Dark Angel (2 page)

‘No problem,’ I called after Holly as she swung into her own driveway. ‘My costume will be spectacular. It’s in my head – every last detail.’

‘Liar!’ she yelled back. The garage door rolled open and her car disappeared inside.

‘You know me so well,’ I muttered, taking out my phone, hoping for a message from Orlando – Missing u. Can’t w8 4 Friday. xox type of thing. No new messages, my phone told me.

Sometimes I sit inside my house and wonder, what was the baby’s name – Katie? Jordan? Mollie? Which room did she sleep in? Bobby Mackey’s book tells you only that she died in the fire on her first birthday and that her parents ran back into the house to try and save her – first the mom then the dad, both in vain.

I sit in my room and listen. The breath of a sleeping baby is silent, eyes closed, lashes curled, its tiny chest rising and falling.

‘Hey, Tania. How’s the costume coming along?’ It was Grace on the phone, checking up on me.

‘I made a few sketches,’ I lied.

‘I need details. Are you doing the angel thing – wings and all?’

‘Seriously, I’m not that into the Heavenly Bodies theme.’

‘So I heard. What’s wrong with you?’

‘Angels are all played out.’ Gauze and sequins, plumage, shimmery silver body paint. Been there, done that.

‘So surprise us – come up with something original. Paint yourself red all over, show up as a Martian.’

‘Thanks for that suggestion, best buddy of mine. Very attractive.’

There was a pause while I heard Grace turn on the shower. ‘You and Orlando
will
be there Friday?’ she checked.

‘You betcha.’

‘Cool. Gotta go now, hon. I’m meeting Jude in five.’

Beep went the phone. End of conversation. I sat on my bed and doodled a couple of sketches, but my angels came out as devils, with horns and forked tails. ‘Hmmm …’ I said.

‘Interesting,’ Mom said when I went downstairs and showed her the fruits of my labours. She was taking laundry from the machine, breathing in the scent of meadow flowers. ‘I can definitely see Orlando as a devil.’

‘Nice. I’ll tell him.’

Mom folded towels, hung shirts on hangers. ‘How’s Dallas? Did he text you?’

‘No. I guess he’s busy.’

‘When does he get back?’

‘Thursday. These costumes are driving me nuts. I think we won’t go.’

Mom smoothed the neat pile of towels. ‘Go,’ she urged. ‘It’s a big event. Maybe you’ll even get to meet the man himself.’

Eighteen months back, Zoran Brancusi had quit the rock scene at the height of his fame. His last album, entitled
Heavenly Bodies
– so no surprise about the party theme – went global. He did the world tour then got badly injured in a car crash and dropped out of sight. A year later he turned up in Bitterroot. Not in town exactly. To be clear, he bought twenty thousand acres of land, including half a mountain covered in pine forest. He built a house out there, in Black Eagle Canyon. The upcoming party looked like his way of saying hi to a thousand new neighbours – the entire teen population of Bitterroot.

‘He’s planning a comeback,’ Mom predicted as she carried the towels into the bathroom. ‘There’ll be a host of celebs at the party, a deal with a gossip magazine – photographs, a full-length feature. You wait and see.’

Orlando called me at midnight from Dallas. I pictured him hunched over his phone, long legs resting on a coffee table, dark hair flopping forward. I totally wished I was there.

‘Bird of paradise,’ he suggested for my costume.

‘Really?’ Technically it wasn’t a heavenly body; it actually existed. I explained the subtle difference to my absent boyfriend.

‘Why so literal all of a sudden? The clue’s in the name – bird of
paradise
. Garden of Eden, all that stuff.’

‘I’ll think about it.’

‘It’ll be cool, Tania. I see you as a bird, a delicate, exotic bird – turquoise plumage, orange and gold.’ He’s applying for fashion design courses at college so he says stuff like this without blushing. ‘Make a mask, a headdress with feathers. You’re creative – you can do it.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ I said again. Say you miss me, tell me you can’t wait to hold me in your arms. Insecurity was seeping out of every pore.

‘I went to a seminar, got introduced to two potential course tutors – Julian Sellars and Mimi Rossi. They were both amazing,’ he tells me, fast and enthusiastic. ‘Oh, and by the way, I won’t be there.’

‘What do you mean, you won’t be here?’ Explosion into uncontrolled panic; I can’t keep it out of my voice.

‘I won’t make it back in time,’ he explained calmly. ‘Mom plans to visit a cousin here in Dallas. The trip is extended till Sunday.’

I go into freefall and Orlando puts up a barrier. He plays it deliberately cool, doesn’t give the needy version of me any space. It’s a pattern we’ve gotten into.

