Above (14 page)

The fire takes its mouth first. It doesn’t struggle while the fire eats it up, head to tips of the fingers to toes, and finally smolders out on the scorched wood floor. A painting of black ash in the shape of a living body. A stain on the floor like any other.

“We killed it,” I manage.

“Nuh-uh,” Jack says, hoarse and quiet like funerals. He tucks his gloves back on, face bent to that smear on the floor and not looking away. “It chose.”

I spare a good look at Jack, and his eyes are tired like a day-and-night duty in the hot-hate sun. “If it chose, that means it’s a thinking thing,” I say. “That wasn’t a thing from the sewers.” He gets it:
That wasn’t monsters.
You can tell the Whitecoats by the smoothness ’round their eyes, and you can tell monsters because they never, never weep.

But he doesn’t reply, just looks over at Whisper hunched over the floor and pats my shoulder.
Hush
, says that pat, better than any word would.
Between us.

I hush.

Whisper swears a little on the ground, and when I hurry over, her fingers are trying to piece together the shredded mess of Atticus’s file. “It’s gone,” Whisper says, and her face is fury-bleak.

“Goddamn,” Jack sighs, but his heart ain’t in it. He’s too far away, in the land of
hush
. He lifts her up with an offered hand, still looking half over his shoulder at that smear on the floor. “Wanna check the other cells,” he says after a moment.

Whisper gathers up the last tears and pieces of the file in one of her fluttered skirt pockets. “Not leaving anything more of us here,” she says, and caresses them through the cloth. I take her hand when she’s done. It’s cold and tight, not soft no more; tighter yet as we step through the door to Isolation, over the spilled-out and burned-in shadows.

My brand is running down, running out. I shrug the burned-up rags onto the floor and stomp them careful, twisting my shoe on the embers ’til I know they’re truly out. I cough at the risen dust, suck in a steady breath.

I let it out slow, and someone lets a breath out after me.

“Someone living,” Jack calls low and shrugs off his gloves again, quick-step moving to the last unopened cell.
Shouldn’t have put down the fire
, I think, but fire don’t do nothing against the living. I loose Whisper’s hand and follow Jack in.

When I catch up his back’s straight, his fists open; everything in his body saying
nothing threatening
. And it’s not: a tumbledown pile of pants and arms, gleam-pale and unmoving. Somewhere underneath it all, a glint of eyes. “Hello?” I try, but it don’t move, don’t speak.
Dying
, I think, and then the air shifts in the eaves and my nose finds the musty-sweet smell of flowers.

“Violet,” falls out of me, horrified, and the broken pile of woman moves.

Whisper shoves past me hard, rushes to the side of the tumbledown blanketed thing. “Vee?” she murmurs, stricken, and carefully lifts her chin to the light.

I don’t see the face. But I see Whisper’s break into cracks and lines and mess. “Oh, Vee,” she chokes, wide-eyed and terrible. “Oh no, oh no, my Violet —”

It takes two of us to haul Violet up to sitting. She doesn’t help; she’s limp like a dead thing in our hands. Violet stares straight forward without blinking, eyes red and dry from staring so long. Nothing moves, nothing but her fingers
taptaptap
and a little smack of lips so we know for sure it’s her. I swallow. Wave a hand in front of her gaze, back and then forth again. She doesn’t follow.

“What’s wrong with her?” I whisper, throat ache-straining, picturing tunnels and houses and all the corners of Safe stacked full of people unseeing, limp and robbed of everything but breathing.

Nobody answers.

Whisper leans down to the curve of Violet’s ear, and her lips move urgent, words that I know aren’t made for me. She murmurs and sings and cajoles for too long while I hold Violet’s shoulders up from sagging, and when her voice dies down there’s something ugly in it, ready to break.

“Whis?” Jack asks, soft, too soft.

“There —” Whisper halts, and her voice is queer and small. “There ain’t no ghost in her.”

“What’s that mean?”
Dead meat
, my hands on her shoulders tell me.
It means she’s nothing but dead meat.

“It means gone,” Whisper says, breathless. “Lost her mind.”

“She was never Sick —” I choke out, and bite my lip.

