The Mercy of Birds

CHAPTER 50: HEART OF A CHILD

CHAPTER 50
HEART OF A CHILD

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He found himself waking up in his old city today but he no longer saw everything from his own perspective, rather his frame of mind had transmuted into that of his sister's. The unfurling, muted pink sky with cranes flying over was hers; the seedy buildings reconquered by the tendrils of vines and weeds; the rundown sidewalk where wildflowers grow, perforating the concrete; the laughter that resounded throughout the whole neighborhood, and also the cries...

He had thought he was better off not driving through the route that would pass what used to be their house, but he couldn't resist the temptation, and with her sinking so deep in his skin, he didn't think he would be able to call it a house anymore. House would denote the fact that there was a person or people inhabiting it that endeavored not to let everything cave in, but what they had was already ashes to begin with. An illusion of warmth and devotion while their feet were bleeding upon trampling on broken glass, and their parents, they made them think that it was normal for them to carry blood and pain everywhere.

Upon seeing the beige and blue-gray paint of that place, he began to see the pattern that aligned them into a fettering recurrence, bound them into retelling of endless tragedies. The suburban house with stone steps on the veranda, a slender tower for chimney, a wide berth of window that overlooked the lawn, a cherry tree billowing and overshadowing the path where it branched into two, leading up to the front and side doors—were all features that could be found either in their second house in Montana or in Cameron's in South Dakota.

Was it in their subconscious to be drawn into a place like this or did it follow them? Latching into their lineage like a malediction?

Still, the house stood tall, even resided in by newcomers who slipped in and out of the view from the window as they went about their daily routine, as he, the oldest son of the previous owners who had dwelled in that space before, whose family was torn into pieces under that roofs, had to fight the urge to go up there and rouse them away as he watched them in his car, like a creep from across the street, run! What the fuck are you doing here?! Run for your lives!

When he felt like he couldn't stay any moment longer without beginning to let the detrimental emotions consume him, he finally drove away from the area to the one destination that Nova had appointed to him. The house with the blueberry shrubs in front of it.

It was certainly not difficult to find and before he knew it, he was already walking out into the cleared path. All while he tried not to think, abstractions could only be deleterious and would bring him to the most extreme, that if the detective still refused to lend his help in this case, he was going to lose himself alongside her.

He inhaled a deep breath and knocked on the white-washed door and it swung promptly as if the person inside had expected his arrival from a million miles away. Then a little boy whose height only reached just near his thighs looked up at him with wide, dark brown eyes laden with curiosity, enshrined with more life to it than this entire city.

"Who are you?" he said as he held the door ajar.

Nicholas crouched to his level, his voice mellow but his words didn't reduce into that amelioration and deliberate inflection one often produced when talking to a child. "I'm looking for Jonathan Cantrell. Is this the right house?"

The curly haired boy nodded. "That's my grampa."

"Is he inside? Can you call him?"

"Zane? Who is it?" a feminine voice interrupted their exchange and their heads swung to find a woman approaching from the hallway inside the house.