Original Fiction: Little Birdies (Chapters 1 & 2 of 10)
I know I should be putting in some time on all my other WIPs and I have been poking a some of them, but this story really wanted to get out here, so...
Title: Little Birdies
Genre: Original Science Fiction (containing Slash, Femmeslash and Het elements)
Rating: R-ish (NC-17 eventually?)
Summary: How did she know? A little birdie told her.
Little Birdies
Chapter 1: Phoenix
It was a funny little blue bird that came up to Heather first. Not a Bluebird with the blue back and the rust-colored belly (which was one of the only birds she knew on sight), it was just a bird that was blue- Heather didn't know what type. She wasn't much of a bird person, but this bird got her attention- chirping at her and hopping closer to where she was kneeling on her apartment's little back patio. She was weeding her potted thyme plants (she didn't cook with herbs much, but she liked the idea of growing her own anyway). The blue bird came even closer, still chirping away and Heather bent down to get a better look at it. "You want to tell me something, little one?" she asked, awed that this wild thing was so unafraid of her. The birdsong got louder and kind of ring-y in her ears and she sat back, feeling nauseous, closing her eyes.
When she opened her eyes, she was surrounded by heat and flames. The air was sooty- the inside of her nose was suddenly coated with the thickness of smoke. She coughed and fell sideways, getting dizzy. She looked down her body to see that her legs were covered in fire. She tried to scream, but it just came out hoarse- barely there. The next moment she remembered that she wasn't a woman named Heather Clokey- she wasn't a woman at all. She was Isaac Goldstein, husband, father, retired carpenter. His life- all seventy-six years of it- flashed through his brain. His childhood in Teaneck, his army days, marrying Sarah and having the boys- it all seemed so fast- he hadn't done enough- he couldn't be dying yet- there was more to do-
Heather groaned and sat up gingerly. Her head ached and she could smell vomit and urine on herself. She peered down at her body- no flames, just filth and potting soil (she'd tipped the thyme somehow). The little bird was nowhere around- she must have scared it off. Inside, she showered off, keeping her eyes open as much as possible- that way she didn't see the flames as they cooked Isaac's skin. The smell of the soot was still there inside her nose even after she'd dried off.
She'd never had that vivid an imagination before- maybe it was a virus or something. She'd heard that sometimes illnesses could make your dreams more dramatic. That had to be it- she was getting sick. She ate some soup (which was all she could really stomach) and went to bed for the day.
***
After ten minutes of trying to sleep, her phone rang. It was her friend Dana from across the courtyard. Heather had met Dana the day she moved in- Dana had been helping her ex-boyfriend Jack move his things out of her apartment, and she was doing it with feeling (and at the top of her lungs). Heather had just pulled the smallest rental truck on Earth up if front of the building when Dana had decided to help Jack move his old CD collection down the three flights of stairs to the street via the window. The crash of several dozen plastic jewel cases hitting the hood of the truck made Heather jump and throw her hands up to protect her face. Fortunately, the windshield easily deflected the shards. Dana had come running down all apologies and concern. They had been friends ever since.
"Hey, chica, what say we order Chinese and watch that new show about the Goddess Athena where Zeus is a geneticist and accidentally clones her from the sweat of his brow? Sound good?" Dana chirped out at her.
"Yeah, no I- I'm not feeling great tonight. I'm just gonna crash. Can you tivo it and we'll watch it next week?"
"Aww- poor poppet. You need anything? I could bring you soup." Dana was an atrocious cook, but that didn't stop her from trying to cook or making Heather try her attempts.
"Oh, no I already had some. I'm just gonna sleep," Heather replied.
"Well, you should uh- you should eat something really garlicky and wrap a hot towel around your head to clear your sinuses," Dana advised as Heather giggled despite herself. "Oh and put some rubbing alcohol on the soles of your feet if you think you might have fever."
"Okay, bye Dana."
"I'll be over in the morning to check on you."
"I'm hanging up now."
"I'll make a mustard plaster just in case."
Click.
***
Hours later, Heather had not slept at all. She had just lain in the bed thinking about Isaac Goldstein- about his life. It was ridiculous, but she couldn't stop thinking about his life. She had made him up in her head, but he felt real and his memories felt real and they were so, well- uh- real. There were all these details about him that kept coming to her- the taste of his mother's stewed tomatoes, the funny look his son Alan used to get on his face when he'd been potty training, the feel and smell of Sarah when they had first been dating. Sarah had been a nice Jewish girl, so it had been months of blue balls and heavy petting before Isaac had gotten her to let him- and then she'd gotten pregnant with the first time, so they had had a hastily planned wedding. But the wedding night- hmmm Heather had surprised herself by winding her hand into her panties and getting herself off while thinking about how so very good it had been to fuck into Sarah- the imagined memory of her soft, high, panting breaths echoed in Heather's own.
Heather still didn't sleep, but she felt a little easier after that. Sarah was gone now- Isaac had buried her last year. It hurt to remember that imagined loss, but he'd come to accept it for the most part.