What he likes is me when I’m creative – sketching, painting. This bit he understands and admires.

‘You’re so gifted,’ he tells me. ‘You don’t know how talented you are.’

Me and a million other wannabe Warhols, I think, standing back from my latest canvas – a silkscreen portrait of a rainbow-coloured woman with the eyes blanked out, no window into the soul.

‘And beautiful,’ he insists, loosening my long black hair and watching it slide down my back. I’m his trophy girl, up there on a pedestal.

‘I don’t feel it,’ I sigh, knocking back each and every compliment. It’s a plea for him to understand what goes on beneath the surface, how I feel inside my so-called beautiful skin.

Up goes the wall. Orlando rolls his eyes and talks basketball, which he knows I hate.

This sounds like the perfect relationship, right?

I was in school the next day, still dark and moody, sitting between Grace and Jude after classes had ended.

‘So come with us.’ Grace took in the latest news from Orlando and jumped in with her offer. ‘This doesn’t mean you’re off the party hook,’ she warned.

Take Grace and Jude as a more finished version of me and Orlando. Jude of the perfect teeth, jaw line and long neck, the Afro-American shaved head and curling lashes. Flawless, blonde Grace Montrose with long, slim fingers and wide blue eyes. She has no insecurities for Jude to ignore.

‘We’ll call for you,’ he told me. ‘We’ll drive out to Black Eagle together.’

I was still hurting from last night’s argument. ‘Did you forget the party?’ I’d asked Orlando, trying not to load my tone with accusation and failing.

‘No I didn’t forget,’ he’d replied. By now his feet would have been off the table, his eyelids would be half shut and his oh-so-kissable mouth wouldn’t be smiling. ‘Like I said, Mom plans to visit her cousin. What do you want me to do – sprout wings and fly home on an air current?’

‘Try a conventional airplane,’ I’d suggested.

‘Ha-ha. Where will I find the cash?’ There was a pause filled by a sigh, followed by an attempt to soften the blow. ‘Listen, Tania, it’s only three extra days.’

‘That’s not the point – it’s the party!’

‘Oh, sorry – The Party! Well, what do you know, I didn’t mark that down as the pinnacle of my social diary this summer. I’m kind of busy looking for a college place for the fall.’

He’d turned it around and put me in the wrong, made me feel so bad. I’d apologized and went to bed hating myself, wondering when exactly I’d begun to press the destruct button on our relationship.

‘Tania, we’ll drive you out to Black Eagle Lodge.’ Grace broke my dark thoughts to repeat the offer. ‘And tomorrow night I’ll come to your place to help with your costume. What was it again – bird of paradise?’

My dad came home that night with news that should have solved the costume dilemma plus the going-to-theparty-solo problem in one fell swoop.

‘Forest fire,’ he reported as he flung down his flight bag and kicked off his boots. ‘Out at Black Eagle Canyon. I saw Forest Service pumper heading out there to join county fire crew.’

‘How bad?’ Mom asked.

I was half elated that the party would now be cancelled, half spooked by the news of a fresh forest fire. It ended in a shiver right down my spine.

‘Plenty of smoke heading down mountain. Couldn’t see flames.’ Dad was tired – he’d been out of state on a construction project in the Utah desert, sleeping in camp for three nights. At the best of times he chops his English into short, sharp bursts, ignores details like the definite article, the personal pronoun. Exhaustion exaggerates the habit.

Mom jumped on the news. ‘How did it start?’

‘Fuel accumulation at ground level – deadwood. Lightning strike, no rain.’

‘Let’s hope it stays low, doesn’t get into the canopy,’ Mom said. Round here everyone is a wildfire expert. ‘Wind’s coming in from the north, which means the flames should push towards Turner Lake and fizzle out.’

We all thought but no one said, What about our retired rock star’s multimillion-dollar spread? Did the flames engulf the house?

‘Untouched,’ Holly reported next morning. We could smell smoke in the air, even from a distance of ten miles. Everyone gathered at the school entrance, picking up snippets of news. ‘The flames leaped from one side of Black Eagle Canyon to the other; left the lodge unscathed.’

‘It’s a miracle,’ Jude said. ‘But I guess the party’s off.’

‘No way,’ the fountain of all knowledge insisted. ‘Zoran already put it on his blog – attendance of heavenly bodies required, his place, eight p.m. tomorrow.’

Smoke still hung in the air during lunch break. We breathed in acrid fumes, felt it catch at the back of our throats.

