I hold up the rosary, let it dangle in the sunshine. The red berries seem to pulse with their own heartbeat against the backdrop of the blue harbor. No, that’s my screwed-up head, my tightening throat siphoning off air, not allowing enough oxygen to my brain. I snatch the rosary to my chest and whirl around. I’m out in the open, squinting into the sun, where anyone could see me.
I watch the coastline. I scan for a variation in the reedy sameness; a flash of fabric or the suggestion of skin. There’s a distant cough, but the cougher isn’t visible. A black Lab on the other side of the harbor is running down the grassy slope of his backyard. I feel his marble eyes on me. The tumbling laughter of children from far away, or maybe Ben and I are laughing in the past and the clear, sharp sound is cutting through time. I replace the rosary as soon as I’m sure I’m not being observed.
Upstairs I call Willa and ask her to meet me at Becca’s. I keep the shortened rosary to myself. It’s the kind of thing I should dial Dad about; tell the police. Confess to everything I think I know. At best this would get me sympathetic stares and concerned whispers. Lana McBrook thinks her dead stepbrother is picking off the kids who wronged them. And what if Detective Sweeny or Dad or any adult who mattered believed me? I would be telling on Ben.
Not the Ben who was crackling with life, who blew into a room like saltwater wind, frizzing your hair with a static charge, tickling a smile out of you, but Ben as he is now.
Willa’s Prius is parked behind Duncan’s SUV in Becca’s driveway. When no one answers, I push open Becca’s door. No one bothered to lock it. Offhandedly, I think this is weird, and then I see the boys on the terrace. Josh is a blur of circuitous motion; Rusty and Duncan are statues. I discover Willa on the kitchen floor, knees pulled to her chest, back slumped against the stainless-steel fridge, fingers gouging into her temples.
I kneel beside her. “What’s wrong?” I ask.
Her face has a scrubbed pink look. “I was already on my way here. Carolynn called me. Just go see.”
I sidestep shards of white glass, a puddle of coffee, and Duncan’s abandoned skipper hat. At the threshold I stop short. A coal-black mangy-looking bird is in the middle of a wooden plank of the terrace.
“It’s beakless,” Duncan says. Rogue feathers are scattered across the deck, their filaments trembling in the breeze. Off to my left the waist-high gate that connects the terrace to the side of the house is blowing open and shut, creaking and rattling with each swipe. Rusty braces himself over the railing, his knobby spine showing through his ribbed tank top. His puke smacks the rocks below. Josh has come to a stop at the side of the house, his arm propped up, bent, and his eyes hiding. Becca’s dogs are at his feet.
“Dead,” he says. “Winkie and Twinkie are dead.”
“How?” I direct it to Duncan. He’s the most composed.
He rubs his forehead with a fist. “Who the fuck knows? I called Carolynn about Ford and we came over here to find Becca hyperventilating.” Duncan looks slowly from Josh to me. “She was screaming. She had scratches all over her arms.” He runs his hand from his shoulder to his wrist. “And she was yanking her hair. It was a grade A meltdown. Her dogs are dead and there’s this bird . . . butchered. Some psycho took its beak.”
“What do you mean, took its beak?” Josh says. He’s shouldering the side of the house like he’s trying to push it down.
Rusty shoves off the railing with a moan.
“I mean, it’s gone,” Duncan says, loud and frustrated. “Whoever killed the dogs killed this creepy-ass bird, took its beak off, and got the hell out of here.” He waves indicating the unlatched side gate.
“You don’t know that someone did this,” Rusty says. “You don’t know that for real, man. Those dogs were vicious.” He points a shaky arm at them but can’t look their way. “They could have attacked that bird, chewed its face off, and then . . . and then . . .”
“Spontaneously croaked?” Duncan says, rubbing a fist in one eye, then the other.
“Maybe the bird’s poisonous? Bro, I’m saying holy fuck, rosary peas turned out to be toxic.” Rusty pulls his baseball cap from his head and replaces it backward. His eyes bug out from his head. “We can’t jump to conclusions saying someone did this, is all I’m getting at.” His chest is heaving, and he forces his hands still by shoving them into his board shorts.
“Did you call the cops?” Josh asks.
“I called 9-1-1 and they chewed me out. The woman was all, ‘Call a veterinarian, the police are busy with actual crimes,’ ” Rusty says. “Becca was losing her shit, crying about Maggie’s killer being angry with us for finding her body. She kept wailing about this being revenge, and we hadn’t even told her about Ford yet.”
