Vultures Read online

  To the stirrups.

  INTERLUDE

  THE HOSPITAL

  The doctor’s voice drones on and on. He’s not talking to Miriam. He’s talking to Evelyn. Evelyn, prim Evelyn, buttoned-up Evelyn, Evelyn who’s dressed like she’s at a funeral (and in her mind, she is).

  The doctor, a round man with hair that seems to have left the top of his head and migrated to his eyebrows and the inside of his nose, is going on and on about the consequences of miscarriage.

  “The miscarriage was a bad one born of internal trauma,” he’s saying, his voice with a dog’s gruffness, ruff-ruff.

  Evelyn corrects: “External trauma. My daughter was attacked.”

  “Yes, yes,” he says, still not looking at Miriam, not talking to her, either. “Caused excessive bleeding and a subsequent infection, and the result is . . . scar tissue has built up inside her.” Her. Miriam screams inside her own head: I’m right here, you can talk to me! Please talk to me! “They call it Asherman’s Syndrome. We did a hysteroscopy to determine the scope and severity of the scarring, and it’s considerable. Difficult to know how considerable until she’s a little older and her body sets into . . . more predictable rhythms, but it’ll be a concern for her going forward.”

  “Can she conceive again?” Evelyn asks.

  Miriam wants the doctor to stop talking to her mother and start talking to her. She also knows something about him, something that can’t be true: in seven years, he’ll die from a heart attack in the parking lot of this very hospital on a cold winter’s night. His death will be slow and nobody will help him, despite being so close to so many people who can.

  “I’m right here,” Miriam says in a small voice.

  Her mother shushes her.

  The doctor wets his lips. “Infertility is the likely outcome. If she does manage to get pregnant, her body isn’t prepared to nourish the fetus, so a miscarriage remains a strong possibility.”

  “And the chances of her conceiving a child and bringing it to term?”

  I’m right here I’m right here I’m right here.

  “Ennnh. I want to be honest with you,” he says. “It’s a near-impossibility. A statistical impossibility.”

  Evelyn won’t look at her. She just stares down at her own knees, her own feet. To the floor. Through the floor, to some faraway place where none of this is happening, where her daughter is not a shameful smear, a stain in the carpet that won’t ever come out. Evelyn has ideas, Miriam knows, ideas about a woman’s role in this world, in this life.

  And Miriam does not fit them.

  I should go. I should leave.

  Those are the thoughts that repeat in her head like a mantra, even as the doctor gets up and goes, even as her mother sits simmering in silence.

  FOURTEEN

  THE SEED

  She’s weeping.

  This is not like her.

  Admittedly, it’s happened more and more in the last year or so, but even still: it’s way off-brand. Miriam sees herself as a take-no-shit, give-no-fucks kinda lady. She’s all sneer and middle fingers. I’m supposed to be impervious, she thinks. Bulletproof. Bomb-proof. Life-proof. She’s seen so much shit, so much blood, so many lives cut short by a merciless swipe of the reaper’s blade that she has long believed herself to be comfortably and appropriately dead inside.

  And yet, here she sits, blubbering like a little girl.

  She’s in Beagle’s bathroom. Thankfully, he has one, and she’s not required to pee on a puppy pad or squat over a litter box. It’s clean, actually. Medicinally clean. So was the exam room, to her surprise—she figured it’d be as dirty as a barstool at a cheap Nevada brothel, but it looked how she expected a real exam room to look. All clean, all sterile. (When Beagle saw her shocked face, he said, “I’m a real doctor. Or was, once.”)

  Now she sits in the restroom, panties around her ankles. She peed like, ten minutes ago, and has been sitting here since, crying like an asshole and blowing her nose in so much toilet paper that the roll is almost bald.

  The examination was, as examinations go, no fun. First came the uncomfortable questions: “What was your period like?” (Like the elevator from The Shining.) “Do you drink or smoke?” (I drink like a desert camel and used to smoke like a tire fire.) “What do you do for a job?” (Ha ha ha, “job,” that’s a good one, doc.) “What type of birth control do you use?” (Uh. Spray and pray?) And then the real fun one: “Have you ever had a miscarriage?”

