Page 82 of Our Crooked Hearts
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The suburbs
Back then
There was a moment just before Ivy came when the whole world went porous. When the weave of it stretched and I could see the great yawp of nothing behind and I stopped being afraid because I couldfeelher. She needed me to be brave.
There’s object magic, sympathetic magic, spells you cook or coax or speak into being. Luminous magic and magic so cruel that to wield it is to wrap your fist around a blade with no hilt. And there’s magic born out of pure will, voiceless. No, notpure:will muddied and thickened with grief and terror, and love in all its forms.
With all my compromised will, and all my callused heart, I reached for the creature swimming, struggling at the center of me.
Come,I said to it.Little one, come.
The thing—baby—twitched in its casing. It was afraid. I knew what it was afraid of and I glared again at that panting black-eyed dog.Not yet,I told it. The force of the thought made it cower in its corner.Someday, someday. But not yet.
The creature turned once on the floor. Then it slipped, smoke-like, through the world’s loosened weave. When it was gone I spoke again to my child.Come. I’ll keep you safe. If you’ll come.
Ivy came. With a rooster-red comb-over and the scathing eyes of someone looking to lodge a complaint about allthis,everything, the big and the bright and the cold. She couldn’t cry right away, the cord looped around her throat like a two-strand necklace, but I knew we would live.
When they finally put her in my arms I thought of wishbone halves and walnut shells.Loosen your grip,I told myself, on reflex—never wanting Hank to feel smothered, never wanting Rob to worry I’d die of it if he got fed up and left me—but she was so new she couldn’t even see me. I held on as tightly as I wished.
It came to me at night. In those endless early days, in those fragile starlit hours. When I nursed before dawn, the only person awake in the world, the fear of what I might have done rolled over me. That I could havealteredIvy somehow, her nature or chemistry. That, in reaching out to her with love and will and magic, I’d woken in her something that should have stayed asleep.
I considered it with terror, I imagined it with pride. Across the years the anxiety dimmed but it never blinked out. And when she was six, Ivy proved my suspicions correct.