“Where is Becca now?” I ask
“Upstairs with Car,” Duncan says.
Josh pulls his cell from his pocket. A moment later he’s telling his mom as much as we know. Once there’s a job to be done, he takes over. This is who Josh is: the protector of the core; older brother; consoler and spokesperson.
I inch closer to the bird. Its feathers are scruffy, their quills crimped. There are red puncture marks all over its back. “Those are bite marks. Maybe Rusty is right and the dogs caught it and killed it?” I say. I would prefer this explanation. Minutes ago I was hoping my dead stepbrother had poisoned Maggie and Ford because it meant he’d found a way to be on this island. And if Ben were here at all, able to poison and kill, then couldn’t I talk to him? Couldn’t we drive to his favorite taco truck or play Scrabble or roast marshmallows at midnight? Wouldn’t it mean that he’d forgiven me for not going after him that night? For not saving him?
Duncan nudges the bird with his shoe. The bird rolls to face me. There’s a red sore like a blister where the beak should be. The edges are clean, not ragged, as if the beak was removed with precision. Its black eyes gleam blindly. Its scaly black claws—four toes on each foot—are curled in on themselves. They look prehistoric, a remnant of what should no longer be here. I don’t want this bird to be connected to Maggie’s or Ford’s death because I don’t want Ben to have had a hand in this.
“Are blackbirds poisonous to dogs, like some prey are poisonous to their natural predators?” Duncan asks.
“Blackbirds?” I murmur.
He squints up at me from where he’s kneeling and examining the bird. “My little bro Jeffrey’s favorite book is one with all these sick nursery rhymes.” There’s a lag between Duncan’s lips moving and his voice reaching me. “This looks like the blackbirds that broke free from a pie.” Those disembodied words paint vivid black forms, flapping their wings in the air. They beat harder until their wings splinter and break against their bodies. I remember Mom’s voice, rich and velvety: four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie.
The sun’s voltage is hiked up. I shade my eyes, shake my head, and mutter I’m not sure what to Duncan. I imagine a wriggle under my flip-flop and I jump back, seized by the fantasy that it’s the blackbird’s beak, cawing for help. Dismembered and chirping.
There were blackbirds in one of Ben’s stories. Correction. Beakless blackbirds. And the beakless body on the terrace is an echo of that long-ago childhood tale. I reenter the house. The present has a twilit feel, eclipsed by a bright long-ago moment. I can’t stop hearing it, seeing it, replaying it.
The pink floral blanket was a canopy above eight intricately carved dining chairs. The floor was covered with brocade throw pillows that made irresistible scratching posts for Basel, some of their tassels frayed and bitten.
“You ready for a story?” Ben asked, propping a bowl of popcorn on the belly of my giant brown plush bear. The stuffed toy wore a circus collar that I eventually cut off because I couldn’t stand how comical it made him seem. I nodded. “It’s a bloody one,” Ben warned. I grinned wider.
He recounted the story he titled, “The Lovely Scarecrow.” Not all Ben’s stories had names, and most I wouldn’t remember if they did. This one made an impression.
A half man, half demon lived in a bank of mist in the land next to the kingdom of death. He hated girls. I can’t remember why—doesn’t matter, though, does it? He rode around on a mule and sheared off the noses of blackbirds to toss at the girls. Lana the brave made him pay—can’t remember how. I bet he lost his nose. I remember clapping and jumping to my knees as Ben shared the grotesque ending.
People think girls aren’t supposed to crave violence like boys do. Video games and toy soldiers weren’t supposed to be for me. Here’s a secret, though. I was hungry for the violent stories, the sheared-off body parts, the vengeful heroes, as much as any boy could have been.
The dead birds and the poisonous rosary were threads of Ben’s imagination, and now they’ve been spun into reality. The marauding villains of Ben’s stories weren’t born out of air. I asked him where they came from, more than once. Where did your stories start? He sidestepped. He pleaded imagination. He went silent, stood up abruptly, and left me in the blanket fort. Stories have beginnings, origins. But what do they matter? They aren’t real. Real is Willa’s arm, hot on mine. Real is Ben, who invented heroes and villains and the means they’d fight and die by.
Soon Karen arrives from the firehouse. She brings another firefighter with her, and they’re all business. Josh says that Becca’s mom is on her way from work. Willa ducks into the bathroom to call her own mother. I should call Dad, but I glide up the stairs instead. Becca and Carolynn haven’t come down.
