Page 57 of Our Crooked Hearts
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The city
Back then
I slumped across the plastic seats of the Blue Line, my skin feeling as thin and chitinous as butterfly wings. It was Thursday morning. We were almost out of time.
An hour ago I’d poured myself a bowl of Marshmallow Mateys and a dead bunny kit thumped out of the box, membranous eyelids shut tight. Any sleep I’d gotten was hole-punched to tatters by dreams in which I was falling, waking all night in a panic, body bouncing against the mattress. My heartbeats clicked against each other like billiard balls.
I got off the train at Halsted, the smell of my skin intensifying in the heat coming up from the tracks. I twisted my hair into a knot, tucking it beneath my ball cap.
There was this old guy Fee had introduced me to who kept a table at the market on Maxwell Street. Mr. Lazar sold enough worthless junk that you had to have a particular kind of eye to notice what he wasreallyselling, overpriced but far from worthless. When I rolled up on him he was sitting in a sun-faded folding chair, doing the crossword.
He looked at me over his glasses. “By yourself today, brat? Where’s the beauty?”
There was a possibility he could help me, so I bit my tongue. “Fee’s busy.”
“No window shopping today. If you’re not here to buy, go bother Andy. He’s got nothing worth paying for.”
The guy at the next table flipped him the bird.
“I’m buying,” I told him, “if you’ve got what I need.”
Lazar’s mouth stayed flat, but his eyes went keen. “I see. Step into my office.”
Over his plot lay a balding carpet as dirty as the ground beneath it, stretching a few feet past the edges of his table. I stepped onto it and the world around us went vague. We could talk in privacy now, just yards away from hagglers and passersby who could no longer make out exactly what we said. I hoped that went for hovering spirits as well.
“We’re being haunted,” I said. “Bad summoning, ghost who won’t go. I don’t trust the person who says she can banish it. I wanna see if there’s something else we can do.”
Lazar considered me like I was a thorny crossword clue. Then he stood and shuffled around to the far side of his hoard.
“I’ve been thinking you’d be back,” he said, his Algerian accent flattened by years spent in this city. “First time I met you, I knew I had something that was yours.”
From between a limp stack of old newspapers and what I was pretty sure was a gramophone, he extracted a boxy black suitcase. It looked like the kind of thing a magician would use to carry around pieces of his assistant. Lazar settled the case over his knees and opened it with a toothy snap, revealing another,smaller suitcase. He went on like this for a while. I couldn’t tell whether the matryoshka bit was pure showman’s theater or something real, until he lifted the seventh box into the light.
Something real.
It was just over sandwich-size, made of what looked to be pure gold. Its leonine color made my heart drop. I had a pocket filled up from one of my dad’s emergency cash stashes, the one I’d known about longest and judged most likely to have been forgotten. But if the box was actual gold I would never be able to afford it.
My throat dried at the thought. Iwantedit. Badly enough that I guessed the wanting was part of how it worked.
I cleared my throat. “What is it?”
He knocked gently on the box’s top. Or its bottom, maybe. The thing had no apparent lid. “It has a very long name. I call it the forgetting box.”
“Forgetting box?” I acted skeptical, hoping that might make it come cheaper. “Doesn’t sound like what I’m looking for.”
“It’s not about what you’re looking for, it’s about what you’ll need. Tomorrow or next year or in fifty years. You know me, I’m a matchmaker.”
I didn’t really know him, not well, but Fee had told me as much. She’d heard about Lazar from a curandera to whom he’d sold a length of white lace. The woman used the lace to trim two christening gowns, completing them in secret just before her daughter learned she was pregnant with twins following years of infertility struggles. Though I doubted all the stories about him were so sweet.
“I’ve got a problem right now,” I told him, still staring at the box. “Not in a year or fifty years.”
“That hand is dealt. There’s nothing I can sell you that will change it. All I can tell you is, one day you’ll wantthis.”
I found my fingers drifting toward my box. “What’s it for?”
He eyed me up. “That red hair, I thought Irish. But you’re Polish?”
