Someplace to Be Flying (11 page)

Rory had never heard music so loud, never realized so much energy could come from one battered acoustic guitar and a human throat the way Annie could draw it out. She could be tender, too, but that was a less common side of her music. Her repertoire dealt mostly with environmental issues—sometimes overtly political, other times she slid the issues into what might at first be taken for songs dealing with interpersonal relationships. He often played her CDs when he was working.

He was mildly infatuated with her, though he wasn’t certain whether it was her outlandishness that attracted him or merely the insufficiency of his own love life. Lily insisted it was both.

But Annie was almost normal compared to Lucius.

Lucius Portsmouth owned the building and shared the top-floor apartment with a woman named Chloë Graine. Rory wasn’t quite sure about Chloë‘s relationship to his landlord. Lover, nurse, confidante? Possibly all three, though the first required a stretch of the imagination that put too much of a strain upon Rory’s credulity.

Mostly it was the size difference between the two. Lucius was huge. He had to weigh at least five hundred pounds, an enormous man with skin the color of the midnight sky, round-faced, dark-eyed, a black Buddha who had never— in the nine years Rory rented from him—left his apartment, spending his days and evenings sitting by the front window of their apartment, watching the sky. He had no hair, not even eyebrows, though Rory couldn’t swear the condition was inclusive of all body hair. Truth was, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. When Lucius walked across the room—a rare occurrence that took place twice a day—the entire house seemed to shift and groan under the strain and anyone in the building knew that the mountain was moving to Muhammad once more.

Chloë was taller than Rory and of normal weight, though she appeared wraithlike in the company of her roommate, her brown skin pale against the deep ebony of his. She had a Roman nose and high cheekbones, a long neck, slender hands, and a thick black fountain of hair falling to her shoulders in a torrent that could easily have serviced two women. Her eyes were birdlike and large, wide-set, their gaze forever darting about, never settling on any one thing for more than a moment.

The difference between the two was more than physical. Lucius, for all his immense presence, seemed to merge into his surroundings, absorbed by the wallpaper, the carpet, the sofa, like a chameleon. He had a calm that was almost supernatural, an air about him as though he lived in this world only by sufferance, his gaze and attention forever focused on something only he could perceive. Chloë, in contrast, was entirely present, so down-to-earth and
here
that the intensity of her attention could be as disconcerting as Lucius’s indifference. When not seeing after Lucius’s needs, she spent long hours perched on the peak of the roof, a gangly, wingless bird whose sharp gaze missed nothing that went on below; not so much a scarecrow as a welcoming crow, for the resident flock inevitably gathered about her, like courtiers to a lady, dreams to a dreamer.

Rory had never spoken to his landlord and only met him the once, when he first rented his apartment—if “met” was a term that could be used when one party entirely ignored the other. His only communication with Lucius was through Chloë, who was always the one to knock on his door or phone down to ask him to handle some small repair, deal with a delivery man, see to the rental of an apartment. For these favors he received modest rebates on his rent checks, welcome additions to an income that was often stretched to its
very
limit by the end of the month. He and Chloë got along well enough, but there was still something too off-center about her for him to exchange more than small talk.

The coach house in back wasn’t free of eccentrics either. The upper of the two small apartments was rented to Brandon Cole, a young black saxophone player who had a steady gig at the Rhatigan over on Palm Street—sat in with the house band one night after Saxophone Joe disappeared and he’d been playing with them ever since. He had the tall rangy stature and handsome good looks of a Maasai warrior, but he didn’t have time for the women who came by the band’s dressing room between sets or after a show. He was too focused on his music, music you had to dig deep to understand, part Coltrane, part Coleman, mostly himself. Late nights, early afternoons, he’d be sitting on the top of the stairs leading up into his apartment, hands folded on his lap, composing solos in his head. He didn’t need the instrument, just closed his eyes and he was there, wherever “there” was; he was gone to that place the music came from, communicating with it. Sometimes Rory thought he could hear a faint echo of a sax coming from the top of the stairs, but all he would see was Brandon, hands empty, gaze as faraway as Lucius’s, but taking in a different view.