  That’s when she had to tell him—and Gabby, who was standing there.

  She told them both how she was pregnant as a teen.

  How the mother of the kid who got her knocked up attacked her with a snow shovel in a high school bathroom.

  How she miscarried.

  How something broke inside her, and how way too much blood came out of her for that to have been normal.

  And how the doctor told her she had something called Asherman’s, and that meant, at least in her case, a lifetime of infertility.

  Hence, no birth control, because why bother?

  (It was at that point Gabby reached for her, and Miriam flinched. Yet another thing to apologize for later, if she can muster it. For Miriam, apologizing is like passing a kidney stone. Necessary, sometimes, but hurts as bad as passing a LEGO brick through her urethra.)

  After that came a blood test, a pee test, a pap smear.

  And for the finale: a transvaginal ultrasound. (Aren’t you gonna buy me dinner first? Or at least put a song on the jukebox for me, sailor?)

  During the tests, she kept thinking that maybe she wasn’t pregnant at all. Maybe this was all just a fluke. If she wasn’t, then that meant she didn’t have a way out of this curse that trapped her—a curse that so far had frustratingly failed to yield to her a vision of Beagle’s death, because apparently “doctors” wear something called “gloves” to be all “doctor-like.” Though she wanted an escape from this power, if her body had once again chosen to be as inhospitable to life as a canyon on Mars, so be it. That wasn’t her fault. That was life. That was fate. It is what it is, Miriam.

  “You said you have Asherman’s?” Beagle says, with some dubiousness.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “No sign of it here.”

  “No sign—what? How is that even possible?”

  “You have surgery to correct it?”

  She frowned. “No.”

  “It doesn’t usually heal on its own.”

  Heal on its own . . .

  Like the wound under her arm. She was about to open her mouth again to protest his finding—

  But that’s when she saw it. She saw the seed.

  “There it is,” Beagle said. On the screen, a dot. Like a bug. “Bit bigger than a sesame seed right now,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “What is it?” he repeated, giving her an incredulous eyebrow.

  Gabby’s hand fell on her shoulder again, and this time, Miriam did not twitch or pull away. “Miriam, that’s the baby.”

  “It’s . . .” Mine. “So tiny.”

  “They don’t start out fully formed,” Beagle said, sounding irritated. “At this stage they’re just a . . . a little bundle of cells dividing. Forming nerves and—there, see that?” In the sesame seed, a tiny fluttering pulse. Like a distant star winking. “That’s the heartbeat.”

  That’s the heartbeat.

  Here, in the bathroom, that’s what she keeps thinking about.

  That’s when it hit her. That little beating heart. It has a destiny now. It’s like getting a social security number: that heart starts to beat, and now her baby is in the system. It has a fate, and the fate isn’t long for this world. Hell, it never even makes it to this world. It dies on the way out. Born into death, still and cold. It never gets to make sense of the light. It never gets to see all the life around it. All the life that will one day die, she thinks.

  She’s been so inured to the realities of death, she has been left utterly defenseless to the light of life. It ha
s blinded her with tears. She’s left wracked and reeling, bewildered and utterly fucked.

  She fumbles for the toilet paper roll, reminded suddenly that it’s empty, and so she spins it fruitlessly as she grits her teeth and forces herself to shut up and stop crying.

  A gentle knock comes to the door.

  “Miriam.”

  Gabby’s voice.

  “I’m peeing, what.”

  “You’ve been in there a while.”

  “I’ve . . . got a lot of pee.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Ugh. Fine.” Miriam reaches out, unlocks the door—it’s a small bathroom, so she can reach it. Gabby slides in through the door, then gently closes it behind her. Now Miriam is in the uncomfortable position of sitting half-naked on the toilet while Gabby stands above her, knees-to-knees. Miriam sniffs. “Don’t judge me. I see you judging me.”

  “I swear, I’m not judging you.”

  “I’m not really peeing. I haven’t been peeing this whole time. I mean, like, a few drops here and there.”

  “I know.” Gabby gives her a sad look. “You’re upset.”

  “Yes. Yeah. Shit.”

  “You don’t want to lose your baby.”

