Time stretched itself like a cat waking from a long nap, luxurious and patient. I took a deep breath, held it while I counted to seven, and let it go. The candle flame jumped. I tried to lose myself in the light rippling across the face of the mirror. Another deep breath, hold it. . . .
An owl hooted a long, eerie call. Hooo-hooo-hoo-hoo!
“Whoa,” Finn said.
I put my finger to my lips. “Shh.”
The owl hooted a second time, much closer, and then a third time, so loud it seemed like the bird was about to shatter the window and fly into the room. A shadow crept into the mirror, a vague shape trying to take form. I was afraid to look at it directly, afraid that if I did, it would vanish. I wasn’t cold, but I shivered again, my feathers shaking.
Finn broke the spell. “This is creepy.”
My eyes snapped back into focus. “You ruined it. Someone was trying to get into the mirror.”
The owl hooted again, much fainter, like she was flying away.
“Sorry,” he said after a moment.
I didn’t answer.
“Think it was Rebecca?” he asked. “Your mom?”
I stared at him through the waving, watery candlelight. “How do you know her name?”
He pointed at Gracie.
“Did she tell you anything else?”
“No.” He unfolded his legs and lay on his side, his head propped up on his hand. “Just that she died when you were little.”
I waited, hoping the owl would come back.
“Tell me something about her,” he said.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Something fun. Something you never told anyone else.”
I pulled a long feather out of my shawl, slowly thinking over the tiny handful of things I knew about my mother.
“True story about Rebecca,” I said. “She jumped out of an airplane when she was pregnant with me. She didn’t know she was pregnant, of course. Teaching people how to parachute was her job. She had to give it up when she realized I was on board, too.”
I dipped the tip of the feather in a pool of melted wax and dragged a shiny thread of it across the mirror. “I swear I can remember that jump. That’s impossible, right? But I do: the falling, the rush of air, the jerk of the parachute, and then the sound of laughing, her laughing. I think she gave me the memory, like it was the first thing she wanted me to know.”
Finn put his fingertip in the cooling wax and carefully lifted it, leaving a fingerprint behind. “So who is Trish?”
They were coming, on wings from far away, all the pictures and voices, smells, tastes, all the everything from the past was flying toward me as fast as it could.
I passed my hand through the flame.
“Don’t do that,” he said. “You’ll get burned.”
“So?”
Finn blew out the candle.
“I told you a secret,” I said in the dark. “It’s your turn.”
“Only if you tell me about Trish.”
“Only if your secret is true.”
“True,” he echoed, playing with his lighter. He rolled the striker wheel slowly, sparks leaping out like miniature fireworks, the flame never quite catching. “You already know I have a sister, Chelsea. The secret is that she’s an addict. She’ll smoke or snort anything she can get her hands on.”
“Wow, really? I . . . I don’t know what to say. Where is she?”
“Boston.” He set the lighter on the mirror. “That’s why Dad took that job and why Mom drove there this morning. Chelsea is claiming she’s had another ‘big breakthrough.’ Woo-hoo.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means she wants to screw my parents over again. They burned through their retirement money to pay for her first two rehabs. She ran away from both. The third time, they took out a second mortgage to pay for a clinic in Hawaii. She didn’t run away from that one. She came home with a great tan and stayed clean for eight whole days.”
His voice sounded older in the dark.
“Now she says she wants to ask forgiveness so we can all start the, quote, unquote, healing process. Such bullshit. She’ll guilt Mom into giving her money and then she’ll take off again.”
The lighter flared, breaking his face into waves of light and shadow.
“True enough?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry.”
He lit the candle. “Your turn, Miss Blue. What’s so awful about this Trish beast? Why did you freak out?”
She put me on the bus, lunch box packed with a peanut butter and banana sandwich, crusts cut off. She coached my soccer team. She fired the babysitter who spanked me. Took me to work with her for a week until she found a new sitter. She drank wine, not vodka. Sometimes forgot to eat. She only smoked cigarettes when I was asleep. She forgot to answer the phone when I called for a ride home. She forgot to lock the door when she left.
“She used to be my mom,” I said. “And then she quit.”
61
So I told him . . . most of it.
Rebecca, my biological mother, was T-boned by a drunk driver when I was a baby. Dad was fighting insurgents in the mountains, but the army gave him a couple of weeks to come home and sort things out. Battle zones don’t have day care, so he took me to his mother’s. Gramma raised me until she died, just before I turned seven. That was when Trish took over. She was Daddy’s base bunny, his stateside girlfriend who said she loved babysitting.
(I skipped the part where I really loved her and I used to call her Mommy because it sounded so dumb and pathetic.)
“What about your mom’s relatives?” he asked.
“I don’t remember meeting them. At some point they died. My grandma was all the family I needed.”
I glanced in the mirror. No one was waiting there.
“What happened to your dad?”
The kindness in his voice almost sent me over the edge.
