Above (16 page)

There’s a rhythm to it. One-two-three up-two-three and then take another breath and blow. I go four times before Doctor Marybeth shivers against my nose-pinch hand and coughs, and I back off fearing she’s going to cough up shadow, like my mouth’s not already been touching it for four breaths, four silent wind-touched three-counts where nothing else moved but the floorboards. But nothing comes back up. Her eyes flutter open instead, and she sucks in a deep, scraping breath.

“Oh God,” Jack says, and collapses back to sitting.

I make it to the bathroom before I sick up. There’s a grace in that.

Doctor Marybeth’s breathing slow on the floor when I get back, my mouth sour and face damp from the cool water from her sink; from tears, from just reaction. I go back to where Whisper’s kneeling, brushing Doctor Marybeth’s hair off her forehead, all that mad and hate and mistrusting between them forgotten.

“Can you feel it inside?” she asks, big-eyed with a mama’s fear.

Doctor Marybeth shakes her head. Her eyes are closed. She looks three-day-duty tired.

Jack says nothing. He kneels drawn-up next to Whisper, hands clasped tight in front of him like a kid expecting to get scolded; eyes heavy, hard, unknowable. His hands flicker with light. “You livin’?” he asks gruffly.

“Jack —” Doctor Marybeth says, hand outstretched to comfort or to take some, just to make sure he’s real.

“Don’t touch,” he snaps, drawing his hands back. His gloves are still across the room. Doctor Marybeth jerks herself back as their hands get too close and spark.

“Sorry,” Jack says, low to the edge of my hearing.

“S’okay,” she says back, automatic, and leans eyes-shut against the floor.

“Let’s get you into bed,” Jack says, and delivers Whisper and me a look you don’t gainsay. We take her by the arms, one each, and help her onto the mattress. She’s cold, cold enough to prickle my fingers, but not blue-lips chill no more. Still, I tuck the blanket up under her arms, careful not to put her in too tight.

“It’s all right,” Doctor Marybeth says. It’s weak enough that no one believes her.

“Hot tea,” Whisper says to me. “Quickly.”

I hurdle down the steps two-three at a time, tumble into the quiet kitchen fumbling for the kettle. It bangs too loud on the stove. My hands are shaking.

By the time I get back upstairs, Whisper’s got a broom in hand. She’s swept all the dust into a crumbling, tiny heap while Jack presses his thick gloves against Doctor Marybeth’s forehead. He reaches for the mug without thinking, awkward; I know enough to hold it back until Doctor Marybeth looks up and takes it in her little, precise, Normal hand.

“Wasn’t Atticus,” Jack says, watching Whisper like he didn’t notice my hand and Doctor Marybeth’s, the clumsiness of his own. His color’s high. I pretend for him too; he’s earned a little pretending.

“Was so,” Whisper says, and bends down with a dust-pan. “It spoke his voice. It knew the way his sentences turned.”

“It was a shadow,” Jack says just in the same tone of voice, flat and factual and feeling just about nothing. “The shadows put on Corner too, just like real.”

We don’t look over our shoulders when we say the name no more.

Whisper gathers up all the little dust motes and takes them down the stairs, a quiet creak at each step telling just how careful she’s walking. The back door opens when Doctor Marybeth’s worked halfway down the mug of tea, and there’s a flicker of flame out the high attic window. Dust doesn’t burn so good. The flame is slow and dim.

When I look back, Doctor Marybeth’s watching me, eyes too steady for almost dying. “Sorry,” I mutter.

“Don’t be,” she says, and my hand starts shaking again, enough that she wraps it around her mug to keep it still as her eyes.

“You’re not dead,” falls out of my mouth. Or lost. Or blank Violet stolen.

But she doesn’t even blink. “I’m not dead,” she agrees, and takes another sip. She licks her lips after. They look cracked; little ridges of dead skin rising out of them. “I saw …”

I take her hand. Breathe in rhythm with the noise of Whisper’s feet coming back up the steps. Put on my best Teller voice. “What did you see?”

She closes her eyes. The better to see it in the dark, maybe. “That last night with Corner.” She licks her lips again. Her voice is all throaty and scraped.