***
The next evening, after feeling half-Isaac-y all day long, she couldn't take it any longer. She told her friend Dana, whose car she'd borrowed, that she was just going for a drive. People did that- drove around just to drive, right? Dana'd looked at her a little doubtfully and made certain that she didn't have a fever, but she gave Heather the keys anyway- she owed Heather for the whole pelican thing, so she couldn't really refuse. Heather wasn't going to go anywhere specific, and she really wasn't going just to see if the house, the street, the neighborhood that Isaac lived in was real. She was not looking for Isaac- she just wanted to take a leisurely drive out to the Bronx just for a lark. She cringed to herself thinking about the little blue bird- it hadn't been a lark, had it? Heather didn't think that larks were blue- it didn't really matter- especially since she was pulling up in front of Isaac's house.
The house wasn't anything special- it looked almost exactly like every other house on the street, like every other house on the block, but Heather recognized the telltale section of the siding that had been replaced because little Ben had put one too many dents in it from bouncing his soccer ball against the house and the panels had cracked. The color was still just a little brighter on those replacement panels just below the kitchen window. And holy crap, the house was real. Heather sat there as the twilight faded into full dark and stared at the house.
A few minutes later, as she was trying to get up the nerve to get out of the car, cross the street, and knock on the door to the house that Isaac couldn't possibly actually live in, a couple of men in their forties walked up the block and sat on the two high-backed chairs on the front porch. They looked not a little bit like Isaac's sons Ben and Alan. There was no way that they were really them. Heather rolled down the window and let the night sounds in.
She could hear the neighborhood dogs barking and an occasional siren or car horn in the distance. She could also hear the two men on the porch of the house that didn't- couldn't possibly- belong to the imaginary Isaac- she could hear those two men talking and laughing. The sounds of them drifted in her window along with the smell of their cigars- warm and musky and familiar. Someone came out of the house- he was familiar too- like hearing her own voice on a recording was familiar. She let herself live in denial for a few minutes, trying in vain to place that voice as belonging to anyone other than imaginary Isaac. She failed.
After a while, the men grew quiet and Heather heard the screen door creak open and slam closed. Isaac was inside again. She watched Ben stroll to the edge of the porch and dump the ashtray over the railing where the metal garbage cans were. Then she watched the two men walk off the porch and back down the street. The lights inside the house went out one at a time until just the one upstairs window was lit. The street was quiet and the last light in the house went out.
Heather knew she should go- go and not even think about coming back. It was all just a crazy coincidence- it had to be. She should just go the hell home and try to sleep- get over this virus that was messing with her head- hope to wake up in the morning to find that this really was all a fevered dream. She knew that she should not stay there keeping vigil over a house she was afraid to go up to and a man who she sort of felt like/wished she still was, but she couldn't get her hands to release the parking break or to turn the key. She couldn't even let herself turn on the radio- afraid that she'd miss hearing something.
There were long minutes when she started being afraid to even blink and miss an exciting moment of watching the dark, quiet house on the dark, quiet street, in the dark, quiet neighborhood. Even in the darkness, more of Isaac's memories rolled through her head- that house next door used to be the Sterns- Ben had taken their Lydia out all though high school Isaac had been sure he and Jacob Stern were going to be sharing grandchildren, but then Lydia had married someone else- broke Bens heart until he' found his Nola. And that little park down the corner was where Sarah would take the boys on Saturday mornings. Alan had fallen off the slide when he was tree and broken his tiny little arm. Isaac had carried the boy all the way up twelve blocks to the hospital that day.
Her pensiveness was caught up short when something new prickled into her awareness- she didn't know what it was, but she knew she didn't like it. She took a deep breath to calm her nerves. The smell of the cigars, which had long faded from the cool night air, came back to her- an illusion, a sense memory just like the sooty-smoke smell-feel that hung in her nose most of the day. Then she saw the glow. It was faint and irregular and right next to imaginary Isaac's front porch. Heather unlocked the car door.
The garden hose was where she remembered Isaac remembered it being, and just as she expected, it was long enough to reach from the side of the house where the spigot was to the front of the house to water the rose bushes by the front steps. This time she didn't water the flowers.
Heather wasn't a firefighter, and she wasn't really sure what she was doing, but Isaac had been to that Fire Safety for Seniors thing last year and well, maybe she still mostly wanted this all to be her imagination, but at that moment she was praying that the advice to aim low and sweep the water spray back and forth over the fire was right and not just her imagination of what a firefighter would have told them. It took just a minute or two to put the fire out, but she stayed there another ten minutes soaking the pile of ash and garbage, as well as the side of the house and the pavement all around.
Eventually, her arms got way tired so she shut the hose off. There was a light on upstairs when she came back to the front of the house to gather in the hose. Heather kept walking down the driveway and across the street to Dana's car. Isaac could put away his own hose, now that he wasn't going to burn to death in the night. She made the car before he opened the front door and she watched him come warily out and look around. She could see when he spotted the ashes and the hose on the pavement. She sat silently in the dark as he cleaned up the hose, looked around some and went back into the house. She left after the upstairs light went out again.
There was a bit item in the paper two days later about how some unknown Good Samaritan had put out a garbage fire, but aside from that, Heather's life went right back to normal once she had driven home to her tiny apartment and gotten some sleep.
Chapter 2: Love Birds
Heather was in Central Park having lunch. She'd experimented with putting her own fresh thyme in her potato salad. It wasn't half bad. The day was fair and the air was sweet with the late springtime flowers. Knowing her life, it couldn't last long….
Two big black crows landed on the bench next to her and started cawing dark and heavy.
