By a Charm and a Curse(45)

Lately, I’ve felt more comfortable spending the evenings in her tiny wagon. When I’m there, with her, I feel calm. Sated. Home. And I don’t think I realized that until this very second.

Mom takes my silence for compliance and hands me the keys to the truck. “Bring the Chevy around and we’ll hitch up. I’ll explain things to Leslie.”

The keys sit in my palm, the heavy pewter keychain in the shape of Arkansas glinting dully in the light. I breathe in deep and that sets off a twinge of pain, but I do my best to ignore it. “No, Mom.”

Immediately I see her mouth open to argue and I backtrack. “I mean, let’s talk. Yes, the world out there is dangerous. And so is the carnival. The charm does keep us safe, and it has for years. But I got this”—I lift up the hem of my shirt to show her the slick white scar I still have from the car accident that killed Dad—“out there, not here. Whiskey was hurt. But that doesn’t mean I’ll be hurt, too.”

Her eyes are pinched at the corners, and I know she’s not convinced.

“All I’m saying is that we have to play the odds. And it seems to me that the odds are better in here rather than out there. Right?”

She slowly sinks down onto the box she just closed up and drops the roll of packing tape to the ground. Some intangible thing inside her is broken, or at the very least shaken.

“Mom, I’m not some fragile little thing, okay? I don’t know what it’s like to look at someone you love lying in a hospital bed, but that’s in the past.” I kneel down in front of her. The ground is cool and the chill seeps through my jeans immediately, centering me. Suddenly I feel everything is going to be all right; Mom will stay, I’ll help Emma break the curse, and everything will work out one way or another. It has to.

It has to.





Chapter Twenty


Emma


Leslie presses her fingers to her forehead, smoothing the furrows creasing her brow. “So Katarina possessed the twins and told you she can help? And you believe it? Believe it enough to completely change our course?”

Leslie stares at me, last night’s stage makeup still sitting in the fine lines around her eyes, and she looks so weary. I glance down at the flat, anonymous backs of my hands. They have the same vague shape my hands did before, but they’re so pale and almost…generic. Like this is what hands should look like, not necessarily what my hands should look like. Never would I have thought that one day I’d find myself missing the lines, cracks, and creases that make my hands mine.

“I believe her.”

Leslie sighs and her gaze darts around the camper, lingering on the poster for the carnival with a painting of Sidney in the box. After a long stretch of silence, she pulls a stack of maps out of the same cupboard that had held the giant leather-bound book. Some are decades old, some only days, it seems like. One of them has trails traced out in faded strands of embroidery floss, marking into the paper the paths the carnival made each year. Many paths of thread are so old that the colors start to all look like they’re the same creamy beige. Finally, she finds a giant one of Texas and another of Louisiana.

She lines them up on her small table, folded over to show just the half of Texas that we’re in and the part of Louisiana we want to be in. My heart sinks when I see the inches marking the hundreds of miles standing between Round Rock and New Orleans. Why couldn’t the twins’ magic grandmother live a few inches closer?

“The plan,” Leslie says, “had been to take the I-35 down to I-10, and then drive west. New Mexico, Arizona, all those places would have been warmer for you, at least during the day. But now—” She hovers in close over the map, picking out much, much smaller highways and farm roads. “Now we’ll head the opposite direction. We’ll still have to make stops—performing means money, and money keeps this carnival moving—but we’ll get there.”

She has me bring over the coffee tin full of markers and pens and highlighters, and she begins to plot out a path, turning miles of highway bright pink.

“We’ll cut down to Houston and follow I-10 in the other direction. We’ll stop here.” She marks a small dot on the messy sprawl that is Houston. “And here—” Another town, the much smaller Orange, Texas, another mark. “Before we cross into Louisiana. And that’s if we can get the permits we’ll need. Saundra usually does that for me and she’s already headed toward Arizona. I’ll have to call her back.” After marking out our stops along the freeway, she drops the highlighter into the tin with a clatter and pushes her platinum curls off her face. She stares down at the maps as she talks. “It’ll take weeks, Emma. At least. And that’s with no snags.”

I look at the line marked out in drying ink. When you factor in all the stops we have to make—one day for set up, a minimum of three days in a town, another day for tear down—we are at least a month away. But then I look past the top of the map of Texas, up in the vague place where my hometown would be, where my dad and brothers and Juliet are. I look at my hands and the way they twitch. And I think about how I want to kiss Benjamin with lips that are mine, with a mouth that will mold into a new shape with his. A shape that’s only ours.

“Yes,” I say.

She glances down at the maps again. Her eyes flit from here to there, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Leslie knew every gas station and pit stop and road marker along the way. “I’ll tell Saundra, let her know about the change of plans. I doubt that anyone besides you and me and Sidney will figure out what’s going on.”