The Bird Eater (19 page)

His worry over Eric losing interest was unfounded; Eric never put more than a few car lengths between their bumpers, and by the time the gravel driveway crunched beneath Aaron’s tires, he felt strangely revived—his fear and disbelief numbed by a newfound sense of conviction and self-assurance. He
wasn’t
crazy. These things
were
happening. He had documentation, and more important, he had someone to show it to, someone who would take one look at it and validate all of his fears.

Yes, this house
is
haunted,
Eric would say.
I should know, I’ve been ghost hunting all my life. I run my own society. I know this stuff.

Eric was a believer, and that meant he was open to seeing the same things Aaron saw—shifting shadows, figures in the trees. Because that was one thing Evangeline’s infatuation with the paranormal had taught him: the ones who believed were more receptive to the other side.

He pulled up on the parking brake and jingled the keys out of the ignition before stepping into the warmth of the morning. It struck him every time, the odd feeling of trepidation despite the sunny weather. Fear was supposed to be born of nightshade and thunderstorms; it wasn’t supposed to exist beneath the blue of a summer sky. There should have been storm clouds on the horizon, at least
some
hint of forewarning, but all the skyline held were cottony tufts of white. Ryder would have called them bunny tails, and despite Aaron’s tension, their silver linings shot a thread of optimism through his unease.

Things were going to get better.

They were going to work out just as soon as someone else believed him, just as soon as someone else knew…

Eric hovered around the back bumper of Aaron’s car, keeping his distance until Aaron acknowledged him with a faint nod. When Aaron turned to face the house, he felt lucky to have Eric there. He would have never set foot back inside otherwise.

Not ever, and certainly not alone.

“Are you okay?” Eric asked, noting his hesitation.

Aaron nodded again and forced his legs to move, walking across the weedy front lawn and up the porch steps. When the front door swung open, he searched the corners for blots of darkness, but the front room looked as innocuous as the powder blue sky. Yellow slashes of sunshine cut through the sheer curtains and shone in long rectangles across the hardwood floor. Edie’s crocheted blanket winked at them from the center of the room, its kaleidoscopic colors inviting them inside. But Aaron couldn’t bring himself to move, cemented in place until Eric’s hand fell on his shoulder in silent reassurance that he would follow Aaron inside.

Aaron left the front door wide open behind them. It felt safer that way, like a kid leaving the light on in the hall, never completely closing the bedroom door; like sleeping on the side of the bed closest to the night-light, not daring to let arms or legs jut out from beneath the sheets. He moved around the couch, his heart sputtering at the sight of the camcorder on the floor. Crouching next to the coffee table, he gingerly plucked the device from the floorboards and slid onto the couch, fumbling with the buttons.

It’s broken
.

He swallowed against a lump of nerves.

Eric will never know what you know.

Gritting his teeth against his own pessimism, he pressed the power button, started to feel himself slip when nothing happened, started to spiral into a well of panic.

He’ll never know.

“What’s wrong?”

Eric sidled up to the couch and peered down at the camera in Aaron’s hands.

Aaron shoved a finger against the power button again, pushing it down as hard as he could, his lungs squeezing the air out of his chest with each failed attempt.

He’ll never know what you know.

“No,” he whispered dryly, refusing to accept the fact that the machine in his hands was defying him, that his sanity relied on this very thing, that the last thread of clarity would be cut because
he had panicked and dropped the goddamn camcorder on the floor.

“Hey.” Eric reached down, carefully pulling the device from Aaron’s hands. “Take a breath.”

Eric’s composure was baffling; the way he casually took a seat on the couch next to him, his expression cool and unshaken. It made Aaron want to scream. This recording was the only proof that he hadn’t lost his fucking mind, and Eric was looking at him like he was some overdramatic diva.

“Was this on the floor all night?” Eric asked.

Aaron stared at him, afraid to open his mouth in fear of all the things he wanted to say.

I smashed that kid’s face in.

I bashed his brains until they were splattered across the floor.

Eric snapped his fingers to bring Aaron back around. “Earth to Holbrook. Where’s the charger?”

