The Swan and the Jackal (20 page)

I helped her get through the fence quickly and I closed it off after she was on the other side. Minutes later, I heard Seraphina screaming from inside her house. I sat curled up inside the shed, shaking all over hearing her blood-curdling cries rock through every bone in my body. I wet myself it scared me so bad. What sounded like a long strip of leather rang out through the air. Over and over again. And Seraphina screamed and screamed until she fell silent. But even still, I could hear the leather strap beating down on her.

I sat curled up in the corner of the shed, sobbing into my hands, tasting salt and snot and bile in the back of my throat. For a very brief but profound moment, I had hoped he’d killed her so she would never have to go through that again.

I didn’t see Seraphina for a week after that, but then one day she was sitting on the grass in the backyard again, just like she was the day I met her.

“Seraphina?” I whispered quietly through the gap in the fence.

She wouldn’t look over, but I could sense that she heard me.

“Seraphina? Are you OK?”

She barely turned her head, but even at such an angle I could see the pain in her face. She was dressed in pants and a long-sleeved shirt even though it was warm outside. I knew why. I could only wonder what the bruises looked like underneath her clothes.

We were both afraid for her to come over to my side of the fence, but we also both wanted her to. So, after a few minutes, she finally snuck to the back of the yard and I helped her crawl through the opening.

“Did he find out?” I asked once we were hidden away safely inside the shed. “About you sneaking over here?”

She shook her dark head and lowered her eyes to the little lamb in her lap. “No,” she said quietly, “he was mad because I left my clothes on my bedroom floor.”

I thought that was the most terrible thing. The stupidest thing to get in trouble for. I just sat there staring at her with my mouth agape.

Seraphina hardly ever looked me in the eyes. She sat awkwardly, as if the bones in her back and bottom hurt too badly for her to sit with comfort. And I noticed she kept pulling at the crotch of her purple pants as if the material was aggravating her skin down there. It made me feel weird. Dark. I wanted to ask why she was itching, but I was too afraid. I didn’t know why.

Seraphina raised her eyes to me.

“I have to go,” she said suddenly and pushed herself—with difficulty—to her feet, the stuffed lamb secured in the bend of her arm. “I have to get back to my project.”

“What project?” I asked with intense curiosity.

Seraphina smiled, which I thought too was odd in such a circumstance—had she already forgotten what happened to her? She offered her hand to me. I took it and she helped me to my feet.

“Just something I gotta do,” she said. “I’ll tell you about it soon.”

And then she left, sneaking back through to her side of the fence without another word.

Fredrik has never held me so tight. His arms are wrapped around me so securely that if it were any tighter I wouldn’t be able to breathe. I feel his lips on the top of my head, and his heart beating powerfully against my back.

I lift my head from his arm and turn it slightly at an angle so that I can see him. There is moisture in his eyes. I’ve never seen him this way before and it reminds me of the things he told me he went through when
he
was a boy.

I kiss the tops of his knuckles.

“I’m sorry…if this is bringing back bad memories,” I say. “I can stop.”

Fredrik shakes his head and wipes his eyes before the tears can fall. “No,” he says softly, “don’t apologize to me; this has nothing to do with me. Please…just tell me the story.”

I kiss his knuckles again and reluctantly continue.

Seraphina was different after that last time her father beat her, but it wasn’t thanks to me or my mother. Because I tried to help Seraphina. I sat down with my mother one night when my dad was gone at the bar and I told her about what happened.

“But momma,” I said, “he beat her so bad. I heard her screaming and it gives me nightmares.”

My mother shook her head and stuck her fork in her mouth, taking in a bite of salad. “You should stay out of it, Cassia,” she said, chewing on the leafy greens. “Don’t you tell anyone else, either. Do you hear me? If you do, you’ll be in a lot of trouble yourself.” She pointed her fork at me. “Her daddy is some big shot government guy. Very dangerous. We don’t get involved, do you understand?” She sipped down the last of her water.

I nodded nervously, and while although I couldn’t understand why my mother—who was such a loving and smart woman—wouldn’t want to call the police right away about what was happening next door, I knew too that she must’ve been afraid of Seraphina’s father for good reason. And so I did as she said and kept my mouth shut.

This went on for three years.

By the time Seraphina and I turned thirteen—her a few months before me—Seraphina was a very different girl from the one I met on the grass holding the little lamb. She still took beatings from her father, but she didn’t seem afraid of him anymore.

She even started coming to my house. Walked right out her front door one day, up my sidewalk and my front porch steps. I was shocked when I answered the door and saw her standing there. For a moment, I just stood there staring at her.

“Aren’t ya’ gonna let me in?” she said with a grin.

She was no longer carrying the stuffed lamb by this time. Said she got rid of it. I found its remains in a heap of ash in my backyard.

Seraphina never did tell me everything about her ‘project’, but she did say that one day she was going to get away from her parents and that her project was her ticket. I had stopped asking her questions about it.

That afternoon, Seraphina spent the rest of the day at my house, tucked away in my room with me. We watched TV and talked about whatever. She bragged about stealing some of her mother’s perfume and stuck her wrists under my nose so that I could smell it. I really liked that perfume. By nightfall, when I heard my father coming in from work, Seraphina got nervous. I could see it in her eyes, her posture, the way her back stiffened and her chest stopped moving as if her lungs forgot how to work. Like a lot of things I thought about Seraphina, I thought her reaction to my father coming home from work, was strange. Especially after it seemed she wasn’t even afraid of her own father anymore. So, why would she be afraid of mine?

“Cassia!” I heard my father call out, “Come eat dinner!”

