The Mathematical Inevitability of Corvids
SEANAN MCGUIRE
Morning means chaos at the birdbath, the beating of wings and the opening of beaks, threat displays and warnings. The early bird may get the worm in someone else’s garden, but here, it’s the early bird that gets the best shot at the water. I put the food out when I finish my own morning tasks, and that includes counting out the birds at the bath, making sure everything is properly weighted for the day to come. The birds know that. They don’t check the feeder before the door opens anymore, or sit outside my window and scream. We’ve come to an agreement, them and me.
The big Steller’s jay is in the middle of the bath again, throwing water over his feathers and fluffing them out like he thinks he’s impressing someone. I dutifully note him down. The count always begins from the center out, and today he’s the first bird, the sorrow bird, the bird that brings down the sky. My chest is tight when I look at the bath again—a tightness that fades as I spot the two northwestern crows behind him, grooming each other with careful strokes of their beaks. The joy bird and the girl bird, in one swoop. Joy, girl, joy, whispers the voice of my grandmother, who taught me the crow-count when I was little and lost and needed something to hold on to.
One’s for sorrow, two’s for joy, three’s a girl, and there’s four, for a boy: the little black-billed magpie who’s been coming around, shy as anything, holding back when the others mob the feeder. She’s getting enough to eat, but she’s not going to find a mate if she stays around here. We don’t have many black-billed magpies in this area. She’s the first I’ve seen in years. She’s the only one that’s stayed. And then there are three. My little murder, sitting on the rim of the bath and watching the window with clever crow-eyes, waiting for me to move away from my binoculars. They’ll be at the feeder by the time I open the front door, ready for their due.
I note them down, one after the other. Five’s for silver. Six for gold. Seven’s for a secret, never to be told.
I am very good with secrets.
There are other birds at the birdbath, little brown hopping things with inquisitive voices and skinny orange feet that never move separately but always together, like the birds themselves are spring-loaded. None of them matter for my count. Perhaps somewhere there is someone who keeps their time by sparrows, or marks the passage of the starlings, but that is not me. That is not my job. I put my binoculars aside, slip my notebook into the pocket of my coat, and rise.
It is time to feed the birds.
My name is Brenda. It means “raven.” I did not choose it for myself. My mother says it was the name of my great-grandmother, who died before I was born. I would ask my grandmother, who one assumes would remember her own mother, but my grandmother died as well, three years ago, after a week where I never counted more than a single corvid in a single day. Sorrow, sorrow, sorrow, said the birds, and sorrow was what I got: sorrow, and a long polished box, and shoes that pinched, and a mother who cried for days before she dried her eyes and started looking at me critically, quizzically, like somehow my strangeness had been invisible before my grandmother had to go.
My name is Brenda. I am fifteen years old. I learned to count when I was two, marking things off on my fingers, looking for the answers. If I counted one of something, it was mine: one crib, one bear, one mommy, who still stroked my hair and smoothed my brow and called me her beautiful girl back then, before things got complicated. I learned to count higher numbers when I was four, when my mother came home from the hospital with a small, red-faced thing that squawked and squalled and smelled of sour milk and talcum powder. His name was David. His name is still David now, eleven years later, and he still lives with us, although he doesn’t smell of sour milk as often anymore. His father still lives with us too, tall and cold and unforgiving toward me, cuckoo child hatched from another man’s egg but still living in his nest.
I do not count cuckoos. Cuckoos are not part of my numbers. I think cuckoos could be counted with owls, maybe, measured in those columns, but I do not know the rhyme, and I am happy with my corvids—my ravens and crows and jays. They know me and I know them, and I no longer need the bird books that sit in stacks around my bed to pick their familiar profiles out of the throng. There are crows I’ve never seen before, Jamaican and palm and Cuban, here in North America, and a hundred more scattered around the world, in Australia and Asia and Europe, but here, all the corvids are familiar. They are known. They can be counted. I would be a fool to change my numbers now, when I am fifteen, when I am so close to understanding their equations.
