Devil and the Bluebird Read online

“It’s the only way to live in a small space,” she’d told Blue when asked why she didn’t sleep late, or at least drink a second cup of coffee and try her hand at the Saturday crossword. “You let things go and you may as well move into Gus Thompson’s barn.”

  Gus’s barn smelled of hay and ammonia, and his rooster crowed from sunrise to sundown. That was bad enough, but then there was Gus’s tendency to start his chain saw up first thing in the morning on weekends to work on the sculptures of bears and eagles he sold to tourists venturing away from Vacationland’s coast. By comparison, Lynne’s neat streak ranked as a minor irritation.

  Most everything about her aunt counted as a minor irritation. Lynne had fed them and clothed them and made sure they went to school, kept them up-to-date on vaccinations and left presents under the Christmas tree. She wasn’t Mama, though. You’d never open a drawer in her house and find an old bird’s nest where you expected the silverware to be. Lynne was meant to be the relative you visited at Christmas, not lived with year-round.

  Family was Cass, and Cass was gone.

  Blue sat up and touched her feet to the floor gingerly. Last night, walking home, they’d ached. Not like when she used to cover for Teena at the diner, before Teena stopped talking to her and started talking about her. No, this ache ran deep and strong.

  Nothing happened, though, when her arches sank into the soft rug. Just her feet, plain and normal, second toes longer than the first, one big toenail only half grown back from when she’d dropped a brick on it over the summer. The same as always.

  If her feet were fine, then . . . She called out to Lynne. Tried to. Her mouth made the right shapes, but only air escaped her lips. No words, no whistle, no nothing. Not fair. No voice meant she should also have the homing device the woman in the red dress had described. Otherwise, it wasn’t a game, it was torture.

  The noise of the vacuum grew. She jumped back into bed, pulled the covers up to her nose. A few more swipes and Lynne would reach Blue’s door. She’d crack it open same as always, to confirm Blue was there. There, yes. Able to talk, no. She closed her eyes and slowed her breathing to sleep speed.

  The vacuum turned off. A whiz as the cord retracted, a tap at the door. “Blue, you awake?” A creak as the door opened, the smell of pine soap and lemon.

  Two years ago, it must have been the same. Lynne knocking and calling to them, only that time Blue had been asleep. Lynne had shaken her awake to ask if she knew where Cass was. Then they’d found the note. Cass was gone.

  A retreat, a gentle click as the door shut behind her. Ten minutes more, and the front door opened and closed, followed by the sound of Lynne’s Subaru starting up.

  Her voice. What had happened? Last night there’d been the woman in the red dress, and the deal, and the kiss. They couldn’t possibly be real. She tried summoning it again, attempting everything from a whisper to a yell. Still nothing came.

  She hurried into the bathroom, where she started the shower, washed her hair, and breathed in steam, waiting for her throat to loosen up and her voice to come pouring out. No luck. Clams made more noise than she did.

  Showered and dressed, she headed to the front door out of habit. All the way through last summer, Teena would pick her up on Saturdays. They’d shop for groceries for Teena’s gram and clean her house. She insisted on giving them a little money in exchange—pocket change—but Blue would have done it for free. Anything for Teena’s gram, who smelled of violet perfume, had papery skin through which you could see the bones of her hands, and told stories of feeding hoboes during the Great Depression. Blue’s own grandmother had died before she’d been born—the one on her mother’s side, at least. On her father’s—well, her father’s side didn’t really exist. Family wasn’t part of a sperm donor’s donation.

  She studied her feet as she sat to put on her boots. Encased in gray wool socks, they looked like feet. No sparks of magic, no weird tingles, nothing more special than bones and muscle and skin waiting to do their job. Her hiking boots rested on the plastic floor protector by the door. She unlaced them, thinking about walking out along the trail through the pines or maybe going all the way back to Somerset Hill and up, away from everyone.

  She slipped the first boot on her foot. The feeling came fast, as if she’d stuck her toes in an electrical socket. It was the same aching need from last night: the call to move. Only in the booted foot, though. The other stayed unchanged, just a foot in a sock on a rug.

