Threshold (18 page)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

T
HE morning sun is hot and bright across Chance’s face, shining straight through her eyelids, and the angry, uneasy dreams finally let her go, reluctantly send her dazed and blinking back to the waking world. July sun through the open window and the sugarsoft smell of dandelions and daisy fleabane from the yard below, the room filled with the smell of summer flowers and rich black coffee, and “You’re awake,” the girl says.
Am I?
Chance thinks, trying to remember the strange girl’s name.
Am I really awake?

“What time is it?” Chance asks, straining to read the clock beside the bed, but still too groggy to make out its blocky, digital numbers, red numbers that all look like eights or zeros, and
Dancy,
she remembers, the girl from the library, the albino girl, and then Chance also remembers the finger in the jar, the newspaper clippings, and worse things, and she closes her eyes again.

“Ten thirty-four,” the albino girl says.

“I fainted,” murky glimmer of surprise or wonder in her sleepy voice, nothing she ever expected to hear herself say.
I fainted.

“I brought you some coffee, if you want it.”

“You didn’t have to do that,” and Chance has started thinking about the flowery smell instead of the night before, better to worry about the grass that will need cutting soon, pulling up weeds, setting traps for moles, anything but what it means that Dancy Flammarion wasn’t only a part of the dreams.

“I don’t mind,” Dancy says. “I had to make some for Deacon anyway. He’s sick,” and Chance rubs at her eyes and sits up in bed, sees that she’s still wearing her clothes from the day before, the same pair of blue jeans and T-shirt, same socks, and she puts the pillows between her back and the headboard. Dancy hands her the coffee cup—the cup and the matching saucer, her grandmother’s good china—not the cups she uses for breakfast, but Dancy couldn’t have known that. The cup is trimmed in gold and there are primroses painted on it, pink primroses on the saucer, too.

“Sick? What’s wrong with him?” and Dancy looks out the window like she’s said too much already; Chance takes a sip of the steaming black coffee. “You mean Deacon has a hangover,” she says, and Dancy nods her head once.

“He’s an alcoholic,” Chance says, and she takes another sip of the strong coffee, bitter and so hot that she has to be careful not to scald the roof of her mouth, her throat; she usually takes lots of milk, milk or half-and-half, but Dancy wouldn’t have known that, either. “Deacon has hangovers the way most people have toast and jelly. It’s what he does in the morning.”

“I think this one is worse,” Dancy says and frowns. “And besides, Sadie keeps yelling at him.”

“Yeah, well, they deserve each other. Fuck, my tongue hurts,” and she sticks out her tongue and carefully touches the tip end of it with an index finger.

“Deacon said you bit it pretty hard when you fell,” Dancy says, and yeah, she remembers that, too, salty mouthful of blood like seawater and old pennies, then Deke wiping at her face with a wet washcloth, Deke cleaning her face and putting her to bed in her clothes.

Chance puts her tongue back in her mouth and looks at her finger like she expects to see more blood, but there’s only a drop of coffee-stained spittle. And for a little while neither of them says anything else. Chance drinks her black coffee and tries not to think about anything but the hopeful way the morning smells, and Dancy watches the window, the ivory curtains stirring in the light breeze, the leafygreen branches of the oaks and pecan trees in the front yard.
Maybe if this could just go on forever,
Chance thinks,
or just for a while longer,
because it isn’t so bad, really, isn’t even so strange if she doesn’t think about what it
means,
what it all signifies—this rumpled albino girl bringing her coffee, the morning half over and Chance still in bed, Deacon puking downstairs, Deacon in her house again.

But then the gold and primrose cup is empty, and she’s staring at the grounds stranded at the bottom, and Chance sighs, probably a louder sigh than she intended, and Dancy turns towards her. “Does your tongue still hurt?” she asks, and Chance shrugs. “Yeah, but I think the coffee helped a little bit,” and that makes Dancy smile.

“We have to talk, don’t we?” Chance asks her, and Dancy nods again, her pink eyes like the secret insides of conch shells, like the hearts of roses, and they don’t make Chance uneasy, they actually frighten her.

“I thought so.”

“I didn’t mean to upset you last night,” Dancy says very softly, apology that’s almost a whisper, regretful, nervous whisper, and “I knew I shouldn’t say that . . . that word, but I had to say something that would make you believe me.”