“Brenda!” Mother’s voice is thin as she calls me from the kitchen window. I have been on the porch too long, watching my birds attack their breakfast of dry dog food and chopped-up eggs, waiting to see if any more will appear. I would like to count eight before my day moves on, or better still, ten. I would like to be secure.
I turn. “Yes?”
“School,” she says wearily. “You need to come in and eat something before the bus gets here.”
“Yes, Mother,” I agree. If eight comes, I will not see it, nor nine. Some numbers are invisible, seen only in retrospect, when the day does not align with my count. Those days are the bad ones. Those days are the ones where I have to sit in my bed for hours, matching numbers to likely birds, tracing migration routes, apologizing, apologizing, always apologizing for getting the math wrong.
The day my grandmother died, my count said “joy,” but when I got home, it was sorrow waiting on the phone, sorrow waiting in the deep lines of my mother’s face. One’s for sorrow, yes, but eight’s for Heaven. If I had counted that high, I would have known that my grandmother was at peace. Nine’s for Hell. If I had counted that, I would have scoured the whole city, if that was what it took, to bring the count higher, to find her a better ending. Ten’s for the Devil. I don’t believe in him, not really. Eleven’s for penance. Twelve’s for sin.
There are as many numbers as there are corvids, and someday I will catalog them all, and then nothing will ever slip by me again.
Mother is watching me with loving exasperation on her face. She never looks at David like that. He is only eleven, but he is already the good child, the normal child, the child who concerns himself with things that she can understand and does not focus on things she can’t. David understands me better than she does, I think, because he’s never lived in a world where I was expected to be normal; he’s only ever lived in a world where I was his beloved older sister, strange as an out-of-season Steller’s jay. I count on my crows. He counts on me.
Today, I will tell him the corvids have said a secret, and he will smile his small and shining smile, and we will be happy together, he and I.
I sit at the table and eat my cereal. David sits across from me. He enjoys Lucky Charms, the welter of shapes and colors and flavors pleasing to his tongue. I can’t abide the idea of so many unlike things touching inside my mouth. When I have Lucky Charms, I have to separate all the pieces out, one from another, putting them into different bowls before I can eat them. That makes it a bad cereal for me on school days. I would be late, if I had Lucky Charms. I have Frosted Flakes. Sometimes they can be different sizes. I don’t like that. I eat them anyway. I have to make an effort to accommodate the rest of the world, even as the rest of the world is making an effort to accommodate me.
“Eat up,” says David’s father. His name is Carl. He is looking at me. I try to hunch my shoulders, to pretend that I don’t see, but it’s too late; he knows I can hear him. “I’m dropping you off, and I’m not going to be late because of you.”
He never wants to be anything because of me. Didn’t want to be a father because of me; waited until he had a child of his own to marry my mother. Didn’t want to go to family counseling because of me, even when my therapist said that it would help us all, even when my mother begged him. No matter how you sliced it, I wasn’t his fault, he argued, and argues, and will always argue, even when the sky goes black with crows: I am the way I am because the genes I got from my father and the genes I got from my mother counted themselves out and decided on a girl who saw patterns everywhere, who saw the sky falling when they weren’t followed exactly as they ought to be. I am not his fault at all.
This may be the only area where Carl and I have ever agreed. I am not his fault. I am nothing of his. David is his, by half, and I think, sometimes, that all that is good in Carl went into the making of my brother, who is the best thing in the world, and the only thing I do not need to count. He is a constant. There is gravity, and there is oxygen, and there is David.
We finish our cereal. We climb into Carl’s car, me in the back, David in the front, where he can shyly answer his father’s questions about homework and sports and girls—all the things Carl has already decided will be important to his son. I say nothing, even though I know that David would rather talk about art class, and the way sunlight slants through flower petals, and the boy who sits next to him in band, the one who plays the cello with his quick and clever fingers. I keep my eyes on the window all the way to school, watching for the flash of familiar wings against the charcoal sky.
I count two more corvids before we reach the parking lot. Nine’s for Hell.
This will not be a good day.