I picked up a text from Orlando: ‘Sorry,’ he said. That was all. It was enough. ‘Me too,’ I texted back. ‘Luv u.’

Grace was rechecking Zoran’s updated blog. ‘The flames stayed low on the ground,’ she reported. ‘The fire crew graded it low intensity, surface fire. Trees, house, outbuildings are all OK.’

‘Cool,’ everyone agreed.

But then Jude brought the mood down. ‘The way I heard it, a guy from the forest service got caught on the mountain without a shelter.’

‘No way. What happened to him?’ Leo Douglas asked. He’d been sitting next to me, watching me text Orlando and I’d been about to tell him how his best buddy was delayed in Dallas and wimping out of the biggest party of the decade.

‘They didn’t find him yet,’ Jude told us. ‘He’s been missing since four p.m. yesterday.’

‘How do they know he didn’t have a shelter?’ Leo again.

A shelter is a foil tent that a firefighter shakes out and climbs into while the flames sweep through. The way Bobby Mackey tells it, it’s a total life saver.

‘It was still in the truck with his name on. Marty Austin found it and tried to locate the missing man by two-way radio. No reply. The guy is twenty-four years old, with a wife and a baby.’

‘So how come it’s not on Zoran’s blog?’ Grace didn’t want to believe Jude. She finds it hard to absorb bad news.

I was in freefall again, smelling smoke, hearing the deadwood crackle, shielding my face from its orange blaze. Sparks rise and dance in billowing white smoke, way above the treetops.

‘I guess he won’t want to talk about it – not until it’s been confirmed,’ Holly suggested.

What followed was one of those uneasy silences that no one found a way to break. We were all thinking maybe our rock star shouldn’t go ahead with the party out of respect, or maybe they would find the missing guy safe and well.

But I remembered the time last fall when a woman hiker in her early thirties went up Black Rock alone. It was a normal day, no weather warnings. She never came back. They went over the whole area with a fine-tooth comb – nothing. In the end they came up with two strong possibilities. Either the lone hiker had fallen into a sink hole caused by an old forest fire – the kind of hole that opens up when flames have burned underground for weeks, gobbled up tree roots and hollowed out big, unseen caverns. Or else she’d
wanted
to disappear, i.e. she’d planned the whole thing in order to flee from her family. If you run with this story, she and her secret lover are currently running a beach bar in Barbados, Bermuda, Bali … you choose. Personally, with my apocalyptic sensors on full alert and given the many and lethal dangers up on Black Rock, I lean towards the sink hole option.

As you can see, I’m the complete opposite of my best friend Grace.

‘Are you OK, Jude?’ she asked as we gave up speculating and headed indoors for afternoon class. The two of them hung behind. He was searching through his pockets for something.

‘Inhaler,’ he mumbled.

I noticed he was short of breath, trying to draw air into clogged lungs.

Luckily Grace always carries a spare. She dug it out of the bottom of her bag and handed it to him. ‘Is it the smoke?’ she asked.

Jude nodded, inserted the mouthpiece and sucked hard. I heard the light mechanical whir of the tiny device.

‘Slow down, breathe deep,’ Grace instructed, so accustomed to Jude’s asthma attacks that she didn’t miss a beat.

‘You want to take him to a doctor?’ I asked.

She shook her head. ‘Give him five minutes, he’ll be cool.’

‘Sure?’ Jude didn’t look cool. His breaths came short, shallow and sharp, his head was tilted back and his mouth was pursed into an ‘O’.

Grace nodded. ‘Go ahead, Tania. I’ll see you later – costume, remember?’

‘My place?’

‘Seven thirty. See you.’

I went inside and sat through classes, living with a shaky feeling that the blaze out at Black Eagle Canyon, the missing firefighter, even Jude’s asthma and Orlando not being here were all bad signs that combined into some kind of warning not to attend the party, a message in the ether.

‘Even for you that’s total bullshit,’ tell-it-like-it-is Holly informed me on our drive home. ‘Quit the superstitious crap, Tania, for chrissakes.’

I didn’t argue with Holly. I never do.

Time to join dots, I guess.

Holly Randle doesn’t suffer fools. She spits out tough opinions, no softening, no compromise. She has the mind and body of a professional athlete, a tennis player serving 120mph balls straight at your body. Her total focus is on winning every argument, holding the advantage, psyching out the opposition. Physically she conforms to type too – she’s tall, tanned and wears her blonde hair tied high on her head, like those Eastern European Amazons who blast their opponents off the court, whose legs go on for ever and whose names begin with an impossible collection of hard consonants all rattling together and ending in ‘ova’.