Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(8)

He won’t tell me. Even if he wakes up, even if he recovers completely, a father with no son to call his own, he won’t tell me. He hated me when I was a shadow in his home, taking up space that he could have occupied, using up resources that he could have taken for his own child. Now that David is gone, Carl will hate me even more. The numbers support the conclusion.

Carl went to collect David from school without telling anyone, took his car and drove it to the school I used to attend. I can see it if I close my eyes, his little red sedan easing its way into the parking lot. Carl in the office, speaking in contemptuous tones to Miss Engleton, the front desk secretary, whose job it was to keep students in class whenever possible. Carl leading David to the car, insisting he sit in the front seat, even though all automotive safety recommendations said that David should sit in back, should be safer, should be farther from the probable point of impact.

I should have stopped counting at seven. I should have closed my eyes and stumbled blindly through my day, rather than risk a nine. Rather than risk everything.

Carl put David in the front seat and he drove away from the school. And maybe he was driving too fast, or maybe he wasn’t paying attention, and maybe maybe maybe doesn’t matter, because all the maybe in the world won’t change anything. Carl drove. Carl entered an intersection. Carl slammed headlong into a truck heading in the opposite direction.

Carl sustained injuries to his head and spinal column, and David was killed on impact, David never even made it out of the car, never even made it to the hospital, never had a chance, and now there is Carl and no David, just like when I was a child. But time does not rewind. Time does not reset. Just because we have returned to a world without David, that doesn’t mean we have returned to a world before David. David wasn’t; David was; David is no longer.

My brother is dead.

I sit in the hospital hallway, clutching my knees, fighting the urge to rock back and forth, to whip my head from side to side and feel the reassuring brush of my hair against my ears. It upsets people when I do that, even though it isn’t hurting them, even though they have their own little calming rituals. My psychiatrist says I mustn’t upset people, no matter how harmless it seems, says that when I indulge my strangeness, the people around me see me less as one of them and more as something to be avoided and feared.

It isn’t fair. They have their cigarettes and their chewing gum and their bitten nails, and all those things are normal, because some quiet council to which I was not invited deemed it so. I have my flapping hands and my shifting hips, and those things are strange, because they do not share them with me.

David never thought that I was strange. David only loved me.

The urge to move flees as abruptly as it came, replaced by a frail and frigid stillness. I’m thinking of my brother in the past tense. There is no present tense for David, not any longer, and it burns. It burns so badly that when my mother comes down the hall, pale ghost of a woman with one child broken and the other gone—one’s for sorrow, two’s for more sorrow still—I don’t say anything, don’t ask if I can go out and search the parking lot for corvids, don’t tell her that I’m hungry or that I need to use the bathroom. I follow her without saying a word, into a world that doesn’t have David in it anymore.

I count three crows on the sidewalk during the drive home, one two three’s a girl. I am a girl, I am a three of crows, and I am alone in the world.

The house is empty, filled with shadows. My mother and I rattle through the rooms like peas in a glass, rebounding off things that should be familiar, would be familiar, were it not for the feeling of absence that wreathes everything in smoke and silence. David is not here. I should still be at school, should be there for another hour, but David should be home, sitting at the kitchen table, going over his homework as he waits for me to come and help him with his math.

Doing math with David is one of my favorite things in the world. The thought that I will never have it again is ashes on my tongue. I have to stop what I’m doing and count the shadows on the wall before I feel like I can continue. My mother is still a ghost, haunting the front room now, a photo album open in her lap. The sound of her weeping is steady, unrelenting. She can’t understand how her world has changed so utterly, so unforgivingly.

I have more experience than she does with living in a world set against you, a world that will not forgive your flaws or take back its cruelties. For a moment, I want to go to her, to sit down beside her and take her hand and try to explain. I don’t. I can’t. The wall between us is too high, and I don’t know how to climb it. She built it one brick at a time, and Carl was always there to help her build it higher, and only David ever cared about me enough to help her tear pieces of it down. We are strangers to each other, she and I, even though she’s my mother and I’m her little girl.

Listless, unsure of what else I have to do, I go outside.

The birdbath is surrounded. In a flash, I add six, seven, eight corvids to my count. If I add them to the three I saw on the way home, I have eleven, eleven, eleven is for the gates of Heaven. If I add them to the nine I lived with all day, the nine that took David away from me forever, I have twenty. The rhymes are unclear past thirteen; I have had to find the definitions myself, teasing them out of the world through trial and error.

Eleven is for the gates of Heaven; twelve’s for the man who lets you in.

Thirteen is for a broken promise; fourteen’s the feathers underneath your skin.