The Bird Eater (14 page)

“I guess that’s why I’m here, why I’m so quick to toss aside my existing life for something new, something that includes you. Because it’s what I’ve always wanted.”

Again, she looked away, unable to handle his silence, his lack of movement.

“I know you aren’t going to stay here forever,” she said quietly. “I guess there isn’t much of a point to any of this. I just needed to tell you in case you decide to leave without saying goodbye.”

His lack of response was unnerving. She had to get out of there before she threw herself at him, had to leave before she started weeping like an overzealous mourner, embarrassing herself more than she already had.

Wobbling to her feet, she noticed that he had moved away from the counter and was now standing not more than two feet away, his hands gripping the top of one of the chairs.

“You regretted not having a chance to tell me,” he murmured. “So tell me now.”

A rush of heat burned the backs of her eyes. She had already been on the verge of tears, but they were coming in a mad rush now. Cheri turned away from him, pressing her hands to her face. Why was he doing this to her? He was married but he wasn’t; he wanted her to go but also to stay; he wanted her to spill her guts but he didn’t want to respond.

“Why?” she asked, wiping at her eyes, refusing to look at him, afraid that if she did she’d burst into full-on sobs.

“Because I need to hear it.”

“So you can tell me it doesn’t matter?”

He went quiet at that. She shook her head at the silence.

“No,” she finally decided. “I’ve said too much. Call me. Just call me if you really want to know.”

Twisting away from him, she gathered her purse and moved into the hall that would lead her to the front door. She faltered when she reached it, tossing a glance over her shoulder. Aaron was at the opposite end of the hall, staring down its length to where she stood. She wanted to repeat her request.

Please call me…just call me tomorrow and I’ll tell you everything. If you call me tomorrow, I’ll know I’m not in this alone.

But all she managed to eke out was “Sorry about lunch,” before ducking into the early afternoon heat.

Aaron sat on the living room sofa with his hands folded in front of him, his eyes fixed on the camcorder’s blinking red light. His mind raced as the device recorded his stasis, his thoughts tumbling over themselves too quickly to process. It was too much. Too much.
Too fucking much to deal with.
This wasn’t why he had come to Ironwood. This wasn’t what he had hoped to find.

“There’s no silence here.”

He spoke to the empty room, documenting his thoughts as he tugged on the hem of his stretched-out T-shirt, his hair a mess. Seeing his reflection on the small LCD screen, he realized he looked ragged, nearing the bottom of a downward spiral.

“No silence,” he murmured. “It’s louder here than it was back home.”

He shoved his fingers through his hair, exhaled a tired breath.

“I’m drinking again.”

He scoffed at that, as if it were the most pathetic thing he’d heard himself say in a while.

“The Ativan is nearly gone. Not really sure what the hell I’m going to do when that happens. Probably drink more.”

He shook his head helplessly.

“Cheri…I haven’t been so happy or so terrified to see someone from my past in my entire life. Miles could break me in half, but she comes here anyway, tells me these things about how I’ve haunted her, how she’s never been able to forget, and I’m left standing here like…What do I say to that? What do I do?”

He pressed his fingers against his eyelids, dropping his hands after a moment, his palms slapping his knees.

“What do I fucking do?”

Silence.

“Evan isn’t coming back. Not unless I figure out how to rouse the dead. And these nightmares…or daymares…or hallucinations…or whatever the hell they are. I don’t understand them. None of it makes sense. Am I just seeing this shit because it’s in my head, or…”

A pause of consideration.

“It has to be in my head.”

He leaned back, drew his hands down his face, tilted his head up to the ceiling.

“Maybe I do need meds. Not everyone recovers from grief, right? Maybe I’m not supposed to be able to work through this.”

He leaned into the camera, his elbows against his knees, his head in his hands. Closing his eyes, he sat motionless for a long moment, fingers tangled in his hair.

“But if what I’m seeing is real, maybe that means that Ryder is here. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense. Paranormal or not, things can’t just be random. There has to be some sort of logic, some sort of order. If Ryder’s name is showing up on my car door, on that kid’s name patch, that means Ryder is putting it there. And wouldn’t that be incredible?”

His gaze flitted to the camera, then away, unsure of his own train of thought.

“The dead reaching out to the living; my son, my little boy…”

He chewed on a knuckle, contemplating it.

