7
It arrived around two in the morning, possibly awoken by the sawlike caw of the bird next door, screaming at the moon. Stevie
felt it in her dream, in which she was being shoved into a hole in the ground and her head—just her head—was being covered
in cement.
Stevie’s anxiety attacks never announced themselves. They sprang, fully formed, often in the dead of night, electrifying her
nervous system and jolting her awake and into a world of confusion and terror. She went through her steps—told herself it
was just anxiety, that the air wasn’t being sucked out of her lungs, that the world was not reducing to a single, fading point.
She clawed for the Ativan she kept in the front of her bag and took one, then paced around this strange living room waiting
for it to work. The foreignness of the apartment didn’t help, or that she had stayed away from her parents on Christmas, that
David was gone, that there was nothing . . .
Nothing except Nate, sleeping behind the closed bedroom door. He’d been at Elliot’s for three hours the night before. She
could wake him up, ask him to sit with her.
No. She would get through this. She got out her phone and cycled through anything at all that reassured her. A rewatch of her favorite show. Some videos of animals in pajamas. People mudlarking on the banks of the Thames and pulling up little china doll heads and marbles.
That was boring and soothing enough to work. Mudlarking it was. As she watched a woman find tiny green bottles she called
poisons, Stevie’s pulse slowed and she drifted back off to sleep. The next thing she knew, there was a heavy thumping on the
door, startling her awake. She pulled the blanket up to her nose protectively until it stopped. Nate burst through the bedroom
door and, to Stevie’s surprised dismay, opened the front door.
“Morning.”
It was the older woman from next door, Helen. She was wearing patterned yoga-style red hippie pants with elephants on them,
along with a white tunic top with red edging.
“Thought you might be hungry. I have cake and coffee.”
“Oh,” Nate said, backing away. “I’m good. We’re . . .”
Helen craned her neck to look at Stevie, who was peering over the edge of the sofa.
“You. Murder girl. Come over. I need to talk to you. I’ll leave the door unlocked.”
No “would you mind coming over” or “if you want to come over.” This was a New York City come over.
“Why did you open it?” Stevie asked in a low voice as Nate shut the door.
“I . . . I thought I had to. It might have been . . .”
Without finishing the thought, Nate returned to his room and shut the door, leaving Stevie to fend for herself with the neighbor.
Stevie didn’t want to go next door and deal with whatever weirdness this building had thrown her way—then again, they had no food in the apartment.
She decided she was willing to put up with a little strangeness for cake.
She pulled on her Icelandic sweater and some slippers and shuffled out into the hall and knocked on Helen’s door.
“I said it’s unlocked!”
Stevie opened the door into the swelteringly hot apartment, where an old coffeepot hissed as it brewed.
“Don’t get old,” Helen said as she limped through her kitchen. “Your bones turn to chalk.”
Stop it! Hello. Pineapple. Stop it! Asshole.
This came from a massive cockatoo who was skittering back and forth on the perch inside the gigantic cage that took up the
center of the room. It was nearly as big as the elevator. Unlike the apartment Stevie and Nate were in, Helen’s apartment
was lived in. The white walls had an aged patina with cracks and yellowing chips. There was a gray sofa with sagging cushions
and was piled thick with colored crocheted blankets. Stevie felt more at home here, especially since the walls were lined
with overladen shelves, stuffed both horizontally and vertically to pack in as many books as possible. This was a reader’s
home, and Stevie had the deep and largely unconscious belief that anyone who filled their living space with books could never
be all bad, even if they ordered her to come over and had a bird that called her an asshole.
“He’s flirting with you,” Helen said as the bird flailed and stretched his wings. “What do you want? Cookies? Gingerbread? Fruitcake?”
“Um, anything? Not fruitcake.”
“No one likes fruitcake,” Helen said, shaking her head and piling cookies onto a yellow Fiestaware plate. “They should. It’s
a good cake. Mine’s real good. I make them for spite now. I think the gingerbread is the way to go this morning. Go say hi
to Murph.”
Murph, Stevie assumed, was the bird. He cooed as Stevie approached, twisting his head and regarding her curiously through
the bars of his white metal cage, the paint of which was peppered with dings and divots. Murph seemed cheerful, though—his
cage was full of toys and swings. He had something that looked like a little doorbell that was also badly dinged, some kind
of stone for sharpening his weapon of a beak, and a mirror to see how good he looked doing it.
“You want to see your new girlfriend?” Helen said, coming out of the kitchen, breathing heavily with every step. “Okay, okay,
I’ll let you out. . . .”
