Sarah Durst: Conjured

She wondered how she even knew this was a bedroom when she didn’t remember ever having one. She’d known what a car was too, though the seat belt had felt unfamiliar. She could recognize a few kinds of birds. For example, she knew that these painted ones on the walls were sparrows and the live one outside had been a wren. She didn’t know how she knew that. Perhaps Malcolm had told her in one of her lessons.

Or maybe it was a memory, forcing its way to the surface of her mind. But the sparrows she remembered flew. She pictured their bodies, black against a blindingly blue sky. She didn’t know where that sky was or when she had seen it. The birds had flown free.

Eve raised her hand toward the birds on the wall. “Fly,” she whispered.

The birds detached from the wall.

The air filled with rustling and crinkling as the paper birds fluttered their delicate wings. At first they trembled, but then they gained strength. Circling the room, they rose higher toward the ceiling. They spiraled up and around Eve’s head. She reached her arms up, and the birds brushed past her fingers. She felt their paper feathers, and she smiled.

Then she heard a rushing like a flood of water, and a familiar blackness filled her eyes.

I am alone in a carnival tent of tattered red. Music, tinny and warped, swirls around me. Fog teases at my feet as if it wishes to taste me. A trapeze swings empty above me, and then it’s not empty. A broken doll dangles from it .

I hear a man’s voice. Loud, as if to an audience, he says, “Choose a card.”

The trapeze vanishes, and I am standing in front of a table covered in red velvet. Cards lie in front of me: seven of spades, queen of hearts, jack of diamonds, a castle caught in thorny vines, a man hanging from a tree …

“Choose a card,” the Magician says .

He’s a shadow in the mist .

I study the cards . Perhaps the castle, I think. I reach for it .

The Magician catches my wrist. “Not for you.” His voice is soft, nearly a purr in my ear, and I want to ask why not. No sound comes out of my mouth. I touch my throat. I feel bumps in my skin, even, in a row, straight across my neck .

My scream is silent .

Lying on the bed, Eve sucked in air. Her hands flew to her neck. Smooth skin. She swallowed and felt her throat throb as if she had screamed it raw.

The birds were on the floor, lifeless as paper.

She heard a knock on the bedroom door. “Food’s ready, if you’re hungry.” It was Aunt Nicki. “Sandwiches. Microwave soup.”

Eve jumped up and scooped the paper birds off the floor. They lay limp in her hands with feathers spread and beaks open. She shoved them into a dresser drawer just as the doorknob turned.

Aunt Nicki stuck her head into the room. “You okay?”

Eve nodded. Leaning against the dresser, she wet her lips and wondered if she could speak. Worst vision yet , she thought.

The woman sighed. “This is the part where I say something all touchy-feely about how it’s all going to be okay and this will feel like home in no time and you have a wonderful opportunity to reinvent yourself and your life …”

“You can skip that speech if you want,” Eve said. Her throat felt rough, as if she’d swallowed sand. She licked her lips again.

“Awesome,” Aunt Nicki said. “Come out and eat so you don’t faint.”

Eve’s eyes slid to the bed. Anyone could see she’d been lying there. She didn’t know if Aunt Nicki noticed. “In a minute, okay?”

Aunt Nicki closed the door.

Eve sagged. After a moment, she recovered and peeked in the dresser drawer at the limp birds. The branches in the wallpaper were bare now, and the leaves fanned out against an empty blue sky. “Sorry,” she whispered to the birds. She wondered if they’d liked their taste of freedom or if they’d been scared. She shut the drawer again, gently this time.

Eve left the bedroom before Aunt Nicki could return to fetch her. She found the two agents in a tiny kitchen. They sat at a table squeezed between the refrigerator and a wall.

“Ham, chicken, or turkey?” Aunt Nicki asked without looking at Eve. She pointed to bags of cold cuts on the kitchen table. “Or do you want to be a vegetarian?”

Eve selected a roll and picked at the crust. She sat at the table, a little closer to both of them than she liked, but there wasn’t much choice.

“Vegetarians don’t eat meat,” Malcolm explained. “No hamburgers. No sausage. No steak. No bacon. No pepperoni.” He helped himself to a stack of ham slices and shoved them into a roll. “Instead, they eat a lot of beans. Also, fruit. This is a kiwi, by the way.” He speared a slice of green fruit with a fork and ate it.

He was being kind again, acting as if he could heal the holes inside her if only he were helpful enough, and Eve had to look away, studying the kitchen instead of him. The kitchen was sparse but clean. The yellow walls were nice. The counter had been scoured bare in spots. Not all of the cabinets hung straight. The lace curtains drooped over closed shades. She interrupted a discussion of the pros and cons of vegetarianism to ask, “Can we open the shades?”

Malcolm and Aunt Nicki exchanged looks.

“We could,” Malcolm said slowly.

“You said I’d be safe here,” Eve said.

Both of them nodded. “So long as you follow the rules,” Aunt Nicki said. “No witness who followed the rules has ever been harmed in the history of the witness protection program.”

Malcolm studied her with narrowed eyes. “Repeat the rules.”

Eve put down her roll. The crumbs felt like dry dust in her mouth. “No contact with anyone I used to know. No phone calls. No letters. No smoke signals. And if telepathy miraculously becomes possible, no telepathy either.”

“And?” he prompted.

“Don’t tell anyone about my past,” Eve said.

“And?”

“Don’t discuss the case.”

Malcolm nodded. “Good.”

Eve crossed to the window and raised the shades. She looked outside at the brown lawn with the crooked tree, the black agency car with the tinted windows, and the dull gray sky.

“Feel better?” Aunt Nicki asked.

Eve didn’t answer.

445 … 446 … 447 … Eve counted the cracks in the plaster ceiling as she lay in bed and waited for dawn. 451 … 452 … Shadows clung to all the furniture. Occasionally, a car’s headlights swept across the room, erasing the shadows, but then they returned, smothering the room. She listened to the clang and snap of the pipes in the walls and thought of hands playing the pipes as if the heating system were a carnival organ, like the one that played in her visions.

492 … 493 …

Slowly, the shadows in the room faded from black to slate, then from slate to dove gray. The branches in the wallpaper still looked bare and bereft without their birds.

Eve heard a door open and close, and then footsteps. She counted them instead of the cracks … ten steps between Aunt Nicki’s room and the bathroom. Another door creaked open and shut, and then she heard the water whoosh on in the shower. This sent the pipes clanking and rattling in the walls so loudly that Eve got out of bed and placed her hands flat on the walls to feel as well as hear the shaking. She felt like that inside—as if she were rattling, clanging and clanking and snapping like the pipes.

She waited until the sound of the shower ceased, and then she found a set of clothes in one of the dresser drawers. Malcolm had left them for her—socks, underwear, bra, jeans, and a T-shirt. She touched the cotton T-shirt to her cheek. He’d asked her in the agency, the day before they came here, what colors she liked. She’d picked a few at random. These shirts were those colors. Poking her head outside her room, she checked the hall. Aunt Nicki had already returned to her bedroom. The bathroom door was open. Eve darted inside and slid the lock.