Mockingbird (8 page)

  "I'm… sorry," the teacher says.

  "Without standing, Miriam reaches over and grunts as she grabs the fallen bottle of Scotch. "Alcohol abuse," she muses, then turns the bottle over and lets the last few drops plop onto her tongue.

  "What did you see?" the woman asks.

  "Do you really want to know?"

  "I do. I want to know. I
need
this."

  And then Miriam tells her, but what she tells her is a lie. She doesn't say that Katey has pancreatic cancer. She doesn't say that the cancer is present now,
right now
, and that the woman has nine months almost to the day to live. That's the truth.

  Instead she says, "Heart attack in twenty years. You're eating an egg-white omelet at your breakfast nook and your heart seizes and that's that." She preserves one detail. "You drop a glass of iced tea. With lemon. The glass breaks."

  Katey's face falls. Shoulders sag as she expels a long breath and as disappointment settles across her back like the yoke of a plow.

  "Well. Thank you for that." Her voice quiet, nasal, the words clipped short as though cut at the ends by a razor. "I'm… sorry again about pushing you. That's not like me. Not like me at all."

  And then the teacher walks away. Toward the school. Head low.

 

The lie. There it waits. Like a sword over her head. Like a pubic hair in rum punch. A mystery. A sharpened question mark like a sickle ready to slit her throat.

  She doesn't get it. It makes no sense. Why the lie?

  She stands there, looking out over the river. Pitching pretzels into its mud-churned milk-waters. Picking at the lie. Teasing apart the motivation behind it.

  Part of her thinks she's doing this woman a favor. Katey's got less than a year left. Pancreatic cancer – Miriam, that crow on death's shoulder, has seen it before. It's like an oil-fire. Once it starts, it won't go out. Spreads fast, too. Tell the woman about her diagnosis and it's – what? Just a series of debilitating therapies, each worse than the last. All futile. The door to despair thrown wide, the impossible and impending dark beyond.

  Maybe, though, it's punishment. Maybe she wanted to punish this woman. Say, fuck you, you don't want my help? You spill my Scotch, cause a hundred dollars of my money to get swallowed by the river? Like a passive-aggressive child pushing a plant off the sill to make Mommy mad: She lied. A lie borne of small and secret vengeance. A momentary reprisal.

  Even that doesn't add up. It isn't the whole picture. A part of the puzzle, maybe – the edge of it, the margins, painting by negative space – but it's not the whole of the image.

  She does all she can do for the moment. She smokes.

  What to do, what to do.

  She's got a pocket full of money. She could do anything. Catch a cab. Find a greasy spoon. Hit a strip club. Ditch her cell phone, buy a burner. Grab a bus to somewhere she's never been. To nowhere. To Maine, California, New Orleans, Montreal, Tijuana. Lobster, avocados, beignets, donkey shows.

  None of it sounds appealing. That surprises her. Those things should all be pretty great. But the very notion of escaping again doesn't do anything for her. Like a flat soda, the bubbles have all gone.

  Miriam takes the tequila, breaks the cap.

  
Drink up.

  Smooth and sour going down. It sits in her stomach like a gym sock soaked in cider vinegar and scorpion venom.

  She belches. Nearby, scared birds take flight.

  Right now, her thoughts are like hangnails. She wants to pick at them even if that means pulling them so far it unzips her arm into a bloody bisected mess.

  Easy solution to soothe the soul: Hair dye. A balm for bad thoughts.

  Goodbye, ugly chestnut mop. Goodbye, old original. Goodbye, good girl.

  Hello, fuchsia motherfucking flamingo.

 

Well. That didn't work out.

  Miriam sits outside the principal's office with a handful of flimsy brown paper towels wadded up around her collar. All of them, sodden. In her pocket, an as-yet-unopened package of pink hair dye.

  Her scalp burns. Especially around the bullet-dug skin-ditch.