“Kitchen,” Aaron murmured.

When Eric slid off the couch, Aaron couldn’t help but trail him, afraid to be out of arm’s reach. Eric stepped across the kitchen, approached the counter, grabbed the black cord plugged into the wall, and stuck the end into the camcorder’s electrical port. He gave Aaron a satisfied look, turning the device so that Aaron could see the glow of the tiny screen.

“It’s fine. No batteries, that’s all.”

Aaron opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was a stupefied laugh. He had been ready to lift the thing over his head and hurl it down between his feet, to smash it to bits with his bare hands while weeping hysterical, lunatic tears.

“What am I looking for?” Eric asked, holding the camera out to him.

Aaron squared his shoulders and composed himself as best he could. He didn’t want to see the footage again. He felt as though watching that corner of shadow transform into a child for a second time was too much like inviting the madness to stay.

Meeting Eric at the counter, he advanced the recording to the correct spot, skipped through the monologue he didn’t particularly want Eric to hear—that was Doc Jandreau territory—and paused it just as his image rose from the couch. He handed the camera back and offered Eric a look of apology.

No,
his expression said.
I won’t watch it with you.

There was a price to pay for watching implausibility defy reason, a price Aaron simply couldn’t afford.

He turned away, mutely moved to the table, and slid into his seat. He kept his gaze downturned, studying the grain of the wood before him, wondering if things like tables and walls and houses could be imprinted by the past. If he put his ear to the wood, could he hear his own laughter as he and Fletcher played checkers? Could he hear Edie singing Tom Petty songs while she stood over the stove? Was it possible that, if there wasn’t someone present to watch a soul pass from this side to the next, that soul could become trapped by the sorrow of that very spot; wasn’t that the theory behind ghosts?

Aaron narrowed his eyes at his hands, trying to play the scene in his mind: Edie home alone, tumbling down the stairs. He squeezed his eyes shut as the camcorder played back the thud that had roused him from the couch—a rolling thud, like something,
someone
falling from the second floor to the first.

His nerves bristled beneath his skin.

She had died alone.

Maybe she was the shadow that looked out the windows onto the world, the house that she had been so proud of now nothing but an eternal prison of the soul.

“Aaron?”

He glanced up.

Eric looked puzzled rather than terrified. He shook his head ever so slightly, not having to say a word.

Aaron already knew.

There was no shadow, no leering boy.

“I don’t see anything.”

Aaron looked away, his mouth quirking up into a weary half smile, the last thread of sanity pulling itself taut, threatening to snap and let him tumble, let him go for good.

“Of course there isn’t,” Aaron said.

His voice was hollow, vacant of the hysteria that was roiling inside his skull, and for a second he wasn’t sure the voice was his at all. The kitchen felt like it was growing smaller by the second, the walls pulling inward, his peripheral vision narrowing to pinholes, invisible hands pressing against the sides of his head, trying to collapse his skull.

Eric placed the camcorder on the table and pulled a chair around so he could sit. He studied the camera for a long while, as if trying to piece together a delicate way of telling Aaron he needed to be committed, that he shouldn’t be left alone.

“I know what I saw,” Aaron said, but he couldn’t meet Eric’s gaze.

If the recording showed nothing…

“What
did
you see?” Eric asked.

The kid had erased himself.

Or maybe he hadn’t ever been there at all.

“The shadow in the corner,” Aaron murmured, “the one beside the window; it changed after I got up.”

“What do you mean?”

“It rippled at first, and then…”

it turned into a boy who looked a lot like my son until it sneered with a mouth full of blood.

He went silent, the insatiable need for someone to help him understand suddenly gone; overwhelmed by a wave of realization that it would be easier, so much easier to go through with what he’d been intending for the better part of a year.

End it once and for all.

He was suddenly more exhausted than he’d been in his entire life.

He wanted to sleep.

Close his eyes forever without dreaming a thing.

