Green Fairy (Dangerous Spirits) (33 page)

There are many things one might see in the painting. The fox’s nudity and demure pose suggest romantic meanings: as he is caught between staying and leaving, perhaps love is always in such an unsettled state. As the fox’s bright green eye is staring off beyond the autumn trees, perhaps love is always looking toward that which is unattainable. As the red and gold leaves show the autumn and the dying of the trees, perhaps love is arriving just before the moment of death. But Niki sees in it a message for him, and him alone: You are about to leave me, and so I am leaving you first.

And yet, it is the loveliest thing Henri has painted, and Niki finds wrapped around the emptiness in his heart a gladness that his friend completed it before he died.

Sol woke with a heaving sob, his pillow wet. His eyes were sore, the fur around them as wet as the pillow, and his throat felt scratchy and raw. His alarm was silent; the whole house was silent, but the light outside bathed his room in a soft glow. The dream enfolded him as surely as did his soft sheets, the taste of the rope against his tongue, the weight of his dead friend in his arm, the question howling through his mind:
why, why, why?
And, worse than the question, the answer, in the painting itself.

Sol clutched his pillow to his face. He saw the paintings all around the studio in the daylight, awake for the first time, but he could not remember details of any of them, none except for the painting of the fox. There had been soft colors and landscapes, faces, and the dead eyes and slack jaw of Henri. The chill of the artist’s studio worked its way into Sol’s fur, adding shivers to his sobs. He pulled his sheet around him, but the chill was inside him, and the sheets did nothing to warm him. Grief filled his chest, broke through his throat in a keening cry no matter how he tried to muffle it with the pillow.

He’d thought the grief of Cireil’s death was bad; this was a hundred times worse. There was no questioning the reality he was grieving, not when the smell of death curled through his nose, the chill of the rain lingered on his skin, the anguish burned all through him. His chest heaved, sending sparks of pain through his ribs as he sobbed against the fabric, sheets clutched in his fists. He heard Henri’s words from his dreams, the rat’s passion for art and for Niki: gone, gone forever now.
Death comes for us all.
Sol could see the rat placing the noose around his neck, thinking himself alone in the world, despairing, falling, dying.

Yesterday, he had looked at the bathtub with that same thought, with no regard for the people in his life. That was when Niki’s shadow had come and stopped him, and the fury made sense now. Niki had been through this before, had lost Cireil and Henri in the span of a few days, and he would not let Sol make the same mistake Henri had. Sol felt hot, his nose running and eyes still streaming tears, and this was what he had been about to inflict on his mother, his father, Meg and Natty. Uncle Nolan’s howling grief over losing his son did not seem ironic, nor desirable, nor anything but pitiable now. Even though Sol hadn’t really been thinking of killing himself, not more than a passing image, he had been serious about running away from home. What would his mother have thought when she came home and found him gone without saying good-bye, without telling them where he was going or why or that he loved them? Look at how Tsarev had reacted, and he barely knew Sol.

The young wolf rubbed at his eyes and nose again. Grief and hurt still wrapped around his chest, tightening a vise around his lungs. His breaths came shallow, and still came with sobs. Every time he closed his eyes against the blur of tears, he saw the body of the black rat in his arms—in Niki’s arms. And then he thought, what came back from the dream this time?

He wiped his nose and sniffed the air, looked around his room. There was no red dress, no white robe, no filthy rope. There was no smell of rat, of rain, of paint. Had the absinthe not given him any hallucination this time? Why would this time be any different?

Perhaps the story was over, and this was how it ended: with Niki alone and cold amid the smell of death. Nothing had come back because there was nothing left to bring back.

A different grief sent Sol into another paroxysm of sobs. He rubbed tears from his muzzle, tried to take deep breaths to calm himself, and finally the constriction around his chest loosened, just a bit. He felt he was gaining control of himself, until the worst thought of all occurred to him: what if the thing that had come into the world from his dream this time was death?

