“Don’t be scared. She’s tough,” I remind Kai as I look out the window, watching the world growing ever whiter. People are sledding on trash-can lids and flattened boxes, since no one in the South actually owns a sled. They’re laughing and playing, while Kai holds back tears.
“She looked awful,” Kai says, exhaling. “What if she doesn’t make it?”
I want to tell him that she will, but I’m not so sure. I open my mouth to speak, but the girl driving us breaks in.
“Then you’ll still be here,” she says. Kai lifts his head; she speaks again. “You can’t let yourself die when someone else does. When my sister died, I thought my life was over. But it was just beginning.”
“But,” I say, squeezing Kai’s hand, “that’s something we can think about at the hospital.”
“Your sister died?” Kai asks. The ambulance skids through an intersection; the girl expertly navigates the gearshift, jetting through the red light to keep up.
“Ages ago,” the girl says. “My whole world changed.”
“I’m sorry,” Kai says. “What’s your name?”
“Mora,” she answers.
“I’m Kai,” he says. “And this is Ginny.”
“Thank you for driving us,” I add. “It’s a nightmare, driving in the snow.”
“Not a problem,” she says, smiling at me in the rearview mirror. Her teeth are as perfect as her skin, and I hate that I can see my reflection next to hers. I turn back to Kai, who is staring at the back of Mora’s head.
“Your grandmother plans everything, right?” I say.
“Yeah,” Kai says, sniffling. I can’t tell if it’s the cold or the emotion making his nose red and eyes watery.
“She planned your clothes every day until last year. She planned each and every trip to the grocery store. She even planned arguments she suspected she’d get into. You think she’d really plan for her last words to be about me? She hates me.”
Kai almost laughs, but not quite. He shakes his head and looks away from Mora’s head and at me.
“Then those aren’t her last words,” I say, a promise I’m afraid will become a lie. “She isn’t done yet.” Kai lifts my hand and kisses it, then rests his head against the back of the seat, eyes closed.
It was a lie after all. Grandma Dalia died before she even got to the hospital.
CHAPTER THREE
I saw Kai playing in the courtyard the day we moved in. It was December, a few weeks before Christmas. My dad and his brothers handled the furniture, while my mom lugged box after box of lamps and books and silverware up the stairs. I was too small to really help, and eventually my mom got so irritated with me weaving around under her legs that she told me to go play with “that little boy in the courtyard, the one with the ball.”
It wasn’t a ball—it was a Frisbee, and neither of us actually knew how to throw it. Kai and I pretended it was a weapon, something we flung at our enemies to knock them off their horses. They didn’t stand a chance against us, and we’d slain dozens before we got around to sharing our names.
“Kai,” he said.
“I’ve never heard that name before.”
“That’s because you’ve never met me before.”
He had a point.
Becoming fast friends when you’re that small is easy, because the only requirement is that the other person likes to play games. We eventually made our way up to his apartment and were drinking juice boxes when Grandma Dalia found us. She was already old, even then, but she stood a little straighter, and her hawk eyes were a little brighter. She looked at Kai warmly for a split second, but then her eyes moved to me. Everything changed; she darkened and beckoned Kai to come to her. Seeing I wasn’t following him, he turned around, blissfully unaware of the look she was giving me.
“I’m Ginny,” I said, trying to look polite despite the fact that my hands were grubby and the cowlick on the back of my head was sticking up. I desperately wanted Grandma Dalia to like me—I didn’t have grandparents, and my parents were already starting to drift away from me. Even at that age, I knew what I wanted: to have a home. To be loved. To be cared for. To have someone look at me the way Grandma Dalia looked at Kai—
“Ginny,” Grandma Dalia said coolly, like she didn’t believe me, and I deflated. “Kai has to practice his violin now, and you have to go home. Besides,” she said, “he doesn’t play with girls.”
“I did today, Grandma!” Kai said, proud. “We played all afternoon, and it was great.”
“I’m glad you enjoyed yourself,” Grandma Dalia said, looking down at him. She wrapped a clawlike hand around his shoulder protectively. “But little boys and little girls don’t play together.”