Seventeen

If anyone had asked Cheri whether or not she was afraid of Miles Vaughn, she would have said no. It had been less than a day since their blowup—the worst one Cheri could recall—and things were already on their way back to being miserably normal. She had spent the majority of the morning sitting at her desk, staring out the window, listening to the echo of death metal spill in through the swinging door of the garage. The time she took away from her desk was spent outside in the shade of the shop, cigarette after cigarette burning down to the first knuckle of her index and middle finger. She wasn’t afraid of Miles, and she supposed that was exactly why she drove north past the restaurants on Main Street and ended up on Old Mill rather than picking up Miles’s lunch.

She sat in Aaron’s driveway for a long while as she chewed on a red fingernail, wondering how long things would continue this way—sneaking out of the office, driving a dozen miles to see a man she had pretended was dead, putting on a smile and trying not to argue with Miles when all she could think about was Aaron out here by himself.

Stepping out of the car, she sauntered across the grass, the spikes of her high heels sinking into the soft earth with each hip-swaying step. She clamored up the front porch stairs and knocked on the door.

No answer.

Cheri tossed a look over her shoulder at Aaron’s Tercel. Unless Eric had swung by to pick him up for lunch, Aaron had to be home. She knocked again, then moved around to one of the front windows, cupping her hands against the glass, trying to see inside through the sheer white curtains. The place looked empty, benign, but something about its stasis sent a chill down her arms. Aaron had scared her, not at all the man she had expected, so much more vulnerable than she’d ever imagined.

“Aaron?”

Cheri spoke through the glass, sure he’d be able to hear her. But still, there was no response. Anyone else would have shrugged their shoulders and left, but she couldn’t do it. Deep down she was a fatalist. When her cell phone rang in the middle of the night, her first thought was always that someone had died; when Miles wouldn’t get home till late, she pictured him trapped inside a mangled wreck on a backwoods road, hit by some insane drunk who hadn’t bothered to stop. And now, with Aaron not answering the door, she couldn’t help but imagine him upstairs somewhere, slashed wrists bleeding onto a hardwood floor; or maybe he was in the basement, slowly swinging from the rafters, his feet less than an inch from the ground.

She did an about-face, moved around the side of the house to the back, her own morbid thoughts setting her teeth on edge. She climbed onto the back porch, prepared to pound on the door or break a window to get inside. Lifting a hand, she curled her fingers into a fist and opened her mouth, ready to yell, but all the fight left her when she saw Aaron standing in the middle of the hallway, as though he’d been hiding there, waiting for her to leave.

Cheri closed her mouth, pressing her lips into a tight line.

She watched him as he considered his options, pasted on a wary smile, and eventually dragged his feet all the way to the kitchen door.

“Hey,” he said. “Sorry, I was sleeping.”

It was a lie and she knew it.

She eyed him and stepped inside, her gaze immediately stopping on the coffeemaker, the overwhelming scent of burned coffee assaulting her senses. Dropping her purse onto the counter, she stepped across the room and pulled the coffeemaker’s plug free of the wall socket. Then she turned to look at Aaron, considering calling him out on his lie, but the way he slouched into one of the kitchen chairs made her stop. For half a second she hardly recognized him. He looked so frail, almost ancient in how his shoulders slumped forward.

Cheri looked down at her feet, pressed her fingers to her mouth, then wordlessly let her hand fall to her hip. She nearly laughed at this whole ridiculous idea; if a girl wanted to have an affair, so be it, but it didn’t make sense to pick someone like Aaron, not in his state—yet she couldn’t bring herself to turn away.

Standing motionless with her arms coiled across her stomach, she waited for him to look up at her. It was only after he did that she spoke.

“Do you want me to leave?”

It took him a few seconds, but he managed to reply. “No.”

Cheri released the breath she was holding in and pushed away from the kitchen counter, pulled a chair out from the table more aggressively than she had anticipated, and sat down with a frown. Aaron had problems she couldn’t even begin to imagine, she understood that, but the fact that he was refusing help was enough to make her grit her teeth.

“Do you want me to leave?” she asked again, wondering if she wanted him to say yes, to give her permission to go without feeling guilty.

“I said no,” he said, staring down at his hands.

Her nerves sizzled.