“Not Sick,” Whisper interrupts, harsh like Atticus scared, and she never interrupts; she speaks ladylike and precise like her mama and papa trained her to do. “Lost her mind.”

“Not lost,” Jack murmurs, back in the shadows. “Stolen.”

We carry Violet out into the hungry green yard. There’s no shadows left to follow us.

Violet stumbles. We gotta lift her up good over the grass and potholes, dragging her feet in a way that makes me want to cry, until Jack just swears a long tangle of words I was never, ever supposed to say and lifts her with one arm behind her knees, one under her shoulders; carries her like a child to the chest. A glitter of electricity plays on the metal of her allergy bracelet.

“Whisper,” Jack says, and Whisper undoes the bracelet’s catch. I think she’s gonna pocket it, keep it secret and close and safe, but her fist closes about it tight enough that I feel the dent of metal in my own flesh. She’s still for a long moment, two, eyes shut against something she won’t yet deign to see.

“Whis?” Jack says again, gentler, and shifts Violet’s hanging weight in his short, rough arms.

“I wish this place never was,” she says, and opens her eyes to stare a stare so full of grieving I want to fly into her arms.

“Won’t be, soon,” is all I can say.

“That’s
not good enough
,” she spits, hair tangled, eyes sparking, and still I’m watching the hand with Violet’s bracelet in it closed tight as the Pactbridge door.

My hand in my pocket closes on something else. Something strong for reassurance, folded and sharp. Six matches wide.

“Houses burn,” I say to Whisper, and the hand tightens into a fist.

The grass rustles. Falls silent.

“Then burn it,” she says, and stalks across the long-grown lawn.

Jack looks at me. I look at him.

I pull the first match and strike a light.

There’s no getting the smoke off us.

The smoke of houses burning is more sewer-thing than friend; rank and slippery and foul, following you down the streets, through the alleys where every electric light sputters dark from Jack Flash’s passing. The smell sticks; marks you out different for the police who come squalling through the afternoon, too late to save what used to be Lakeshore Psychiatric. Marks you Freak.

When we get back to Doctor Marybeth’s, I’m sure she knows what we’ve done.

But: “Oh lord,” she says, not to us but at us, and takes Violet off Jack’s failing arms to help her safe indoors.

“Water,” she snaps, and lays Violet out on her stuffed red couch. I stare for a second. Violet’s still and stiff like Jack’s face when he tells the Tale of the lightning. Doctor Marybeth runs one hand through her hair and glares at us. “I need water and my rounds bag,
now
.”

Whisper scatters up the stairs for the bag. I hurry into the kitchen and fill a clean glass right up with cool clear water. My fingers leave black smudges on the crystal.

“This ’nuff?” I ask, small, and Doctor Marybeth takes it without a second glance.

She listens to Violet’s heart. She listens to her breath, light and choosy as it is. She drips the water down Violet’s throat with a tiny glass eyedropper, and all the while we sit in the parlor chairs watching, watching like a violation, too scared to look away.

Violet’s chest rises and hitches and sinks all out of tune, and I can’t bear to look away in case the breath I miss is the last. At least Ariel isn’t here. Safe with Beatrice and probably mad at me — and that gives me a little unfunny twitch of a smile. Burning mad at me and with Beatrice: living, breathing, safe.

Violet stares on at a nothingness. Finally I close my eyes against it, shutting out the bad things, the dark. All I see in my eyelids is that awful stare on Mack, on Scar, on Heather.

After an age and a half Doctor Marybeth sits back, lets her stethoscope slide down onto her belly instead of holding it up high. “She’s gotta go to the hospital.”

My skin goes cold.

“No,” Whisper says somewhere behind me. “No way in
hell
.”

“She has to.” Doctor Marybeth scrubs her eyes. Her voice is heavy, beat. “She can’t eat. She can’t sit up. She’s
catatonic
.”

I don’t know catatonic. But Violet doesn’t look up, doesn’t speak while we talk over her head. Spit gathers in the side of her mouth, brought on by her mouth music, the smacking clasping sounds she always makes. I watch it fill up, overflow, sitting in my chair shivering and forgot.

