The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)(37)
We park on the street and head up the fairly new ramp to the porch. Vic and his brothers, plus a handful of nieces and nephews, got together to build it after Marlene had to admit she needed her walker more often than not and the ramp would be easier than stairs. We helped, too, and afterward we laughed and watched all the grandkids carefully dip their hands into trays of paint and press them against the side of the ramp. It’s one of a number of small changes around and in the house, most of which started not long after her strokes.
They’re not serious strokes—not like Shira’s father’s—but they’re small and somewhat frequent and have a way of clustering together. Marlene is in her nineties, but she’s always seemed twenty years younger, healthy and active and still teasing her children at every opportunity. Now she’s slowing down, her age growing more apparent. Anything Vic can do to make things a little easier or more comfortable for her, he’s going to do. And with the ramp already in place for the walker, it’s also there for the wheelchair she has to use the first week or so after a stroke, and increasingly more often as time goes by, however much she fights it.
Jenny Hanoverian, Vic’s wife, greets us at the front door, a Virginia hostess to her bones. She thanks us for coming, asks us how we are, kisses us all on the cheek, tugs Bran down by his coat for a second round when he squirms the first time, and scolds me for going out with wet hair in this weather, all in one breath. We peek into the kitchen first, with the coat closet right beside it, and find Marlene sitting on a high-backed stool near the long counter, guiding Victoria-Bliss through shaping a raw pastry shell. Victoria-Bliss has the tip of her tongue pinched between her teeth in concentration, eyes narrowed . . . and her feet planted on a step stool so she can comfortably work on the counter, because she’s all of five-foot-nothing when she swells with fury. Even Cass is taller by an inch or so, which cheers Cass immensely.
Bran eyes the step stool and visibly decides not to comment. Instead, we put away our coats and hats and retreat to the living room.
Vic is in his comfortable armchair, the leather faded in places from years of regular use, Ian next to him on a matching chair, while Inara and Priya press together on the loveseat. The girls—women, really, they’re twenty-five—look up and grin in greeting. Priya’s added more color to her hair since the last time we saw her in person, leaving only about half of her hair black and the other half swirling through four or five different shades of blues. A blue-and-clear crystal stud set in silver glitters at one nostril, matched by a similar bindi between dark eyes lined with perfect black wings and soft silver-and-white shadows. As always, her mouth is a bold slash of red, a challenge and a snarl no matter what the rest of her face is doing. A thin silver band loops over the center of her lower lip, something she picked up from her mother.
Inara is nearly the same height, with pale brown eyes and the golden-brown skin of her mother’s Polynesian ancestry. She doesn’t have Priya’s expressiveness, but rather sits back to watch and observe before deciding what reaction she’s going to allow to show. That trait softens somewhat here in Vic’s house, in the suite he built for the girls over his garage so they would always have someplace to stay, but it’s always going to be a part of her. Her dark hair is long enough for an inch or two to pool around her thighs on the cushion.
They’re a striking pair, a striking group when Victoria-Bliss is with them, with her frost-pale skin and a mass of curls so deep a black they look nearly blue in some lights, her eyes so blue they almost look violet. The Gardener did so love to collect lovely girls. These three are beautiful and fierce and fully capable of savaging anyone who thinks to know them by those looks alone. They’re formidable, wonderful friends to have.
“Rush out to see us, did you?” Priya asks, biting back a snicker.
“I needed to wash my hair but didn’t have the time to dry it.” I sprayed it with detangler when I pulled it out of the towel, but I wish I’d thought to throw that in the bag with the brush, because I’m pretty sure the knit cap just leeched it all out. I attack the ends and barely get an inch in when Bran takes the brush from my hand and sits on the arm of the long couch where Ksenia and Mercedes are sitting.
He points in front of him, using the brush.
“I can brush my own hair.”
“Not if you’re doing that to it.”
Inara and Priya lean into each other to muffle their giggles. They’re fully grown adults, hard-working professionals, but here with this cobbled-together family, they act more like the teenagers they never really got to be, too shaped by their experiences to be young.
I give up and stand in front of Bran. If he needs to take care of someone right now—even if that means being a little smothering—okay. I can deal.
“He used to be the best hair braider in his neighborhood,” Ian says, and the girls pop up like meerkats to regard him. They can always smell a story. “I’d come to pick him up on a Saturday morning and there’d be a line of little girls on the porch.”
I don’t even have to look behind me to know that Bran’s blushing. Of course he is.
“Did he charge them?” asks Inara.
“Just a hug and a thank-you.”
“Sometimes the mamás would send along food,” Bran mumbles. As if braiding hair for food was more macho than doing it for affection.
Inara smiles slightly, sadly—more at the sight of Bran doing the work than at the braided crown that forms the end result. All the Butterflies in the Garden used to have to keep their hair up so the massive wings the Gardener tattooed on their backs wouldn’t be covered, and they got very good at doing each other’s hair. Simple when they just needed it up, intricate when they were bored, which was often. Sometimes, when the memories are raw and more painful than usual, the survivors can’t stand to have anyone touch their hair, can’t have it up at all.