“Those capris do nothing for your ass. And girl, really, you have a nice ass.”
“You’re assessing my ass?”
“Yes. Grading on the curve.” Mari cracked herself up. “Seriously though, yours is a fully realized butt.”
I tossed a shirt at her. “Speaking of curvy Latin butts, I’m hungry.”
“Me, too,” she said, judging her own backside in the mirror. “Think we can rip off a couple of empanadas? They smell insane.”
We went on empanada recon, stealthily making our way to the kitchen like we used to when we were little and wanted midnight cookies, because Mari convinced me that if you ate a sweet at midnight, it would give you sweet dreams. My father caught us as he was coming out of his office, looking serious and grave. No longer empanada ninjas, we continued to the kitchen, each grabbing one from the cooling rack on the counter and wrapping them in napkins.
“We should call Dun and tell him to come over. You know how much he loves these,” Mari said, nibbling the corner of the pastry. Steam coiled out with the pungent aroma of beef and garlic. “And he always cheers you up better than me.”
“I’m on it,” I said, but my cell phone was about dead after calling my dad from the supermarket. I set it on the charger and went to grab the phone in Dad’s office. The phone was still warm from my father’s hand. As soon as I touched it, my vision went black. Flashes of images and sounds assaulted my mind.
I saw my father speaking on this phone, his voice a panicked whisper. “It’s happened. Ever since she got sick, she’s been different. Changed.”
My grandmother’s gristly voice scraped across the miles. “She is her mother’s daughter, Benito. We knew this could happen.”
“Yes, but for years, you held it at bay. Until I can further analyze her blood for a possible answer, you have to help her. They might have found us. Strange things are happening. I think we’re not safe here anymore. If they see, if anyone figures out the truth about her…”
I swayed slightly on my feet, the world around me invisible but for the vision of my father on the phone and their hushed voices inside my head. “No, mijo,” my grandmother said. “I’ve tried. I don’t think I can help her anymore.” Despair. I could feel the utter despair coating my father, especially when Mami Tulke added softly, “She is what she is. You cannot save her from this, just as you could not save Grace.”
The flashes abruptly stopped, and the office whirled into focus. The phone burned in my grip, and I flung it across the floor, my heart thumping wildly, sweat beading on my forehead. My hand stung where I had held the phone, like I had been bitten on the finger by a small animal. I glanced down and gasped. A delicate inky line of black clovers wreathed my ring finger.
I stared in awe. The image had burned into my skin. I licked my finger and touched the tender area to see if it would rub off. The clover ring prickled when I swiped it, but it would not go away. I’d somehow been tattooed, marked by a memory.
“I take it Dun can’t come?” Mari said from the doorway, motioning to the phone on the floor.
I willed myself to stop shaking.
“You buggin’ out?” she asked, concern creasing her forehead into tight grooves.
I couldn’t answer. How could I tell her I had just had a major hallucination that left me marked in some way? It was too weird. Too abnormal. Like the cloak separating fantasy and reality had been worn thin, and I didn’t know what was real.
“I’m not feeling well,” I choked out, and it was so true.
I mentally scrolled through all of my interactions with my father in the last couple of weeks. The hazy memory of him drawing my blood while Janelle asked if my illness could have anything to do with my mother. And he’d been so scared when I first told him I thought I was seeing auras. I could see his fear, especially after Mrs. Oberman’s death.
“I need to talk to my father. Right now.”
Twelve
Dad entered his office with a perplexed and wary expression. One hand rattled a few loose coins in his pocket. My newly marred hand was tucked away in the sleeve of my hoodie. Mari and Janelle stood in the doorway with expectant, inquisitive looks on their faces.
“I need to talk privately with my dad. Can you give us a minute?” I said with more grit than I knew I had. The double doors shut us in the office together. I registered the sound of a fly beating itself senseless against the window to get to something he could see but not reach.
Truth could be like that.
“Dad…” Tears gathered in the back of my throat. “You spoke to Mami Tulke.”
The statement versus question tactic worked. I could see from his shocked expression that it was true.
“Have you been eavesdropping?” His face contorted from alarm to stern reproach.
“If I had been, how would I also know what she said?” His office had a separate line. No other phones in the house connected to it.
He stood in shocked silence. His aura flared erratically, changing from a greenish-yellow to a mustard one that I’d come to associate with fear. “There is no sane way to explain this, so I’m just going to say it. I came in here to call Dun, and when I picked up the phone, I heard the whole conversation. Like a replay. I felt what you were feeling. I know what Mami Tulke said to you!” My voice rose successively higher, my own disbelief still coursing through me.
“I don’t know what you’re going on about, Cora. What you’re telling me is impossible.”
“I don’t care how impossible it sounds! I am my mother’s daughter. So tell me what that means! Tell me what you meant when you said ‘if anyone figures out the truth about her.’ Tell me what it is that you can’t save me from, because freaky things are happening to me, Dad, and I don’t know how to save myself. You’re supposed to protect me.”
His mouth hung open, his face drawn. He spoke slowly and softly, as if I were mentally challenged. “I never said that, sweetheart. You must have imagined it.”
His words came out in a puff of black smoke. The gray-black hovered over his mouth a moment, curled around his lips and throat, then slowly dissipated.
His lie was a cannon shot in the mist.
It struck me in the gut. A condensed ball of yellow rolled from him—like I’d seen in Finn’s aura in the forest, only much larger—floating like a polyp, an enormous cystic secret. He was lying to protect that secret.
I pulled my hand out and shoved the marking in his face. “Am I imagining this?”
He gasped. “You got a tattoo of your mother’s wedding ring? How did you know what it looked like?” Even if I hadn’t been able to see his aura, I could read the conflict in his eyes and the threat of tears in their rims.
My own eyes filled with tears. My mother’s wedding ring? Fresh pain of missing her stabbed at my heart. I’d gone twelve years without knowing the touch of my mother, and now I had to wear an image of her wedding ring on my finger?
“This conversation is over. We will not speak of it again.” My father turned and left me standing alone in the office, beating myself against the glass between us.
Thirteen
I watched my father eat his breakfast the next morning in the way a scientist observes the mating ritual of sloths. Suddenly, everything he did and how he did it was slow, irritating, and suspicious. I was consumed with questions about myself, about my mother, and now knew that my father, the one person I had trusted above all others, was hiding the answers from me. His idea of keeping me safe was to render me ignorant.