Call Down the Hawk Read online

  For several long minutes, he sat in the car in the parking area in front of the farmhouse, listening to the night noises of the Barns. The crickets and the dreamt nightbirds and the hush of the wind from the mountains gently rocking the car. Everything about this place was the same as he had left it except for the person who lived inside it: him.

  He texted Adam: you up?

  Adam replied immediately. Yes.

  Ronan, relieved, called him. “Bryde saved my life.”

  He had not thought he was going to tell Adam the whole of it. At first he hadn’t wanted to call while Adam was in class, and then he hadn’t wanted to call when he might be playing cards with the Crying Club because the thought of him telling them just wait a minute it’s Ronan to take the call after the dorm incident was unbearable. Also, he hadn’t been sure how to talk about a thing he didn’t understand himself. But once he’d begun to explain the day to Adam, he couldn’t stop, not only because he needed to hear it said out loud, but because he needed to say it out loud to Adam.

  Adam listened quietly while Ronan told him everything that had happened, and then, at the end of it, he was quiet for a long space. Then he said, “I want to know what he gets out of it. Out of saving you. All of them, actually. I want to know why they moved you.”

  “Why do they have to get something out of it?”

  “They have to,” Adam said. “That’s just the way the world works.”

  “You saved my life.” Ronan remembered it freshly because the driveway security system sometimes dredged it up. Not the successful end, but the feelings before: Ronan drowning in an acid lake, hand stretched to his little psychopomp Opal, completely failing to save either her or himself. Adam and his exceptional, rarely used ability swooping in to rescue him, surprising them all.

  “That’s different.”

  “How is it different?”

  Adam sounded irritable. “I saved your life because I love you and I was scared and I didn’t know what else to do. That doesn’t sound like Bryde.”

  This statement simultaneously pleased and aggravated Ronan. His mind stored away the first half for safekeeping, to take out and look at again on a rotten day, and decided to discard the second half because it felt deflating.

  “Most people aren’t like you, Ronan,” Adam went on. “They’re too afraid to put their necks out for nothing. There’s an element of—what do you call it? Self-defense. Survival. Not doing something risky without a good reason because bodies are fragile.”

  “You don’t know if he had to stick his neck out,” Ronan said. He used his car key to dig cracker crumbs out from around the cigarette lighter. “You don’t know if they were risking anything to move my car and me in it.”

  “There’s such thing as an emotional cost,” Adam said. “Investing in someone else’s survival isn’t free, and some people’s emotional banks are already overdrawn. Anyway, I know what you want me to say.”

  “What do I want you to say?”

  “You want me to tell you it’s okay to go after Bryde and those other people, no matter what Declan thinks.”

  Adam was right. Once Ronan had heard it, he knew that this was, in fact, exactly what he wanted to hear.

  Adam continued, “Only problem with that is that I agree with Declan.”

  “For fuck’s sake.”

  “I didn’t say I had the same reasons. I don’t think you have to spend your life under a rock, but I don’t think you should go chasing tigers until you’re sure you have matching stripes.”

  Now Ronan knew he sounded irritable. “Poetic. You’re a fucking sage. I’m writing that down.”

  “I’m just saying. Go slow. If you wait for break, I can help, maybe.”

  Ronan did not want to go slow. He felt like this was a candle that might burn out if he waited too long.

  “I just want to know,” Adam said finally, in a slightly different voice from before, “that when I come for break, you’ll be there.”

  “I’ll be here.” He was always here. Double-sided murder crabs had made sure of it.

  “In one piece.”

  “In one piece.”

  “I know you,” Adam said, but he didn’t add anything else, nothing about what knowing Ronan meant.

  They sat in the quiet of a phone call with nothing in it for nearly a minute. Ronan could hear the sounds of doors opening and closing on Adam’s side of the call, voices murmuring and laughing. He was sure Adam could hear the night noises of the Barns on Ronan’s end.