I am a genius, according to the people who take and review the tests, measuring minds in columns of numbers and vocabulary words. I am in the top 2 percent nationally, not just for my age range, but for high school students as a whole. Sometimes I wish they had drawn a different conclusion from my scores. With my intelligence, they argue, mainstreaming is not only the appropriate course of action, it is the only course of action. Our Special Education program is underfunded and understaffed, and its resources are better spent on those who truly need them, while those like me, who can keep up with the classwork and excel at the material, are pushed out into the “real world” to fend for ourselves.
My mother attempted to contest the mainstreaming once, citing my absence seizures and my tendency to see catastrophe in the movement of the air as reasons that I needed more support. Carl put a stop to her objections. “She’s going to have to deal with the real world in three years,” he’d said, voice cold as ever. “She can’t stay here after she turns eighteen. I’m not going to be a nursemaid to your little mistake for my entire life.”
When Carl speaks, my mother stops. That is how it has been for as long as he’s been a part of our lives, for as long as David can remember, for there has never been a time when there was David and no Carl. They are part of the same equation, one for sorrow and two for joy, and to have the one I must accept the other. I would prefer David with no Carl, but as that is not, is not, is not to be, I am willing to have what I have. And what I have is classes with peers who will never belong to me, for their math is too different from my own.
Some of them are kind to me. Some of them are cruel. The lines do not follow the patterns that the television tells me they should; the math does not align. The ones in fancy clothes and letter jackets, with makeup done just so and eyes rimed in colors bright as birds, they are usually gentle; they remember my name, ask me about my birds, and do not mock me. The ones with tattered paperbacks in their hands and mockery ringing in their own ears, who have been kicked often enough to yearn to do the kicking, they are all too often cold; I am a target that cannot turn on them, I am vulnerable, I am a bird without a flock to come to my defense.
I sit quiet. I do my work, when I can, and I sit and stare silent at my desk when I can’t, my fingers tapping out the memory of birds against the wood. One for sorrow, two for joy, three’s a girl, four’s a boy. This is a nine-bird day, and I am on edge from the beginning. Something is going to happen.
Midway through first period, I cannot take it anymore. I put up my hand. I wait. The teacher ignores me as long as she can, but eventually, she must acknowledge my palm, pale and starfish-patient as I turn it toward the ceiling. She sighs, looking to me, and asks, “Yes, Brenda?”
“I need to go outside,” I say. “I need to go out into the field.”
Her exasperation grows. She likes my mainstreaming less than my mother does; to her, I am a trial, sent to test her, when she already has too many students to keep track of. I would apologize, if I could, but when I have tried, she has never understood what I was struggling to say. Sometimes I think I should bring David to class and have him translate me for her. He always knows what I am trying to say. “Why do you need to go outside, Brenda?”
“I counted nine corvids this morning. The math is bad. Nine means something will happen. I don’t want anything to happen. Please, can I go outside? I need to find more birds. I need to raise the count.”
For a moment, my teacher looks like she wants to put down her head and cry. I am more complex than she is paid to handle. She has the certifications, and she knew when she took the job that she might be teaching mainstreamed students. She did not expect me, did not expect obsessions and compulsions and the never-ending mathematics of a complicated, shifting sky. I am more trouble than I am worth.
She looks around the class. The other students are watching her, some with patience, others with irritation. None of them look as if they will object to her releasing me.
“You may be excused, Brenda,” she says finally. “Please come back quickly.”
“Yes, thank you, I will,” I say, and stand, and leave the classroom without look back. None of these people are birds. None of them are here to be counted.
(I have seen people who should be counted, ravens in human skins, crows with girl-faces who peek, shy and silent, from beneath the fringes of their blackened bangs. My psychiatrist says that these delusions are secretly good things, are proof that my mind is trying to translate what it needs and knows into what the world around me requires. When I can cast all people as birds in human guise, can see the feathers underneath their skins, I will be able to relate. I will be able to empathize. My psychiatrist is wrong. David is not a bird, is not something to count or configure, and I relate to him. I empathize with him. I am not impossible to reach. I simply do not care about reaching people who do not reach for me.)