It was the same noncommittal game he had played the last time she had been over: He didn’t want her to be there, but he didn’t want her to leave either. Stay and be ignored. Go and be resented. That, and she could smell him—that all-too-familiar scent she’d grown up with as a girl. He’d been drinking again.

“Then why won’t you look at me?” she asked.

When he failed to lift his eyes to hers, she reached out and caught him by the chin.

“Why won’t you look at me, Aaron?”

He twisted away from her grasp, calculating his escape.

“Why won’t you tell me what’s going on?” Her voice rose, trembling with emotion, on the verge of a full-blown yell. “What were you so scared of out on that beach? Why can’t you look me in the eye?”

“Because I’m afraid it won’t be you!” Aaron shouted and shoved away from the table, his chair toppling over behind him. “You want me to tell you what’s happening? I’m seeing things, that’s what’s happening.”

She winced as he waved his hands in front of his face like a demented street performer. He spun away a second later, leaving her to stare at his back.

Cheri lifted her hands as if in prayer. Her thumbs hooked beneath her chin, her eyes not once leaving the plain gray cotton of his T-shirt. She allowed the silence to draw itself across the kitchen, waited for the tension in his shoulders to visibly ease. It was only after the muscles of his back loosened that she spoke again.

“Sit down.”

He sat, and she stared at him for a long while before leaning back in her chair. It seemed like months ago when Aaron had first walked in to Vaughn Mechanical. But it hadn’t been months; it had been days. Aaron had looked better then, better
yesterday
than he did now. The hours between now and the last time she’d seen him had been particularly cruel.

He looked sick.

Haunted.

“You shouldn’t be out here by yourself,” she finally told him. “At least stay in town until the house is done.”

“Stay where?”

“Anywhere. Eric has an extra room,” she said softly. “I’m sure he would—”

“—let me impose?” Aaron shook his head. “I can’t leave anyway.” His gaze drifted across the walls of the kitchen before returning to his hands.

“Why not?”

She didn’t like the way he had said that, distant and weirdly dreamy, as though the place had wormed its way into his very core.

“I’m tied to this place.”

Cheri frowned at that word.

“What do you mean
tied
? By memory?”

“Or something.” He actually laughed, let his shoulders rise and fall in an eerily detached way. “Did you talk to Eric? Did he tell you what I did?”

She was suddenly uncomfortable; the air felt thick.

“What are you talking about?”

Cheri swallowed the saliva that had gathered at the back of her throat. There was something wrong, something beyond what had been wrong before.

“Baseball,” Aaron said, smiling down at his hands.

She sat silent in her chair, staring at him, desperate to pick apart exactly what part of him was “off.” There was something genuinely creepy about the way he was acting, something that made her think of how nice men sometimes turned into mass murderers, how seemingly normal people snapped and took guns to work or killed entire nuclear families.

She nearly jumped when he rose from his seat, but all he did was pace the room. Her hand pressed over her mouth as the vision of the man who had once been her best friend, her first love, began to crumble before her eyes. She was suddenly afraid. This wasn’t Aaron Holbrook—not the one she knew two decades ago, not the one who had been with her on the bank of Bull Shoals Lake the day before.

Gathering herself up, Cheri grabbed her purse and moved across the room to meet him by the refrigerator.

“Come on,” she said. “You aren’t staying here alone.”

Catching him by his arm, she began to pull him down the hall, desperate to get him out of that house, certain that if she didn’t she might never see
this
Aaron again. He was already half-gone. If she walked away now, he’d disappear completely.

Aaron pulled free of her grasp, but Cheri wasn’t one to give up easily. She’d threaten him with everything she had. If he ever wanted to see her again, he’d bend to her wishes; if she had to use guilt to get him moving, she’d remind him of how helpless she had felt when he had vanished, how much pain she had gone through as a girl, all because of him.

Unlocking the front door, she let it swing open before walking around the couch to where Aaron stood, wondering whether this was what he had looked like twenty-one years before—defiant, yet simultaneously unprepared to fight.

“Let’s go, okay?” she asked, trying to coax him closer to the door. “Let’s go talk to Eric, make arrangements. We’ll get your stuff later.”