It's not as though she'd been able to forget the stuff with Isaac and the fire and the blue bird- she'd been having sex dreams about Sarah during the three weeks since all that had happened- so the crows freaked her out- but she was also kind of ready for it when it came. She put down her food, braced herself by gripping the edge of the slats on the bench and closed her eyes as the cawing grew darker and heavier, ringing through her skull and making her clenched jaw ache.
His hands were white-knuckled around the steering wheel even though there wasn't anywhere to turn it safely. David was sitting next to him and clutching at his shoulder. David was saying something that he-she, Jeff-Heather couldn't make out. He closed his eyes for the impact. There was something odd on the ground in front of him- like a mannequin's hand. Jeff blinked and shook his head, which hurt a lot. It wasn't a mannequin's hand- it was wearing David's ring- the thick silver one with the garnets that Jeff had given him on the beach that day. Jeff sat up, saw the rest of David- all torn up- his beautiful eyes dull and unblinking. He heaved up.
Heather managed to lean over and puke in the grass instead of on her shoes.
***
Jeff and David lived in a restored brownstone in the Village. Their big SUV- the one that Heather remembered from the crash- was parked in front. She hadn't let herself delay in finding Jeff and David the way she had with Isaac. Once she had stopped sobbing in grief over seeing David all dead and gory, she had called in sick to work for the afternoon- it wasn't even a lie, she had vomited up her lunch. Then she had gotten into a taxi and gone right to their house. Being right about the fire at Isaac's house was all she had needed to believe in whatever it was that was happening to her. Standing on the impossibly familiar front stoop to Jeff's house, Heather took a deep breath and knocked hard on the big front door.
When Jeff opened the door, he was laughingly calling something about ducks over his shoulder and Heather flashed a recall of a flirty-dirty conversation about duck cocks that Jeff and David had had the day of the crash- just a few minutes before they had gotten into the SUV…
"Can I help you with something?" Jeff asked her and she suspected that she had missed his first greeting while lost in memory.
"Er-" she began, suddenly realizing that she had no idea of how to explain what she needed to explain- especially to Jeff who was a skeptic. Maybe if she could get David to come to the door- he'd always been one to buy into spiritual mumbo-jumbo- Jeff tried to protect him from believing that kind of thing too much.
"You okay, miss?" Jeff asked. "Do you need help?"
"Oh- no. I- I'm… My name is Heather Clokey. I'm here to uh… to save you," she said, biting her lip at how ridiculous it sounded.
"Ah- well, we're on our way out, so if you have a pamphlet or something…"
"No- not, not your soul or something. I'm here to save your-" she paused and regrouped. She pointed out to the street. "Your Jeep- it's not safe. You need to stop driving it."
"You have an environmental petition to sign?" he asked sounding confused. And David came up behind him in the doorway. He looked so good- whole and healthy and-
"David," she chirped happily without thinking about it and David looked back at her puzzled for minute.
"Uh- hi," he answered slowly.
"How do you know his name?" Jeff asked suspiciously. He stepped sideways a little to put David behind him, hide him from Heather's view.
"I- uh, I can't-" She realized that she had set Jeff's protective streak off. She needed to win him over fast or the door would be shut. "Jeff, you have to listen to me. You can't drive the SUV. There's something wrong with the breaks-"
"Lady, Is that some kind of threat?"
"No. I- you don't want David to get hurt do you?" She tried, last-ditch, already sure that she'd screwed up too much to convince Jeff that she wasn't some crazy stalker.
"That's it! I'm calling the police if you don't get the hell off my property!" he threatened, but he didn't wait to make sure she would go before slamming the door shut.
Heather stood there a moment shocked and panicked because she could still feel how they were still going to die bloody and horrible. She had to push down a wave of nausea before she could get her brain working again. There was no way they were letting her inside, and there was little chance of convincing them of anything through the door, especially if the police really were on the way- and yeah- Jeff would call them without a second thought. She turned around and considered the Jeep.
When she had first moved into her own place, her mother had given her a whistle to wear when she had to go out at night, but it was her friend Dana who had told her that carrying around a pair of sewing scissors was a better option. As long as she had a little sewing kit and a half-stitched baby bib in her bag as well, the cops would never consider it the same as carrying a blade. It took a little work- the first tire had taken three tries to stab through the thick rubber- but she managed to puncture all four of them and be around the block before she even heard the siren.
Heather probably should have been worried because she had given Jeff her real name, which he had undoubtedly given to the police, but she couldn't make herself care. The moment she had broken through the fourth tire with the scissors, a contentedness came over her. She somehow knew that from that action, she had changed what was going to happen to Jeff and David- that they were both going to live. Later, when that calm had faded, she grew more and more surprised at how not under arrest she continued to be. Maybe they hadn't remembered her last name.
***
They had totally remembered her last name. This Heather learned when she opened her apartment door a week later expecting her Chinese food delivery and instead found Jeff.
"Hi," she said, kind of taken aback by the way the light was glinting off his dark hair.
"Hi," he replied. He was wearing a too-big smile that was similar to the one she knew she was sporting on her own face. His teeth were big and straight and Heather wanted to touch them- his mouth, his stubbly cheeks- so strangely familiar.
"Wow, you two okay?" David asked from his spot next to Jeff, and Heather wondered how she had missed that he was there, his hand clasped in Jeff's.
"Uh- what are you-" Heather stopped, suddenly unsure. "Are the police coming?" she asked.
