Blackbird Page 19

  “Movie night. I won’t even make you sleep on the couch.”

  Rory raised his eyebrows. He turned back to Eric, who was trying to change the music again. Their argument resumed, an amiable squabble that faded for Celia to white noise.

  “Did you get your scores yet?” Kate said.

  “Yes,” Celia said. “And there were no sixes, let me tell you.”

  “Only because you won’t try.”

  Celia wobbled her head. She supposed it was true. But college had always felt like a waste of time. Though she understood the point of university in Eric’s case—he planned to study engineering—she wasn’t sure why it mattered so much to Kate. Her family had been in the hotel business for generations; they could train her on the job.

  “It might be Kate herself who wants the degree,” Rory had said. “Something to hang on the wall.”

  “All that money and effort for wall art?” It wasn’t the way things worked in their home.

  “For ego,” he said, as if it were self-evident.

  In the seat next to her, Kate was brainstorming Celia’s career path.

  “You could study design,” she said. “Fashion design, or maybe interiors. It wouldn’t be like a real school.”

  “No?”

  “Not really. I mean, you wouldn’t have to study math or science or anything. You’d just—I don’t know, draw and learn about color schemes and how to put together a room.” Her face lit up. “You could design our hotels. My mom will be retiring soon. You could apprentice with her and work your way up. Maybe even take her place someday.”

  Celia leaned her head against the seat cushion. Design was a Katie word, a way of making something difficult out of what should be easy. When she got dressed, Kate was Putting Together an Outfit. She struggled into clothes and peeled them off and switched bras and shoes and accessories. Her bathroom contained an array of cosmetics, and she used it all: lipstick, mascara, eyeliner, even glitter sometimes, a wash of silver under her eyebrows. Dressing for Kate was a process, like building a beautiful, tight-fitting shell.

  Celia picked out her clothes for the sensual pleasure of wearing them. In the summer, she loved the feeling of light cotton skirts that brushed her bare legs, blouses that slipped across her breasts, long strands of beads that thumped against her chest and slid inside her neckline and all the way down her stomach, surprising her sometimes when they rolled cool as water across her nipple. She never understood why some colors matched or didn’t match, why you couldn’t mix stripes and plaid, why a hiking boot didn’t go with a peasant skirt or a scarf shouldn’t be worn around the thigh, the ends swaying like meadow grass against her calf. She never understood the point of being uncomfortable, not for a minute.

  None of that would make sense if she tried to explain it to Kate.

  Instead she shrugged. “You know me. Can learn, cannot be taught.”

  “You won’t get a job that way, though, Cee.”

  “I already have a job.”

  Kate clicked her tongue. “At the Hut. You won’t want to be making cappuccinos when you’re fifty.”

  “True. When I’m fifty, I’ll turn my talents to alcohol and become a bartender.”

  “You’re being stupid. You need a good job, something that’s going to pay the bills.”

  Rory turned around in his seat.

  “Celia’s smarter than any of us. Not everyone needs the fat stacks, Kate.”

  He smiled to take the sting out of the words, but Kate seemed to feel them all the same. She subsided into the corner, the thermos of coffee tucked like a child’s blanket against the side of her neck.

  * * *

  The base at Crested Butte was ninety-four inches deep, and they’d gotten a little more the previous night, a buoyant layer of powder that seemed to levitate them down the mountain, each languid turn whispering off the back of their boards. The snow was smooth and luminous as a sheet of silk, glittering in the sunshine, tinged blue with reflected sky.

  No one wanted to stop for lunch. No one wanted to stop at all. They found a trail through the woods and skied it single file, Celia pulling up the rear because she liked to stop sometimes and listen. The mountains here had a brighter sound than the dense hush of Telluride; the voices of children rang in the distance, and the squeak of the ski lift jumped around the snow so that she kept looking up, expecting to see it directly overhead. From the lower trail, a snowmobile droned and then faded away.

  At the bottom, they lined up for the last run of the day. Rory hung back to tighten his boot as Celia came up behind him. Kate waited ahead, next to Eric.

  Rory waved them on.

  “Go on up. We’ll be right behind you.”

  Celia saw the flash of disappointment in Kate’s face as she looked back from the lift. A moment later, Eric’s quick grin and an exaggerated eye roll.

  “You have an admirer,” Celia said, kicking the loose snow off her board as she and Rory swung into the chairlift. “Better sharpen your knife—you’ll be adding another notch to the bedpost.”

  Rory pulled off his glove and unzipped his pocket to pull out some lip balm. “Seems like you’re developing quite an edge yourself.”

  “You’re right. That was an awful thing to say.”

  “I like it. At least it’s honest for a change.”

  Celia lifted her face to the sun as the lift bore them gently up the hill.

  “You’ve been avoiding me,” Rory said. “You don’t want to be alone with me anymore.”

  “We’re alone now.”

  “Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Right, it’s just me. Me in fantasyland.” He jerked his glove back on. “You can be such a bitch, Cee.”

  Celia’s face flushed, and she felt a rush of tingly vertigo. She wrapped her arm around the bar of the chairlift.

