Behind the thin walls of a house that was not her own, Katherine Merrimon stared into the bathroom mirror. She’d recognized the lie in the cop’s face, felt it like a slap. So she asked herself the hardest question.
Was she a good mother?
Her skin stretched across the bones of her face, washed out and too pale. Hair hung with more weight than it should, and her fingers shook when she raised them to her cheek. She saw how chipped her nails had become, the way dark flesh rose up around her eyes. She looked for something familiar, but the eyes were cardboard eyes.
An image of Johnny pressed into her mind. He was bandaged, bled white; and his first thought had been of his sister.
Alyssa.
The name channeled through her lips, almost took her down. She gripped the sink until one hand rose. She found the mirror, and with great loathing, she opened it. Pill bottles lined three shelves. Orange plastic. White labels. She picked a bottle at random: Vicodin. She got the top off, dumped three pills into her palm. They could take it all away, the kaleidoscope memories, the loss.
Sweat trickled down her back. Her mouth went painfully dry and she could feel how they would be on her tongue-the hard swallow and the short, bitter wait. But when she lifted her gaze to the mirror, she saw those cutout eyes, and they looked faded, like copies of copies. They were the same as Johnny’s eyes, and they had not always looked like that. Not for either of them.
She tilted her hand and allowed the pills to fall. They made small sounds as they struck the porcelain. In a sudden frenzy, she scooped out all of the bottles, raked them into the sink. One by one, she tore them open, dumped the pills into the toilet. One bottle. Twenty. She emptied them all and flushed the pills down.
Fast.
It had to be fast.
She carried the empty bottles to the kitchen, threw them in the trash and hauled the bag outside. Time collapsed as she cleaned and scrubbed. Floors. The refrigerator. Windows. The hours became a hot blur of sweat and ammonia. She stuffed sheets into the washing machine, poured liquor into the weeds and threw bottles into the open can where they shattered and burst as she spun and went back for more. In the end, she confronted the same mirror. Blood hammered in the soft place beneath her jaw. She turned the water scalding hot and scrubbed her face until it hurt, but the eyes still looked wrong. She tore off her clothes and stepped into the shower; but it was not enough.
The dirt was on the inside.
Johnny woke alone in a strange room. He heard footsteps beyond the door, a muted voice. A doctor was paged over an intercom, and bits of memory came back. He touched the bandages on his chest, felt pain, then tried to sit as nausea pushed through him. Colors spiked at the edge of his vision: dull red through the window, flat white under the door. He looked for his mother and the walls twisted. When he sat, he saw remnants of soot under his nails, hints of berry juice and blood stains on his fingers. His feathers were gone, but that didn’t matter anymore. He closed his eyes and felt Jar’s impossible grip. He smelled car leather, felt the long, cold lines as Jar crushed his neck and slashed him with his own knife.
Johnny pulled his hands beneath the sheet, but still felt the warm, spongy hole in the back of Jar’s head. He heard sounds that went from hard to wet and remembered that Jar was dead. Johnny rolled onto his side and closed out the light.
The door opened so quietly that Johnny didn’t really hear it. He sensed the movement of air, the presence of someone by his bed. He opened his eyes and saw Detective Hunt, who looked haggard, his smile forced. “I’m not supposed to be here,” he said, then gestured at the chair. “Do you mind?”
Johnny straightened against the pillows. He tried to speak, but the world was wrapped in cotton.
“How do you feel?” Hunt asked.
Johnny’s eyes settled on the gun whose butt showed under the detective’s jacket. “I’m okay.” The words sounded thick and slow and false.
Hunt sat. “Can we talk?” Johnny did not respond, and Detective Hunt leaned forward. He made a steeple of his fingers and put his elbows on his knees. The jacket gapped open so that Johnny could see the worn holster, the black lacquer that seemed to coat the steel. “I need to know what happened.”
Johnny didn’t answer. He was transfixed.
“Can you look at me, son?”
Johnny nodded, but his eyes felt too heavy to lift.
“Johnny?”
Johnny stared at the gun. The checkered grip. The white bead of the safety.
His hand moved, all on its own, and the cop was dimming, even as Johnny stretched for the gun. He just wanted to hold it, to see if it was as heavy as it looked, but the gun receded into a ball of soft light. A weight came onto Johnny’s chest. It pressed him into the mattress and he heard the cop’s distant voice. “Johnny. Stay with me, Johnny.”
