Goodnight Blackbird (23 page)

"They give me more 'cause I'm cuter! Give it back!"

Darren stepped between them and rummaged through Madison's bag. "He does have a point, sweetie. Cough up some of that."

"Hey! Don't take it all!"

He only took a Butterfinger for himself and one of the Ring Pops. He caught Jacqueline's eye and smiled. Then he slid the Ring Pop on her finger. He folded his hand over hers.

Happiness, Jacqueline finally understood, fighting back tears, is a lightness, a subtle dizziness and a relief. It was the emotional equivalent of coming out of a snarl of city traffic and seeing the freeway open up before you, clear and straight, heading into the sun.
Tonight your life begins again
.

They turned the corner and the kids trick-or-treated their way down the street. It was full dark now, and there were a few parents out escorting their children. Jacqueline smelled the occasional cigarette, saw the occasional bob of a flashlight beam. She and Kevin had taken Michelle out for trick-or-treating only once. They had only gone to a couple houses because Michelle had found the notion of knocking on strange doors for handouts of candy strange and wildly intimidating. Jacqueline recalled that Michelle had liked the Milky Ways and Three Musketeers bars she had gotten.

By the time they got to the end of the street, Madison was holding Jacqueline's hand and chatting as if they were old friends. By the time they got to the end of the next street, Jacqueline was wearing Madison's tiara at Madison's insistence "because it gives you special powers and anyone who wears it will become a secret princess. This way we can be princesses together in our own kingdom."

"That sounds like a good deal," Jacqueline said. "I've always wanted to be a princess."

On the way back home, Madison turned to her uncle. "Do you have to go to Portland like Mom said?"

"That's where my new job is, sweetie."

"Are you gonna have a house out there?"

"No, probably just an apartment."

"But what about your house here?"

"I'll have to sell it," Darren said.

Madison looked sad and panicked. "But who's going to take care of Rachel?"

Darren said nothing.

Under the porchlight of the Wilcox house, Madison looked at her limp and underwhelming fairy princess wand, which was shedding glitter the way a five-year-old Chevy Citation sheds rust. "Mom's wand isn't very good. And I don't know why I have to wear this dumb jacket. I don't look like a princess at all."

Jacqueline crouched so she could look her in the eyes. "You're very beautiful. And you do look like a princess. I enjoyed meeting you, Madison. Can I have a piece of candy?"

The young fairy princess turned suddenly shy, but she opened her bag and gave Jacqueline two Milky Ways.

T
hey said goodbye on the porch.

Darren had to babysit the kids until Julia returned, and Jacqueline wanted to get home to e-mail her lawyer and tell him she was reconsidering keeping the house, so they said goodbye at the door. Their first kiss was tentative, awkward, brief. Darren had a twinge of panic. Maybe they were sexually incompatible. Maybe this was a colossal disaster in the making. He was sure he'd see doubt and alarm in Jacqueline's eyes—the oh-God-maybe-this-was-a-bad-idea look—but he saw no such thing. She was grinning. She kissed him again—longer this time.

"This is not going to be any ordinary marriage," she said.

Driving home, he could barely concentrate on the road. He drove too fast, then too slow. He could only see his eyes in the rearview mirror but was certain that if he could have seen the bottom half of his face, he would have seen a twitching, bewildered half-smile—the kind of look you get when you witness something borderline miraculous, like a UFO or sunset over the Greek Islands.

He stopped for gas at a BP station off of I-271 and the old man filling up across from him gave Darren a funny look.

"You okay?" the old man asked.

"Yeah, I'm good."

"Looks like you're crying, man."

"I'm okay. I'm good."

Khabir also noticed something off about Darren. "All right, who are you and what have you done with Darren Ciccone? Something is different."

"Maybe he's in
love
," crowed one of Khabir's cousins, nineteen-year-old Sasha. She was dressed as a Playboy bunny, while the two younger ones—Nadia and Aida—wore the ebon gowns and black lipstick of a pair of vampire queens. In the dining room, the three girls pulled tinfoil off of plates of Mediterranean beef kafta and spread the spicy tahini sauce on the chicken shawarma.

"Smells good," Darren said. "You guys really shouldn't have done all this."

