Our Crooked Hearts(22)
I hung there a while breathing in the summer air, laced with flowers and smoke from somebody’s barbecue. The moon was very high and very far, glowing like a halogen bulb in its cowl of cloud. Nothing moved but the wind through the garden. I was about to go back inside when I heard the smallest sound: the fairy-tale whisper of breeze over broken glass.
There, nearly lost beneath the picnic table, lay a scatter of glinting pieces. Beside it, bisected between shadow and moonlight, an arc of spilled blood. My breath went ragged, but I didn’t understand what I was looking at until I saw the shard of mirror.
Someone had dug up the jar my mom buried and smashed it over the concrete.
There’d been a piece of white paper curled inside that jar. I couldn’t see it from where I stood, but I knew it was there. It took all the courage I had to make myself walk down the steps in search of it. The light clicked on and my mother’s blood was sickening beneath its glow. I found the curl of paper, stained and stuck to the leg of a deck chair, and plucked it free with two fingertips. Breathing through my teeth, I unrolled it. My mom’s handwriting spooled across the scrap in an unbroken line.
If it be unfriendly let it go if it be unwilling make it go if it be a poison may it go if it be a threat I will it go
A breeze slid over me like staticky silk. The night wasn’t so silent after all. It ticked and scratched with creatures and weather and sleepy suburban machines. I ran back into the house and locked the door behind me.
The word I’d been avoiding came back like a scream. The one I was too practical to say, too stupid, maybe, a poppy seed that crunched, releasing poison, as I finally bit in. Magic. The words on the piece of paper, the blood in the jar—the pins and feathers in her closet, even. All pointed toward the same impossible probability.
It wasn’t surprise I felt. Or even relief, to finally have a label for the thing that made my mother so unreachable. I was flooded instead with a strangling fury. Because what the fuck? What did my mom think she was doing? Where did she get the nerve to think reality should bend to her, of all people?
And what the hell did it say about reality that it might actually have worked?
Beneath the anger something else squirmed, rolling its bright green eyes. Jealousy. I jerked away from the thought. Leaving the lights off, I batted around the first floor, checking the doors and windows. All were locked, all was quiet except for the clamor in my head. In the kitchen I peered out at nothing more sinister than lilac bushes and the next house’s yellow siding. When I turned my eye fell on the cookies left on my plate.
I’d eaten two, left three untouched. Now, by the light coming through the window, I saw that each remaining cookie had a bite taken out of it, in three perfect cartoon curves.
Nimbly I strode from the kitchen, to the front door. I turned the lock, then the knob, and flung myself onto the porch.
Mosquitoes threw themselves at my skin as I sprinted down the drive. The house was dark and still, all its windows pitch-colored or glazed with silver. When I reached for my phone, I realized I’d left it inside. I swore and dropped into a crouch, hands over my face.
“Ivy?”
I turned. The Paxtons’ house was belted in the shadows of its long country-style porch. Inside them floated the orange cherry of Billy’s cigarette, fading and brightening like a signal at sea. “Did something happen?” he called.
“I think there’s someone inside my house.”
“Seriously?” He dropped his cigarette and jogged down the drive. “Are you okay? Did you call the police?”
Even by streetlight he was sunny, charged up like a solar battery. I could see every freckle on his skin. My cheeks heated remembering the sketch I’d found, in which my younger self drew those freckles as stars. “I didn’t.”
“Oh.” He looked mistrustfully at my house. “Should I?”
“Not yet. Can you just … sit with me a sec?”
He dropped obediently to the concrete. “Yeah. Of course. So—what happened?”
I didn’t know what I looked like. Like I’d just stepped away from an explosion, probably, my eyes all wide with revelation. I couldn’t bear to start blathering about cookies. “Nothing. Nothing actually happened, I just … I’m home alone. I thought someone was in the backyard. Then I went back inside and I thought maybe they were in the house.”
“Holy shit. Were they?”
“I don’t know,” I said slowly. Maybe I’d bitten the cookies myself. Had I? Hadn’t I? I could still taste chocolate on my tongue. When I tried to picture an intruder, all I could see was my mother moving through the house in horror-film jump cuts. I shuddered. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
He pressed his toes into a strip of soft tar. “But you don’t want to call the cops.”
“No.”
I thought he’d push me on that, but he only nodded. It was oddly intense sitting so close to him. Billy Paxton, with that lanky body in jeans stained with paint and oil and pizza sauce, because he had three part-time jobs. I only knew that because I’d seen him in his blue jumpsuit at the Jiffy Lube, and rolling down the drive with a Pepino’s delivery light on his hood, and climbing in and out of his dad’s truck, its bed laden with primer cans. I had the strangest urge to tell him the whole and actual truth. I didn’t, of course. I told him one sliced-down, shined-up piece of it.