Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(67)

It doesn’t happen. But it had.

I didn’t even check in with Mom that I was leaving—standard procedure when dusk was even close to dusking—I just breezed through the kitchen, got my keys from the hook without missing a step, and like that I was going to save my best friend’s life, to clean up this mess before it pooled big enough to lap up around my new shoes.

The reason I was supposed to check in on the way out, it was that the grainy light of dusk, that’s when accidents like to happen, according to my dad.

He was right.

For exactly one half of an instant, just past Pine, almost to Spruce—Tad and Kim Rogers live on Magnolia—for exactly one slice of inattention, one moment of looking behind that planter, behind those rosebushes, there was a blot in my headlights.

Then that blot was a sound. Then a bump.

How Ben had gotten nine houses down from his house is a complete mystery, even now. He had pants on too, which made even less sense. What four-year-old has shame enough to get dressed?

I should have stopped, I know. I know I know I know. Except I was screaming. Except my brain was just one white line of sound.

I whipped into the last turn before Magnolia—Evergreen Court—and I stopped down at the round curb at the edge of the culvert. Because the edge of the culvert was always crumbling away, there were no houses down there.

This whole thing would have gone a completely different way, had some lookyloo PTA watchdog been keeping vigil at a window.

I was alone, though. Alone with what I’d done, alone with what had just happened, with what was going to ruin my whole life if I let it. Finally I quit screaming and hammering my hands onto the dash.

In my mind, I was four hundred yards behind, on the street, administering CPR.

I still kind of am, I guess.

Except for the proof otherwise. The proof still stuck under the car, up in the wheel well.

Ben was that little, yeah.

I went cold all over. Cold and mechanical.

All I could see was my dad, looking up from his chair at the kitchen table, asking me what was wrong, dear?

“Everything,” I would have told him, I know. Everything.

And that would be unacceptable.

So, with my cold, mechanical hands and arms, with my new shoe pushing against the fender, I hooked a finger through Ben Rogers’s belt loop and extracted him from the front left wheel well of my handed-down Buick Regal.

He came out in one piece.

I dropped him into the culvert with all the open-lidded washing machines and sprung shopping baskets and sumac and general grossness.

Which I’m sorry for. So sorry. He deserved better. Anybody does.

Then, because my brain had gone cold and mechanical too, I did what I had to do: drove over to Elm.

Curtis Grant’s rangy yellow lab was loping around like always, trying to race every car that dared its street.

I dared.

And at a certain point in the race, I jerked the wheel over to the left, sucked that big yellow dog up into the wheel well, then let it cycle a bit before screeching the brakes loud, to draw people out into the street, alibi me.

Ben Rogers, his hair had been blond.

Nobody suspected anything.


I can’t say for sure—all I’ve got to go on’s what’s happening now—but here’s what I figure happened.

A boy is walking home from his half-day preschool early in May. His mom’s bopping along beside him in her cute way. Some days it’s his dad, since the mom and dad both manage to work from home, and know they get only so many “hold my hand”-walks total. But today it’s the mom, her hair in a messy bun on top of her head, a spring in her step because she’s basically living the dream, here. One she’s thankful for every day.

This boy, see—you have to understand what a walking-talking miracle he is.

It’s been four years, so everybody in town has kind of got accustomed to him, but there was a time.

My mom explained it to me in hushed tones over the breakfast table one day. Evidently, you used to have to get blood tests before you got married. They told you it was to get the bride and groom clean bills of health—no gonorrhea here, sir, ma’am—but the whispery part of it, the reason my mom waited for my dad to be gone to say it, was that she’d heard the test was to make sure mixing blood with this other person wasn’t going to create some sad monster.

“Eugenics?” I asked my mom, because I’m all A’s and not a Nazi, and in reply she’d covered my hand with both of hers, heated her eyes up to match her the downturned lines of her mouth, and said it hadn’t been a bad idea. Some people’s blood just shouldn’t touch, even in a petri dish. It was as easy and as obvious as that.

In the case of this boy, his mom and dad, as perfect as they were, they weren’t the genetically compatible kind of perfect. The doctor figured it out about halfway through the pregnancy and had the necessary sit-down with the couple.

They understood what needed to be done. That didn’t mean they could do that, however.

Instead, they brought it before the church, and it became this big test-of-faith thing, where the whole congregation got together in the main chapel and held hands and prayed together, with this mom-to-be—already showing, she’s got such a small frame—with her in a middle pew, her head leaned into her husband’s shoulder, both of them crying freely.

The end result was that, very much against medical advice and second-opinion medical advice, they let this doomed pregnancy keep happening. No medicine because there is no medicine, but a lot of prayer, which my dad, never one not to know a detail or object to a wrong one, explained to me.