The halls are empty, the students prisoned in their individual classrooms. I do not care for high school. Last year, David and I attended classes on the same campus. I always knew that he was near, that if I needed him, I could go to him; that he would pause in his own education to clarify the complications with mine. Carl said that it was unfair for me to lean so heavily upon my little brother, but David swore he didn’t mind, and if I must believe one of them over the other, I will always believe David, who has never lied to me, or threatened to be rid of me. David only ever needs to love me.
Outside the school, the air still smells like morning. Seagulls and pigeons clog the field, beaks stabbing at the sprinkler-softened ground, searching for meals of worms and beetles and burrowing things. I walk past them, scanning the trees, searching the sky, looking for flashes of black against the bright and blinding world. Nine is no good. Eight would have been fine, would have been a day cast in heavenly brightness, but nine? No. I cannot abide a day defined by nines. I need ten, eleven, something I can trust not to betray me.
One of the school’s security guards sees me across the lawn, offers me a nod, and minds his own business. We have an accord, the security and I. I don’t bother them with things they don’t care about, and they don’t bother me when I’m walking the school grounds, looking for birds. A few students have grumbled in my hearing about how I get “special treatment,” but they’ve all stopped when I offered to trade them. They can have the constant count, the looming catastrophe, the knowledge that if they relax, even for a moment, they might be responsible for the end of the world. I’ll have their well-thumbed paperbacks and their easy smiles, their constant conviction that the world is not doing them ill somehow when they’re not looking.
It wouldn’t be a fair exchange and I wouldn’t know how to make it if one of them said yes, but I would try if they told me to. It would be worth it to smile at David and see no shadows lurking overhead.
I search the grounds until the bell rings in the building behind me. I count no corvids, catch no crows. This day is still defined by nines, and I am afraid. I am so very, very afraid.
My second-period teacher is less exhausted and, consequentially, less forgiving. He will not let me go. Neither will my third-period teacher, and by fourth period, the morning has bled away, leaving us marooned well in the body of the day, which is digesting us all one minute at a time. I glance anxiously at the windows as I move through the halls alongside my schoolmates, trying to mask my unhappiness. My psychiatrist says that when I am nervous, others around me are nervous, because I am so bad at concealing it. She says this puts an undue psychological burden on the people who have to interact with me.
When I ask her what to tell them about the undue psychological burden they put on me by asking me to be silent and still and not tell them when I see the shadows, she has nothing to say. There is a lesson in that, as much as in her requests for quiet. The world is a lesson, if you know how to look for it.
I am allowed to have my phone during the school day. I am a high school student now, and more, I am “special needs,” even with the mainstreaming, even with the teachers who frown and don’t know what to make of me. I could make a call. But David isn’t allowed to have his phone during the day, and his breaks aren’t the same as mine, and I have no one else to call. My mother doesn’t want me to contact her while I’m at school unless it’s an emergency. Her definition of the word is not the same as mine. Her definition is not the same as mine at all. So I run my fingers over the screen, feeling how comfortingly smooth it is, knowing that the ghosts of numbers whisper past my skin, pressed flat in digital display and waiting to be needed. I carry the mathematical world with me everywhere I go.
Lunch comes. I go to my usual bench and look at pictures of crows and ravens and jays on my little screen, trying to take comfort in the shape of their beaks, the subtle patterns of the feathers on their heads. Not all the pictures are mine. Some are downloaded from the Internet, carefully curated to soothe the parts of my soul that know, all the way to the bone, how essential it is to count the corvids accurately and chart the pattern of the day. But a few, a precious few, are pictures I took myself. They show familiar birds, birds whose voices I know, and I allow them to calm me.
I am calm when I return to class after the lunch bell rings again. I am calm as I sit in my desk next to the window and listen to the teacher droning on about material I will not understand until I see it written down. My assessments say that I am a visual learner, not an auditory learner, but somehow the accommodations intended to make me equal to my classmates never seem to come with handouts to read while the lecture goes on. I am expected to listen. I am not expected to retain.
I am calm when the classroom door opens and my principal steps inside. She is a lovely woman, aesthetically speaking. Her hair is always perfect, and her suits are always tailored just so, fitting the curves of her body without emphasizing them. She is a creature well-suited to her natural habitat, and I can’t imagine what she looks like outside the boundaries of the school.
