I was jealous of him, I realized. Jealous of the way he could love Althea—uncomplicated, a fan’s adoration. Envy lodged in my chest like a chunk of green apple. “Why do you love it?” I asked. “Althea’s book.”
I heard him shift on the floor. It couldn’t have been that comfortable down there.
“You know how fairy tales are, like, told and retold?” he said, his voice soft. “And they all fit into these certain types, and you can find a dozen versions of ‘The Twelve Dancing Princesses’ or ‘The Juniper Tree’ or whatever?”
I nodded, because I did know. I’d read them all.
“I always found that comforting. I liked formulas. I liked narrative arcs I could predict. I liked that my dad still kissed my mom when he got home, on the lips, like in a sitcom. I liked doing stuff the same way every day and reading stories I could take apart into pieces and never really being surprised by anything. I was anxious, I guess. I liked structure.”
The rat-a-tat talk of Adult Swim bled through the floorboards. I could pick out a word here and there.
“Then my parents got divorced, and my dad and my therapist gave me loads of books about kids with divorced parents, and kids who were mad at the world, but all that anger and uncertainty made it worse. And I thought, like, boohoo, my life sucks, all that. Can’t get worse. But haha, the universe was like ‘Fuck that,’ and she—my mom—she died. Um. She killed herself.”
I knew it was coming, but the words still took a chunk out of me. I stayed very still when he said them, because I didn’t know what else to do.
He breathed in and out, soft. “And my friends didn’t know what to say to me, and my dad didn’t know what to do with me, so it was pretty much me and books. But I didn’t want the touchy-feely tragedy crap my therapist gave me to make me feel like I was less alone. I wanted that distance. I wanted that uncaring, ‘here’s your blood and guts and your fucked-up happy ending’ fairy-tale voice. But, like, the Andrew Lang stuff wasn’t cutting it for me anymore.
“Then I got my hands on Althea’s book. And it was perfect. There are no lessons in it. There’s just this harsh, horrible world touched with beautiful magic, where shitty things happen. And they don’t happen for a reason, or in threes, or in a way that looks like justice. They’re set in a place that has no rules and doesn’t want any. And the author’s voice—your grandmother’s voice—is perfectly pitiless. She’s like a war reporter who doesn’t give a fuck.” He breathed in like he was going to say more, then went silent.
“It was nice of your dad,” I said, “to give you those other books. Even if you hated them.”
He laughed, kind of. “That’s your takeaway?”
“No. I just … I’ve spent so much time obsessing over Althea. Getting ready to meet her. Reading all kinds of fairy tales so I could impress her when I finally did. But she never called, and she never cared, and now she’s dead.” I’d never said any of this out loud, and doing it now felt like purging poison. “Some part of me has been defined by, like, her not being there, and now that she’s gone I’m being haunted by something she created.”
“You really think she created it?”
“Of course she did. What do you mean?”
He was shaking his head; he sat back up on his sleeping bag. “I told you, she was like a war reporter. She didn’t write this stuff into creation—she wrote about something that was already out there. I used to think it was metaphors for something, but not anymore, not after seeing Twice-Killed Katherine.” He paused. “And Alice, don’t you wonder…”
“What?”
He flopped down again. “Never mind.”
“No way. You’ve got to stop doing that. What were you going to say?”
When he spoke, it was almost in a whisper. “Don’t you wonder if your mom’s not the one they want? What if you’re the target, and she’s the bait?”
“Then they would’ve kidnapped me. It would’ve been easy.”
“They did kidnap you—that man was Hinterland, you know it. Maybe it’s different now that you’re older. Maybe now you have to go by choice.”
“Even if you were right,” I said slowly, “it doesn’t change anything. They want to get me to do something? They found the right way to do it. I’d follow my mom to hell if I had to. She’d do the same for me.”
She would, too. Beneath the beauty and the charm and the sharp sparkle of her personality, she had a core of steel. She was like a blade wrapped in a bouquet of orchids. I hoped to god whoever took her made the mistake of underestimating her.
Finch sighed in a way I couldn’t read. “Let’s try to sleep. Long day tomorrow.”
Questions crowded at the back of my throat. Why are you helping me? Do you think I’ll find her? Was that really Twice-Killed Katherine? But he’d rolled away from me. A line of moonlight ran like a thin white road from the crown of his head down his back. The longer I stared at it, the more it made him look like he was splitting in two, revealing something shining beneath his skin.
I rolled over and shut my eyes tight, but it was a long time before I drifted away.
OceanofPDF.com
12
I didn’t dream about Twice-Killed Katherine, like I worried I might. I dreamed about my mother. I dreamed about the day I realized we didn’t move for fun, or because she was restless. That she didn’t do it to ruin my life, or on a superstitious whim because she didn’t like the way an old woman hovered a hand over my forehead on the bus, drawing a helix in the air before hustling off at the next stop.
I was ten, and it was our second move in less than eight months. I’d woken that morning in my trundle bed on the floor next to Ella’s, feeling a tightness in my scalp. When I reached up, my fingers found the coiled bumps of braids. My hair was wrapped in a tight crown of them around my head.
But I’d fallen asleep with my hair shower damp and falling to my shoulders in tangles. “Mom,” I said, patting at my braided crown. “Why’d you do my hair?”
Ella rolled over and blinked at me sleepily. Then a look came into her eyes: fear and a spiky anger that yawned open like an aperture before slamming shut into something worse—hopelessness.
“No school today,” she’d said, rolling out of bed and going straight to the closet to pull down her suitcase.
My rage that time had struck like lightning. While she was shoving our kitchen into boxes, I cut every pair of her jeans off just below the crotch, in protest over leaving town the day my fifth-grade reading teacher was bringing in Turkish Delight.
It wasn’t until we were in the car, my body splayed against the seat like a shipwreck survivor in the wake of my tantrum, that I’d told her about the candy I was missing out on.
“It’s not like you think it’ll be,” she said, the bungalow we’d spent half a year in shrinking in our rearview. “It’s chalky and it smells like flowers. You’d hate it.”
“You’re lying,” I replied, turning my head to the window.
Ella stopped the car dead, in the middle of the road. “Hey.”