  She figured, fuck it, I can dye my hair in one of the girls' restrooms. Who cares, right? She went in, wandered around for a while, found a bathroom. Started killing the old chestnut color with a bleach wash, and while she was in there she shared a couple smokes with some of the older girls who came in. One of them was a nice black girl named Sharise, the other her gawky white friend Bella.

  They smoked. Talked about the hell of high school. Good times.

  But then – po-po came rolling in. Five-oh. Someone must have seen her wandering the halls and called the front desk and before she knew what was happening she was being escorted here by a pair of security guards. One guy who looked like a hyper-roided authority machine with a shorn scalp and muscles ill-contained by his guard uniform. The other guy looking like the Italian plumber from that video game. But shorter. And a little fatter.

  And now the principal's office. Or just outside it. Facing a wall with wooden wainscoting. Brass sconces. Dullsville. Boredopolis. Yawnworld.

  Next to her is some red-haired little twat with a smear of freckles across the bridge of her nose, sitting there with her smug arms folded over a bunched-up navy blazer hugged tight against her chest. The girl smells faintly of cigarettes. Different brand from what Miriam smokes.

  Wait.

  Miriam gets another look at her.

  "You're that girl."

  The girl scowls. Sneers. Eyebrow arched. "What?"

  "The girl. With the sketchbook. And the–" Miriam mimics the slap-down move. "Blammo."

  "Oh. Yeah. She said my leaf looked like dog butt."

  "Did it?"

  "Mostly. But that's no reason to be rude. A lot of the world looks like dog butt. Doesn't mean you should go around saying so."

  Miriam shrugs. "I dunno. That's how I treat life."

  "Your breath is rank."

  "And that's obviously how you treat life, too. Yeah, I know my breath is rank. I just drank tequila."

  "Out of a Port-a-Potty toilet?"

  "Cute. That'd be the bleach you're smelling."

  "This isn't a hair salon, you know."

  "My god," Miriam, "you are such a little See-You-Next-Tuesday."

  "I don't get it."

  "Spell it out."

  The girl does. "Oh. I get it. Cunt." The girl rolls her eyes. "Whatever."

  "Don't you roll your eyes at me, missy. And you shouldn't say that word."

  "Okay,
Mom
."

  "I'm not your mom."

  "I know that. I'm not a moron. Did you think that for a moment I actually believed you were my mother?" She thrusts her tongue into the pocket of her cheek with a bulge, looks Miriam up and down. "You're old enough to be my mom, though."

  "I am not, you little fucking jerk. I'm only in my mid-twenties."

  She shrugs. "So is my mom."

  "You're what, thirteen?"

  "Twelve." She sees Miriam looking at her. "Yeah, my mom was fifteen when I was born. And since I'm not a total tardcart, I can do the math, and that means she's twenty-seven. See? Mid-twenties."

  "
Late
-twenties," Miriam corrects. "And even then, it's not like she's some old-ass
hausfrau
. Respect your elders. Or something."

  "I would but she's gone."

  "Gone. Like, poof, evaporated into nothing? Gone like dead? What?"

  "Like, left me alone in her studio apartment a year ago to go off and see the world. Or shoot heroin. Because she really likes heroin."

  "So she kind of sucks, then."

  "Kind of."

  "My mother was the opposite," Miriam says. She tries to picture her mother's face. It's hard. The face swims in a cloud of features – noses and eyes and cheeks and skin palettes. Some drift into place before floating away again, rejected. "Prim and proper. Had me locked me down pretty good. That woman probably could've
used
a little heroin. Loosen her up a bit."

  "My mom could've used more prim and proper."

  "We could trade moms."

  "Deal."

  The girl offers her hand.

  Miriam stares at it like it's covered in spiders.

  The door to the office opens – and Miriam notes that it says Headmaster, not Principal. A small man with slicked-back black hair, two dark cherry-pit eyes, and a navy blazer pokes his head out.

  "Miss Lauren Martin," the Headmaster says, his voice long and drawn out and creaky like an old door. "Nice to see you again. We will attend to you shortly. First I must meet with Miss…"

  He looks at Miriam, expectant.

