The Cormorant (29 page)

And that does it. A surge of adrenalin sets fire to the encroaching darkness, and now Miriam’s the one caught in the throes of rage – she swipes at him, hissing and spitting. “You leave her alone, you motherfucker–”

“Hey, Miriam. I have a joke. Wanna hear it?”

“I’m going to take you apart piece by piece, Ashley, I swear–”

“What do you say to a girl who has two black eyes?”

“Fuck you!”

“Nothing you haven’t said to her twice already.”

He pops her with a fist. In her right eye.

Then again in her left.

She sees fireworks as capillaries break. As her brain rocks against the back of her head. And then the fireworks show is over and all she’s got left is the dark.

INTERLUDE

YELLOW JACKETS IN SEPTEMBER

Everything hurts. Her body is a roadmap of little welts – like her skin is Braille for the blind to read. She tries not to cry. But she keeps crying anyway even as Mother hunches over her, using big cotton balls to blob globs of pink calamine lotion onto the red welts.

“I told you not to run back there,” Mother says.

“They never bothered me before,” Miriam says, sniffling.

“They’re yellow jackets in September. They know their time is coming what with winter approaching. They grow agitated.”

“My fingers feel fat.”

“Because they’re swollen.”

Miriam sees a little rabbit’s tail of goopy cotton stuck to a calamine smear on her arm. Idly she moves to pick it off.

Mother swats her hand.

“Ow!” she cries, pulling her hand away.

“Don’t mess,” Mother says.

“But they stung me there and you hit my hand.”

But Mother just frowns and keeps dabbing lotion all over.

Miriam had run back behind the house into the woods. Under a rotten log she’d found a hole and yellow jackets – which always made her think of little jet planes, little
evil
jet planes like out of one of those cartoons Mother says is
for boys only
– and she kept hurrying over and shoving things into the hole to stop the yellow jackets from coming out. She was laughing and having fun, watching them try to push past her roadblock of mulch and twigs and fallen ash tree leaves.

But then suddenly the air was filled with them – and they were all over her and under her shirt and then came the buzz of wings. The dance of little feet. The biting. The stinging.

The screaming.

And now here she is.

“You mess with things you shouldn’t mess with,” Mother says.

“It was fun.”

Mother grunts. “There is an apocryphal gospel – the gospel of the Nazarenes – in which Jesus says, ‘
Woe unto the crafty who hurt the creatures of God. Woe unto the hunters for they shall become the hunted
.’ You think you’re crafty but you’re not. You were the hunter who became the hunted.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry doesn’t change what you did. Sorry is a poor man’s Band-Aid.” Mother pauses in her ministrations, then sighs. “We’re not going to the carnival tonight.”

“But Mom!”

“Shush. You’re going to swell up like a balloon. You look like a mess. I can’t show the other ladies from the church my bee-stung daughter. The evidence of your sin is for you, not for me. You’ll sit at home.”

Miriam starts to cry. “But tonight’s the last night!”

“It is what it is, Miriam.”

FORTY-EIGHT

TWO DAYS LEFT

Miriam wakes.

She can hear her own breathing as she swings upside-down from the tamarind tree. It’s a raspy, whistling sound – like wind keening through the broken shutters of an old window. Her nose is full. Her sinuses ache. Opening her eyes is a bitter acid misery.

Everything hurts.

Eventually the calendar clicks over and from her vantage point the sun falls from the horizon like a light bulb dropping from its fixture in slow motion. It isn’t long before the air grows hot and the sun’s kiss turns from something pleasurable into something torturous.

When the sun lights the world she sees it – further down the shoreline sits, of all things, a submarine. Not a real one, like, some huge nuclear Navy sub. But a small thing. Bigger than a rowboat, but not by much. The narco-sub sits painted in blue camo.

The front is torn open.

A red, dead hand rests on the torn metal. Gathering flies. One of the transporters. One of the Colombians Tap-Tap said went missing.

I have to get down
.

Ashley is going to kill Gabby.

Gabby may already be dead.

That realization nearly causes her to black out again so strong is the rush of grief and horror. It’s not like she loved Gabby. She’s not sure that what they had was anything at all besides two people crashing together before pulling themselves apart. But it was fun and Gabby was nice and she deserved more than what Miriam gave her.

Miriam’s legacy of pain.

The pain is all over her. Swaddling her: a blanket of nettles for a troublesome infant. Her face pounds. Her middle aches. Her ankle feels like it’s a toothpick cracked in half. And whenever she tries to move, the knife in her thigh gives her a mean twinge. If the rest of her leg weren’t numb she’d probably feel fresh blood trickling.

The knife.

She has to get the knife.

She can cut herself down.

She bends her body at the waist–

Her whole body is a powder flash of hot pain. Miriam cries out. She lets her body go slack.

Again. Try again.

Another hard bend at the waist, and more pain crashes through her – a big rock in a little pond, a train through a pre-school, a 747 into one of the Twin Towers. But this time she reaches up and catches a fistful of her own jeans. It anchors her, lets her stay bent.

Blood moves around her body, rushing this way and that. Filling spaces it had fled. Leaving spaces it had pooled. Her muscles scream. Her skin tingles like it’s being poked with safety pins.

Keep going. Move, you crafty bitch.