“No hospitals,” Whisper says. Her eyes are full of tears; unlike Jack or Ari or me, she doesn’t look away when she’s crying. She’s not ashamed. “Atticus said no —”

“Atticus is dead,” Doctor Marybeth’s voice cracks. “And there’s no one to take care of her.”

“There’s us,” Whisper keeps on. “Same as it’s always been.”

“You?” And Doctor Marybeth laughs, not a happy laugh. “Can
you
do it? Can you change her pants and put the spoon down her throat? Can you draw the kind of power it takes to run an ECG?” She takes in a shaky breath, and when I dare to open my eyes, her hands are tight and round on the tops of her knees. “You can’t. Because you don’t even have downstairs right now, so
fuck
what Atticus said.”

Jack stands up. I suck in a breath and hold it, not making one little sound.

But she’s crying too. There’s wet all over Doctor Marybeth’s cheeks and dripping off her chin, and Jack just leans forward and puts one heavy-glove hand on hers, smoothes it down from a tight knobbed fist into flatness, palm down on her slacks.

“Trust
me
,” she says, and she’s pleading, she’s leaned over the coffee table and taken Whisper’s hand. “I got you out. I sent you supplies that might’ve cost me my license, never mind my goddamned job. I’ve kept this secret for twenty-three years and you still won’t trust me to do right.”

“It’s not you —” Jack starts, rough.

“Oh, it is,” she snaps, and pushes herself to her feet. “With your stories. If you can’t tell the difference between good medicine and bad after all this time —”

“It’s not just stories!” Whisper screams, and everyone else flinches back. “They
did
those things, they happened, and it’ll happen again and take a
look
at her, just look!”

Doctor Marybeth shudders in place. “They did those things. Don’t you even
think
you have to tell me that.”

“You want to give her to a —”

“I want to put her in a hospital,” Doctor Marybeth says flat, “’cause otherwise she’s going to starve and rot in the dark. And even all the things that happened to you in Lakeshore and all the stories you’ve blown up so big you can’t see what’s changed won’t stop that from being cruel.”

Jack’s hands have fallen awkward to his sides. He puts them, then himself between Whisper and Doctor Marybeth, blocks the sight of one from the other. “Nobody’s bein’ cruel,” he says, thick and uncomfortable.

Violet’s chest rises, falls. The drapes flutter. They match Doctor Marybeth’s sofa.

“You would be,” Doctor Marybeth says, and turns her gaze to him, burning. “She’d end up in a little room trapped and hungry, and then
you’d
be the goddamned … the
Whitecoats
from all your terror stories.”

“They’re
my
stories,” I whisper, and I wouldn’t know that anyone hears except that Doctor Marybeth glances toward me, to my working tangled hands and eyes so big I can feel the strain in them, and her mouth goes tight and sorrowful.

“The things you teach your children,” she says half to herself.

“So you don’t care about us?” Whisper says, and she’s gulping sobs. “So leave us alone. Let me take her home.” But she’s still sitting down, wringing her hands back and forth. The tears shake down her face in little pipe-falls and spray wild across the table. “You don’t want us,
leave us alone.
”

“That’s not what I said,” Doctor Marybeth says quieter, and takes Whisper’s hands in hers.

“You said we were Whitecoats —”

“That’s not what I said,” again, and her voice is smooth and calm again, a voice that’s just as in charge as Atticus ever could be but soft and collected as my mama’s.
Her doctor voice
, I realize. The one she uses to keep you still while the needle goes in or the baby comes.

“Anne, Annie,” Doctor Marybeth says, and then the tears get in her mouth and make her stop for breath. “I love her too.”

Whisper’s mouth opens, then shuts, and she snatches her hands away and stuffs them behind her back. “Don’t ever call me that,” she croaks. “That’s not my name anymore,” before her voice fails and she bawls like a little baby, like a kid who’d never gone to Atticus and got their first lesson: that big kids are quiet, and big kids are sharp, and if the world cuts you, you never cry out loud.

D
OCTOR
M
ARYBETH’S
T
ALE

I don’t know Doctor Marybeth’s Tale.

I never asked her.

There are medical words on the Whitecoat papers Doctor Marybeth writes up to send Violet to the hospital; words I don’t know. After our silent supper, a supper Whisper won’t come down for, I ask Doctor Marybeth for them.