“Why not?” Kai asked, disappointed.
She looked back up at me and narrowed her eyes. “Because, sweetheart. It isn’t safe.”
After a morning of debate, we decide that Grandma Dalia will be buried in a fuchsia suit, one that has a matching hat and looks like something I’d expect to see on the queen of England. Kai and I sit on the couch, ignoring the television in front of us, the suit laid across the dining room table. The TV is the one modern thing in the room—when Grandma Dalia realized she could watch soap operas and the Home Shopping Network in HD, she bought it and had it same-day delivered. The rest of the place is a strange combination of old lady and… something else.
There are knitted holders on the tissue boxes and bits of John the Conqueror root on the bookshelves. Statues of kittens sit beside house-blessing incense, black hen feathers hang by the windows—thousands of little things that would supposedly keep her, Kai, and the apartment safe. There’s an ashtray of dimes at the door; she insisted Kai tuck one into his sock each time he left, so he’d be protected even away from her fortress of charms. More than once, Kai removed it at school to contribute to the cost of a candy bar at the vending machine.
On the couch, Kai frowns—we’re trying to work out how to personalize the funeral service. “We could sing that song.” He coils his fingers around my hair, which is spread out across the pillow in his lap. I look up at him and raise an eyebrow. “You know,” he says. “That old one she sang all the time, the Kelly one—‘Has anybody here seen Kelly? K-E-double-L-Y, has—’ ”
“Oh god, now it’s stuck in my head,” I groan, curling in and covering my face with my hands.
“What? She loved it. We could sing it in rounds at the funeral,” he says, laughing a little. The sound seems to throw him; he swallows the happiness down, then speaks. “Maybe I should just play the violin.”
I pause. “I think she’d really like that.”
Kai looks at me—there are still red spots under his eyes from crying earlier. “Thank you, Ginny,” he says quietly. “I know she wasn’t your favorite person.”
“I wasn’t her favorite either,” I remind him.
“No one was her favorite,” Kai adds. “Let’s be honest. She was mean. And I think a little racist.”
“She is going to haunt the hell out of you if you keep talking like this,” I say.
“Yeah, well… she was. Is it wrong I loved her anyway?”
“No,” I say firmly. “Not at all. You’re family.” I say that like I understand the misery on Kai’s face, but to be honest, I think only losing him could make me look that way.
We’re silent for a long time.
“When is your aunt getting here?” I ask. Kai’s aunt is related by marriage and met Grandma Dalia only a handful of times. Still, she was supposed to show up and help Kai with the mountain of paperwork piling up—life insurance forms, credit card debts, estate taxes.
“I’m not sure,” Kai answers. “She said today, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.” He glances at the window—it’s still snowing heavily, the cold seeping in through the pane that cracked while the paramedics were here. We repaired it as best we could with duct tape, but it felt a little like taping up a leak on a submarine.
Kai shivers and looks back to me. “You don??
?t think my aunt will miss the funeral, do you? I’m worried.” Kai was the center of Grandma Dalia’s universe; this is his first time being alone among stars. I imagine it’s jarring, having your world change so fast, and I’m oddly grateful that my parents distanced themselves from me a little at a time, farther and farther away from the center, until I was barely in their orbit.
“Let’s just figure out the music,” I suggest, avoiding his question. “Work that out, and then we’ll start worrying about your aunt after dinner.”
“Right. Dinner. I’m not hungry,” Kai says, seeming confused that meals are still a thing.
“Get hungry,” I say firmly. “Because every old lady in the building has brought over a casserole. Anyway. Music—we’re figuring out music.”
“Okay—what if I can’t play tomorrow?” Kai says. He swallows. “What if I’m not able? If I’m too…”
Sad.
I nod and think for a moment. “Then we should have a backup plan,” I say. “And I think I know where to look.” I hurry to the kitchen, nearly sliding on the beat-up rug on the linoleum, There it is, on the shelf above the oven, wedged between a statue of a chicken and a dozen editions of the annual Southern Living cookbook.
