Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [16]
“Are you listening, Niki?” she’d asked, “The sky is falling.”
Niki had listened, had heard nothing but the storm and a garbage can rattling noisily somewhere behind the house.
“No, Mother. It’s just a storm. It’s only rain and wind.”
“Yes,” her mother had replied. “Of course, Niki.”
Then the cigarette had glowed more intensely in the darkness, but she hadn’t heard her mother exhale over the roar and wail of the storm.
“When I was a girl,” her mother had said, “when I was only a little older than you, Niki, I saw the sky fall down to earth. I saw the stars fall down and burn the world. I saw children—”
And then lightning had flashed so bright and violent and her mother had seemed to wither in the electric white glare, hardly alive in her flannel housecoat and the lines on her face drawn like wounds. Off towards the river, the thunder had rumbled contentedly to itself, proud, throaty sound. And Niki had realized how tightly her mother was squeezing her leg through the covers.
“It’s okay, Mother,” Niki had whispered, had tried to sound like she believed what she was saying, but for the first time she could remember she’d been frightened of the night and one of the delta storms.
Her mother had said nothing else, had not moved from where she sat at the foot of the bed, and Niki had eventually drifted back into uneasy dreams, sleep so shallow that the sound of the thunder and the rain had come right through. The next morning, her mother had said nothing, had never brought it up, and Niki had known better. But afterwards, on very stormy nights, she’d lain awake, and sometimes she’d heard her mother moving around in the kitchen, restless sounds, or the scuff of her slippers on the hallway floor outside her door.
And years later, not long before she’d finally dropped out of high school, she’d heard a song by R.E.M. on the radio, “Fall On Me,” had bought the album even though she’d never particularly liked the band, and played that one track over and over again, thinking of her mother and that night and the storm. By that time, she’d read and seen enough to guess her mother’s nightmares, had understood enough of jellied gasoline and mortars and hauntings to glimpse the bright edges of that insomnia. Finally, maybe twenty or thirty times through the song, picking the lyrics from the lush and tangled weave of voice and music, she’d put the record away and never listened to it again.
If New Orleans had taught Niki Ky nothing else, it had taught her the respect due to ghosts, proper respect for pain so deep it transcended flesh and blood, and scarred time.
If her father had bad dreams, they’d never shown.
3.
Niki sat alone in the service station’s lobby, part office, part convenience store, sat pinned beneath fluorescence glaring like noon sunshine on a hangover. The Thomas Pynchon novel she’d picked up at a secondhand bookstore before leaving Myrtle Beach lay open across her lap, its spine broken by the vicious way she tended to bend paperbacks double while she read. But she’d hardly glanced at the pages once in the last half hour, not since the tow truck had come back and deposited the Vega at one edge of the Texaco’s wide, empty parking lot.
The driver was a heavyset black man named Milo, his hair beginning to gray at the temples and his name stitched blue on his shirt. Milo had checked under the hood, shaken his head and wiped his hands with the same oily rag he’d used to clean the dipstick. His prognosis hadn’t been any better than Wendel Sayer’s, and worse, he’d brought up money.
“Exactly how much?” she’d asked cautiously, and Milo had shrugged and slammed the hood shut.
“Now, that all depends on whether you just got yourself a blown gasket or a cracked cylinder head, or if maybe it’s the engine block that’s cracked. If it’s just the head, we’re talkin’ five, maybe six hundred, but, if it’s the block, well—”
“Whoa,” Niki had said, one hand up to stop him. “Thanks, but I really don’t