“You remembered it,” I fill in.

She shakes her head. “No,” she says, “I saw it how
she
saw it.”

I’m good and careful. My hand doesn’t slip and spill hot tea all over the quilt Doctor Marybeth’s mama made her.

“I see it,” she finishes, and lets out a breath.

I put the tea down. Just to be careful and sure. Jack’s at the door arguing with Whisper in a voice that’s low, cupped-in, but he’s listening, I think. Jack can’t do nothing in his life if he can’t take in three conversations word for word, strung together, all at once.

“Tell me?” I ask.

She tells me.

Corner’s not scared.

Corner’s got a cool and even calm that comes over its bones when bad things happen (it says in Doctor Marybeth’s voice, through Doctor Marybeth’s lips), and it’s used enough to bad things that the edges of tonight are familiar. The edges of tonight are shadow-dark and worn, like it’s every other bad night away from home.

(Shadow-dark? I ask her, choosing words right careful.

Yes
, she whispers, and her eyes go far away again.)

This time, at least it’s warm. This time, it’s safe as safe can be Above, in Marybeth’s attic room, under the quilt Marybeth brought from home in a folded brown-paper parcel after she got out of the Whitecoat school where they dumped all the kids of her kind. Marybeth’s got no claw arms or bloodtouch and never cut herself even once, but she knows what it’s like to be Freak: how the words on your tongue don’t come out quite right to anyone, home or away. Marybeth’s Safe.

(— and I watch Doctor Marybeth for wincing as these words fall from her tongue, but there isn’t none. Just her far-gone eyes and her still small hands and the spirit of Corner telling me dark things, and true.)

It tells me ’bout cool and even calm, the kid-familiar smell of grass and trees; the smell of
never too late to blend in
, Pass quiet, prove them all wrong and build a life Above that’ll last. Be a rocket scientist. Be a doctor.

Make your mama proud.

(And Doctor Marybeth’s hand rises, and wipes away the tears.)

So when Marybeth gets back, you’re ready. Ready to say
yes
to her and take her spare bed and helping hand, be done with him and Safe and all of it. Until you see the slack pallor of her face. The tight fist-curls of her hands.

Because there was a ceremony (you can see it). Because they burned your last year’s offering in a special-made fire. They closed the big door to Safe at the end and it clanged and echoed, blowing out the silence.

Because
he
did. He led them, start to end.

I’ll find you something
, she says, a hand on your back that’s not wanted there no more, breath in your hair where it’s not wanted no more. Her hand and breath both shaking with rage.
I’ll find you work. You stay with me. We’ll get you a life that’s real.

But all you can say is
Doctor give me something give me poison give me pills
, the want to die getting harder and sharper with every breath, sharper than any time before or after Lakeshore. There’s tears hot on your cheeks and it’s shameful, the height of shame. The end of all your plans. Shut door. Unnamed. The Tale of how you came down never told again, and your name turned into
Killer.

No no,
she whispers.
Be strong. I know you’re good and strong.

You’re not. (And here the voice stumbles, the bell-voice, the shadow-voice, tripping over broken-backed regrets.) Atticus is strong for the both of you, and you are —

You’re alone.

And now Corner’s mad.

And now Corner’s scared.

“And she’s gonna run away —” and Doctor Marybeth lets out a sob that ain’t her own, hardly human and half shadow-talk but all real in its weeping. Whisper rushes over at the sound and takes her hand, brushes me aside not thinking, half-thinking.

“It’s okay,” she murmurs, smoothing out Doctor Marybeth’s hair, running her fingers through its strands. “It’s okay, dearie, it’s okay.”

I get up and snug my shoes on, tug the laces up tight. Check my pockets: matches in one, emergency money in the other, twenty-five dollars still secret, still snug. It’s been more than half an hour, and half an hour matters, and I did a wrong thing today and I’ve gotta go fix it
now
. Before it’s too big to take back. Before we’re all alone, and I’m alone from my Ariel too.

