Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(24)

“That’s not fair.” Except, it was, at least in part. “Or true.” That, too. “Those things belong to us. And you’re the one who found the patterns for the kimono online, remember? You’re the one who bought fabric and snuck her sewing machine to Jovan’s studio to sew them for us.”

I could hear her swallow. “But I don’t call relatives we might have in Japan—if they even exist—real family, like you do. As if Mama and I are fake to you.”

“That’s not how I mean that,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean to hurt her. Or you. I just meant, maybe there I would be someone. Someone real, not just a poor-man’s version of the two of you.”

Lina brought her thumb to her mouth and chewed furiously at it. “Please, please never say that to me again. There’s no world in which I’m whatever it is you think I am. Prettier, easier to love, somehow better than you. I can’t stand knowing that you think that. That’s—that’s such bullshit, Riss.”

She spat the word out like it hurt, like she’d been holding tacks on her tongue. I knew how much she hated swearing, and somehow that one word in the whole un-Malina-like tirade comforted me more than anything else she’d said. I stayed silent but I tightened my arm around her waist. In turn, she curled her fingers around my wrist, her ragged cuticles scratchy against my skin. Then she snapped my hair band for me once, as if she knew I needed it. A warm breeze stole over both of us through the cracked-open window, bringing with it the smell of night-blooming jasmine and the sea.

“Are you going to say something?” she whispered.

“It’s just, I can’t feel anything properly. Other than that one feeling. I haven’t even cried since we got here.”

“That’s not all you feel,” Lina murmured. “That’s just the top.” She shifted against me, reaching up to knot my fingers with hers. “Do you want me to sing it for you? It would be better with the violin, but I can do it if I use all three.”

I hesitated. Malina’s polyphonic songs could be overwhelming when she didn’t hold back, not just echoing emotions but stealing inside you through the cracks—and whatever lurked below my frozen surface, the trapped minnows and monsters underneath, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to meet it face-to-face.

But the mother who had nibbled on our cheeks—the mother who’d looked at me like Queen Jevrosima at her beloved son—she deserved my tears.

“Go ahead,” I said.

She sang softly, just loud enough for me to hear, the hum of the fundamental joined by one overtone and then the other. At first the song was peaceful, gentle dips and falls like seawater rippling under a night sky scattered with dim stars, but then I caught the refrain, and it was us—two girls adrift on a raft big enough for three, an endless sea lapping against the edges. We were together, but so alone, far from any welcoming shore. And the space between us, mother-shaped, ached with every note that formed its contours.

We’d had a mother, wrapped in barbed wire more often than not, but still alive and ours.

And now we didn’t. Whatever was happening to her, she was gone. We had only each other, and it wasn’t nearly enough.

I felt my tears before I even knew I was crying, sliding silent but scalding down my cheeks. I wept into Malina’s hair until my body quaked, my ribs aching with the sobs I swallowed. I’d thought nothing could be worse than when Mama’s eyes chilled, or when she flamed into sudden rage like a phoenix, but I’d been wrong. This was worse, so much worse—especially when I remembered imagining her dead a thousand times over, after she slapped me, ignored me, or gutted me with a single word.

And worse yet when I acknowledged the faintest tinge of relief beneath it all.

“I saw it happen, Lina,” I whispered through the tears. “I saw it—I saw her dying. I can’t . . . it keeps playing in my head, on loop. I can’t think about anything else.” I could hear her shuddering breath jostle between the notes of the melody. “And sometimes . . . sometimes I wanted her to die. Do you think . . . ?”

“No,” she said firmly, breaking off the song. “Of course you thought about it, sometimes. So did I. So do kids whose mothers don’t ignore them for two weeks because they accidentally put salt instead of sugar in the meringue. It doesn’t mean we wished her dead, you know?”

WE BOTH GREW quiet after that. I turned away from Malina, my spine notching into hers like clockwork gears. Drained of everything, I fell asleep in a lurching, heavy drop, as if I’d been heaved into water with stones tied to my feet.

And then the bed was gone and I was cold, colder than I’d ever been inside a dream. The night sky above me was both black and bright, feathered with a vast, milky tapestry of stars and a sickle moon. I stood on a sweeping mountain plateau, circled by peaks looming darker than the night above. Frosted pines surrounded the clearing, and at its very center, a naked woman knelt with her face turned up to the sky.

I followed the spill of moonlight on her dark hair, so long it swept over her shoulders and covered her breasts, its ends brushing the thick, curved muscle of her thighs. I could see the wisps of breath pluming from her flared nostrils; she was so much warmer than the air that the snow had melted beneath her folded legs, all the way down to the brittle, dead grass and earth beneath. Even from where I stood, I thought I could smell her, something sweet and stirring that pierced me to my core.