The Storyteller

 

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To Michael and Joy

 

THE CHRONICLES OF KERRIGAN CLEARY

Sometimes I'm a sister who gives advice and teases and all of that, and sometimes I'm just a girl who wonders how the kid who sleeps in the next room could ever be related to her. Only natural, right? We all love our brothers, in spite of the fact that none of us has a clue what's really in their hearts.

Even before Fiona Loomis took off, or got killed, or who knows … before this neighborhood was all sirens, search parties, and ladies standing by their windows at all hours … weeks before someone shot Kyle Dwyer in the stomach, my brother, Alistair, had changed. Puberty: it got him and it got him good. At least that's what I thought at first. That's not what I think now. Because when they found him in our front yard, looking up at the stars, that wasn't the boy I knew, and that wasn't even the one I didn't know yet. That was someone from outer space.

Here's what we can say so far: Kyle Dwyer will live. For now. He's in a coma, so he isn't talking. Can't tell us who shot him. My money is on Charlie because, well, he's Charlie, and Charlie has always been a bit off. But Charlie is nowhere to be found, and the police bagged up Alistair's wet and bloody clothes. They say Alistair is the one who made the 911 call.

“It's not how it looks,” Alistair told me two nights ago as he stood in our hallway, dripping wet and terrified. “Just make sure they know it's not how it looks.”

I didn't make sure “they” knew anything. I love the kid, but he has to speak for himself. He has to start talking. He put a padlock on his mouth, though. Swallowed the key. Mom and Dad think he's still in shock. It's only been a couple of days, so they may be right. A psychologist tried to get him to open up and will try again. The police gave it a try too. Nothing doing. Not enough evidence to arrest him, I guess, but they can't help but think this has something to do with Fiona Loomis.

Everyone thinks that.

The town prays for Kyle Dwyer. A sentence I thought I'd never write.

The town misses Charlie Dwyer. Another sentence that tests the laws of logic.

The town is sure my brother shot someone in the gut. Ding, ding, ding! That's three in a row.

Oh, the town. Forgot to tell you about that. The town is Thessaly, up here in the forehead of New York State, where no one notices us until a couple of kids go
poof
.

Oh, and me. I'm Kerrigan Cleary. Keri to friends. I'll admit, Keri Cleary is a bit of a tongue twister.
Keri Cleary carried cherries for cheery chipmunks.
Say that ten times fast. What can I do, though? It's the name I got and I can't get another.

Oh, and one more thing. I haven't even told you the date yet, which I guess is pretty much necessary for this sort of … endeavor. I hesitate to call this a diary, even though that's what it is. Hopefully it becomes more than that. A place to confess. A place to tell stories. Truth and fiction.

Anyway, I'm writing this on:

TUESDAY, 11/21/1989 EVENING

Which is two days after Kyle was shot and Charlie disappeared. A day after they found my brother sitting in our yard, looking up at the stars. Hours after I started thinking up a story about a wombat.

Yes, a wombat.

That's yet another thing. There are no wombats here in Thessaly, at least that I know of. Most of my neighbors probably don't even have a clue what a wombat is. For the record, it's a marsupial, which means it has a pouch like a kangaroo or koala, and lives in Australia. It looks a bit like a woodchuck, but it isn't related. Not even close.

How much wom could a wombat bat if a wombat could bat wom?

Dumb joke. Forget it.

The story is the important thing. In it, this brother and sister find a wombat on the side of the road, and the wombat has a sign around her neck that reads:
PERFECTLY FINE WOMBAT
. This is the type of story where kids believe signs like that, so they take her home and make her their pet.

I don't think I'm ready to write any of it down yet, but I do have a pretty good idea how it'll end. In a waterfall. Images and ideas have been crashing into me like a meteor shower for the last day, and the image of a waterfall is the clearest. The story starts with a brother and a sister on a road. It ends with a wombat and a waterfall. That's what I've got so far.

I've never thought of myself as a writer. Don't get me wrong, I've written stories before. For school. A few times for fun. But this is the first time I've really felt like I needed to do it. I'm finding out that if you have the ending from the get-go, then you're in good shape. Problem is, I rarely have the ending from the get-go.

Here, for instance, is a different story, a shorter story, one about endings that doesn't really have an ending. I don't care. That won't stop me from writing it.

