Mockingbird (13 page)

  "Huh." Katey nests on that for a while. "Do I get chemo?"

  "What?"

  "You know. Chemo. Does it look like I get chemo?"

  Miriam scrunches up her nose, the skin between her brows forming a crumpled V. "No, I don't think so. No hair loss. Not too much weight loss, either."

  "Aw, heck. I could've used the weight loss. Still. I think you're right. I don't think I will get chemo. Quality of life and all that. I want to keep things the way they are for as long as I can."

  "You going to keep teaching?"

  "I am."

  "Why? Why not… quit, escape, fuck off to an island somewhere, go get rub-downs and happy endings by some cabana boy named Manuel?"

  "I'll do some of that. I have some time off. But I can't leave my girls."

  "You're just a teacher."

  "
Just
a teacher? You know how to make a girl feel real good about her life choices." Katey laughs. "I see the look in your eye. You never had one of
those
teachers, did you? A teacher who inspired you to learn more, to be better?"

  "I never had a teacher get up on a table and read me poetry, if that's what you're asking. None of them ever took a bullet for me or sent me roses or tried to fuck me." She drums her fingers and closes them suddenly into a fist, wishing she could smoke in here. "Okay. I did have one teacher. English teacher. Introduced me to Poe and Plath and Dickinson."

  She thinks,
And Keats and Donne and Yeats and all those lovelorn assholes who made me want to go out and get goofy on Crème de Menthe in the woods with Ben Hodge, Ben whose brains were blown out of his head, Ben whose baby ended up dead.

  "I hope I'm the kind of teacher my girls remember. Maybe that's why I'm here. To leave something behind." The waitress comes, and Katey orders some tropical drink for her, another vodka for Miriam, telling the woman to cut it with a little cranberry juice (to Miriam's sour-faced chagrin). "These girls need help. Some of them are just a little lost in the fog, but others are deep in the dark. Girls who were abused by parents. Or molested. Some of them were substance abusers or are bipolar or they cut themselves. Their families – heck, the whole world – have in many cases left them behind. Abandoned them to the wolves and lions of the plains and jungles. They need our help. Because we're the only ones giving it to them and not asking for anything in return. Which means I've still got work to do."

  
You've got work to do, Miriam.

  The waitress shows. No bird-head. No scar marks on her neck. A banner night.

  She gives Miriam a vodka-cranberry. Then she drops a drink in front of Katey that looks like a fishbowl full of Windex that's been garnished with orange slices and cherries and not one but
two
little paper umbrellas.

  It's a drink so girly Miriam can feel her uterus twinge.

  "I gotta tell you," Miriam says, "that school doesn't feel like a school for damaged goods. It feels like a rich girls' school. Hoity-fucking-toity. Like these are all chicks who fought tooth-and-claw to be there, whose parents pay out the bunghole to ensure their kids a spot. These are girls with a guaranteed shot at a big school with Greek columns and a heraldry crest and ivy crawling up the walls."

  "That's the idea. We're not trying to give these girls the bare minimum. We're trying to give them everything. A full-access pass to a real life." Katey sips her drink from a little red straw so narrow it looks like a petrified human capillary. Her eyelids flutter with delight. "Mm. Mm! Mm. So good. You want a little taste?"

  "I don't drink hull cleaner."

  Katey waves her off. "Your loss. Anyway. Some parents
do
pay out the wazoo. Rich girls can be troubled, too. Sometimes rich girls have the worst problems, believe you me. Anorexia. Oxycontin."

  "Shopping addictions!" Miriam exclaims in fauxhorror.

  "Be nice."

  "It's not my strong suit."

  "They have problems same as the rest of us. And their parents help – perhaps unknowingly – to fund the tuitions and room and board of the girls who cannot afford it. We also get donations and state subsidies. All to help these poor girls not just get through, not just survive, but excel."

  "But not boys."

  "Girls are targets. They're assumed to be weak. The world treats them as though they're inferior, a secondclass citizen to men. We've had to fight longer and harder–"

  Miriam's cell rings.

  Louis.

