Page 61 of Our Crooked Hearts
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The city
Back then
Friday morning. We hadn’t talked to Marion or Sharon since the shop. But we knew they’d be waiting at the occultist’s house tonight, Marion all fairy-pinched with bruises.
“At least we’ll get to sleep again,” Fee said. It was just past eight in the morning and we were walking back from the McDonald’s. “Whatever happens tonight, tomorrow wesleep.”
Warily I slid my apple pie from its sleeve. Nothing gross came with it, or at least nothing grosser than a McDonald’s apple pie. “So true. I hear you get the best sleep ever when you’re dead.”
“Don’t be fucking funny, Dana,” she said. “Can you imagine what would happen to our dads if we were dead?”
“Mine would sell my shit and buy a Trans Am.”
“What do you have that’s worth anything? He’d buy a Trans Am decal.”
“Who’s being funny now?”
She wrung her hands. “I don’t want to be another one of my dad’s saints. I don’t want to be on his sad wall between my mother and the Virgin for the rest of my dead life.”
“All soft focus. Velvet hair bow, crucifix on.”
“He asked about the crucifix, by the way. I told him you were borrowing it. I told him you needed it to pray for your dad.”
“Uncle Nestor! He believed that?”
She pressed her palms together and looked up. “Perdóname, Padre.”
“Oh, my love,” I said. Joking as I began, and then very much not, my throat drawing tighter with every syllable. “My beautiful Felicita. You know if anything actually happened to you I would go full-on Orpheus. I would drag you back. I would…”Melt into sand without you. Disintegrate into stars.
“Me, too,” she said, and cinched an arm around me. “My one and only sister.”
I think we really believed that love could work that way. That we could hold each other fast to the surface of the spinning world.
We shaved the hours away, minute by endless minute, until seven p.m. came and time started melting like a sno-cone.
It was eight and we were trying to fill our stomachs, enough so we wouldn’t be trembly but not so much that we’d barf. Nine p.m. and the sun was gone. We blinked and it was 10:30 and we were waiting for the bus, so twitchy a woman waiting with us—clear vinyl backpack, green powder to her brows—offered us some pretzels. Half past eleven and we were lost in the scented shade of the occultist’s house, combing the grass for four-leaf clovers.
Sharon arrived just behind us. She saw what we were doing,dropped onto the grass, and joined the hunt. None of us found any luck before Marion showed.
Her bruises had faded to ugly smudges of yellow and green. She looked brittle as a candy stick, with a raw vitality to her that made me think of a frayed and sparking wire. I stared at her until I understood: it was Astrid’s gift. While Fee and I were making ourselves sick trying to suppress it, Marion must’ve been tending her portion of power like a strangler vine. My stomach gnawed on itself. It would be hard for her to give that up.
“Let’s get this over with,” she said.
We retraced our steps, trooping through the dust and the dark. The library’s antique air made me feel like I was breathing through rough cotton. Astrid was with us, a presence at our backs, ahead of us, pressing in from the sides. We scaled the attic ladder.
The moon was just right for our purposes, leaner now but satiating in a way I could feel to the bottom of my witch’s soul. Now that the moment had come, now that we were here, I felt curiously calm. As if everything that was about to happen already had.
The hour turned. Marion kneeled. The working began.
The spell unfolded with the gripless texture of reenactment. Blue flame, gray mirror, white wax. Until Marion snapped her knife open and lifted the rabbit.
It was wild this time, and skinny despite the season, sides heaving beneath its mottled coat. It fought and fought, twisting in Marion’s grip, finally jerking its head into a broken angle to bite her. Even through the pain of its yellow teeth she was silent. The rest of us hissed in dismay as her blood hit the wax.
With a decisive stab her knife went in. But it must’ve been toodull, or the creature’s neck too sinewy. Dying, it twisted free; Marion wrestled it back. She held it more efficiently this time, sawing away so fiercely a spurt of arterial blood hit my knuckles. I dropped my needle and had to scrabble in the dust to find it.
The spell went on, but the chain had come off. The magic felt loose and messy, a drafty house where any kind of weather might come in. When Marion began the incantation it sounded different than it had the first time. Harsher vowels, cruder consonants. She laid the salt circle with her bleeding hand, lit the waxed mirror. The entire room wobbled with spiking heat, and that was wrong, too. There must’ve been an error somewhere, a gap.It’s not gonna work, I thought. Glad and terrified at once. But no, look: there was Astrid Washington, her gold-dust eyes peering up through the glass. She smiled, lips drawing back from teeth as white and uniform as seed pearls.