  “I don’t give a shit about this baby because it’s my baby. I give a shit because it’s my way out. It’s the key to my prison cell. That’s what Mary Stitch told me. I pop out this baby, it ends. I can shut it off and walk away.”

  Gabby stiffens a little. “But it’s still a baby. A life.”

  Miriam wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “Stop. Don’t give me that speech. I’ve seen what constitutes life. Life is . . . not worth it, okay? It’s here just to end. It’s a slow walk into a wood chipper. Babies aren’t special because they’re babies; they’re just weaker, doughier, poopier versions of actual people, and all people are stupid and all people die.” She sighs. “I’m overselling this, aren’t I?”

  Gabby holds her finger and thumb an inch apart. “Little bit.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I care about the kid. The not-quite-a-kid. The seed. Okay? I care. I don’t want to care but I do care.”

  “It’ll be okay.”

  “It won’t. The kid dies. That’s what fate has in store. A death, and one that comes so early, it comes before life even really begins.” She thinks of Louis now. And how happy this baby would make him. And how sad he would be to lose it. Worse, she can’t help but feel sad at how she lost him.

  Gabby starts to help her up. She says, “You’ve saved people before.”

  “This is different. I don’t know how to save it. Just like I don’t know how to . . .” She doesn’t finish that sentence. She doesn’t have to.

  Because Gabby finishes it for her:

  “Just like you don’t know how to save me.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t need saving.”

  “We all need saving.”

  “I’m not going to kill myself.”

  Oh, but you are. I saw it in my vision. Fate gets what fate wants, Gabs. And what fate wants is you swallowing an entire medicine cabinet full of pills and turning your heart off like it’s a fucking stopwatch, cla-click.

  Gabby shakes her head. “I don’t buy it. I’ll be okay. And this baby will be okay, too. Here—” Gabby eases down and helps Miriam get her panties back up. Miriam can feel her breath on her shins, her messy, spiky hair tickling her knees. It’s an oddly intimate moment. Not sexual, not at all. Just intimate. A moment perfect for Miriam to ruin.

  “This is not the time for oral sex,” Miriam says.

  “Miriam.”

  “Sorry. I can get my own panties up. I’m not some pregnant beast-blob who can’t see her own toes. Not yet, anyway.”

  “I’m helping, so let me help.”

  Miriam lets her help. She stands, head craning back on her neck, staring up at the light above the toilet.

  “Ugh. God. Fuck. I’m going to get pregnant. I mean, I know I’m already pregnant, but I’m going to get pregnant-pregnant. Swollen and wobbly. This little seed is going to turn into a giant watermelon.”

  But as she’s saying that, Gabby is looking down. Studying something.

  She stoops to pick something up.

  It’s a Band-Aid.

  One from underneath Miriam’s arm. Where the wound was before it . . . healed up and went away. It must’ve popped out of her sleeve.

  “You lost a bandage,” Gabby says.

  “I don’t think that’s mine—Gabs, you shouldn’t pick Band-Aids up off a bathroom floor. Pretty sure that’s how Ebola starts.”

  But now Gabby is invested—like a mother monkey, she’s grabbing Miriam’s arm gently and giving a look down through the sleeve.

  “I don’t see any blood,” Gabby says.

  “I know— It’s not—”

  “Wait, is it this arm? This side?”

  “Yeah, no, it’s—”

  “You should have the doctor look at it—I know he’s not that kind of doctor, but he’s still a doctor, so while we’re here—” By now, Gabby’s rolled up the bottom of Miriam’s T-shirt, and Miriam thinks to fight it, but what’s the point? It’ll come out eventually. The truth is like a dead body: you can only hide it for so long before it pops back up somewhere.

  It’s then that Gabby says it:

  “You’re all healed.”

  “. . . yes?”

  “Yes? Yes. You’re saying yes like you already know this.”

  “I . . . am maybe saying it that way, yeah.”

  “Miriam, that was a bullet wound.”

  “It was.”

  “A week ago, it looked like hell. You could’ve slotted a roll of quarters in that thing.”