“I haven’t said that I believe you, Dancy. I’m not even sure what it is you want me to believe,” and that makes Dancy look away again, makes her frown again, and she chews fretfully at one of her stubby fingernails.

“You don’t even believe in God,” Dancy says. “I don’t know where I’m supposed to start.”

Chance takes a deep breath, fills her lungs with all the brightness getting in through the window, filling herself with that sane and ordinary air, with what she
knows
is real, reality to make her brave.

“Do you even know what a
Dicranurus
is?” Chance asks her.

Dancy shakes her head slow, stops chewing her nail, and Chance can see that her cuticle has started bleeding, that there are fresh drops of blood like red berries against her white, white skin.

“No, but
you
do, Chance. I know you do, and I need you to tell me what it means.”

“And what about the water works tunnel, and Elise, all the stuff in those old newspaper clippings?”

“All those things fit together some way,” Dancy says. “It’s all supposed to fit together in my dreams, but—”

“So you’re saying that you have dreams about the tunnel and Elise? That you dream about my grandmother?” And Chance is sitting closer to Dancy now, watching the albino girl, keeping tabs on her nervous, apologetic eyes.

“That’s why I’m here, Chance,” she says. “This time, I can’t see how all the pieces fit together. That’s never happened to me before.”

Chance gives the coffee cup and saucer back to Dancy, pushes away the tangle of sheets, and climbs out of bed. She stands next to the chair where Dancy is sitting and rubs at her chin, the sore spot just beneath her chin, and there’s probably already a bruise there.

“You need me to answer your questions so that you can find someone you think is a monster,” she says, and now she isn’t looking at Dancy, hard enough to say these things aloud without having to look at her, too. “So you can find them and kill them. Like the person you took that finger from.”

“Chance, just tell me what killed Elise and your grandmother,” Dancy asks, and her voice has changed somehow, grown suddenly older, an old woman’s knowing, weary voice from Dancy’s lips. “Tell me what you and Deacon and Elise saw in the tunnel.”

“They killed
themselves,
” Chance replies, and Dancy’s standing beside her, takes her hand and somewhere downstairs, Sadie’s started yelling at Deacon again. “That’s
all,
Dancy. They both killed themselves.”

“That’s only what it wants you to think,” Dancy says.

For almost a minute Chance stands staring silently at Dancy Flammarion, almost a minute because now she can read the clock radio on the table by the bed. But there’s nothing left she can think to say, nothing this girl doesn’t have another crazy answer for, so what’s the point. Dancy’s still holding her hand, holding it the way she was holding Sadie’s on the porch, the way a shy child holds its mother’s hand.

“Well, let’s go downstairs,” Chance says. “I certainly don’t want that bitch killing him in my house.”

 

Cold cereal and more coffee, Sadie and Chance sharing the last of a box of stale Cheerios, Dancy eating straight from a box of Nabisco shredded wheat, dipping the fibrous little biscuits into her coffee so they make a soggy sort of crunch when she bites into them; Deacon still too sick to come to the kitchen table, sitting on the floor in the hall bathroom, nursing his fourth or fifth cup of Red Diamond, because puking up coffee is better than dry heaves, he says.

“You’re absolutely sure you don’t want some milk with those things?” Sadie asks Dancy for the third time, and Dancy shakes her head before her hand disappears back into the box of shredded wheat.

There are two crows in the backyard pecking at something in the grass, something that Chance can’t quite see from her chair by the window. One of the crows spreads its wings very wide; hops backwards, and for a moment Chance sees or thinks she sees a dark shape writhing in the grass, dark coils, a small snake or a very big worm, stickywet skin or glinting scales the color of licorice, and then both the crows are on top of it again.

“We owe you an apology,” Sadie says, hesitant, uncertain, and Chance looks away from the window. “You know, about Deacon finding those bottles last night and getting pissed in your house. I know how you feel about that.”

“Sadie, if Deacon really wants to say he’s sorry, let him do it for himself,” and Chance gets up from the table, walks past Dancy to the sink and pours her Cheerio-stained milk down the drain. She turns on the faucet and rinses her bowl with lukewarm water.

