Charles woke to a sound like wings surfing the night air. He opened his eyes, and saw a shadow flicker in the moonlight outside the open window.
The dark scent of the forest behind the house rolled into his bedroom, a smell of puddles and fur and fallen leaves. Dust specks gleamed in the pale light, and the springs of his sisters’ mattress squeaked in the room next door. Were Lirette and Riselle awake? He slipped out of bed to go see. He wore only pajama shorts in the warm night, which would make the teenage girls laugh and tickle him and call him their little monkey boy.
The floorboards in the hall creaked like tree branches beneath his bare feet. He stepped through his sisters’ door and into a beam of moonlight. Lirette had one arm flung over her face, and Riselle’s head lolled to the side, her lips barely parted. They wore matching black t-shirts that reached halfway down their thighs.
They both floated a foot above their double bed.
For a moment, it seemed normal for their bodies to hover like that. Then Charles frowned. He reached out to touch Riselle’s shoulder. Her skin was as cold as a steak from the refrigerator. His hand sprang back.
The overhead lamp came on like a spotlight. The glare made him flinch.
“Charles?” Mama said from the doorway, her dark red hair frizzing out of the braid she wore to sleep. “What are you doing?”
Charles pointed at the bed, but his sisters no longer hung suspended. Their bodies rested on the mattress in the same positions in which they had floated. He didn’t know what to say. Mama stepped up to the bed.
“Girls?” She shook Riselle’s shoulder where Charles’s hand had touched. She yanked her hand away, too, and let out a scream that twisted in on itself within Charles until he had to clutch at his chest. The sound surely would have woken Lirette and Riselle, if they had still been alive.
Charles’s chest never really unclenched after that night. Not when the ambulance shrieked up the driveway, nor at the hospital when the doctor—a woman with bulgy eyes and short gray hair—asked if the girls had been acting at all . . . unusual lately.
“Of course not,” Mama had gasped, huddled beneath Papa’s arm.
Charles remembered how Lirette and Riselle had floated. But that wasn’t what the doctor was talking about. And she wouldn’t know what it meant if he told her. She only wanted to know if his sisters had killed themselves.
Which was stupid. They never would have abandoned him. Not like that. They had been there for his first words and his first steps, while Mama and Papa worked long hours at the paper mill. If he wanted to invite Brad or Tony over for the afternoon, he would ask Lirette and Riselle. They had taught him to tie his shoes, to play catch, and to hold on to their backs with his arms and legs while they climbed trees.
Hang on, monkey boy, they would say as all three of them rose up into the leaf world of the treetops. To Charles, it had felt like flying.
In fact, he could only remember them in the forest now. Splashing in the shadow-splotched creek. Closing their eyes as wind stirred the leaves and raced over their faces. Sitting with their backs against a tree trunk as they told Charles about how they had met a band of gypsies that day, or a troupe of Chinese acrobats, or a gang of motorcycle gorillas, all of whom wanted to buy a little boy who was good at climbing trees.
They were willing to pay top dollar, Lirette would say.
But we told them you’re ours, and we aren’t letting you go, Riselle would chime in.
Not for all the money in a million universes, Lirette would finish.
His chest still felt like it had a fist inside when both sets of grandparents arrived from the city for the funeral. He showered anyway, and fumbled his way into a new black suit and a tie that pressed up against his throat. Papa combed Charles’s dark brown cowlick back, scraping the teeth of the comb along his scalp. Charles noticed for the first time how much Papa’s eyes looked like Lirette’s and Riselle’s, wide-set and high-browed. But theirs had been green and gold, not brown.
“A little help, please, Charles,” Papa muttered, yanking a black sock up over Charles’s foot. “This is no time for you to start acting like a baby.”
That was when Charles realized he wasn’t going to see their eyes again. And he only saw their faces once more—at the church, sitting in the front row between Mama and Papa, staring at the waxy forms that had been his sisters. The minister talked about how everyone would get through this, and eventually would learn to let go of the girls. Charles wasn’t sure about that, but the minister seemed to know what he was talking about.
After the service there was a reception at the house, where people brought hot casseroles and cold noodle salads and stood around talking. Charles found the minister sipping coffee from a paper cup in the kitchen. He tapped the man’s elbow.
“Hello, Charles,” the minister said. He smiled, and Charles could see that his thick orange eyebrows grew out so far that they shaded his eyes. “What can I do for you?”
Charles wiped his palms on his legs. “What does it mean when dead bodies float?”
The minister frowned for a moment, then set his cup on the table and squatted down. Charles smelled coffee on the man’s breath, sour and bitter at the same time.
“It doesn’t mean anything. Not one single thing.”
Charles tugged at his collar, which had grown so tight it was hard to swallow. “Not even that they’re on their way to heaven?”