My teacher stops mid-lecture, moving to the doorway, where she speaks with the principal in a low, hushed voice. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but I know they’re talking about me. They glance in my direction several times, and this was a day defined by nines, even though I tried to make it better. Something bad was preordained.
By the time they’re ready to turn and beckon me forward, I have already gathered my things. I am serene. I am prepared for anything.
The principal’s voice is gentle. “Brenda,” she says. “There’s been an accident.”
I am not prepared for this.
Carl went to collect David from school, early. Too early. Why? There is no knowing. Carl is in the hospital, Carl is blood and bandages and uncharacteristic silence. Maybe he wanted to take David for some father-son time. Maybe he was finally making good on his threat to leave my mother and take his son away from her, away from me, the damaged sister who might damage him in turn. Maybe he just felt like it. There is no knowing, and there will never be any knowing. I could ask Carl over and over again forever, count the crows in his wake, divide by the rare and hesitant ravens pecking at the highway median, and still never find the answers I need.
He won’t tell me. Even if he wakes up, even if he recovers completely, a father with no son to call his own, he won’t tell me. He hated me when I was a shadow in his home, taking up space that he could have occupied, using up resources that he could have taken for his own child. Now that David is gone, Carl will hate me even more. The numbers support the conclusion.
Carl went to collect David from school without telling anyone, took his car and drove it to the school I used to attend. I can see it if I close my eyes, his little red sedan easing its way into the parking lot. Carl in the office, speaking in contemptuous tones to Miss Engleton, the front desk secretary, whose job it was to keep students in class whenever possible. Carl leading David to the car, insisting he sit in the front seat, even though all automotive safety recommendations said that David should sit in back, should be safer, should be farther from the probable point of impact.
I should have stopped counting at seven. I should have closed my eyes and stumbled blindly through my day, rather than risk a nine. Rather than risk everything.
Carl put David in the front seat and he drove away from the school. And maybe he was driving too fast, or maybe he wasn’t paying attention, and maybe maybe maybe doesn’t matter, because all the maybe in the world won’t change anything. Carl drove. Carl entered an intersection. Carl slammed headlong into a truck heading in the opposite direction.
Carl sustained injuries to his head and spinal column, and David was killed on impact, David never even made it out of the car, never even made it to the hospital, never had a chance, and now there is Carl and no David, just like when I was a child. But time does not rewind. Time does not reset. Just because we have returned to a world without David, that doesn’t mean we have returned to a world before David. David wasn’t; David was; David is no longer.
My brother is dead.
I sit in the hospital hallway, clutching my knees, fighting the urge to rock back and forth, to whip my head from side to side and feel the reassuring brush of my hair against my ears. It upsets people when I do that, even though it isn’t hurting them, even though they have their own little calming rituals. My psychiatrist says I mustn’t upset people, no matter how harmless it seems, says that when I indulge my strangeness, the people around me see me less as one of them and more as something to be avoided and feared.
It isn’t fair. They have their cigarettes and their chewing gum and their bitten nails, and all those things are normal, because some quiet council to which I was not invited deemed it so. I have my flapping hands and my shifting hips, and those things are strange, because they do not share them with me.
David never thought that I was strange. David only loved me.
The urge to move flees as abruptly as it came, replaced by a frail and frigid stillness. I’m thinking of my brother in the past tense. There is no present tense for David, not any longer, and it burns. It burns so badly that when my mother comes down the hall, pale ghost of a woman with one child broken and the other gone—one’s for sorrow, two’s for more sorrow still—I don’t say anything, don’t ask if I can go out and search the parking lot for corvids, don’t tell her that I’m hungry or that I need to use the bathroom. I follow her without saying a word, into a world that doesn’t have David in it anymore.
I count three crows on the sidewalk during the drive home, one two three’s a girl. I am a girl, I am a three of crows, and I am alone in the world.
The house is empty, filled with shadows. My mother and I rattle through the rooms like peas in a glass, rebounding off things that should be familiar, would be familiar, were it not for the feeling of absence that wreathes everything in smoke and silence. David is not here. I should still be at school, should be there for another hour, but David should be home, sitting at the kitchen table, going over his homework as he waits for me to come and help him with his math.
