Our Crooked Hearts(69)

Her self-pity brought all of Ivy’s fury roaring back. “I’m gonna do what you should’ve done twenty years ago,” she said. “I’m bringing Marion home.”

The name hit Mom like a hand grenade. “Ivy,” she said wretchedly. “There is no bringing back the dead.”

“The dead?” Ivy frowned. “Marion’s not dead.”





CHAPTER FORTY-THREE



The suburbs

Back then

I felt a great unraveling.

The truth tore through me and it ripped every stitch I’d made from that day to this: from the minute I’d pushed Marion through the mirror and given her up gratefully for dead, to right now, watching my child confirm what I’d refused to believe.

I felt myself reaching for magic. Words to calm my racing heart, to make every breakable thing in this room burst. But magic was what had opened the doors in the first place, and let the wolves come in.

Ivy didn’t see that I’d been shattered. She saw me the way I’d taught her to: as a stoic, as a foe, someone to love and rage against, to trade half-truths with.

“The thing is, Mom, you can’t stop me,” she was saying. Not taunting but coldly certain, her voice pulling me back to the here and now. “I’m bringing her back. All I need is a mirror. You think you can hide every mirror from me every day for the rest of my life?” Now she let a smirk in. She was too young, too strong, she couldn’t help herself. “You can’t do shit.”

My vision went bright with anger and very very clear, like I was looking at the world through red Saran Wrap. She was twelve years old. Sheltered, self-righteous, threatening me with a living nightmare.

What Ivy brought back wouldn’t be Marion. It might be shaped like her, but all the parts you couldn’t see would be twisted, broken, sucked dry across the unfathomable years. She would be a monster.

But—to know she was out there, and do nothing. That would make me the monstrous one.

“Magic that big would break you,” I said in a voice I barely recognized. “It would grind your bones for its bread.”

She blinked. Good. She should be scared. She should be terrified.

“You can’t—” she began, a little wobbly, and I cut her off.

“Can’t stop you. I heard you the first time.”

Because Ivy was right, I’d have a hell of a time stopping her. I’d have to lock her up to keep her from tearing her mind and body to pieces trying to wield whatever terrible spell Marion had whispered through the mirror. She was so much stronger than me.

But there was one thing in this house that was stronger than her.

I could feel now that it had been waiting for me since I was sixteen. The golden box, a creature that slumbered with half-open eyes. I’d been told long ago I would need it one day. Now that day had come and my whole body felt heavy with sorrow.

It was wrapped in a torn Sleater-Kinney T-shirt, tucked into a shoe box on the top shelf of my closet. When I returned to Ivy’s room her posture was unchanged: shoulders up, fists balled, head down. Her eyes hooked onto the box.

“What’s that?”

I held it out, setting in motion a story that had already been told. “Take it.”

She yanked it from my hands like it was hers to begin with. She looked so much like me. Suspicious and hungry, heart humming so hard you could see it through cotton, skin, bone. She turned the box over, looking for the catch. “What’s inside?”

I was breathing hard. I was the witch with the apple. “Open it. Just needs a drop of blood.”

With her teeth she ripped a cuticle away, leaving a thin white furrow that filled with red.

“Touch it,” I said. “To the box.”

It wasn’t dramatic. The box was solid, then seamed, the lid lifting on a hinge. I thought it would be gold inside, too, but it was lined with a gleaming, rosy-colored wood. The longer I looked the more the color seemed anatomical, its iridescence the queasy sheen you find on deli roast beef.

“I love you,” I said. “And I cannot let you destroy yourself over this.”

My voice was indistinct, my words anodyne. She didn’t seem to hear me.

“I love you,” I repeated.

Then I spoke the incantation.

It had been recited to me once, on Maxwell Street when I was sixteen. I’d written it down, but a couple months later I burned it. It was fossilized in my head alongside Fee’s childhood phone number, the Empire Carpet theme song, the expression on Rob’s face when I told him I was pregnant the first time.

Fury propelled me through the first half. Then it was the sheer terror of using magic to mess with my kid’s brain, and wondering if I could cause literal brain damage if I tried to stop.

I don’t want to take too much away, I told the box. All I want you to hold is her memory of this. All the awful, dangerous things, all these tainted memories of magic.

But everything that matters is a little dangerous. All magic is tainted—tinted, shaped—by something. And the box was a fairy enchantment. I should’ve remembered fairy bargains are poison to the root.

Ivy was still staring into the box when I spoke the incantation’s last thorn-tipped syllable. “What is—” she began, then stopped, eyes flicking to mine, welling with fear.

“Mom?” she whispered.