"Tell
him
that," Nadia said, jerking a thumb at Khabir. "His idea. He starts getting laid again and he makes us suffer for it just because the only thing he can cook is a Pop-Tart."

"Yeah, why couldn't you just have bought Darren a gift card to somewhere," said Sasha. "That's what you get us for our birthdays. And you're gonna make us late for the party." The girls were on their way to a Halloween party at Cleveland State, where Sasha was a sophomore.

Khabir looked appalled. "A gift card? This man gave me the love of my life. Such a thing is an occasion, an
event
, one that demands an expression of gratitude that is only possible through hardworking, caring hands making good, nourishing food."

The three girls emitted a bored and nearly simultaneous "Whatever."

The girls filled the dining room and kitchen with such loud, free-spirited chatter that it seemed as if there were far more than three girls in the house—the total was more than the sum of its parts. Once, out of the corner of his eye, Darren thought he saw a fourth costumed girl in the kitchen, but he chalked it up to the effect of being amongst a trio of teens all talking at once about cute guys, parties, cute guys and cute guys.

As quickly as the girls and Khabir had swooped in and laid siege to the house, they swooped out again at nine, piling into Khabir's piece-of-crap Buick. Nadia blew the horn and hollered at Khabir to hurry his dumb ass up, but he hung back in the kitchen, car keys in hand, scrutinizing Darren. "Something is definitely going on with you. Tell me."

"Can you keep a secret?" Darren said.

"By default, yes. No one ever talks to me."

"Jacqueline wants to marry me."

After several moments, a grin blossomed on Khabir's face. "You're lying. Or she's playing a cruel joke on you."

"No lie, no joke." Darren gave him a brief rundown of the night's events.

"It doesn't bother you that she deserves to be with a much better man?" Khabir asked.

"A little, but sometimes a man has to reach for the stars."

"Will I be best man?"

"Absolutely, if my first nine choices fall through."

Khabir's grin was so wide it was nearly psychotic. He grasped his friend by the shoulders and kissed him on the lips, much to Darren's consternation. Khabir half-skipped to the car, barking Jordanian curse words at his cousins.

Darren rinsed the dirty dishes and put them in the dishwasher. That was when he noticed, in his peripheral vision, the costumed girl standing five feet away, next to the refrigerator. His first automatic thought was that Sasha or Nadia had come back for some reason. His mouth was in the process of forming the words
Did you forget something
but he'd already heard Khabir's rumbling Buick pull out of the driveway. It had not returned.

Darren's bladder suddenly felt as if it were filled with ice water.

He looked at the girl. The girl looked at him. The girl wore a pale, glittery harlequin's mask, the mouth an enigmatic 'O' of wonder or melancholy. She was about five-six, a shade taller than the average teen. The girl wore a formal-looking navy dress—the dress she had probably been buried in, Darren assumed.

Well, this was what he wanted, wasn't it? It was why he hadn't taken Khabir outside when he told him about Jacqueline. Rachel had to know.

His hands shook as he closed the dishwasher. When he turned back, Rachel was gone.

"You were going to find out one way or another," Darren said, his voice sounding strange and too loud in the still house. "I'm getting married."

He wandered into the living room. There was nothing out of the ordinary there. "I can't stay here," he said, a little louder this time. "I just can't. My job here is probably going away, and the economy here is terrible. This other place offered me a job. It's in Portland. I can't stay here, Rachel."

He stood at the foot of the stairs, looking up into the darkness. He flicked on the light.

"Jacqueline cares for me." The stair tread groaned as his shoe pressed down on it. Halfway up the stairs, he paused, but he heard nothing. "I'm not doing this to hurt you."

He stood in the hall outside the spare bedroom. The door was half-open as it always was. He pushed it all the way open and looked inside.

Nothing.

Nothing was amiss in the bathroom or his bedroom either. He began to relax.

In the basement, he folded up some clean laundry, then toted the laundry basket upstairs to his room. That's when he saw that every knife from the kitchen—butcher, butter, steak and paring—had been driven hilt-deep into his pillow, pinning it to the mattress.

He put some clothes in a duffel bag and grabbed his keys and wallet from the bureau. His hand shook as he locked the house. He drove to Jacqueline's place.