The second story is wrong. Stuffy. There’s a heady, nostril-burning scent I can’t place. I expected to hear Becca’s baying or Carolynn talking her calm. There’s nothing but a white band of light under Becca’s bedroom door in the dark, long hallway. I don’t knock.
I should have.
The scene is jarring. Becca’s in a sunshine-yellow bra and underwear. She sits on the edge of her bed, facing the door, with her fingers laced in her lap. Other than the almost nakedness, she sits prim as she would in class. Her hair has a lank, painted-on look. Water drips from the tapering ends, a scatter of spots on the silk duvet. Her bra is see-through.
“That better not be Duncan,” Carolynn yells from Becca’s bathroom.
I open my mouth to say it’s me. I don’t get that far. There are what looks like self-inflicted scratches on Becca’s forearms. Three each. “Hey, Lan,” Becca says. Her voice is detached and airy as a floating balloon.
“Hi,” I croak.
Carolynn pops her head out of the bathroom. “Is it just you?” she asks. Her hair is wet and sticking to one side of her face. I nod and she ducks away.
I let myself slowly onto the bed. The room stinks of rubbing alcohol and the cake-frosting candle on the desk. The ceiling fan is whirling it up into a sickening-smelling twister.
Becca catches me looking at the red lines. “Don’t worry,” she says. “Car cleaned them. I went a little mental.” She laughs softly. “I get a pass.”
Carolynn’s wrapped in a towel. “Showers are second only to Xanax,” she says, crossing to the closet.
“Do you need something?” I ask. “Water? Josh?”
Carolynn stops pushing aside hangers. “He doesn’t need to see this,” she says. “Will you find B a long-sleeved shirt to wear?” She points at the dresser under a mother-of-pearl-inlaid mirror on the wall. Carolynn yanks a sundress from a hanger and wriggles it over her own head.
Dressing Becca is a lot like dressing a life-size doll. She doesn’t help as I worm her noodle arms through sleeves and scrunch the fabric up so her hands pop out.
“My babies loved you, did you know?” she asks with an off-putting cheerful smile. I shake my head. She doesn’t acknowledge that I’m dressing her. “You should take that as a major compliment, since they only tolerated pretty girls. I think they remembered your smell from when I used to go over your house when we were little.” She rubs the heel of her hand at her temple before her arm thuds back into her lap. “Isn’t that so funny?” I incline my chin. Suddenly, her eyes are swimming in tears. Her shaking fingers tuck a piece of hair behind my ear, and her wrist brushes my cheek. “You get that I’m super sorry for everything, right?” she whispers.
Her bottom lips quivers, and I think about that scared little girl on the swing next to me when we were small. I used to sing really loud to drown out her parents’ fighting. Their voices echoed over the water and boomeranged back at us. “Sorry for what, B?” I ask.
She shrugs a shoulder. The neckline of her shirt is askew, and I go to fix it. She grabs my wrist hard. “Listen,” she pleads. I wait. “I’m sorry for . . . like, for telling all the girls when we were in sixth grade that you had really rank BO and that I stopped going to your house because you were a smelly lesbian who wanted to make out with me and you wore a sports bra because you didn’t have two boobs, just one, like a boob Cyclops.” She sniffs. “They were going to invite you to sit with us at lunch, and I didn’t want them to because I thought . . .”
I’m standing. All I see is Becca. Her wet hair is tucked in the neck of her shirt and her lips are curling nervously. I’m light-headed. “You thought what?”
She drags the back of her hand across her nose messily. “That you’d blab about my parents and them fighting and my dad sleeping with his yoga instructor and how I cried and everything you heard them yell. They said really embarrassing stuff.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know”—she waves a hand in the air—“all our family dirtiness. If you sat with us to eat and got invited to sleepovers, I worried you were going to spill.”
I’ve stopped breathing. “I wouldn’t have.”
“I know that now. Obviously.” She starts to roll her eyes but stops midway through. She exhales loudly. “I just didn’t know it then. I was only eleven.”
“ ‘I was only eleven.’ ” I touch my collarbone. “Girls have called me Uni-Boob since. Do you realize that? I thought Carolynn was some teasing mastermind and told them to. I couldn’t understand why out of nowhere she made it her life’s mission to torture me.” There’s a snort from behind me.
Becca lifts her hands, her fingers splaying. She isn’t shaking any longer. “What do you want me to say?”
“Huh?”
“What else did you say about me?”
