The Bird Eater Page 10

  Aaron sat on the front porch step, his arms wound around his knees, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s half-empty at his feet. He had slipped up, tumbled down the rabbit hole, unable to look away from his son’s scribbled name etched into his car door, unable to fathom how it had gotten there, how it was possible.

  It’s im-fucking-possible.

  He took another swig of alcohol, wiped his mouth against his wrist and squinted through the midday sun, the heat intensifying the spinning inside his head.

  He knew it was stupid before he dug his phone out of his pocket, knew it was a mistake before he scrolled through his contacts, stopped on Evan for Evangeline, and pressed SEND. He knew it was a really bad fucking idea, but he pressed the phone to his ear and waited for the call to connect because he had to tell her.

  Evangeline had to know.

  “Hello?”

  Her voice made his heart lurch. He squeezed his eyes shut, felt ready to burst into a fit of incoherent sobs. He wanted to beg her: Please stop this. Let’s start over. Let’s be the way we were before any of this happened, before there was anything beyond the two of us. But that was the problem—that was his problem; he couldn’t let go, couldn’t move on. He could beg all he wanted, but when it came down to it, he was the one who was stuck. The name carved into his door proved it. The alcohol that coursed through his veins sealed the deal.

  “Aaron?” She sounded unsure of herself.

  He was sure she could hear him breathing as he considered hanging up before words had a chance to claw their way from inside his throat, but he simply sat there with the phone glued to his ear, unable to make a decision, unable to move.

  “I’m in Arkansas,” he finally told her, his tongue tripping over his home state.

  There was a long silence on her end, but she eventually spoke.

  “You’re drunk.”

  “I know.” He replied quickly, sure she was on the verge of insisting he call her back when he was sober.

  Call me when I can’t smell you through the phone, Aaron. Get yourself together. Don’t call me like this again.

  “But it’s because there’s this thing…” he said.

  Again, a long silence from two thousand miles away.

  “A thing,” she finally replied.

  “Yes,” he said, relieved that she understood. “I just…Ryder’s name, Evan. It’s here.”

  “What?” She sounded less than amused.

  “On my door. Someone wrote it.”

  “Someone wrote Ryder’s name on your door,” she said steadily. “On the house door?”

  “The car.”

  “Someone wrote his name on the car door.”

  “Except it wasn’t there before,” Aaron explained. “I walked around the car and all I saw was the window and I checked twice because of the asshole kid, he won’t leave me alone and he slashed my tire, which cost me like two hundred bucks, so I was sure that maybe he—But that…it isn’t important.”

  He shook his head, trying to get his story straight. “It wasn’t there, and then it was there, and people are telling me this house is haunted and I thought that maybe, I don’t know, I just…”

  He struggled for words, not sure what he was trying to say, suddenly realizing just how bad an idea calling her had been.

  “You hallucinated something—” Evan began.

  “No.” Aaron cut her off, but Evan wasn’t swayed.

  “You hallucinated something,” she repeated, “and then you proceeded to get drunk and call me to, what, suggest Ryder is there with you? Do you know how sick that is, Aaron? Do you know how crazy you sound?”

  “But you believe in that stuff,” Aaron reminded her.

  He remembered how excited Evangeline would get when her favorite show came on Friday nights—a ghost hunting show that Aaron teased her for watching, making fun of the “hunters” with their bulging gym-rat muscles and their tight bedazzled T-shirts. Evangeline even joined in on the teasing once in a while, mocking the TV screen during the more ridiculous parts. But she never gave it up, faithfully popping her popcorn and pouring herself a glass of red wine ten minutes before the start of the show. When Aaron asked her what she saw in it, why she subjected herself to hours’ worth of guys sneaking through dark hallways and rickety buildings, she’d shrug her shoulders and offer him an abashed sort of smile—a little embarrassed by her guilty pleasure, but not embarrassed enough to give it up. She was a true believer, putting her faith in the idea of an afterlife.

  Back then, Aaron had thought her infatuation cute, never stopping to consider “what if.” Now he wondered whether his refusal to believe had to do with Evangeline’s inability to continue loving him. Maybe if he had believed, they would have stayed together; they would have fought through the grief, bonded by the unified hope that their little boy—while gone from this earth—was still out there somewhere, that it was only a matter of time before they were together again.

  But now that he had evidence with enough power to convince him, Evan was snorting at him on the other end of the line. He couldn’t see her, but he knew she was rolling her eyes, imagined her lips going tight over her teeth.

  “What if it is him?” Aaron asked after a moment, his voice tapering off. “What if he’s here? I don’t know why he’d be here, but what if he is?”

  “I don’t think you should call me anymore,” Evangeline finally said.

  “I’m sorry,” Aaron murmured. “I’ll call back when I’m…not like this. It was stupid, I just got scared. I needed to tell you.”

  “Aaron?”

  “Yes?”

  Aaron blinked, suddenly scared by her steady tone.

  “I don’t think you should call me anymore,” she told him again, but her voice cracked this time.

  “What?”

  He swallowed the spit that had collected in his mouth. It tasted foul, metallic, like iron or blood.