"I don't think the house is safe anymore," he told her.

"I
have to talk to her," Jacqueline said.

Darren sat at her kitchen table, looking out at the backyard. He didn't notice the mug of coffee Jacqueline slid in front of him.

"I'll talk to her and explain things," she said.

"Sure. Calm, reasonable discourse will save the day. It always does."

"I have to try. I just feel like I have to be the one."

"It's not safe in there." He got up and opened drawers. "Aspirin?"

"Bottom drawer."

"Mind if I sleep on your couch tonight?"

"Seeing as how you're going to be my husband, I think I can do better than the couch." She had let her voice drop to what she hoped was a husky tone but she gave it up. "You're not hurting her. She's unstable. Don't let yourself feel bad or guilty about this."

"Too late."

"What's the alternative, Darren? Staying alone in that house for the rest of your life with her? Even after you get laid off and have no money? Is that fair to you?"

"This thing is probably going to get very ugly very quickly. Not too late for you to back out of this."

"Out of the marriage?"

He nodded.

"Rachel doesn't scare me," she said.

There followed several breathless days of the usual social niceties that accompany any freshly minted engagement. They took Jacqueline's parents out for dinner at the Outback Steakhouse in Lyndhurst—her parents' favorite—so they could meet/appraise Darren. News of the engagement was saved for the end of the meal, when the waitress was clearing the plates. Jacqueline was impressed at how Darren acquitted himself in what was essentially a no-win situation. He was polite, asked questions, pulled out chairs for the ladies. But Jacqueline's mom still looked at him coolly, clearly seeing him as a poor substitute for Saint Kevin the Perfect. Jacqueline's dad, however, was his usual gruff but amiable self, and he and Darren had a warm chat about, of all things, defense spending.

When Jacqueline announced the engagement, though, the color drained out of both of their faces.

"Jackie, you're not even divorced yet," her mother said.

"I realize that. We don't have a timetable yet."

Her mother shot Darren a hard look, then gazed at the ceiling as if appealing to some higher power. "I don't understand you," she said. "You chase Kevin away, you tell me and everyone else you're done with marriage, you just want to be alone, and now this. You're all over the place. You need to think this through, Jacqueline."

On the drive home, Jacqueline couldn't stop smiling.

Darren gave her a sidelong glance. "That was brutal. And you're smiling. Why are you smiling?"

It amazed her. She wasn't even thinking about what her parents said. "I'm happy," Jacqueline said.

Darren's parents were an easier audience. His mother cooked (Moroccan chicken with couscous), and it was Jacqueline's turn to shine. Or at least try to. She wanted his parents to think their son had gotten himself a sleek, sophisticated woman of business, so she dressed as if she were going to a job interview at a Manhattan hedge fund. She was sweet. She was charming. She did everything but give a PowerPoint presentation on why Jacqueline LaPierre was a good investment for their son. She won over Lou and Natalie Ciccone, and they won her over as well. The pair of liberal academics had the driest senses of humor she'd ever encountered aside from Darren. She would enjoy coming around for dinner during the holidays.

They toasted the engagement with an expensive Pinot noir Darren's father had been saving for a special occasion. And while Darren helped his mother with the dishes, Darren's father took Jacqueline aside and presented her with a small burgundy box. In it was an exquisite sterling silver pin shaped like the silhouette of a bird in flight.

"It was Darren's grandmother's," Lou Ciccone said. "A good woman. She had little money but she held her family together, even after losing a daughter—my sister—to cancer at an early age. You would have liked her. She once said that after losing a daughter, she felt she was strong enough to face anything life had to throw at her. And she was right."

"She sounds like someone I would have looked up to. But this is far too precious a gift for me."

He folded her hand over the box. "In some ways," he said, "she would have looked up to you."

That was also the week that Larry and Lydia Steinbach came to town.

