The Hum and the Shiver

6

“That was weird,” Bronwyn said as she settled in at the kitchen table and propped her crutches against it. “A preacher trying to save souls in Needsville.” The weirdest part was that the intangible defenses that kept most outsiders at a distance, like those reporters, apparently hadn’t impeded the young minister.

Her father put a fresh cup of coffee in front of her and sat down in the opposite chair. “Yeah, reckon it’s a weird time. What with that Internet and all them cell phones, Needsville’s almost part of the world these days.”

“The world ain’t ready for us, Daddy,” she said with certainty. “I’ve been out there and seen it. We’d be like tulips in a windstorm.”

He nodded. “Can’t say I’d be sorry to go back to the way things were ’bout twenty years ago.”

“Before I was born?” she teased. “Am I that bad?”

He looked at her evenly. “Might do it differently with you if I could start over.”

“Daddy, you did fine. Some things are just born wild, and it takes a while for ’em to run it off.”

“You run yours off yet?”

She looked down at the coffee. From this angle, it reflected her father’s face. “I sure ain’t feeling too wild these days. Don’t know if it’ll come back or not. Part of me hopes it does, the rest of me…” She trailed off with a shrug, then took another sip of her drink. “I don’t even know where the rest of me is right now.”

“You’ll be fine,” he said with certainty. “Although I’m worried to hear you paraphrasin’ Ronald Reagan.”

Bronwyn smiled, then looked around. “Hey, where’s Mom?”

“She went out to check something in the garden. Said she’d be right back.”

She looked out the window. Her mother was on her knees at the bottom of the yard, picking the beginnings of weeds from the dirt. Her autoharp rested on a folding chair nearby. A mockingbird flew down, perched on the chair, and pecked once at the instrument’s strings.

Bronwyn couldn’t hear the sound, but the scene made her smile. As a little girl she’d sat in that same chair plucking those same strings, aching for the day she could coax music from them and fly on the night wind.

“I can carry you out there,” Deacon said. “Or push your wheelchair.”

She shook her head. “No thanks. It ain’t that. It’s…”

“Couldn’t play Magda?”

She nodded. “How’d you know?”

“Expected to hear you playing last night, and didn’t.” And it was normally true: a full-blood Tufa who’d been away from home all this time would’ve spent half the night playing. The silence once her door closed told her family everything.

“It ain’t that I can’t play,” Bronwyn said quietly. “Everything works. This hole in my arm went right through, so it healed up pretty quick, like you said.”

“It’s the hole in your head giving you trouble?”

She smiled. Many times in her youth, her father had accused her of having extra holes in her head. “I wasn’t shot in the head, Daddy, I had a skull fracture and concussion from the IED. It makes some things… fuzzy.”

“Like what things?”

“Like… music.”

They were both quiet for a long moment. “You tell your mama?” he asked finally, no accusation or judgment, just a question.

She shook her head. “You gonna tell her?”

“One of us is.”

“Okay, okay. I will.” She sipped her coffee and watched the porch chimes wave in the breeze without quite sounding. “Did I hear the phone ring before I got up?”

“It was that Major Maitland. He’s a slippery fella, isn’t he?”

“He may be president someday. What’d he want?”

“See how you were. See if them reporters was still around. I don’t think he believed me when I told him they wasn’t. I reckon he suspects they’re hanging out in the trees like squirrels.”

“That’s what he’s used to,” she said. “He’ll never understand this place.”

“Not many from the outside would. He said people from Hollywood are calling. I got the idea lots of money was involved.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That I’d tell you he called.”

Chloe entered through the back door, stepped out of her sandals, and went to the sink. As she washed a pair of fresh tomatoes she said, “Bliss Overbay’ll be stopping by to see you.”

“Good, I ain’t seen her in weeks,” Deacon deadpanned.

“Not you,” Chloe scolded. “Girl like Bliss ain’t got time for an old man like you.”

“That’s ’cause I’d flat wear her out,” Deacon said with a grin.

Bronwyn recalled the bird, the bells, and the haint she’d put off last night. “Bliss is coming to talk to me?”

“Course. You saw her yesterday, so you knew she would.”

“Didn’t know it’d be right away. Thought she might give me some time to settle in.”

“It’s your home,” Chloe said as she dried her fingers. “How settled do you need to be?”

Bronwyn sighed. “Reckon you’re right.” But she knew Bliss would not be making a simple social call. In the hidden, complex world of Tufa authority, Bliss Overbay wielded a mighty stick, and when she swung it, all the Tufa ducked. There was etiquette to a meeting like this, and Bronwyn would have to at least try to fulfill her part of things.

Chloe poured herself a cup of coffee. She kissed Deacon on the cheek as she passed him, then sat in the only other open chair. “You’ll have to talk to that haint tonight, too.”

“I will. Damn, Mom, I just got out of the hospital.”

Her mother slapped her hand on the table so loud and hard, it was like a pistol shot; in fact, Bronwyn might’ve reflexively jumped aside if she hadn’t been trapped by the pin frame. Her chest constricted and her eyes went wide.

Even Deacon looked surprised. “Honey?” he said to his wife.