  “But I thought we were going to try to—”

  “Stop,” she said, that single word trembling like a tree in autumn wind. “Please just stop. I can’t do this anymore, Aaron. I can’t live like this, okay?”

  Aaron fell into what felt like a suffocating silence. He was drowning in it, struggling to find the right words to say so frantically that all they did was choke off his air. His heart somersaulted inside his chest, pinballing against his ribs. He suddenly felt like he was going to throw up and scream all at once.

  “But I’m fixing it,” he managed to whisper. “I’ve been doing better, Evan, I just need a little more time.”

  He could hear her sniffling on the end of the line.

  She was cutting him off just as he was coming into the clear.

  She was abandoning him when he’d finally come to terms with the fact that she was right, that he needed help, that he couldn’t continue to live the way he’d been living—with the booze and the grief and the pills and the pain.

  “I can’t do this without you,” he said, his words warbling with emotion. “I need you, Evan. Please just give me a few more months; just let me get back to Portland. I’ll keep seeing Doctor Jandreau for as long as you want…forever if you want.”

  Her lack of response speared him through the heart. He was gripping the phone so viciously, pressing it so hard against his face that his ear was starting to ache.

  “Evan?” he whispered. “Say something. Just don’t say you—”

  “I have to go.”

  He squeezed his eyes shut.

  “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I just can’t.”

  When she disconnected the call, he continued to hold it to his ear, praying that she was still there, waiting for her to change her mind. But there was only silence.

  Evangeline was gone.

  For a moment Aaron felt like he was dying. He doubled over against the pain in his chest, his heart petrifying li
ke a stone. Anxiety washed over him in a crippling rush, the same anxiety that, back in Portland, caused him to nearly dial 911 over a dozen times, sure that his heart was about to explode, that his aorta would give beneath his skyrocketing blood pressure, that it would bisect and he’d bleed out and it would take a week for anyone to find him. Hell, out here it could be months, his dead body lying out on the lawn, putrefying in the sun. The fact that he’d seen things like that actually happen didn’t help. The guy with the bisected aorta died in the ambulance on the way to Legacy Good Samaritan. Countless heart attack victims had expired, strapped to a gurney while Aaron and Cooper defibbed and CPR’d. They had walked into an apartment where a woman had passed away in her bed weeks before. They had responded to a call where the body of a suicide had literally liquefied into a lake of carnage; he and Cooper had to stumble out of the bathroom and call for hazmat cleanup.

  Aaron stared at the tangle of dead hydrangea bushes flanking the porch’s balustrade, twisted and dry like skeleton arms. He considered going inside, swallowing the rest of his pills, washing them down with whiskey, and waiting for the final fade to black. He thought about the gun he’d shoved beneath his old bed upstairs, wondered how it would feel to blow a hole through the back of his own skull.

  But instead of stumbling headlong into his typical reaction of numbing himself until he couldn’t feel a single thing, he shoved himself off the porch steps and grabbed the shovel that was propped against the stairs. When he’d woken that morning, he had been determined to clear the bushes from the front of the house like a gravedigger clearing the dead, but he’d been derailed by his shattered window, by a collection of six letters etched into his paint. Now, fueled by newfound rage, he sank the spade into the soil at the base of one of Edie’s bushes and jammed it up to its hilt with a downward stomp, but as he dug he realized the irony of it all. He had come here to work out his issues, and the only reason he had for working out his issues was to win back his wife. Now she didn’t want to talk to him anymore, he was stuck here in Ironwood, and something was happening—something he couldn’t explain.

  He stumbled backward, pulled his arm back, and gave the shovel a javelin throw into the yard, spun around, and grabbed the bottle of Jack Daniel’s from the porch step, only to launch it at the balustrade. The bottle hit the wood with a hollow thunk and fell into the bushes that needed digging up. Aaron turned away from the house, his hands buried in his hair. He walked down the driveway, thinking that maybe a few minutes of reflection would help him get his head on straight, but something about putting that house to his back only made him feel more volatile.

  Reaching the end of the driveway, he turned to look back at his childhood home, the place that had effectively ruined him, that had cursed him to a life surrounded by death.

  His hands balled into fists.

  His lungs filled with air.

  Standing on the cracked pavement of Old Mill Road, Aaron opened his mouth and let out an anguished yell.

  He screamed at that fucking house, willing it back into hell. But rather than sinking into the ground, it stood steadfast in place.

  Aaron stared at it for a long while, as if challenging it to do its worst. And then his eyes slid shut, he pulled in a steadying breath, and he walked up the driveway again. There was still hope—that’s what Doc Jandreau had said.

  There’s always hope, as long as you keep hoping.

  Nine

  The baseball boy twisted where he stood, moving painfully slow as he fell into a run, but Aaron was quick. Before the kid was able to bolt out of the room, Aaron snatched the abandoned baseball bat beside the bed, reached out with his free hand to catch the boy by the back of the shirt, and gave him a stern backward yank. The baseball player released a startled yell and threw his weight forward, desperate to escape Aaron’s grasp, stretching his arms outward, fingers groping the edge of the door. He was trying to drag himself out of the room despite his jersey being pulled impossibly tight against his chest.

