Goodnight Blackbird (9 page)

T
he next day at work, Darren noticed an e-mail from Jacqueline mixed in among the usual interoffice e-mails and come-ons for cheap Viagra:

Darren—

I cringe at the fact that I'm starting this message with a cliché but in this case the cliché is true—no words can express how grateful I am to you for what you did. It is far and away the most generous thing anyone has ever done for me, and it dismays me that all I can muster in return are two small, drab words: thank you.
      But perhaps I can muster something more. As lame and small as it is, I would be grateful and delighted if you would let me make dinner for you this Friday night. PLEASE COME. If Friday is not good for you, then pick another day. Any day. Every day, even. My home is your home. You are always welcome wherever I am.

Darren breezed through his work that day. Even Annie Burlana's passive-aggressive sighing over the loudness of his typing did not bother him.

Over the ensuing weeks, dinner at Jacqueline's place became a weekly—sometimes twice weekly—event, and most of the time it was Darren who cooked (although his definition of cooking primarily consisted of opening Chinese food containers or removing the lid from a bucket of chicken). He would have liked to host a few of these evenings at his place, but after he told Jacqueline about the threat in ketchup she told him not to risk it.

"You know the old saying about a scorned woman," she said.

"Putting the place up for sale is about the most profound act of scorn there is. And so far she hasn't made any noise about that. So maybe I'm just jumping at shadows." By some unspoken consensus, he and Jacqueline came to believe it was Rachel McAvoy's spirit in the house. No other explanation seemed to fit. Referring to the presence as
she
made him uneasy, though. When he thought of what was happening at 1661 Shadeland as random bursts of unexplainable phenomena, it seemed less threatening somehow. Once it became the handiwork of an actual personality, it became... well, personal. There was another person in his house.

"I wonder what she looked like," Jacqueline said one evening as she rinsed out their coffee cups.

He pulled a folded piece of paper from his wallet. It was a printout of a
Plain Dealer
article two days after the shootings, complete with a grainy photo of Rachel McAvoy that had obviously been lifted from the Brush High School yearbook. With dark shoulder-length hair and a nervous, wincing smile, Rachel looked like the sort of girl who spent much of her time hoping no one would pick on her in gym class.

Jacqueline handed the article back. "Why do you carry it around with you?"

Darren felt himself blushing. "I don't know. Maybe to remind myself that it's just a young girl I'm dealing with. Not a boogeyman."

But what happened at the first showing of his house in the middle of July did seem more like the work of a boogeyman than that of a teenage girl. The violence of that day could have easily been more serious than it was, and Darren considered himself lucky that the man decided not to hit him with a lawsuit.

Miriam was adamant about decluttering, so a few nights a week Darren would stash as much stuff as he could in the garage and in the attic. He toyed with the idea of renting one of those self-storage units but decided it wasn't necessary—the only truly messy parts of his house were his crowded bookshelves, and the overflow could be easily boxed up and stored in the attic. He had the downstairs hardwood floors refinished and he took a closetful of old clothes to Goodwill. He vacuumed; he scrubbed. Miriam might have bitched about how much still needed to be done—Miriam bitched about everything—but even she had to admit the place was in good enough shape for an official showing. Well, almost—she wanted the beat-up old desk in the spare bedroom removed.

"I want clean, uncluttered minimalism," she said, "not the
Sanford and Son
junkyard."

The evening before the showing, Darren bought dinner for Khabir in exchange for helping him move the offending furniture out to the garage. Which was easier said than done, because they somehow managed to get the bulky desk stuck in the back doorway. They budged, shoved, pushed, wiggled, swore and sweated for ten minutes before Khabir suggested they coat the damned thing with butter.

"Why?" Darren asked. "So you can eat it?"

"Maybe while we have this moment together you can explain why you won't come to the convention." Two weeks ago Khabir asked Darren to come with him and some friends to the Motor City Comic-Con.

"Because I'm not twelve years old and I still have some semblance of dignity."

"You could bring Jacqueline."