"Oh. No, we uh- we decided not to press charges," Jeff answered.
"Not with the whole psychic, saving our lives thing you did," David added and Jeff gave him a small sideways scowl. Heather knew it was the word psychic that got that reaction. He didn't believe in any of that- it was too weird.
"Okay, so uh- do you want to come in?" she offered, stepping back to allow them to walk passed her.
"Uh- thanks," Jeff answered, finally speaking again and they stepped inside.
Over Chinese food, microwave popcorn and Jeff's favorite microbrew- Heather had bought it the day before because the part of her that still felt like Jeff had been craving it- over food and beer, she told them her story. As expected, Jeff didn't believe it until she had told him his mother's maiden name, his favorite color, the slightly edited story of his own first kiss (she left out the worst part of it- the Gummy Bears and the ear wax- the same way Jeff had when he'd told it to David), and which of the moles on David's body was Jeff's very favorite to lick and tickle. At that point, David had blushed so prettily that Heather had had to go dig out the Rocky Road before she tried to kiss him and messed it all up.
Over ice cream, they thanked her again and she had to ask, "So, how did it happen- or not happen?" meaning the crash that they didn't get into.
And Jeff had smirked. "You don't know?"
But David had hit him on the shoulder and explained, "The mechanic noticed something weird with the breaks when he was balancing the new tires- he said it was some kind of manufacturing defect and if we'd driven it like that, it was only a matter of time before we would have been in an accident."
"Which is why we had to come and talk to you again," Jeff added, "to find out how you knew."
"Because she's psychic," David answered. And Heather really couldn't contradict him.
***
A couple of days later, Jeff and David asked Heather to come out dancing with them. She had expected that once they had had their one thank you and let's explain meal together that Jeff and David would have just gone back to their regular lives and Heather would have gone back to her almost normal life (except for the part where she had the life's memories and feelings of two different men bumping around in her head and sometimes got visions of grizzly death that she felt compelled to prevent). Turned out that David, sweet thing that he was, felt as if the three of them had some kind of obligation to keep up the connection between them.
"How can we not want to be friends with the woman who saved both our lives?" he had said and Jeff had mutely nodded in agreement. So, Heather got the joyous torture of spending friendly bonding time with Jeff, who she could read like a book almost all the time- and he felt kind of squirrely around her most of the time- and with David, who she loved via Jeff's heart with an ache so deep that she hardly thought of Sarah anymore- but she could no more touch David than she could find a way to satisfy her latent urge to lay with Isaac's dead wife again. She wasn't even sleeping with anyone and her love life was a mess.
It was a gay nightclub. Heather had never been to one, but with Jeff in her head, not only was she comfortable with being there, but she knew her way around the place, had memories of other nights in the place, knew people's names before they were introduced to her. When David had twigged on that, he had gotten great glee in calling over everyone they knew in the club and having her tell them who they were and random stories about themselves- making it into a game David took to calling Stump the Psychic Chick. Heather had been mostly thinking of her visions (all two of them) alternately as a curse and a huge responsibility. Letting David show her off and watching him get such a big kick out of it was a welcome change. Plus he kept touching her- not touching her- not with intent, just touching her- a casual arm over her shoulder or pat in the cheek. It was sort of the way he had touched Jeff way back before they had become an item.
Heather was reveling in it until she picked up on how steamed Jeff was getting watching them. Then she remembered that David was bi and that that was one of the things that made Jeff a little crazy- he was totally secure that he was a better man for David than any other, but he didn't even know how to begin to compete with the women who occasionally caught David's eye. Thankfully, David had never done more than look since they had gotten serious. Women still made Jeff feel insecure anyway.
"You know, this had been a blast, but I'm beat. I'm going to get a cab," Heather had said, faking a yawn and stretching a little. "I'll see you guys later."
But David had caught up her wrist and then her hand in his saying, "It's raining- we'll drop you." And she'd been dragged out of the club, Jeff morosely following behind them and possibly muttering about "mumbo jumbo".
Somehow, even though she had meant to leave them alone, they all ended up back at the brownstone after the club. The rain had actually stopped and they walked the six block distance because that is how Jeff and David had come. "It makes drinking and driving really unlikely," Jeff had explained (even though she already knew that because she remembered that time when David had done it and hit the post and how worried Jeff had been). The Jeep wasn't in their driveway- there was a canary-yellow Mini Cooper sitting there in its place. Heather didn't comment, but she was relieved to see it, just the same.
Inside, Jeff seemed to lighten, and Heather knew that it was because David had this thing about the sanctity of their house- he waxed rhapsodic about building them a safe space. The Jeffness inside Heather knew that David would never betray the spirit of that safe space. He wouldn't have brought Heather into their house if he meant to screw around on Jeff with her. It made her head spin to feel jealous of herself like that, it really did.
On the sofa, Jeff leaned over so close that she could smell the malt-yeastiness of the beer he had had at the club on his breath and said, "You know it's not fair how you know so damned much about us and we know next to nothing about you." Heather knew it for the dare that it was, so over a few more beers, and then later, over that sparkly water that David likes but Jeff could never remember the right name for- over drinks, Heather told them her life's story. And considering the details- both intimate and embarrassing- that she knew about both men, she didn't censor her stories. By the end of the night, they knew more about Heather than her current best friend Dana did- hell, they knew more about her than her mother, her high school best friend Shaye, and Dana combined. She slept that night on their sofa bed because it was so, so late- David insisted.
