Our Crooked Hearts(14)
A cobbled corridor ran between the Small Shop and Vanilla Fudge, decked with cast-iron lanterns. I hurried beneath them, glad for the first time that I was forced into service as a gift wrapper during the shop’s holiday rush—I had a copy of its employee-door key.
I let myself into the cellar coolness of the back room. Nobody there, but the lights were on.
“Hello? Mom?”
No answer. It was cluttered back here, but organized. I scanned the shelves, the tidy piles of stock, the rolling mail crate where they kept unopened product samples—slivers of chocolate made beneath the harvest moon, minerals you rubbed on your face, magazines featuring Scandinavian women in recycled overalls telling you why you should feed your babies raw honey. All sorts of goofy shit.
The Small Shop was named for Aunt Fee’s theory of small good things: everything they sold was meant to provide a small good, a slight adjustment that would make your life better. Usually it smelled like herbs and organic oolong, plus whatever aggressive candle they had going on the counter, but today the air was acrid, unpleasant. It coated my tongue. I looked around for something to rinse my mouth and found an iced coffee cup sweating atop a filing cabinet, Aunt Fee’s dark lipstick ringing the straw. I touched a knuckle to its beading side. Still cold.
“Mom?” I said again. “Aunt Fee?”
I threw the rest of the lights and walked into the empty shop. Everything out here was mellow white or the wind-blasted gray of driftwood. Against it all the products stood out like art pieces. My eye went straight to the rust-colored smear in front of the counter.
Blood. Too big for a nosebleed, too small to start looking for a body. A tuft of hair was smeared into it. I moved closer and it became something else, with a distinctive ombre of brown and gray. Rabbit fur.
There was a pressure in my head, climbing. Not quite pain, not yet.
I turned, sped through the shop’s back door, out onto the suburban concrete. Kneeling in the anemic shade of a lamppost, my lungs all clotted with sugared air, I called my mother.
The call went straight to voicemail. She was forever leaving her phone in the car, letting it die, allowing her voicemail box to fill up.
Aunt Fee, then. At least her phone rang. When that call, too, went to voicemail I cursed so loud and long the ponytailed fudge shop employee sucking on a vape a few sidewalk squares down said, “Whoa.”
I flipped her off and got back on my bike. I could hear her laughing as I rode away.
* * *
Aunt Fee lived in a two-story cottage at the end of a street lined with them, suburban starter homes for one-kid families. Her driveway was empty. When I peeked in the windows of her garage, that was empty, too. I tried the bell, but no one answered.
I was standing on the step, considering whether to check for unlocked windows, when my phone chimed.
Sorry I missed your call. Talk soon okay?
Aunt Fee. The fist around my heart loosened as I dropped onto the steps.
I went to the shop, I replied. What’s happening? Where are you?
The house was at my back. Empty, but as I waited for her reply my neck started to itch. The feeling pushed me off the stoop and onto the grass, turning to keep the house’s windows in my sights.
Sorry, she texted. Dealing with something but we’re fine. I’ll call you soon, Ivy-girl.
I read and reread her words, trying to source my unease. I breathed out slow. Rubbed a hand over my prickling neck.
Does this something have to do with the rabbits?
This time she didn’t reply. I stood another minute on the grass, waiting for her to get back to me, but she never did.
CHAPTER NINE
The city
Back then
By the time I was fifteen I’d learned how to be lots of different people. With my dad I was demanding and high-strung, a showoff. With the kids at school I was quiet. With Fee I never had to think about it, so who knows. On the train, in the world, I was a girl as hard as safety glass.
But Marion was one person. She wouldn’t, she couldn’t, shape-shift. Some days I was impressed by it, and on others her refusal to fake it pissed me off. Fee and I knew when to make ourselves small and when to pretend we felt big, but Marion refused to be anything other than who she was. She was too intense, she came on too strong, she could never take a joke unless she’d made it. She told off customers out loud instead of under her breath, and snapped like a twig at catcallers.
Her refusal to compromise made us braver. She coaxed us out of our neighborhood, down the long spine of the city. Together we slid through the crowds at all-ages shows, hands linked, pretending someone was waiting for us at the front. We walked under the viaduct at two in the morning, past sleeping bags and shopping carts. For the price of coffee and pie we rented out tables in all-night diners populated by men in work boots and gutter punks ashing into their eggs.
Marion started working at the fish shop in midwinter, when the city was half dead under a rock-salt overcoat. It was a night in late March, at the start of the thaw, that we sat on the beach at Farwell, fish grease breathing off our clothes, passing around a bottle of Mal?rt.
This late the beach was a cruising ground. Nobody paid us any mind. It was warm for the season, Marion’s boombox playing Yo La Tengo on low. She was relaxed for once, elbows in the sand. Fee’s head was in my lap and I was furrowing her black hair into loose braids and out again, rhythmic as a rosary. Down by the water two men shuffled by. I saw one of them notice us, grabbing his friend’s arm to reroute him.