"Yes, I'm sure she'd love driving six hours to look at a bunch of moldy Aquaman comic books."

"It's an opportunity, my friend. A gorgeous lady invites you to her house every week and you don't even so much as shake her hand. You need to take it up a notch."

"We're just friends."

Khabir rolled his sad, suspicious eyes.

"And she's still technically married," Darren said. "Even if she weren't, a relationship isn't her number one priority right now. Tell you the truth, I don't think it's mine either."

"You are absolutely the world's worst liar."

"How am I lying?"

"Any man who says he's not interested in love," Khabir said, "is either a liar or a fool. I see your face when you're on the phone with her at work, you know."

"Let's just move this thing."

They tried for another five minutes to unstick the desk. It moved a grand total of one centimeter. Darren and Khabir were both drenched in sweat, and Khabir's t-shirt had ripped at one armpit. His flip-flops slipped and slid as he made one more clumsy but valiant try to budge the desk.

"Why are you wearing sandals?" Darren asked. "Are you a gladiator?"

The showing was scheduled for two p.m. the next day. When Miriam called him at work around four, he thought—with extraordinary naïveté—that an offer was on the table.

The first words out of Miriam's mouth, however, were: "We have a problem."

Fifteen minutes later, he met Miriam and a young Japanese couple out in Darren's backyard. The man's name was Edward Kanagawa; his wife was Sachika. Edward's left hand was wrapped in a swath of bandages, his index and middle fingers braced in a splint. He didn't look to be in any serious pain, though. Darren thought he looked more like someone miffed that the newspaper had dropped his favorite comic strip.

After some hurried introductions, Miriam took Darren aside. "I was giving them the tour. Everything was fine. We go up to the spare bedroom, he asks if there's air conditioning, how old is the roof, the usual stuff. The window was up. I opened it before they came. The window facing the driveway. Goddamned thing was a nightmare to open. Anyway, he was running his fingers along the windowsill and asking me how old the windows are. Right then the window just slams down on his fingers like a goddamned guillotine. I have never in my life seen something like that. And you know what those frigging windows are like."

Darren did—you could get a hernia opening or closing them. They squealed and groaned and fought you every inch of the way.

"It scared the Jesus out of me," Miriam said, running her fingers through her henna-rinsed hair. "The guy just went down on his knees like he'd been sucker-punched and his wife nearly fainted. We just got back from the ER. Christ, they're gonna yank my license for this, I know it."

Darren went to the young couple. "Mr. Kanagawa, I am so sorry for what happened. Are you all right? Is anything broken?"

"No, just one bitch of a sprain. Tore open the skin." His smile was grim and businesslike, and his eyes glittered shrewdly. "So, your listing is for one-oh-seven. That price pretty firm?"

Darren's brow furrowed. "You're still interested?"

"No!" Sachika said, tugging on her husband's arm. The expression on her face—disbelief with an undertone of disgust—reminded Darren of the look Annika had given him when he too had expressed interest in 1661 Shadeland. Sachika looked at Darren and Miriam. "No, please, thank you for showing us the house. We are not interested."

"Honey," Edward began.

Sachika's cold look shut him down. "I am not going to live in a house where people were murdered, Edward. End of story."

Darren bestowed a similarly frosty look upon his Judas of a Realtor.

"It's the law," Miriam said defensively. "I have to disclose it."

Super. Ohio's 'stigmatized property' disclosure law had just cost him a motivated buyer in the worst housing market since the Depression. Could there be a better definition of 'snakebitten'?

Darren slipped his hands in his pockets and studied the house, which stared back at him in all its humble, idiot blandness, like a pit bull sitting docilely by its master's side an hour after mauling the postman.

Once Miriam and the Kanagawas were gone, Darren mowed the backyard, then the front. He debated whether or not to go to the gas station to fill up the plastic gas can for the mower.

The Sphinxlike house waited politely. Gonna have to come inside eventually, it seemed to say.

Darren stood in the back doorway. He took a few tentative steps into the kitchen. All was quiet. He went into the living room, his fingers jingling the change in his pockets.