I pause. I shouldn’t touch it. It’s not mine. It’s not Kai’s, even. It’s Grandma Dalia’s, even in death, and she was never crazy about Kai and I looking at it. I inhale, raise a hand, and slowly, gently tug it down. It’s a book—her cookbook, she called it, spattered with age. The cloth binding is so worn that it’s missing entirely around the top of the spine and the corners, and it’s misshapen due to all the clippings, photos, and dried four-leaf clovers I know are inside.
“Good idea,” Kai says behind me. We sit on opposite sides of the tiny kitchen table, and it feels every bit as weird as holding the book—there are only two chairs, which was Grandma Dalia’s excuse as to why I could never eat dinner with them. Kai offered to give up his seat each time he asked me to stay; she wouldn’t allow that. I slide the book across the table into Kai’s waiting palms as I remember her words. “You’re not giving your seat to that neighbor child.” It feels strange now, to just take a seat at the table when for so long one wasn’t offered.
The cookbook flops open easily to a page in the middle, one that’s marked by a thick collection of magazine clippings, stuck together with a paperclip. This page is still mostly blank, though I suspect it’s the only one of its kind. Most of the book is packed with recipes, quotes, and inspirational sayings. But there are pages, several dozen or so, that are very different. Pages of charms. Of warnings. Descriptions of beasts, of their teeth and claws. Grandma Dalia gathered information on them from all sorts of people—psychics, scholars, hoboes—and wrote it all down, as if she planned on writing a book on her paranoia.
When Kai and I were small we loved this section. We’d sneak into the kitchen, pull the book down, and stare at these pages with delighted fear. Descriptions of creatures that ate children, lured them into the forest, broke into their homes—sometimes men, sometimes wolflike, but always terrifying. There was a map of the country, faded with time, on which Grandma Dalia had drawn thick lines, defining the territories of the beasts: their world, laid atop ours.
Grandma Dalia would inevitably catch us. Her expression was always the same one she gave me and Kai when she found us mesmerized by the body of a dead cat on Seventh Street—horror and disgust. This is serious. This isn’t for play. You’d best learn to mind the beasts, or they’ll come for you.
Yet we’d always sneak into the kitchen again, stare at the pictures, and reenact the horrors described on the page in our play. We had to take turns playing the beast. Just seeing the images for the first time in a few years rushes memories back to me; Kai looks up at me and smiles a little.
“Maybe we can just tell these at the funeral. The world’s worst bedtime stories.”
I laugh a little at how inappropriate it would be. “Careful, Kai,” I say, trying to sound serious. “Mind the Snow Queen.” The Snow Queen doesn’t have a page full of scribbles and sketches like the other beasts do; her page is the blank one in the center of the book. I could never tell if Grandma Dalia didn’t know much about the beasts’ ruler or if she was just too afraid to write it all down.
Kai chuckles, raps his fingers against the book, and flips the page. “I can’t tell what she’d be madder about—how wrong it would be to use a scary bedtime story as her eulogy, or the fact that I’m telling everyone about the beasts. Though I guess she doesn’t need to worry about anyone thinking she’s crazy anymore. So… she’s got that going for her, at least.” The sadness is still in Kai’s voice, underneath the joke, but it feels good to hear him push it aside at least for a moment.
“And she doesn’t need to worry about the beasts, period,” I add.
“True. Though she was never really worried for herself. She was worried for me. Like the whole world was waiting to eat me up.” He rolls his eyes but then gets quiet. “I should have come back down when it was snowing, even if it got us in trouble. You know the snow was the worst for her. She must have been so scared for me. She probably died—”
“Knowing you were fine. She saw you before she died,” I cut him off. He swallows, and in the silence our eyes simultaneously wander to the window. How is it still snowing? It’s over a foot now, record-breaking, I think. When he looks back at me he smiles a little, though it seems as if the expression’s only purpose is keeping him from crying.
“It looks like it’s just me and you,” he says, and manages a small laugh. “You’re the only family I have now.”
I trail my hands down to his and smile as he lifts my palms to kiss them gently. Kai has felt like my only family for ages; I’m relieved that he sees me the same way now.
