Girl One(15)

“No,” I said. “No, no, no, I’m fine, it’s a dream—” Wanda must’ve heard the scream: she must be coming. “Please. It’s okay.”

I backed away. Emily was half crawling out of bed now, knocking over the glasses, which rolled wildly, rattling. One shattered and Emily’s foot came down on the scoop of broken glass, the edge sliding right into her heel. She didn’t even stop—her footprints were stamped in red. “They hurt you,” she said. “They hurt you. You’re going to die—”

I looked down at myself, ran my hands over my body. My palms came away clean.

Emily wrapped her hands around my throat now, squeezing, squeezing. I reached up to pull her hands away and couldn’t find any purchase, couldn’t pry her fingers off. My breath was stuck somewhere in my breastbone and I thought, very distinctly and with a surprising calm: What if I die right now? Right behind that: I’ll never get to see my mother again.

I looked into Emily’s eyes. Greenish, stippled with a murky gold, darkening near the iris. Those dark pits of her pupils. How often did I look into someone else’s eyes this closely or this intently? As I made eye contact with Emily, her pupils dilated, slightly but abruptly, a welling blackness. Dizziness swept over me, and I wondered if I was losing consciousness. Her pupils were the only thing I could see.

“Let go of me,” I managed, a raw-edged whisper. “Let go now.”

Emily’s eyelid twitched slightly. She kept looking at me, unblinking, and then—then—a fucking miracle. She let go, and it felt like something many-fingered unraveling from around my throat, letting me breathe again. She swayed there, her arms at her side, like she didn’t know what to do with herself.

I took a painful breath, coughing. The air rushed back, wild and sweet.

“Oh, Josephine, you’re lost,” Emily said. The attic shrank until it enclosed the two of us, holding us there. “She’s lost too. Nobody can find her and you’re scared, you’re nothing without her.” I couldn’t speak. “But it’s all right,” Emily went on, and smiled. “It really is. He’ll help you find your mother. He’ll take you to her. He will.”

“Who?” I asked, a hoarse whisper.

“Him,” she said. “The one who looks out for you.”





6

“She’s sleeping now,” Wanda said, returning from the attic, giving me a limp smile.

I was waiting downstairs. Emily had left a long pink scrape circling my throat like a necklace. The sweat had dried on my skin and I was chilly, pacing to keep warm.

“Emily scared you good, huh? You should count yourself lucky she talked at all.”

“What’s wrong with her?” Sick didn’t explain what I’d seen in that attic. Sick was a simple term standing in for something bigger, the way I felt whenever someone described me as fatherless.

“Oh, you’ve seen what’s wrong with her,” Wanda said. “It’s like she has trouble staying here.” She tapped at the side of her head. “Or here.” A vigorous thump on her breastbone. “When Tami died, Emily didn’t have anybody else. I let her come stay with me here. She’s just been sleeping more and more. Even when she’s awake, she’s not here. When your mother got in touch, I thought maybe she’d know how to help. I do my best, but—” She stopped.

“But?”

Wanda drew closer, even though we were alone. “One week, she was going on and on about the people coming through the glass. Jibber jabber. They have glass in their hair. But there was a bad storm that next weekend and a car ran the red light down near Cove Circle—” She gestured, as if I were familiar with the area. “Ugly pileup. Two people died. Went right through the windshield. I saw the photo in the paper, glass everywhere on the road.”

I was on edge in a way that wasn’t exactly unpleasant. It reminded me of the time my mother had taken me swimming in the lake and I’d ventured past the drop-off as I dog-paddled, my toes searching for land and finding only the deep, sudden cold. A thrill, a terror. “You—what? Think she was predicting the future?”

Wanda stiffened and stepped back, physically distancing herself from what she’d just said. “Emily, she says all sorts of things. You’ve heard her. Most of it is just noise. I’ve heard her talk about things that happened when she was a tiny girl. She talks about her mama all the time, and Lord knows that’s all in the past now.”

But it isn’t, I wanted to say. It didn’t matter if her mother was dead, vanished, estranged—she was there in Emily’s past, her future, her present. Always.

“Well,” Wanda said. “I should…” She gestured vaguely at the house around her, a signal that I understood meant, Get the hell out already.

“Right. Yeah. I’ll get going,” I said.

The Chevy was waiting for me against the curb. The alternator had been making an ominous, intermittent grinding noise for the last hundred miles; the air-conditioning had given out, so I’d been forced to roll down the only two windows that would still function. I thought about climbing back into the Chevy, heading out—to where? Back home to Chicago, already giving up on my mother, abandoning her to her fate?

At the door, I turned impulsively. “Do you know if my mom was on her way to see anybody else?”