Doing math with David is one of my favorite things in the world. The thought that I will never have it again is ashes on my tongue. I have to stop what I’m doing and count the shadows on the wall before I feel like I can continue. My mother is still a ghost, haunting the front room now, a photo album open in her lap. The sound of her weeping is steady, unrelenting. She can’t understand how her world has changed so utterly, so unforgivingly.
I have more experience than she does with living in a world set against you, a world that will not forgive your flaws or take back its cruelties. For a moment, I want to go to her, to sit down beside her and take her hand and try to explain. I don’t. I can’t. The wall between us is too high, and I don’t know how to climb it. She built it one brick at a time, and Carl was always there to help her build it higher, and only David ever cared about me enough to help her tear pieces of it down. We are strangers to each other, she and I, even though she’s my mother and I’m her little girl.
Listless, unsure of what else I have to do, I go outside.
The birdbath is surrounded. In a flash, I add six, seven, eight corvids to my count. If I add them to the three I saw on the way home, I have eleven, eleven, eleven is for the gates of Heaven. If I add them to the nine I lived with all day, the nine that took David away from me forever, I have twenty. The rhymes are unclear past thirteen; I have had to find the definitions myself, teasing them out of the world through trial and error.
Eleven is for the gates of Heaven; twelve’s for the man who lets you in.
Thirteen is for a broken promise; fourteen’s the feathers underneath your skin.
Fifteen is for the things we carry; sixteen’s for when we put them down.
Seventeen’s all the lies and shadows; eighteen’s the waters where we drown.
Nineteen has always been unclear to me. Odd numbers are usually less forgiving than even numbers, but ten’s for the Devil his own self, and after that, the evens turn a little kinder. I don’t know, I don’t know. I think nineteen is for an unasked question, which would make twenty for an answer you won’t want. It fits together. It feeds itself. A good rhyme—a good equation—should feed itself. But if I’m wrong about nineteen, I’ll be wrong about twenty, and if I’m wrong about twenty, there’s no saving the math. I’ll have to start again.
Starting again won’t bring David back. I stare at the crows around my birdbath, glossy and black and unaware that my heart is broken, my heart is breaking, my heart is an eggshell with nothing left inside, and for the first time, I hate them. I hate what they are to me, what my mind makes them into. I hate that they have seen David every day of their short and feathered lives, have watched him through the window while I prepared their food, and still they don’t care. He’s gone, and they don’t care.
Screaming, I run at the birdbath with my arms up, making a monster of myself when they have only ever known me for a mathematician. The crows look at me in avian bewilderment until I get so close, and then they fly! Fly! Black wings beating against the air, black feathers sheeting down to litter the lawn like accusations, and I have nothing left to count, and I am alone. Here, and always, I am alone.
There are twenty feathers. Twenty corvids, twenty feathers: twenty is the answer, but the answer’s still unclear.
I fall asleep sitting in the grass at the base of the birdbath and don’t wake until morning, when the dew is sticky on my skin and the croaking of the crows who watch me, wary, from the fence filters into my consciousness. I sit up. They look at me accusingly.
“I’m sorry,” I say. There are seven of them, a secret to start the day, lined up and watching me.
My mother is already gone, off to the hospital to be with Carl. I do not want to stay here alone, in this house where David isn’t, and never will be again. I wash. I gather my things. I walk to the bus stop. I wait.
Two more corvids appear, a Steller’s jay and a big, glossy raven. Nine. Again, nine. I consider turning around and going back inside, where I may be alone but at least I won’t be out in the world. I am still considering when the bus pulls up, when the door hisses open, and my feet carry me onboard as much out of habit as anything else. The bus goes, and I go with it, bound for school. I watch the windows as we go. There are no more corvids to be counted.
