Chapter 4
The Casa Comfort motel stood at a squat three stories, wrapping snugly around an empty pool that doubled as a museum of shriveled leaves and no less than two dead frogs.
Nora wrapped her coat tight around her slender torso, tucking Charlie’s file under one arm, convinced she’d sent agents out this way at least once for some unseemly soul collection.
She walked around the car to find Charlie squeezing Jessica’s cage into his duffel bag.
“Okay, baby girl. I need you to be nice and quiet for Daddy. Can you do that for me?”
“Smells bad,” was Jessica’s reply as Charlie pulled the zipper and slung the bag over his shoulder.
“Where’d you get that thing anyway?” Nora asked.
“Walmart.”
“The parrot?”
“Oh.” They passed under the entryway awning just as the wind picked up. “Someone left her on the porch. Crazy, right? A whole-ass bird.”
“Do you ever do anything like a normal person?”
“Says the grim reaper.”
“Administrative coordinator for grim reapers,” Nora corrected. “Wait, no, I mean, they’re not—”
But by that point they’d reached the concierge desk and the roughly Gumby-shaped guy of no more than eighteen behind it, scrolling on his phone. Nora left the rest of her sentence at the door and changed tactics, directing her focus towards the motel employee.
“Hey. Hi. Good afternoon,” she tried, her nerves too fried for small talk. “We need a room. Like, right now.”
“I see,” said the young man, stooping his towering torso to meet Nora at eye height. He looked back and forth between the twins with a knowing smirk, clearly stifling a giggle. “A room right now, you say?”
“Oh god.” Nora caught up to the teen’s tone with horror. “No.”
“Dude,” Charlie added.
“Not a room like that.”
“Dude.”
“Two beds, please. As far apart as you’ve got them.”
The teen’s face fell slightly. “Oh. Yeah. All right, fine. We’ve got a few of those available.
” He tapped at his computer for a second or two, turned to the wall of keys behind him, and plucked one from its hook.
“Room 204. You’ve got a pool view, which is honestly just depressing this time of year.
A constant reminder of the many limitations thrust upon us by the weather and her fickle moods. Can’t even use the floaties.”
“Uh, thanks.” Nora took the key from the teen’s outstretched hand.
“Enjoy your stay,” said the teen. “Or try to, anyway. Enjoyment is a fleeting thing, difficult to conjure and even more challenging to sustain. Checkout is at ten a.m.”
“Happiness is temporary,” came a squawk from Charlie’s duffel. The twins froze, their eyes sliding in synchronicity to meet the other’s with a look that said, “Oh fuck, we’re screwed.”
“The bag gets it,” was all the teen said before returning to his phone.
Nora and Charlie simultaneously let out the breath they’d been holding and scurried towards their room.
* * *
The carpet of room 204 had been a different color once, that much was clear.
The mystery of which color was one that would require a crack detective team to solve, and even then it was likely to end up as a cold case.
These days it lived its life as a concerning shade of noncommittal beige against the earwax orange of the walls.
Charlie shrugged his bag off his shoulder and onto the bed closest to the window, claiming his territory as he wrangled the birdcage to freedom.
“There’s my girl,” he cooed as Jessica emerged, her gray head bobbing back and forth in greeting.
Nora flopped heavily onto her own narrow bed, the weight of the day having sunk deep into her bones.
She stared sightlessly at the boob-shaped light above her, its glow nearly as orange as the chipped paint on the walls.
Her coat rustled against the rough, aggressively floral comforter, and a pang of homesickness struck her.
She’d only been away from her cozy little apartment—her sanctuary—for a few hours, but under the circumstances she couldn’t imagine when she’d be able to return again.
Her fiddle-leaf fig was a goner for sure.
She blinked and the boob light was gone, replaced by Charlie’s fuzzy face.
“I’m going exploring,” he said. “Wanna come?”
“No.”
“Suit yourself, I’ll—”
“No, I mean you’re not going out there,” said Nora. “It’s too risky.”
“I’m not gonna be in a car, Nor,” said Charlie. “Gonna be a bit tricky for me to get into a car accident on foot.”
Nora groaned and rolled over, grabbing Charlie’s file from where it sat by her scratchy pillow. The cause of death hadn’t changed.
“Fine,” she relented. “Stay on the premises and, for fuck’s sake, be safe.”
Charlie gave a salute and disappeared out the door. Nora turned onto her side and found Jessica perched on the pillow, waiting for her. She jumped back in surprise, then regained her composure. “Why doesn’t anybody understand personal space?”
The bird shuffled its weight from foot to foot, staring at Nora expectantly. Nora stared back, unsure of what to make of this strange creature. Jessica seemed to be thinking the same thing.
“Okay, so we’re stuck here,” Nora said after a moment, more to herself than the parrot.
“Charlie can’t be in the car because Charlie will die in the car.
Because Charlie is still going to die. Why the fuck is Charlie going to die?
” Her voice caught. She steadied herself. “We need a plan. A proper one.”
Jessica bobbed her head again.
“Any insights?”
Jessica hopped a step closer. “Forest house,” she squawked, the nonsense words sharp against the still air of the room.
“Didn’t think so. No. I’ve got to do this on my own. Shocker. What else is new?”
The bird gave a shake of her feathers, hopped off the bed, and went back into her cage across the room.
“Typical,” said Nora. “You really are Charlie’s pet.”
Nora tossed over onto her back and closed her eyes to think.
They couldn’t get back on the road, that much was certain.
