Our Crooked Hearts(46)

“We have so much to talk about,” he said. “But I promised your mom this conversation wouldn’t happen without her.”

“What conversation?” I asked sharply.

“Not until she’s here.”

“Make an exception? Make a ‘we’ve got a stalker, Mom’s run off’ exception?”

“No,” he said with surprising vehemence. “This has gotta come from her. I can’t even make myself say the words she owes you.”

I started to fathom, then, the size of what he wasn’t saying. And suddenly I wasn’t sure I was ready to know. He must’ve seen my hesitation, because he grabbed my shoulder.

“Hey. Look at me. I’m not telling you to back off,” he said fiercely. “I’m proud of you. I love seeing you ask questions this way.”

I shook him off. “Here’s another one for you, Dad. Why did you marry her?”

The softness in his face compacted. “Ivy.”

“I mean, I know why you married her. Because of Hank. But why did you stay married?”

“Because I love her,” he said dangerously. “She’s my wife. We have two wonderful kids together, we have a home. We have a history that started long before you came along.”

“How is that enough for you?” The question burst out of me. “Do you two even talk anymore? Did you ever? Don’t you get sick of being lied to? Of the way your wife looks right past you?”

My dad’s temper lived way down deep. When it did surface, it was with the vast inevitability of a leviathan.

“It’s time for you to stop talking about what you don’t understand,” he said through gritted teeth. “She’s your mother. You got me? You’re seventeen now, well. She was an orphan by seventeen. She was a mother at twenty. She didn’t have the luxury of a childhood, parents dragging her toward college, giving her a bedtime. She’s been working since she was ten years old. Ten! There are things you should ask for and information you are owed, but an accounting of my marriage is not one of them. Christ, Ivy. You need to know when to stop.”

Eyes down, quiet as I could, I fled the room.

“Ivy. Ivy, come back here.”

I ignored him, sprinting up the stairs.

“Do not leave this house!” he shouted at my back.

I didn’t start crying until I’d slammed my bedroom door.





CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE



The city

Back then

I slumped across the plastic seats of the Blue Line, my skin feeling as thin and chitinous as butterfly wings. It was Thursday morning. We were almost out of time.

An hour ago I’d poured myself a bowl of Marshmallow Mateys and a dead bunny kit thumped out of the box, membranous eyelids shut tight. Any sleep I’d gotten was hole-punched to tatters by dreams in which I was falling, waking all night in a panic, body bouncing against the mattress. My heartbeats clicked against each other like billiard balls.

I got off the train at Halsted, the smell of my skin intensifying in the heat coming up from the tracks. I twisted my hair into a knot, tucking it beneath my ball cap.

There was this old guy Fee had introduced me to who kept a table at the market on Maxwell Street. Mr. Lazar sold enough worthless junk that you had to have a particular kind of eye to notice what he was really selling, overpriced but far from worthless. When I rolled up on him he was sitting in a sun-faded folding chair, doing the crossword.

He looked at me over his glasses. “By yourself today, brat? Where’s the beauty?”

There was a possibility he could help me, so I bit my tongue. “Fee’s busy.”

“No window shopping today. If you’re not here to buy, go bother Andy. He’s got nothing worth paying for.”

The guy at the next table flipped him the bird.

“I’m buying,” I told him, “if you’ve got what I need.”

Lazar’s mouth stayed flat, but his eyes went keen. “I see. Step into my office.”

Over his plot lay a balding carpet as dirty as the ground beneath it, stretching a few feet past the edges of his table. I stepped onto it and the world around us went vague. We could talk in privacy now, just yards away from hagglers and passersby who could no longer make out exactly what we said. I hoped that went for hovering spirits as well.

“We’re being haunted,” I said. “Bad summoning, ghost who won’t go. I don’t trust the person who says she can banish it. I wanna see if there’s something else we can do.”

Lazar considered me like I was a thorny crossword clue. Then he stood and shuffled around to the far side of his hoard.

“I’ve been thinking you’d be back,” he said, his Algerian accent flattened by years spent in this city. “First time I met you, I knew I had something that was yours.”

From between a limp stack of old newspapers and what I was pretty sure was a gramophone, he extracted a boxy black suitcase. It looked like the kind of thing a magician would use to carry around pieces of his assistant. Lazar settled the case over his knees and opened it with a toothy snap, revealing another, smaller suitcase. He went on like this for a while. I couldn’t tell whether the matryoshka bit was pure showman’s theater or something real, until he lifted the seventh box into the light.

Something real.