  “I have to go paint over some crab blood,” Adam said eventually. “Tamquam—”

  It had been over a year since either had sat in a Latin class, but it lingered as their private language. It had been one of the languages spoken in Ronan’s dreams for a very long time, and so Latin had been one of the few classes Ronan had thrown himself into when they were at school. Adam couldn’t stand not to be the best at whichever class he was in, so he’d had to throw himself into it with just as much fervor. It was possible that no two students at Aglionby had ever come away with such a thorough understanding of Latin (or, possibly, of each other).

  “—alter idem,” finished Ronan.

  They hung up.

  Ronan climbed out of the car in a better mood than he’d climbed into it. Poking Chainsaw the raven where she slept on the farmhouse porch railing, he unlocked the door, and then the two of them went inside. He set himself a fire in the sitting room and started a can of soup on the stove while he showered and cotton swabbed all the black rubbish out of his ears and hair. A curious energy was running through him. Adam had not told him yes but he hadn’t told him no, either.

  He’d told him go slow.

  He could go slow, he told himself.

  He could go look at photos of his real mother and compare her to the woman he’d seen earlier that day. That was slow. That wouldn’t hurt anything. He could do that while eating soup in front of a fire. Surely that would keep both Adam and Declan happy.

  He retrieved an old photo box from the storage space in his parents’ old bedroom and returned downstairs. With a mug of soup, he sat by his fire in the sitting room. It was a comforting, low-ceilinged space with exposed beams, the fireplace yawning in an unevenly plastered wall, all of it appearing to belong to an older country than the one it had been built in. Like the rest of the house, it felt as organic and alive as Ronan. It was a good friend to look at these photos with.

  He really was in a good mood.

  “Cracker,” Ronan told Chainsaw. He held one out to her where she sat on her pooping-blanket on the couch. She had one eye on the desired saltine and one eye on the fire, which she didn’t trust. Every time it popped, she twitched with knowing suspicion.

  “Cracker,” he said again. He tapped her beak with it so that she’d pay more attention to him and less to the fire.

  “Kreker,” she croaked.

  He stroked the small feathers next to her large beak and let her have it.

  Sitting on the floor, he flipped the lid off the box. Inside were haphazardly stacked vintage photos, some in photo books, some not. He saw his mother, his father, aunt and uncle (he pulled that one out to save it for further study), his brothers when much younger, a variety of animals and musical instruments. His mother looked as he remembered her—softer than that portrait. Softer than that woman wearing her face in the little white sedan. He was glad to see that his memory hadn’t tricked him, but it didn’t really provide an answer for the other woman’s existence.

  He kept digging, down, down, down, to the bottom of the box, until suddenly, he saw a corner of a photo tucked beneath another that made his fingers draw back. He couldn’t see much of the photo, but he recognized the corner. Not truly recognized. Rather, he remembered the way it used to make him feel to look at it. He knew without pulling out the rest of it that it was a photo of Niall Lynch in his youth, not long before he came over from Belfast. He hadn’t looked at it in many, many years, and he didn’t remember many of the details of it apart fr
om the overwhelming memory of not liking it. It had made a younger Ronan feel bad enough that he had stuffed it right down to the bottom of the photo box, where he wouldn’t easily uncover it again in other photo-looking sessions. All he recalled now was his father’s ferocious energy in it—he was a wild person, more alive than anyone else Ronan had ever met, more awake than anyone else Ronan had ever met—and his youth. Eighteen. Twenty.

  Thinking about it now, he thought that the youth was what had engendered Ronan’s pronounced dislike. To child Ronan, seeing his father with so much life ahead of him felt retro-actively terrifying. Like the Niall in the photo had so many choices left to make, and any one of them might make him never end up their father.

  But now Ronan was the same age as the man in the photograph, and in any case, their father had already made all the choices he was ever going to make, all of them leading to him being dead.

  He pulled out the photo and studied it again now.