First period has already begun when I arrive on campus. I consider going to the office to tell them I’m here, and dismiss it as a bad idea. The rules say that if I’m going to be late, my mother needs to contact the school and excuse me. I am sure she hasn’t contacted the school, not when she didn’t notice me sleeping in the yard, not when she has a son to mourn and a husband to fret over. With no call, there will be no waiting slip to explain my tardiness. Better go straight to class, to let my teacher decide what to do with me. I ghost through the halls, and no one stops me; no one sees me go. I might as well not be here at all.
My teacher is at the front of the room when I open the door. She turns toward the sound and stops, going very still, like a bird confronted with a cat. It’s odd to think of myself as a predator, as something that consumes.
“Brenda,” she says finally. “I didn’t think you were going to be joining us today. Do you have a note from the office?”
“No,” I say. “To have a note, your parent or guardian must contact the school to explain your reasons for tardiness or absence. My parent or guardian did not contact the school. May I sit?”
She sighs, pinches the bridge of her nose like I have pained her. “Brenda, you know I can’t let you join late if you’re unexcused. Can you call your mother and ask her for a note?”
“No.”
She lowers her hand and frowns at me. A giggle runs though the class. “Why not?”
I am told that my tendency toward brevity when asked direct questions is troubling. I can see it now, in my teacher’s face. “She’s at the hospital with my stepfather,” I explain politely.
My teacher’s eyes flare with sudden alarm. “Is everything all right?” She probably isn’t supposed to ask that. Even as a student, I’m meant to have privacy.
I don’t mind. Privacy is for people with something to hide. I’ve never had anything to hide. I’ll tell anyone who asks what I’ve counted. “No,” I say. “My stepfather had an accident. My little brother was in the car with him. David died. Carl didn’t. Please, may I sit down?”
The class isn’t giggling anymore. The class is staring at me in wide-eyed horror, their looks of sympathy and dismay mirroring the teacher’s. Belatedly, I realize that this may have been a bad decision, that they may see my presence on campus as proof that I have no real feelings. They already whisper that about me. It hurts. My feelings may not look like theirs do, but that doesn’t make them any less real.
“I’m sorry,” I say, before my teacher can answer me. “This was an error. I’m sorry.”
Then I turn and walk out of the classroom, back across the campus, out to the street. There’s no bus this time; it will be at least a half hour before the next bus comes. I don’t want to wait here, visible from the school windows as I stand at the bus stop, while the students whisper and point. I set my feet to the sidewalk. I start walking.
My house is three miles from campus. On a good day, that can be a pleasant walk, almost enjoyable in its predictability. I know the route well enough that I don’t need to watch where I’m going; instead, I can keep my eyes turned upward.
Ten and eleven are waiting for me on the corner, big black birds that take off when they see me coming. Twelve, thirteen, and fourteen are pecking at the gravel of the median when I turn. Fifteen caws at me from a power line. Sixteen and seventeen peek down from a rooftop. Eighteen flies back, dark wings across the horizon, and then nineteen is looking at me, standing in the middle of the sidewalk, fearless. It does not care that I am bigger than it is. It does not care that I am a human being.
I stop walking. The crow remains.
“Nineteen,” I say. The crow remains.
Nineteen has always been unclear to me. I look at the crow, and the crow looks at me, and nineteen is not for an unasked question; this far into the rhyme, the questions have all been asked. The questions are clear.
“Nineteen is for the one who wronged you,” I whisper, and the rest of the rhyme comes clear. It was only ever missing that single piece, that revelation around which everything else turned.
Nineteen is for the one who wronged you, and I’m running, I’m running; the crow takes off in a flurry of feathers and still I’m running as hard as I can toward home.
The twentieth crow flies by and twenty is for a place to stand, and still I’m running.
The twenty-first is a jay in a hedge, and twenty-one’s all you have to offer, and still I’m running.
The twenty-second is another crow, this one perched on the edge of my birdbath, the birdbath where I counted most of my way to nine. It caws and takes off at the sight of me, black wings beating like a disembodied heart, and I’m home. I’m home. I don’t need to run anymore, and I know what the twenty-second crow means. I understand everything. I close the door behind myself and head for the kitchen. Everything I need is there.
