Our Crooked Hearts(64)

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It came to me at night. In those endless early days, in those fragile starlit hours. When I nursed before dawn, the only person awake in the world, the fear of what I might have done rolled over me. That I could have altered Ivy somehow, her nature or chemistry. That, in reaching out to her with love and will and magic, I’d woken in her something that should have stayed asleep.

I considered it with terror, I imagined it with pride. Across the years the anxiety dimmed but it never blinked out. And when she was six, Ivy proved my suspicions correct.





CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT



The suburbs

Back then

Ivy Chase was six years old. She loved ducks and drawing and butterscotch pie and, lately, the purple bounce house she’d jumped in at her friend Shawna’s birthday party.

Every night since then she’d fallen asleep fast, so she could spend more time in the bounce house dream. She’d been perfecting it for a week and tonight it was glorious. The house was as sheer and daunting as a ship. The air smelled like funnel cake. The grass was so plush she bent to run her palms over the rubbery-soft blades. If her mom could just see how awesome this was, she would understand Ivy’s birthday party needed a bounce house, too.

Still inside the dream, Ivy’s body pulsed with a thrilling realization. There was no reason Mom couldn’t see this. She was right across the hall.

Ivy had begun to suspect that her dreamlife—vast, lucid, entirely moldable, though she wouldn’t have used any of those words—was unusual. It was Aunt Fee who tipped her off. Ivy was going on and on about a dream she’d made, and auntie’s face was going stiller and stiller. When Ivy broke off, uneasy, her aunt smiled.

“That’s awesome,” she’d said. “Tell me about another one.” But Ivy said she couldn’t remember any more.

She wasn’t thinking about that right now. Within her dreamworld she was queen. She could, if she wished to, turn the grass blue or make the cloudless sky rain Dippin’ Dots, or have a puppy run right out of the bounce house and into her arms. There was no reason she shouldn’t be able to reach her mother, too.

She could, when she concentrated, feel her mom across the hall. That was one of the nicest things about dreaming: even though they weren’t with her, Ivy could feel Mom, Dad, and Hank asleep. They were three different kinds of warmth.

Standing in the velvet shadow of the bounce house, she closed her eyes and felt for the blue, bottom-of-the-fire heat that was her sleeping mother.

There. Ivy got hold of her. She tugged, and she didn’t even have to tug that hard. Her mother stepped into the dream.

Her face was vacant. She stood on the grass, eyes clicking emptily from one thing to the next, squinting away from the sun. Then they clicked onto Ivy.

“Hi, Mom.”

Her mother’s pupils spread like ink spots. She opened her mouth and Ivy heard two sutured screams: one in the dream and one out of it, across the hall.

The shock woke her up. Also the noise. A breath, two, then her mom flew in wearing a tank top and underpants, her hair streaming like a Valkyrie’s. Ivy’s eyes were open but Mom still put a hand to her heart, like she wouldn’t believe her daughter was okay until she felt it beating. Then she scooped Ivy into her arms.

“How did you do that?” she asked in a fierce whisper.

“I don’t know,” Ivy whispered back. Then, defensively, “Do what?”

Mom pulled away, sliding the backs of her fingers over her wet cheeks. Ivy could see her thinking.

Then, slowly, Mom’s eyelids shut. Her mouth was loose and her head drifted on her neck like seaweed. Ivy watched her, heart running like a rabbit. At least a full minute passed, then Mom opened her eyes.

“Did you lose that watch Dad gave you?”

Ivy felt confused, then annoyed. Her dad had let her borrow his diving watch for a game, and yes, she’d lost it, but that had nothing to do with anything.

“Hey.” Mom tapped her knee. “You’re not in trouble, Ivy-girl. I’m just … here, I’ll show you.”

She moved like a wading bird through the low sea of golden nightlight, then crouched in front of the bookshelf. On the bottom row, lying horizontally across the tops of the other books, was a copy of The Westing Game. Mom picked it up and pulled the watch from its pages.

Ivy looked between her and the watch, trying to find the trick. “How’d you know it was there?”

“How’d you pull me into your dream?”

Ivy set her jaw. “You first.”

Mom smiled. Really smiled, the with-teeth kind that made your belly feel warm as a dragon’s. Until right then Ivy still thought she was in trouble.

“Tomorrow morning,” Mom said, “we’ll both tell each other how we did it. Deal?”

They shook on it. The next day, Ivy’s second life began.





CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE



The suburbs

Back then

“Some kinds of magic are for everyone. Growing things, the weather. The moon belongs to all of us. Fingernails, spit. You can keep yourself like a garden.”

I wouldn’t tell Ivy yet about the weeding you had to do. There was enough of me in her that she’d find out for herself soon enough.

“Some kinds of magic are just for you—the magic that grows in your blood. Everyone is a well fed by different springs, different traditions. Folk magic, myth magic, we’ve got lots of that in our tree. You have to be careful, you’ve gotta keep your eyes off other people’s paper. Your aunt and I…” Here I tiptoed around the great ravine at the center of everything I ever told my daughter. “We learned when we were young not to siphon off springs that don’t belong to us.”