Title: Little Birdies
Genre: Original Science Fiction (containing Slash, Femmeslash and Het elements)
Rating: R-ish (NC-17 eventually?)
Summary: How did she know? A little birdie told her.
Little Birdies
Chapter 1: Phoenix
It was a funny little blue bird that came up to Heather first. Not a Bluebird with the blue back and the rust-colored belly (which was one of the only birds she knew on sight), it was just a bird that was blue- Heather didn't know what type. She wasn't much of a bird person, but this bird got her attention- chirping at her and hopping closer to where she was kneeling on her apartment's little back patio. She was weeding her potted thyme plants (she didn't cook with herbs much, but she liked the idea of growing her own anyway). The blue bird came even closer, still chirping away and Heather bent down to get a better look at it. "You want to tell me something, little one?" she asked, awed that this wild thing was so unafraid of her. The birdsong got louder and kind of ring-y in her ears and she sat back, feeling nauseous, closing her eyes.
When she opened her eyes, she was surrounded by heat and flames. The air was sooty- the inside of her nose was suddenly coated with the thickness of smoke. She coughed and fell sideways, getting dizzy. She looked down her body to see that her legs were covered in fire. She tried to scream, but it just came out hoarse- barely there. The next moment she remembered that she wasn't a woman named Heather Clokey- she wasn't a woman at all. She was Isaac Goldstein, husband, father, retired carpenter. His life- all seventy-six years of it- flashed through his brain. His childhood in Teaneck, his army days, marrying Sarah and having the boys- it all seemed so fast- he hadn't done enough- he couldn't be dying yet- there was more to do-
Heather groaned and sat up gingerly. Her head ached and she could smell vomit and urine on herself. She peered down at her body- no flames, just filth and potting soil (she'd tipped the thyme somehow). The little bird was nowhere around- she must have scared it off. Inside, she showered off, keeping her eyes open as much as possible- that way she didn't see the flames as they cooked Isaac's skin. The smell of the soot was still there inside her nose even after she'd dried off.
She'd never had that vivid an imagination before- maybe it was a virus or something. She'd heard that sometimes illnesses could make your dreams more dramatic. That had to be it- she was getting sick. She ate some soup (which was all she could really stomach) and went to bed for the day.
***
After ten minutes of trying to sleep, her phone rang. It was her friend Dana from across the courtyard. Heather had met Dana the day she moved in- Dana had been helping her ex-boyfriend Jack move his things out of her apartment, and she was doing it with feeling (and at the top of her lungs). Heather had just pulled the smallest rental truck on Earth up if front of the building when Dana had decided to help Jack move his old CD collection down the three flights of stairs to the street via the window. The crash of several dozen plastic jewel cases hitting the hood of the truck made Heather jump and throw her hands up to protect her face. Fortunately, the windshield easily deflected the shards. Dana had come running down all apologies and concern. They had been friends ever since.
"Hey, chica, what say we order Chinese and watch that new show about the Goddess Athena where Zeus is a geneticist and accidentally clones her from the sweat of his brow? Sound good?" Dana chirped out at her.
"Yeah, no I- I'm not feeling great tonight. I'm just gonna crash. Can you tivo it and we'll watch it next week?"
"Aww- poor poppet. You need anything? I could bring you soup." Dana was an atrocious cook, but that didn't stop her from trying to cook or making Heather try her attempts.
"Oh, no I already had some. I'm just gonna sleep," Heather replied.
"Well, you should uh- you should eat something really garlicky and wrap a hot towel around your head to clear your sinuses," Dana advised as Heather giggled despite herself. "Oh and put some rubbing alcohol on the soles of your feet if you think you might have fever."
"Okay, bye Dana."
"I'll be over in the morning to check on you."
"I'm hanging up now."
"I'll make a mustard plaster just in case."
Click.
***
Hours later, Heather had not slept at all. She had just lain in the bed thinking about Isaac Goldstein- about his life. It was ridiculous, but she couldn't stop thinking about his life. She had made him up in her head, but he felt real and his memories felt real and they were so, well- uh- real. There were all these details about him that kept coming to her- the taste of his mother's stewed tomatoes, the funny look his son Alan used to get on his face when he'd been potty training, the feel and smell of Sarah when they had first been dating. Sarah had been a nice Jewish girl, so it had been months of blue balls and heavy petting before Isaac had gotten her to let him- and then she'd gotten pregnant with the first time, so they had had a hastily planned wedding. But the wedding night- hmmm Heather had surprised herself by winding her hand into her panties and getting herself off while thinking about how so very good it had been to fuck into Sarah- the imagined memory of her soft, high, panting breaths echoed in Heather's own.
Heather still didn't sleep, but she felt a little easier after that. Sarah was gone now- Isaac had buried her last year. It hurt to remember that imagined loss, but he'd come to accept it for the most part.
***
The next evening, after feeling half-Isaac-y all day long, she couldn't take it any longer. She told her friend Dana, whose car she'd borrowed, that she was just going for a drive. People did that- drove around just to drive, right? Dana'd looked at her a little doubtfully and made certain that she didn't have a fever, but she gave Heather the keys anyway- she owed Heather for the whole pelican thing, so she couldn't really refuse. Heather wasn't going to go anywhere specific, and she really wasn't going just to see if the house, the street, the neighborhood that Isaac lived in was real. She was not looking for Isaac- she just wanted to take a leisurely drive out to the Bronx just for a lark. She cringed to herself thinking about the little blue bird- it hadn't been a lark, had it? Heather didn't think that larks were blue- it didn't really matter- especially since she was pulling up in front of Isaac's house.
