Maura still had the form as she came back to her place. “Well, what do you have to say for yourself?” She looked prim and disapproving, her face not giving anything away. I still didn’t have a firm read on her. Was she going to turn me in? “As your Ops. Supervisor,” she went on, “this is the part where I’m supposed to bust your balls.”
I blushed. “There’s no such position at this branch,” I said. I was pretty sure Maura was a Customer Care Specialist, level two, just like me.
Maura showed me the page, a blank loan application sheet where she’d printed official complaint form at the top and the name lucien swenson underneath with details of my transgressions. She smiled and then dropped the form into the shredder. There were no customers in the lobby. She set one hand on her hip, shaking her head at the departing customer. “Good luck on your quest,” she said, “Frodo Douchebaggins.”
After that, we were tight. “So you’re a student at Northern? What are you studying?” she asked during another lull between customers. I liked the sound of her voice, too, a little husky for a woman, tinged with smoke.
“Life,” I said. If that sounds like a smug answer, I was twenty. A dumb punk. I already knew then that I wasn’t cut out for biology, though I had doggedly enrolled in calculus and anatomy that semester. I wanted to study English, but my dad ruled it out. It was pre-med or econ like him, so I could grow up and work for a bank, groom myself for management. That was my dad’s deal for me. He would pay my tuition so long as I stuck to marketable majors. My job at the bank covered most everything else.
“Life studies must be one of the liberal arts,” she said. “Something in the humanities?”
“It sure as hell isn’t a science.”
Maura just laughed. “No,” she said, “it’s more like a poem written by a drunkard, down in the ditch looking up at the stars.”
“Something like that,” I said, recognizing the Oscar Wilde reference.
I didn’t know many people in Aurora Bay. My cousin in Duluth had moved to Sioux Falls and the rest of my family lived in Chicago. After the move I lost touch with friends from high school, most of whom had gone on to better things at the University of Chicago or Loyola. Northern had proved to be one of those suitcase campuses, a ghost town on the weekends, and I’d only made a few friends. Where Maura was concerned, I was doomed from the start.
And from the start, I idealized her. One time Harry Larkin held the monthly staff meeting at night to go over changes in procedures and projected growth in branch checking accounts along with new marketing pitches. Maura brought her daughter, Sarah, to the meeting, then just a baby. Baby Sarah had thistledown hair and the huge round eyes of an anime character, and she delighted the loan supervisor and other female tellers with her cooing charms, though Harry had been clearly displeased by the distraction. He was introducing an important new marketing blitz—No monthly fees! Automatic overdraft protection!—and tellers would now be expected to make cold calls during lulls in the day. I sucked at sales, so I ignored much of Harry’s instructions and instead made faces at the baby, who had the trilling laugh of a bird.
After the meeting ended and everyone else skedaddled, another teller named Dorothy—a stout, matronly woman—and I were handling final closing procedures. Dorothy was the only female I’ve ever met with a mullet, which somehow suited her personality and her square face. She was already a grandmother at the age of thirty-seven.
Maura had not left with the others because baby Sarah needed to be fed and so she had discreetly rolled her chair over to one corner by the branch manager’s desk to unbutton her blouse. She’d positioned the chair so it was facing away from us, so from behind the teller’s station I could just see the crown of her head, see how she cupped the baby by the back of her head, both of them bathed in the soft green glow of the branch manager’s lamp. In the quiet after closing, I could hear the baby feeding. They were held by the light, mother and child. I could see how much Maura loved her baby.
Maura, do you know what I felt most in that moment, what I still feel? I wanted to protect you. Even before I knew you were in trouble. I wanted you and Sarah to stay in the warm light and not have to step outside into the icy, outer darkness. I wanted to be the one who kept you safe. I didn’t know how much pain this would mean for both of us, but even if I had known, I think I would have still done the same.
I hadn’t realized I was staring until Dorothy nudged me. “She’s sweet on you,” she said.
“I’m good with babies,” I said. But of course, she hadn’t meant the baby and I knew that.
Dorothy gave me her cut-the-bullshit look. “Don’t get any ideas,” she said, patting me on my shoulder.
I woke, not unlike Maura’s man down in the ditch, but I wasn’t looking up at any stars. Instead, I woke to a nightmare. I woke when Kaiser stuck his icy muzzle right into the soft of my neck and let out a snort. The pain softly thrummed behind my temples, but I could see again. I climbed unsteadily to my feet. I woke to the rage.
I stood up in the ringing din, in the falling snow. The reek and scream where ravens dark as bruises blotted the pines. Something must have torn up inside their heads. All these years later, I can still feel it inside me. A rip in time. Whatever tissue that had penned the boiling shadows inside their brains at bay disintegrated. Or, when I stood I snapped a branch, sharp as the report of a rifle.
All at once they lifted from the trees, flinging their bodies from the branches, screeching, rising into the sky and then diving with talons outstretched, one whisking right past my head. Still groggy with the remains of a migraine, I didn’t even duck. At first I thought they were attacking me. I was about to be the first man in America to die by being pecked to death by an unkindness of ravens, or carried off like the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. The air whirred around me, a maelstrom of beak and talon. Then I saw one impale its beak into the chest of another. Those two plummeted to the ground, locked in their fatal embrace. I realized what was happening. They were killing each other, killing their own kind. Mothers and brothers and friends. Hundreds battling. Whirling black feathers and bones cracking. The thump and thwack of bodies smashing into the icy ground.
Kaiser and I stood in the vortex, stunned by their savagery, the birds’ minds bleeding red, all pulsing shadows. The birds did not see us. They shuddered at each impact. They flew all around us, but we were not touched. What a terrifying thing a nightmare is when you stand in the midst of it.
How long did it last? How long? Time elongated.
When the battle was done, the shadow lifted, ascending like a breath, one last gasp before perdition. Around us lay the dead, dozens bleeding out in the snow. The Enemy gone. It had taken all morning for so many ravens to fill up the pines on the ridge, but they died in a few minutes.
The survivors, most of the birds, winged off north again, climbing vanishing ladders of snow into the clouds. Black feathers clotted the ice, pinkish streaks of blood and bird brain. We stood in the middle of it, untouched. A great silence spread and deepened. The pain in my mind quieted.