Her eyes run over the room. Nothing’s changed about Becca’s appearance, and yet she doesn’t look like a fragile doll to me anymore. She looks like a spoiled, selfish child a minute away from stomping her foot and demanding that she get a lifelong pass for cruelty.
“Car?” Becca whines, making her eyes big and innocent.
Carolynn’s reclining on the window seat. “This isn’t my thing, B.” She shakes a bottle of nail polish. It rattles. She unscrews it and removes the brush. She begins to meticulously paint her nails while pointedly avoiding eye contact.
“Fine,” Becca says with a huff. She closes her eyelids briefly, and raps gently on her forehead with her fist. “So there was the whole sports bra thing, and I told them you wore those gross pads that look like diapers because you peed like an old lady when you laughed. It was so stupid.” She giggles under her breath.
I am motionless. “What else?”
She busies herself strapping sandals on her feet and glances at me like she was hoping I’d vanish. “That was enough for girls not to want you in the lunch circle. I mean, there was high school, and I said a lot of nasty things about tons of girls. I had the crappiest self-esteem in the universe.” Her butt bounces once on the mattress, and she shrugs. “I was insecure, so that’s like a pass, you know?”
“No,” I say, “that is not a pass. You do not get a pass. What specifically did you say in high school?”
She chews her bottom lip, and I cover my mouth when the urge to gag becomes so strong I need to hold it in. This girl. I let her dote on me. I binged on her compliments. I let her make me glow. I wanted to be her friend even after she ditched me. Even though it was obvious that Becca had a talent for excluding the many and including the few.
“You have to swear not to stay pissed.” She speaks quickly, and her tone is equal parts irritated and hopeful. “But I told a few girls that I saw you and Ben doing it on your terrace. I said I could see your deck from mine, which I can’t because of my mom’s hedges, but they didn’t know that. It was awful and shitty of me and it was freshman year and there were some new girls and I wanted them all to want to be my friends. Can you blame me? They were all checking out the older guys at lunch and Ben walked by, and I don’t know, he was the dark horse of hotness, and they were all gushing about him and it just flew out. It was like this one thing that I knew—well, said I knew—about the guy they all wanted. I don’t always act like a good person.” Her sooty lashes flutter shut with the admission.
“That’s because you’re not one,” I say without skipping a beat.
She nods, relief bowing her lips, happy to be understood. “No, not always.”
My muscles ache from holding myself stiff, and I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. “It just flew out? Ben walks by you in the ninth grade and you lie and tell girls that I had sex with him? Other girls repeated that rumor. I was terrified that Ben would hear. That he’d think I had something to do with the gossip or he wouldn’t want to be seen with me if he knew what girls were saying.”
She pulls her hair from her collar and fans it over her shoulders. “Jeez, what do you want from me? I admitted it—not that I had to or anything. I’m sooo sorry, okay?”
“I thought it was Carolynn who made that up.”
Becca shakes her head. “Car was there when I said it, and she just repeated it. I dunno, L. Maybe she thought it was true?”
My attention snaps toward Carolynn “Did you?”
She’s parting the white gossamer curtains and peering at the street below. “Becca’s mom just pulled up.”
“Carolynn,” I yell.
Her eyes dart to mine and her hand releases the curtain. Shafts of diagonal light pass over her features. “No, I didn’t believe it. It was a messed-up thing to repeat and I’m sorry. Teenage girls are the cruelest animal.”
“Yeah, they are,” Becca gibbers. “See, everyone knows it.”
I whirl back to face her. “You’re the cruelest. Can you imagine what being called Uni-Boob felt like when I was eleven years old? Before I even had boobs? Do you know how gross and ugly it made me feel?”
Becca hooks her fingers in her lap as she stares at them. When her head snaps up, I expect another toss of her hair or a disconnected smile. Her eyes are glazed, tears sneaking out the corners. “You may not believe me, but I am sorry. As sorry as I’ve ever been.” The back of her hand wipes a tear streaking her cheek. “I would go back in time and change it. I would shut the eff up and tell you to eat lunch with us and do all the stuff with you I should have. But I can’t.”
I don’t get to respond because Becca’s mother throws open the door and flies into the room. What is there to say? Words aren’t enough. They weren’t for the villains of our stories and they’re not for Becca. My hands are fisted at my hips. I can’t release them. I tilt against the wall. A poster’s at my back. It’s one of those French billboard replicas, with a half-naked girl wearing a masquerade mask as she swims in a glass of champagne. I hear it tear as I sink to the floor, and that strikes me as terribly appropriate.