  Last fall she’d gone with Teena to the outlets in Kittery, where they’d picked through the remnants the tourists had turned down. She’d just finished reading a book about a woman hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in California, and she’d longed for something similar. She didn’t yearn for Augusta, or Portland, or even Boston, the way Teena did. Used to be that Teena’s dreams were hers, too—that she was happy to follow Teena’s course for their future. Little by little, things had shifted, and she’d found herself between racks of fleece and flannel and sweaters with moose on the front, asking for a good pair of boots.

  “Hiking boots? Whatever,” Teena had said, but they’d gone through every shoe section of every store. None of the boots were right—too big, too small, way too expensive—until Teena groaned with frustration and made a U-turn into the Goodwill parking lot. There, on the third shelf from the bottom, perched a pair of reddish-brown leather hiking boots. Blue’s size. No wear marks. Ten bucks.

  Blue had worked oil into the leather until they darkened up nice and ripe. She’d gone on day hikes to break them in, until they fit her feet as if they’d been made for them. The extra half inch of height they gave her, the firm way they met the ground—in them she became just shy of invincible. Different, too. The kind of girl who might start dreaming things on her own, whether she wanted to or not.

  Thanks to the woman in the red dress, now they’d become something more. With the second one on, the sensation ran like a current straight up both legs and into her heart, telling her it was time to go.

  Time to go.

  When Cass left, she’d wanted to sweep everything off her sister’s dresser, to toss the expensive makeup out the window to be crushed on the gravel drive. It had felt as if every layer Cass had applied was one more coat sealing in her anger. “Our mother,” she’d said, sitting on her bed the summer before she’d gone, “could have left us with a lot more than Eliotville, Maine, and Lynne’s trailer if she hadn’t insisted on playing music no one wanted, with frigging Tish Bellamy as a partner. I’m never going to be that stupid. I deserve more than this.”

  She’d said it as if she were talking to Blue, sure; but it felt like a conversation Cass was having with herself. As if Tish were the root of everything bad—as if she could have even planted cancer in Mama. Cass—the same girl who could spend forty-five minutes gently unsnarling Blue’s hair when winter hats and scarves conspired to tie it in knots—had given herself up inch by inch to fury. All Blue knew how to do was to watch, until that day, when she found what she shouldn’t have and showed it to Cass.

  Now it was time to fix what she had broken. She pulled out her day pack and started stuffing it. T-shirts, jeans, underwear, a couple of flannel shirts worn soft and cozy. Socks, three pairs of wool ones Lynne had knitted her for Christmas. She put on the oversized Guatemalan sweater she’d impulsively bought last year in a little hippie shop in Portland only to cast it aside, too shy to wear it. It was itchy as hell but warmer than anything. She threw her barn coat on over it. What else? What do you pack when you have no clue where you’re going?

  She picked up her phone but put it back down. If she brought it, Lynne would call it. It could be used to track her, too, and she didn’t want that. The one reason to bring it was in case Cass called it, but Cass had called the house phone every other time. Better to leave it and buy a new one once she was away from Maine.

  That left just a few things. Her velvet keepsake bag. Hidden in her dresser, it contained the sorts of treasures only she could appreciate: letters and pictures, comfo
rt and memory. She took out Mama’s silver ring with the turquoise detail and slipped it on her finger before placing the bag in her backpack. Mama’s guitar, safe within its hard case, came next. A notebook; some pens and pencils. Without a voice, she’d either need to write or become a mime to rival Marcel Marceau.

  Lynne’s trailer had seemed like a dream when Blue visited it as a little girl, with its shag rugs and vases with silk flowers, every petal free of dust. It was so different from the apartments she and Mama and Cass and Tish had drifted through. Those had been carved out of corners of ramshackle houses—drafty spaces with water stains on the ceilings and mice running along the floorboards at night.

