Our Crooked Hearts(74)

Someone speaks in your ear. Ivy. Strong girl, clever girl. Make yourself into a fortress. Make yourself into an ark. You’re a safe, you’re a sailboat, you’re a hot-air balloon. Hold tight to your edges. You’re a raincoat.

You don’t know how you do it, but you do: you tuck your mind away. You make it weathertight. You tread the flood and like Prospero you find on it an isle: a memory so clear and crystal-cut you can beach yourself on its shores, and rest.

Freckles. That’s what comes.

You’re little enough that your hair hangs down your back, uncut. You forgot how heavy it was. You’re wearing overalls that belonged to your brother and a T-shirt with a hole at the neck and you’re crouched in the spring dirt. There’s a sticky patch at the corner of your lip that you touch your tongue to absently. Maple syrup.

A boy is watching you. Yesterday there was a moving truck parked across the street and today a boy with curly brown hair and freckles and a Peter Pan smile. He’s spying from the gap in the fence line.

You’re young, but old enough to know the capital R Rule: Don’t let anyone see the things you can do. They belong to a world that belongs to you (and your mother, and your aunt) and you don’t show anyone, not ever. Not your soccer friends or your recess friends or your nature camp friends, and if Hank asks any questions you send him straight to me.

But it’s spring now, this very day. You could feel the change when you woke up. That limbering of the world’s bones, every branch and bud humming with promise. The season has an impatience to it that makes the working easy. The sun isn’t fully up and the rest of the block shouldn’t be either, but here’s this grinning stranger, just your size and lit up with curiosity like a Christmas bulb.

He kneels beside you. You should try to hide what you were doing, to deny it, but you’re too proud, too hungry to share this secret: that you can do things other people can’t.

Laid out in front of you is a patch of clover. With touch and will you’re giving each clover new ambitions, coaxing them into unfurling a lucky fourth leaf. The luckiest among them have five. You comb your fingers through and find one, give it to him.

Holy moly, he says, in his scratchy voice like Peppermint Patty’s. Show me again.

From the start, you and Billy were magic.

It’s always summer with him. Flashlights and frogs and the burn in your legs as you chase the ice-cream truck. Even your winter memories have the molten texture of June. It starts with magic—with yours, showing off at last; he has no aptitude—but after a while magic isn’t the point anymore. Not the doing of it, just the secret. It binds you together more tightly than a spit pact, it gives your expanding play world shadows and deep ravines.

Most days you’re just silly. Most days you ride bikes and build forts and buy massive bags of Jelly Bellies at the mall and eat them at the movies. But some days you show him the things you can do and he watches with awe and no jealousy, the two of you glowing with your gift.

And wound through all of it, a rising awareness that plays in you like a song. A shimmer that grows into a feeling no word can hold.

And then, at last, a kiss. In the creek, in the violet hour. Wet lashes and freckles and Popsicle mouths.

You want to balance here, inside this pretty summer dream, but the flood takes you away. Now the way grows rockier, and you remember things it wasn’t so bad to forget.

Hanging over a mirror, tracing its surface with a fingertip, your heart beating delicate dread. Because you love your mother. She’s your mother, impatient and wry. The green tree you shelter beneath; a tough nut to crack. But she’s a liar, too. She has secrets, gaps in her history she thinks she’s so good at hiding. She wants you to turn down the dial on your magic, to dole it out in teaspoons. If you could just confront her, dig up proof she wasn’t always the good witch she pretends to be, maybe she’d finally tell you all the things you’re dying to know. Maybe she’d stop clipping your wings.

On a late summer night you pluck a big piece of magic off your mother’s don’t even think about it shelf and you make yourself a scrying glass. From its depths rises a phantom rendered in shades of butter and ice, whispering to you. I am your mother’s secret.

Your mother’s secret will be bigger than you thought it would be. It will be more than you wanted to know. But your curiosity is just a little bit louder than the warning bells ringing in your head.

I knew your mother, says the pale-lipped ghost. I was young with her. All the years since then I’ve been pacing the halls of Hell. Would you like to know how I got here?

You love your mother. You’re old enough to know she’s imperfect and smart enough to name some of her flaws and sure you see her as clearly as anyone could.

Until you learn what she did, and it alters you like a chemical reaction.

You’re close to the end now. The flood of memories is ebbing, it’s only knee-high.

That last fight with your mother, words popping between you like firecrackers. Her arms folded, her face closed and weary, then flaring with horror and revelation.

She puts the golden box into your hands. Its cool metal turns to something living when it meets your blood, a wicked mouth that wicks you up. Your mother’s eyes are wet and full of remorse, like the killer who cries as their dagger goes in.

The box strips away the best and strangest pieces of you. It shaves you down into a different girl. Your mother makes you into someone who is easy, and then finds herself incapable of loving what she’s made.