Chloe’s voice shook with suppressed anger. “Yes, I know, I’ve heard all about your sacrifices, your injuries, all about what a hero you are. And you know what? I don’t care. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve spent the last two years playacting, and now that you’re home where the real work is, you’re trying to avoid it. You will see Bliss when she comes, and you will listen to your haint tonight. I don’t want to hear any more about it.”

Bronwyn could barely breathe. A new image, one she’d never recalled before, came unbidden through her fog of memory, shaken loose by her mother’s slap. It was the same flash of orange light, but then it turned white, and she realized it was a flashlight. Beyond it was a swarthy face with a jet-black mustache and dark, panicky eyes. He said something she couldn’t catch—her Arabic was terrible—and then reached for her.

She shivered, and realized she was sweating. When she looked up, Chloe and Deacon both stared at her. “One of them flashbacks?” her father asked softly.

She nodded. She could still smell both the gasoline from the wrecked truck and the burning flesh of the man trapped behind her. “One of the Iraqis was trying to get me out of the truck.”

Deacon’s voice changed very slightly, but it was enough to express his sincere, extreme concern. “You sure it was a real thing, and not just something you imagined?”

“No,” she said bitterly. “I’m not sure. You hear about something enough, your brain starts to believe it. The whole time I was in the hospital, I heard about how the Iraqis pulled me out of the wreck and then… well… did stuff to me.” She actually blushed, something she hadn’t done in years, at talking about this in front of her parents. “But I don’t know if it’s true.”

“There’s ways to find out,” Chloe said quietly. “If it matters.”

“No,” Bronwyn said. “It doesn’t, really. I’ve got enough pain that I can remember.” She shifted her weight, wishing she’d brought a pillow to put beneath her butt on the hard chair.

Aiden finally emerged from his bedroom. “Did I hear a gunshot?”

“Your mama was just making a point,” Deacon said, his gaze on Chloe. He kissed her on the cheek and went outside. Chloe turned on the water and began washing the breakfast dishes. She kept her back to her children.

Aiden leaned close to Bronwyn and said, “I hear you’ve got a haint.”

“You hear a lot,” she said. For just a moment, her old big-sister annoyance with Aiden threatened to appear, but it faded. Would she be numb this way forever?

“Well, if you want, I can sit up with you and run it off when it shows up again.”

She snorted. “You’d pee your pants if you saw a ghost. You know you would.”

“Uh-uh. I’d look it right in the eye and say, ‘Hey, leave my sister alone, she’s a war hero.’ Then I’d chase it with a hatchet.”

“What if it didn’t have any eyes? What if it just had big black sockets where its eyes used to be?”

He thought this over. In utter deadpan he said, “Then instead of a hatchet, I’d use a socket wrench.”

They both burst into giggles. Without turning Chloe said, “Aiden Hyatt, get down to the bus stop now. Nobody’s got time to drive you in to school if you miss it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said with a full-body shrug. He grabbed his book bag and dragged it across the floor behind him as he slouched out the door.

As Bronwyn watched her brother leave, something swaying in the breeze caught her eye. Through the screen door she saw a bundle of feathers tied together with hexwound guitar string and hung from a wind chime’s clapper, giving extra purchase to the wind and producing a constant, soft tinkling.

She frowned. She knew what this was… didn’t she? The hawk feathers, mixed with those of a crow and tied to the clapper between three chimes that, in the right order, played… what song? What did it mean?

Her father must’ve built it; he loved putting chimes together in different musical combinations, and had racks of aluminum and wooden tubes in the shed. But she wouldn’t ask him, because goddammit, she should know. She was a Tufa, a First Daughter, heir to the songs and rider on the night wind.

At last she said, “I think I’m going to lay down for a while. I’ll see you at lunch.”

In her room, she once again opened the mandolin case. The instrument gleamed in the sun coming through the window; its finish reflected the red, white, and blue from the curtains. She rested her fingertips lightly on the strings.

The calluses she’d earned had softened a little in the time she’d been away, but her skin still seemed to hold the memory. Her thumb curled as it would to pluck a string. But the experiences that connected these things, that allowed her to coax music from Magda, were still missing.

Because of her sudden media notoriety, the military doctor who’d tended her when she arrived stateside from Iraq had tried to be kind, but clearly lacked experience in real doctor–patient relations. “You may have some memory loss. Most of it will be connected directly with the accident, when your brain suffered its trauma. But it could crop up with other things. You may forget people you’ve known all your life, how to do certain tasks, and so forth. You can relearn the skills; the memories may or may not return.”

Since she’d been semiconscious with a feeding tube down her throat, she’d only been able to nod. Really, though, what other response could there be?

She turned the mandolin in her hands. It was light, and felt fragile compared to the heavy, solid things she’d handled for the past two years. She had refused to take it with her to basic training, and from there to her deployment in Iraq, because she wanted nothing to remind her of Needsville. But now it was more tangible than the metal guns, equipment, and vehicles she’d gotten to know intimately.

“Shit,” she sighed, and felt her eyes itch as tears tried to form. But like her memories, they never quite appeared.