But they had driven long enough and far enough that they were now somewhere roughly in the middle, or just to the left, of nowhere.
Hopefully, nowhere enough that S.C.Y.T.H.E.
wouldn’t find them. That Death wouldn’t find them.
Maybe, somehow, by some fluke of fate, they were safe.
That wasn’t a word that came easily to Nora.
Even at her desk or in the soft warmth of her bed, she was never confidently safe.
Accidents could happen anywhere, and often did.
But her anxiety-consumed mind needed safety right now, and in her exhaustion she allowed herself to have it, just for a moment.
Just long enough for her muscles to loosen, her body to sink as much as possible into the stiff motel mattress, and finally, for Nora to drift into unbidden sleep.
* * *
Nora awoke nearly two hours later to the smell of something burning.
She scrambled, trying to blink away the grogginess blurring her vision to a chorus of “shit, shit” from Charlie somewhere towards the other end of the room.
When her eyes finally adjusted, she found him sucking his middle and index fingers, a still-smoking match in a freshly singed divot on the carpet at his feet.
“What the hell are you doing?” Nora swung herself out of bed and started towards him.
“No, no, close your eyes,” Charlie said.
“Charlie.” Nora crossed her arms in front of her chest, staring daggers.
“Well, it was supposed to be a surprise.” He stepped away from the window, revealing a vending machine Moon Pie with a match sticking out of it perched on the sill.
Nora looked from the little cake to her brother and back.
“For our birthday,” he said, waving his hands at the treat like a 1970s game show prize model.
“Oh,” said Nora.
He dug into the waistband of his pajama pants and plucked out a photograph.
“Here,” he said, offering it to her. “I’ve been saving it for you. For us, I guess.”
“Oh,” Nora said again. She took the photo, brows knitted.
Her nap still clung to her enough to make the whole exchange surreal.
The man in the middle of the photo stared back at her with eyes that pinched slightly at the corners the same way hers did, a dimple pocking his right cheek identical to the one on her own.
He had one arm around another man, his other around a woman.
Nora discreetly gave her thigh a small pinch with her free hand to make sure she was actually awake.
“He was exactly twenty-six there, just like us,” Charlie said. “Look.” He flipped the picture over in Nora’s hand. On the back, in writing she knew nearly as well as her own, were the words “The Bird siblings, Virgo Bay, Nova Scotia, 1996.”
Nora looked up at Charlie. “Virgo Bay? Why does that ring a bell?”
“It’s where Dad grew up. I forgot about it too.
He didn’t talk about it much, but there were a bunch of other things from there in that old cigar box of his that Bubbie held on to.
Coupla other photos and some seashells and stuff.
That’s where I found this.” He poked at the photo, still flipped over in Nora’s hands.
She read the inscription again, her already-furrowed brow furrowing further.
“Dad didn’t have siblings.”
“Yeah, I figure that must’ve been his squad. My buddies and I all go by the West Side Horn Dogs, but to each their own. They seem like a fun bunch.”
Nora flipped the photo back over and examined the three figures it held locked in time.
The man beside her father was shorter, his hair straight and thinning where her father’s curled around his brows in lush waves, but there was something familiar in the man’s expression that Nora couldn’t shake.
The woman on the other side was a delicate thing with birdlike bones and fire in her eyes, standing a whole head shorter than Martin Bird.
They were all soaked to the bone in their windbreakers, rain glistening on their faces, ocean waves lifted in a frantic dance behind them.
“This was two years before we were born,” said Nora, transfixed. “Why don’t we know about them?”
Charlie shrugged. “People get weird when they have kids. Friends drop like flies.”
“I guess.” Nora pried her gaze away and looked back to Charlie. “Thanks for this.”
“All good. Figured you’d have more use for it. Everything just gets lost or peed on at my place.”
Nora nodded, slipping the photo into the pocket of her jacket, her mind still half in Virgo Bay.
“Anyhoo, shall we?” Charlie said. He struck the match from the Moon Pie against the motel-brand matchbook in his hand. The little makeshift candle took light, its reflection undulating in the window behind it. “Happy birthday!”
“Happy birthday,” Nora said, allowing herself a small smile.
She wouldn’t let that carcinogenic chocolate time bomb of a snack cake anywhere near her internal organs, but it was an unexpectedly sweet gesture all the same.
Maybe they could do this. Maybe they could actually do this.
Together. The first thing they’d done together in eighteen years, and the most important of their lives.
“We blow it out on the count of three,” said Charlie. “Ready?”
The twins moved over the little flickering match.
“One,” said Charlie. “Two. Thr—”
Someone knocked on the door to a neighboring room. Hard. Another knock sounded from down the hall. And another from the other side.
Nora froze. The knocking continued, getting closer, occasionally interrupted by the sound of a door opening, of words being exchanged, before more knocking resumed.
“Stay here,” Nora said, her stomach suddenly somewhere below her knees.
She slunk to the motel room door and pressed an eye to the peephole.
A scattered herd of black-clad people lined the hallway, going door to door, a scythe and arrow emblem emblazoned on the backs of their jackets.
Nora stepped back from the door, eyes wild. “No. No, no, no.”
“Nor?”
“Shh!” She flicked off the lights and raced back to the window, blowing out the match with more spit than air. The room sank into a heavy darkness, the clouds beyond the window staving off any remaining whispers of setting sunlight. “It’s them. They’re coming.”
Before Charlie could open his mouth to reply, a knock sent their door shivering on its hinges.
They were here.