  They’d moved in for good the year Blue turned nine, the year being sick had become Mama’s full-time job. Mama’d died in Lynne’s room, on Lynne’s bed, a year later. They’d known the end was coming, and Blue had tried to stay through the hours, days, but Mama had held on so much longer than anyone had thought she would, her harsh breathing slowing and speeding again and again. When the spaces between the breaths began to stretch further and further, Blue felt herself strangling, desperate for air. She’d run from the room, outside, into the pines where she’d hidden behind the biggest one she could find. No one had followed—they couldn’t, wouldn’t have left Mama—and she’d come back alone to the terrible nothingness left where Mama’s breath should have been.

  That was the only time she’d seen Lynne cry. Not in the year before, when Mama was sick. Not later, when Cass had left. Lynne had done lots of things then—called the police to report Cass as a runaway, talked to the social services people, questioned Cass’s friends herself to see if they knew where she was, continued to change the sheets on Cass’s bed once a week—but crying hadn’t been one of them. After the first call from Cass, a month after she’d left, Lynne had said that Cass was old enough and smart enough to make her own choices.

  “She’s not here, Blue,” she’d announced, when Blue got home from school that day. “She’s not in Maine anymore. She’s not a fugitive. She hasn’t been kidnapped. She knows she can come home. She’s almost eighteen, and she doesn’t want to be here anymore.” Was that what Mama would have done? No, because Mama wouldn’t have let Cass fill up with anger. At least, that was what Blue thought. It was hard to know, with no one to help sort out her real memories of her mother from her imagined.

  She opened to a blank sheet of paper in an unused green notebook.

  Dear Lynne, she wrote, taking pains to be neat. I’ve got to go for a while. I think I know how to find Cass. I’m okay, so you don’t need to look for me either. I’ll be in touch when I can. Love, Blue

  She meant more: something about thanks for taking care of her, and for the socks Lynne knitted, and for the handful of times she’d driven them out to the ocean to wander along the rocks or taken them to pick blueberries on the hill up past the edge of town. She meant I’m sorry, too, because even if Lynne didn’t cry, Blue knew she still hurt inside. It was obvious in how she looked at Blue sometimes, or called her by Mama’s name when she was tired. They’d each lost a sister; only, Blue had a chance to find Cass now, while Mama was gone for good.

  She ripped out the sheet and folded it, wrote “Lynne” on the outside, and left it on the coffee table. Then she shouldered her backpack, grabbed the guitar, and headed out the door.

  She had a license but no car. She’d never seen the need. Teena had had the Beast, a rusted-out old pickup with the Pats’ Flying Elvis painted across the hood. Not “had,” past tense. Teena still had the Beast; only, Blue no longer had her. Not Beck, either, who drove a full-sized white pickup that he kept spotless year-round, and who’d always been willing to take her anywhere.

  Once she’d had friends. Now she had her feet and almost $900, saved up from cleaning cabins for Emma Bissonette during hunting season, babysitting, and working the shifts Teena tossed her at the diner. Road trip money, earmarked to get them to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Teena had planned it all out for them in junior high. In seventh grade, it had sounded marginally fun. By tenth, Blue could imagine a whole long list of things she’d rather use the money on; but friends did that, right? Stuck with plans they’d made, didn’t change things even when they wanted something else.

  Never mind. It was Find Cass Money now.

  Money stashed safely in her backpack after stopping at the bank, Blue hurried out and up the street. Past Teena’s aunt’s hair salon, past the Laundromat, past Jayne’s Hardware. She hesitated at the diner, her stomach rumbling. In the window she could see Teena, paused by a table, a tray in hand. Teena, not even five feet tall, could party like someone three times her size. She had a Tweety Bird tattoo on her left hip, a brown stain of a birthmark between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand, and a passion for classic rock.

  Cass was Blue’s sister, but Teena had been her savior when life had shipwrecked her in Eliotville. She’d ridden up to her on a battered boy’s bike, looked Blue up and down as she waited by the door of the 7-Eleven, and said, “We got five kittens in the barn. You ever seen kittens in a barn before, city girl?” Then she’d coaxed Blue onto the handlebars of her bike for the ride to her farm, Blue wondering the whole time whether being a city girl was considered good or bad. She’d assumed that it was something she wore that made her stick out. From that point forward, she’d studied how Teena dressed, adjusting her wardrobe piece by piece until her clothes no longer gave her away.