The minister opened his mouth, but then closed it again before speaking. “Don’t worry. Your sisters are in a better place. Okay?”
Charles nodded, but only because the minister clearly wanted him to. Soon after that, he saw the minister approach his parents. The three of them spoke together and glanced toward Charles with identical expressions of worry. His collar itched, and the fist inside his chest tightened. He retreated to the shadows of the stairway, around the corner from the living room. No one could see him there. He fumbled at his tie to loosen it, and undid the top button of his shirt. His breath came too hot, too fast.
“Can you imagine losing twins like that, at the same time?” a woman’s voice said from the living room. “They were going to start college this fall. And I hear the coroner still hasn’t determined a cause of death. Thank God they had the boy, accident or no.”
“What is he, eight? Nine?” This was a man’s voice. “Tough break.”
“I never could tell those girls apart, not even in their coffins. Isn’t that awful?”
Charles’s throat went hard, like he was choking on stones. His eyes burned. He ran to his room. He could tell them apart, always. Riselle chewed gum with her mouth open and rested a hand on her hip when she stood still. Lirette wound the ends of her chestnut ponytail around her right thumb and always wore her t-shirts inside out.
He stumbled into his closet and slammed the door so none of the dumb people downstairs could hear the sobs that rattled his ribcage.
 |
A month after Lirette and Riselle died, Charles lay beneath his sheet and a blanket, staring at the ceiling planks over his bed. Moonlight made the room glow, and a breeze blew in. The chill of approaching autumn edged the earthen smell of the forest.
For what seemed like the millionth time since the funeral, he closed his eyes and tensed all his muscles, trying to make his body rise off the bed. It still didn’t work. He let go and sank into a limp heap of himself.
His parents’ nightly whisper session had ended. Charles listened every night to see if they would say what killed the girls, but they never did. He didn’t think anyone knew. Instead, they usually talked about how to help him let go, like the minister and now the therapist—skinny Dr. Slater who had a shaved head and smelled like bubble gum—both said. But tonight they had talked about his fight with Austin Peck that day at recess.
Charles’s teeth clamped together with a click as he remembered how Austin’s cheeks had jiggled as he tried to twist away from Charles’s fists. Charles had held onto Austin’s chest with his legs and pounded. He couldn’t punch as hard as he wanted to, so he swung his arms down at Austin like hammers until two teachers lifted him up and carried him to the principal’s office. Charles had sat silently beneath the principal’s questions even though Austin had started the fight by calling Lirette and Riselle maggot food.
He tensed his whole body again, and held his breath as long as he could. Still nothing.
But something moved at the edge of his vision. He turned his head to look. His mouth opened all by itself, and his lungs filled with night air as cool as water.
Two figures stood in the room, black silhouettes, like animated shadows in the filmy moonlight. One had a hand on her hip, the other twirled her ponytail around her thumb.
The moment stretched, and wrapped around Charles so tightly he couldn’t move. The moon brightened, making the black forms even darker.
“Lirette?” Charles whispered, his fingers closing around the blanket. “Riselle?”
“Hey, kiddo.” Lirette’s voice sounded as thin as tissue. Charles had to strain to hear her.
“That doctor guy is right,” Riselle said, her voice just as quiet. “You gotta let go.”
They glided toward the bed and placed their shadow palms on Charles’s forehead for a moment. It felt like fog—cool and damp and pillow-soft.
Then they slid back and streamed out the window. The milky moonlight flickered as they disappeared outside and he heard a sound like a single beat of wings.
He hurtled from his bed to the sill in time to see them vanish into the woods behind the house, right where the stream came out and purred over the rocks.
The forest. Of course! He should have known to look for them there.
He ran through the hall, down the stairs, out the back door and across the lawn. Two shadow shapes moved within the ranks of trees and he raced ahead, his bare feet splashing in the shock of the cold creek.
“Charles?” his father’s voice called behind him. “What’s going on?”
Charles kept running.
“For God’s sake, where are you going?”
His legs carried him into the blackness beneath a stand of pine trees, across the cushioned bed of needles, and deep into the woods.
He would let go, all right. But not of Lirette and Riselle. Never of them. He could let go of anything else. School, friends, even Mama and Papa. He felt lighter already, as though he were shedding real weight. His legs pumped faster, and still faster.
The ground fell away beneath his feet, and he rose up into the enveloping sigh of the leaves. Still running, he glanced back and a picture flashed into his mind—an image of his own body floating at the edge of the forest as though asleep among the tree trunks.
He turned forward again. Cool leaves brushed his face as he flew through the canopy, and the wind rose at his back. His eyes widened until he could see in the shadows as easily as in daylight. And beneath the murmured rush of the trees he heard the whispers of teenage girls, growing closer by the moment.