  She holds up a finger to Katey, and then she holds the phone between thumb and forefinger like she's picking up a jizzy tissue.

  
Plunk
. She drops her phone in a glass of water.

  "See?" Miriam says. "I refuse to be a second-class citizen to men. Totally on board with what you're saying. Um. What were you saying again?"

  "Uh. Well." Katey can't help but look at the phone sunken inside the water glass. "I'm just saying we need to fight to keep our place at the table. A man gets killed, nobody asks whether he deserved it. A woman gets raped, they ask, well, what was she wearing? Did she come onto him, lead him on? Did she say
no
loudly and clearly enough? As though those loopholes make rape okay. Young women have it even worse. They don't have a voice. They don't have advocates. That's what we do. We give them a voice. We give them power."

  To this, Miriam says nothing. Her inclination is to call bullshit, but she knows it's true. She's been out there for almost ten years now, floating and drifting, and few have ever treated her like a beautiful leaf on a stream. Most acted like she was a piece of trash bobbling on a tide of sewer run-off. Like she's nothing but an empty McDonald's bag filled with dirty syringes.

  Louis was one of the rare few who treated her like something special.

  Louis.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  The two of them order food and Miriam tries for a hamburger and it's about the most mediocre hamburger she's ever had, but it's not
bad
, not exactly, and she figures that since they burned it to a hockeypuck consistency it certainly won't make her sick with e.coli – "e.coli" just being code for "somebody's poop germs" – and the vodka will help ensure that any such germs are bathed in a scathing wash of antiseptic alcohol.

  Katey talks while Miriam eats.

  At the end of the meal, Miriam's picking pieces off her leftover bun and sopping them in leftover ketchup before popping them in her mouth.

  This meeting has a reason, so it's time to get to it.

  "There's a serial killer," she says.

  Katey almost laughs. "What?"

  "I told you that Lauren Martin might get hurt. What I meant is she might die. Worse, I just found out that she's not the only victim."

  Miriam tells her the story.

  She doesn't withhold anything: the barbed wire, the carved Xs in the palms and feet, the doctor's table, the bird mask, the axe, the funeral flowers, everything. Heads rolling. Tongues extracted. By the end of it, the teacher looks harrowed out.

  "You see things like that," Katey says, matter-offactly.

  "Yeah."

  "That's horrible."

  "Pretty much."

  "This is who you are."

  Miriam just nods

  "Oh." Katey blinked.

  "These visions I get, I see things in them, and sometimes those things don't add up. Details lead to questions that don't have answers. To that end," Miriam pauses, takes a drink, "I want to talk about swallows. The bird."

  "Why swallows?"

  "The killer has a tattoo. Earlier you said something about Philomena."

  "Philo
mela
. A… Princess of Athens."

  "What does she have to do with swallows?"

  Katey tells Miriam the story.

  She tells her how Philomela was daughter to King Pandion and sister to Procne. Both girls were beautiful. Procne married Tereus, King of Thrace, and went to live with him. Five years passed and the sisters had not seen each other and Procne missed Philomela.

  She sent her husband to fetch Philomela so that the sisters could again be together. But upon seeing Philomela, Tereus found her more beautiful than his own wife. So beautiful that he could not control himself, and he raped her.

  To silence Philomela, Tereus grasped her tongue with pincers and cut out her tongue with his sword. Then he hid her away, telling Procne that her sister had died.

  "Men," Miriam says. "Always such charmers. What happened after that? Where do the swallows come in?"

  "Philomela was hidden away, but she began to weave the most wondrous tapestries – tapestries that secretly explained what happened to her. She packed the tapestries up and sent them to Procne as an anonymous gift. Procne saw the truth of what had happened. She went and found her sister, and together they planned their revenge."

  "And did they get it?"

  "They did. Procne invited her husband to dinner. He sat down and enjoyed plate after plate of succulent meats. As he finished, licking his fingers, rubbing his belly, Philomela emerged from the kitchen and dropped onto the table the severed head of Tereus' first son, Itys. Procne had had the boy killed and his body butchered into the meal that Tereus ate and enjoyed."