Seraphina’s eyes widened as she stared at my bedroom door.

“Just a minute, daddy!” I called out.

Turning back to Seraphina, I said with a jerk of my head toward the bedroom door, “Come on, I guess it’s time for you to go home.”

Seraphina shook her head and it seemed she didn’t even blink.

“I’ll go out the window,” she said. “I don’t want your parents telling mine that I was over here.”

She was still afraid of her father, after all, but had only gotten better at hiding it, I realized.

I nodded. “OK,” I said and walked over to my window, flipping the latch open and raising the glass.

“CASSIA!” my father shouted. “GET YOUR ASS IN HERE AND EAT!” I gasped sharply at his tone.

He was a good father—nothing like Seraphina’s father—but intolerant to disobedience.

Seraphina had just started to climb out the window, but when she heard him the second time, she stopped and looked back at me with an enraged look in her big brown eyes.

I waved my hands at her, trying to hurry her up and shuffle her over the windowsill.

“Why is he talking to you like that?” she asked with narrowed eyes and anger in her voice.

I kept looking back and forth between her and the bedroom door, growing more nervous the longer she took. I didn’t want to get grounded.

“He’s always like this when he gets home from work,” I said. “Now hurry up. I’ve gotta go.”

A few more seconds of looking between me and the door, Seraphina finally slipped outside and ran through my backyard. I saw her slip through the secret hole in the fence instead of waltzing through her front door boldly as I expected her to after so boldly coming to mine earlier.

A week later, I was sitting in the shed writing in my notebook that I kept as a journal, when Seraphina joined me. She had a spiteful and cunning look on her face, a grin that sent a chill up my back. Her eyes were dark and she looked upon me as though about to tell me something I knew was going to make me uncomfortable.

She plopped down on the concrete shed floor and kissed me on the cheek.

“Do you love me, Cassia?”

I smiled ridiculously. “Of course I do. You’re like my sister.”

She cocked her head to one side and folded her hands in the hollow of her lap.

“Remember that time you told me you wanted to go wherever I go? That you wanted us to be sisters forever, no matter what?”

I nodded with an even brighter smile, because it was true. I did want to go wherever she went. She was my best friend. I wanted us to grow up and grow old together.

“Yeah, I remember.”

She smiled and softened her eyes. “Good. Then tonight we’re going to run away together.”

My face fell and I tried to swallow the knot that had suddenly formed in my throat, but it was too dry.

“W-What do you mean, run away?” I felt guilty for even having the conversation.

Seraphina pulled me into a brief hug, afterwards letting her hands brush down the length of my arms until her fingers found mine. She held my hands firmly and said, “I want to go to New York. I’ve got it all planned out. We can get on a bus—it’s easy, they do it in the movies all the time and no one ever checks for identification unless they look like kids. But we don’t look like kids”—she waved her finger back and forth between us—“I can easily pass for seventeen, and you, well I think you could too if you put on a little makeup.”

I was shaking my head absently the whole time she was explaining her plan, but she just kept on talking with the excitement of it all ever-growing in her eyes.

“I want to be a singer,” she said with the biggest smile of wonderment I had ever seen on her face. She gripped my hands tighter. “And Cassia, you could, too. We could both be singers. You sing even better than me!”

I blushed and lowered my gaze to our hands.

“I-I don’t know, Seraphina.” I looked toward the shed door, terrified my parents might’ve been listening in. “Running away won’t be easy. My parents check in on me every night. First my mom. Then later my dad. They’d know I was missing before we made it to the bus station—and what about money? I don’t have any money.”

Seraphina grinned and leaned forward so she could reach around to her back pocket. There was a wad of cash in her hand when she brought it back around.

“Stole it from my mom’s jewelry box,” she said with a proud smirk and then placed the money into my hands. “This’ll get us both to New York.”

I looked down at the cash and then back up at her. I didn’t want to tell her no, but at the same time, I was scared. I was scared of running away. Getting caught. Getting grounded for the rest of my life.

But I think most of all, I was scared of Seraphina.

“So, are you going to leave with me?”

She sat there with her hands in her lap, her fingers coiling anxiously around one another. Her face was full of excitement and danger and risk and trouble—everything I always steered clear of. Everything I was afraid of.

But then finally I said, “But what if my parents wake up and see that I’m gone? What if they catch us before we get to New York?”

“They
won’t
catch us,” she said with such resolve that I couldn’t help but believe her. “I’m going to take care of that before we leave.”

Before Seraphina snuck out of my shed that afternoon and went back into her yard, I had agreed to go with her. And to trust in her, no matter what she had to do to help me get away.

I’m lying down against the bed now with my head on Fredrik’s thigh. I don’t even recall when I shifted position, I’ve been so engrossed in the memory. It’s been a year since I’ve remembered any of this, or anything about my life at all, so it’s all quite a lot to take in.

Fredrik’s hand moves softly through the top of my hair, sending shivers from the back of my neck and throughout my body. It feels like he’s consoling me, but more than that, it feels like he’s hurting and I don’t want to go on. I know he had a terrible life and that he went through some horrific things when he was a boy, things that he will probably never tell me. But I know they were much worse than anything I ever went through.

“What did Seraphina do to your parents, Cassia?” he asks in a soft voice while spearing his fingers through my long locks.

I stare out at the television on the wall across the basement and let the scene from that night play out before me as if it were playing out on the dark screen.

And then I answer, “She stabbed my father in the throat while he was downstairs asleep in his favorite chair. And then she poured gasoline she took from the shed in my backyard all over the house and set the house on fire. My mother burned to death in her room.”