His voice sounded small and strange when he called out, "Rachel?"

His only answer was the mindless, almost inaudible hum of the refrigerator.

"Is it you who's here?" he said, his voice a bit softer.

He wandered through the living room and stood at the foot of the steps.

"I guess we haven't been formally introduced yet. You know who I am, but I'm still not really sure who you are. Or what you want."

Over on the next street, someone's dog barked.

"Why are you doing this to me? Why are you terrorizing the people who come here? Why are you terrorizing me? I've done nothing to you. I only wanted to live here in peace. But now I just don't feel safe here. So that's why I have to leave. Can you understand that?"

Even with his senses on high alert, Darren neither heard nor felt anything out of the ordinary. He mounted the steps, the anxiety and dread within him starting to abate somewhat. It was a sunny midsummer afternoon, and from a few streets away came the musical tinkling of the ice cream truck, a sound that made him relax. The prosaic, comforting white magic of his ordinary neighborhood was battling whatever dark magic had infected this house, and it was winning.

At the top of the steps he looked into the spare bedroom. The only furniture left in it was a cherry nightstand by the window. He'd have to put a plant or something on it before the next showing. The room looked painfully bare. Bereft.

The room was a few feet shorter than Darren's bedroom. He assumed this must have been Rachel's room.

The sill of the window overlooking the driveway was dotted with red-brown spots. Blood. Greasy fingerprints were smeared all over the upper portion of the frame, undoubtedly from Miriam trying to budge the window upward. She had managed to force it up about an inch to free Edward's fingers. Darren tried pushing it up further. It groaned and squealed. He got the window up another inch before his shoulder muscles throbbed in protest.

He sat on the floor with his back against the wall. The blank walls were like a white canvas which he tried mentally decorating with the posters she might have had back in '01 or '02. What bands had been popular then? In Darren's day it had been Springsteen and Van Halen.

"I talked to your teacher. Mr. Lancaster. He liked you very much."

The room was silent.

"He said you were a good person. I'm sure you were. He showed me one of your poems. You were very talented. I bet if I'd been going to your school I would have liked you. In some ways we're a lot alike. I didn't talk much in class. I didn't have a lot of friends. Definitely no girlfriends."

The similarities ended there, though. Darren had had a first kiss. He had gone to college, gotten married. He had lived. Rachel had not.

"Are you angry? I can imagine you would be. All the things you never got to experience.... You know, most of those things aren't as great as they're cracked up to be. Like marriage. But it's not fair that they were taken away from you."

The shaft of afternoon sun on the far wall slid a half-degree lower. The seconds ticked by. Through the window came a whiff of barbecue from a cookout down the block.

"I just want to know what you want. I want to know how I can help you. You need to communicate with me. I just don't want you to scare me. Or the people who come here. Please?"

He felt stupid talking to himself this way.

Darren stood and moved to the door. I will turn back, he thought, and I will see something. She will be standing there, or else there will be some other sign—maybe a rose on the nightstand. Maybe the scent of roses in the air.

But when he turned back there was nothing.

The next morning at work he got two e-mails. The first was from Kat Shakespeare, resident kook of the Akron chapter of the Archangel Society:

Hi Mr. Ciccone! Sorry for the delay! I found your story fascinating! It does sound like your home is ripe for a clearing! I'll need to come there and do an evaluation in person, then I'll get an idea of what sort of ritual would be appropriate. Interested? Gimme a holler and we'll figure it out!

XXXOOOXXX—Kat S.

The second e-mail had no sender address. It had been sent at 2:06 a.m.
Pls dont lea v me,
it said.

D
arren was right. Kevin deserved to know. He had lost a daughter, too.

Jacqueline found a space in a garage not too far from Key Tower, where the Stratus Chemical administrative offices were located. She hated coming downtown but it wasn't fair to always make Kevin drive out to Beachwood. The afternoon was muggy and overcast, but the marble lobby of Key Tower was wonderfully cool, an air-conditioned grotto.

