Page 26 of Our Crooked Hearts
CHAPTER TWELVE
The suburbs
Right now
It was nighttime now, and I was laying out the pieces.
A buried jar, a closet safe. Migraines and dead rabbits and the fate of Hattie Carter. And this:So she was one of Sharon’s girls.I’d googled ’Twixt and ’Tween, of course, andsharon twixt and tween, but there were some things even the internet doesn’t know.
There was a word I kept thinking, kept prodding at like a seed caught in my teeth. A word for what it might mean when youdosomething—something that might involve a jar of blood, let’s say—with the expectation that, somewhere else in the world, you’ve made somethinghappen.
Hank’s derisive words came back to me.That’s the kind of thing a New Age white lady does under a full moon.
Okay, yes. But what if—for argument’s sake—what if, in my mother’s case, the moonlistened?
It was ridiculous. If I believed that, I was as bad as the Small Shop’s most codependent customers, those questing souls who poured money into herbs and crystals and my aunt’s remedies, like shiny objects could stave off the dark.
Except: I pressed my lips together to feel the place where my skin had closed. I’d used Aunt Fee’s salve once and wiped it right off. Still I’d healed up like Wolverine. Even arnica can’t dothat.Which meant, if this was real, it was both of them.
Maybe I was an idiot if Ididn’tbelieve it. If I didn’t accept what was right in front of me, what could very well be the reason behind the scars and the silences and the secretive bullshit I’d learned to live with: my mother was capable of unnatural things.
I was alone with my spiraling thoughts. Hank was out, my dad off pretending to be an orc or whatever at game night with his grad school friends. He’d texted around eight to let me know he was crashing in the city. I reread the last text Aunt Fee sent me.
Sorry. Dealing with something but we’re fine. I’ll call you soon, Ivy-girl.
I microwaved a plate of Chips Ahoy! and sat at the kitchen table. The AC cycled off with a sigh and the house was too quiet. At my back was the basement door, across from me the windows. With the sun down and the lights on they’d become a one-way mirror. Inside it a platinum-haired stranger picked at a plate of cookies.
Someone could be standing right there. On the other side of the glass, watching me. They could be yards away and I wouldn’t even know it.
I heard a rubberythump.Faint but definite, not from the windows but the other side of the house, where the sliding door opened onto the backyard.
The cookie turned to sand on my tongue. That was the sound of something bumping up against glass.
I stood slowly, clutching my phone. As I moved through the house I turned off every light, so I could see out but no one else could see in. The backyard was dark. The light out there had a sensor and turned on if anyone came as close as the patio. That gave me the courage to charge across the carpet, past the black mouth of the laundry room, and throw open the sliding door.
I hung there a while breathing in the summer air, laced with flowers and smoke from somebody’s barbecue. The moon was very high and very far, glowing like a halogen bulb in its cowl of cloud. Nothing moved but the wind through the garden. I was about to go back inside when I heard the smallest sound: the fairy-tale whisper of breeze over broken glass.
There, nearly lost beneath the picnic table, lay a scatter of glinting pieces. Beside it, bisected between shadow and moonlight, an arc of spilled blood. My breath went ragged, but I didn’t understand what I was looking at until I saw the shard of mirror.
Someone had dug up the jar my mom buried and smashed it over the concrete.
There’d been a piece of white paper curled inside that jar. I couldn’t see it from where I stood, but I knew it was there. It took all the courage I had to make myself walk down the steps in search of it. The light clicked on and my mother’s blood was sickening beneath its glow. I found the curl of paper, stained and stuck to the leg of a deck chair, and plucked it free with two fingertips. Breathing through my teeth, I unrolled it. My mom’s handwriting spooled across the scrap in an unbroken line.
If it be unfriendly let it go if it be unwilling make it go if it be a poison may it go if it be a threat I will it go
A breeze slid over me like staticky silk. The night wasn’t so silent after all. It ticked and scratched with creatures and weather and sleepy suburban machines. I ran back into the house and locked the door behind me.
The word I’d been avoiding came back like a scream. The one I was too practical to say, too stupid, maybe, a poppy seed that crunched, releasing poison, as I finally bit in.Magic. The words on the piece of paper, the blood in the jar—the pins and feathers in her closet, even. All pointed toward the same impossible probability.
It wasn’t surprise I felt. Or even relief, to finally have a label for the thing that made my mother so unreachable. I was flooded instead with a strangling fury. Because what thefuck? What did my mom think she was doing? Where did she get the nerve to think reality should bend to her, of all people?
And what the hell did it say about reality that it might actually haveworked?
Beneath the anger something else squirmed, rolling its bright green eyes.Jealousy.I jerked away from the thought. Leaving the lights off, I batted around the first floor, checking the doors and windows. All were locked, all was quiet except for the clamor in my head. In the kitchen I peered out at nothing more sinister than lilac bushes and the next house’s yellow siding. When I turned my eye fell on the cookies left on my plate.
I’d eaten two, left three untouched. Now, by the light coming through the window, I saw that each remaining cookie had a bite taken out of it, in three perfect cartoon curves.
Nimbly I strode from the kitchen, to the front door. I turned the lock, then the knob, and flung myself onto the porch.
