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His mother always told him to listen for the banshee's cry to know when death was about to make a visit.
But he hadn't heard the banshee. There hadn't been a sign, just fucking silence from the spirit world. The only cry he'd heard was Lizzie's: a cry of grief that their daughter was gone, mingled with all the hate she felt for him.
She blamed him. What was new? He blamed himself. The same story.
He'd gone mad somewhere along the way. He lived with one foot in the world and one in another place, a world of the mind where all the nightmares lived.
He threw the empty bottle in the bonfire and watched it rush upward and outward into the dark, with heat that made his face run like rain.
He grabbed the next bottle and popped the cork.
He saw her face. Her fucking face. So fucking perfect and sweet, her brown eyes innocent and trusting. She just wanted to play, to be tucked in with her dolls, to splash in the creek with bare feet and dance in the sunshine and chase the dogs, to run and hug him when he came home and be swept up and told she was loved. She just wanted to live.
He'd promised to build a snowman for her. He'd promised Ruby to build a snowman, and he'd promised Lizzie to save their daughter, and here he was with a head full of gin and whiskey and Ruby was dead in the ground.
Why the fuck was she dead?
He got up. Kicked the stump he'd been sitting on. Kicked it again and again. Shouted incoherently at it. Ruby was dead and he was still alive, and life was a fucking joke.
He wanted to hug her. Jesus, fuck, he wanted to hug her. He needed to get down on his knees and beg her to forgive him for being a terrible father, for leaving her behind, for the ambition and the curse that lived side by side in him, like twin demons keeping him chained to destruction. It was his fault she was dead, and she hadn't asked to have him as a father. All she'd wanted was to live. To live. To be here and be in love with the world the way Tommy couldn't be.
He thought of her smile, still so like a baby—he remembered her as a baby, a little bundle of sweetness yawning in his arm, looking up at him with eyes like candles glowing in the dark. He thought of her arms around his neck, purely happy, purely glad to see him and wanting his smile, the only honest thing left in his life. The only one who loved him for being alive and being with her, not just for the money and the business and the fucking houses.
He sat down in the muddy grass and drank and drank until he couldn't see straight. It hurt less now because he was in a dark tunnel and couldn't feel much, but whatever he did still feel was still about Ruby.
She was a good girl. She was eight years old. She was his daughter, and he didn't want her to be dead.
He laid down on his back and gazed at blurry stars.
It was strange to him that he wasn't dead.
Wasn't it?
He lay awhile and listened, straining, hoping like a little boy that if he wished hard enough, out here in the damp dark at the witching hour, with the fire blazing and the wilds beyond, he would hear the banshee scream for him.