Someplace to Be Flying (14 page)

“You don’t believe that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s …”

He’d been about to say “impossible,” but the word got swallowed by the sudden eerie sensation that flooded him.
After all these years,
he repeated to himself. He’d been living here almost a decade and it had only occurred to him now that he’d always thought of the crow girls as a couple of neighborhood tomboys. Kids. Barely teenagers—fourteen years old at the most. But they’d looked like that when he first met them and in nine vears they hadn’t changed. They
still
looked like the rambunctious twins they’d been the morning he’d moved in, appearing out of nowhere at his door, wanting to know who he was, and where had he come from, and how long did he plan to live here, and did he like to climb trees… .

“This is so weird,” he said slowly. “Do you know what I just realized?”

Annie was looking at him with obvious amusement. “No. But it must have been some really deep thought because your face has gotten all scrunched up and way serious.”

“It’s the twins—the crow girls. They …”

His voice trailed off again, but this time it was because of the sound of music coming from Kerry’s apartment across the hall. Piano music. Some classical piece. He vaguely recognized it, but it was nothing he could put a name to. He and Annie looked at each other.

“Rachmaninoff,” Annie said.

Rory forgot about the crow girls and their unchanging looks.

“Annie,” he began.

But she had a faraway look in her eyes. She was listening, only not to him.

“No one’s played that piano since Paul died,” she said. “He used to play that piece all the time—remember?”

Rory didn’t—classical music all sounded the same to him—but he nodded anyway, to let her know he was listening.

Annie sighed and a sorrow settled over her like a cloak, the way it always did when she thought of Paul. Rory wasn’t quite sure what their relationship had been—more than friends, not quite lovers. An affection that went deeper than blood ties, certainly. She’d been devastated when he died—the whole house had gone into mourning—but she’d taken it the worst.

Rory had liked Paul, too, though he hadn’t been nearly as close to him as Annie. Paul had always been a little too intense for him—a man on a mission, though Rory had never quite figured out what that mission was. He’d died in his sleep, which had seemed odd to Rory, considering Paul seemed to be in better physical shape than ninety percent of the people he knew, always exercising, eating right, the whole nine yards. But the coroner’s report had stated that he’d died of natural causes. Go figure.

“You still miss him, don’t you?” Rory said.

“I’ll always miss him.”

Rory nodded. He waited a moment, then came back to what had bothered him when they first heard the sound of the piano.

“Kerry can’t be playing that,” he said.

Annie blinked, coming back from wherever it was that her memories had taken her.

“I hear the piano,” she said. “Don’t you?”

“Sure. It’s just that … I was joking with her earlier, when we were waiting in the hall for you to answer your door, about how the apartment wasn’t completely unfurnished. There was at least the piano.

” ‘Doesn’t do me any good,’ she says. ‘I can’t play.’ “

“Well,” Annie said, “I guess she was putting you on because she plays beautifully.”

“I suppose… .”

But it didn’t seem right. What possible motivation could she have for lying about something so inconsequential?

The music stopped abruptly in midbar. After a moment Rory realized that both he and Annie were holding their breath, waiting for the music to take up where it had left off. He leaned forward, listening with his whole body, then finally let out a sigh when only silence responded. Annie took a sip from her beer.

“You’re still strangers,” she said, as though reading his mind. “Maybe it’s just something she didn’t want to talk about. Maybe something about a piano brings back painful memories—I mean, look at how suddenly she stopped.”

“Sure.”

Annie shook her head. “Don’t read more into it than there is. I’m sure there are all kinds of things you wouldn’t want to talk about with a stranger, stuff you wouldn’t even talk about with me.”

Rory gave her a puzzled look. “Like what?”

“How would I know? What I do know is that we’ve all got our hidden currents, no matter how wide and friendly the river seems. Start casting deep enough and who knows what you’ll dredge up.”

Rory had to smile. “Now isn’t that a lovely image.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I guess I do. I was just … surprised.”