“I got home from running . . . went out back because I left the dogs there . . . they pee under the table and you said I had to leave them out. You said that dogs belong outside.” Becca ends in a muffled wail as she melts into her mother’s lap.
I glare at the mop of Becca’s wet hair. My sadness is limited to Twinkie and Winkie, with their technicolor nails and darting pink tongues. They weren’t bad dogs. They could be sweet, endlessly enthusiastic no matter how many times you left and reentered a room. They didn’t deserve to die, but Becca deserved to lose them.
Is this the punishment my fictive self would have doled out if I’d known that Becca was behind the awful whispers? I wasn’t plotting my revenge on Carolynn when I thought she was the perpetrator, yet somehow, it’s so much worse that it’s Becca. Becca and I were friends. I kept her parents’ fights secret. I smiled at her in the halls when she pretended not to notice me. I never held it against her. Were all those biting, passing comments Ben made about Becca because he knew what I didn’t? Becca was the mastermind behind the rumors.
If there is a part of Ben on our island, it would want revenge.
I think back to that evening on the terrace when he asked if girls ever hurt me. He offered to kill them. I wondered out loud how he’d do it and he looked disappointed, I assumed because I sounded serious. Perhaps that wasn’t it. What if Ben was disappointed that I asked him how he’d do it rather than tell him that I’d been plotting my own revenge? In that moment I took shape, and he saw how different I was from the Lana in his head.
At present Becca says she’d go back and do things differently. She says she’s sorry. It’s easy to apologize after the fact, though, isn’t it? It’s easy to say, I should have been honest and brave.
That’s how the rest of the afternoon goes. I’m stupefied with fury and hurt. Becca’s mom escapes for a pot of tea when it’s clear that she can’t console her daughter. Willa and the boys huddle in Becca’s room after Sophia leaves. Josh waits for more news about Ford. The firefighters declare the cuts on Twinkie and Winkie puncture wounds, likely made by birds. They believe it’s possible that one of the dogs bit the bird’s beak clean from its face. The last person through the terrace’s gate must not have latched it properly and the wind blew it open. None of the adults are alarmed. Dead animals are nothing compared to the body of a boy. Even Detective Ward is ambivalent when Josh asks him over the phone if this could be payback from Maggie’s killer for discovering the body. The grown-ups dismiss it as little more than Mother Nature—the suburban, and therefore tame and benign, version of a lion attacking a gazelle.
“We should listen to Josh’s mom,” Rusty says. “Karen knows what’s going on better than we do.”
“Do you hear yourself? You are such a sheep,” Duncan tells him, propped against Becca’s bed with a corner of her duvet on his shoulder.
“I can’t believe Ford is dead,” Carolynn repeats for the third time. “Do you know he made a grab for my boob sophomore year at a dance?” She fans her hands over her chest. “I punched him in the face and told him I’d kill him if he ever touched me again.”
Becca smashes her finger against her lips. “My mom could hear you.”
Carolynn scowls. “So what? I didn’t kill him.”
Willa nudges me after I zone out. I’ve missed the last piece of their conversation, and everyone’s attention is on me. “I won’t be able to sneak out tonight. Can you, Lana?”
Becca hugs herself. “You’re still in for Ben’s peace out, right? I can’t stay home and do nothing tonight . . . not after my babies. Pleeeease.” She smiles wide. It’s an alligator smile. A mask. I used to believe she was too transparent to lie convincingly about who she is. Willa would say too stupid. We were both wrong.
“We staked out the wildlife museum last night,” Duncan says.
Rusty is on his feet, practicing his swing. “They don’t even have a security guard or an alarm,” he says. Doing something as ordinary and natural to him as swinging an imaginary bat has helped him recover since the terrace.
“I wanna do this so bad. Not just for Ben—mostly for him,” Duncan directs to me, “but it’ll be a declaration of life for us, too. We. Are. Alive. And we won’t let nothing—no one—change that.” He rubs his fist in his palm.
A murmur of agreement travels around our circle. On an ordinary, small day, the kind that before was made of, breaking into the Gant Wildlife Rehabilitation Museum would have given me hives. Today I don’t need convincing. Everything that’s happened has made it easier to believe that Ben could be here, somewhere in Gant, in some form. The prank is for him; he’ll know it immediately. It’ll make the newspaper, people will talk, or Ben will be able to sense it happened and recognize it as the message it is.
Anticipation for tonight settles into my chest. I’m dying to tell Ben:
You haven’t been forgotten.