She pulls herself further. Hand sliding along the back of her thigh. She bumps the tip of her ring finger into the base of the knife and it’s like flicking a car antenna. A frequency of new pain runs through her, and she thinks,
It’s like a Band-Aid, just rip it off fast.
She grabs the knife with her fingers and wrenches it free with a splash of blood–

But her fingers are numb–

Blood makes a helluva lube–

The knife drops from her hand.

The blade sticks in the ground.

She tries not to sob. Tries not to scream.

Miriam reaches for it.

It’s too far.

Fuck.
Fuck!

She stops struggling for a while. She tries not to weep but it’s too late. The tears come, spilling up toward her brow, dampening her hair. It feels weak. Meager.
Crying is for girls,
she thinks.
You’re no girl. You’re a bad-ass woman. You’re a hunter. A killer. You’re the river breaker. You’re fate’s foe
.

And yet, the tears keep coming.

Until a shadow falls over her.

Louis.

He found her.

He’s here to save her.

Of course he is. He always is. He’s always the one standing between her and death – the one keeping her sane, keeping her balanced – and the wave of realization crashes down on her shores:
I need Louis to balance me out. I never would’ve killed that boy in Philly if he were around.
She holds his arms and he shushes her and tells her it’s going to be OK, and she says, “Oh, God, Louis, please help me–” And she reaches out and he reaches back and his massive hands clasp her arms at the biceps, and they could squeeze her and wrench her arms out of the sockets, but his touch is as gentle as it’s always been.

“I had a dream about you,” he says, “and so I came.”

But then she sees something move–

A yellow jacket crawls from beneath his arm.

Then a second. And a third. And four more after that.

Soon his arms are a swarm of them, some alighting into the air before landing again on his skin. Miriam says, “No, no, no, now is not the time, don’t fuck with me, quit fucking with me,” but the Trespasser leans forward and whispers into her ear.

“You messed up. You weren’t ready. You went off like a gun half-cocked, and now what? Now you’ve lost your shot. And Gabby’s dead. And your mother’s going to die, too. You’ve failed.”

Miriam screams.

Her scream echoes out over the water.

Loud enough, she thinks, to churn the seas. To rip the sun out of the sky and cast in into the water. To tear up the shore. To part the clouds.

It’s enough. A jolt of adrenalin lights her up like a city skyline and she reaches, reaches – her fingertips tickle the end of the knife.

–almost–

–her fingers slide off, finding no purchase–

–the angle’s all wrong on the knife–

–
goddamnit goddamnit goddamnit
–

Then she falls. Not her body. But her mind. It feels like her brain slips a gear and lurches out of sync and–

She sees herself. Hanging there. Looking like fresh hell. Like a dirty sock that’s been run through a mud puddle and then a pile of roadkill, then hung up in a tree to dry. She feels little feet beneath her. Feels the taste of worms and sand and fish in her mouth. She tries to move toward herself and the little feet go
hop hop hop
and then it hits her–

Oh fuck I’m a fucking bird.

It worked. Now. Beaten to hell. Beaten down. It worked.

The bird as Miriam, Miriam as bird, hops forward.

Hop hop hop
.

To the knife. A little beak – her beak – thrusts out and taps the knife handle forward,
tap tap tap
, putting it in reach–

A sound of rushing wind. Like cars in a mountain tunnel. And then Miriam’s back in her own body. She gasps. Still tastes the sea water, the fish brine, the worm guts. A little gray-and-white plover bird stares up at her and shakes like a dog trying to free itself of rainwater before flying away.

Her fingers pinch the bottom of the knife.

She has it.

I have it!

Triumph tastes sweet. At least until she again has to bend at the waist – misery throttling her body,
bend don’t break
– and saw the rope with the blood-wet blade of the small knife.

The rope frays. Cuts. Miriam drops.

She lands hard on her shoulder but the ground beneath is soft.

For a while, she lays on her side. Curling up like a baby in the crib. Her body shudders as if she’s crying but no tears appear.

Then eventually she sits.

She looks around: no gun anywhere. And her cell phone is back in the car where she left it.

Out there, the ocean. The line of black water. Bright at the top with the cresting sun. The hungry water. The consumptive deep.

She’s going to have to swim.

I’m going to have to swim
.

She doesn’t have the strength. The water terrifies her. Her muscles will fail out there. The ocean will suck her down. Chew her up. Her and Eleanor Caldecott: bowels for fish, throat for eels, eyes for minnows.

Then comes a heavy flutter of wings.

Followed by a piggy grunt.

A green-eyed cormorant lands by her side. And stares up at her.

Grunt, grunt, squark
.

Miriam tries to spit at it but she can’t summon any
moisture
into her mouth. “Go away,” she croaks. “Trespass somewhere else.”

The cormorant pecks at her knee. Peck, peck, peck.

Then: footsteps. Splashing in water. Crashing through brush.

“Miriam?”

She blinks.

“
Miriam
?”

And that’s when Jerry Wu comes running full steam up the shore.

FORTY-NINE

HOBBLE AND LIMP

The world seems askew, unfixed, like a paper boat tossed about in a river. This feeling is magnified upon getting into Jerry’s rowboat – with Corie the cormorant sitting proudly at the bow, the ugliest mermaid you ever did see – as the water shoves and slaps the little boat along.