Delicate Monsters Page 15

  And then he kissed her.

  chapter thirty-seven

  Birds. The birds were everywhere.

  Dozens of them.

  They were spread out on the dirt. Across the marble-topped slab. They were nailed to the wall and the wood beams that ran up to the rafters. All with their wings pulled wide as if in flight. All with their heads missing.

  Sadie walked around slowly, taking stock of it all. There were hawks, crows, pigeons, robins, sparrows, tiny hummingbirds with green iridescent feathers, and one grotesque creature that took Sadie a moment to recognize as a wild turkey, maybe even the old tom she’d seen strutting around in the road the other day. Its dark body was positioned awkwardly beside the others, as if in death, the wretched thing believed it might finally soar with its lighter-weight counterparts.

  In addition to the birds, there were words written everywhere, splashed across the walls in bright dripping letters that Sadie mistook for blood before realizing it was paint. Someone had used an old brush and red paint as bright as a berry.

  The words read:

  salute

  press

  perry

  passé

  riposte

  thrust

  touché

  And beneath that:

  help me

  please

  help

  chapter thirty-eight

  Emerson pulled back from the kiss with May. Not that the kissing wasn’t making him feel good on a day when nothing felt good, but his limbs, his whole being felt restless, unsatisfied. He walked away from her and over to the window where he stared out at the street below. There was a boy jogging with a large dog, some kind of shepherd mix, and two kids wrapped in beach towels walking home from the river. They both wore flip-flops. “You know, I realized, this thing with Miles, it’s happened before.”

  “What’s happened?” May asked from the other side of the room.

  “Him disappearing.”

  “It has?”

  Emerson nodded, still gazing out the window. “Yup. When he was seven. He disappeared for a whole day. Freaked everyone the hell out.”

  “Where was he? How’d you find him?”

  “The owner of this vineyard where my mom used to work found him. He’d gotten locked down in this old cellar on the back of their property and couldn’t get out.”

  “Scary.”

  “The vineyard guy was so mad. Like, really pissed. He fired my mom the next week. Said Miles could’ve died down there.”

  “Well, that’s kind of crappy. I mean, it was an accident, right?”

  He turned to look at her. May was sitting on his bed, long legs folded beneath her like a fawn. “Miles was different after that, you know? Just weird. Kind of a weird kid. He had nightmares. Got picked on in school. Started getting sick all the time. I should’ve felt bad for him, but sometimes…”

  “Sometimes what?”

  Emerson shook his head. “I don’t know how to explain it. Sometimes it’s hard to feel bad for someone who’s always suffering.”

  “You think?” May sounded doubtful.

  “I don’t know,” he said again, closing his eyes and rubbing his fingers in small circles against the lids. “Maybe that’s just me.”

  chapter thirty-nine

  Sadie’s heart sank. She knew who’d written these words. Without a doubt.

  Miles the fencer.

  He was the boy from the cellar, wasn’t he? The one her dad had rescued like a hero, all those years ago. The details were faint in her mind, soft wisps of remembrance. Sadie hadn’t been there when it’d happened, but she’d heard about it, heard the words her father had muttered in Mandarin as he chained the doors shut for good. At the time it made her wonder if he’d seen the things she and Emerson had stockpiled down there, and if he had, what he thought of her. But her father never said anything about that.

  Which was infinitely worse than if he had.

  What he did tell her was that a small boy had gotten locked in the cellar. Some sort of accident or misunderstanding. However it had happened, the child had spent hours in there, alone and unable to escape. Sadie couldn’t be bothered to care much about some random boy, or even a nonrandom one, but even she knew whatever that child endured was the stuff of nightmares. Trapped amidst death and reek and rotting things. He must’ve been frantic. Traumatized.

  And now, years later, for some reason, he’d returned.

  Why?

  Sadie went to one of the painted walls. Pressed her fingers against the words. They were sticky, all of them. Her fingers came back red.

  Minutes stretched, and the lantern’s glow began to fade. On legs that felt weak but no longer drunk, Sadie walked back to the staircase and stared up toward the cellar entrance.

  At that bright patch of sunlight.

  At that blue, blue sky.

  Disturbed, he’d told her in her car the last time she’d given him a ride. I’m a disturbed person.

  “Miles,” she whispered into the void. “Come on, kid. Show me where the hell you are. Let me fucking help.”

  chapter forty

  The girl was calling his name.

  That meant she’d found his message. To her. To the world.

  She called out for him again, louder this time, and Miles whimpered from where he lay hidden in the bushes and shadows behind the old press. Like a weak spot worn bare by wanting, some thin part of him stretched and ached to go to her. To spread his wings. To share his pain and be heard. She’d done that before. She’d listened to him, without judgment or appeasement, without wanting to fix him. But he didn’t go. His wings were long clipped, his soul long scarred, and what he’d left in that bunker for her to find—those birds that couldn’t fly; those words he couldn’t say—was the very best he could do.

  The future, his future, was almost here. He couldn’t deny that.

  Duty to harm, the wind whispered.

  You know what you have to do, boy.

  Miles squeezed his eyes shut.

  He clapped his hands over his ears.

