Our Crooked Hearts(47)

It was just over sandwich-size, made of what looked to be pure gold. Its leonine color made my heart drop. I had a pocket filled up from one of my dad’s emergency cash stashes, the one I’d known about longest and judged most likely to have been forgotten. But if the box was actual gold I would never be able to afford it.

My throat dried at the thought. I wanted it. Badly enough that I guessed the wanting was part of how it worked.

I cleared my throat. “What is it?”

He knocked gently on the box’s top. Or its bottom, maybe. The thing had no apparent lid. “It has a very long name. I call it the forgetting box.”

“Forgetting box?” I acted skeptical, hoping that might make it come cheaper. “Doesn’t sound like what I’m looking for.”

“It’s not about what you’re looking for, it’s about what you’ll need. Tomorrow or next year or in fifty years. You know me, I’m a matchmaker.”

I didn’t really know him, not well, but Fee had told me as much. She’d heard about Lazar from a curandera to whom he’d sold a length of white lace. The woman used the lace to trim two christening gowns, completing them in secret just before her daughter learned she was pregnant with twins following years of infertility struggles. Though I doubted all the stories about him were so sweet.

“I’ve got a problem right now,” I told him, still staring at the box. “Not in a year or fifty years.”

“That hand is dealt. There’s nothing I can sell you that will change it. All I can tell you is, one day you’ll want this.”

I found my fingers drifting toward my box. “What’s it for?”

He eyed me up. “That red hair, I thought Irish. But you’re Polish?”

“I’m both.” I frowned. “Why do you know that?”

“I told you, I’m a matchmaker. The forgetting box is from Poland. Like you.” He smirked. “What did you think, I’d sell a Polish-Irish girl a juju? A vial of Kvasir’s blood? No. You children like to swim around in other people’s waters, but you’ll never go that deep. And there are things in the water that’ll get you if you do. Blood, that’s thicker. Stick with the magic that’s in your blood.”

I could feel his words sinking into me, where I didn’t want them to go. I thought about the three of us working our shallow way through the grimoire of a dead occultist, a woman I preferred not to think about at all. As if every spell was a fresh-forged thing, devoid of fingerprints or history.

Lazar watched me, smiling faintly. “When it’s hard to hear, that’s how you know. Anyway. The box. There’s a Polish folk story, goes by a few names. ‘Agnes and the Lonely Prince,’ ‘The Little Hut in the Woods.’ A girl falls in love with a prince, but a jealous fairy steals his memories and hides them in a golden box. The girl goes through many trials to find and unlock it, so her love will remember her.”

“Uh-huh. And you’re saying this is the box from that fairy tale?”

He inclined his head.

I could almost believe it. The thing would’ve looked at home in the chapped hands of some winter queen, faraway, long ago. Or maybe he was just jiggering up the price. “Why would I even want this?”

Lazar pursed his lips in that irritating French way. “I’m supposed to know?”

I asked the question I’d been putting off. “How much?”

Lazar snorted. “How much is it worth? More than you’ve got. How much will I take for it? That’s another question.”

I pulled out my wad of cash. “This is what I’ve got. This is all I’ve got. I don’t even know if I want that thing.”

“It’s yours either way. You think I’m happy something worth this much belongs to a little girl who doesn’t even clean her hair? No. I wish it was a rich man’s treasure. Oh, well.” He picked ten twenties off my pile. Considered the two that remained, and took one more. “A girl shouldn’t walk around with empty pockets. It’s still not enough, but how’s this for a deal: if you tell the beauty to bring me a few more bottles of that stomach settler, we’ll call it even.”

“Just, she’s got a name,” I said, rubbing my forehead. “Call her Felicita, alright? And I don’t know what you’re talking about with stomach settler.”

“She’s an herbalist, your friend. A good one. My wife is receiving chemotherapy, and nothing else works so well for the nausea. I take your money now, and Felicita brings me five big bottles of stomach settler. Do we have a deal?”

Still I hesitated, trying to imagine why I’d need the box. How would it feel to carry it around like a self-fulfilling prophecy, an empty place where stolen memories would one day reside? But whose—my father’s? My own? Someone’s I hadn’t even met yet?

It didn’t matter. Whether it was power of suggestion or true enchantment or my dad’s Polish blood in my veins, I wanted it. It was meant to be mine. And right then it was comforting to be told I had a future coming at all.

“Okay,” I told Mr. Lazar. “If telling me how it works is part of the asking price, then yes. We’ve got a deal.”



* * *



I caught Fee up on my visit with Lazar. When I showed her the box she said, “Huh.”