“Sorry, I canceled my subscription to Charlie’s Love Life Updates after it raised the price.”
“Inflation’s a bitch.” Charlie dug back into his bag and pulled out a glass pipe and a colorful packet of weed. “Watch my sweet girl for me, will you? I’m heading out back for a little evening refreshment.”
“Oh sure, you didn’t bring a jacket but you packed your weed,” Nora snapped as Charlie sauntered to the door.
“I told you, only the essentials.”
He disappeared just as Nora threw her dirty sock at the closing door. Infuriating. If there’s one thing she could count on, it’sthat she couldn’t count on Charlie for anything practical. She looked over at the bird on the bed opposite her.
“How do you put up with him?”
Jessica once again said nothing.
“Not feeling chatty, huh? Well, fine. Turn around. I’m getting changed and I don’t need any commentary.”
Nora picked up the nightgown Ruby had left on Martin’s old bed for her. It was thick flannel, with a ruffled bib and a high collar. Not Nora’s usual style, but it was clean and didn’t smell like sweat and two days’ worth of BO, so it was already a great improvement over her own clothes.
Once fully flanneled, Nora peeled back the blue-and-red bedsheets and crawled under the covers. The mattress was harder than she’d expected, the sheets scratchy, but on them lingered the slightest hint of a scent she recognized. Or maybe she was imagining it. Either way, she sank deeper into the bed and let herself imagine, for a very brief moment, that the blanket was her father’s arms holding her in a hug. She could still remember what that felt like, just a little. Warm and comforting, like none of the dangers in the world could touch her. And like the sudden drop of something weighing roughly a pound or so onto her big toe. Wait, no, not that part. She opened her eyes. Jessica stood perched on her foot, watching her intently with pale yellow eyes.
“I thought I told you to turn around,” said Nora. Still Jessica said nothing. Instead she hopped down and made the steady climb up Nora’s bent legs, coming to rest on one knee. “All right, fine,” Nora said. “Moment over. I’m mad at Dad anyway. But fuck, it’s hard to be mad at someone dead. Have you ever tried it? They can’t explain themselves. They can’t apologize. There’s nothingremotely satisfying about it. I guess it would be easier if he was freshly dead, like the souls my colleagues have to deal with. At least they can talk back. But then I think you’d just end up feeling too sorry for them for being dead that you couldn’t even stay mad at them. How unfair is that?”
Jessica bobbed up and down.
“Maybe someone pretending to be dead is the next best thing,” she said, still speculating. She’d experienced more than enough of that growing up. The deeper she fell into her fear of death, the more a teenaged Charlie had tried to scare it out of her. It started when they were fourteen. She’d just returned home from a grueling day at school (dodgeball followed by an oral presentation in which she’d mispronounced “pianist” rather profoundly) and walked into Bubbie’s living room to find Charlie dead on the couch, a pool of blood surrounding him. After a shriek so high-pitched it upset the neighborhood dogs more than a block away, Charlie came clean and was forced to spend the rest of the evening apologizing to Nora and scrubbing strawberry Kool-Aid off the couch cushions. Nora hated him for it, naturally, and hated him just as much when he faked his death in four more ways over the course of the next two years, mastering the art of shallow breathing and rolling his eyeballs in ways eyeballs were not meant to roll. But secretly she was a little grateful to him too, because each time he turned out to be alive, she got to be angry and swear at him and cry in his arms—something she never got the chance to do with her parents no matter how badly she’d needed to.
Nora shook her head. “Whatever. I have more important things to worry about.” She cracked open Charlie’s file from where she’d left it on the bed before going up to dinner. Shetapped her pen on the letters she’d written along the inside of the file. “S-T-A…”
Jessica cocked her head, enthralled.
“S-T-A.” Nora repeated. “S-T-A.”
“Stare,” Jessica said.
Nora looked up in surprise, a second voice in the room unexpected after hers had dominated for so long. Then she shook it off and turned back to the file. “Yes, you are staring at me. Quite intensely. It’s very off-putting.”
Jessica hopped to Nora’s other knee.
“S-T-A,” she said again. Then leapt up. Jessica went sailing in a flurry of feathers, catching herself midair and landing on the other bed with an affronted squawk, but Nora barely noticed. “Stairs!”
She raced out the door and careened into the open space between bedrooms, reaching the bottom of the rickety wooden staircase just as Charlie’s silhouette appeared at the top.
“Charlie,” she called out in warning, but all that did was confuse Charlie, who was too mellow to understand warnings in his current state, causing him to miss the top step and begin a painful tumble down the rest. Nora had seen this before. Not in person, but in case file after case file that had once stood stacked on her desk at S.C.Y.T.H.E.: broken necks and cracked skulls resulting from a heavy fall down the stairs. In her mind’s eye she watched as Charlie thudded to the wooden floor by her feet, another staircase death to add to the roster. But before her mind had time to move on from this thought and connect to her feet, Nora was already bolting up the stairs, throwing herself in Charlie’s way like a stuntman’s crash mat with bones. Any thought of her own welfare was uncharacteristically gone from her mind forjust long enough to propel her upward before the twins collided and tumbled down, down, landing in a heap of limbs and groans at the bottom.
Nora smacked at her brother’s meaty form, which was lying like an anvil across her rib cage. “Off. Off,” she wheezed. Charlie rolled off and lay there, dazed, head-to-head with Nora, their legs stretched out in opposite directions. Neither had what it took to move.
“Did you die?” Nora asked, still scrambling for breath.
“I don’t think so,” Charlie said back.
“Good. Good.”
“Was I going to? Was that the thing?”
“I think it might’ve been.”
“So we stopped it?”
“I stopped it. You nearly marijuana-ed yourself right into it.”
