Our Crooked Hearts(49)

He was studying the cigar box sitting on the bed. “Ivy, do you mind if I…?”

I shook my head, more shudder than assent. Carefully he lifted the lid, laughing softly at what lay inside. The ring of wood, the faded theater ticket, the guitar pick. He touched a finger to the lock of red hair. Then he closed the box and clicked its latch back into place.

“You’re a good kid,” he told me. “This is all gonna be fine.”

That’s when I truly understood he couldn’t protect me. He wouldn’t even know how to try. His only defense against the darkness was comforting lies.

“Thanks, Dad,” I said.



* * *



So the girl was here for me.

That was the conclusion I’d reached. Knees drawn up, thumbnail in my mouth, staring at nothing until my eyes felt like swollen plum pits. She stole something from their closet, but she left my shirt. She broke into our house when I was alone, only to creep around taking bites out of my cookies. Like what she really wanted was to show me how close she could get.

Stay away from mirrors, Sharon had said. My belly bottomed out as I remembered that flash I’d seen after bleaching my hair, the girl’s pale face in the bathroom mirror instead of my own reflection. What if I hadn’t imagined it?

My dad came in one more time, around ten, to kiss me good night. He was still pretending everything would be fine, and I complied with a solid imitation of a person who wasn’t losing her mind. When he slipped away my brain returned to its obsessive loop, leaping from one discovery to the next, gliding over the darkness between. It all felt like puzzle pieces from different boxes.

There was something that wanted to break through. A question, maybe, or a memory, slithering along the edges of conscious thought. I fell asleep still reaching for it, and in dreams it tiptoed from its hiding place.

I woke up.

It was the middle of the night but it could’ve been high noon. My brain switched on like a lamp. I climbed from bed holding delicately to the thought I’d had.

My bare soles on the carpet felt nervy, strangely tender, my vision scalloped at the edges with light. I crossed the hall and eased open my parents’ bedroom door. My dad was facing away from me, keeping neatly to his half of the bed. I crept past him to the vanity and picked up the old framed photo of my mom and Aunt Fee at sixteen.

I moved to the light coming through the window to confirm the hazy recollection that had come clear to me in dreaming: one half of the photo lay flat. But the other bulged outward, against the glass.

And the best friend hearts around their necks, broken into thirds.

I unclasped the back of the frame and flipped the photo out.

I was right. The photo pushed against the glass because one third of it had been folded under, tucked away, by someone who didn’t want to look at it anymore but couldn’t bring themselves to scissor it free. A wave of queasy revelation broke over me as I saw what had been hidden.

My mother and aunt leaned into each other, but the third girl stood straight as a fingerbone. Heavy eyeliner, naked mouth, a length of green ribbon tied around her throat like an urban legend. Hanging below it, the other edge of the Best Friends heart. You could have daubed her face into an old painting—something Dutch, maybe, with peasants or saints—and aside from the eyeliner nobody would’ve blinked.

She was less raw-boned here. Less leached and furtive. But she was absolutely the girl who’d appeared on the road in front of Nate’s car. The specter who’d paced ahead of me through Woodbine’s night-lit streets, all the way to our door. Twenty-five years after this photo was taken, her face as untouched as a time traveler’s.





CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN



The city

Back then

Friday morning. We hadn’t talked to Marion or Sharon since the shop. But we knew they’d be waiting at the occultist’s house tonight, Marion all fairy-pinched with bruises.

“At least we’ll get to sleep again,” Fee said. It was just past eight in the morning and we were walking back from the McDonald’s. “Whatever happens tonight, tomorrow we sleep.”

Warily I slid my apple pie from its sleeve. Nothing gross came with it, or at least nothing grosser than a McDonald’s apple pie. “So true. I hear you get the best sleep ever when you’re dead.”

“Don’t be fucking funny, Dana,” she said. “Can you imagine what would happen to our dads if we were dead?”

“Mine would sell my shit and buy a Trans Am.”

“What do you have that’s worth anything? He’d buy a Trans Am decal.”

“Who’s being funny now?”

She wrung her hands. “I don’t want to be another one of my dad’s saints. I don’t want to be on his sad wall between my mother and the Virgin for the rest of my dead life.”

“All soft focus. Velvet hair bow, crucifix on.”

“He asked about the crucifix, by the way. I told him you were borrowing it. I told him you needed it to pray for your dad.”

“Uncle Nestor! He believed that?”

She pressed her palms together and looked up. “Perdóname, Padre.”

“Oh, my love,” I said. Joking as I began, and then very much not, my throat drawing tighter with every syllable. “My beautiful Felicita. You know if anything actually happened to you I would go full-on Orpheus. I would drag you back. I would…” Melt into sand without you. Disintegrate into stars.