 

THE ENDING

Justine Barlow was a runner. She wore sweat suits. She drank Gatorade. Every morning, when her cuckoo clock cheeped six times, she got up, got out of the house, clipped a Walkman to her waistband, stretched against a tree, hopped in place a few times, and then set off into her neighborhood.

It cleared her head. It kept her heart healthy, which was important because hers was a good heart. She gave money to the homeless, even when they weren't begging. She said “Good morning” to people and meant it.

Why not? Mornings
were
good. Cold mornings, rainy ones. It didn't matter. They were new beginnings. Justine had recently graduated from college, was living on her own for the first time, and had her entire life ahead of her. “Each day is a blank page,” she told people. “A fresh thing to write on. Have fun with it.”

Running was hard work, but it was fun too. The sounds—the barks, beeps, and buzzes—always entertained and they were never the same, even if her route was, a four-mile loop that passed by the school and the reservoir, through the center of town and back home past the rickety old houses on Palmer Street. The images were always different too. The trees that went from green to brown to white to pink to green, depending on the season. The babies who went from slings to strollers to feet to bikes. Change. Beauty. Life. All that crap.

And death. That came later.

It started with one baby bird, clear-feathered and dead on the sidewalk beneath an oak tree.
Poor little thing must have fallen from her nest,
Justine thought. She even considered burying it, giving it a proper funeral, but she knew that wasn't how nature was supposed to work. A stray cat or raccoon would eat it and poop it out, and then the poop would become dirt and plants would grow from the poop and other birds would eat the plants. This was called the circle of life.

So the next morning, when she saw two dead birds on the sidewalk, she thought,
Poor little things,
and she ran on.

The next morning she saw four.
Poor little things.
The cats and raccoons were going to be plump as can be.

It kept doubling, though. Eight the next day. Then sixteen. Thirty-two. Sixty-four dead birds by the end of the week, all along the same running route.

Justine was disturbed. “Have you noticed a lot of dead birds lately?” she asked her friend Laura.

“Always see some in the spring,” Laura said. “It's a shame. The world is a tough place.”

“How many have you seen this spring?” Justine asked.

“I don't know. Normal amount, I guess. I haven't counted.”

Justine had been counting. She had started by keeping tabs in her head, but now she put little check marks in a pocket notebook as she ran.

One hundred and twenty-eight baby birds the next day. Two hundred and fifty-six the next.

Was this an omen of something worse to come? How could other people not be noticing? She asked around. “What's with the birds?”

People would reply by looking into the cloudless sky and shrugging.

The birds weren't imaginary. They were flesh and blood. Cold flesh and cold blood, that is. Justine knew because she poked them with her finger. There weren't enough cats and raccoons to possibly eat them all, so she started scooping the bodies up in plastic grocery bags like little logs of dog poop. Or at least that's what it looked like to her neighbors.

“You probably have yourself one of those Great Danes,” a postman joked as Justine jogged past with two sagging plastic bags.

Strange thing to say,
Justine thought.
If that's the case, then where's the dog? I don't just run around scooping poop. No sir. This is death. Something serious is afoot.

“Aren't you worried?” Justine asked him. It wasn't the type of question she normally posed. For her entire life up until that point, she believed in a world without worry.

“Worried about what?” the postman asked.

“All the death.”

He too looked up at the sky, but he kissed his fingers. “Our time comes when our time comes,” he said, and returned to his route.

Justine returned to her route, but she couldn't run anymore. Too many birds to pick up. When she made it home, she buried them all in a hole in her backyard as a suspicious neighbor boy watched from a perch in a tree house.

“It'll be okay,” she assured him, but he didn't respond. Maybe it was the wobble in her voice, the tone that said it would, in fact, not
be okay
, that it was actually going to be pretty damn horrible.

Because Justine could do the math: 512; 1,024; 2,048; 4,096; 8,192. That was just one more week's worth if it kept doubling, and she was sure it would. It meant in two more weeks there would be a billion dead birds. A month after that? She couldn't fathom such a number. Enough to cover the entire earth, she suspected. It seemed biblical. Beyond biblical.

She locked herself in the house. She started making phone calls. The police, senators' offices, her parents.

“What will we do to stop it?” she asked.