An elevator door whisked open, disgorging a crowd of suits. Kevin was among them. He was talking to a woman. Jacqueline recognized her—she was another Stratus lawyer, a more senior attorney. Sylvia somebody. Mid-forties, brutally short blonde hair. Attractive in a take-charge corporate way. Jacqueline was about to approach them but something in their manner made her hold back by the information desk. Kevin looked... light. Upbeat. The way he used to look after his legal team had won a big case and their boss had promised them bonuses. He did not look like a man whose daughter had died. Kevin grinned and murmured something to Sylvia—and were they standing a bit too close to one another?—and Sylvia put her head back and cackled. Sylvia's eyes glimmered warmly at him and she patted him on the forearm before drifting off with some other suits heading out of the revolving doors toward home-grilled flank steaks or drinks at Marbella.

Jacqueline tried to gauge how she felt about this. Finally she decided to cut him some slack. Most likely they were just talking about some work-related bullshit. Sylvia was older and, if Jacqueline remembered correctly from a past Christmas party, she wore a rather large, rather ostentatious wedding ring.

When Kevin saw Jacqueline, his breezy demeanor vanished and his smile tightened.

Gee, she thought, control your enthusiasm.

"Did you get caught in rush hour?" Kevin asked.

"A little bit."

"I didn't make reservations anywhere. I just figured we'd walk over to Steinkamp's, if that's okay."

Steinkamp's was a steak and chop house on the corner. Jacqueline had always found the place irritating—the dim lighting, the mahogany and the brass promised upscale dining, but the drinks were watery, the steaks were forgettable and the servers were as sloppy and inattentive as the teens who waited on you at Applebee's. Kevin ordered a chicken sandwich and a beer; Jacqueline requested an iced tea. Nothing else.

"Have you eaten anything all day?" Kevin asked.

"I'm fine. I need to talk to you."

"How come you won't tell me why you got laid off? They loved you there. Have you told your folks yet?"

"I don't want to talk about my job."

"Well, how are you going to pay your bills? Or did you expect me to do that?"

She stared at him. "I've got a job lined up already. I'll be starting in the middle of August. This is not what I came to talk about."

The waitress came with their drinks. When she left, Jacqueline said, "I wanted to tell you why I don't want to leave the house."

Kevin sipped his beer.

Suddenly Jacqueline felt foolish. It was going to sound ridiculous, no matter how she phrased it.
Kevin, do you believe in ghosts?
Coming on the heels of getting fired, it would be further embarrassing evidence that his soon-to-be-ex-wife was losing her mind.

"Do you remember all those books on psychic phenomena and mediums I was reading after Michelle died?" Jacqueline asked. "You bought a lot of them for me."

"I remember."

"You know, I could never figure out if you believed any of that stuff yourself. You never came right out and said if you did."

"I never really gave it a lot of thought. What's this about?"

"But you read a few of them. I think you read one of the books by Michael Percival, right?"

"I can't remember that far back. Why?"

"Just tell me. Do you believe in life after death? Like... ghosts?"

Kevin's eyes hardened. He took a deep breath. "Jacqueline."

"Sometimes I sense her. I know how that sounds. I know. But I swear to you it's true. This is why I think it would be a mistake if we gave up the house."

Kevin shifted in his seat.

"I know how crazy it sounds," Jacqueline said. "But she's still there."

"And you want me to keep on paying the mortgage. You don't actually want to be my wife anymore, you just want me to sign a check for you every month."

"This is going to sound laughable, but would it be possible somehow to have—I don't even know if this is the right term—joint custody of the place? Maybe we can share it. We can work out a schedule."

"Sure. Sounds fair. Where will you stay when it's my turn at the house? I know you don't have any desire to sleep in the same room with me. But maybe we could just fix up one of the spare bedrooms."

Jacqueline looked away.

"And that way," Kevin said, "I could maybe bring over a date, if I have one, and we'll all be out of each other's way. We could all have breakfast together in the morning. No, that won't be too awkward at all."

"You don't have to be sarcastic."

"The house is going to be sold."

Jacqueline stirred the ice around in her tea with the straw. "Would you come with me to see Michael Percival?"