  "Black," she says. She thought about lying, but fuck it.

  "Good. Miss Black, if you care to…" He steps back from his door.

  The girl – Lauren – looks up at her. Hand still out.

  "Do we have a deal?" she asks Miriam. "To trade moms."

  Miriam knows she shouldn't touch the hand. What's the point? Just as she's starting to like this girl she's going to fast-forward to the girl's demise, however it goes. Drunk-driving accident at age eighteen or a head-cracking slip in the shower at age eighty-one?

  And yet there's that urge, that familiar urge, the tingle in the tips of her fingers and the damp creases of her palm, and she reaches in and hesitates suddenly the way an airplane hovers above the landing strip before setting down on the tarmac and then–

  She takes her hand and sees how the girl is going to die.

 

Early morning light shines gray through shattered window, capturing in its beam whorls of dust and flakes of rot, and the beam ends on the face of Lauren Martin, age eighteen, strapped to an old doctor's table. The leather padding beneath her is cracked and bites into her naked back, thighs, buttocks. Smells braid together: sweat, urine, steel, and through all of it the thread of a sharp chemical stink.

  Lauren is gagged with barbed wire, wound all the way around her head, front to back – the rusty barbs tearing into the corners of the girl's mouth.

  The wire binds her head to the table.

  Her tongue and lips are dried. She's been here a while.

  The walls around her are blackened and charred. Wallpaper bubbled like blistered skin. The ceiling is pulled down in places. Knob and tube wiring dangle, caught in saggy bundles of ruined insulation, bundles that look like gray clouds dragged down by hard rains.

  Moths dance. Crickets chirp.

  A man emerges out of shadow. He's singing a song.

 

  "Young people, hark while I relate

  The story of poor old Polly's fate

  She was a lady, young and fair

  And died a-groaning in despair."

 

  The song is folksy, old, measured. His voice is gravelly, yet behind it the voice warbles and wavers from lowpitch to high-pitch, as pleasant as the tines of a fork dragged across a piece of slate. Sometimes the voice is a man's. Other times, a woman's.

 

  
"She'd to go frolic, dance and play

  
In spite of all her friends would say

  
'I'll turn to God when I get old

  
And then I'm sure he'll take my soul.'"

 

  Lauren whimpers against the gag. Scabs at the corners of her mouth crack, and fresh blood flows over dry. Her palms are marked with Xs. Shallow cuts, but cuts just the same. Her feet bear the same marks.

 

  
"One Friday morn, Polly took ill

  
Her stubborn heart began to fail

  
She cried 'Oh no, my days are spent,

  
And now it's too late to repent'."

 

  A new odor, a pungent odor, fills the air. Smoke. Strong of dry flowers, funeral flowers, rose and lavender and carnations, an oily tincture of bitter orange.

 

  
"She called her mother to her bed

  
Her eyes were rolling in her head

  
A ghastly look, she did assume

  
And then she cried, 'This is my doom'."

 

  The man's face is that of a bird, a featherless beast with flesh of leather and a beak as long as a child's arm. Wisps of greasy wet smoke drift up from holes in the beak. Human eyes blink from behind filmy goggle lenses bolted to the flesh. This is not his head but rather a hood, a hood that covers down to his shoulders and leads to a bare and sallow chest. Across that chest is a tattoo, blue as a vein, dark as a bruise: the boomerang wing of a barn swallow, twin tails sharp as a barbecue fork.

  He reaches into the dark corner of the room, past a scorched mattress. From the shadows he draws a fire axe.

 

  
"She called her father to her bed

  
Her eyes were rolling in her head

  
'Oh early father, fare you well,

  
Your wicked daughter screams in Hell.'"

 

  Lauren struggles upon seeing the axe. She rubs her head back and forth, trying to escape, trying to free some part of herself – her scream a hollow and harrowing call as the barbed wire saws into her cheeks.

  Blood in her throat. Almost choking her.

  The man in the beaked hood leans in, caresses the girl's face. His fingers return wet with red. He steps back, axe held against the tattoo's ink.