Jane Doe
, she gifts me. That’s the name for girls who don’t have a name they know Above, like Violet.
Catatonic.
That’s when someone won’t move, won’t talk, won’t see.
Supervised care facility.

That’s a Whitecoat hospital.

She stops. “Don’t hate me for this,” she says, hands fidgeting on the papers, straightening them just so against the wood-grain lines of her polished kitchen table. In the other room, Violet lies hands tucked in her lap, staring at the swirls of white plaster on the ceiling. She don’t blink. She don’t speak.

Doctor Marybeth pronounced my ma dead when I was but three years old. She clipped the cord from my belly when I was born, and held my hand a long night when I was seven and my throat closed up with fever. “I don’t hate you,” I tell her.

I’m afraid to take her hand or smooth it down calm from a fist. I’m not Jack. I don’t need to decide, though, because she takes mine, squeezes it; holds on too long.

I have to hide in the bathroom when the car comes to take Violet away. Passing or not, the Whitecoats — Doctor Marybeth calls them
paramedics
— will have questions. They’ll want to know ’bout Violet’s finding, the smell of smoke on her clothes. They’ll want to know who the strange boy is. It’s easier for her to lie to them if I’m not about.

“Lock the door, Matthew,” she tells me as the knock raps on the front door, and I push the little brass button beside the bathroom doorknob three times to make sure it’s locked tight. I sit on top of Doctor Marybeth’s clean white toilet and stare at patterns on the brown-and-white tiled floor while Whitecoat boots stump down the hall past me. Stop in the parlor, and lay eyes and hands on Violet.

“Need to carry her,” says a voice, burnt and thin. “The hall’s too narrow for the stretcher.”

“Shit,” says another: prompt, sharp, sucked dry of anything good. “Help me lift.”

I close my eyes, picture it like a Tale: his hands on Violet, taking Violet away. And reach out for a hand that ain’t here to hold.

Ari.
The idea comes without the asking: Ari carried away by Whitecoats with a grunt and a stomp, kicking, screaming. They’d put a needle in. They wouldn’t want her changing while they did it.

Forget shadows. Forget ghosts. I should have gone back for her.

The Whitecoat feet tromp back up the hall, heavier this time, slower. “Bring the stretcher to the doorway,” the second voice says, and it’s strained from weight; and then muttered low, something nobody’s meant to hear: “Don’t you worry, now. We’ll get you somewhere nice and warm.”

The feet fade out, disappearing into the big cold world Above.

The silence is like buildings before they burn.

I get up. Turn the knob. Open the bathroom door a touch, just a handspan, and slide my head through the crack. Look down the hall through Doctor Marybeth’s wide-open front door.

Everything outside is white lights. White hands, white as drowned blind mice, are putting Violet on a hard white bed with metal wheels that glimmer and force your eyes away. A white car’s coughing stink into the air beside it, and the red-and-white plastic bar atop it glows, throwing that sharp light everywhere.

I watch Doctor Marybeth bend over the wheeled bed half-shadowed, her face closed up smooth and tight as a tunnel grave. She’s not crying no more.
Atticus’s lesson
, I think;
big kids are quiet, and big kids are sharp
, and I huddle tighter behind the thin, useless bathroom door, shaping words for it in my mouth. Tasting them quiet against the day when I can carve the Tale down on the door with the martyrs.

Doctor Marybeth sees them gone and then stands in the doorway a minute, two, letting hot thick air slide through the open door. I put my hands behind my back, fight the wanting to get up and close it, to draw her crook-elbow back inside.

When she does come back to me, her mouth’s drawn small and her face is damp. “Nobody’s admitted your others to the hospital,” she says after a long moment. “I asked.”

I should be relieved. Or terrified:
Hide Heather Mack lost in the dark.
“Oh,” is all I say, and she closes the door.

We stand quiet for a long minute.

“That’s what it’s here for. The medical system,” she says finally, soft so Whisper and Jack, locked upstairs in the attic room, won’t hear her giving sedition into my ears. “It’s to take care of those who can’t care for themselves.”

“Atticus and Whisper could care for themselves.” I look down at the pale pinkish wall between the front window and floor. Doctor Marybeth’s painted it for a rosy dawn; or so she told me, waiting for the car to come. I’ve not seen a dawn Above that was softhearted as that.