Their conversation lagged then. Rory understood what Annie had been getting at, but the logic of her argument hadn’t done much to quell the disappointment he was feeling. It wasn’t as though he’d had any great plans to hit on Kerry or anything, but he had liked her and the lie seemed so out of character—

Then he really had to laugh at himself. Right there was the hole in his own logic. What did he really know about her character? He’d put together a little picture in his mind of who Kerry was—pretty, sweet, innocent, and honest— and the lie had poked a hole in it. That was the real problem. Not anything Kerry had done.

Annie was probably right. Undoubtedly seeing the piano had woken a bad memory for her and rather than get into it, she’d simply denied she could play, denied any past that included a piano. It wasn’t so much that she’d lied about it. She was simply trying to avoid having to deal with it. End of story.

He looked over at Annie to see her finishing her beer. She set the empty bottle down on the floor beside the sofa and raised her eyebrows.

“You want another?” she asked.

Rory held up his bottle to show he still had a third left. “I’m okay with this.”

“So you were talking about the crow girls,” Annie went on.

“The crow girls. Right.”

It took him a moment to pick up the threads of their earlier conversation. The strangeness of his observation, once he’d considered it again, hit him as strongly as it had the first time. How could he not have noticed it before?

“They don’t change,” he said. “They look exactly the same now as when I first met them.”

Annie laughed. “And you’ve changed?”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t look any different from when I first met you either.”

Rory knew what she meant. Some people aged well—or settled into their looks at an early age—and he was one of them. He looked about the same now as he had when he left high school.

“But that’s different,” he said. “Adults don’t always change that much over a few years, but kids do.”

Annie gave him an odd look. “How old do you think they look?”

“Fourteen, tops.”

“Really? They look to be in their late teens, early twenties to me and they don’t seem to change. I think of them as being more like the Aunts, or Lucius—”

“Instead of yourself,” Rory finished, “who likes to reinvent herself even? six months or so.”

“Keeps me interesting.”

Rory had to laugh. “The last thing you could be is boring.”

Annie put a palm against her chest and affected a suitably humble expression.

“One tries,” she said.

“So … late teens,” Rory said.

“At least.”

He regarded her for a long moment, just to reassure himself that she wasn’t putting him on. There was humor in Annie’s eyes, but no more than usual.

“I’m going to have to think about this,” he said.

And give the girls a serious once-over, the next time he saw them, because now he was remembering Lily’s story and it was simply too close, too much of a coincidence. How could there be two pairs of raggedy wild girls in the city? Where that fell apart, though, was that Lily claimed the girls she’d seen had killed the man attacking her.

He gave Annie a thoughtful look. “Do you think they could be dangerous?” “Who? The crow girls?”

He nodded.

“Push the right button,” Annie said, “and anybody can be dangerous. Why do you ask?”

Rory shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m still trying to get around them not being fourteen anymore and I never noticed.” Finishing the last swallow of beer in his bottle, he stood up. “I’m going to call it a night. You up for doing some running around with Kerry tomorrow?”

“You’re bailing?”

“No. I just thought it would be fun if we all went.”

“Okay. But not too early.”

“Gotcha.”

“And Rory?”

He paused by the door.

“Don’t always be thinking so much—you’ll wear your brain out. Try letting things just happen once in awhile without looking for hidden meanings.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Asshole,” she said as he shut the door.

Rory started for the stairs, but paused outside Kerry’s door. He wasn’t sure what he was listening for. Maybe the piano. Maybe just to hear that there was really someone in there.

Don’t think so much, he thought, repeating Annie’s advice. Maybe she had a point there.

He started to turn away, then sensed he wasn’t alone in the hallway anymore. Smelling a familiar scent of anise, he knew who it was. His gaze lifted past the stairs leading to the third floor to find Chloë leaning on the rail, looking down at him. Her dark frizzy hair was a halo of tiny curls around her face, lending her an odd look in the hall’s low light. For a moment she was like a disembodied face, watching him from the heart of a tree. Or an animal, caught in a car’s high beams.

“Everything all right with the new tenant?” she asked.

Rory nodded. “Except she was expecting the apartment to be furnished.”

“Why would she think that?”

