Our Crooked Hearts(38)

Marion was quiet a minute. “Yeah, well. Nobody’s gonna be happy now, are they?”

She slipped off after Sharon.



* * *



We went home to Fee’s. Nobody on the bus at that time of night cared that we were covered in blood. We took showers and drank 7 and 7s and walked over to Jarvis Beach.

The lake was the same color as the sky. We stripped off our clothes and walked in. It was August but the water was so cold and thin it felt like swimming in chilled gin. We bobbed and gasped, looking back at the surreal curve of the city. The attic room and Sharon’s dark warnings felt too far to touch us.

Maybe it would be okay. Maybe this—Seagram’s and the small hours and the scouring cold—were as good as a banishing charm. Magic had always been good to us, fluid beneath our fingers. Why should that stop now?

I thought these arrogant thoughts right up until the fish bobbed to the surface beside me. Long and skinny as an eel, its teeth wicked and its eyes bone white. I splashed back, gulping dirty water as another fish joined it. Then another.

We stroked clumsily to shore, fish bodies boiling up around us. Our knees scraped sand and we dragged our bodies out, looking back at the spreading arrow point of silver corpses. Like Astrid had dipped one misty finger into the water and stirred.





CHAPTER TWENTY



The suburbs

Right now

“This is Sharon. You left a message for me.”

“Sharon.” My brain whirred, placing the name. “Sharon. Hi.”

No reply.

“Thanks for calling. Sorry. It’s just…” I gathered myself, trying to banish, briefly, visions of the pale-haired stranger. “It’s really early.”

“Where I am, it’s late.” Her words bumped against each other belligerently. “What do you want?”

“I think you knew my mom. Dana Nowak. From ’Twixt and ’Tween, a long time ago. That was your shop, right?”

“I haven’t talked to Dana Nowak in over twenty years, honey. I’ve got nothing to tell you.”

She was drunk. I tried to picture the stranger attached to the voice, tried to imagine what it was about this call that made her want to drink before she made it.

“You called me back. If you’ve got nothing to say, why bother?”

No reply.

“I just want to know what she was like,” I told her, before she could decide to hang up. “Anything you can remember.”

“Dana’s dead,” she said abruptly, and my head filled with white noise. Then I figured out she wasn’t telling me, she was asking.

“God, no, that’s not what I— Why would you think she was dead?”

“Some kinds of girl don’t have a long life span.”

I cupped a hand to my eyes. “I don’t know what that means.”

“What do you know?” Less aggressive now, but still wary.

“I know you called me back for a reason. And I know…” I hesitated. Even in my brain the word felt unwieldy. Standing alone on the drive, talking to a stranger, I finally said it. “I know she’s a witch. I’m thinking you might be one, too.”

“Worker.” The word had a sarcastic edge. “But I’m out of work.”

I dropped to the concrete, my head flooding with questions. “What does it mean, though—to be a witch, or a worker? What can you do? Do you learn it? Are you born with it?”

I could hear her loosening up. Liking to be asked questions she actually wanted to answer. “Some workers have aptitude, sure. But more have … other things. Hunger, ambition, nerve. The arrogance to look at reality and say, ‘Here’s how I would’ve done it.’ Guess which one I am.” She laughed, an unhealthy, rock-tumbler sound.

“What about my mom?”

“Aptitude,” she said. “Arrogance, too.”

“What could she do? When you knew her, could she—do you think she could’ve made a person forget something? Something really big?”

A pause. “Why don’t you ask her all this? Seeing as she’s not dead.”

My laugh hurt coming up, its edges sharpened on broken glass and the bones of dead rabbits. “She’s hard to talk to.”

“I’ll bet,” Sharon said dryly, and sighed. “I only knew her a little while. I was glad to see the back of her. Thought she was tough, but she was nothing but underbelly. Her friend, Felicita, she was the strong one. There, that’s something I know about your mom: she’s a one-owner dog. She still hang around with a girl named Felicita Guzman?”

“Yeah.”

“I figured. Fee was a good girl, but she and your mom were a package deal. Well, them and—”

She cut off so hard I might’ve thought the call had dropped, but I could still hear that ocean sound down the line. I edited my guess: it was the hiss of wind through trees. I pictured her standing at the rim of some lonely place.

“Them and who?”

“Them, Dana and Felicita. A matched set.”

She said it with a note of hard finality. I paused before I spoke again.

“The woman at Petals and Prose said my mom was one of your girls. ‘One of Sharon’s girls,’ she said. What does that mean?”