As soon as Helen opened the cage door, Murph bounced over to the opening and stepped gingerly onto Helen’s arm. Murph fixed
a beady eye on Stevie and stretched out a wing.
“Hold out your arm,” Helen said.
Stevie found that she complied despite her better judgment.
Murph reached out a big foot, wiggled his talons, and made the first step onto Stevie.
He side-footed his way up her arm, stopping at the shoulder, and stuck his face into her short blond hair.
Most of his face was a gray hook of beak that looked like it could puncture a can.
Stevie imagined his beak going right into her jugular and her neck turning into a fruit-punch-colored fountain of horror.
“What do I do? With him?”
“What do you mean?” Helen said. “You don’t do anything. Come sit down.”
Stevie crept across the room, bird on her shoulder, with the exaggerated care of someone trying not to set off a trip wire.
Murph pressed his talons into her shoulder for the ride.
“Here,” Helen said as she sat down. “You want this? I used to buy this crap from Margo because Luna is nice to Murph. I don’t
want greasy grass hands.”
She plucked a small tube from a fruit basket full of odds and ends and handed it to Stevie.
It read Touch Grass: a biohacked refinishing lotion for your hands, infused with lignin and chamomile.
As she did so, Stevie noticed that there was a tattoo on Helen’s hand, right in the space between her thumb and index finger.
It was a small tattoo—a bird, inked in blue. It looked old, not very professional.
“Got that a long time ago,” Helen said, noting Stevie’s gaze. “Lifetimes ago. I’ve always loved birds.”
Stevie nodded carefully as Murph explored her ear with his beak.
“You gonna eat?” Helen asked.
“I don’t know if I can move.”
Helen laughed and pulled the foil seal from a small plastic fruit cup she had brought to the table.
“Pineapple,” she said. “It’s his favorite food. Murph will do anything for pineapple. Come on, Murph.”
Murph bounced down Stevie’s arm and crab-walked over her hand to get to the dish. He dug in at once, puncturing the fruit
with his beak. Stevie reached over her shoulder to check for the bird poop she was sure was there but found none. She grabbed
the coffee in relief.
Without the bird—and with the caffeine—Stevie was gradually aware that the true sharpness wasn’t Murph’s beak. It was the
way Helen was looking at her, not explaining why she had summoned Stevie. The silence stretched, punctured by Stevie taking
the loudest slurp of her coffee.
“There was a lot of drama at that party last night,” Stevie finally said.
“Drama?” Helen chuckled. “That wasn’t drama. Mitzi loves to complain. It’s her favorite thing in the world. I invited Benny
as a Christmas present for her. See, Lance was an air traffic controller and Mitz was way up in customer service for an airline.
She was the one who stepped in when things really went wrong. People were always yelling at her. Getting to yell back is like
vacation. And now that Lance is retired, he doesn’t have to worry that if he makes a mistake, planes will fall out of the
sky. He keeps trying to get her to buy a place in Italy like you see online, where some town will sell you a house for a dollar
because it’s on an ancient Roman sewer and the pipes are made of lead. What’s Mitzi going to do in a place like that? Anyway,
Benny’s all right. She and Luna are the only ones I trust to take care of Murph. Isn’t that right, Murph?”
Murph was demolishing the pineapple, absolutely mashing it to pulp and getting it into his little bird face.
“That poor actress, though,” Helen went on. “Arthur’s been obsessed with her since they moved in a few weeks ago. She’s on
Broadway and she’s British. Arthur loves both of those things. Never get him started on the royal family. He will not shut
up. Ever.”
She let out a dry cough and rubbed at her chest before going on.
“Somehow he got invited to the palace once—I can’t remember which palace, some palace, not the main one—and he got his picture
taken standing in the royal bathtub. He says he knows the royal undertaker. I love Arthur, but he’s a pain in the ass sometimes.
Eat the gingerbread. It’s my best recipe. The trick is warming the spices in the blackstrap molasses. I used to work in a
lot of hippie stores. Lots of whole grains and molasses. I learned how to make healthy food taste rich.”
Stevie took a bite as instructed. It was spicy enough to make her want to sneeze, but also absurdly good.
“So,” Helen said, settling herself in her chair. She drew her shoulders back and her chin in, making herself very square and
solid. “You’re the girl who knows everything.”
That characterization was so wildly incorrect that Stevie almost said, Yes, yes, I am. The girl who knows literally everything. I was out there making good choices, but you caught me and now I