“Whisht, child.” Her eyes were lit with rage.
They passed an uncomfortable meal talking about the changing weather, the cool winds bringing in the real autumn. Wiley rubbed his scalp between courses, pondering his new haircut with his fingernails, grinning like a tot whenever he strayed into the field of Mrs. Gavin's be-maddened glances. When the dishes had been cleared, Erica registered her old complaint once more, the tiredness coming on despite the hours in the healing sun, perhaps too much sun, and she let herself be led to the child's room, where the rite of story and prayer continued, falling asleep as Una read Aesop's fable of the fox and the stork. When she awakened hours later and remembered there had been no sleeping potion, Erica put a hand to her cool forehead and thought her fever had broken.
Kicking the quilt from her legs, she crawled from Una's tiny bed to hunt for the ladder leading to Wiley, but the room was dark and the hallway darker still. With arms stretched and hands extended, she closed her eyes and gingerly felt her way along the wall, step by step, until she reached the sharp edge of the corner. Her bare feet stuck to the wooden kitchen floor, and she counted the paces to where the parlor was supposed to begin and where she expected scant starlight to offer better illumination, but when she opened her eyes, Erica saw that she had entered a narrow curiosity box. All around her, the room's strange objects swelled and crowded close, pinning her to the center of the space. A huge globe rolled off its pedestal, its axis threatening to impale her. A riderless velocipede cranked its pedals in mad abandon, spiraling in figure eights around the dressmaker's mannequin, which arched its back like a magician stretching arms toward the hearth, where the fireplace sparked, then roared with flames. The creatures on the walls blinked to life: the deer head strained to escape the wall, a raccoon, trilling with ecstasy, scooped a crayfish from the acrylic waters, and a bird spread its cottony wings to fly once around the room before settling atop the bookcase. A pane shattered, and the butterflies escaped the shadow box. The glass doors popped open and the books tumbled in single file from the shelves, fanning their pages in freedom, their contents spilling out word after word, uttered in their authors’ voices, then falling like road signs into jumbled stacks of hot type. She stood in the middle of a pinball game, her gaze bouncing from bumper to bumper, like a toy in a penny arcade. A pair of giant eyes filled the picture window, the wizened head tilted for a closer look, and Mee-Maw screeched like a witch. Projected on the far wall were the larger-than-life faces of the Virginia state trooper pining for her, and Carl and Barry from the diner, talking with one another in hushed tones. Superimposed over their features appeared circular targets, and the shots rang out from behind her, the points piling high with each hit. A fierce wind roared through the trees outside, and the voices of her father and mother blew in, bored into her ears, and drilled into her brain.
Una descended from the loft, her wings unrolled and shimmering like an angel's. Not the celestial kind, but a watcher, more sinister and threatening, as though the heavens had been emptied out and they roamed the earth in misery, unsure of their mission. She walked toward her, arms outstretched, crying Mother. The bohemian girl whose car they had stolen soared beneath the eaves, abandoning Wiley in the bed, shorn and spent, his life draining between his legs. Luminous and foreboding, she spread her wings to span from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall. In her hands she cupped a radiant fire, shielded its brightness in the knot of her fingers, and then released it all at once until the light and heat filled the room to sweep everything from its path and send Erica tumbling into the fathoms, falling up into the limitless sky. She reached out to be saved, and then cried once and collapsed to the floor, where he found her in the morning, dropped from the sky in a crumpled heap of bones and hair.
“We are getting out of this place,” he said. “Let's go.” Wiley bent over her and slid his hand beneath her shoulders, but she did not recognize his face without the curtain of curls. Sharp against his skin, his skull flashed, and she thought he was dead. She had fallen away from him to the bottom, drowning in an ink blue sea pressing on her body and soul. Parting the blades of water, she emerged gasping and unsure of her whereabouts, cast away and waking in the middle of an endless ocean.
“Let's go, Erica. We should have gone long ago.”