Chapter 2 American Crow #6
This isn’t to say that I didn’t like Angel on the Rock .
. . It’s one of a cluster of restaurants owned by the older brother of a friend of mine, all in the Chicago area but each of them themed to represent a different iconic seaside town somewhere in the world.
Angel on the Rock is themed after Brighton, in England, a resort town with a huge coastline and boardwalk beach pier where families huddled on the sand.
Its chosen art form is poetry. There’s one called Seven Gables, that pays homage to the sights of Salem, Massachusetts, where the patrons told ghost stories, often in costume, and he had planned one as an homage to Mykonos, that Greek hillside town with its candy-colored houses and buildings like chunks of chalk, where solo musicians would be invited to perform.
I’d stayed at Angel on the Rock for two years, doing occasional freelance stories (“Ten Ways to Look Like a Diva in Thrift” . . .
“Ten Ways to Ace an Interview” . . . “How to Be a Good Parent After a Bad Childhood” . . . “How to Start a Book Club for Serious
Readers” . . . “How to Host a Dinner Party for Twelve for $100” . . . “Know Your Physician’s Politics”) for online zines.
During this time, I lived with Daniel and Steven, married medical students who were having twins by surrogacy with Elodie,
another medical school classmate. In the aggregate they were the three most beautiful people probably in Chicago at the time.
All that genetic grace and hope had the effect of making me feel dumb and lonely.
So I went to graduate school, figuring on even more onerous student debt but getting a scholarship because the dean was a
friend of my mom’s, which made me feel like a Hollywood A-lister who bought her kid’s way into USC, but in reverse.
I’d had a lucky life. My luck held.
And then, just by chance, right out of grad school, Fuchsia.
Mine was not a good job, it was a great job.
And now there was a lot on the line for it, to boot (Louboutin boot . . . ).
So when I talked big, I was betting against the house, but I knew that Ivy could not spare experienced staff, even me. Against
odds, the publication had lasted a year, and got a ton of attention, but it could either tank after another six months or
become the cornerstone of a magazine revival.
“Let’s not get crazy, Reenie,” Ivy said. “If this story is so intriguing to you and it isn’t just because you knew the woman,
then you’ll do something amazing. Let’s get you all the support you need. Write up a proposal.”
It took me a full minute to believe that I was hearing Ivy correctly. It was as though I’d been on death row, and somebody came along one morning and said oops, sorry, there’d been a mistake, you were actually supposed to be at the Peninsula Hotel.
All Ivy asked was that I bring our new intern up to speed on what she’d need to dig into for the next issue . . . or two.
“You pulled that out of a hat,” Marcus said. “Or out of your ass. I can’t believe you threatened Ivy Torres and got away with
it.”
“Fortune favors the brave, Marcus,” I told him, and then I wiggled my fingers at him and retreated to my office.
While I was up there, I would also find that so-cute lawyer of hers. One straight path to Felicity would be through him.
Later that day, for the third time in twenty-four hours, I set out on the same long drive.
When I got home, no one was there. Pure luxury. I made myself a child’s meal, peanut-butter toast, scribbled a note, and retreated
to my childhood bedroom.
My parents’ house was a golden sanctuary of silence.
As kids, we’d come to love our silence. We had no choice.
We had no video games. We had the kind of wireless service you think must be powered by a hamster running on a wheel. We got
TV for four hours on Saturdays, period, one classic movie channel. My father watched hockey, football, and reruns of old Westerns.
I knew all the words to the theme song from Have Gun - Will Travel.
Reading became survival. We’d have lost our minds otherwise.
Once you have the habit, if you don’t have something to read, you feel like you can’t breathe.
You’ll read an owner’s manual. At our friends’ houses, TV was like an ever-present loud uncle blatting away in another room.
Our friends thought my parents were nuts.
They wanted to call social services. But my college teachers were as impressed as my peers were depressed: One called me the only literate kid he’d ever taught.
So at least it got you places with authority figures.
Only later on did I discover that a nerdy, pretty woman who could quote from classic books and poetry was considered kind of sexy.
I climbed into bed with one of my mother’s prized first editions, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, which is one harrowing story. But I couldn’t concentrate on it.
So, oh well. Sleep solves everything. I decided on a brief nap. I slept twelve hours.
