Thalo Blue (55 page)

Now, with his eyes closed, he heard the birds as he used to, sitting still somewhere, maybe cross-legged in the clearing, or in the back yard by the fire pit. The chips and twitters came like a strange rhythm, almost like the birds had discussed the tune with their troop beforehand. One would chirrup in a back corner and the sound would trick him. It would seem to travel through
him
and then forward out into the front yard where another bird would sound. He heard the singing as clearly in his mind as he ever had in life and he turned towards what he could hear, towards light that swarmed brown and yellow under his eyelids, making boxes, defined squares cut into the landscape of his swirling colored darkness. The chirps dissolved to cawing. The squares dissolved to nothingness. His eyes opened and he saw a handful of crows, black bodies, perched in the green-made-white peak branches of the tallest triplet pine, coated in frost. His vision blurred and dissolved to embrace what separated him from the pines and crows: the narrow dormer with dirty windows.

It was time for the Last Hoorah, the final goodbye march.

Pay up and get out.

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He went to the window, half-expecting to see Malin out in the front yard between the triplets and the front porch. But the yard was filled with only messy dimpled snow. The crows were gone. Their silence had never been a clue to their arrival
or
their departure. But evidence that they did exist and weren’t just a fabrication of his—or worse, the Druid’s—mind was there: The flattened snow, the tiny three-pronged steps overlapping each other...

He smelled smoke then and an awful putrid stink mixed with it. Something was burning and he realized that the Druid had come back up the stairs while he had been considering the reality of a flock of birds. She didn’t tackle the door like the offensive lineman on a football team as he had expected. There was just more quiet.

But then there was smoke coming from beneath the door and through the jamb. The smell was oily and pungent. He thought he heard the crackling of flames but couldn’t be sure. He ripped the top sheet off the bed, a white throw cloth like all those over the furniture on the main floor. With cold hands that still didn’t tremble, he stuffed it under the door and tried to slip it into the margin between it and the jamb. The door felt warm to touch. The smell of the smoke, it was the squeal of the faucet at home in the guest bathroom, blasting hot water, steaming the mirror over the sink. He moved his ear close to the door’s surface, tenderly, trying to cock his ear and catch a detail. He craned against the sound, trying to drown it out, trying to hear real sound. Earthly sound.

Something popped and then cracked against the other side of the door. Loud and sudden, it made him jump back, expectant. And then two more pops came. He pressed his finger to his tongue to moisten it, then pressed the finger carefully to the door knob.

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On the other side of the doorway, the Druid knelt in a smoking mess of burning canvas and paint tubes. After lighting the array of junk with a
RedBird
blue-tip stike-anywhere match she had found in a box near a candle in the living room, she came down on her knees. She was crying and oblivious to the image of herself, licked and caressed with orange and yellow flames, blue at their bases. When the heat of the burning oil finally got hot enough to burst the plastic caps on some of the tubes which had bubbling labels, she didn’t even notice when they cracked outwards against the doorway, the wall, and even near her own head.

The carpet was on fire now, and so was the railing at the stairway. The space was filled with smoke and there was no ventilation for it. The portrait of Malin Holmsund was consumed. She was gone.

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The door knob was too hot to touch with his finger for more than a second. Though not burned, Zeb pulled back. The room itself was now warm, and the smoke was starting to sting his eyes. Taking a chance, Zeb pulled the chair out from its slant against the cedar door. He expected, in a brief shot of irony, that such a move would be exactly what the Druid was aiming for him to do. But he couldn’t try anything else. The memory of the car exhaust from the R65 motorcycle was too sharp in his memory to let him sit still.

The Last Hoorah: he swung the legs of the chair against the dormer window, shattering it and sending out shards of glass. One of the chair’s legs broke off and there was a whoosh of changing air pressure. He fell to the floor, half-expecting the sudden flux of oxygen to cause the fire to rush and expand, perhaps even blowing the door off its hinges. Without much of a pause to see if that
would
happen, he leapt through the window and onto the slanted, snow-covered, slippery shingles of the rooftop.