The Aunts had the apartment downstairs. Eloisa and Mercedes. They weren’t Rory’s aunts; they weren’t anyone’s aunts, so far as he knew, but that was the way he thought of them. Their given names were somewhat exotic, but they were plain women with strong features and tall bodies. He guessed them to be in their sixties, spinsters, perhaps, or widows. With their dark complexions, their thick gray hair tied back in loose buns, those long black cotton dresses, Rory could easily picture them in Rome, Madrid, Istanbul, gossips meeting in a Mediterranean village market square, or sitting together on a back stoop, heads leaning together. He couldn’t tell them apart, but he didn’t think they were twins. For all he knew, they might not even be sisters. No one had ever told him their surnames.

They had two passions: gardening and watercolors. They began their gardening before the last frost had left the ground, filling their windowsills with trays of small sprouting plants. Whenever Rory tried to help out, they would let him turn the soil with a spade, weed, trim, and the like, then they’d do it all over again to their own satisfaction. Finally he took the hint and left them to their devices. After the first snowfall, they were still harvesting kale and a few herbs.

The rest of the time they would paint and they could keep to it all day, in wicker chairs under the elm in summer, by the worktable in their apartment in the winter, the cast-iron stove behind them casting off a cozy heat. Sometimes they worked on the same piece, other times each chose her own subject.

Their work was highly detailed, with the same technical proficiency of a botany textbook. Rory had no idea what became of the paintings when they were done. He’d been inside their apartment dozens of times, to fix a faucet, clean the stovepipe, gout the bathroom walls, but had never seen anything of the stacks of watercolor paper with the completed paintings on them—they were not on the walls, certainly—and no one ever seemed to come to take them away. Where could they all go? Sometimes, he wondered if he only imagined them painting, the long hours filled with the quiet murmur of their voices, heads bent over the easels—the way he was sure he only imagined he could hear Brandon’s sax when there was no instrument at hand.

The house lent itself to flights of the imagination. “There’s no such thing as fiction,” Annie told him once. “If you can imagine something, then it’s happened.” So he wondered, but he didn’t worry. They were characters, all of them. Peculiar, certainly, more so than most one would meet in the routine of day-to-day living, but there was nothing truly inexplicable about any of them.

He couldn’t say the same thing about Maida and Zia, the neighborhood tomboys who claimed to live in the branches of the old elm tree behind the house.

Kerry Madan tramped down Stanton Street, the leather soles of her boots scuffling on the pavement, her knapsack heavy on her back, the valise in her hand heavier still. It was quieter here, away from the traffic on Lee Street, but the quiet made her uneasy. There was something claustrophobic about walking under this long row of enormous oaks. The trees were too big, their dense canopy almost completely blocking the sky. They cast deep shadows against the tall houses and the shrubbery collected against their porches and brick walls, throwing off her sense of time. It no longer felt like the tail end of the day. It was too much like late evening now, a time when anyone could be out and about, watching her, waiting in the shadows for her to step too close. Anyone, or anything.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been outside like this—at night, by herself. Her anxiety took her past the usual dangers of a big city until her imagination went into high gear and she was inventing other threats, nameless things, creatures with hungry eyes and too many teeth. It didn’t feel safe here, not even close. In the few moments she’d been walking under the oaks she’d gone from feeling brave and free to wondering if it hadn’t been a huge mistake to so completely cut her ties with the past.

Her pace faltered. She’d given up checking the numbers of the houses, more concerned now with what might be hiding in the bunched lilacs and cedars that crowded against the porches than finding number thirty-seven.

Stop it, she told herself.

This was what she’d wanted—
insisted
on. To be on her own. To make her own way in the world—
out
in the world, not cloistered away from it like a nun, or someone who couldn’t take care of herself.

Only maybe I can’t, she thought. It was so easy in the other world to look into this one and think, I can do that. I can live there. I can be normal. But she didn’t even know what normal was. The outer trappings were easy to figure out, but not what went on inside normal people’s heads, how they coped. That was more alien to her than her world would ever be to them. Stop it, she told herself again.

