Our Crooked Hearts(84)
The stars were watching us again. Really watching us, their alien gazes prickly sharp. It was a sky identical to the one I’d almost drowned beneath, panicking in the swimming pool after I opened the golden box.
Billy planted his feet beside mine and put his arms around my waist. “Let’s wake up now, okay?”
I nodded, focusing on my breaths. Then I looked down at the water and cried out. The vivid blue creek was gone. We were submerged waist deep in pliant mirror glass.
“Look at me.” Billy’s voice was soothing, firm. He was the solid point around which the dream pulsed. I clung to him.
“Let’s wake up,” he said.
And we did.
Outside the tree house the mourning doves were calling their peaceful calls and the sky looked like silver paper. I rolled over and buried my face in his chest. “I’m sorry,” I said, muffled.
He kissed my temple. “Nothing to be sorry for.”
We held on until the last possible second. Then we climbed down from the tree house and parted ways at the gate, to sneak back into our beds.
* * *
Three weeks had passed since the longest night of my life. I kept an eye on the news, but so far nothing had come up that fit any description of Marion: no unexplained mysteries, no wandering amnesiacs found, no prodigal, supernaturally ageless daughters returned.
For my family it was three weeks of a new kind of honesty, which—in the interest of total honesty—wasn’t entirely a good thing. My dad thrived in the new normal, all of us alive and together and the worst of our secrets flushed out of hiding. For Hank, though, looking reality in the face was an adjustment. He walked around all dazzled and skittish, like he’d accidentally stared straight at the sun.
And then there was my mom and me. I guessed things would be weird between us for a while. Too much had been revealed at once. But she tried. She was trying.
The thing that worked best was for us to not speak. To work together, side by side. Little spells, mainly, magic for children. Things she’d taken from me, that Marion helped me get back. Sometimes Aunt Fee was with us and sometimes we were alone.
On the other side of everything, we were not okay. But maybe someday we would be.
I had this superstitious idea that by the time my bleached hair grew out, I’d have forgiven her. In my vision of this future, we matched again. Mother and daughter, two red-haired witches side by side. I could look at her and see the mother who did love me, forgive the complicated woman who’d messed it up. She could reach for me without shame, and I could take her hand without compromise. In this dream I had.
So I waited, and let my hair grow.
* * *
I climbed into bed exhausted. My mouth was so flushed, so obviously crushed with kissing, I’d have to hide out a while.
In a few hours I’d see Billy again. We were meeting Amina and Emily at Denny’s for breakfast, then he was dropping me and my bike downtown to go job hunting. He’d offered to put a word in at Pepino’s, but I didn’t think it was the right move to work with my boyfriend. I rolled over, smiling, then stopped.
The room was gray and mild and there was something in it that didn’t belong there.
Delicately I rolled from bed, crouched in front of my bookshelf, and pulled the something out from where it was wedged between Lunch Poems and The Dark Is Rising. It was smaller than the other books, its spine blank. On the shelf it had looked like a lean black gap.
I wondered when Marion had left it for me. A little over three weeks ago, I guessed, when she broke in and took the golden box. It must have been sitting here all the days since, waiting for me to see it.
It was new, the kind of unlined book you’d find at a fancy stationary shop, bound in black leather. I didn’t open it right away. There might be things inside it that were dangerous just to look at, to read in your head. But in the end, of course, I flipped back its cover.
The Book of Marion Peretz, it read on the first page. Just seeing her last name, that sliver of new information, sent a charge through me.
It was an occultist’s book, half full, its pages scrawled thickly with inked notes, rhymes, rough-sketched sigils. She must’ve spent hours pouring her knowledge into this book, for me.
I should burn it. My mom still believed magic could be poisonous, tainted like blood after a snakebite. While I didn’t fully believe that, I knew far too well there were spells you didn’t cast, forces you didn’t mess with.
I should burn it. I should run across the hall right now and give it to my mother. I wondered again when Marion had snuck it onto my shelf, and how I could’ve overlooked it for weeks.
In the end I tucked it at the very back of my bottom dresser drawer, among all my hibernating autumn sweaters.
When I lay back down I thought about Marion, who’d watched me through a scrying glass all my life. Whose memories of me were locked inside a golden box, which was itself now stashed in a safety deposit box at the bank, until my mom and I could brush up on better ways to secure it.
Marion was gone now, and wouldn’t know me even if I stood right in front of her. But before I hid her book away something made me hold a hand up to the air. In recognition, in farewell, in some kind of messed-up gratitude.
Just in case.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my agent, Faye Bender, for your warm heart, cool head, and general brilliance. Thank you to my editor, Sarah Barley, for walking through this new world with me, and for your rock-steady faith in your authors’ voices, ideas, and ability to tell the sometimes very strange stories we want to tell.