Jacqueline and Darren met them for dinner at a high-end Thai place near the airport. Darren briefed her on what to expect from them—"pompous L.A. assholes who probably think 'roughing it' means settling for a three-star hotel"—and they did not disappoint. Larry Steinbach, who was surprisingly short, wore an expensive leather jacket and cheerfully told Darren that Cleveland "smells kind of like mildew." Lydia, who was startlingly tall and lovely in that blonde, vacuous way of ex-lingerie models, said little and ate even less. She tried a spoonful of the bean curd, grimaced, then informed Jacqueline that you "just can't get good bean curd east of Burbank." Darren again asked Larry what he did with the properties he bought but Larry dodged the question. "Let's just see if your place makes the cut, shall we?" he said, checking his voice mail messages on his cell.

They wanted to walk through the house that evening so the L.A. hotshots in their rental Lexus followed Darren and Jacqueline back to the East Side. At times Darren had to follow them—Larry drove like an impatient NASCAR driver, zipping in and out of lanes and leaving everyone in the dust.

"Does that fuckstick even know where he's going?" Darren said.

"He had all that stuff printed out from MapQuest," Jacqueline said. "I don't know which of them was ruder. Lydia actually looked around the restaurant and told me she'd never seen so many overweight people in her life. She was actually thrilled by that. Cleveland's just a zoo to them. What movie did this guy write?"

"
Sex Demon II
. Which, in my opinion, couldn't hold a candle to the original. It completely tarnished the franchise."

Jacqueline waited in the car while Darren and the Steinbachs toured the house. Downstairs lights blinked on, then the upstairs lights. Jacqueline had listened to five songs and two long commercial breaks on the oldies station when Darren finally rapped at her window.

She got out of the car. "Well?"

"The knives were still there in the pillow. But that was it. Everything's quiet."

They watched as Larry and Lydia appeared near the kitchen windows. Larry was on his cell phone. Lydia was yawning.

"How important is it to sell the place to them?" Jacqueline asked. "On a scale of one to ten."

"Seven. Seven-and-a-half. In the short term I can handle the mortgage and an apartment. But I'm going to be burning through my savings pretty quickly."

"I'll be contributing something, too. Don't forget that." But the words sounded a little hollow to her ears. Low-paying clerical work or maybe slinging coffee at Starbucks—that's what she would be looking at in the short term. Things would still be tight.

They were interrupted by the tap-tap-tap of Jimmy Choos on the driveway. Lydia was shivering in her suede jacket. "It's a cute little place," she said to Darren.

Jacqueline smirked. Cute—like kitschy retro earrings or a downscale club at the bad end of Beverly Boulevard. Middle-class people everywhere had to sweat blood for twenty years to pay off a house like this, but to Lydia it was a "cute little place." The catering for her Sweet Sixteenth had probably exceeded the sum total of Darren's mortgage.

Through the windows, they saw Larry still wandering about in the kitchen and living room, head bowed as if deep in thought.

"He'll probably take a few more minutes," Lydia said. "He actually likes doing this alone. He gets a better sense of the atmosphere that way."

"Is he psychic or something?" Jacqueline asked.

"No. Just very empathic."

Jacqueline and Darren exchanged a look. Empathic wasn't the adjective she would have chosen.

"What does he do with the houses he buys?" Darren asked. "Does he turn them into tourist attractions? Or is he making some reality show?
Survivor: Afterlife
, or something like that?"

Lydia raised her well-plucked eyebrows. "Gosh, no. Why would you think that?"

"He hasn't been real forthcoming about his motives," Darren said.

"That's just Larry being Larry. He'd probably kill me for saying this, but what he wants is to help the souls who are trapped in these places. He does some TV script work and it pays well, but it's just busywork to him. He's working on a Ph.D. in grief counseling and his real passion is counseling the souls who get trapped here for one reason or another. They usually get stuck here because their passing was so unsettling and traumatic that they cling to whatever is familiar to them, whatever feels normal and comforting. Like their homes. They need someone to help them. Larry doesn't want places like this to become sideshows or objects of fear. That's cruel. You wouldn't treat someone like that who had been raped or was suffering from cancer, would you? Occasionally Larry will bring in a psychic—someone he thinks is on the level—and sometimes he'll bring in a priest or someone like that. But most of the time it's just Larry trying to open himself to whatever is in there, listening, offering understanding, offering to be a witness if the spirit needs to manifest and communicate that way."

Once again, Jacqueline and Darren looked at one another, dumbfounded.

"How did he ever get involved in something like this?" Jacqueline asked.