Where’m I learning running? From Corner, maybe. From the shadow-taint that comes from fighting them, from shadows brushing up against your skin. Maybe from Atticus, passed on in the very air, after he made a mistake too big to take back and ran from it by pushing Corner out of Safe. I slept without my ma or pa for years inside his house, learning his lessons. Carving his histories into our people’s good doors.

Atticus leaving. Corner leaving, no good-byes.

Whisper looks up as I get to my feet. “Where you going?” She’s long-necked and alarmed, like a deer, a rabbit. Something that’s scared that you’ll move to hurt.

“To find my Ariel,” I say, give her a last, twisted little smile, and go.

P
APA’S
T
ALE

Papa didn’t walk until his second birthday, and after that, it wasn’t often.

(He told it softer ’cause I was his child. He told it to me long before I was the Teller, once it came clear that maybe one day I would be, and with it he put paper and stub-snapped crayons in my hands to teach me the art of clean straight lines. Whisper told me some when I was the Teller for true, and she told it softer too, running skirt between finger and thumb whenever she left a bad thing out. Reynard was the only one who didn’t tell it soft, and he wouldn’t tell it to me at all.
A boy can hear his own papa’s Tale
, he said, with that quirk of the eyebrow and the jump his hands did to make up for his legs never working,
without going to pester the Teller
.)

(So I don’t have the whole of it. I don’t have the worst.)

Papa didn’t walk until his second birthday, and after that they took him to the specialist to look at his feet.

Even as a baby, Papa’s feet were hard like a lion’s. The gold fur hadn’t yet come in; the tough pads were soft and new from want of walking, and the nails were tiny if they were thick and sharp. It wasn’t ’til he grew a little longer that his parents realized he wasn’t a baby like their others.

Know this, he’d say: Your dadi and dada loved all their children. Back on the farm in the old country, they would never have minded, so long as I could walk and plant wheat and bring your dada water in the afternoons. I’d have danced in the Jaggo for your aunties’ weddings. But here (and he’d stop, and gesture upward, taking in the whole of Above with his one scabbed muscled hand) here there are Whitecoats, and they knew much better than we did at home.

You listened to the Whitecoats. You did what they said.

They broke my papa’s feet for the first time when he was three years old, and put them back together before he was four.

He didn’t remember the first breaking. What he did remember was before it: a bright small room all glass and mirrors, white light on white walls, white tables. “Stand up,” the head Whitecoat said to him, over and over, and took from him his mama’s hand;
stand straight
even though the standing hurt him.

The Whitecoats came in and he stood for hours. They got him to stand wide, stand thin, poked at his feet with rods and took pictures, the flashes popping on all sides. The light snapped off the white walls and dazzled his eyes so he could no longer see his mama, standing with her five brown fingers pressed up against the thick glass window. He stood stripped down to his undies until his legs shook and he fell and cried for her, and the Whitecoats frowned at him and called for the breaking of his feet.

(
Maybe they wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t cry
, he never said, but he had a thin stern frown every time he told it, and by the time I was old enough to understand what that frown meant, he was dead and far past asking.)

There were leg braces (Papa took the grey crayon and drew braces). Every morning Dadi strapped him into the metal and leather and tightened them up, and Papa walked about the house hurting and hurting as the braces bent his feet Normal. “Be brave,” his own papa said. Papa was brave.

When he could walk ’round the house ten times without falling they sent him away to school.

Papa watched the other kids run the track in gym class (he explained with a great relief how good it was that there was no such thing in Safe). He followed them around and around in circles from indoors, where he sat with his cane and leg braces, and bit his lip down until nobody could see him wanting. It’s a bad thing to be caught wanting, he said. Especially when you could not run.

(
They didn’t know what to do with my kind back then
, he’d say with a gentle smile, and I’d ask,
lion’s-foot people?
and he’d laugh and laugh, his rich Papa laugh, and go
no no, people from Punjab. Indian people
.

One place Above was much like another for me, especially when I was knee-high to my papa and followed him everywhere except the dark duty shifts Above.
Do they now?
I asked him once, and the smile went away and his eyes looked elsewhere.
No
, he said.
They do not
.