  She often felt this way at night. Lying in bed, the velvety darkness pressing at her ears, the mattress would seem insubstantial all at once, and though she’d remind herself that you couldn’t fall when you were already down, she would sometimes grip the sheets so hard that her hands ached.

  At 2:00 a.m. the night before, she had given up on sleep and padded to the kitchen to make a cup of chamomile tea. As the first small bubbles began to vibrate inside the kettle, she heard Rory’s bedroom door open. A moment later, he appeared around the corner, blinking into the sharp light from the bulb over the stove.

  They’d met this way in the tiny kitchen a hundred times. She’d seen him just like this: rumpled and bare-chested, a cluster of knobby muscles above the waistband of his boxers, herself in a cotton nightgown—it happened all the time.

  But last night something was different. He stood looking at her, motionless and surprised as if he were holding his breath. Something about his stillness seized her attention, made her limbs heavy and her stomach queasily light. His gaze tilted slowly down her body, and his face filled with something like shock, as if he’d found her dead on the floor instead of propped against the stove making tea.

  She turned away, fumbling with the wrapper of her tea bag.

  Go away. Go back to bed, Rory. Go away.

  He edged up behind her, reached over her shoulder to get a glass from the cupboard. A hundred times before, they’d been here. A thousand. This was nothing new; this was nothing at all.

  But that night, his nearness made the hair rise on her arms, sent a chill across her skin. Her muscles had gone springy, unpredictable, like those of a small child. The wrapper crinkled in her hands.

  He closed the cupboard door but didn’t back away. She could feel his body—his whole body from his shoulders and all the way to the floor—push against the sliver of space between them. His hand next to hers gripped the edge of the counter, his fingers curl
ed under and the knuckles standing white against his skin.

  She didn’t move. Couldn’t breathe.

  He pressed his face to the top of her head.

  “Fuck, Celia.”

  The kettle began a petulant whistle. A cloud of steam poured from its spout. She reached quickly to pull it off the heat, and when she turned around, Rory was gone, the empty glass abandoned on the counter.

  Now Celia wound her arm more tightly around the bar. The snowboard tugged at her feet, so heavy that she was afraid its weight might drag her right out of the chair.

  “You’re my brother,” she said.

  “I’m not your brother,” he said quickly. “Not really.”

  “Maybe I want you to be.”

  “Really? Because if that’s what you want, then stop...stop...”

  His voice trailed off.

  The chair chattered over the last pole before the ramp at the top of the lift. Celia gritted her teeth and hung on.

  “Is it Eric?” he said.

  It didn’t sound like a question.

  At the top of the run, where Eric and Kate were waiting, Celia clamped down her binding and took off before Rory could say another word. She stayed right under the lift, the quickest way down, weaving a tight line through the bumps.

  Eric passed on her left, darting in and out of the late afternoon shadows. He caught some air and hung for a moment, his arms outstretched like wings against the sky.

  * * *

  Rory watched Celia slide away, leaving a fan of softly carved snow in her wake, and all the words he couldn’t say still trapped inside his throat.

  It was Eric who talked best to Celia. He offered extravagant compliments, an unending flirtation, a constant low-level howl outside her window. His hands roamed freely over her back and arms and even her ass. He liked to touch her hair, which had grown out since Darlene cut it, and now fell in thick waves to the middle of her back with a point at the end like a flame. Eric wrapped her hair around his hand, kissed her easily on the cheeks and the inside of her wrist—and another time, full on the lips while she was standing at her open locker outside the high school gymnasium. He surrounded Celia, and she responded with gestures so supple and generous that Rory could never be sure whether they were meant to include him. He looked on with a wretched envy as Eric pressed Celia’s palm to his lips, swept his mouth across her shoulder while she smoked his weed. Eric burned with a fiery energy that seemed to suck all the oxygen from the room, so that Rory could only find sips of air that never filled his lungs.

  Sometimes he found Eric looking back at him with his faun-like grin, one dark eye winking closed. He was flirting with both of them. Probably he knew how Rory roiled inside, how he thought of Celia when he was with other girls, and paused beneath her attic bedroom in the desolate hours of the night when he’d already emptied his body and still could not stop the blistering pornographic course of his thoughts.

  I’m not your brother, Rory had said, and it was true. It was true. They were not even distant cousins; they were not at all related. There was nothing to stop them.

  He thought about the way she looked the night before, the pearly outline of her body inside the nightgown, the scent of her hair. A sudden tense awareness, and his own voice stretched like wire in his throat. His hands had ached with emptiness; he’d clenched them shut, leaving a row of purple half-moons in his palm.

  I’m not your brother.

  I’m not your father.

  I’m nothing like him.

  * * *

  The mood of the house became strained after Darlene cut Celia’s hair that day years ago. At dinner they would make desultory conversation for a few minutes: How’s your day? Did you do your homework? I heard they caught the guy in Grand Junction who kidnapped that little girl. But the effort seemed too much for sustained chat. They’d finish the meal to the clatter of cutlery and the creaks of the roof settling under the weight of heavy snow.