  He slipped into the past from which he’d come, but would never understand.

  *

  Their family was a happy family. Then their father died, and his brother became angry and their mother became sad.

  No.

  That wasn’t how the story went.

  His brother was angry and their mother was distant, and their father was sick. Their father tried to get help for his sickness, but the help he found didn’t work. It only made him sicker. And sadder.

  Then their father died.

  And Miles grew scared.

  There was no one left to guard him.

  *

  When Miles was small, he watched his brother Emerson all the time. He watched him the way a mouse would watch a sleeping cat. When their mother started a new job taking care of a sick, old man out at a fancy winery, Miles did his best to watch from her side or behind her apron strings. The apron strings were metaphorical, of course, because their mother was a nurse, not a housewife or a cook. She took care of people who were dying, and some days, when Emerson was at his cruelest, Miles wished he’d die, too.

  Those sprawling acres brought something dark out of his brother. Not that he’d ever been funny or warm or protective or any of those things brothers were shown to be in books or movies. But the days spent running through the grapevines, heady with sun and abandon, harvested a new side of Emerson. A savagery.

  Or maybe that side of him had always been there. Maybe he’d slipped from the womb with his cold eyes and quick temper. With his compulsive need to do anything he could get away with and take what he wanted. Maybe it was just that without their father’s guidance, there was no one left to curb his urges—no one to worry his soul or snap him back in line and teach him that strength could be a weakness sometimes, the very, very worst kind of weakness. Their mother wasn’t up to the task, that was for sure. She was too lost in her denial. Her avoidance. Grief was one thing, and it was
understandable, but Miles couldn’t help but wonder if his father had ever felt the same scraping emptiness when he tried to talk to her about things that mattered. As if her heart were a lock to which he had no key.

  As if he would always, always be alone.

  In that open season of bruises and seeping wounds and down-the-stairs shoving, Emerson wasn’t the only one Miles had to watch out for. There was a girl at the winery, too. She never touched him, not once, but she was brash and loud and talked back to adults without an ounce of fear. Worst of all, she liked Emerson, and that meant Miles knew well enough to stay out of her way.

  There were times his mother wouldn’t let him stay with her. This usually happened when the old man needed certain things done, like his sponge bath or pain meds or had to go to the bathroom. Sometimes it happened when she was simply sick and tired of having him around.

  “Scoot,” she’d say. “Go on. You’re not a baby. Someday you’re going to have to take care of me, you know. So you’d better learn to be brave. To stick up for yourself. Like your brother does.”

  Those were the times when Miles roamed the big house alone, quiet as the smallest beast. He absorbed the secrets he saw and heard because no one knew he was there.

  He learned that the lady of the house wasn’t happy. Her daddy was dying and Miles knew about that sort of sadness, about the way it could eat you up with an ache that went on and on, flowing like the tides, both high and low, but never ending, never letting go. Daddylost, he’d come to call it inside his head, and even though she was an adult, the lady sounded like a child when she cried. Miles knew he sounded like a child when he cried, too, but he was a child, no matter what his mother said.

  Once Miles went to the lady when she was all alone and spilling over with her daddylost pain. He went to her because no one else did, not even her husband, who heard her, but just closed his office door and hid behind the beauty of old guns and old books and turned up the opera music he was listening to in there.

  She lay sprawled on a fancy couch in a special porch room that was part inside and part outside and opened onto a huge garden. The room smelled wonderful like lilacs and night jasmine and tea with honey, but the lady was crying so hard that nothing about it felt good. Miles’s nerves rattled into rickety little freight trains threatening to go off their rails. He didn’t know what to do or how to make her feel better, so he’d just gone to her and stroked her back. Her skin was warm. Hot, even, like bread fresh from the oven. She fell asleep while he touched her and started to snore.

  Miles also learned that the man of the house longed not to be there. He had a pattern of coming and going. Of turning toward and turning away. His daughter noticed most when he was gone. His wife, too. It made them both sad and angry. Pretty soon Miles realized that the man didn’t understand his wife or daughter. He tried to, but they confused him. He didn’t like confusion.

  Soon, he didn’t like them.

  On occasion Miles let his guard down. That was always a mistake. Like the time he let Emerson and the girl feed him lunch. It didn’t make sense that his brother would do something nice for him, but when he started getting sick on the ride home, he’d understood. His mother told the hospital that he must have gotten into some cleaning products when she wasn’t looking. And even though they both knew she was lying, Miles didn’t say differently because he liked the peace of the hospital and how the people there were nice and he didn’t have to keep up his endless vigilance with avoiding his brother. That little bit of peace made up for how bad he felt, and when he was older he learned to chase that hospital room peace. Through pills. Through microbes. Through self-induced harm.

  After the poisoned-drink incident, Miles followed Emerson and the girl a few times, wondering if there was a way he could get back at them. Getting back wasn’t a concept he liked, but he liked survival and not being hurt, so he considered it. He watched the two of them go in and out of some hidden bunker that was built into the ground out by the boggy creek.

