Our Crooked Hearts(8)

Then she was running. Up the drive, through the front door. When she saw me in front of the window, her hands went up. Not in surprise. Not to shield herself. She held her palms straight out, crooking her fingers in a gesture that plucked at my guts like a guitar pick. It was an attitude so unreadable yet so obviously malevolent it sent a bolt of cold thudding down my spine.

Then her face slackened and her hands dropped. “Ivy!” she said. “Your hair!”

I touched it, the ragged white ends that curled at my chin and smelled of chemical.

“I thought…” She was panting. “I didn’t recognize you.”

“Sorry,” I said.

Her eyes wouldn’t settle, on me or anything. She kept pressing two fingers to the hollow of her throat. “Are you alone?”

“Yeah.”

“Have you been here all day?”

“Um. Yes? I’m still grounded, right?”

She came closer. Her eyes were a lucid blue, like lucky Hank’s. She touched her own hair. “You covered the red.”

I shrugged. What, was I supposed to apologize?

“I don’t like it.” Her voice sliced cold and clean. “The blonde looks cheap on you. Between the hair and the lip, you could play one of those dead girls on SVU.”

I bit my cheek and saw her seeing the hurt I couldn’t hide. For a second I thought she might actually acknowledge it.

“I’m going upstairs,” she said instead. “My head’s still not right.”

That was the closest to an apology that I was gonna get.



* * *



She stayed in her room until dinner.

The late light coming into the kitchen made it seem darker. My mom moved forkfuls of takeout around her plate, her right hand smooth and her left scarred from knuckles to wrist. She’d always had those scars but tonight they seemed to stand out, to pulse like swollen veins. It was so strange to me, suddenly, that I’d never been told how she got them.

My dad worked through a pile of gnocchi, struggling to find something nice to say about my hair. Hank kept his eyes on his phone the entire meal. I could tell by his smirk he was texting a guy, and probably not the one he was dating. Hank should not have been granted massive blue eyes and Kaz Brekker cheekbones. It was like giving a toddler a ray gun.

My mom cried out.

We all snapped to, Hank included. She pressed a hand to her mouth, spit something into her palm. A brief glance and she folded her fingers neatly in to hide it.

“Dana?”

She took her time looking back at my dad. Her balled hand was in her lap, the other tight around her water glass. “Hmm?”

He put down his fork. “What was that? What did you just take out of your mouth?”

She watched him steadily. “Shrimp shell.”

“Are you sure? It looked like … could you have cracked a tooth?”

She pulled her lips back in a frozen smile. My brother and I glanced at each other, then away. “How do I look, Rob? Did I lose a tooth and just not notice? It was a shrimp shell.”

“Fine,” he said. That was the last word anyone spoke for the rest of the meal.

She was lying, of course. I’d seen it, too. The thing she’d spit out was a hard yellowish sliver. Not her own tooth, but somebody else’s.

I’d say a rabbit’s.



* * *



It was barely eight when I escaped to my room. I lay in bed sucking on ice cubes, flipping the pages of a graphic novel Richard had loaned me, but I kept seeing my mother. The way she’d looked at me before she knew it was me. The gesture she made with her hands that twanged like a discordant note I’d heard before. And the dead rabbit, the iced shells of its eyes.

“Ivy?” My mom tapped on the door, then opened it.

I swallowed an ice cube, wincing as it ran like an ice-skate blade all the way down. “What’s up?”

“I meant to ask how you’re feeling. Fee told me she gave you some stuff for your lip.”

I hadn’t thought about my lip in a while, because it had stopped hurting. When I pressed a pinky to it, the swelling was almost gone. “Yeah. It helped.”

“Good. So. Your hair.” She rapped again on the doorframe, then walked all the way in. “I think it suits you, actually. It’s very old Hollywood.”

I had zero to say to this bullshit backtrack. I watched as she took a dirty T-shirt off the floor and folded it, placing it on the foot of my bed. That wasn’t like her: my mom didn’t take care of our messes for us. And she didn’t have the kind of nervous hands that made busy work out of nothing.

“The other night,” she said idly, still smoothing the shirt, “you told me Nate swerved.”

“Yeah.”

Now she looked up. “What did he swerve for?”

I smiled at her, no teeth. “A rabbit.”

She watched me steadily and didn’t reply.

The book I’d been reading lay across my chest. I put it aside and leaned toward her, stretching out a hand. Brow furrowed, like she suspected a trap, she reached back.

I caught her hand in mine. Touched a fingertip to a ridge of scar and looked at her questioningly.

She snatched it back. “Stop it.”

“Mom,” I said softly. An hour ago she’d spat another creature’s tooth out of her own mouth. We’d watched her do it, watched her lie without even caring whether any of us believed her. It was like a game of pretend we never stopped playing.