“Yeah,” she says, and wipes her nose with a tidy pinch. “The problems start when you can’t decide who can care for themselves and who can’t.”

The stubborn rises in me, hard as a grown-in crab claw. “And who says they get to decide anyway?”

We both know who
they
is. Doctor Marybeth looks away. She sits down right in the hallway and leans her head against the wall.

“You take an oath when you become a doctor,” she says after a minute. Her hand goes up to her belly, just beneath her heart and breasts and the corner-crux of her ribs. My good clean mad fades away; that’s where I keep my oaths too, sworn and private. Where Jack Flash taught me all good oaths stay. “They’ve changed it a lot. Things change. But you swear not to hurt anyone.”

She settles her hands on her knees: rough skin, a lighter brown than my own. “Lakeshore didn’t hurt most people. It was the patients who were going to hurt other people, or hurt themselves.” She looks up at me, and her eyes are black and tired. “You don’t see the worst of how people can end up. The real worst cases never make it down to Safe.”

“Reynard made it,” I say. “And Heather.”

Reynard, who was Teller before me, crawled down to Safe. He near drowned in the sewer pipes, dragging himself by his elbows ’cause his legs didn’t work right. My pa found him passed out at the gateway to the old sewers, exhausted, beard choked with filth and teeth bared with anger. Heather, who took Reynard’s wheelchair after he died and went into the ground, was carried down. Mercy knew her from the same Whitecoat home built with ramps and lifts and buttons where once she’d been kept locked away. One night she and Mack went up without having a duty, and they carried Heather all the way home.

There were others Mercy wanted out; friends, Sick or Freak or in trouble. But we only had one wheelchair.

“That’s not what I mean, worst,” Doctor Marybeth says. Her eyes don’t even flicker. “I don’t mean physically. If the bad cases really did make it down to you, you’d have sent a lot more people out.”

Suddenly I get it. She means the screamers. Whisper talks sometimes about them: screamers, cutters, ones who’d trip you in the dinner line and smile dog-tooth smiles.
Sent a lot more people
— I turn full to Doctor Marybeth. “You knew ’bout Corner.”

“Yeah,” she says, like a kid caught filching paper to doodle.

“What happened?” I ask, and this time I hold her eye, try to push the Tale free just by force of looking. Not a hand on the back, not encouragement gentle and soft.
Tell me a Tale. Tell me true.

“She wouldn’t say the whole,” Doctor Marybeth says, quieter than sedition, or shadows, or ghosts. “She came to me half past midnight, and wouldn’t let me near.” She wraps her arms around herself like restraints, showing me the weight and heft of Corner. “Stayed the night, and all she said was she was never going back.”

“You didn’t know it was Killer,” I say, hushed with the thought of Corner’s bloodtouch bloodstain hands wrapped ’round Doctor Marybeth’s crockery; Corner’s body curled up in the upstairs bed with the big eagle quilt about its shoulders. My arms prickle where they clutched it three nights past.

Doctor Marybeth lowers her arms slowly to her sides. “Matthew,” she says, careful and delicate as bad news. “I don’t think she killed.”

I watch her. Blink once, twice. That can’t be telling true.

Yes it can
, says my gut and head and heart, thick and smug ’cause they’ve known it all along. That there were holes and tatters in the Tale taught to me.
Oh, it can.

“Oh?” I manage, ugly little droplet of sound. Doctor Marybeth nods once, still studying me, watching me as Whisper does: that same look of mingled sadness and care that makes me turn aside. She reaches out a hand and I pull mine away, fingertip-small. Enough to make her rest hers back on the beat-up rug; on the floor.

“They’d fought before, of course,” she starts, like it’s
of course
to think of Atticus and Corner together, in love, fighting. “Not a lot came of it. Corner would sleep somewhere else, go walking. I caught them in the middle of it once, about turning pages fast enough, of all the little things, and they were both so embarrassed….”

I study the pattern of the carpet: a double-headed bird, all in red. Two beaks open wide, two sets of claws. A Beast.