  Dorothy doors were how he thought of the entrance to their hideout, because the twin batten doors reminded him of the one that led to the storm cellar in The Wizard of Oz. Miles longed to know what was down there and if he could use their secrets to protect himself, and when they were gone one day because the girl was visiting relatives and Emerson was down by the highway shooting squirrels with a slingshot, Miles snuck in.

  And his nightmares came alive.

  The birds. Oh god. Here they were.

  For months his dreams had been haunted by images of dead birds trying to fly, crows mostly, and Miles hadn’t understood why this was. But now, down in this horrible bunker, he was surrounded by bird corpses—the exact images of his dreams. There was a whole pile of them, thrown carelessly onto the floor: their tiny bodies mutilated, many with missing heads and claws and wings. A soft sob of horror escaped Miles as he stared at them all.

  His dreams hadn’t prepared him for this. He loved animals. They had kind eyes, and when they touched you there was never pain. Or fear. But the birds. The birds. It broke his heart to see them.

  It was just so sad.

  Miles started to cry.

  That’s when the sound of shattering glass filled the bunker. Miles jumped, and the Dorothy doors above him slammed shut with a resounding thud.

  His whole world went black.

  Miles stood, trembling, every hair on his body risen in fear. He listened to the soft clunk and clang of the metal chain being wrapped methodically through the door handles. He heard Emerson’s soft teasing laugh. He bolted up the staircase, his shoes crunching on shards of the broken lightbulb, and pounded on the bottom of the doors to be let out. He screamed. He yelled. He threw himself at the doors and clawed wood until his fingers bled. But nothing happened.

  He was trapped.

  In the dark.

  Alone.

  He screamed more. Fought more. All useless. Eventually his voice went hoarse. Eventually his tears dried up. Eventually he curled on the top step by the locked doors and slept.

  Time passed strangely after that, a tumbling roll of being that ceased to make sense. He was more than daddylost. He was utterly lost in every sense of the word. He couldn’t tell day from night. Sleep from wakefulness.

  Life from death.

  Sometime later, Miles became aware that the birds were talking to him. From the black depths of the bunker they whispered and chattered their truth to him. They used their minds, their broken fluttering wings, to communicate, to ease his fear. They understood that his wings were broken, too. Finally he slunk back down the stairs where he sat on the dirt floor, gathered them all into his lap, and picked them up, one by one.

  Like seashells, he held each ruined bird to his ear and listened to what it had to say. His dreams hadn’t been dreams at all, they told him, but pieces of a moment yet to come. A moment only he could see. A power only he could wield.

  After he was done listening, Miles tossed them each into the air.

  Here was the future, he thought. Here is my gift. Right in my most powerless hands.

  Yes! Yes! The birds crowed as they flew.

  The future was truth!

  The future was his!

  And death, like the dark horror who called himself his brother, was inescapable.

  part 4

  Delicate Monsters

  The things that we love tell us what we are.

  —St. Thomas Aquinas

  chapter forty-one

  Monday morning came, bleak and solemn, and Emerson tried going to school. Miles was still missing and still presumed dead, but he craved routine. He craved normalcy. He craved not being trapped in his apartment with his miserable mother, having to grieve and watch the minutes tick by while nothing happened.

  But when he got to campus, it was all too much—the stimulation. The crowds. The hive-mind hum. Emerson’s hands shook and his lungs burned. He didn’t know what else to do, so he sat and took a few shots from a newly acquired bottle of Wild Turkey—this
one slipped into the waistband of his jeans in the middle of the night at the grocery store—before getting out of the Mustang and stumbling toward the main quad. It was 7:45 a.m.

  Trey saw him first, which was a relief. Winding through the bustling courtyard before the first-period bell, he reached an arm out and slapped Emerson on the shoulder. His eyes were red, like he’d been crying. A jarring sight. As long as Emerson had known Trey, he’d only seen him cry once, and that was when Dahlia Temple dumped him in the ninth grade after promising him they could go all the way.

  “You all right?” he asked Emerson. “I wanted to call over the weekend, but I didn’t know … Giovanna said I shouldn’t bother you, but…”

  Emerson gave a boozy smile. “It’s fine. Really. And let’s not talk about it here, all right?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ve been drinking,” he admitted.

  “Okay.”

  “Now I kind of want to get shit-faced.”

  “Good for you.”

  “You want to join me?”

  Trey looked around and nodded. “Hell, yeah.”

  *

  “I fucked up,” Emerson said when they were in his car together out by the country club golf course. He’d parked on the edge of the frontage road, backed up against a sound wall, and he was sitting behind the wheel with the bottle of Wild Turkey clutched between his legs. Trey lay sprawled in the backseat with his feet up, smoking a joint. He held it out to Emerson, who shook his head. “Coach tests you, you’re dead.”

  Trey waved a hand and took another drag. “He won’t test during preseason.”

  “He’s cracking down this year.”

  “Whatever. I don’t care. No school’s going to pick me up anyway. I’d rather play at the goddamn Y then bust my ass for another five hundred season.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “Hell if I don’t.” Trey lifted his chin. “So how’d you fuck up?”

  Emerson reached out and flipped the radio on. Classic rock. An old Metallica song was playing. The one about praying to God and laying down to sleep.