Brian Freeman - The Night Bird

Somehow, he’d slipped a second phone into her bag. As if to say, I was this close to you once. I can be this close to you again. He was worming his way into her life. Into her brain.

She remembered sitting next to Todd Ferris on the bench the previous day. Was it him?

Or had the Night Bird been among the crowd at Zingari again?

Frankie dove into her purse and answered her phone. She didn’t recognize the incoming number.

“Dr. Stein?”

“Yes, who is this?”

“It’s Khristeen Smith with the San Francisco Chronicle . I wanted to see if you had any comment about the unusual deaths of three of your patients.”

Frankie’s fist tightened around the phone. The news was out. Soon she’d be under siege. “No, I don’t have any comment right now.”

“Should your patients be worried? Do you have any idea how this could be happening?”

“I can’t talk to you right now, Ms. Smith,” Frankie said. She hung up the phone. Almost immediately, it rang again. She didn’t answer; she knew it would be another reporter. The vultures were gathering. She powered down her phone and returned it to her purse. She felt déjà vu. This was how it had started with Darren Newman, too. Her life was spinning out of control.

Frankie went downstairs. She poured coffee from the pot and took it out to the solarium. Pam was there, reading the newspaper on her iPad, and she didn’t look up as Frankie took the chair next to her. A cool distance blew between them.

“Hey,” Frankie said.

“Hey yourself.”

“Where’s Jason?”

“Running.” Pam’s head swiveled. Her blond hair was casually messy. Her long bare legs were propped on a second chair. “Looks like you’re famous again. It’s on TV. It’s in the paper.”

“I know.”

“Did you screw up? Give somebody the wrong meds?”

“It’s not me. Someone else is doing this.”

Pam sipped coffee. “What do you mean?”

“Some psycho is targeting my patients. And me.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“I thought I heard you shout earlier. Did something happen?”

“Just a bad dream,” Frankie said. After a pause, she added, “The dream was about Dad, actually.”

“Sounds like a nightmare.”

“It was. Remember how he used to ask us all those questions on our camping trips?”

“Oh Lord,” Pam groaned. She lowered her voice to imitate their father. “Question. Does addiction constitute a brain illness or an absence of will? Question. Does the intervention of family help or hurt in an addict’s trajectory of dependence? Like I didn’t know he was talking about me. His questions were always designed to remind me that I was a shit-hole failure in his eyes.”

Frankie knew Pam was right about that. Marvin’s questions usually had a sharp edge, and the edge was always directed at Pam. “Hey, you lucked out when the topic was extraplanetary life. There wasn’t much he could do with that.”

“I don’t know. I kept waiting for him to say, ‘Question. If humans were relocated to another planet, would Pam be a minimum-wage waitress or a whore?’”

“He wasn’t quite that bad.”

“He was every bit that bad, Frankie,” Pam replied.

Just like that, the shadow was back between them. Even from the grave, their father drove the two of them apart.

“I dreamed that I saw him on the cliff,” Frankie said.

“Lucky you.”

“He didn’t fall. He jumped. In my dream.”

“Maybe he did.”

“Pam, don’t say that,” Frankie chided her.

“You said the rangers couldn’t be sure. If he slipped, or if he jumped, what difference does it make to us? In the end, it’s the same. He’s gone. And you know what? I don’t miss him.”

Frankie hesitated. “Neither do I.”

“Okay, then,” Pam said. “Let’s leave the bastard behind instead of talking about him every time we’re together.”

“Sorry. It still haunts me.”

Frankie got up. She wasn’t done with her coffee, but she wanted to get to the office. She always felt safe at her office. That was where her life made sense. Plus, she was sure she had messages waiting for her. Patients would be watching the news, and they’d be scared.

“Do you think I’m a bad person?” she asked.

Pam’s eyes had the sharpness of knives. “I asked you that once myself. Remember? I OD’d and nearly died. I was in rehab for the second time. Dad wouldn’t even come to see me. I was crying because I needed a father, and I didn’t have one. I asked you if I was a bad person.”

Frankie closed her eyes. “I do remember.”

“You told me there was no such thing as bad people,” Pam went on. “Only bad memories.”

Frost played the song for Lucy.

She sat across from him on a bench in the SoMa market on Sunday morning. Shack licked crepe syrup from her finger through the door of his carrier. The market was loud with the roar of cars on the elevated ramp of Highway 101 behind them. The stone wall of a parking lot across the street looked like a prison. The appeal of the market was its food, not its ambience.

He increased the volume and put his phone between them. Carole King began singing. The song was “Nightingale.”

“Do you recognize it?” he asked her.

“Sure, I know the song.” Lucy nodded along with the music, but then her face clouded with unease as a memory came back. Her lips pressed tightly together. She closed her eyes. He could hear the raggedness of her breathing.

“Wait, that was the song on the radio that night,” she said. “It was playing when Brynn...”

Frost nodded. “I’m sorry. I figured it was, but I needed to be sure.”

“Why does that matter?” Lucy asked.

He took his phone back and found the video of the wedding where Monica Farr shot herself. He played the video for Lucy — not as far as the chaos and the shooting, but far enough to hear the screaming begin in the background.

The DJ at the wedding was playing the same song.

“Oh my God,” Lucy said.

“The same thing happened in a bar in the Tenderloin last night,” Frost continued. “The same song was playing. Another woman had a mental breakdown. She ran into the street and was killed.”

Lucy pushed away his phone as if it had become hot to the touch. “This is creepy as hell.”

“I know.”

They were silent for a while, eating Duane’s crepes. He could see his brother at the window of his food truck. A line of two dozen people backed up at the truck, waiting for Duane’s famous Sunday morning banana-granola crepes with sweet hoisin-maple syrup. Lucy spotted Duane, too, and she held up the crepe and shouted, “This is amazing !”

Frost’s brother took a little bow with his hands folded across the chest of his white chef’s uniform. The customers around him applauded.

“You and your brother don’t look much alike,” Lucy said to Frost.

“You don’t think so? Funny, most people pick us out as brothers right away. But I agree with you. I don’t see it. After all, I’m much more handsome than he is.”

Lucy grinned. “Well, you’re right about that.”

“Now, Katie and I, we were practically twins,” Frost went on.

“Do you have a picture of her?”

Frost slid his phone across the bench to Lucy. He reached over and tapped the digits to unlock it so she could see the photo of him and Katie that he used as his screen saver. The picture showed the two of them at Alcatraz on a perfect summer day, with the city and the bay waters behind them and an endless California sky overhead. Her hair was sunny blond. Her head leaned into his shoulder.

“Wow, she was pretty,” Lucy said. “And yes, you two definitely could have been twins.”