“I’ve no idea. Annie and I are going to help her get some stuff tomorrow.”

“That’s nice,” Chloë said. “I think she’ll need some friends to get her through these first few days on her own.”

“On her own?”

Chloë shrugged. “You know. Big city, she doesn’t know anybody, that sort of thing. It always takes some adjustment. And all things considered, she might need a little more time than you or I might in the same situation.”

“Is there something special about Kerry?” he found himself asking.

Chloë regarded him for a long moment, an unreadable expression in those midnight eyes of hers.

“Everybody’s special,” she told him.

Rory nodded, waiting for more, but all Chloë did was lean on the railing and look down at him.

And everybody’s a philosopher tonight, Rory thought as he finally turned away and continued on down to his own apartment.

A mild panic took hold of Kerry as the door closed behind Rory and Annie.

No, she wanted to cry out after them. I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to be alone.

She forced herself to calm down. What was the problem? She’d been alone before. Except it hadn’t been the same. In her old world there was always someone on call. Someone to ease the panic with a pill, or even a kind word. She still had pills, to help her sleep. The small orange plastic container was at the bottom of her knapsack with a cotton ball stuffed inside to keep the pills from rattling against each other, a childproof cap she had trouble opening, typed instructions on a label glued to the side. Though she knew it was only her imagination, she could smell the faint medicinal smell of the pills from where she stood.

She’d never liked taking pills—not after the incident with the aspirin. Kind words worked better; being held, better still. That kind of medicine hadn’t always been available in her old world, and here, it wasn’t really available at all. It wasn’t the kind of thing you asked of strangers and even if it was, she didn’t know how to ask, what to say. If I start crying for no reason, could you just hold me? If I start shaking for no reason … if I get so scared I can’t seem to breathe …

She stared at the door for a moment longer before she finally made herself turn away. You can do it on your own, she told herself. Without pills or kind words. Just take it one day at a time, one moment at a time.

The ghosts of past failures wanted to argue with her, but she wouldn’t let them. Instead she kept busy, hanging her two dresses and one jacket in the closet, folding the rest of her clothes and placing them on the shelf above, using the stool from the piano to stand on so that she could reach. Setting her valise at the back of the closet, she closed the door and glanced at the futon lying under the window. Rory had made up the bed for her, but she wasn’t ready to lie down yet. Taking the pillow, she went back into the living room and put it on the club chair, then pulled the chair over to the window seat.

Now that she’d turned off the overhead in the bedroom, there wasn’t much illumination in the apartment. What there was came from the light above the stove, a dim glow that seeped out the kitchen door. It was just enough to see by.

For a few minutes she sat in the chair and looked past the vague image of her reflection on the windowpane, out into what she could see of the dark backyard of the house. The huge elm took up most of her view. There was a whole dangerous world out there, she thought, but she was safe from it for now. And there’d be good things out there, too. There had to be.

Before a mood could take hold, she hoisted up her knapsack and began to take a few things out of it. A dozen paperbacks were put in alphabetical order on one side of the window seat. Two slim hardcovers joined them, set together on one side of the smaller books. In front of them she placed a small brass candlestick, unwrapped a candle, and put it in place. It would be nice to light it, she thought, but she didn’t have any matches. On the other side of the window seat she put two small plush toys. Dog, so worn and battered it was hard to make out his canine shape anymore, but she knew who he was. And Cowslip, a faded yellow monkey in a tiny crocheted pink wool dress. Neither was taller than the length of her hand. Last she brought out a small framed black-and-white photograph.

She stared at the older woman in the picture, memory filling in the colors that the camera hadn’t captured: the dark red hair, hardly touched by the grays of age. Blue eyes, like cornflowers in a grainfield. And the dress, also blue, but faded from the sun and a hundred washes. The weatherworn yellows of the porch on which she sat. The field of wildflowers that could only be glimpsed in the photograph, but ran on for miles in her mind’s eye, if not in the reality of when the picture had been taken. The soft brown tint of the woman’s complexion was missing, too, but Kerry had only to look into a mirror to find it.