Page 13 of Our Crooked Hearts
The backyard smelled wild, fermented crabapples and wet rosemary and the pungent soil my mom bought by the sackful. I took a trowel from a coil of hose and brushed through the mint plot, where black flies big as thumb joints hovered when the sun was out. When I reached the place I’d seen her brushing the dirt away, I got on my knees and started to dig.
The trowel hit metal a few inches down. It took a while to unearth it: a screw-top jam jar buried vertically in the dirt, empty but for an inch of sludge at the bottom. I held it to the moonlight. Earth, dried herbs, enough blood that I could identify it by the drops adhered to the glass. Stirred into the mess was a piece of broken mirror and a curl of white paper.
From a distance I observed the contents of the jar and the thudding of my own heart. Then I shoved the jar back into the ground and covered it, tramping over the soil until it looked the way she’d left it.
I went straight from the backyard to the shower, no idea what I’d say if she stepped out of her room and saw my dirty knees, my raw fingers.
I was breathing too fast. My vision sizzled, my head felt helium-light. Not because I was scared of what I’d dug up from the garden, but because Iwasn’t. The discovery should have felt alien, appalling. It didn’t. It chimed in grim accord with the feeling I got when she arranged her hands just so, and the certainty I had glimpsing the rabbit’s tooth in her palm.
There was a quiet place at the center of me. A pool of blackwater frozen to a sheen. It was made up of the questions it was easier not to ask, the mysteries I didn’t bother prodding. I’d been letting it thicken as far back as I could recall. Something was moving beneath the ice now. Shifting, making the surface creak, turning it rotten.
You’re so chill,Nate told me once, approvingly.Nothing bothers you.
My dad, indulgently:What happened last night, that wasn’t like you.
And my mother. When she didn’t like the question I asked she pushed me back on the bed, rearranging my hands like I was her doll, like my body didn’t even belong to me. I hadn’t fought back. I made it soeasyfor her; I didn’t say a word.
I was done with that now. Even under the shower’s spray I kept my eyes wide open, so suddenly sick of secrets I couldn’t bear the dark.