Then he was falling, and somebody drove black spikes into his eyes.
Katherine ironed her clothes and dressed. She fought to keep her fingers steady, but the buttons felt very small. She dried her hair, combed out the tangles, and debated over makeup. In the end, she looked like a normal woman stretched over the bones of someone very ill. When she called for a cab, she had to think hard to remember the numbers on the house; then she sat on the sofa’s edge to wait.
A clock ticked in the kitchen.
She kept her back straight.
When the sweat began to form, it started between the blades on her back. She imagined the taste of a drink and heard the lullaby of one more forgotten day.
It would be easy.
So very, very easy.
The decision to pray stole across her like a shadow. It was as if she’d blinked, then opened her eyes to an absence of light so distinct, it made her look up. The temptation rose from a deep place in her soul, a once-fierce heat now compressed to something black and cold. She fought the temptation, but lost, and when she knelt, she felt like a liar and a fake, like a traveler lost in a night of ceaseless rain.
Words, at first, refused to come, and it felt like God, himself, had closed her throat. But she dipped her chin and strove to remember how it felt. Nakedness. Faith. The humility to plead. And that’s what she did. She begged for strength, and for her son to be well. She begged God for help, silently, ardently. She begged to keep what she had: her son, their life together. When she stood, she heard the sound of tires on gravel, and it sounded like rain. And then the sound stopped.
Ken Holloway met her at the door.
His suit was creased, the tie a rich purple, loose around his neck. Katherine froze when she saw the displeasure on his face, the sweat on his collar. She stared at the brush of hair that covered the back of his hand.
“What are you doing?” He cupped her chin with a thumb and two hard fingers. “Who are you so dressed up for?” She could not answer. He squeezed her chin. “I said, who are you so dressed up for?”
“I’m going to the hospital.” Small voice.
Ken looked at his watch. “Visiting hours will be over in an hour. How about you pour us a drink and you can go tomorrow? First thing.”
“They’ll wonder why I’m not there.”
“Who will wonder?”
She swallowed. “DSS.”
“Bureaucrats. They can’t hurt you.”
She raised her head. “I have to go.”
“Fix me a drink.”
“There’s nothing here.”
“What?”
“It’s gone. All of it.” She tried to move past him. He stopped her with one massive arm.
“It’s late.” He ran a hand down the small of her back.
“I can’t.”
“I was in jail all night.” He gripped her arm. “That was Johnny’s fault, you know. Your son’s fault. If he hadn’t thrown that rock through my window…”
“You don’t know that he did that.”
“Did you just contradict me?”
Pain flared in her arm. She looked down at his fingers. “Take your hand off me.”
He laughed, and she felt him move against her, the press of his chest as he filled the doorway. He began to drive her back. “Let go,” she said. But he was pushing her into the house, his lips thin below unforgiving eyes. A sudden image of her son came to Katherine, his small chin in one still hand as he sat on the stoop and looked up the hill for some sign of his father’s return. She’d chastised him for it, but she felt it now, the hope he must have felt. Her gaze slid up from Ken’s arm and she looked up the same hill. She imagined the rise and fall of her husband’s truck, but the hill was empty, the road a stretch of silent black. Ken made the same raw sound in his throat, and when she looked up, she saw a smile cut his face. “Tomorrow,” he said. “Johnny. First thing.”
She looked again to the hilltop, saw metal flash as a car rose at the crest. Her breath caught, then she recognized the car. “My cab,” she said.
Ken stepped back as the cab began to slow. Katherine pulled her arm free, but felt him there, tall and thick and angry. “I have to go,” she said, then pushed past him and met the cab in the drive.
“Katherine.” His smile was broad, and to anyone else might have seemed genuine. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
She threw herself into the cab, felt the seat on her back, smelled cigarettes, unwashed clothes and hair tonic. The driver had folded skin and a scar on his neck that was the color of damp pearl. “Where to?”
Katherine kept her eyes on Ken Holloway.
“Ma’am?”
Ken kept his smile.
“The hospital,” she said.
The driver watched her in the mirror. She felt his eyes and met them. “Are you okay?” he asked.
She was sweaty and shaking. “I’ll be fine,” she said.
But she was wrong.