“Yeah,” Indigo said. “I didn’t want to bother you. I’m really sorry—”
A slow smile spread across his face. “Not to worry. This is actually kinda great news.”
Indigo raised her eyebrows, but Silber’s eyes were still glued to the screen.
“Zal and that Asiya girl are linked: amazing,” he said. “What could be better?”
Indigo blinked blankly.
Zal wrote, Are you still there? Please, I feel desperate.
Silber told Indigo to go on the errand or make Lionel do it, but she could be excused, and he focused on the screen. Finally he wrote the words: I’m sorry for what has happened to you and your girlfriend. He realized it sounded not Silberish enough after Indigo’s perfect Silberisms. Anyway, ding-dong! (Ding-dong? Even he was surprised.) I know more about this than you think. She contacted us. We called it in. Not me so much — it’s a long story. But one I will tell you, don’t burn your lil’ bird heart out! I’ll tell you and I’ll help you. . but I want something too.
Zal was in shock. Could she have? Would she have? He didn’t know if he was writing friend or enemy, if she was even friend or enemy. He was so full of questions, he didn’t know where to start. Shoot, he typed.
There was a pause.
Zal tried to clarify: Anything.
Silber’s smile turned wider and wilder as he wrote, I’m really intrigued by what she saw in all this. Can we begin there? I mean, she threatened us, which is crazy and all, but why us? What did she know about this? What did she think about this? I guess I’m asking you — and don’t get me wrong, I know the answer, on my part, that is — what she thought it all meant, you get me?
Zal nodded to no one but a dark room and tried to remember, tried to conjure every illogical word, every insane instant. And slowly, but surely, he began to type.
But something was going to happen first, before it all came down. Zal had for days stayed inside his apartment, pacing its perimeter, contemplating his computer and cell phone at times, and usually finding solace only in naps that never quite got him to dream state. They were thick, unsatisfying, fever-like spells of sleep. He’d wake up in sheer alarm, convinced that everything was on its head again. He started to feel consumed by fear, fear not unlike what Asiya had felt those last weeks: death panics, expiration fixations, existential terrors. His own apartment started to feel foreign to him, hostile even, and he felt desperate for company.
He felt, he imagined, the way many must have felt the night before the clock struck 2000, the year many thought they’d never live to see. And yet, back then he had been calm. Not only had he been full of life, but he had suddenly found love. The love he had lost. He had become a man, and now what was he? Not man, not bird, not. .
Anything?
He just didn’t know. He was dying to call Rhodes, his father, anyone, but he couldn’t. Once in a while he’d e-mail Silber, and Silber, so overwhelmed with the labor of his upcoming miracle, could barely attend to him, even when guilt steered him to.
Zal was destroyed by how absolutely alone he felt.
So, still resisting the chaos that connection with his father could cause this time around, he went to that other family, never ones he could call close to his own, but they were people he knew and trusted. What was there about even Zachary not to trust? His anger was justified. Zal knew that then, and he knew it now. And especially now. It was strangely Zachary, of all people, who was on his mind when he walked over to the McDonald residence one early September twilight evening.
When he got there, the gate was wide-open and the door was wide-open. On the couch was a woman he had never seen before, an older woman with her head in her hands, shocks of short white hair poking through her knuckles. She slowly became aware of his presence and looked up to face him. There was something a bit breathtaking about her. At first he thought it was just her eccentric appearance: she was dressed in a long black tunic, limbs wiry and lithe and white, as minimal as a one-dimensional rendering, with lips painted so red they looked black. But then he realized that what was making his heart race was her perfect resemblance to the woman he’d just lost — she was the exact reflection of an older Asiya.
He knew at once who it was.
“Mrs. McDonald?”
“Shell,” she said without a smile. “Shell Hooper. And you are?”
“Zal Hendricks. Asiya’s boyfriend.”
She blinked, stared back blankly. It was possible she didn’t know. “Are you in touch with Daisy?”
Daisy. Zal began to get into it, but before he got even a few words out, the woman’s face crumpled as if it were a piece of paper. A high-pitched sound came, nonhuman and unrelenting, like the scream of a smoke alarm. And he realized that this woman, Shell Hooper, was crying. She collapsed back on the couch again, and Zal almost embraced her but stopped just short of the presumption, taking a seat next to her. He told her what had happened to her daughter.
“I’m so sorry about Asi—” he quickly caught himself—“Daisy. It’s so awful, but Willa said lawyers were looking—”
Her sobs accumulated, grew louder, and her body shuddered harder. He noticed she was shaking her head more violently, the more he said.
“Mrs. Shell, Mrs. Hooper, what is it, what is it. .” he began to say, suddenly sensing something was wrong, feeling the house full of an artificial draft, as if it were museum air, as if it had long been empty, something very different from what he had known entirely.
After several moments she looked up, met his eyes with her now red-cracked ones, and, still trembling, told him what she soon realized he did not know. “It’s not Daisy that’s. . that’s causing this. . It’s. . it’s. . her sister.”
“Willa,” Zal numbly mouthed, looking up at her room, wanting suddenly to run up to it.
“She’s gone.” Shell gasped out the words.
“Gone?”
“Gone,” she whispered, as if anything louder would take her back to sobs. “She died yesterday.”
Zal felt like the giant pendulum had swung and hit him square in the skull.
“She did it to herself,” she went on. “Yesterday. Zach wasn’t home, of course. But he came and found that she had opened her window and jumped out.”
“Opened her window? But she lived on that bed, she couldn’t—”
Shell was nodding, looking a bit irked. “It was apparently her first time properly out of that bed in ages. She had made it across the room. She had lost weight, you know. .”
Zal nodded. “Had Zach seen her walk before?”
Shell snorted. “He knew nothing about her or her state lately. She had the caretaker. Who had been coming less and less, due to Willa’s instructions. I don’t know what the hell happened in this goddamned house, but I have one daughter dead and another in fucking jail.”
The profanities, especially those uttered by others, made Zal nervous, as usual — and of course reminded him of Asiya, so like Asiya she was in so many ways — but he understood.
“Where is Zach?” Zal finally asked, when he could think of something to stay.
“Zach is at some friend’s. Zach could never stand me. And this — he can’t deal with things. Zach is a bit off, you know.” Zal just stared at the floor, not wanting to make his agreement known. “Hell, all my children are, apparently! And, well, there’s me.”
Zal looked at her, uneasy. She seemed capable of anything, this slight woman, raven-like almost, a shiny, glittering loose cannon amidst considerable tragedy.