  Miriam shrugs. “And now it’s fine. Yay. Let’s move on.” But Gabby isn’t satisfied. She’s got Miriam’s arm up. She’s studying that area. Miriam says, “I didn’t know you had an armpit thing. You could’ve told me. No shame here. We all have our sexual peccadillos, Gabs—”

  “There’s not even a scab. Or a scar.”

  “Yeah, I . . . noticed that.”

  “But you kept putting bandages on it.”

  Miriam winces like a guilty child. “I did.”

  “Why?”

  “Because . . .” Miriam can’t think of a lie.

  “Because you wanted to fool me.”

  “Yes, to fool you. But wait, no, not to fool you, not exactly—”

  “Not exactly?”

  The explanation comes out in a gushing rush. “I thought it was weird and I didn’t really wanna talk about it. I’ve got enough insanity on my mind right now to have to sit and contemplate the ramifications of healing a bullet hole in a few days—”

  “A few days?”

  “Maybe less. I woke up in the Super 8 and it was healed.”

  Gabby’s eyes go wide. “That’s fast.”

  Miriam sighs. “No shit, Nurse Ratched.”

  “That’s too fast.”

  “I know! That’s what I’m saying. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know why I have it. I don’t know if I can do it again or if it was some kind of fluke or hey, shit, what if I can’t even die and—”

  The words are caught suddenly in her throat, trapped there like a rat in a tube sock. She replays the thought in her head: What if I can’t die?

  Like Harriet.

  “I’m going to come for you now,” Harriet says. “And then I’m going to eat your precious heart. One animal eating the power of another.”

  Miriam tastes heartsblood on her tongue.

  Then she turns around and pukes in the toilet.

  FIFTEEN

  GROTESQUE REVIVIFICATION

  The puke taste stains the back of her tongue like the ectoplasm of a passing poltergeist. Miriam staggers out of the bathroom, zombie-like, led by Gabby. Beagle asks her if she’s all right and she mumbles something that, again, is zombified in its mush-mouthed meaninglessness. Gabby covers for her, says it’s “just
nerves.”

  Dr. Never-Dick is talking at her, but she’s not listening. Instead, she’s thinking about that night, not long ago now but one that feels like a lifetime before, where she cut out Harriet Adams’ heart and ate it. She ate it because it was the only way to kill the bitch—a bitch who had risen from the dead on a mission to kill her. Raised from the dead perhaps by the Trespasser. Or, at least, possessed by her own version of one.

  It was the only way to end her. Harriet couldn’t be stopped. When Harriet came at her the first time back in Miriam’s old house, she kicked in the witch’s kneecap, attacked her with an owl, and yet the hag kept coming. Miriam went out the window to escape, and Harriet followed close behind, galloping down the roof on all fours like an animal. Harriet leapt off the roof but landed wrong—her arm snapped, breaking so bad the bone lanced through the skin like a spear-tip. And next time she saw that monster? Harriet was A-OK. Good to go without an injury in sight. Leg working fine. Bone back in her arm. No claw marks from Bird of Doom.

  So, to kill her, Miriam removed, then ate, her heart.

  But eating Harriet’s heart, that wasn’t Miriam’s idea. Oh, no. That idea, she stole. She stole it from Harriet herself, because the undying bitch let that little tidbit slip. Harriet said to Miriam:

  I’m going to cut off your head.

  And then I’m going to take out your heart.

  Your head I will leave behind so it can watch as I eat your heart. That is how I take your power. That is how I conquer.

  Eat the heart. Take her power.

  So, Miriam ate Harriet’s heart instead. Not to take the power for herself but rather to take it away from Harriet.

  Seems it worked both ways, though, didn’t it? Yes, she robbed Harriet of her power to heal. Yes, it allowed Harriet to die, finally, there in the winter-struck forest, in the snow, in the cold.

  But now Miriam wonders if she has that power, too. The power to heal all injuries. The power not to die.

  And she has no idea what that means.

  Miriam shuffles her way to the door. Walking out into the brutal bright vengeance of the angry Florida day-star, she hears the doctor say something to her. She offer a grumpy mammalian grunt, turning toward him—he’s saying to her, “It’ll be fine, you’re healthy, the baby looks healthy, come back in a week for the results of the blood test, and—”