By a Charm and a Curse(47)
I turn and maneuver to the dinette booth and pull two books from the box beneath it. One is a large leather-bound journal Emma got from Leslie, records of everyone who ever worked for the carnival. The other is newer, but only because the old one had to be transcribed. This journal details the history of the curse, up until about ten years ago. The twins hadn’t updated it, as Sidney hadn’t had any successes or failures worth noting in that time.
I drop down into the booth and crack open the big book. I feel like I should have on those white gloves that people use to handle priceless books from the dawn of time. “I haven’t really—”
“Is this you?” Emma’s in front of the panel that hides our water heater, which Mom has covered in family photos. The picture she’s pointing to is me at about three or four, chubby-cheeked and towheaded and even then I had to wear glasses. My cheeks and neck flush with heat. But luckily Emma has moved on from that one and has bent over to look at another taped a little lower.
In that one, I’m just a toddler, and it’s one of those pictures where I’m supposed to be sitting happily with a mall Santa Claus. Naturally, I’m screaming my head off. The only reason I can see for keeping it is that my dad is in the photo, crouched near Santa, as if his proximity would make being seated next to the strange dude in an acrylic beard any better.
“That your dad?”
The photo has started to yellow around the corners, casting Dad in a strange golden glow. “Yeah. That was about two years before the car accident.”
The playful smile picking up the corners of her mouth falls in a flash, replaced with something more thoughtful, more serious. “You look like him,” she says. “In that picture, he even had a furrow right—” She reaches out and touches between my eyebrows, just over the bridge of my glasses. “Here, like you do sometimes.” Her fingers skim the line of my brow and down my cheek until she’s cupping my jaw in her hand. Even though I know it wouldn’t be the same as kissing a normal girl, all I can think about is what it would be like to pull her in close and press my lips to hers.
The trailer hits a pothole, and when Emma stumbles backward, it’s like instinct to reach out and wrap an arm around her waist, tuck her body close to mine. She looks up at me, so close I can see each delicate eyelash, and my breath catches in my chest because at the same moment that I think she’s going to kiss me another thought runs parallel in my head. Her kiss could curse me.
The thought shatters the bubble I’m in, not because it holds anything close to the truth—Emma told me how complicated it is to transfer the curse—but because it’s so hard to shake the myth I’ve grown up with. She must see something in my eyes, because she pulls away, carefully disentangling from my hold.
I cough and peer at the photographs, stuck dubiously in place by strips of cheap tape, looking for something to back up her earlier assessment. In many of the photos Dad’s smiling, but here and there Mom caught him lost in thought, more serious moments that are now forever trapped between me photographed in various points of parental pride. If I squint and give him glasses and imagine his hair is blonder, Emma’s right. This thought makes me happier than I ever imagined it would. It’s with this extra sort of buoyancy that I begin to flip through Leslie’s massive journal as Emma goes through the one we got from the twins.
But soon enough, the hypnotic thrum of the road and the small, tight handwriting take their toll. I think I’ve read the same page three times in a row. Then Emma slides her hand over until it lines up with mine just so, and suddenly I am awake. Her twitching is particularly bad today, and I feel terrible that the heater in the Airstream isn’t enough to keep it at bay. I try to ignore her twitches the way you would ignore the fact that someone has a terrible scar. It’s not the scar that defines the person, just like her twitching doesn’t define her. In fact, the gentle, irregular tapping becomes kind of a peaceful background noise, like a substitute for her breathing or something.
I find that I’m staring at the way her dark hair curves over and behind her ear. The line where her jaw curves down into her throat. When she turns, her lips are like red, red rubies. Even now, reduced to the simplest lines that make her her, I find Emma beautiful. I don’t know if my brain will be able to process her when she’s herself again.
That’s when we hear the bangs.
They’re in quick succession, two loud and close and three at distances farther out. The Airstream swerves sharply to the right, and it’s only a quick grab onto the table that saves me from falling to the floor. Emma is thrown into me, and I wrap an arm around her, drawing her close. The ground beneath us becomes bumpy, and then we slow to a halt. It takes a second to figure it out, but I quickly realize that it’s the sound of tires being blown. Enough of the cars and trailers must have had a blowout to necessitate the entire caravan stopping.
“Stay hidden,” I say, and I hop out of the trailer to look around for myself. Sure enough, the truck behind us has a flat at the front driver’s side wheel. I walk around to the Chevy to talk to Mom and find that the car in front of us has a flat tire, too, same wheel.
When Mom cranks down the window, there’s a thin veneer of confusion over her already frustrated features. Her talk with Sidney must not be going well.
“I’ve never seen a flat on the line, ever,” she says.
I lean on the door. “It’s the one behind us, too.” Her brow creases. “And I think I heard more blowouts.” It’s almost like I know what she’s thinking before she thinks it. “I’m sure it’s nothing—a construction crew dropped nails and some of the cars picked them up.”