  Niall wore a leather jacket, collar popped up. A white V-neck. Leather bands wound round his wrists that he’d stopped wearing before Ronan was born—strange to think that Ronan wore them now without having remembered this detail. This young Niall had long, curly hair nearly down to his shoulders. He had a ferocious, living expression. He was young and alive, alive, oh.

  It did not make Ronan feel bad to look at it. It made him feel the opposite. It also gave him something he wasn’t expecting: an answer.

  It wasn’t Ronan’s face he’d seen peering out of the car by the burned hotel. It had been his father’s.

  Jordan spent quite a bit of time working in museums. Continuing education. Job security. Sanity check. At least twice a week, she joined the ranks of area art students who went to galleries to learn by imitation. For a few hours, she became a forgery herself: She looked exactly like the other young artists working in the museum while in reality being nothing like them.

  DC was spoiled for choice when it came to museums. The pink-hued National Portrait Gallery. The slyly uncomfortable Renwick. The chaotically colorful Museum of African Art. The Art Museum of the Americas and Mexican Cultural Institute with their beautiful Mayan and Pueblo tiles. Dumbarton Oaks’ lovely garden. The NMWA, which Hennessy had once gotten thrown out of for an altercation so now none of them could really go back. The Kreeger and the Phillips, the Hillwood and the Hirshhorn. There were so many. The small and chilly Freer was Jordan’s favorite, its small collection curated long ago by a man who collected with his heart first and his brain second. She and Hennessy had an agreement: Jordan would not work in the Sackler next door, and Hennessy would not work in the Freer.

  One thing, at least, that they didn’t share.

  But this morning, because she was not giving away real pieces of herself, she headed into the National Gallery of Art. It was a big, handsome building with sky-high ceilings, heavy crown molding, and richly muted walls to show off its gilt-edged treasure. There were always plenty of students and art groups sketching, and several of the rooms already had massive, heavy easels for visiting artists to copy works. A forger could work right in the middle of it without being the center of attention.

  She checked the time. She was a little late. Hennessy said that arriving late for a meeting was an act of aggression. It was like reaching into someone’s pocket, she said, and thumbing out their wallet. It was leaning against their car and siphoning their fuel, she said, while making eye contact. Or it was just DC traffic, Jordan had replied once, and Hennessy had said they’d have to agree to disagree.

  She glimpsed a figure on the other side of the lobby, studying one of the marble statues. His back was to her, and his gray suit was unspecific and anonymous, but nonetheless she felt certain she recognized the posture, the curled dark hair. It was an artful scene with the light filtering in among the columns, everything brown and black and white. It would have been a good painting, if she painted originals.

  “I heard,” she announced, “you’re the son of the Devil.”

  Declan Lynch did not turn his head as she approached, but she saw his mouth tense in a suppressed smile. He said, “That’s true.”

  It had taken only a few keystrokes to find out that he was the eldest son of Niall Lynch, The Dark Lady’s creator. She hadn’t been trying to research him. Really she’d just wanted to know what to expect for the dutiful date. In the few photos she found of him—in his private school’s website archives, in background shots on political news articles, in posed photos at an art show opening—he looked dull and forgettable. Portrait of a Dark-Haired Youth. There was nothing to remind her of what had seemed fleetingly appealing about him at the Fairy Market; it was probably the heightened atmosphere of the night that had lent him charm, she thought. This would be a chore, she decided. An acceptable chore she could bullshit through while they reached into his pocket and thumbed out his wallet, but a chore nonetheless. She was relieved, really. Better that way.

  She sidled by him. He was not as dull-looking as the photos and her memory had suggested. Already she had forgotten that he was handsome. It seemed a strange thing to forget. He was scented with something subtly mannish, mild and unfamiliar, an oil rather than a fragrance. Jordan was reminded at a most basic level of all the strangers she had made out with, strangers who smelled pleasantly of scents never again encountered, scents that forever belonged only to them in her memory.

  “I did a little reading on you since we last met.”

  “Coincidentally,” Declan said, his gaze still fixed on the statue, “so did I. I hear you grew up in London.”