She was tired and wished she’d taken a cab now instead of trying to make it from the airport on her own. At the time it had seemed like a good idea— she wouldn’t always be able to afford cabs so why not familiarize herself with public transport from the start? The first bus had been easy. She’d been congratulating herself on how sensible she was being until she went and got all confused transferring to the subway system. The next thing she knew, she’d lost her way and then been forced to ask for directions so often that she now had no idea how she’d finally managed to get here. This very scary here.

Something caught her attention, a strange, undefined sound that stopped her in her tracks and had her peering fearfully up into the branches above her. Her pulse jumped into overtime as she realized that the monsters weren’t hiding in the shrubbery, but ready to pounce on her from above. They were … Only birds.

She gave a quick nervous laugh and shifted her valise from one hand to the other.

Blackbirds, perched on various branches. A half dozen or so.

The momentary rush of adrenaline faded, leaving behind a shivery, weak feeling.

Crows, or ravens? She didn’t really know the difference. There was some sort of a rhyme about them, wasn’t there? Something to do with luck and sorrow and marriages, but she couldn’t call it to mind.

Her gaze dropped from the birds and settled on the front porch post closest to the walk that started at her feet. There were numbers there, two small brass plates attached to the white wood, but they didn’t really register and her gaze moved on. There were no shrubs, only a well-kept lawn and flower beds stuffed with a riot of blooms running the length of the porch on either side of the walk. She squinted, deliberately blurring her vision to turn them into one of Monet’s later paintings and immediately felt calmer. Smiling, she returned her attention to the brass numbers attached to the post. Thirty-seven. This was it.

She hesitated a moment longer, gaze lingering now on the brass plaque above the door that read, “the Rookery.” The building was bigger than she’d thought it would be, a tall old Victorian house, a little forbidding for all the ironwork curlicues and gingerbread trim—though maybe that was only the light. She wasn’t so sure. The whole street struck her as gloomy, though she knew Katy would like it. The street, the house, the trees. Katy always liked—

She cut herself off, determined not to let that tangled skein of memory unravel again. Squaring her shoulders, she started up the walk. As she drew near the flower beds she spotted a few cheerful geraniums growing among the jungle of cosmos, purple coneflowers, and golden glows. The smell of them was comforting, reminding her of another garden—a safe garden, if not a happy one. Lulled by their familiar scent, she was unprepared for the front door suddenly being flung open. She paused on the first step leading up to the porch, pulse drumming, hard-gained composure fled once more.

An odd-looking girl stood grinning down at her from the patch of light that spilled out from the hall beyond the doorway. She was small in height and slight in build, a skinny childlike figure with coffee-colored skin and sharp features set in a triangular-shaped face. Her eyes were large, bird-bright and dark, her hair an unruly lawn of blue-black spikes. Though the evening was cooling, she was barefoot, dressed only in black leggings and an oversized flannel shirt with the arms cut off.

“Are you Kerry?” she asked.

Her voice held laughter, an amusement that Kerry didn’t feel was so much directed at her as simply bubbling over.

“Well,
are
you?” the girl repeated.

Kerry nodded. “Sorry. You caught me by surprise. I—” She started over again. “You must be Chloë.”

Because who else would know her name?

The girl called back over her shoulder. “Did you hear that? She thinks I’m Chloë.”

Again the laughter, bright and innocent. A child’s laughter. But when she came bouncing down the stairs to join Kerry on the bottom step, Kerry realized she was much older than she’d first thought. Tiny, not even Kerry’s five-one, truly child-sized, but the eyes looking up into her own were ageless.

“I’m not nearly solemn enough to be Chloë,” she said.

“I’m sorry. I’ve never met—”

A slender hand reached out to touch Kerry’s hair. “It’s so red. Is it on fire? It doesn’t feel hot at all.”

“No, it’s just—”

“I like you,” she told Kerry. “You’re funny and you’re almost my size. We’ll have such fun, you wait and see.”