Next morning, in the bright sunlight, I lay quietly observing how not even three coats of Sherwin-Williams Natural Linen could
entirely obscure the border of gigantic black roses that I, as a teenager, had stenciled, with house paint, just under the
lip of the crown molding. Having surrendered to sleep in the way a human body can do only in the full knowledge of inviolable
safety, I was still dazed. In one sense, the trompe l’oeil of ghost roses gave the room a piquant quality, like something
from Masterpiece Theatre. In another era and economic caste, I’d have rung for tea.
It was a Sunday. Everyone in our small family was around, even my sister, Nell, the golden child.
I smelled bacon frying, one of those treats in life you can enjoy only if you don’t think too much about it.
One of those old songs was playing—“Only you, the very thought of you, the way you look tonight.” To be clear, the doors of my childhood home did not automatically open on a pop-up greeting card.
Yet, this one weekend, when so much of my consciousness was centered on dark deeds, the gift of good parents with an intact marriage was one of the best pieces of fortune a grown-up kid could be handed.
Relative to my friends’ parents, my folks were young and strong.
Their idea of fun was painting walls together while singing old songs by even older people, like the Eagles.
They had been remodeling the house since my earliest memory and, although my father was a builder, it was not much closer to finished.
My dad could easily have found someone to finish it in short order, but DIYing it was apparently a big thrill.
The dining room, where people ate only three times a year, looked like a set design for The Great Gatsby.
The bathrooms looked like the “before” segment of Fixer Upper.
I sat up, blearily checking my phone for messages, and then heard a sound at the window.
A single crow sat on the outdoor sill, tapping impatiently at the glass, where it probably saw its reflection. Sunlight turned
its feathers to shiny onyx. It was also huge, like two feet tall. What kind of monster was this? Were there ravens in Wisconsin?
When I was very young, after having seen something on TV about a girl whose parents rehabbed and released injured wild birds,
I wanted my parents to catch a crow in a trap to be my companion. I would teach it to talk. They bought me a parakeet, which
promptly sickened and went claws up in its cage. I don’t remember being sad. It bit viciously and never even learned to say
“pretty bird,” only “bird.”
In fact, I had an old, secret fear of all birds. They seemed to me a violent species, primitive in their disregard, greedily
violating the nests of others. Birds were what fascinated Felicity. I thought about crow lore . . . there was something tapping
at my mind as insistently as that gigantic shiny black bird was tapping at the glass. What was it? When we were little, Patrick,
my father, would read to us from a book of children’s poetry that had belonged to his Irish grandmother.
Dad told us that superstitious Irish who spotted a crow or a magpie would say, “Mr. Magpie, how’s your wife?” The belief was
that magpies and crows should come in pairs, and a lone magpie at the window meant somebody in the house would die.
Nice thought for little kids.
He used to read us this old rhyme from the same book. It was like making us watch that ancient Disney movie Old Yeller, child abuse, but legal. It went, “The crow on the cradle, the white and the black, somebody’s baby will never come back . . .”
Somebody’s done for.
I remembered a summer night, school just out, maybe in ninth grade, when Felicity and I were sitting in my bedroom in just
underpants and T-shirts, the windows open and fans pointed at our heads (Miranda and Patrick didn’t believe in using AC until
people were sweating through their shirts twice a day). We were trying to watch a horror movie on my laptop, but the wireless
was so basic in my house that the movie kept stopping before every jump scare. An ambulance cruised by slowly, running lights
but not sirens. Felicity said, “That’s how they do it when there’s no hurry.” I raised an eyebrow. “No hurry to get to the
hospital. Somebody’s done for.”
Now I rapped hard on that same window glass. “Go away,” I shouted. “Go away!” What kind of creepy bird ignored a human being
waving her arms and shouting and just stared with its jeweled eye?
I ran down the stairs and sort of skidded into the kitchen.
“Reenie!” my father said. “What’s wrong?”
To catch my breath, I poured myself a cup of my dad’s high-octane coffee and took a scalding sip before I answered. “I slept
great, but then I think I had a nightmare.”
“No surprise,” he said. “I’d have nightmares too if I was writing about a murder committed by my friend. You’re either brave
or stupid, Irene.”