Free Four and Twenty Blackbirds by Cherie Priest Page B

"She all right?" he asked quietly, but Lulu heard him.
    "Would she have called you back from Atlanta if she was all right?" she spat, not budging from her prone position except to stuff a pillow up under her head. "And now this little thing thinks she can, she thinks, she wants to know about Pine Breeze, if you can believe that. . . ."
    My uncle pulled me outside the doorway and leaned close. He peeked around the corner back at Lulu, and he lowered his voice. "You got plans with friends or anything? I mean, are you going off someplace tonight?"
    "Not sure. Maybe I will, and maybe I won't."
    He ignored my attitude and moved to his next query. "How bad do you want to know about Pine Breeze?"
    No sense in lying. I dropped the nonchalance. "Pretty bad."
    "Okay. Stick around. But give me a minute here. Let me get her to sleep." He nudged me farther down the hall and stepped into their bedroom, closing the door behind himself.
    I stood there, baffled. It had occurred to me before that I might pump Dave for clues, but he always allied himself with Lulu, pleading ignorance or parental alliance. I wandered into the living room and flipped the television on, wondering if he was actually going to make good or if he'd only been trying to get rid of me.
    Dave was a great guy, but it was a rare, rare day that he'd go against Lulu's wishes.
    After an hour or two I heard the bedroom door open and close softly. Then boxes were shifting across the hall in the studio. Papers were shuffled. Boxes were replaced and the studio door swung shut.
    Dave tiptoed past the bedroom door and joined me on the couch. He was holding an album I'd never seen before. He opened it across his left knee and my right one. Despite the expanse of the living room, the length of the hallway, and a shut door separating us from Lulu, my uncle's voice barely crested a conspiring whisper.
    "Pine Breeze," he began, "has been closed since you were about six weeks old. That's why you've never heard anything about it. Your mother was sent there before anyone knew she was pregnant with you. The facilities weren't any good—it was a home for messed-up teenagers, it wasn't a hospital—and she bled to death before they had time to spank you into breathing on your own. That's why they're closed. They were supported by private donations and government funding, but when your mother's story got out it all got pulled. No one wanted to be talked about.
    "Lulu and I got thinking about it once and I decided to go poking around. It's out towards Red Bank, on the north side of the river, and I swear they just abandoned it. I don't think they packed up a single thing except maybe some of the furniture. They just left it."
    Dave flipped the first page of the album, to a photograph of an enormous brick building covered with ivy. The windows were cracked and dirty, and random bricks had fallen out of the masonry down to the untrimmed shrubbery. At the bottom left corner of the photo Lulu was staring into a window with her nose pressed flat against it, her hands against the pane to shield away the glare.
    I ran my fingers lightly across the picture's edges. "Is this it, then? Is this Pine Breeze?"
    "Part of it. The complex was scattered all over that whole hill. There's about eight or nine buildings altogether, I guess. We thought this one was the main administrative office."
    "They needed eight or nine buildings to house crazy teenagers?"
    "It wasn't always an adolescent ward. The first parts were built around the turn of the century, for a health spa or something. I'm not sure what. But after that closed, it was bought out by someone else, who turned it into something else and added a new section or two . . . and so forth. By the time your mother was there they only used a couple of the buildings anymore. The rest of them were shut up, I guess, but I've always been under the impression that there weren't more than fifteen or twenty kids left there when it closed."
    He turned the page