Page 17 of Our Crooked Hearts
CHAPTER EIGHT
The suburbs
Right now
I sat on my bed, sifting through the cigar box.
There were familiar things, of course. A green-paste gemstone from my old paper dress-up crown, a ticket stub from the time my aunt took me—just me—to seeHamilton.A marbled guitar pick my dad had given me, strung on thin ribbon, and a fountain pen with a cobalt cartridge.
But I couldn’t remember where I’d picked up the flat black stone, roughly circular with an eraser-width hole straight through its center. Or the four-leaf clover, dried and pressed beneath a piece of Scotch tape. I looked closer; it was afive-leaf clover. I must’ve taped the extra leaf in. There was a ring of tree branch the width and thickness of a dollar coin, a stump of white candle, a rubber-banded hank of red hair. Mine? My mother’s? I ran a palm over my bleached head.
I was about to pack everything away when I saw the paper at the very bottom, folded to the size of the box’s interior. Just its grain against my fingers was familiar. Even before I opened it I knew it was a sheet from one of my old sketchbooks.
It was a pencil drawing, a pretty good one. In it a boy in jeans and bare feet cradled an armful of white gardenias, smiling with closed eyes. His freckles were rendered as a smear of stars.
I touched a finger to the drawing. The ruffled Degas skirts of the flowers, the boy’s dreamy smile. I’d captured that, somehow. But what had moved me to make—much lesssave—a drawing of Billy Paxton?
I checked the date. I’d drawn it the summer before seventh grade, just a few months before the Embarrassing Incident that marked the first and, until the other night, last time Billy and I ever spoke. His face in my sketchbook—distant, serene—clashed with my crystal-etched memory of the way he’d looked at me that day, hot-eyed and almost hateful.
I must have seen him from across the street before I drew this. Gotten his face caught in my head and exorcised it on a wave of white petals.
I studied the drawing, then each object I’d pulled out before it, panning for any clue as to why the box had been hidden. But there were no answers here. Just another mystery.
Why?While washing my face, getting dressed, eating a Pop-Tart from a box labeledHANK’S POP-TARTS, I asked myself the question. Why lock up a child’s treasure box? I kept bouncing up, pacing, sitting down again. Until finally I got sick of yelling at my mother in my head.
I had to face her now, today. Because rightnowI could still feel her slender fingers squeezing mine, pressing me back ontothe bed. I could taste the weird sizzle of the gold. There was a flame in my head, I couldn’t let it burn out.
I set off through the heat feeling fragile as sugar glass. Biking across the back ends of parking lots, through dusty stands of Queen Anne’s lace. Bathing in the shuffle of passing radios and teetering along the rims of retention ponds, hoping nobody winged a Big Gulp at me out a car window.
I was glazed in sweat by the time I hit Woodbine’s downtown stretch. It was six blocks of stores and restaurants and coffee shops, plus a two-screen movie theater and the hilarious Lounge Le Bleu, where people who wanted to pretend they were in the city went to drink cocktails stuck with glow-in-the-dark swizzle sticks.
My mom and aunt’s shop was sandwiched between two fancy candy stores and just below a dance studio, so there were always footfalls shaking the ceiling. As I rolled up I could hear the tinny sounds of a recorded symphony drifting from the studio’s open windows.
But the Small Shop’s window was dark. When I yanked the door, it didn’t give.
The day was so bright I couldn’t make out its interior, even when I cupped my hands to the glass. I scanned the posted hours, though I knew them by heart. The shop should’ve opened at ten.
A cobbled corridor ran between the Small Shop and Vanilla Fudge, decked with cast-iron lanterns. I hurried beneath them, glad for the first time that I was forced into service as a gift wrapper during the shop’s holiday rush—I had a copy of its employee-door key.
I let myself into the cellar coolness of the back room. Nobody there, but the lights were on.
“Hello? Mom?”
No answer. It was cluttered back here, but organized. I scanned the shelves, the tidy piles of stock, the rolling mail crate where they kept unopened product samples—slivers of chocolate made beneath the harvest moon, minerals you rubbed on your face, magazines featuring Scandinavian women in recycled overalls telling you why you should feed your babies raw honey. All sorts of goofy shit.
The Small Shop was named for Aunt Fee’s theory of small good things: everything they sold was meant to provide a small good, a slight adjustment that would make your life better. Usually it smelled like herbs and organic oolong, plus whatever aggressive candle they had going on the counter, but today the air was acrid, unpleasant. It coated my tongue. I looked around for something to rinse my mouth and found an iced coffee cup sweating atop a filing cabinet, Aunt Fee’s dark lipstick ringing the straw. I touched a knuckle to its beading side. Still cold.
“Mom?” I said again. “Aunt Fee?”
I threw the rest of the lights and walked into the empty shop. Everything out here was mellow white or the wind-blasted gray of driftwood. Against it all the products stood out like art pieces. My eye went straight to the rust-colored smear in front of the counter.
Blood. Too big for a nosebleed, too small to start looking for a body. A tuft of hair was smeared into it. I moved closer and it became something else, with a distinctive ombre of brown and gray. Rabbit fur.
There was a pressure in my head, climbing. Not quite pain, not yet.
I turned, sped through the shop’s back door, out onto the suburban concrete. Kneeling in the anemic shade of a lamppost, my lungs all clotted with sugared air, I called my mother.
The call went straight to voicemail. She was forever leaving her phone in the car, letting it die, allowing her voicemail box to fill up.