The house wasn't anything special- it looked almost exactly like every other house on the street, like every other house on the block, but Heather recognized the telltale section of the siding that had been replaced because little Ben had put one too many dents in it from bouncing his soccer ball against the house and the panels had cracked. The color was still just a little brighter on those replacement panels just below the kitchen window. And holy crap, the house was real. Heather sat there as the twilight faded into full dark and stared at the house.
A few minutes later, as she was trying to get up the nerve to get out of the car, cross the street, and knock on the door to the house that Isaac couldn't possibly actually live in, a couple of men in their forties walked up the block and sat on the two high-backed chairs on the front porch. They looked not a little bit like Isaac's sons Ben and Alan. There was no way that they were really them. Heather rolled down the window and let the night sounds in.
She could hear the neighborhood dogs barking and an occasional siren or car horn in the distance. She could also hear the two men on the porch of the house that didn't- couldn't possibly- belong to the imaginary Isaac- she could hear those two men talking and laughing. The sounds of them drifted in her window along with the smell of their cigars- warm and musky and familiar. Someone came out of the house- he was familiar too- like hearing her own voice on a recording was familiar. She let herself live in denial for a few minutes, trying in vain to place that voice as belonging to anyone other than imaginary Isaac. She failed.
After a while, the men grew quiet and Heather heard the screen door creak open and slam closed. Isaac was inside again. She watched Ben stroll to the edge of the porch and dump the ashtray over the railing where the metal garbage cans were. Then she watched the two men walk off the porch and back down the street. The lights inside the house went out one at a time until just the one upstairs window was lit. The street was quiet and the last light in the house went out.
Heather knew she should go- go and not even think about coming back. It was all just a crazy coincidence- it had to be. She should just go the hell home and try to sleep- get over this virus that was messing with her head- hope to wake up in the morning to find that this really was all a fevered dream. She knew that she should not stay there keeping vigil over a house she was afraid to go up to and a man who she sort of felt like/wished she still was, but she couldn't get her hands to release the parking break or to turn the key. She couldn't even let herself turn on the radio- afraid that she'd miss hearing something.
There were long minutes when she started being afraid to even blink and miss an exciting moment of watching the dark, quiet house on the dark, quiet street, in the dark, quiet neighborhood. Even in the darkness, more of Isaac's memories rolled through her head- that house next door used to be the Sterns- Ben had taken their Lydia out all though high school Isaac had been sure he and Jacob Stern were going to be sharing grandchildren, but then Lydia had married someone else- broke Bens heart until he' found his Nola. And that little park down the corner was where Sarah would take the boys on Saturday mornings. Alan had fallen off the slide when he was tree and broken his tiny little arm. Isaac had carried the boy all the way up twelve blocks to the hospital that day.
Her pensiveness was caught up short when something new prickled into her awareness- she didn't know what it was, but she knew she didn't like it. She took a deep breath to calm her nerves. The smell of the cigars, which had long faded from the cool night air, came back to her- an illusion, a sense memory just like the sooty-smoke smell-feel that hung in her nose most of the day. Then she saw the glow. It was faint and irregular and right next to imaginary Isaac's front porch. Heather unlocked the car door.
The garden hose was where she remembered Isaac remembered it being, and just as she expected, it was long enough to reach from the side of the house where the spigot was to the front of the house to water the rose bushes by the front steps. This time she didn't water the flowers.
Heather wasn't a firefighter, and she wasn't really sure what she was doing, but Isaac had been to that Fire Safety for Seniors thing last year and well, maybe she still mostly wanted this all to be her imagination, but at that moment she was praying that the advice to aim low and sweep the water spray back and forth over the fire was right and not just her imagination of what a firefighter would have told them. It took just a minute or two to put the fire out, but she stayed there another ten minutes soaking the pile of ash and garbage, as well as the side of the house and the pavement all around.
Eventually, her arms got way tired so she shut the hose off. There was a light on upstairs when she came back to the front of the house to gather in the hose. Heather kept walking down the driveway and across the street to Dana's car. Isaac could put away his own hose, now that he wasn't going to burn to death in the night. She made the car before he opened the front door and she watched him come warily out and look around. She could see when he spotted the ashes and the hose on the pavement. She sat silently in the dark as he cleaned up the hose, looked around some and went back into the house. She left after the upstairs light went out again.
There was a bit item in the paper two days later about how some unknown Good Samaritan had put out a garbage fire, but aside from that, Heather's life went right back to normal once she had driven home to her tiny apartment and gotten some sleep.
Chapter 2: Love Birds
Heather was in Central Park having lunch. She'd experimented with putting her own fresh thyme in her potato salad. It wasn't half bad. The day was fair and the air was sweet with the late springtime flowers. Knowing her life, it couldn't last long….
Two big black crows landed on the bench next to her and started cawing dark and heavy.