  His struggle was cut short when Aaron reeled back and brought the wooden baseball bat down on top of the boy’s head.

  The kid let out a shout, his grip reflexively releasing the doorframe, his arms folding across the top of his head. Aaron didn’t hesitate. He brought the bat down again and again, both hands choking up on the grip. The baseball player’s screams shifted from terrified to garbled, guttural, until he finally went quiet, nothing but the wet slap of wood against hopelessly traumatized flesh.

  Aaron stepped back, wiping a forearm across the blood-spattered curve of his cheek. A woman yelled up from the first floor. Edie surfaced from the hallway that led into the kitchen, her head upturned, spotting her nephew as she ran up the stairs. Aaron’s fingers twitched against the bat and his

  muscles spasmed; his eyes shot open, staring into the darkness of his bedroom.

  He covered his face, rolled onto his side, and swiped a prescription bottle off the bedside table with a sweep of the hand. Shaking three yellow tabs into his palm, he tossed them back and washed them down with a swig of flat beer. And then he faced the wall, pulled the pillow over his head, and squeezed his eyes shut once more.

  He spent the next day aimlessly floating from one room to another. One minute he was collapsed on his bed, the next he was sitting at the top of the stairs. He lay on the couch and stared up at the ceiling, wondering how much a house alarm would set him back, how long it would take to install; his muscles aching from a frenzy of the previous day’s work.

  In his anger, he had replaced every single one of those goddamn hydrangea bushes, pretending that every shovelful of dirt had been a shovel closer to digging his own grave. After the bushes were planted, he’d replaced the bug netting on both the front and back porch and scrubbed the peeling floor planks until his back lower back screamed bloody murder. Yesterday, he had relished the pain. The physical ache had been a welcome change to the one deep within his chest. Today, the wrenching of his muscles was annoying, grounding him from doing much of anything but lounging around.

  He lazed out on the weedy lawn and stared up at the clouds, dialed Cooper’s number a half dozen times but failed to press SEND, deciding he wasn’t up for listening to his best friend launch into his typical that’s what you get for living out in the middle of nowhere spiel when it came to the asshole kid, the birds, the cops who refused to lift a finger; not wanting to hear about how stupid it was for him to have called Evangeline the way he had. He knew it had been a mistake.

  Blame it on temporary insanity.

  Unable to clear his head, he locked up the house and walked down the driveway, his worn-out Asics pounding the cracked pavement of winding, woodland streets. It took him nearly twenty minutes to reach his closest neighbor—a beaten-down house that was surely abandoned despite the crap littering the ground. Crabgrass and thistle swept across the bottoms of the windows in the light summer breeze, and the driveway showed no signs of recent use. A kid had lived there when Aaron was still in elementary school, but they had never been friends. Edie hadn’t liked those neighbors because they didn’t take care of their property. Trash had lined the street just beyond their house and it made her feel like all the effort she put into making their house nice was for nothing. It didn’t matter that the neighbors were a good mile away. Aaron stopped just shy of the weeded driveway and looked up at the dilapidated tragedy, wondering if someone was squatting within those run-down walls, wondering if that fucking kid was staring back at him from behind rotting curtains, his mouth curled up in that ugly leer.

  Aaron stopped walking after another mile. He’d gone far enough to satisfy his curiosity, to reassure himself that he was very much alone on that stretch of road. The few houses that peppered the ten miles between his place and the intersection that led to Ironwood proper had been allowed to wither away. They were vandalized, beaten down by the weather, overgrown by the wild. The curving pavement of the dead-end street was nothing but a finger
of desolation jutting into the hickories and oaks.

  Arriving back home, Aaron considered calling Mike and Eric for an impromptu barbecue—maybe he’d go out on a limb and invite Cheri and her overly intimidating husband over for burgers and brews. They’d have a reunion that was long overdue.

  No, that would be a little too weird. He didn’t want Miles knowing where he lived, though he had a feeling the guy already knew. Aaron didn’t want to deal with it; hell, he didn’t have enough luck to press. But he also couldn’t sit out here alone, not today, not after his meltdown the day before. He was slipping farther down the rabbit hole by the minute, having thrown himself off the wagon rather than casually tumbling off. Not more than a few months ago, he wouldn’t have thought twice about giving up, but Aaron wasn’t ready to surrender yet. He had to finish what he started, if not for Evangeline than for Edie, for Cooper, for himself.

  Turning his cell phone over and over again in his hands, he finally gave in and dialed Eric’s number. Maybe once the house was done he’d be ready for a big shindig, but one person would be enough company for now.

  Eric cackled as Aaron battled the flames with a metal spatula. He looked like a fencer, whapping at the fire, trying to cut it down to size while shielding his eyebrows with his left arm.

  “Save them!” Eric pleaded from the back porch. “For the love of God, save the beef!”

  Aaron managed to salvage a couple of patties at the cost of choking on lungs full of smoke.

  “Ah, the smell of summer,” Eric mused.

  Aaron ascended the steps and presented a paper plate of barely rescued hamburger meat.