  
Cut tongues.

  
Severed heads.

  "Those Greeks knew how to party." Miriam takes a long sip from her too-sweet too-tart cran-vodka. "Still not clear on the swallow thing."

  "Well." Katey takes another long sip of her radioactive cocktail. "Tereus was, of course, none too happy about having just consumed his first and best son. Men, you might say, are sore losers, and Tereus was no different. And so he chased the women down with a sword. He had them cornered, and he was just about to slay them when…" Another sip.

  Miriam makes the
I'm-over-here-impatiently-waiting
face.

  "The gods took pity and turned them all into birds."

  Ah. There it is.

  "Right. I can guess what Philomela became."

  "A swallow. The swallow was at the time thought to be a silent bird with no song and no call – not true, of course." Katey stares off into the restaurant, no doubt trying to imagine how this all relates to a dead girl named Lauren Martin. "Procne became a nightingale, while the King turned into a hoopoe."

  "A hoopwhat? Now you're just making shit up."

  "Hoopoe. I thought it sounded fake, too, and some myths have him as a hawk. The hoopoe's an… ostentatious bird, black and white but for the crown of bright orange feathers on his head. A crown like a king's crown."

  Miriam sniffs. "Even in the end the guy gets to be the prettiest bird. Stupid gods. If I had the powers of the divine, I would've turned him into a – well, I don't know my birds. A little one-winged parakeet flopping around at the bottom of his cage in piles of his own bird shit."

  "I don't know what to say about all this." Katey finally plucks the straw from the cocktail and pitches it onto a napkin. Blue Curacao bleeds. Katey cups the fishbowl with both hands and finishes it off. Then gets the shivers. "I think I needed that."

  "Yeah," Miriam intones, dry, tired. A gutted husk. In her head a storm of birds takes flight. Some carry severed tongues. Others together share the burden of carrying severed heads aloft. "
Yeah
. It's time I hit the bricks with my getaway sticks."

  "We should do this again."

  "Mmn." A non-committal grunt if ever there was one.

  "Where are you staying?"

  Miriam stands. Hikes her bag up over her shoulder.

  "No idea. Got kicked out of my motel this morning for non-payment. I'll find something."

  "Something."

  "Underneath an overpass. Maybe I'll get lucky and find an abandoned car."

  "You're homeless." The teacher says the words in the same way you might say,
You have pancreatic cancer and you've got nine months to live.

  "It would not be the first time. In fact, at this point in my life, a third of my existence has been on the road. No home of which to speak." She shrugs as though to echo her mother's old refrain,
It is what it is.

  "Come stay with me."

  Miriam snorts hard enough she thinks she might puke up her vodka. "You're joking."

  "No. What do you have to lose?"

  "Better question is, what do
you
have to lose? To which I answer, your safety, sanity, a general sense of togetherness and well-being. Health. Happiness. Hope."

  Katey shakes her head and offers a sad smile. "You have this dark cloud about you, Miriam. It's like you want it there. A cloud of flies, or a storm passing overhead."

  "I'm a poison pill. I'm a Mister Yuck sticker. I'm not good for people. You want to know how I see the world? How I see people? Bunch of rubes. Just waiting to be taken for a ride. And if I'm not careful, that's how I'll start seeing you. And I'll take you for a ride, and a ride with me is a log flume splash through blood and tears that drops clean through the Devil's open mouth and out his ass. I don't want that for you, Katey. You're just too nice a lady."

  The teacher gets quiet. She takes out her debit card and slides it next to the check. When she looks up, her eyes are wet. Glassy and shimmering like an old snow globe.

  "I'm dead in nine months. Nothing you can do to me changes that."

  "I can turn those remaining precious days to shit."

  "Let me do this for you. It'll kill me 267 days early if I have to think of you out there somewhere laying your head on a dirty pallet of cardboard boxes. Stay with me."

  Miriam hesitates. But in the end, what else can she say?

  It's a bad idea but she's the queen of bad ideas.

  And this one wasn't even hers.