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The voices and the faces were everywhere. Held in each lick of flame, in the twisting mal-forming liquid mess of the melting canvas. In the smoke billows and on the walls. The cedar door panels, once off-white, now black, were panes of history, places where the princesses now lay in forever tombs.

As with all the times before, the light seemed brighter now, the pain more intense. The Druid, David Langtree first, and all the others second, just wanted to rest, just wanted to finally face an ending. She wanted to toss aside her old woes, throw away what she had run headlong towards and from, let the buzz in her ears finally consume her. At this moment, she just wanted to lay down and let the flames eat her too.

But beyond the crackles of fire and smoke, on the other side of the door she could barely face, she heard something distinct: glass breaking.

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On the melted and re-frozen ice of the rooftop, Zeb lost his footing and nearly plummeted to the stairs below him. He was out in the cold world on his rooftop, wearing only a sweater, pants and his socks, but the chill brought a simple mild puff of visibility to the breath on his lips; the weather was warming. Against fading blue, dots of sparkling glitter fell in complex unity, like a faux snowfall, miniature and temporary. It was the hoarfrost on the trees disbanding, leaving its grasp of the branches for the safety of the ground.

He managed to reach out towards the partially frost-dusted branch of the nearest triplet and its flex absorbed his drop enough to let him come down to the earth in a gentle fall. Pain shot up his shoulder; the tactic made his body stretch and it hurt so bad that he wanted to cry out. He didn’t, fought the rising holler in his throat, and counted his grab of the triplet’s branch as providential. The limb flung upward in a return bounce and he was covered in a spate of frigid and refreshing snow. He sat for only a fraction of a second before bursting up the three steps of the deck and into the house.

Wincing, he moved through the screen door and let the thick oak one past it bounce against the living room wall. He reached down and snagged those keys off the foyer’s tile floor without even looking around. He expected a blow from outside his peripheral. It didn’t come. But footsteps on the stairs came and he craned his head upward to see Malin’s boots on the top stairs.

Bolting from the house, he nearly fell down the stairs of the deck. A sliver of pine from the deck railing caught in his palm, a large dagger of wood like the fang of a monster, stabbed under his skin and his hand—the one nearly burned by the upstairs door knob—flew out from his body.

But he ignored it.

And he fumbled with his fingers, despite the tooth of wood in his skin, and on the key ring he found the remote button to unlock the BMW’s doors. With a chirp-click they came undone. And Zeb nearly did too. He could sense the Druid behind him...was nearly sure that the sewer breath, in lieu of the lavender and rain he loved so much, was laying itself in a slick patch across his neck. But that might have been his imagination.

He ran down the driveway towards the car. The crow printed snow, crunching a little under his socks, was a sooty ashen gray in the fleeing light.

Inside the Ci, with his thumb pressed on the button, he re-engaged the locks. He was feverishly trying to get the key in the ignition—jamming and scraping its point against the polished face plate instead of popping it into the keyhole—when the Druid came from the house appearing disorientated and lost. He looked in the rearview mirror, not really formulating a plan or a course, but just accepting one. The bars of the gate doors where closed. He had left them open but they were drawn shut now—the Druid had thought that far in advance and she had taken care of that while he stood on the couch reading from his book, oblivious to her arrival.

Zeb started the car, barely letting the engine revolve before popping it into reverse. He glanced in the rearview mirror again, his eyes focusing beyond the rental parked behind him and towards the black bars of the wrought-iron gate. His foot found the accelerator. The car lurched backwards on the snow and ice, throwing up a dusting on the Druid as she came forward from the deck.

Even cranking the steering wheel to a hard left didn’t create an angle sharp enough to keep the Ci from clipping the front driver’s corner of Malin’s rental. That car fluttered back and gravel from the curved driveway flew into the air. It was mixed with snow and the broken glass of the Ci’s taillight and the headlight of the rental. The impact sent a shudder through the Ci—through Zeb—and he cringed, not daring to look back at the front windshield where a vision of Malin as a mad creature with mad eyes stood.