Kevin's brow furrowed. "You want me to go see a psychic."

"He's a medium. Kevin, you read one of his books. I think he's on the level. More so than most other psychics. He can communicate with the dead—"

Kevin sighed.

"Well," Jacqueline said, powerless to stop the anger from seeping into her voice now, "I'm going to see him in Tampa. In October. With or without you. I figured you would have welcomed the chance to speak to your daughter one more time, but I guess I was wrong."

"How much is he charging? More to the point, how are you going to afford this?"

"That's all you have to say? I bring up communicating with Michelle and you're more concerned with the money? Don't worry, it won't cost you a thing. A friend set it up for me. For us."

"That guy 'friend' of yours."

Jacqueline sat back in the booth. She wanted to fling her iced tea in his face. "Yeah, that guy 'friend' of mine. Darren. He's sort of my version of Sylvia."

Kevin did not take the bait. His face maintained its expression of mild irritation. "What exactly are you doing?"

"What do you mean?"

"What do you hope to get out of this? Assuming this guy is on the level and he can talk to spirits, what exactly are you looking for? Absolution?"

"I want a chance to speak to the daughter I lost. But I suppose that doesn't interest you."

"And what will she say to us that you don't already know, Jacqueline? That she loves us? That what happened wasn't your fault, wasn't anyone's fault? We already know all this. Why do you have to put yourself through some wrenching emotional..." He cleared his throat as the waitress brought his sandwich.

When the waitress departed, Kevin leaned forward. "Don't ever tell me or insinuate to me that I don't love my daughter as much as you do. Don't ever do that."

"I wasn't trying to do that."

"I don't know what's going on with you. You want to close the door on a big, ugly part of your past—and I guess disposing of me is key to that. Fine. But at the same time you keep peeling back the scab. What is it that you want? Do you want a fresh start or not? I think you have to make a choice, otherwise you're going to drive yourself crazy. It's definitely not fair to the next man in your life. I think he deserves to know where you're coming from."

Kevin took a bite of his chicken sandwich and sighed. "I told her no pickles," he said, picking off the pickles.

It was then that Jacqueline understood, with astonishing clarity, that her marriage was now over. Even after Kevin had moved out, and even after he filed the paperwork with his lawyer friend Josh Culberson, she could still sense a frayed but nevertheless tangible connection between them. She could see it in Kevin's sad, longing-filled looks, in his thankless performance as her long-suffering, hand-wringing handmaiden.
Whatever you want, Jacqueline, whatever you need—just please keep me in your life.
That had seemed to be his philosophy. A few months ago he had called her and with an awkward formality had asked her out to dinner at an expensive restaurant in Chagrin Falls. He had sounded like a nervous high school boy asking out the girl of his dreams.
Keep me in your life
. But now that was all done, and Jacqueline felt like weeping for the man she had hurt and now had lost. There was a businesslike curtness to him now. He was guarded and wary with her, and he would no longer reach across the table and take her hand the way he used to do. Why would he? She had starved him and discarded him. Treat anyone like that—treat even the most loyal golden retriever like that—and the love and trust would go away. There wasn't even any confusion and resentment in his eyes now, there wasn't that expression of
Why did you hurt me?
She supposed she had been ignoring him for so long that she hadn't noticed he had already passed through that stage and was on to the next chapter of his life—the first chapter without her.

The next afternoon she was supposed to drop off a wok at her parents' house in Shaker Heights. Since her mom retired last year after more than thirty years as a nurse, she had rediscovered her love for cooking. The more exotic the better. Gone was the baked chicken and mac and cheese from Jacqueline's childhood; hello, Cantonese duck and fried calamari in white wine sauce.

When she pulled into the driveway, Jacqueline noticed the cars at the curb. They were familiar. In fact, she could have sworn the red Cavalier was Allison's.

In the kitchen, her mom sat at the table with Allison and Kayla.

"Hi," Jacqueline said. She suddenly felt ill at ease. The last time her mom had ever socialized with Allison and Kayla was at Michelle's funeral. All three women looked solemn, like mourners at a wake. "What are you two doing here? What's wrong?"