"His mom died when he was just a boy," Lydia said. "Breast cancer. Larry ended up being raised by his dad. Major mistake. His dad was... well, he had a drinking problem. And he wasn't the nicest man in the world. Sometimes he'd hit Larry. But sometimes things would happen. Sometimes his dad would fly into a rage and go into his bedroom to get his belt to give Larry a beating, and the door would slam shut, locking his dad in until he cooled off. One time he was going to hit Larry with a bottle of booze. The bottle disintegrated in his hand before he could bring it down on Larry's head. It wasn't until Larry ran away when he was sixteen that he realized it was probably his mother, trying to protect him. It was an old house in Anaheim and his dad eventually sold it. In the early nineties it was torn down to make room for a new development. Larry always felt bad about that. Felt bad about not getting a chance to say goodbye. Or thank you. I guess he's trying to make amends." Lydia shrugged. "By the way, you didn't hear any of this from me, okay? He hates when I talk about him."

The back door opened and Larry trotted down the back steps. "Okay. Thanks for the dinner, Darren." He already had his car keys in his hand.

"That's it?" Jacqueline asked.

"That's it." Larry was looking at his wad of MapQuest directions. "To get back to the freeway I just take Richmond to Cedar, is that it?"

"So the deal's off?" Darren said.

"I don't sense anything in there. But when I get back home I'll forward you a list of some researchers. A couple of 'em are at Ohio State. Maybe they can do a longer walk-through with thermal imaging gear and magnetometers, the whole shebang. I'll take another look at what they find. They don't come cheap, though, so be prepared."

Jacqueline looked at the house. "Larry, come back inside with me."

Darren seemed to stiffen up. "No."

"If you want proof," Jacqueline told Larry, "come inside with me."

"Why?"

"Rachel's jealous of her," Darren said.

Larry looked at his watch, then whistled tunelessly through his teeth, a hissing, irritable sound. "Ten minutes," he said. "That's it."

Jacqueline felt Darren's hand on her arm. "Come with me or not," she said, "but I am going inside, okay?"

They all went back inside and stood around in the kitchen. Jacqueline's throat was dry. She felt very warm. "Rachel," she said, raising her voice. "It's me. Jacqueline."

Several seconds ticked by.

"Darren and I are getting married," Jacqueline said. "I know he's told you already. I wanted you to hear it from me, too. I sort of wanted your blessing."

The house was still. A car with a loud muffler rumbled by on the next street.

Jacqueline looked at Darren, who shrugged, seeming to relax. He stayed close to her as she wandered into the dining room, then the living room. Larry and Lydia brought up the rear.

Lydia spoke first. "Oh Jesus."

At first Jacqueline didn't notice it. She was looking at her own feet, listening to the house. She was expecting doors to slam and windows to slide open or explode in bursts of tinkling glass. But then Darren's hand clamped around her wrist and she looked up at him. He and the Steinbachs were staring at the walls and the ceiling.

Graffiti lacerated the drywall in foot-high letters that looked as if they had been made with a grease pencil or a hunk of charcoal. JACQUELINE THE WHORE, one wall said, over and over again, in writing that varied from drunken, sloppy scribbles to bold, carefully printed declarations. JACQUELINE THE WHORE. The graffiti went up and down, curved and slalomed, a dozen or so taunting linguistic snakes swirling, slashing, intersecting and undulating.

The ceiling said: YOU LET YOUR BABY DIE BAD MOTHER TERRIBLE WIFE WHORE BITCH HOW DID IT FEEL WHEN YOUR BABY DIED YOU CUNT.

"Did you do this?" Darren asked Larry.

Larry laughed. "Does it look like I carry a stepladder with me?" The ceiling was a good four feet above Larry's head. He touched one of the letters on the nearest wall and sniffed his blackened finger. "Some kind of charcoal. Like what sketch artists might use. I couldn't swear to it, though."

Jacqueline felt queasy. Her cheeks burned. It amazed her how it was possible to feel multiple emotions at once, like wearing four different and contradictory outfits at the same time. Wonderment, amusement, fear and an annoyance that was slowly blossoming into anger—she felt all of them.

How did it feel when your baby died.

She looked at Darren. "Did you tell her anything about that? About me?"