Our Crooked Hearts(58)

We snuck out together like we used to, like we hadn’t in months, walking east through the dawn. Fee dropped to her knees and looked over the water, toward the place where the world bent out of sight. Finally she sighed, running both hands through her tangled hair.

“Tonight. We have to at least try.”

“Try.” My head was still toffee-sticky with sleep. “Try what?”

Fee looked at me with a face so naked in its grief I finally saw how much she’d been hiding from me. “To find Marion.”

My heart started to pound. “What are you talking about?”

“I think about her all the time. When I look in a mirror. When I can’t sleep. When I, I don’t know, when I feel good for one minute, I think about how she doesn’t.” Her eyes were pleading. “I don’t think I can live with myself if we don’t try.”

“She’s dead,” I said shrilly. “My god, Fee—all this time you’ve been thinking she’s alive?”

“She can’t be dead. If she were dead, that would mean that you … that you…”

“That I what? Say it.”

She looked back at the water.

“Do you need me to be the bad guy?” I asked her. “I’ll do it. I’ll be that for you, if that’s what you need. But first you have to accept this: Marion’s gone. Dead. And it was either her, or all of us.”

She moved her head restlessly. “We don’t know that. We don’t know what Astrid would’ve done. We didn’t see Marion die.”

“We didn’t have to.”

“I replay it in my head, all the time, and I…”

“Stop.” I dropped my head onto my knees. “I replay it all the time, too. The only way out of that circle was to kill her. It was the only way out of the mess she made, that she refused to even try to clean up. Sometimes I think a knife would’ve been kinder. The way I did it…” I twisted my head to look into my best friend’s sorrowful eyes. “It probably wasn’t quick.”

I pictured it sometimes. If the fall didn’t kill her, Astrid would’ve kept her alive until she found a way to unbind them. Maybe she tortured Marion first. Maybe she left her to wander whatever half-world I’d banished her to until she suffered and faded and perished, like a girl in an old ballad.

But there was no death I could imagine for her that was worse than the alternative: that she’d actually survived.

“Honestly, Fee.” Suddenly I couldn’t speak above a whisper. “I couldn’t bear it if she were alive. It would be unbearable. To think of her alive, and trapped, and, and, kept, by Astrid. Alone. I can’t. She’s flesh and blood, Fee. She can’t have survived it.”

I looked at her for confirmation of what I knew to be true, needed to be true. For absolution. She took a shaky breath.

“Marion is dead,” she said. Gazing across the water proud as a figurehead, her voice so stern you would’ve thought she was the one convincing me.

I breathed in, the succubus weight of guilt finally easing. “She’s dead.”

We watched the gulls rise and fall, cartwheeling through the air and nipping at the waves. Fee whispered a prayer for Marion, and neither of us speculated aloud on whether she’d died in a place that prayer could reach.





CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE



The city

Back then

High school ended and Fee and I moved into a studio apartment on a grim block of Broadway, across from a century-old jazz club whose sign filled our apartment with green light.

She dove headfirst into real life. An apprenticeship with the yerbera in Pilsen, a job with the parks department, a series of relationships with girls who weren’t sure whether to try to win me over or keep an eye on me.

It seemed so easy for her to keep her eyes set on the future. But I could barely see to the end of the day. I worked six shifts a week at the Golden Nugget, gone by six and back by four, then I had the whole evening to fill. Half the time I was alone—our place was too small to bring anyone home to, and Fee was never single for long. On the nights she was out I’d make coffee and play records from my dad’s collection and feel a treacherous relief when the sun went down. I liked to sit in the dark and watch the jazz club’s sequined sign glitter and blink, like a hard-luck woman in a balding green dress.



* * *



I got fired from the diner on a Sunday, ten months after graduation, for knocking a full cup of coffee into an alderman’s lap.

The guy was a regular, a showy tipper with a carnival barker’s voice and cheeks like red taffy. He wasn’t seated in my section, but he’d touched my waist when I walked by, given it a hard pinch. “Filler upper?”

His fingers burned through my polyester work shirt. I was riding on a few hours’ sleep, my head still swimming with slow, rose-colored dreams. I got the pot, filled his cup, and knocked it smartly over with the spout. It wasn’t until he shouted, stumbling out of the booth, that I realized what I’d done.

“You did that on purpose.” He sounded stunned. “She did that on purpose!”

My boss, Sergio, rushed over with a wad of napkins. One of the waitresses trailed behind, carrying a little dish of pink ice cream.

“Get outta here,” Sergio muttered. I was already untying my apron.