  Eddie Dark was quiet and sullen, his formerly sunny disposition darkened with an unrelenting resentment directed at Rory’s mother. And something else, beyond resentment. An undercurrent Rory couldn’t understand.

  Like Celia, he tried to make himself useful, vaguely aware that they both were inserting themselves into the cracks of their parents’ relationship, but unable to think of any more positive or direct intervention. He replaced some lightbulbs, oiled the door hinges, rehung the shower rod in the bathroom, washed the dishes.

  All jobs were subject to critique.

  “C’mon in here, boug,” Eddie would say. “You got to tighten them screws. You gon’ have this whole thing down on our heads.”

  And he’d watch, brimming with impatience, as Rory got out the tools and tried again.

  In his work, Eddie was a perfectionist. The house was never done; there was always something to fix or change, something that was driving him crazy. The edges of two strips of wallpaper that didn’t match up, or a shelf that was not quite level, a faulty window shade that bothered him endlessly until he got his tools out and fixed it. He was impatient, always snatching a hammer or drill from Rory’s hands, and inclined to come along after them even in the kitchen, to rewash the dishes that were already stacked in the cupboard. The house was full, overfull during that time, with the swelling and shrinking of his stepfather’s mood.

  It was on one of these long thick nights that Rory came out of his room, headed for the bathroom down the hall. He glanced into the living room as he passed.

  Celia had fallen asleep on the couch. She was curled on her side, a pillow bunched under her cheek. Her slack face was bathed in a soft blue glow from the TV, her lips slightly parted, one hand tucked between her knees and the other curled like a flower under her chin.

  Rory stopped in his tracks.

  Eddie Dark was standing over her, leaning with one hand on the wall behind the couch. The other hand was down the front of his pants, moving fast. He was staring down at Celia with a grimace, like her sleeping face hurt him somehow.

  Rory felt suddenly warm, uncomfortably warm, a scalding heat at the nape of his neck, beads of sweat seething under the surface of his skin. He heard his voice travel up his throat and quiver into the space between them.

  “What are you doing?”

  It wasn’t the right question. Rory knew exactly what Celia’s father was doing. He just couldn’t believe it.

  Eddie’s head swung around. The shock on his face was so complete that it wiped away every trace of expression. He froze as if locked in place.

  “What are you doing?” Rory said again. His mouth felt sticky, each word peeling off his tongue.

  Eddie jerked his hand out of his pants and lurched away from the couch. He shoved past Rory to his bedroom and shut the door.

  Celia hadn’t stirred. Her shorn head never turned on the pillow.

  Rory stood with his feet halfway on the carpet and half on the cold linoleum floor. The heat leached away and left him stone-faced and heavy with shame.

  He understood then why his mother had cut Celia’s hair.

  It’s too much, too much...

  The temptation, she meant. She had been trying to protect Celia.

  He fetched a pillow and blanket from his room and made a bed for himself beside the couch, at Celia’s feet. He strained to track the shallow sound of her breath, praying she would not wake up to the roar of his heartbeat and wonder what he was doing there.

  Don’t wake up, he thought to her, over and over, his body desperately still. Don’t wake up, don’t wake up, nobody move here. He clutched his pillow, his eyes trapped open and glued to the screen. He was seized by a terrible emptiness, a violent hollowed-out sadness as if he’d been gouged.

  The minutes ticked by.

  An hour later the bedroom door opened. Eddie came out carrying two fat
duffel bags. Rory watched as he shrugged into his coat.

  They stared at each other through the blue darkness.

  Then Celia’s father picked up his bags and he was gone.

  * * *

  “Do you know how much a trillion dollars is?” Eric said.

  The road home was dark again and rutted with snow, the pines a smeared shadow that rose and fell above the white embankment. Celia breathed a patch of fog onto the glass and drew a smiley face with a curlicue on top of its head like a baby.

  Eric and Kate had been talking about politics, something about the national debt, arguing stridently for and against the new president. Celia had lost the thread of the conversation, but the trillion-dollar question intrigued her.

  “Um, a trillion,” Kate said. “A trillion is a trillion.”

  “It’s a dollar every second for thirty thousand years.”

  “Dude,” Rory said. “That can’t be right.”

  Kate worked out the number on her phone’s calculator. It was right.

  “Mind. Blown,” she said.

  “And did you know,” Eric said, “that if you took the average adult’s circulatory system and laid it out in a line—”

  “Eww,” said Kate.

  “—the whole thing would be nearly sixty thousand miles long. You could circle the Earth two and a half times following a trail of Rory’s capillaries.”

  Celia rested her head against the cool glass, lulled by the hum of the engine and the tired buzz of her muscles. The tops of her thighs would be sore tomorrow, but tonight she felt better than good. Eric had managed to smuggle some beers from his dad’s stash, which they transferred to Big Gulp cups and brought with them into the pizza joint, sipping the bitter liquid through fat red straws. Celia didn’t like the taste at all, but she enjoyed the warm and watery blur it made of her surroundings.

  “I’ve got one,” she said.

  “Factoid Mary,” Eric said. “Go.”

  “The Great Wall of China.”

  “Heard of it.” Eric smiled; she could see his eyes in the rearview mirror.