “You looked like you were worried about something.”

“Oh.”  I think about the charm bracelet.  I think about the parole officer.  “I don’t…”

“Somebody bothering you?  One of the kids in the building?”

“No.  No, nothing like that.”  Spinach frittatas.  I pull myself over to the refrigerator.  Modesto.  Marguerite Modesto—

“It’s almost four,” Judas says, with the air of someone who just woke up from a long, confusing nap.  “Go take your statins.”

I whirl around.  I hurry out of the kitchen, into my bedroom.  There’s a fresh bottle of water on my bedside table.  I’ll thank Judas later.  I hope I will.

I return to the kitchen and find Judas with a book open, reading glasses on his eyes.  He looks up when I approach him.

“Take your statins?” Judas asks.

“I—”

I went into my room.  I saw the bottle.  I know I did.

“Wendy?”

I can’t remember.  I can’t remember if I took the medicine.

Judas takes his glasses off.  He stands up.  “I’ll count the pills.”

“Don’t.”  I’m sorry.  I’m so sorry.

“Don’t worry.  Stay here.”

I sit weakly at the kitchen table.  I want to rip my head open with my fingernails.  Maybe that’ll stop the memory lapses.  Maybe that’ll stop the pain.

Judas comes back a few minutes later.  He hands me a chalky white pill.  I take it in a shaky hand.  I put it in my mouth.  He hands me the water bottle and I drink from it.  I swallow.

“It’s fine,” Judas tells me.

It’s not fine.  He shouldn’t have to put up with this.  I shouldn’t have driven the car that day.

I don’t want to cry anymore.  I really don’t.

I wish somebody could fix me.

Judas sits with me at the kitchen table.  Neither of us speaks.  Words like
Escape
keep flashing across my mind.

“Dinner,” I manage to say.

“We’ll order something.”

He didn’t ask for this.  He didn’t ask to raise the brain-damaged little sister he hadn’t seen in ten years.  He doesn’t complain.  His face is a subdued bas relief of freckles and scars.  A Tragedy in three acts.

Here we are.  Act Three.

“You’re not the only one who’s broken,” Judas says.

I know.  I’ve thought about that before.

“How do we get un-broken?” I ask.  Two murderers sitting at a kitchen table.  It sounds like the punchline to a really bad joke.

“We don’t,” Judas says.

I was afraid of that.

Judas stands up.  I follow him with my eyes.  He grabs his keys off the kitchen table.  He rakes his knuckles through his cloudy gold hair.

“Changed my mind,” Judas says.  “We’re going out.”

* * * * *

The bus is bumpy when it trails across US 101.  It comes as a strange relief to see the terrain devoid of buildings and—for the most part—cars.  The bus is all but empty, too.  The only other passenger is a little old lady sitting behind the driver.

I gaze out the window at my side.  The road is gray with shadows.  The sky is silvery-blue with budding clouds.  It looks like rain.  It can’t be rain.  It doesn’t rain as much as it should anymore.  Meteorologists say it hasn’t snowed in thirteen years.  I remember snow, I think.  I remember the white drops stark against the off-white sand, the way they coated the steely ocean waves in icy stardust.  I remember tilting my head back and watching them drift like messengers from a seamless pearl of a sky.  I was three, maybe four.  Maybe it was a dream.

I know where we’re going today.  I won’t pretend otherwise.

“You alright?” Judas asks.

I smile at him.  “It’s weird,” I say.  “The cars scare me more than the bus does.”  I keep an eye out for them on the road.  They zip past without purpose, intermittent.

“Wanna get papaya tonight?” Judas asks.

“Sure.”

The road snakes and curves.  The exits pass us by.  I can see jagged, weather-beaten rocks on the other side of the interstate railing.  I think we just passed Cape Meares.  I think about Dad dressing up as Santa Claus.  I think about Mom with her marzipan tortells and pistachio torrones and—of course—her lemon pies.  Funny how she bakes those just fine, but not cakes.  Baked.  I forgot.

The whole trip only takes about thirty minutes.  We’re still in Tillamook County.  We get off at the bus stop in Tillamook Town.  My stomach lurches with nerves.  I attended grade school in this town.  I got my checkups here, my booster shots.  It’s a sleepy little village without any apparent structure or planning.  The colonial white houses with their gable roofs slope down toward the distant sea.  From where I stand I can see the ocean, blue waves rippling like a rough sapphire under cloudy autumn skies.

We walk.  We walk past the pharmacy and a diner called Nebraska.  I always wondered at that, a diner called Nebraska in a state called Oregon.  We walk down the incline, bushy cattails brushing our legs.  I can hear the surf growing closer, whispering in my ears like a long-forgotten friend.

“Fishing town,” Judas remarks.

I know what he means.  The air reeks strongly of Chinook salmon.  It’s an unmistakable, unforgettable smell, acid and metallic.  It gets in your pores and down your throat.  It makes your hackles raise.  I love that smell.  I’m probably nuts.

The rough ground underneath us gives way to soft sand, mineral-white, as smooth as a cotton blanket.  A weak white sun shines on the glittering ocean waves, soaking them in various shades of cobalt and royal blue.  Mariners stand around the ageless wooden wharf, their boats docked safely at the berths.  Dad’s boat was aluminum, a custom job, with a trolling motor and an outboard motor.  I used to help him clean it after school.

I swallow.  I smile.  “Could we go a little farther north?” I ask.

Judas hesitates.  “You want to see the house?”

“No.  Not that far north.”

We walk together.  Sunshadows grow longer as they stretch feebly across the sand.  It’s almost wintertime.  Here, by the ocean, I can finally feel it, the air slick with icy ocean spray, the winds whistling, chilling to the bone.  The sun will set within the hour.

“What were you like?” I ask Judas.  “As a kid.”

“A brat,” he says.

I roll my eyes, but smile.  “Besides the obvious.”

“Hated my hometown,” Judas says.  His arms hang at his sides.  He picks his way carefully across the sand, like he’s afraid of it shattering beneath his soles.  “It wasn’t big enough for me.  Me and my big head.”

“You don’t have a big head.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Maybe you used to.  You don’t have one now.”

“All I needed was someone to put me in my place.”

“Prison was your place?”

“You are.”

I look at him quickly.  I’ve been such a crybaby these days, it’s a wonder that I don’t burst into tears.  Lose a family.  Gain a family.  It’s not funny.  I don’t understand why God thinks this is funny.

“Here,” I say quietly.

We stop.  I turn and face the sea.  The water’s crystalline as it reaches for the shore.  The horizon is rich, rain-gray, spotted with the shadows of errant seagulls.  When I was a little girl I looked out toward that horizon and thought it went on forever.  I thought—as long as I thought—that there was no such thing as an end.

This is home, the air fresh with sea salts, the tide a familiar melody.  Home hasn’t changed at all in the months of agony that trailed in its wake, yearning for its presence, scared of its company.  It’s not fair.  It just isn’t.  It ought to have changed.  If only a little, it ought to have changed.

This world is cruel.  That’s what I think.

If it’s so cruel, then why is it reassuring?  As a child, when you fall down for the first time, you run straight for your mother’s comforting arms.  If you were to find that your mother had changed somehow, irreversibly—the length of her arms, the smell of her skin, the timbre of her voice—it wouldn’t be comforting at all.  You want the mother you remember from your earliest days, the one who cradled you when you first opened your eyes, the one who sang you poor lullabies when you couldn’t close them again at night.  Men have fought wars for their mothers.  Heaven lies beneath their feet.