“Yeah. I know that. But this whole thing has him pretty goddamn freaked out. I mean, Jesus, I swear I haven’t seen him that drunk in a long time,” Sadie says. And Chance sets her bowl down in the sink, starts to tell Sadie Jasper she doesn’t want to hear it, too much of her own life spent making excuses for Deacon, but now Sadie’s rummaging noisily through her purse, her ridiculous silver purse shaped like a fucking casket and a red velvet cross glued on the lid, gaudy silver or chrome flashing in the morning sun; Sadie digs out a bubblegumpink plastic mirror, something plastic from a little girl’s dime-store vanity set, the mirror and a black eyeliner pencil.

“I’m finished,” Dancy says, and then she carefully folds the lid of the cereal box closed and sets it near the center of the table, near the Dresden-blue sugar bowl and a half-gallon carton of Barber’s milk, a pair of souvenir salt and pepper shakers from Niagara Falls. “Thank you,” she says to Chance and wipes her mouth on the back of her hand.

“You’re welcome,” Chance says, glad for an excuse to think of anything besides Deacon and Sadie and her morbid death-rocker affectations. “Did you eat enough?”

“Yeah,” Dancy says, and then she’s dusting shredded wheat crumbs off her hand onto the faded sunflower-print oilcloth that covers the tabletop. Sadie pauses, looks towards Dancy and absently taps one end of her eyeliner against her front teeth. “How old are you, anyway?” and Dancy looks back at her;
Wary,
Chance thinks, catching the apprehension that washes so quick across the albino girl’s face, across her carnation eyes, that it might never have been there at all.

“Seventeen,” Dancy says. “Well, I’ll be seventeen come September.”

“Damn,” Sadie says and goes back to her mirror, back to painting her eyes like an oil spill. “You’re not even legal, girl. Are you a runaway or what?”

That apprehension on Dancy’s face again, and this time Chance is sure that she sees it in the guarded, sidelong glance towards Sadie, and “No,” Dancy says firmly. “I’m not running from anything anymore.”

“Hey, kiddo,
everybody’s
running from something. It ain’t nothing to be ashamed of,” and Sadie looks at Chance over the top of her mirror. “Ain’t that right, Chance?”

“I lived with my mother and my grandmomma. But my mother died,” Dancy says, and she’s speaking in the old woman voice from upstairs again and it gives Chance the creeps, gooseflesh prickling her forearms, too much time locked up in a voice like that for sixteen years. “Then my grandmomma died, and I didn’t want to live there all by myself. There wasn’t anything left for me to run away from.”

“Christ, I’m sorry,” and at least Sadie sounds like she means it, sounds ashamed, embarrassed, and Chance takes the box of shredded wheat off the table and returns it to one of the cabinets.

“It’s not your fault,” Dancy says, staring at the brown scatter of crumbs in front of her, and she’s the nervous girl from the library again, sixteen instead of seventy-five. “I don’t think it’s anybody’s fault.”

Sadie puts the mirror and eyeliner back into her purse, takes out an unopened pack of Camels and a disposable lighter, and she glances up at Chance, who shrugs, annoyed but determined not to let it show. “Thanks,” Sadie says, and she begins to peel the cellophane wrapper from the cigarettes.

“I just wish I still had my sunglasses,” Dancy says, wincing at the brilliant backyard sunlight through the windows, and Sadie stops, an unlit Camel dangling between her black lips, and she pulls a pair of bug-eyed orchidpurple shades from her purse and hands them to Dancy.

Dancy looks at Chance, like she’s asking for permission, and “C’mon,” Sadie mumbles around the filter of the Camel. “I always carry a spare. Here. Take ’em.”

“Thanks,” and Dancy smiles a shy and grateful smile and reaches for the purple sunglasses, her alabaster fingers closing around them when the crow crashes into one of the windows and Sadie jumps. The sunglasses slip from Dancy’s hand, clatter to the kitchen floor, and the bird hits the glass again; this time, Chance can see a dull smear of blood and bird shit streaking the window, a few feathers stuck in the mess. The crow is perched on the sill, pecks weakly at the glass once, and “Don’t
look
at it,” Dancy says urgently, growls at them in the impossible old woman voice, just before the crow folds its broken wings and topples, lifeless, into the holly bushes beneath the window.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Sadie whispers, one hand to her chest like she’s having a heart attack, someone scared halfway to death and back again, and she takes the unlit cigarette from her mouth and lays it on the table. “What the fuck was that?”