“She came up that night and I thought something’d happened, someone was ill or the roof had fallen in. But she said everyone else was fine, just … she wasn’t going back to him.” A pause. “That exactly. Wasn’t going back to him. And asked me for a place to stay the night.

“You didn’t know Corner,” she says. “You don’t know how much it was for her to ask for anything. They were all that way in the beginning, but her the worst. So I gave her the spare room. And I begged her to stay until I could get to the bottom of it.”

“How long?” I ask, hollow-voiced and hushed.

“Three days,” and now the guilt’s in, the ache of someone else’s Tale coming through her voice into her restless hands. She plucks at the fringe of the carpet, braids it, discards it. “On the second day I went down to Safe.”

Doctor Marybeth is always sent for. There is always someone with a light to guide her through the new tunnels, the old tunnels, the sewer. “I didn’t know you knew the way,” I say awkward, knowing that this is real secrets now, the kind that would get people in trouble if Atticus were still living and the world not upside down.

“I remembered the way.” She’s calm and neutral, watching me just as much as I’m watching her for every little flick and fillip of voice. “One day there was going to be an emergency and there’d be no one to hold my hand. So I —” she pauses. Out the rightmost edge of my eye I catch a sharp, small smile. “— I counted the turns.”

I whuff. My papa’s snort. Don’t underestimate those Above.

“So I went down to Atticus,” she says, and the smile sinks back into her cheeks to drown. “They’d taken away her Sanctuary.”

I wasn’t the Teller when Corner’s Sanctuary was took — Reynard was. I was nothing but my papa’s little boy with a small gift for the Telling, and I watched the taking-away of Sanctuary from behind his stone-steady legs with a fear I didn’t have words for. I remember jostling; I remember Atticus saying the terrible click-sharp words.

I remember what color Atticus’s eyes were when he exiled the first Beast from Safe.

I don’t remember Doctor Marybeth there. But Papa had his big hand on my head all through, and when it was over he took me back to the house he and I shared once my mama was gone and told me, serious and quiet, what it meant to be Killer. Why it was a thing grave enough that someone would ever have their Sanctuary taken away.

That it wouldn’t happen again. That I was Safe.

Last time.

My belly turns with a sudden, sharp little terror. “You didn’t see him do it, did you? You weren’t there for it all.”

The look Doctor Marybeth gives me is sharp and peculiar, and “No,” she says. “Not until the end. Not ’til it was over.”

I’m shamed at how relieved I am to hear those words.

“I got … upset with him,” Doctor Marybeth says, in a house Above with hardwood floors and worn-patched carpets, in a place where I have no Sanctuary and nobody cares ’bout the Tales of Safe. “I said things that couldn’t be taken back. How he could ever throw her out over one of their spats …” She closes her eyes. “And then he showed me Jonah’s body.”

The knot in my belly hardens. “I thought you said it wasn’t Killer.”

“She wasn’t,” Doctor Marybeth says soft. “I got an autopsy later.” She glances at me to make sure I know
autopsy
and I do. Another Whitecoat wickedness; the sundering of the dead. “Jonah’s heart gave out. That was all. He had one of his seizures in the tunnel and he died.”

“That’s something Corner could do. With the bloodtouch,” I argue, like I don’t already believe her, like I haven’t known the story of Corner’s exile was rotten since the day I was first asked not to Tell it no more.

“Maybe if she was still in the tunnel. But not from my top bedroom,” Doctor Marybeth says. “And Atticus would’ve known that, if he’d been thinking past his hurt pride. He would have known it cold.” She pauses. “I’m sure he came to regret that after.”

We’re quiet a long minute. Together. Apart.

“I got back Above and told her. I thought maybe if she let it cool he’d listen to reason, understand she wasn’t in the tunnels that night, wasn’t hurting anyone. Or Whisper and Violet and Scar would talk sense into him; he was at least listening to the other founders in those days. And if not …” She stops, swallows back too hard for regular spit and air. “If not, I’d help her find a new name, a job. Somewhere to live.”

“Above,” I say soft, so soft.

I barely hear the next part, no matter how strong all my straining. “I said I’d keep her safe,” Doctor Marybeth whispers, and leans her head back against her sunshine wall. “Except in the morning, she was gone, and it wasn’t back to Safe. And that’s when the trouble with the shadows started.”