I took a moment to clear my throat, then gave the short, clean version: two tours in Iraq, two tours in Afghanistan. How he earned the Purple Heart. Talked about the number of stitches in his leg, visiting him in the hospital, watching him in physical therapy. The drinking, the fighting, and how happy I was when they sent him back overseas again and how bad I felt about being happy. The IED that blew up his truck and his brain and his career. More months in the hospital, then the big welcome home, dog tags turned in, army days over. (That was before we knew about the fraying wires in his skull. Before we knew that he could turn into a werewolf even if the moon wasn’t full.)
Trish drinking wine at breakfast. Trish walking out.
“Did he get a new girlfriend after she left?”
I shook my head. “That’s when he became a truck driver. He couldn’t figure out anything else to do with me, so I rode with him.”
“What about school?”
“He homeschooled me. Unschooled me. It was kind of awesome for a while: him driving, me reading out loud, the two of us talking about everything, fractions and evolution, Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet and which Hemingway book is the best. Every once in a while, he’d get a bug up his butt that we needed to settle down in a little town somewhere, but a few weeks or months later, he’d get a different bug and, boom, we took off again.”
Finn crawled around the mirror and sat next me. “How’d you wind up here?”
I took a deep breath. “He got arrested in Arkansas last year. Public drunkenness.”
Finn leaned against me, warm and solid.
“He was only in the jail overnight, but he came out completely set on moving back here. Said I needed to go to a regular school to get ready for college.”
“Makes sense.”
“I thought the move would be good for him, that he’d hook up with old friends and get a decent job. Instead it’s like a bomb has
started ticking in his head.”
“What about Trish?” he asked quietly.
“She’ll make it blow up early.”
My stomach hurt from going too far, telling too many secrets. I should have kept the past locked away so it couldn’t screw up the way I was trying to get by one day at a time. That was Dad’s problem, right? His worst yesterdays played on a constant loop in his head and he couldn’t (or he wouldn’t) stop paying attention to them. At least on the road, there had been times when we’d outrun the memories. Now they had us surrounded and were closing in.
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” I leaned forward and blew out the candle. “Can we go to bed?”
We walked up the stairs, Finn a step in front of me, reaching back to hold my hand. He turned on the desk lamp in his room. The walls were covered with posters of indie bands I never heard of, Russian travel posters, and mostly naked women posed on gleaming motorcycles. A floor-to-ceiling bookcase overflowed with paperbacks, and gaming controllers crowded around the computer monitor and keyboard on his desk. It smelled like body spray and Fritos.
“I wasn’t sure,” he said. “If, you know, you were going to come up here. But I cleaned, just in case.”
“Just in case?”
“Yeah.” He closed the door and hit the space bar on his computer. The screen lit up with an image of a fire burning in a fireplace and jazz poured out of the speakers. He shut off the desk lamp, wrapped his arms around me, and kissed me. He tasted of maple syrup and butter and pancakes and bacon.
Now. I will stay in right now, this minute. Build a fortress with Finn and keep yesterday locked out.
And . . . somehow we found ourselves on his bed. And our clothes started falling off because everything felt good, felt right. The world on the other side of his door didn’t exist. His mouth, his hands, the muscles of his shoulders, the curve of his back; that was all that mattered. Tomorrow . . .
Shit.
I sat up.
“What?” He sat up, too, breathing hard. “Did I do something wrong?”
“I thought of a bad word.”
“A dirty word? I know all of them. Do you have a favorite?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow isn’t a dirty word.” He brushed his hair out of his eyes. “Is it?”
“I said it was bad, not dirty.” I shivered and pulled the covers up to my chin. “Tomorrow as in reality, as in we can’t go as far as we want. Reality sucks.”
“Don’t think about tomorrow.” He ran his fingers down my arm, making me shiver again. “It’s not sexy.”
“You know what’s not sexy?” I pushed his hand away. “Babies. Babies are not sexy.”
“But I bought condoms,” he said. “I even practiced putting one on!”
The lost-puppy look on his face made me smile. “I’m proud of you, Boner Man, but that’s not enough. I have the worst luck in the whole world. If anyone on the planet was going to get pregnant tonight, it would be me. The last thing I need to think about is a baby.”
He groaned and rolled on to his back. “Stop saying that word!”
“Baby, baby, baby.” I picked my shirt off the floor and put it on. “I can’t. I just can’t.”
“Why are you getting dressed?”
“You have to take me home.”
He dug around in the covers for his shirt and pulled it on. “Do you want to go home?”
“No. But if I stay, you’ll be too tempting and we’ll be stupid and my life will be over.”
“I’m not going to ruin your life and we’re not going to be stupid.” He opened his closet door and reached for something on the top shelf. “You mind a sleeping bag?”
“Why?”
He tossed a tightly rolled sleeping bag at me. “Postmodern bundling,” he said. “You stay in yours, I stay in mine.”
“Sleeping bags can be unzipped,” I said.
“I don’t break promises,” he pulled down a second bag, “and I’m pretty sure you don’t, either.”
