Finally, the fire died out and I stood over it, satisfied that nothing was left. But then something caught my eye. Something silver in the ash.
I peered closer. “What is that?”
Noah noticed it, too. He leaned down to look at it with me. “A button?”
I shook my head. “There were no buttons.” I reached for the thing, whatever it was, but Noah pulled back my wrist and shook his head.
“It’s still hot,” he said. But then Noah crouched down and reached for the ashes himself.
I moved to stop him. “I thought it was still hot?”
He glanced back over his shoulder. “Have you forgotten?”
That he could heal? No. But, “Doesn’t it hurt?”
An indifferent shrug was my only answer as Noah stuck his hand into the dead fire. He didn’t flinch as he sifted through the ashes.
Noah carefully extracted the shining thing. He placed it in his open palm, brushed off the soot and stood.
It was an inch long, no bigger. A slim line of silver—half of it hammered into the shape of a feather, the other half a dagger. It was interesting and beautiful, just like the boy who always wore it.
Noah was impossibly still as I pulled down the collar of his T-shirt. I looked at the charm around his neck, the one he never took off, and then stared back at the charm in his hand.
They were exactly the same.
29
WHAT THE HELL WAS GOING ON?
“Noah,” I said, my voice quiet.
He didn’t answer. He was still staring.
I needed to sit down. I didn’t bother with furniture. The floor would do just fine.
Noah hadn’t moved.
“Noah,” I said again.
No response. Nothing.
“Noah.”
He looked at me, finally. “Where did your pendant come from?” I asked him.
His voice was low and cold. “I found it. In my mother’s things.”
“Ruth?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.
Noah shook his head, just as I expected him to. His eyes locked on the pendant again. “It was just after we’d moved here. I’d claimed the library for my room and had taken my guitar up when—I don’t know.” He ran a hand over his jaw. “I went back downstairs feeling like I had to unpack, even though I was jet-lagged and exhausted and planned to pass out for a week. But I headed directly to this one box; inside was a small chest filled with my mother’s—Naomi’s—silver. I began setting the silver aside for absolutely no reason at all and then took the chest apart. Beneath the drawer that held the knives, there it was,” he said, nodding at the charm. “I started wearing it that day.”
Noah reached down—to hand me the charm, I thought—but instead pulled me up from the floor and onto the sheet-covered sofa next to him. He handed me the pendant. My fingers curled around it, just as Noah asked, “Where did you get that doll?”
“It was my grandmother’s,” I said, staring at my closed fist.
“But where did it come from?”
“I don’t—”
I was about to say that I didn’t know, but then remembered the blurred edges of a dream. Hushed voices. A dark hut. A kind girl, sewing me a friend.
Maybe I did know. Maybe I watched while it was made.
Impossible though it was, I told Noah what I remembered. He listened intently, his eyes narrowing as I spoke.
“I never saw the charm, though,” I said when I finished. “The girl never put it inside.”
“It could have been sewn in later,” he said, his voice level.
With whatever that paper was too. “You think—you think it really happened?” I asked. “You think the dream could be real?”
Noah said nothing.
“But if it was real, if it really happened . . .” My voice trailed off, but Noah finished my sentence.
“Then it wasn’t a dream,” he said to himself. “It was a memory.”
We were both quiet as I tried to wrap my mind around the idea.
It made no sense. To remember something, you have to experience it. “I’ve barely left the suburbs,” I said. “I’ve never seen jungles and villages. How could I remember something I’ve never seen?”
Noah stared at nothing and ran his hand slowly through his hair. His voice was very quiet. “Genetic memory.”
Genetic.
My mind conjured my mother’s voice.
“It isn’t you. It might be chemical or behavioral or even genetic—”
“But who in our family has had any kind of—”
“My mother,” she had said. “Your grandmother.”
That was just before she recounted my grandmother’s symptoms.
Grandmother’s symptoms. Grandmother’s doll.
Grandmother’s memory?
“No,” Noah said, shaking his head. “It’s nonsense.”
“What is?”
Noah closed his eyes, and spoke as if from memory. “The idea that some experiences can be stored in our DNA and passed down to future generations,” he said. “Some people think it explains Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious.” He opened his eyes and the corner of his mouth lifted. “I’m partial to Freud, myself.”
“Why do you know this?”
“I read it.”
“Where?”
“In a book.”