It's not as though she'd been able to forget the stuff with Isaac and the fire and the blue bird- she'd been having sex dreams about Sarah during the three weeks since all that had happened- so the crows freaked her out- but she was also kind of ready for it when it came. She put down her food, braced herself by gripping the edge of the slats on the bench and closed her eyes as the cawing grew darker and heavier, ringing through her skull and making her clenched jaw ache.
His hands were white-knuckled around the steering wheel even though there wasn't anywhere to turn it safely. David was sitting next to him and clutching at his shoulder. David was saying something that he-she, Jeff-Heather couldn't make out. He closed his eyes for the impact. There was something odd on the ground in front of him- like a mannequin's hand. Jeff blinked and shook his head, which hurt a lot. It wasn't a mannequin's hand- it was wearing David's ring- the thick silver one with the garnets that Jeff had given him on the beach that day. Jeff sat up, saw the rest of David- all torn up- his beautiful eyes dull and unblinking. He heaved up.
Heather managed to lean over and puke in the grass instead of on her shoes.
***
Jeff and David lived in a restored brownstone in the Village. Their big SUV- the one that Heather remembered from the crash- was parked in front. She hadn't let herself delay in finding Jeff and David the way she had with Isaac. Once she had stopped sobbing in grief over seeing David all dead and gory, she had called in sick to work for the afternoon- it wasn't even a lie, she had vomited up her lunch. Then she had gotten into a taxi and gone right to their house. Being right about the fire at Isaac's house was all she had needed to believe in whatever it was that was happening to her. Standing on the impossibly familiar front stoop to Jeff's house, Heather took a deep breath and knocked hard on the big front door.
When Jeff opened the door, he was laughingly calling something about ducks over his shoulder and Heather flashed a recall of a flirty-dirty conversation about duck cocks that Jeff and David had had the day of the crash- just a few minutes before they had gotten into the SUV…
"Can I help you with something?" Jeff asked her and she suspected that she had missed his first greeting while lost in memory.
"Er-" she began, suddenly realizing that she had no idea of how to explain what she needed to explain- especially to Jeff who was a skeptic. Maybe if she could get David to come to the door- he'd always been one to buy into spiritual mumbo-jumbo- Jeff tried to protect him from believing that kind of thing too much.
"You okay, miss?" Jeff asked. "Do you need help?"
"Oh- no. I- I'm… My name is Heather Clokey. I'm here to uh… to save you," she said, biting her lip at how ridiculous it sounded.
"Ah- well, we're on our way out, so if you have a pamphlet or something…"
"No- not, not your soul or something. I'm here to save your-" she paused and regrouped. She pointed out to the street. "Your Jeep- it's not safe. You need to stop driving it."
"You have an environmental petition to sign?" he asked sounding confused. And David came up behind him in the doorway. He looked so good- whole and healthy and-
"David," she chirped happily without thinking about it and David looked back at her puzzled for minute.
"Uh- hi," he answered slowly.
"How do you know his name?" Jeff asked suspiciously. He stepped sideways a little to put David behind him, hide him from Heather's view.
"I- uh, I can't-" She realized that she had set Jeff's protective streak off. She needed to win him over fast or the door would be shut. "Jeff, you have to listen to me. You can't drive the SUV. There's something wrong with the breaks-"
"Lady, Is that some kind of threat?"
"No. I- you don't want David to get hurt do you?" She tried, last-ditch, already sure that she'd screwed up too much to convince Jeff that she wasn't some crazy stalker.
"That's it! I'm calling the police if you don't get the hell off my property!" he threatened, but he didn't wait to make sure she would go before slamming the door shut.
Heather stood there a moment shocked and panicked because she could still feel how they were still going to die bloody and horrible. She had to push down a wave of nausea before she could get her brain working again. There was no way they were letting her inside, and there was little chance of convincing them of anything through the door, especially if the police really were on the way- and yeah- Jeff would call them without a second thought. She turned around and considered the Jeep.
When she had first moved into her own place, her mother had given her a whistle to wear when she had to go out at night, but it was her friend Dana who had told her that carrying around a pair of sewing scissors was a better option. As long as she had a little sewing kit and a half-stitched baby bib in her bag as well, the cops would never consider it the same as carrying a blade. It took a little work- the first tire had taken three tries to stab through the thick rubber- but she managed to puncture all four of them and be around the block before she even heard the siren.
Heather probably should have been worried because she had given Jeff her real name, which he had undoubtedly given to the police, but she couldn't make herself care. The moment she had broken through the fourth tire with the scissors, a contentedness came over her. She somehow knew that from that action, she had changed what was going to happen to Jeff and David- that they were both going to live. Later, when that calm had faded, she grew more and more surprised at how not under arrest she continued to be. Maybe they hadn't remembered her last name.
***
They had totally remembered her last name. This Heather learned when she opened her apartment door a week later expecting her Chinese food delivery and instead found Jeff.
"Hi," she said, kind of taken aback by the way the light was glinting off his dark hair.
"Hi," he replied. He was wearing a too-big smile that was similar to the one she knew she was sporting on her own face. His teeth were big and straight and Heather wanted to touch them- his mouth, his stubbly cheeks- so strangely familiar.
"Wow, you two okay?" David asked from his spot next to Jeff, and Heather wondered how she had missed that he was there, his hand clasped in Jeff's.
"Uh- what are you-" Heather stopped, suddenly unsure. "Are the police coming?" she asked.
"Oh. No, we uh- we decided not to press charges," Jeff answered.