  Blue and Teena. And Beck: nice-guy Beck, with his truck, his cautious smile, and his hurry to open doors for her. He was Teena’s cousin, son of the local cop, always around if Blue wanted anything. Like a boyfriend. Options were slim in Eliotville when it came to boys.

  “Come on, Blue. He’s cute and he’s totally into you, and you could get married and we’d have the same last name, and I’d be auntie to all your babies.” Teena made their relationship sound as inevitable as graduation.

  Blue liked Beck. She liked how he looked, and how he smelled when she leaned close to him, and how his hands felt when he helped her out of the back of Teena’s truck. She just didn’t love him. Making out with him, after the first time, when half the thrill had been wondering whether he would actually kiss her, had slowly begun to feel as exciting as brushing her teeth. She thought maybe that was what happened, maybe she simply wanted more than a few kisses, and so she’d pushed forward, until she realized that no matter how much fooling around they did, she wasn’t interested.

  She hadn’t even planned to break up with him. She had just said no again and again, to everything, until he finally asked her on the last day of school if she didn’t like him anymore. For a moment, standing under the sun as the buses pulled away, she wanted to say no, that everything would stay the same forever.

  Instead, she’d said, “I’m sorry.” That night, she’d told Teena that it wasn’t a temporary breakup. Somehow, though, it became bigger than whether she was going out with Beck. It was about her and Teena, and about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and how she didn’t really want to go, and it was like discovering that what she’d assumed was a mountain was a volcano about to erupt. By the end, Teena had called her a bitch, and Blue had said she didn’t care, and they hadn’t spoken since.

  Now, as Teena glanced out the diner window, Blue raised her hand in a wave. Teena turned away. So much for salvation. Nothing ever lasted.

  She left town in a truck full of fish. The woman driving had hair dyed shoe-polish black. She kept a cooler on the seat between them, a bag of unshelled sunflower seeds on top.

  “Help yourself,” she said, waving a hand in Blue’s direction. “Always buy unshelled. Slows you down when you’re eating. It’s important to watch your calories when you spend your time on the road. The first year I was driving, I put on weight like you wouldn’t believe. It got so my knees hurt all the time, you know? Probably not. You’re too young to know about it.”

  Blue nodded. She suspected the woman had forgotten she couldn’t make a sound, and it wouldn�
��t have made a difference if she hadn’t. The woman talked as easily as fish swam, before they landed in her truck at least.

  “Anyway, unshelled sunflower seeds, unshelled peas, real peas, not those skinny little kind they put in that Chinese food, and celery sticks. Sometimes in the summer, I’d put in some watermelon all cubed up; but then I figured out it made me pee all the time.” She lowered her voice on the word pee, as if someone might hear.

  Blue had met her in the parking lot of the diner. Uncertain, she’d leaned against a truck with a basketful of clams painted on the side until the woman came out and studied her from the far side of the parking lot.

  “What you doing, kid?” she called out.

  Blue opened her mouth, paused, and closed it again. Voice wasn’t something she’d ever thought about before. It was just there, like the sun and the moon and the ocean.

  She pulled the notebook out of her back pocket.

  Need a ride. Can I come with u?

  The woman came near, looking from the paper to Blue’s face and back again. After a minute, she pulled a glasses case from her shirt pocket. “Reading glasses.” She waved them. “Getting old’s a bitch.”

  She read the note, then looked at Blue again. She examined her, as if something more were written on her face—as if maybe those words were more important than the ones on the page.

  “Just you? You’re traveling alone?”

  Blue nodded and pointed at the bag between her feet, then at the guitar by her side.

  “A musician, huh? You know about that, right? You never turn down a musician in need. I learned that from my husband.”

  Pen to paper again.

  Is he driving 2?

  The woman shook her head. “Bill was a logger when he wasn’t playing the drums.”

  Was. The word needed no explanation. Her mother was, too. Was funny, was smart, was quick to cry, quick to laugh. Was gone forever.

  “Okay, kid. You promise me I’m not gonna find the cops on my tail, I’ll give you a lift. First, though, how do you know I’m even going in the right direction?”