Our Crooked Hearts(53)

She could be anywhere; she could be gone. But I doubted it. The space between us yawned like an open line. I braked to a soft stop in front of the train tracks. Before I could drive on, the passenger door opened.

The girl climbed in.

She was realer than I remembered. Jawline peppered with zits, hair tangled and greasy at the scalp. She might’ve been plain if not for the intensity of those pale wolf’s eyes. I could smell her, a layered accretion of body odor and dirty hair and the bergamot undertow of my mother’s perfume.

“Drive,” she said.

I thought I was too resolute to feel afraid, but my body knew better. My foot was jumpy on the pedal and my limbs quivered like plucked strings. Her presence was a constant scratch, her regard a spotlight that singed my skin. She’d known my mother once. Been young with her. And if my mother really was in trouble, I’d bet this time traveler knew something about it.

The radio was keening about a pink, pink moon. I switched it off. The girl’s silence made its own kind of noise, a bass pulse of hereness that thudded in time with my heart. At the last stop sign before the forest preserve, she pointed left.

“That way.”

When she lifted her arm I caught another breath of my mother’s perfume. The image of this stranger standing at my parents’ vanity, drained face smiling as she sprayed it over her pulse points, raked over my neck like a fingernail. It seemed a greater violation than her teeth in my cookies, her hands in the closet safe.

We could be on our way to my mother now. My breath quickened with anticipation, edged with bitterness. Maybe she and the stranger had been together all this time. We were driving along the suburb’s unincorporated edge, a realm of sprawling houses and overgrown backyards with a reputation for lawlessness akin to that of international waters. For every kid who got arrested out here, there were five more who insisted you couldn’t legally get arrested out here.

“There,” she said.

There was an unlit turnoff cut between the trees. Alone, I wouldn’t have seen it. I went slowly, tires chewing over gravel, until she pressed a hand to the dash.

“Stop. Turn off the car.”

With the headlights out the road in front of us flattened to a gray sea. But the moon was high, the gravel pale, and its contours rebounded. I made out the place where the path veered right and out of sight.

“Where are we?”

She didn’t reply. She was going through some silent deliberation, her breaths shallow as an animal’s. “I don’t know if you’re ready,” she whispered.

“Ready,” I said, and bit my lip. It felt too intimate, our voices meeting in the dark. “Ready for what?”

The girl looked down. I had the sense that she was gathering herself, like the thing she needed to communicate was bigger than she could hold.

“There are fairy tales,” she began, “in which girls trade pieces of themselves away for the things they want. Love, riches.” She looked at me. “Information.”

I pressed both hands to my jittering knees. “Just tell me what you want from me.”

“You’ve paid enough,” she said fervently. “If I had it my way, this wouldn’t cost you one single thing.”

A wave of self-pity washed over me, warm as bathwater. “What wouldn’t?”

One of her eyes was in shadow. The other was a cup of liquid light. “Answers. To all the questions you’ve asked, and all the ones you never thought to.”

“Who are you?” I said.

“I’m your friend, Ivy. Don’t worry. Don’t be afraid. You’ll understand soon.”

The way she said my name—why was that the part that scared me most? Maybe it was how she looked when she said it: like she knew me. Like we shared a whole complicated history. My brain was sodden with fear but busy, too, ticking like a game-show wheel.

“If I want this,” I said. “If I want answers—what happens next?”

“We walk up the path.” Her voice was on the edge of trembling. “We turn, just there. And I take you to a place where you can know everything.”

The car keys were imprinting into my palm. “Why not here? Just tell me here.”

“Doesn’t work that way.”

I looked to the place where the road bent right. It was high summer, the trees too thick to see what lay behind them. I looked back at the girl who knew my mother, and had walked an unfathomable road to sit beside me. “What’s your name?”

She paused, and something shifted behind her eyes. “My name is Marion.”

I had the oddest feeling the name hadn’t been at her fingertips. That she’d had to dredge it up, like she was a ghost who’d already divested itself of the trappings of the living. But I knew that name. I could summon it in my mother’s voice, and Aunt Fee’s. A taint of secrecy hung about it. They’d only ever spoken it at that register reserved for hidden things.

“Marion,” I repeated, and put my hand on the door. “Let’s go.”

The night was still, just the faintest breeze hushing like an endless exhale. This was the way I’d first seen Marion: as a pale shape moving through a nighttime wood. She was clothed now, jeans and a blue peasant shirt that didn’t fit her. I kept her in my sight and one fist tight around my dad’s keys. The gravel was murder on my bare feet. The third time I sucked in a pained breath she glanced down and spoke a few careless words.