He didn’t move.

“Let’s go to the lake,” she suggested, hoping that the memory of their visit would spur him on. “We’ll make some sandwiches and wait for Eric’s shift to be over.”

Aaron was staring down at the floor again, rooted to the ground, as though the house had snapped invisible shackles around his ankles. And his expression…it frightened her. His face flitted between indecision and flat-out mutiny, the corners of his mouth quirking up in a ghostly smile that disappeared a second later. Something was raging inside him, some battle that she couldn’t begin to understand; but she knew it would destroy him if she left him in that house, among those trees, nothing but a ribbon of concrete twisting through that lonely corner of the world.

“Aaron.” She whispered his name into the quiet. “You can’t stay out here by yourself. I won’t allow it.”

She caught him by the wrist for a second time, pulled him toward her, ready to drag him through the front door if only to get that weird, glazed-over look off of his face. But her dogged persistence was derailed by the sound of work boots stalking up the front porch steps. She twisted around, her gaze darting to the front door.

Miles stood in the open doorway, his arms at his sides, his hands balled into fists.

The air left her lungs.

She tried to speak, but it only resulted in her mouth forming the beginnings of an
M
.

No sound, just her lips pressed together like a stutterer attempting to form a sentence, sound that would never come.

Miles charged into the living room toward them both, grabbed Cheri firmly by the arm and shoved her aside before planting his fist against the side of Aaron’s face.

Aaron stumbled and fell back against the couch.

Cheri finally found her voice and screamed, “Miles, don’t!”

Miles pulled back for a second time, slamming his knuckles against Aaron’s mouth.

Blood stained the bottom curve of Aaron’s lips. A string of red spit slashed across his chin.

Miles stepped back, slapping his own chest as he sneered at Aaron’s bloodied face.

“Come on,” he challenged. “Get up and fight, you little prick.”

“Stop it!” Cheri yelled, but it did nothing to deter Miles from grabbing the front of Aaron’s T-shirt and hefting him up to his feet. Aaron wobbled, then took a few backward steps as he wiped at his mouth, but his eyes were steady on Miles, as if at any moment he’d spring forward and strike.

Cheri couldn’t decide which she wanted more, for Aaron to beat the hell out of her husband, or for Miles to simply turn away and go. The first option seemed unlikely; Miles was twice Aaron’s size.

Her eyes darted from her husband to Aaron’s wounded mouth. His nose was oozing blood so thick it nearly looked like tar. Her breath stuck in her throat when, rather than seeing a look of fear or even anger plastered across his face, she saw a smile that made her skin bristle with alarm.

Aaron was
grinning
, his teeth full of blood as he slowly circled the sofa, his eyes glinting in a way she hadn’t seen before—darkness radiating from his stare.

“Get out,” she said, turning to look at Miles. He needed to go. Something about him being there was making Aaron change. He was feeding off of Miles’s hostility.

Twisting to face her husband again, she gave Miles a shove toward the door.

“Are you fucking serious, Cher? You actually
want
this pathetic piece of shit?” He smirked. “The little bitch won’t even fight for you. You think he’s going to stick around?”

“Shut up,” she hissed. “Get out before I call the cops.”

“He doesn’t even have a job,” Miles protested, bending to Cheri’s push. “Who’s going to buy your fancy shoes and your premium smokes, huh? Who’s going to pay for that?
He
will? Fat fucking chance. He’s just going to disappear like he did before. Once a ghost,
always
a ghost.”

“Because that’s all you’re good for!” Cheri’s words exploded from her throat. “Shoes and cigarettes!”

Miles blinked, surprised by her abrupt declaration. He gave her a wounded look, and suddenly Cheri wanted to take it back. She covered her mouth as a sob tore from her throat. Backing away from her husband, she stood equidistant between them both. Her gaze jumped from the spots of blood on the floor to Aaron’s bleeding face—a future divorcee, a parent who’d lost a child. Their eyes met, and Cheri saw that disturbing spark again, one that made her question who Aaron Holbrook really was.