I walked into the kitchen feeling like a thief, and foraged through cabinets in the dark.
“Is that a squirrel I hear, rummaging for nuts?”
I looked at the bag of pecans in my hand and eased it back onto the shelf. Audrey kept tabs and a running commentary on what people ate, her voice hard-edged if it was less than what she did. She sat in the unlit living room, her spume of dark hair in a topknot just visible over the back of the couch. She didn’t turn as I walked closer, but she tensed.
My stepsister was a sexy, zaftig motormouth who made me feel like an awkward breadstick. She was sprawled out in cutoff sweats and a tank top, always a little under-covered even at home. I watched over her shoulder as she clicked, restlessly, on a long feed of women wearing expensive clothes, ordering things she’d barely recognize when they arrived. It made me think of someone sitting at a casino machine.
“You playing superhero again?” she asked, her voice too bright. “Did you save your mom from my evil dad?”
I dropped onto the armchair across from her. “Harold’s not interesting enough to be evil. He’s just not good enough.”
That made her look up, eyes washed to blankness by white computer light. “You think my dad’s not good enough for your mom?” She made the last two words sound like profanity. “You’d still be living out of your car if it wasn’t for him. Wearing Walmart jeans.”
I was impressed she’d heard of Walmart, and pissed at myself for telling her something true. “Hey, sometimes we lived in shacks,” I said. “Or trailers. Once a garage.”
She considered me. “Once I waited so long for my truffle burger it was cold when it got there,” she said. “So I totally get it.”
“Once our car window got broken out, and Ella replaced it with duct tape and a sled.”
Audrey smiled faintly, her hand going still on her laptop. “Once my dad bought a boat and named it The Audrey, but he forgot to put a ballroom in so I sunk it.”
“Once…” The image that came to me then was jagged and fast, a three-frame cut of the bad luck that chased us out of Chicago. I closed my eyes against it, then stood abruptly. “You win.”
Her expression slid shut, and she smirked down at her computer. “Good night, sis,” she muttered as I passed her.
“Good night, Audrey,” I replied, too quiet for her to hear.
Ella and Harold’s room was silent as I passed. I tried to read the silence, but it was hard through a carved oak door. I continued on to the guest room Harold had barely converted for me.
Every morning I left my eyeliner out on the sink of the bathroom attached to my room. I left books open on the bed, socks under the sheets, jeans accordion-scrunched on the floor. Every night they were gone, tucked back into the cabinet, the hamper, the bookshelf. Waking up at Harold’s felt like living in Groundhog Day. No matter what I did, I couldn’t make a mark.
I avoided my eyes while brushing my teeth, then climbed into bed with a copy of The Blind Assassin, because if you’re not with the book you want, you might as well want the book you’re with. But I couldn’t focus on the words, and after a while I got up to retrieve the feather, the comb, and the bone from my dirty apron. I held them on my palm a moment before tipping them into a velvet pouch that used to hold Scrabble tiles and tucking it into my backpack.
I lay back down certain I wouldn’t drift off for hours but found myself waking from a sound sleep while it was still dark. Before my eyes were fully open, I sensed my mother’s presence in the room. She climbed noiselessly into bed beside me, and I loosened my grip on the covers so she could grab her share. I stayed still as she dropped a kiss on my cheek, dry-lipped and smelling of amber.
Her sigh was silvery; it tickled my ear. I held my breath till I couldn’t stand it, then rolled over to face her.
“Why him?”
She went tight, like she was tensing for a blow. I hadn’t hit her since I was ten, but seeing her brace made me press my hands between my knees. I expected her to beg off, to roll over, to tell me to wait till it was light and ask again. Not that she’d answer.
But she turned toward me, her eyes a faint, familiar shine. “I thought I was in love with him,” she whispered. “I promise I did.”
“And now?”
She settled onto her back, long fingers plucking at the comforter. “It feels good to rest. Doesn’t it? It feels so good to just rest.”
The roar in me, of everything that had happened—the man at the coffee shop, his book, the feather, the comb, the bone—turned down like a volume knob. Because Ella deserved this, didn’t she? Peace in a city so dense and bright its lights ate bad luck like they ate darkness.
Unspoken things bloomed at the back of my throat, then went cold. And I decided: I’d give her one more day. One more stretch of rest before telling her the same old curse had found us, in a form I didn’t fully understand.
We lay quiet in the dark a while longer, and fell asleep at the same time.
4
I was drawn to the surface of sleep by a longing for good coffee. When I opened my eyes, Ella was gone.
The best reason to wake up early at Harold’s was to get to the kitchen first. I still felt like a guest, so I preferred to slip around without being seen. A few minutes after I poured my coffee and added milk and honey to the cup, Harold walked into the kitchen in a three-piece suit all buttoned up tight, like he was making up for my having seen him so undone. Pointedly he grabbed the milk off the counter and put it back in the fridge.
“I was still using that,” I said, leaning against the kitchen island and drowning a pulse of rage with a swig of hot coffee.
He side-eyed me. “Coffee stunts your growth,” he said finally. “You want to look like a twelve-year-old your whole life?”
I slammed my cup down on the counter, but he was already leaving the kitchen. I felt like throwing the coffee at his retreating back, but gulped it down in one burning mouthful instead. I needed it. The redheaded man had come to me in dreams, his face looking out from steamed-over windows, his voice whispering stories over a payphone wire. The dreams mashed together with what I’d seen at Salty Dog until none of it felt real. Nothing but the feather, the comb, and the bone, solid in the bottom of my bag.
When Audrey’s dog-whistle voice alerted me to her approach, I grabbed a granola bar from my stash in Harold’s pantry and slipped out of the kitchen. I’d get my fill of her on the way to school—which Audrey she’d be was harder to predict. Maybe she’d ignore me; maybe she’d talk at me nonstop about some arcane statute of girl code one of her friends had broken. Or maybe she’d punish me for last night, for cutting our twisted bonding ritual short.
I hit the sidewalk early, an old smoker’s habit. Audrey stalked out in shades at 8:35, and we climbed into Harold’s black town car.
“Dad’s taking off work today,” she said to her cell phone, tapping away at a text the length of a Bible passage. “And you know what that means.”
“I do?”
“It means,” she said, then dropped her voice to a whisper, “it’s imminent. D-i-v-o-r-c-e.”
I let my head fall back against the car seat’s gamey leather, waiting for the high of victory to hit. It didn’t come. Instead, I had the perverse desire to argue.
“But they just got married. And what’s his staying home have to do with it? Are they getting a divorce right now?”