Juniper & Thorn(19)
Magic was always like that: it had ugly undersides. Wanting anything was a trap.
Most days I could not even stand to sate my own hunger. The fullness of my belly was unbearable, but with two fingers jabbed down my throat I could make it all vanish, turning back my indulgence like a scratched record, undoing it and making myself clean and empty and new again.
I tugged at the ribbon on my wrist, filthy knot still holding fast. On my other wrist was my mother’s charm bracelet. I unclasped it as I stepped into the tub, holding it up above the frothing water. The charms rattled like a sack of lots to be cast. Once I was submerged to the throat, I twisted off the knobs and let my body drift, half-suspended. My hair floated around me in clumps of sand-colored flotsam.
I could feel the grime sloughing off me, the glaze of onion and cooking oil, Fedir Holovaty’s fearful mists. Still holding my mother’s charm bracelet with one hand, I scrubbed between my legs until my skin hurt, wishing I could wash Sevastyan’s memory from me too. All my doomed and foolish desire. My body turned the bathwater a filmy gray.
I fondled my mother’s bracelet, the chain leaving indents on my damp fingers. There were eight charms and I knew them all by touch alone: the tiny hourglass filled with real pink sand, the miniature bicycle with wheels that actually spun, the thimble-sized whale with a mouth that opened on a hinge, the bell that really rang. There was a golden box inside which a paper note was folded over a hundred times, fit so snug that I could not pry it out, even if I’d ever dared enough to try. I didn’t know what the note said, if it said anything at all. There was a whistle that sang faintly when you blew into it, and an owl with little pearls for eyes. There was a book that opened up and had the names of my sisters and me etched onto its gilded pages, along with the years of our birth. I laid the bracelet over my face, the chain stretching from my brow over the slope of my nose, past the bow of my lips, the last charm dangling into my mouth.
I pried the little latch open with my tongue. I tasted all three of our names, tangy and sharp as a bite of bloody meat. That was the flavor of wet gold.
Soon I was clean and my thumb pads were pruning. I stepped out of the tub and dried myself and watched it drain, cloudy water spiraling downward. Halfway through, the pipes gave a choked protest, and the water ceased its circling.
I stopped toweling my hair. I knelt down next to the tub and dipped my hand into the gurgling water. When I pulled it out again, there was a small mound of black sand in my cupped palm.
A ragged breath tore out of me. I couldn’t fathom how the pipes had spewed the sand out at me. Could it have been chafed off my skin, rinsed out of my hair? I hadn’t been to the boardwalk in years, long before our mother had died. I could sometimes hear the tugboat horns from the garden, or smell the briny air seeping through my window at night, or see the gulls circling our house’s wood-rotted turret.
And then panic struck me like a match. What would Papa think if he found it? He would know we had been gone, and he would be right, even if my sisters and I had never dared wander as far as the shoreline on our clandestine outings. He would concoct some punishment even worse than what he’d already done, and I couldn’t even imagine what it would be, and that—the unknowing—terrified me to my marrow.
Hurriedly I scooped up all of the sand and shut it inside the clamshell compact lying on the edge of the sink. Inside it would mingle with our mother’s white face powder and scratch away at the small, rust-flecked mirror, but at least it was hidden. I closed my finger around the compact, feeling its ridges. It was unmistakably heavy now, like the hunk of polished obsidian that Papa used as a paperweight.
Fear was a winged pulse in my belly. There were river stones shifting under me.
As if summoned, Papa’s footsteps echoed up through the floor. I knew he was pacing the foyer, following his perfunctory route from the grandfather clock to the threshold of the sitting room, then back again. I put on my clothes and my mother’s charm bracelet and hurried to my room. My thoughts were scattered like leaves. I flung open my wardrobe and tucked the compact inside one of my satin slippers.
A pair of red eyes blinked at me from under the bed. I combed frantically through my wet hair as I clambered down the stairs again.
Undine was already perched on the chaise longue, her face pale and drawn. When she saw me, her gaze narrowed like a knife blade. Papa’s head swiveled, eyes pinning me to the wall.
“Go fetch your other sister,” Papa said. “And do it quickly. The draught is already cooling.”
I nodded and wordlessly went to the storeroom, my heart pounding in my throat. The smell of basil was leaking through a crack in the door. The weight of this new secret was like a sodden dress; I felt it clinging to me with every step.
Rose was bent over the table, butcher knife in hand, cutting the stems off sprigs of meadow rue. When she heard me, she turned around without dropping the knife and said, “Papa wants us, doesn’t he?”
“Yes,” I managed, not trusting myself with more words. The secret was stinging my tongue like a pinch of paprika.
“What’s wrong, Marlinchen?” Rose came to me, frowning. “You don’t have anything to fret over with the draught . . . do you?”
“No!” I said, heat rising in my cheeks. “No, of course not.”
My objection was too vehement. Rose’s brow furrowed. “You would tell me first, wouldn’t you? Before Papa, of course, but also before Undine.”