He sat up in bed, eyes wide, paws clasped together. He squeezed his muzzle shut, trying not to let the tears out again, telling himself he was being crazy, irrational, but then he saw the rolled-up painting and he couldn’t hold it in. He made a strangled half-sob and grabbed at his phone so roughly that he knocked it to the floor. The image from the dream remained clear, but changed: now he saw Meg’s face on the body cradled in Niki’s arms, felt the stabbing in his heart as though she were the one who was gone.

He dove to the floor, hanging off the bed, and called up her entry to send a text message. He mistyped the simple message,
Are you OK?
, four times before he got it right. She wouldn’t be up yet, but hopefully she’d answer. Of course she was all right, though. She had to be.

But if Meg was all right, then—then what? His parents? He braced his arm against the floor, ignoring the twinge in his ribs, replaced his phone on the nightstand, and was just contorting himself to get out of bed when his mother knocked on his door.

“Sol?” she called softly.

“Mom!” he yelled, unable to help himself. Relief washed over him, so welcome he tried to jump out of bed and got tangled in the sheets again. This time, at least, he didn’t fall, but when his mother came into the room, he was hopping on one leg, pulling his other foot out of the sheets.

“Are you okay?” she said. “I heard—”

He leapt across the empty duffel bags still lying on his floor and threw his arms around her. She wore a thick terrycloth robe, not the soft cotton of the robe in his dreams, but Sol pressed his muzzle against the shoulder and rubbed his eyes on it anyway. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Mom.”

“For what, honey?” Her paw came up to stroke his ears, the other arm holding him. Her scent washed over him, loosening the last of the tightness around his chest.

His breathing slowed and his tail relaxed from its tight curl. “I…” He looked down at the empty bags, and the words spilled out of him. “I was gonna run away.”

Her eyes widened, but she didn’t say anything, just kept him in her embrace, cupping his ears and rubbing at their base. He swallowed. “I was just so frustrated, and I hate the peach cannery and Uncle Nolan and the fight at school and the baseball team and they’re always picking on me…”

He stopped, aware that he was starting to feel like a cub who couldn’t handle his own problems. But his mother nuzzled him and kissed him on the bridge of his nose. “I’m glad you didn’t run away,” she said softly. “I know it’s hard, and I know it seems like forever, but it’ll get better.”

“I know.” Sol hugged her tighter. “I just didn’t want to wait.”

“Oh, honey.” She rocked him back and forth. “Why don’t you stay home again today? I’ll tell your father you’re still feeling sick.”

It was a little humiliating, being coddled like a cub. Stay home, avoid all your problems, and Mom will take care of them. But it was also another vast wave of warm relief to have his mother caring so strongly for him. “Okay,” Sol gulped.

“I’ll call in and see if I can stay home with you. If not, I’ll leave you some chicken soup. Okay?”

“Yeah.”

He loosened his hug. She stepped back and wiped the fur around his eyes delicately. “Promise me something, though.” He nodded. “If you really, really can’t see any solution but running away, come talk to me. We’ll work something out.”

“Wh-what about Dad?”

“We’ll handle your father.” She smiled and patted his shoulder. “Promise?”

He gulped and nodded. “I promise.”

She paused and looked him in the eye. “Is there a reason I should be worried? If something happened to you, you’d tell me, right?”

He almost did, but his legs were still shaking and he felt weak all over. Besides, Carcy was gone, well gone, and telling his mother one thing would open up too much more for right now. “No. I mean, I would, but…I’m okay.”

“Okay. Now go back to bed. I’ll bring you up some toast.”

“With honey?”

“Tch.” She smiled, and as she walked out of his room, her tail wagged slowly.

Sol climbed back into bed, still feeling shaky. Of course she would have noticed his bags, anyway. Not to mention the clear bottle with its finger-height of green liquid, sitting on his desk next to the cloudy glass. But she hadn’t said anything. Maybe, maybe, she hadn’t noticed.

He was glad his mother hadn’t asked questions about how he’d planned to run away. That was the one thing he still could not bring himself to tell his parents. There was no need to, after all. He still felt ashamed of himself for how he’d been duped, how he could have let someone like Carcy into his heart. It hadn’t taken much time at all to figure out that there wasn’t much love there; the ram just wanted a young guy to fuck, and Sol’d almost let it happen. He would have, if not for Niki.