Hours pass before the front door opens. I’ve been sitting on the stairs the whole time, waiting. I hear my mother’s voice. She’s talking to someone, speaking softly, struggling to offer a comfort that shouldn’t be asked of her, not yet, not with my brother’s death so fresh that it still burns when I try to think about it. She should be free to mourn, not tethered to someone who doesn’t understand that her pain matters as much, if not more, than his.
Carl’s voice is under hers, a low rumble of discontent. I stay where I am, waiting for the moment when they come around the bend in the hall and see me there. Carl, face still bruised beneath his bandages, scowls immediately.
“What are you doing?” he demands. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”
“David should have been in school,” I say. He winces, looking ashamed.
My mother just looks sad. “Let us by, please, Brenda,” she says. “Carl needs to rest.”
I don’t argue. I simply stand and walk back up to the landing, where I watch as she leads him up the stairs, supporting him every step of the way. He glares at me when they reach the top. I look impassively back.
“Creepy-ass kid,” he says, and I say nothing, and my mother says nothing, and the crows have already been counted. They vanish into the bedroom that they share.
My mother comes back out alone a few minutes later. She pauses, looking at me, and for a moment—only a moment—I see the light that used to be there, when I was younger, when she didn’t have Carl to tell her that I was broken. I am grateful for the existence of Carl; without him, there would have been no David, and everything has been worth it, I think, to live in a world with David in it, even if it was only for a little while.
My mother says nothing. My mother walks on. I watch her go before walking down the hall to the closed door of their bedroom. It’s never locked. I turn the knob and let myself inside.
Carl is in their bed. He isn’t asleep, not yet, and he turns toward the sound of my footsteps, his eyes widening at the sight of me. “What are you doing in here?” he demands.
“One’s for sorrow,” I tell him. “You were one.”
“I swear to God, you crazy bitch—”
“Two’s for joy,” I say. “David was two.” I’m not crazy—I’ve never been crazy—but that’s a fight I’ve had and lost with him a hundred times already. I’m not here to have it again. “When you joined our family I was three, a girl, and he was four, a boy, and we were perfect. We were sixes and sevens, we were everything. But you tried to make me into a secret, never to be told, and I learned the rest of the rhyme because I had to. Don’t you understand? This is all your fault. I might have learned to live inside the ordinary numbers, if you’d let me.”
“Joyce!” he screams.
It takes me a moment to realize that Joyce is my mother’s name. She’s never been anything but Mother to me, the pale woman haunting the edges of the world, never brave enough to save me, never strong enough to let me go. I hear footsteps on the stairs. I turn my head and the door is open, and she’s watching me from the hall. My back is to her. She has to see the knife. I’m not making any effort to hide it.
She looks at it. She looks at me. She looks at Carl, lying still and halfway helpless in his bed. She knows what I am here to do.
She closes the door, and Carl and I are alone.
“Eight’s for Heaven,” I say, turning back to him. “Nine’s for Hell. I counted nine when David died. When you took him, because you were ten. Ten’s for the Devil his own self.”
“You need to get out of here.”
I show him the knife. His face goes white as whey.
“Eleven is for the gates of Heaven,” I tell him. “Sometimes it’s for penance, and twelve’s for sin, but when it’s for the gates of Heaven, twelve’s for the man who lets you in. I want that for David. Don’t you?”
He doesn’t answer me.
“Thirteen is for a broken promise,” I say, and the distance between us is nothing; I am flying, I am flying, and the knife is in my hand. “Fourteen’s the feathers underneath your skin.”
Carl screams when the knife comes down. I stab and I stab, and I count the punctures one by one, until I reach nineteen, nineteen, nineteen is for the one who wronged you. Twenty is for a place to stand. Twenty-one’s all you have to offer. Twenty-two’s the knife bare in your hand.
The count is done. I pull away from him, a red girl in a red room, and the knife falls from my fingers: I don’t need it anymore. I have counted off my corvids. The math is done. My mother will call the police eventually, if she hasn’t already, and that’s right, too; that was where this equation had to lead us. This is the mathematical inevitability to which I have been building all my life. I can feel the feathers under my skin, aching to be free.
My fingers leave red smears on the window when I pry it open. I know I can only fly for a moment.
I know that it will be enough.