Only the Nightbirds
The details of my mother’s profession remained a mystery. All I knew was that she left the house early in the morning. Once, I attempted to stay up under the weathered moon to find out where she was going, but I succumbed to the lassitude from running the kayak rental during spring break. Another time, I mustered the courage and asked her directly what she did. “Cleaning up messes,” she replied in the sliver of a second she could afford me. A few days later she needed help disposing of three corpses and swore me to secrecy with the look of steel.
It bothered me for the week that March bled into April, but no one other than Isaiah seemed to notice. He worked in the ice-cream parlor all of spring break and came to visit me by the dock in the afternoon with a raspberry sorbet in hand and his cardigan stained with all the demanded flavors of the day.
“Are you done? We can sail out to the peninsula, if you want,” he asked.
“Just a moment,” I said, trying to seem placid while I turned the sign from OPEN to CLOSED. Isaiah inhaled sharply. Every word I’d spoken this week came out like a whisper braided with shrieks, and I knew Isaiah had just about enough of it.
Isaiah’s family owned a skiff, The Lone Parroteer. It was one of the few things of value he had other than the spool of yarn and knitting needles that accompanied him in his leisure time. The boat was big for a skiff but too small to be anything else. Isaiah’s father glued a fake parrot to the side of the boat, and the name “Parroteer” stuck so hard that Isaiah and I spent a weekend painting Lone Parroteer onto the erstwhile Lone Privateer. Everyone other than Isaiah’s older sister thought it was amusing.
The spur of my boot caught the side of The Lone Parroteer, and I lost all purchase, tumbling into the skiff and sending Isaiah onto all fours. He cackled a bit, but the laughter died away quickly. Something was troubling him.
“You remember Ol’ Rusty? He used to be at all of my mother’s dinner parties.”
I remembered plenty about Rusty, the corpulent old man who used to raucously belt indie songs over Isaiah’s older sister’s guitar strumming. At those parties the top half of Isaiah’s black silky hair was always braided out of his face. While all the men and women in sequins bedazzled the room, I crossed the laminate floor in sneakers, a sweatshirt, and jeans. All those glittering boys and girls looked at me as if I was a carcass staining a golden floor in a golden house, with a golden family living inside. What irked people the most was that I sat beside him and whispered jokes into his ear that no one else ever got to hear.
The old folk never seemed to mind me. They just wanted a new young romance, something exciting to hack into and rip out the organs of. Rusty would pull Isaiah over to give him stupid advice on how to impress me. Isaiah was too polite to tell him the truth — we had built tree houses throughout the forbidden zones of the forests, we had secretly sculpted the neighbors’ shrubs into grotesque faces, we had conned people out of money in the name of school donation, and had covered up graffiti with so many images of ducks that the “Duck Gang” was number one on Sheriff McIntyre’s radar.
Isaiah was my partner in crime, too valuable to be risked by a kiss.
Besides, I had no interest in being the envy of all, or decking myself up into something shimmering to measure up to Isaiah, someone who just grew up that charming. The relationship would not be romantic but romanticized. The envious glares would not be exhaustive but exhausting.
“They say Rusty’s missing. It’s so strange,” Isaiah cut through my reverie, “I guess he must’ve gone out of town. Normally he’d yap about a trip all day and night as if it’s the most exciting thing ever. Leaving quietly, for him, is weird… but he’s not yapping our ears off anymore, so I guess it’s a blessing in disguise.”
I remembered Rusty’s dead body. He was one of the messes my mother cleaned up. I shivered.
“Ava, are you cold?” Isaiah asked.
“No.”
“Ah, that’s such a shame.” With a magician’s flourish he unfurled his latest project, a crimson throw blanket. “I guess this would go to waste.”
“You made that for me?”
Isaiah shrugged. He draped it over my shoulders and brushed my bangs from my eyes. Rouge surfaced in his caramel cheeks.
I looked down at the weave of the blanket, the crimson strands woven together, covering me, like the blood I‘d cleaned off my hands. I breathed heavily, remembering the minutiae of each of the corpses. There was Jeremiah, the red-haired librarian who lived in the delusion that nobody knew of his infidelity towards his wife. There was Claire, the gymnast who just came back after being unable to qualify for the team at her dream college. And then there was Rusty. There was no real link between these people except the fact that my mother was responsible for their spilled and wasted blood.
I closed my eyes, shaking my head as if that would shake the culpability away before opening them again and letting the waning sun pique them. I dropped my head into my hands, hoping to avoid eye contact with Isaiah.
They were covered in blood. I gasped out the air I had left inside me and then struggled to collect more afterward. How is the blood still there? I got up every few hours just to inspect myself with fresh eyes every night this week.
Isaiah’s arms came around me, his textured cardigan embossing itself on my bare arms. That was no help. So close was he that with minimal prodding he could coax the secrets off my tongue. I jerked my head down again, trying to see if there was a way to obscure all the blood from him so he wouldn’t ask.
There was no blood, only the warm crimson blanket in my hands.
“Ava, you’re expecting me to pretend it’s perfectly normal that you start panicking and shaking arbitrarily, or that you flinch at every last joke someone makes, or that you canceled almost all the plans we made this week.”
The silence I gave him back wasn’t the right answer. “This isn’t fair.”
No, it never quite was, was it?
If he was trying to make me feel more guilty than I already did, it was working. My stomach felt as though it was dislodged. “I… there’s just some stuff going on between me and my mother…” I shrugged.
His brow furrowed. “You’ve been so out of it lately. It has to be worse than that. You aren’t hurt, are you? Do you need me to get you help?”
I almost scoffed. We lived in the coastal town of more old people than young, who were only interested in haggling uselessly over the price of crab cakes, the terrible middle school choirs, and making it their personal agenda to set Isaiah and me up for a date just so they can add something to their daily palaver. No. I couldn’t ask anyone for help. Conspiracies with as many strings attached as my mother had probably planned would go in straight over everyone’s head. If people knew my mother’s secret, this town would be as good as dead.
“No, no. it’s nothing like that,” I said tacking the corners of my lips up to my cheekbones in a smile. “The environment is just a little… stressful.”
“My sister is on an internship in Valencia. You can sleep in her room, if you want… If it’s that bad.”
Now, that was a fine idea. If I was not at home to help, then I would have a little more peace of mind. At least I wouldn’t have to do it again.
Small plumes of rebellion blossomed inside my stomach. No, I wasn’t going directly against my mother. Still, it was some power over a situation in which there were no reins in my reach. That power was laced in these moments, the ones she could never know about. I nodded against Isaiah’s chest. The sun set before us, sending scintilla scattering across the welter of the bay. Only the nightbirds, preparing to forage as the day died into dusk, knew how The Lone Parroteer rocked, steady and strong. Only the nightbirds knew how Isaiah’s heart echoed mine, steady and strong.
And then all those old moments dissolved into the smoke of the damp and pallid night. They’ve forever ceased. The reins were snatched from my grasp the moment my mother learned of the malicious seed sown into my mind. The salt air and petrichor after a light drizzle washed away the meandering scent of blood and the last of the mirage. That final wash of power I felt ebbed and left no trace behind.
Only the nightbirds knew how I watched my mother clean up another mess through the fogged window that night, with that same blanket draped over my shoulders, staining my entity. This time, it was a mess I made.
Only the nightbirds knew how Isaiah’s silent heart echoed mine.
Copyright © 2022 Sneha Uppal