It took a little while to rearrange the pillows and figure out how to keep the sleeping bags from sliding off the bed, but finally we crawled in and set our phones to wake us up just before dawn. We fell asleep instantly, without even kissing each other good night, like we’d been enchanted.
When our alarms went off, we staggered downstairs and woke up Topher and Gracie. Finn dropped me off at the bottom of my driveway and watched as I keyed Trish’s car on my way to the front door. I snuck in the house without waking up the dog, crawled under my covers with my clothes on, and fell back asleep just as I was getting ready to cry.
62
When I finally rolled out of bed that afternoon, they were watching football in the living room. Trish was curled up in the recliner, rocking slightly back and forth, a thick book in her lap and hideous reading glasses pinching the end of her nose. Dad sipped a beer on the couch. A half-eaten sub rested on the table in front of him, and the dog was sprawled at his feet. An ugly, wooden cuckoo clock hung on the wall above his head, ticking loudly.
“Look who’s up,” Dad said.
I pointed to the clock above the couch. “Where did that come from?”
“Trish found it in the basement,” he said.
She looked at me over the top of her reading glasses. “You look tired, Lee-Lee. Did you get enough sleep?”
Without any warning or asking for permission, my eyes teared up again. I should have ignored Finn. Should’ve walked to the bus station and gotten on the first bus without looking back. Spock rolled over and whined for a belly rub. When Trish looked at him, I wiped my face on my sleeve. Not that I was going to tell her, but she was right. I needed more sleep to deal with all of this, to deal with the bite of the blade, the ripping sound, and the flood . . .
. . . she handed me the pen and I signed my first library card and they let me take out eight books that I could read as many times as I wanted . . .
. . . the snip of scissors and the smell of the glue, chaining one loop of paper to the next, red, green, red, green to hang on the tree . . .
. . . rows of M&M’s laid on the scratched kitchen table, her trying to teach me that multiplication and division could be fun . . .
Trish looked up at me. The light from the window was behind her and made it impossible to read the expression on her face. Focusing on the shadows made it easier . . .
. . . she threw an ashtray at him and he ducked and it exploded into an ice storm of glass . . .
. . . finding her passed out on the couch with a stranger, both of them missing clothes . . .
. . . the sound of the door slamming the last time she left . . .
to lock down the memories that kept trying to seep out.
Trish held up her book so that I could see the cover. “The new Elizabeth George. Do you like mysteries?”
Spock whined again and thumped his tail. He could smell the bullshit, too. Trish was already acting like she lived here. If I ran away, she’d make him fall in love with her again and God knows how that would end this time. But if I stayed and she stayed, I’d have to kill her, and murder was still illegal.
Dad and Trish exchanged one of those grown-up looks that meant whatever happened next, I wasn’t going to like it.
He turned off the game and cleared his throat. “We need to talk.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, heading for the door. “I’m going to mow the lawn.”
“Not yet,” Dad said.
“Please,” Trish added.
I stopped. Crossed my arms over my chest.
“Don’t look at me like that.” Dad scratched his head. “Should have told you she was coming, I know. I tried to the other day when we were shooting hoops, but I got distracted.”
Trish rocked faster. The recliner started to squeak.
“And I’m sor
ry I lost my temper last night,” he continued.
“Well,” I said, “as long as you’re sorry, I guess that makes everything better, doesn’t it?”
“I screwed up, okay?” Dad cracked his knuckles. “You weren’t exactly on your best behavior. Anyway. Trish needs to stay here.”
Trish jumped in. “Only for a week or so.”
“No sense in her wasting money on a hotel room,” Dad said.
“What about the pig barn down the road?” I asked.
The squeaking recliner sounded like a mouse caught in a trap. They exchanged another annoying glance and my last nerve snapped.
“Don’t look at her like that!” I yelled.
“Hayley, please,” Trish said.
I whirled around. “Shut up!”
“Hayley!” Dad said.
Trish shook her head. “Give her some space, Andy.”
“Give me space?” I echoed. “Did you learn that from a fortune cookie?”
“You can’t have it both ways,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“You tell me to shut up and then you ask me a question. You can’t have it both ways. You have to choose.” She pushed the reading glasses into her hair. “I’m a nurse now, Hayley. Got my degree. I’m up here for some interviews. Andy offered me a place to stay, as an old friend, nothing more.”
“Just as a friend,” Dad repeated. “She’s staying in Gramma’s room.”
I hoped Gramma’s ghost heard that. I hoped she was gathering her dead lady friends together to haunt and terrorize Trish. Maybe she could get Rebecca to help, along with the Stockwell family and everyone else from the graveyard, hundreds of dead people to crowd into the bedroom, Gramma tapping Trish’s shoulder and politely suggesting that she get the hell out and leave us alone.
Spock jumped up and shook himself, raising a cloud of fur and dander that hung in the sunlight.
“All right, then.” Dad slapped his knees and stood up, as if everything was decided and I wasn’t on the verge of running in the garage to get the splitting maul.