“What if insanity is just a heightened sense of perception? Or maybe crazy
is
crazy and I’m losing my sh—”

A noise sounded in the background, like something heavy falling down the stairs.

Aaron’s gaze darted to the hallway. He was frozen where he sat, but his breathing picked up the pace. He eventually got up from the couch, the camera focusing in on the faded knees of his jeans, continuing to record as he moved out of frame.

There was a subtle creaking of floorboards beneath Aaron’s weight.

The camcorder picked up the whine of the bottom step as he began to climb.

It focused, then refocused on the crocheted blanket thrown across the back of Edie’s couch, bright hand-stitched blooms giving the dimly lit room a misplaced sense of joy.

But the picture went fuzzy as the camera struggled to keep the image sharp, eventually focusing beyond the sofa and onto the back wall and the two windows on either side of the front door.

A shadow shifted in one of the corners.

A shadow shaped like a boy.

Thirteen

Aaron had fallen asleep on the couch again—it felt safer on the ground floor, easier to react to a cacophony of slamming doors or the ghostly thud of what he imagined his aunt had sounded like while tumbling down the stairs to her death. Sleeping with his head propped against one of the sofa arms at a ninety-degree angle resulted in a nice jolt of neck pain the moment he tried to sit up. He winced, sucked in a breath, and played possum for a few seconds longer, as though staying perfectly still would somehow coax his muscles into relaxation.

His gaze zeroed in on the television beyond the coffee table littered with stuff: a paper plate smeared with pizza sauce, four empty beer bottles, the camcorder, and his gun. The TV had been left on all night—another newfound coping mechanism. Its dancing blue shadows had been comforting, but now he could hardly see the picture on the screen beneath the glare of the morning sun. What he
could
see was the scrim of dust that continued to cling to furniture he had thoroughly cleaned. He’d polished that old coffee table a few times since he had arrived, but the dust seemed to meander from room to room like a lazy cat, lounging on whatever it deemed convenient and comfortable. It was as though the house didn’t want to be renovated, happy in its current state of disrepair.

He steeled his nerves and pushed himself up to sit, immediately greeted good morning by wrenching pain. Slapping a hand against the side of his neck, he squinted against the sun, rolled his head from side to side, and threw his weight forward to get to his feet.

In the kitchen, he put on a pot of coffee and leaned tiredly against the counter as it percolated. He’d work on the front porch first—strip the old paint off of the boards with a chisel before it got too hot to breathe. Once the heat became stifling, he’d drive to Bennie’s for another bacon cheeseburger. It had been a day since he had seen Cheri, and he still wasn’t sure what to do. He crossed his fingers that a morning of vigorous manual labor and a belly full of red meat would help him reach a verdict on whether to call her or not.

Hot mug in hand, he slid into a chair and sipped his coffee while checking the news and the weather on one bar of reception, scrolling through his list of contacts, stopping on Cheri’s name. Again, he found himself unsure. Acceptance would mean taking a significant step away from Evangeline. Rejection would leave him where he was when all he wanted was to be somewhere else. It shouldn’t have been a difficult decision. Evangeline wasn’t coming back and Cheri was right there, smiling her half smile, tossing her hair over a shoulder, looking at him with longing that both excited and scared him.

She had built him up in her mind—a ghost from her past—dark and mysterious and probably far more interesting than he actually was. As far as Aaron was concerned, there was nothing interesting about him—at least, nothing beyond the shit that had turned him into a wreck, beyond the fact that he was potentially losing his mind. He placed his phone on the table and stared at its glowing screen.

He’d call her, but not yet.

He needed to think, had to give himself time to decide.

Sitting at Bennie’s Burgers, Aaron let his gaze wander across the street to the hollow shell that had once been Ironwood High. He tried to enjoy his bacon cheeseburger but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the shattered front windows and the darkness that dwelled beyond.

What if the Grim Reaper is in there?

Eric’s words echoed in Aaron’s ears.

What if he’s in there, waiting for his body count?

And then there were the crows; not one, but two gorgons watching at him with their beady black eyes, cawing at him, inching closer, making him feel claustrophobic, as though they knew; as though they were galled by their brother’s inopportune fate.