The light was dimming, and the world was shades of darkening blue, gray and semi-glowing white that seemed like bright suit clothes worn by every shape and form. He felt the car go off the drive way, through thicker pads of snow. He was concentrating on those black bars surrounded by the red pillars and snow-clad cloaks of dead branches and shrubs. Still looking backwards with one hand flung over the passenger seat, he felt the tires go over the ridge of heavy stones set in between the patchy grass and clover of the lawn and the poured gravel of the drive. He concentrated to get back on a direct path, driving backwards with the pedal down, still spitting up sand and some gravel and furls of white. He felt the tires slipping but ignored it, still letting his foot rest like lead on the gas.

The car slowed just before the gate. The tires had found a patch of ice atop the gravel and they spun wildly, throwing up even more sooty mixture.

Zeb and the car were set into an angled maneuver which he couldn’t recover from. His foot came off the gas but the car, still the victim of its inertia and the downing slope of the front yard, bashed against one half of the iron bars and the west pillar which had already sat askew on its base. The crunch of metal against metal and concrete filled the compartment and Zeb’s head.

The Great Gate of Redfield, the whole monstrosity of it, pushed backwards and came to a screeching, grinding fall. But it didn’t crash to the ground. The posts fell towards each other slightly, like two slumping sentries who have finally fallen from exhaustion. That drew the gates closer together in a triangle out onto the front lane where they scraped the gravel ground to a drudging halt.

The car stopped with Zeb’s foot finally on the brake. The bumper and trunk were crunched and wrecked metal. Even the casing for one of the brake lights was busted, but one of the bulbs was still intact. There was a wash of faded red across the snowy ground and the dimming view of the gates and their bodyguard posts leaning towards each other like a skeletal tepee with no skin. The shrubs and trees lining the perimeter of the yard were thick and unremitting. They stood still in the dying light and they would not move aside for him to drive gently out.

He turned his head back towards the house where flames could now be seen beyond the upstairs dormer window. The triplets would catch fire, and eventually all the trees down here close to the water, the east ridge and those to the hilly inclines back of the house, would all catch before long as well. He could swear that he heard music. It was that Neil Young tune, something about castles burning. No it wasn’t that one. It was another of Young’s, a live version of a different old song:
Helpless
. Dad had the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young version, the original, the definitive, on vinyl. But years later, Sebastion had found a copy of Neil Young doing the song himself. It was just him on stage alone; no band, no back-up singers. Just his guitar and that forlorn harmonica, the breath from his lungs and his fingers on the strings.

Yes, that was the one. How perfect. Helpless.

The lazy, droning harmonica came at him through the treetops. In front of the chaos, then in front of the melody, was the Druid, walking a steady pace, head hung, eyes white in the gloom. She had come from the cottage’s front door and down the steps of the deck. She was edging the driveway, setting out equal paces towards Zeb in his father’s idling BMW coupe, nearly wrecked and completely caged in. She walked like she had all the time in the world.

VI. The Farthest Reaches

Sadie had known about Oliver and the other girls for a few months at least. Maybe longer. How many of them there had been, and whether he still went to them, she did not know. But, like other wives, she chose to ignore it, chose to simply disregard that her husband was not always at work during the evenings when he said he was.

He didn’t come clean, but he also didn’t run off for a rendezvous while she took their son to church on Sundays either. As she stood in the window of the summer house and stared at disappearing wake, she wrestled about whether the problem would solve itself. Or if she would just learn to live with it.

She supposed she hadn’t considered it at all. The long term was just that: a long way off. She had just let it slide from the everyday world that she shared with her little boy and his paints. It was one of those things that a woman just knows. Somewhere on an exhale in the middle of the night, or held in a glance across the crowd at a dinner party, kept inside
something
, there was subtle comprehension. She had been finally ready to confront Oliver about it the night before the weekend fishing trip at Charlemagne, the one that needed to go
smooth sailing, Sadie-babe
with Wittman and Merridew and their wives. It was not, she realized, knew full well even, the most opportune time to attack the subject. But it just happened. It was a time bomb with a hidden counter. And she just couldn’t keep it from going off.