"Not with the whole psychic, saving our lives thing you did," David added and Jeff gave him a small sideways scowl. Heather knew it was the word psychic that got that reaction. He didn't believe in any of that- it was too weird.
"Okay, so uh- do you want to come in?" she offered, stepping back to allow them to walk passed her.
"Uh- thanks," Jeff answered, finally speaking again and they stepped inside.
Over Chinese food, microwave popcorn and Jeff's favorite microbrew- Heather had bought it the day before because the part of her that still felt like Jeff had been craving it- over food and beer, she told them her story. As expected, Jeff didn't believe it until she had told him his mother's maiden name, his favorite color, the slightly edited story of his own first kiss (she left out the worst part of it- the Gummy Bears and the ear wax- the same way Jeff had when he'd told it to David), and which of the moles on David's body was Jeff's very favorite to lick and tickle. At that point, David had blushed so prettily that Heather had had to go dig out the Rocky Road before she tried to kiss him and messed it all up.
Over ice cream, they thanked her again and she had to ask, "So, how did it happen- or not happen?" meaning the crash that they didn't get into.
And Jeff had smirked. "You don't know?"
But David had hit him on the shoulder and explained, "The mechanic noticed something weird with the breaks when he was balancing the new tires- he said it was some kind of manufacturing defect and if we'd driven it like that, it was only a matter of time before we would have been in an accident."
"Which is why we had to come and talk to you again," Jeff added, "to find out how you knew."
"Because she's psychic," David answered. And Heather really couldn't contradict him.
***
A couple of days later, Jeff and David asked Heather to come out dancing with them. She had expected that once they had had their one thank you and let's explain meal together that Jeff and David would have just gone back to their regular lives and Heather would have gone back to her almost normal life (except for the part where she had the life's memories and feelings of two different men bumping around in her head and sometimes got visions of grizzly death that she felt compelled to prevent). Turned out that David, sweet thing that he was, felt as if the three of them had some kind of obligation to keep up the connection between them.
"How can we not want to be friends with the woman who saved both our lives?" he had said and Jeff had mutely nodded in agreement. So, Heather got the joyous torture of spending friendly bonding time with Jeff, who she could read like a book almost all the time- and he felt kind of squirrely around her most of the time- and with David, who she loved via Jeff's heart with an ache so deep that she hardly thought of Sarah anymore- but she could no more touch David than she could find a way to satisfy her latent urge to lay with Isaac's dead wife again. She wasn't even sleeping with anyone and her love life was a mess.
It was a gay nightclub. Heather had never been to one, but with Jeff in her head, not only was she comfortable with being there, but she knew her way around the place, had memories of other nights in the place, knew people's names before they were introduced to her. When David had twigged on that, he had gotten great glee in calling over everyone they knew in the club and having her tell them who they were and random stories about themselves- making it into a game David took to calling Stump the Psychic Chick. Heather had been mostly thinking of her visions (all two of them) alternately as a curse and a huge responsibility. Letting David show her off and watching him get such a big kick out of it was a welcome change. Plus he kept touching her- not touching her- not with intent, just touching her- a casual arm over her shoulder or pat in the cheek. It was sort of the way he had touched Jeff way back before they had become an item.
Heather was reveling in it until she picked up on how steamed Jeff was getting watching them. Then she remembered that David was bi and that that was one of the things that made Jeff a little crazy- he was totally secure that he was a better man for David than any other, but he didn't even know how to begin to compete with the women who occasionally caught David's eye. Thankfully, David had never done more than look since they had gotten serious. Women still made Jeff feel insecure anyway.
"You know, this had been a blast, but I'm beat. I'm going to get a cab," Heather had said, faking a yawn and stretching a little. "I'll see you guys later."
But David had caught up her wrist and then her hand in his saying, "It's raining- we'll drop you." And she'd been dragged out of the club, Jeff morosely following behind them and possibly muttering about "mumbo jumbo".
Somehow, even though she had meant to leave them alone, they all ended up back at the brownstone after the club. The rain had actually stopped and they walked the six block distance because that is how Jeff and David had come. "It makes drinking and driving really unlikely," Jeff had explained (even though she already knew that because she remembered that time when David had done it and hit the post and how worried Jeff had been). The Jeep wasn't in their driveway- there was a canary-yellow Mini Cooper sitting there in its place. Heather didn't comment, but she was relieved to see it, just the same.
Inside, Jeff seemed to lighten, and Heather knew that it was because David had this thing about the sanctity of their house- he waxed rhapsodic about building them a safe space. The Jeffness inside Heather knew that David would never betray the spirit of that safe space. He wouldn't have brought Heather into their house if he meant to screw around on Jeff with her. It made her head spin to feel jealous of herself like that, it really did.
On the sofa, Jeff leaned over so close that she could smell the malt-yeastiness of the beer he had had at the club on his breath and said, "You know it's not fair how you know so damned much about us and we know next to nothing about you." Heather knew it for the dare that it was, so over a few more beers, and then later, over that sparkly water that David likes but Jeff could never remember the right name for- over drinks, Heather told them her life's story. And considering the details- both intimate and embarrassing- that she knew about both men, she didn't censor her stories. By the end of the night, they knew more about Heather than her current best friend Dana did- hell, they knew more about her than her mother, her high school best friend Shaye, and Dana combined. She slept that night on their sofa bed because it was so, so late- David insisted.