"You brought it," her mom said, taking the wok. "You're an angel. Want something to drink?"

"I'm fine. What gives? Did someone die?"

"We wanted to talk to you," Allison said. Although Allison tended to dress a bit more suggestively than was appropriate for a stay-at-home mom in her mid-thirties, her apparel today was surprisingly sedate—jeans and an old Genesis concert t-shirt.

"Kevin called me," Jacqueline's mom said. She sat down again at the table, trying to smile but managing something that could best be described as a grimace. "Last night. He called Allison too. Why didn't you tell me you lost your job?"

"I was going to tell you eventually."

"He also told Allison you think your house is haunted," Kayla said.

Jacqueline stared at Kayla, a girl she had known since junior high. Kayla's large, soulful eyes seemed a bit too watchful today, as if she were afraid Jacqueline would make some sudden, threatening move, like a violent mental patient. She is actually afraid of me, Jacqueline thought. They had had sleepovers, Jacqueline had listened to her moan about all the boys who'd dumped her over the years, Jacqueline had been maid of honor at her wedding, and now Kayla was afraid of her.

"And what's this about going to see some psychic?" Allison said. "I mean, with all that's going on in your life now, why are you getting involved in 'that kind of stuff?"

"'That kind of stuff'? What is that supposed to mean?" Jacqueline said. Then she got it—the metaphorical lightbulb flickered into dim life over her head. This was an intervention. "Where's Dad?"

"At the mall," her mom said, sighing. "He had some huffy notion that we were all going to beat up on you. But all we're trying to do is express our concern for you. We just want you to take a good look at all the things that have been happening in your life. Maybe you need to, you know, take a step back. Maybe talk to someone...."

"You mean a therapist."

"Jackie, you just lost your job," Allison said. "You're getting divorced from a man who would've died for you. And now you keep talking about ghosts and psychics and talking to Michelle. It isn't healthy. And this guy you're hanging around with—I don't know the whole story, but Kevin made it sound like he's kind of enabling you with all this stuff."

This guy
. She made Darren sound like some scuzzy salesman in a cheap suit she met in a bar somewhere. And why the hell was Kevin telling Allison any of this? It was none of her goddamned business. "Answer me this," Jacqueline said. "You and Mark, you still go to that church every Sunday, right?"

Allison blinked. "Yeah. But what does that have to do—"

"Every Sunday you go there and you hear about Jesus, how he rose from the dead and absolved everybody of their sins and gave us eternal life, all that fairytale mumbo-jumbo. You believe all that, don't you? I mean, you wouldn't go there if you didn't, right?"

"What is your point?"

"You believe in life after death and Jesus and heaven," Jacqueline said, "you take your kids there and have that stuff force-fed into their brains, but for some reason my belief in life after death and ghosts and mediumship is unhealthy. I just want to make sure I'm getting the scope of your hypocrisy here. Or maybe it's not really hypocrisy. Maybe it's just that you haven't put any actual thought into your religion. It just goes in one ear and out the other. It's just the suburban thing to do on Sunday morning. It's no more meaningful than an hour at Pottery Barn."

"Jacqueline," her mom said sharply. "There's no call for this."

"All we're asking," Kayla said, "is that you just consider talking to someone. Yes, a therapist. There's no shame in that. When I had postpartum depression, I talked to someone."

Jacqueline looked at her. "Know how many fucking therapists I talked to after Michelle died? Know what most of them said? They said one of the best things a person can do in cases like this is be proactive. Not just sit around. This is what I'm doing."

"Losing your job is being proactive?" Allison asked.

"No, but getting a job is," Jacqueline said. "'That guy' you just sneered at actually set me up with a technical writing job at his company. And how I pursue my beliefs in ghosts or the afterlife is really no concern of yours. Unless you want me to get in your face about things that concern me about your life." For the second time that afternoon, the epiphanic lightbulb came to life and Jacqueline could see why these three women were so insistent on her seeing a shrink.