Unnerved, Aaron gathered up his food and locked himself in the Tercel, took a bite of his burger, and slouched in his seat. He let his head loll back against the headrest and stared at the upholstered ceiling. One of the crows hopped onto the hood, its taloned feet scratching the paint. Aaron honked the horn to scare it off, but it didn’t even flinch—it simply continued to tap dance on the Toyota’s hot hood, as if challenging him to come out into the open and try to chase it off.

Aaron pictured the second one preparing to jet through the plastic sheeting that covered his broken window. He imagined it bursting through his thin veil of false security, scratching and pecking and screaming until Aaron couldn’t see it anymore; blind and bleeding, nothing but holes left where his eyes had been.

He shuddered.

Shoved the key into the ignition.

Ended up in the parking lot across the street from Vaughn Mechanical, the car smelling of ketchup and curly fries.

Cheri was a bad idea, but he needed her. She was the one who was going to set him straight, the person who would help him move on. If he could just get past the guilt, past his broken heart, he was sure these crazy visions would cease. He’d be normal again. He’d stop drinking and sleep would finally come. But he needed Cheri to help him get there. Without her he had no one; without her, he felt as though he was as good as dead.

He sent Cheri a text message
:
Across the street. Can you talk?

Less than thirty seconds later, a reply:
Follow me.

A few minutes passed before Cheri walked out of the shop, casually climbed into her Ford, and drove north. Aaron pulled onto the road behind her, the bacon cheeseburger sitting heavy in his stomach. Grabbing for the cup of cola in the center console, he sucked down four successive gulps of Coke, wishing it were something other than soda, something that could soothe his nerves.

This was insane.

If Miles found out…

But Aaron couldn’t allow that to matter. He was losing his grip, needed someone to ground him and keep him calm, to sit with him and hold his hand and tell him that all the shit he was seeing was just an illusion, that all the stories that surrounded his aunt’s old house were exactly that, just stories, a bunch of bullshit, nothing more.

Cheri eased her Thunderbird into a gas station parking lot. Aaron pulled up to a pump and waited while she parked along the side of the convenience store, but rather than walking over to him directly, she went inside instead. He stared at his gas gauge—over half-full—and nervously drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. Cheri sauntered out of the store a minute later, a domed ICEE cup clasped in her right hand. She shimmied across the parking lot to Aaron’s Tercel, pulled the passenger door open, and slid inside like she’d done it a hundred thousand times before.

“Hi,” she said, then arched an eyebrow at him. “Is that a sunburn?” She reached out to touch his cheek, then pulled her hand back, as if not wanting to overstep.

“Forgot the sunblock yesterday,” he confessed.

“Still working nonstop, then?”

“No rest for the wicked,” he said.

“It smells like fries in here.” Glancing down to the center console in search of a place to put her cup, she quirked a smile at the Bennie’s Burgers cup. “You’ve discovered the pride and joy of Ironwood, I see.”

“Eric introduced me,” Aaron told her, then pulled out of the bay.

Cheri stuck the bright red straw in her mouth and stared out the window, pointing him in the direction she wanted to go. Once they were on the highway, she fiddled with the radio, stopped on a classic rock station, and casually reached out to let her ice-cold fingers drift across his hand.

“I’m glad you texted me,” she said. Their eyes met momentarily, and then they both looked away. Aaron was nervous, but so was she.

They ended up in the southernmost part of Missouri, just twenty miles shy of Ironwood proper, like two star-crossed lovers making a run for the border. Under Cheri’s guidance, Aaron turned off the highway and onto a dirt road that stretched for miles. He wasn’t convinced they were heading anywhere at all, but Cheri assured him they were going in the right direction. She called it her secret spot. Aaron didn’t ask how she had found it or who she had been with when the discovery had been made. He didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to know.

The road ended without warning, disappearing into a bank of towering pines. Aaron pulled off to the side of the road and they climbed out, Cheri leading the short hike down a steep embankment until they were standing on a small lakefront beach, water stretching out so far ahead of them, the horizon swallowed it whole. It was beautiful, secluded, a perfect spot for a secret rendezvous that Aaron still didn’t know if he was ready for.

Cheri smiled at him, her mouth tinted cranberry red. “I told you it’s pretty.” She cradled her ICEE cup against her chest. “I bet if we had a boat we could follow the shore all the way back to Stonehenge.”