  What did one find when one looked up Jordan Hennessy? They found her mother, who possessed a tragic story so familiar it registered less as tragedy than as nodding predictability. The troubled genius artist, the life cut short, the body of work suddenly rendered meaningful and pricey. Hennessy had grown up with her in London; Hennessy had a London accent and so, therefore, did Jordan and all the other girls. “I grew up everywhere. I hear you grew up west of here.”

  “I was born grown-up,” he said blandly.

  “I found out about your father. Tragic.”

  “I found out about your mother. Also tragic.”

  It was Hennessy’s tragedy, though, not Jordan’s. She said, “Less tragic than a murder. My mother’s was her own fault.”

  “One could argue,” Declan said, “my father’s was as well. Mm. Art and violence.” He finally turned his head to her; he looked at her mouth. She just had time to see this—to feel it, an intense and surprising and agreeable heat—and then he said, “Walk and talk?”

  Hennessy would hate him.

  Hennessy wasn’t here.

  They began to stroll through the museum. There was something spare and unusual about it, about the morning-time wander through a museum populated with schoolchildren and retirees and locals. Time worked differently before noon when one ordinarily stayed up all night.

  The two of them allowed themselves to get snagged in the net of a line for the traveling Manet exhibition.

  Declan said, “I didn’t think you’d call.”

  “Nor I, Mr. Lynch.”

  “Oh, that reminds me.” He reached into his jacket pocket. “I brought you something.”

  This was uncomfortable. Here he was doing the proper date thing, and at the moment, the other girls were quite certainly breaking into his house. “Not flowers, I hope.”

  They moved a few steps closer to the entrance to the exhibition.

  “Hand,” he said as the line stopped again. She put her hand out. He set his gift in the middle of her palm.

  She was astonished despite herself.

  “Is this really what it says on the label?” she asked.

  He gave her that bland smile.

  It was a very small glass jar, the size you’d find holding fancy cosmetics. Inside was a mere dusting of purple pigment, so little that it wasn’t even visible unless you turned the glass jar a certain way. A handwritten label on the outside read: Tyrian purple. A historical pigment,
nearly impossible to get. It was made from excreted dye of sea snails such as the Purpura lapillus. Snails were ill-motivated pigment makers; it took an enormous number of them to produce even a small amount of Tyrian purple. Jordan couldn’t remember the precise number. Thousands. Thousands of snails. It was very expensive.

  “I can’t—”

  “Don’t be boring and say ‘I can’t accept this,’” Declan said. “It took a lot of work to find that at short notice.”

  Jordan had not expected to feel conflicted about this experience. Everything about this experience was supposed to be disposable. A means to an end. Not a real date, nothing to beg the real question of would I like this person.

  She hid this all behind her wide smile before slipping the jar into her own pocket. “Crumbs. I won’t, then. I’ll utter your name when I paint something with it.”

  “Say it now,” he said, and he nearly let himself smile. Nearly.

  “Declan,” she said, but had to cut her eyes away because she could feel herself grinning, and not the slick grin she normally gave away. Fuck, she thought.

  “Jordan,” he said, trying it, and she blinked up, surprised. But of course he would call her by her first name. He hadn’t come to her from the world of forgery, of late-night grudge matches, of her introducing herself as Hennessy. He’d looked her up, and had found the full name: Jordan Hennessy.

  Normally this was where she’d correct people. Tell them, no, it’s just Hennessy, really, because that’s what Hennessy would say, and they were all her.

  But she didn’t correct him.

  The Manet exhibition was choked with people, and as they left it, Declan and Jordan were momentarily trapped in the doorway. Suit coats brushed her hands; purses jostled her back. She was crushed against Declan and he against her. For a moment she looked at him and he back, and she saw bright intrigue in his expression and knew he saw it mirrored. Then they backed out of the room and she assembled her swagger and he drew his dull corporate composure close again.

  Eventually they found themselves in Gallery 70, looking at Street in Venice, the painting she had copied before so many eyes at the Fairy Market.