Mothered (57)

What would River say? Only a bully feels better about themself by taking someone else down a notch.

What would SunSoakedSergei say? Don’t lower yourself to other people’s standards.

What would Preston say? If you don’t want it done to you, don’t do it to someone else.

Yeah, the princes talked the talk, but they were paper dolls, and Grace, the voice behind the curtain, didn’t live by the rules of the high road.

What would Miguel say? You’re so bad! But then he’d help her.

What would her damsels say if they knew this was the person they’d trusted with their secrets?

She wasn’t an expert on locks, but it didn’t feel like there was anything inside the little keyhole for the pin to catch. If the consequences didn’t matter, she’d hurl the box against the wall or go downstairs and get the hammer. But she still hoped to solve the mystery and return the box without being discovered. The music was a balm for her vexation, even as it morphed into something more rebellious.

Later, she wondered why she hadn’t heard anything (the music wasn’t that loud). She questioned that before she wondered how Jackie knew.

Grace’s door opened. Her mother loomed in her peripheral vision.

She didn’t knock. She should’ve knocked. But it happened so quickly that Grace didn’t have time to get mad—or stuff the little box under her pillow. For an endless moment there was only their immobile gaze: Grace’s with a busted hue; Jackie’s flat and determined.

“This’ll help.” Jackie tossed something.

A tiny key landed on the soft bedspread beside Grace.

It’s a dream. But as soon as she thought it, a different internal voice negated it.

No it’s not.

Grace jerked into a sitting position, unnerved by that second voice: it wasn’t hers. And it sounded more confident than Grace ever did (even when she playacted a prince).

Now that the key was beside her, Grace was reluctant to take it.

“Go on, Grace. It’s time.” As had happened so often in her nightmares, her mother’s countenance lost its edge. Its menace. And with that loss, Jackie became a different person: smaller and less intimidating, sorrowful and old.

Now that Grace was being commanded to open the box, it was the last thing she wanted to do. But her mother stood there patiently waiting. Why did Jackie want her to see what was inside? Or perhaps she was merely granting permission, accepting the inevitable, seeing how Grace had already claimed her right to know.

A skein of snakes slithered inside her as she grasped the key, warm in her sweaty hand. She was certain now, with the dread alive in her bowels, that she absolutely did not want to see what was inside the little wooden box. Too late. She wouldn’t be able to unknow whatever she was about to see, and it was going to change her; she knew that to her core.

And she was mistaken in thinking earlier that Miguel would’ve helped her—Miguel would’ve told her to leave Miss Jacquelyn’s things alone and mind her own damn business.

Jackie waited, a somber but resolute statue.

Grace wished it was a dream, an unreal thing that she could leave behind. How had this become her life, where nightmares were preferable to the itchy, crawling reality that was threatening to tear open her skin, rip out her eyes?

She put the key in its tiny keyhole and turned. The box opened without resistance. Her mother stepped closer.

“What . . . ?” Grace didn’t understand what she was seeing beneath the open lid. The box felt light—and hadn’t rattled—because it was filled with white feathers.

Her mother reached forward and took a handful of the feathers. She blew them from her hand so they floated through the air.

“What are these? Why do you have them?” Grace asked, struggling to form a coherent question. She was missing something, but what? If her mother expected her to know the answer to this riddle, she was mistaken.

Jackie inhaled and exhaled the slowest breath of her life, as if this response took everything she had.

“These are from the pillow you used to smother your sister.”





36


Wake up. Wake up! WAKE UP!

But no matter how many times Grace screamed it in her head, she still held the box in her hand. Her mother still stood beside her. A dusting of white feathers fluttered at their feet . . . the ones that weren’t nestled in the box like ravaged wings.

“What did you say?” Grace whispered, hoping she’d heard it wrong.

“These are from the pillow you used. To smother your sister.” The words were barely audible this time, as if Jackie had run out of energy.

Grace’s mind ricocheted from past to present, dizzying memories like broken puzzle pieces. And then she considered the more recent past, desperate to recall every interaction she’d had with her mother since she moved in—good and bad, ordinary and strange. Jackie was nothing if not earnest: she clearly believed in what she was saying. But now Grace wondered if there was something deeper to her mother’s erratic behavior—some kind of dementia that Grace hadn’t been warned about.

“Mom . . .” Grace’s confusion gave way to cautious worry. “That’s not what happened. You know that’s not what happened.”

Jackie lumbered over to Grace’s desk chair and collapsed with a sigh. “You think I saved a box of feathers, all these years, without a good reason?”