His mother brought toast with honey and some tea, and if she noticed the absence of the absinthe bottle, she still said nothing. “The office says I can work from home today, so I’ll just be downstairs,” she said. “Call me if you need anything.”

Sol reached for his phone to text Meg, just as his father looked in briefly to say, “See you, champ. Get better soon,” and Sol smiled, with a thumbs-up. When the door closed, he picked up his phone again. Meg still hadn’t written back, and he knew she had to be awake now. Probably she’d be on the bus. He called her phone directly, and got no answer.

She was ignoring him. Of course that was all it was.

To convince himself, he went over the events of the previous night, the way he’d treated Meg to get the absinthe from her. He’d stalked to her house in the middle of the night, acting crazy and obsessed. She, too, had been looking forward to getting away and now was stuck here in Midland, stuck through no fault of her own but only through his actions. She’d wanted to talk about getting out, and he hadn’t spent time commiserating with her, asking her what she would do, caring at all about how she felt. He’d only demanded the drug that would make
him
feel better. She already had to deal with parents who were stoned all the time, who left her to her own devices, and then he’d left her just as alone.

She would be in class by this time. He sent her another text, which also received no answer. She was ignoring him, she was right to ignore him. The cold core of his dream was his and his alone. He had not brought back Henri’s fate to her, he had
not
.

As penance, he applied himself at his computer, spending hours reading passages from the books Meg had recommended. When he’d read so much his head was buzzing, he wrote short essays on the world of Montmartre in 1901: The Lively Community of Artists, The World Outside, and The Struggles To Survive, including the squalid atmosphere he’d seen in his dreams. That was the most difficult part to write. He set down a vivid description of Henri’s cramped studio, writing that many artists shared rooms to save on rent, and sometimes used their roommates as subjects. And sometimes, he wrote, sometimes the world seemed so forbidding that they could not bear it.

Twice he tried to write an essay about a fictional black rat artist, made up as an example. Twice he reached the end and sat staring at the screen for five minutes, unable to write any more. No words he set down adequately conveyed the horror of the stained old rope, the gruesome body dangling from it, the spirit that had animated so many beautiful paintings gone, the paintings themselves lost forever. If Henri had been real and had painted so much work, how many other artists had lived and died and been forgotten? How many lives had ended with no-one to notice them, no-one to care for them? Sol wrote some maudlin closing paragraph and then erased it and lay on his bed staring at the ceiling for fifteen minutes.

It was five in the afternoon when he had written as much as he thought he could, taking a break every hour to text Meg even though she did not respond. The tightness in his chest had lessened but by no means gone, and Sol did not think that going downstairs to watch TV would help. He had to tell her about his dream so that she would understand.

But when he opened a blank document intending to write her a letter, the first words he wrote were, “Once there was a fox named Niki, who wanted to be a dancer. His father wanted him to be a soldier, and so Niki ran away from his family and his home.”

Sol rubbed the back of his paw over his eyes. He had meant to start by telling Meg about the world of his dreams and introducing Niki. He read the words he had just typed, and he did not erase them. When he set his fingers back to the keys, he felt the words come to him. He let them come, typing until his parents came home.

After dinner, after another text to Meg that went unanswered, Sol saw his e-mail indicator blinking. Tsarev had sent him an e-mail message.

Dear Sol,

I guess since you were not in class today that means you have gone. I wanted to wish you very good fortune. I am sorry that I did not get the chance to talk to you more often. I think you are nice wolf but you are lonely like me sometimes. I have host family here, and I have one friend in Samorodka, which is my home, but I do not have friends to talk to here. Many people are nice because I am not from here, but being nice is not like being friend.

It is difficult to talk in person about this. I do not know how to find people who might be okay to talk about it with. You were very kind and in the problems you were having with other boys, I saw problems I used to have in Samorodka, and I thought you will understand. Also I thought that it is easier because you are not here now. I am sorry I could not talk to you before. I hope you will understand me.