Taking a seat on the bank, she pulled her wedge sandals off her feet, and patted the sand for Aaron to join her. He felt like a kid at his first boy/girl party—queasy with nerves, jittery, like he was ready to jump out of his own skin. Sinking onto the bank, he fiddled with the laces of his sneakers, not able to decide whether he wanted to pull them off or leave them on for a quick escape.

“Will you talk to me now?” she asked after a pause, drawing her attention from the mirrorlike surface of the water to his face. “I can’t force you to tell me anything, but I wish you would.”

He stared down at his hands, contemplating her request. He wanted to tell her everything, but he honestly didn’t know where to start.

“How’re things at the house?” she asked. “I ran into Eric when I swung by Banner’s after work. He mentioned you were having issues with some kids?”

“One kid,” Aaron clarified. “He’s got it out for me. I don’t know…”

“Probably one of the house regulars,” Cheri told him. “I, um…”
She shrugged, as if embarrassed by her oncoming confession. “I used to swing by there a lot. Just random drive-bys, mostly.”

“Mostly,” he echoed. “What does that mean?”

She cleared her throat and gave him an apologetic look.

“You went inside?”

“Never with anyone,” she said softly. “And always during the day.”

A pang of aggravation ignited in his chest. That house belonged to his family; it was the scene of a tragedy, and what had Ironwood done? Broken out its windows and rifled through its rooms; made up gruesome stories and carelessly parked cars out on its front lawn. It turned his stomach to think that Cheri had been one of the people who had slunk through his house.

“I missed you,” she told him. “It was the only way I could think of to feel like you weren’t completely gone.”

“And the other kids?”

“What other kids?”

“The ones who would break in after dark.”

Cheri pressed her lips together in a tight line and looked down to the sand. “They didn’t mean anything by it,” she said after a long while. “The house was abandoned. Nobody thought anyone would come back for it. Nobody ever comes back.” Her words faded, replaced by a helpless shrug.

Aaron chewed on his bottom lip, afraid to ask the question balanced on the tip of his tongue, but he had to know. “And you? What do you believe?”

“About the house?”

Aaron nodded faintly, refusing to meet her gaze.

“I think it’s a bunch of bored kids making up stories to scare themselves. I think it’s good that you came back, because now they know they were wrong.”

“Wrong about me being the ghost,” he clarified.

Cheri went silent, and Aaron shook his head at the memory of Mr. Bass’s words.

You’re supposed to be dead.

“I tried to convince myself,” she said. “But I never could believe it. I guess if I had, I would have eventually let you go.”

Aaron swallowed, dragged his fingers through the sand. “There’s some truth to that rumor,” he told her. His stomach twisted as the words left his throat. It wasn’t something he talked about with anyone; it was a subject he even avoided talking about with Cooper, and Cooper had been there; Cooper had been the one who had pulled him back from the other side.

He tensed when Cheri placed her hand on his arm. It was cold, frozen from being wrapped around the plastic cup.

“What are you saying?” she asked, but all he could do was shake his head.

His throat tightened.

His muscles tensed.

He felt like, at any minute, he’d get up and run up the embankment back to the car.

Grabbing Cheri’s cup from between her knees, he sucked down some ICEE, willed it to give him strength.

“I know it isn’t my place,” she said, “but I know fixing up the house is just an excuse. Maybe things would start to get better if you finally admitted why you’re really here.”

He handed back her cup, his pulse vibrating the inside of his skull.

Cheri reached across his lap, gently caught his left arm in her cold fingers, and flipped it to reveal his scar. He winced, instinctively pulled his arm back, but the jagged line of puckered flesh remained visible. It was her way of telling him she knew more than he gave her credit for, a way of saying that she noticed more than he thought.

“Who is that?” she asked, nodding to the only color on that particular arm—the small golden owl perched on the branch of an otherwise dead-looking tree.

He stared down at that scar as if seeing it for the first time, the mere idea of telling her how his world had fallen apart enough to make his face flush hot. What was done was done, what was gone was gone, but saying it out loud…that would make all of this real. He was terrified of losing hope. He wanted to wake up in his house and realize this had been nothing but a nightmare: Evangeline in the kitchen making eggs and toast, Ryder pushing cast-iron cars along the rug while the TV flickered with Saturday morning cartoons.

Aaron leaned forward, his elbows hitting the curve of his knees. He pressed his hands to his face, pushed his fingers through his hair.

“I killed my son.”

The words eked out of his throat, wavy with pain.

The silence was horrible.