Book of Night(31)

“Okay,” Charlie agreed, and took a long sip of her Frappuccino. This was the one piece of advice, no matter how wise, she knew she was not going to follow.

“Good, good.” Ms. Presto stood up. “I will wait for you in the Macy’s. I need to return those sneakers.”

“What am I going to be doing?” Charlie asked, already knowing she was going to hate the answer.

“You’re going to find the people you stole from and put their things back.” Ms. Presto gave her that rabbit-out-of-the-hat smile of hers and sauntered off, bag in hand, looking a lot heavier than it had at the beginning of their trip.

An hour later, Charlie had returned the keys and the wallet and had given up looking for anyone else. Rand was waiting for her outside Macy’s.

“I heard you were good,” he said when she got in. “Really good.”

“Yeah?” she asked.

He laughed. “Don’t let it go to your head, kid.” But he took her to the hamburger place where you could eat as many peanuts as you wanted and let her order whatever, so she knew Ms. Presto had given her high marks.

Charlie couldn’t help being pleased at the idea that she had a natural talent for pickpocketing, but what she loved best was burglary.

She loved being in spaces that belonged to other people. Walking across their carpets. Trying on their lives the way you could try on their clothes.

And it was easy, mostly. People in big, expensive houses had lots of doors, and most of the time she could find one that was open. Sometimes there was a key under the mat. Failing that, an unlatched window. She’d shimmy inside when there were no cars around. Very few people had alarm systems, and even fewer bothered to turn them on.

When Rand sent her into houses, he was usually looking for something specific. A huge sapphire ring. Antique napkin holders shaped like tiny filigree cobwebs. A signed first edition of The Maltese Falcon rumored to go for upward of a hundred grand. He fancied himself one of those heroic criminals in movies, the ones who never lowered themselves to stealing televisions.

But sometimes Charlie would bike across town and break into houses on her own.

When she was little, her dad had worked for a company that installed pools and hot tubs. Sometimes he’d bring her with him on those construction projects and she’d stare at the giant houses with their manicured lawns and their glistening pools, the bright blue of tropical seas in calendars.

Nowadays, when their father saw Posey and Charlie, it was to take them out for ice cream and act as though everything was fine, even though he was married again, his new wife was pregnant, and she clearly didn’t want anything to do with two daughters from his first marriage.

And her father wanted his smiling, happy daughters. Wanted roses in their cheeks and for them to giggle and chorus after a while, crocodile to his see you later, alligator, the way they had when they were little and certain they would always be loved. They had to play along, or he would get stiff and mean. If they were fussy or cranky, he’d ignore them completely.

So when Charlie tried to complain about Travis or tell her father any of her worries or fears, he got annoyed and transferred his attention to her sister. And if Posey chimed in, he took them both straight home.

Their father’s affection was entirely conditional, and he made no secret of it.

Those houses he’d brought her to way back when, though? Those were the houses she broke into when she was alone.

Charlie’d look through their refrigerators, making sandwiches out of whatever was there. Tuna and pickle. Kimchi and leftover pork loin. Tofu and Brie. She’d try on the clothes from their closets, lie down in their beds, and sometimes, when she was sure the people who lived there were away on vacations, she’d swim in those crystalline pools her father built, staring up at the clouds.

She’d pretend that those families were her families. That soon someone would call her inside to do her homework, scold her for not wearing sunscreen and dripping on the carpet.

It was in one of those places she watched a television program that had a gloamist on as a guest. She was explaining about shadow magic, with three models to show off her alterations. One had the shadow of a bird. The second shadow had a heart cut out of its chest. And the third wore a crown, the points rising high off the shadowed head.

When the host asked about other uses for magic, the gloom laughed. “Isn’t this enough?”

“Why were you hidden from the world for so long?” the man on the television asked.

Charlie, stolen ice cream on her lap, soup spoon in her hand, listened as the woman explained how early gloamists weren’t aware of one another. Each one discovered the discipline anew and lost those discoveries with their deaths. A few letters existed as proof that some found one another, and stray telegrams were exchanged in the 1940s. But things didn’t truly change until the BBSs of the 1980s. Much of the contemporary practice of gloaming was developed on message boards and locked forums, when finally people all over the world with quickened shadows realized they weren’t alone.

Charlie had stared at the model whose shadow had a heart-shaped hole in the chest. She wondered how it felt to be him.

When she left those houses she broke into alone, she didn’t take anything at all.





10

FULL-TILT BOOGIE




Looking at the dead man on the floor of Rapture, Charlie knew she had to do something, but the shock of violence rooted her in place.