“You know I’m in love with you, right, Ginny?” He’s looking at my knuckles, running his thumb across them. His eyes flicker to mine. It’s the first time he’s said it aloud, or at least, aloud and meant it like this. “I’ve always been in love with you.”
“I know,” I whisper, and he smiles, leans forward, and kisses me. I lift out of my chair and move to him; he pulls me down into his lap and wraps his arms around me. My fingertips curl at the nape of his neck, and when we break away he finds my eyes and is silent for a long time. He exhales, reaches up, and tucks my hair behind my ears, letting his palm linger by my cheek.
I smile and say, “I’ll always—”
Love you, too. That’s the end of the phrase, but I don’t get to say it because someone is knocking at the door. Probably another well-wisher, hopefully bearing some sort of pie. Kai and I laugh at the timing as I hop off of him. He walks to the door and opens it slightly, just enough to see who it is.
“Oh, hi,” Kai says, sounding surprised. I lean forward, trying to see who’s there, but Kai blocks my view.
“Hi.” The voice is soft, gentle. “I was just stopping by—thought I’d see how things are going.”
“Wow,” Kai says, stuttering a little, as if he couldn’t find the word. “That’s so nice of you. Ginny?” He turns around and motions me over. When he does so, the door opens a little more, and I see the guest’s face. It’s Mora.
“Hey,” I say, smiling. “We didn’t really get to thank you the other day—sorry, we were in such a rush.”
“Of course,” she says, shaking her head. Her hair tumbles everywhere, looking metallic and glowy in the dim hall. She hands me an expensive-looking bouquet. “I wanted to come by and offer my condolences. I saw the obituary in the paper.”
“You didn’t have to,” Kai says.
“I wanted to,” Mora says, flashing her perfect grin. “Well, I’ll be—”
“No!” Kai says, sounding strangely panicked. “Don’t go. We were going to have dinner.” Mora looks hesitant, but Kai continues. “Join us? It’ll be my way of saying thanks for driving us.”
“I guess I can do that,” Mora says, shrugging. She walks into the kitchen and, without hesitation, drops her coat ov
er the back of Kai’s chair, the one I was sitting in. I walk to the living room and pull in an ottoman for myself—there’s no way I’m sitting in Grandma Dalia’s chair, even now that she’s gone.
Grandma Dalia didn’t mind me going to the grocery store with her and Kai. It was one of the few places where I felt as if she didn’t hate me, I suspect because she liked having an extra pair of hands to stoop and grab things off the bottom shelf. She shuffled along the aisles, shouting out brands and, at the end, she’d get us both sugar cookies from the bakery.
One day in July, while Kai and I loaded the purchases into the back of the station wagon, I saw a man. Tall, dark hair, a perfectly trimmed haze of a beard. He was handsome, and it struck me that even though he had all the characteristics of a man, there was something strange about him, as if he were really just wearing a man costume. Still, he smiled at me, and I took a step toward him.
“Hi there,” he said, voice quiet. He was standing a few cars away from ours, his hands shoved into his pockets. “Want to come look at something I found?”
“What is it?” I asked, rolling back on my heels. Grandma Dalia got in her car and started the engine so it would cool off a little. Kai was on the other side, shoving things onto the backseat floorboards. With him and Grandma Dalia so close, it didn’t occur to me to be afraid.
“Come here,” the man said, and when he grinned, something flashed in his eyes, something that reminded me of the way a dog’s eyes look when the sunlight hits them just right. I took another step toward—
“Back!” Grandma Dalia screeched, startling me by appearing at my side. Her wrinkly hand gripped my bicep like a vice; I squirmed, but she held tight. She yelled again, shouting at the man. People were turning, looking over their cars, craning their necks from the display of begonias by the storefront. I began to turn red.
The man looked at Grandma Dalia, then back at me. I expected some sort of apology, a claim that he wasn’t hurting anything, palms held up. But instead, the strange flickery thing happened in his eyes again, and he smiled. Smiled so that the skin around his face stretched, like rubber, and he again looked like something in a costume instead of a man.