The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(21)

“We could live on a farm. We’ve still got money left over from the Hazel Wood sale, enough to live on while we wait to sell this place. We could live in a place with red rocks, where you can see the Milky Way. We could finally get a dog.”

I breathed in and out before I answered. “We can’t keep doing this. Promising me rocks and dogs—it’s not enough for us to keep doing this.”

She lifted her chin, looked me in the aching eyes. “I once promised you a whole world. Did I not make good on that promise?”

“I can’t move again,” I said. “I can’t.”

Because my life here wasn’t just blood and violence and secrets I didn’t want to keep. It was walking over the bridge with Sophia at two a.m. It was hiding a deck of vintage playing cards in the books on Edgar’s shelves, little unsigned notes to fifty-two buyers. It was having the world’s best Danish on Church Street and the world’s worst coffee on Cortelyou and seeing the divot in my bedroom wall from all the times I’d opened the door too hard, a divot that was mine, in a room that was mine, in a city that belonged to no one but at least you could borrow it, in pieces, and pretend it loved you back.

“So what do we do? Just go on like this? On and on like this?” She stalked over to the junk drawer, where rubber-banded takeout menus bred like rabbits. Yanked it open, pulled out a shiny-covered something and held it up.

It was a college brochure. Two sweatered people laughed together over their books, a manicured lawn glowing green around them. She pushed the bottom edge of it hard into my chest.

“Look at this.” She was half laughing, but her face was wet. “I look at these things all the time when you’re not home. I hide them like they’re porn. It’s not even—you don’t have to go to college if you don’t want to. I just want you to act like you’re here, act like you’ll be here, start putting down some roots with me.” She cupped my face in her hands. “Or not with me. Whatever you need. Alice. My god, what more needs to happen for you to stay away from them?”

I put my hand over hers and slid it gently from my face. Then I stepped back.

“Mama.” She stood up straighter when I said the word. I hadn’t said it in years. “What more needs to happen for you to understand that I am them?”

Smoke played like ghosts over the ceiling. The morning light was a lie. And my mother was a forlorn figure in a room where she lived with a girl who was only a figment, really.





11


She wouldn’t let me touch her. Her hand or her cheek or the ends of her black hair. My mother pressed herself small against the counter so I couldn’t reach her. Finally I left the kitchen, stumbling down the hall to my room.

I was parched and starving. I had to pee, and pain sawed at me all over. But after twenty-four hours without it, sleep took me down.

I woke up shaking.

I was hot, then cold, then both at once. The midday light through the blinds was heavy, pouring over me in scalding stripes. I was too weak to roll away.

“Mom,” I said. But the apartment was empty. I could feel it.

Infection. My attacker’s nails that had sliced over me, there must’ve been something on them. It took three tries to pull up my shirt. My ribs looked like shit, the Band-Aids puffed with blood, but the skin around them seemed okay.

My shoulder itched. I scratched through my T-shirt, then under the fabric, finally dragging it over my head. A Hinterland flower was tattooed up my arm, and it itched. The tattoo was years old, it didn’t make sense. The itching deepened to a burn.

I lay down for just a minute, closed my eyes. When I opened them, the light had changed. Time had come unstuck, hours passing without my seeing them go.

Something was wrong with me. It wasn’t just my injuries, I was sick. I thought of ice water gliding down my throat, soaked into a compress laid across my head. I pictured my phone where I’d left it, with my keys by the door. Tears slid over my temples.

It got worse every hour. By early evening I was twisting under the sheets, watching leaf shadows play on the walls. I had to close my eyes and turn away when they became little faces, winking at me.

When my mother finally walked in, I thought she was a hallucination, too. Her face was stricken, her hand on my forehead cool.

“What is this?” she said. “You’re burning up. You.”

I’d never been sick. Never, not once. I’d sprained an ankle, gotten a concussion, been hungover, had headaches, broken a rib once, vomited from bad shrimp tacos, and gouged the absolute shit out of my chin on a coffee table, but I’d never even had a cold. Ella crouched beside me.

“Do we need to go to the emergency room?”

She sounded so young. She had no script for this. Everything she’d dealt with, raising me alone, almost losing me, she’d never had to figure out a sick kid. “No, I’m—” I pushed up a few inches, tasting something in the back of my throat. Something bilious and thin. “I need water. And something to throw up in.”

She brought what I’d asked for, plus a sleeve of crackers and a skimpy sampling from our medicine cabinet. Her steady hands propped me up with pillows, fed me water and crackers and aspirin, and touched a hydrogen peroxide–soaked cotton ball to my chin. I thought of Daphne patching up my ribs, then giving them a slap. The image broke as Ella climbed into bed with me and took my hand.