_*_ 60 _*_
Gracie tripped over the threshold. Topher trailed behind her with a stupid grin on his face. Both of them were redeyed and buzzed.
“Did you drive?” Finn asked.
“Got a ride,” Topher said. “We escaped just in time.” “So many police cars,” Gracie said with a giggle. “Police?” Finn opened the door again to check. “They busted the party at the quarry.” Topher grinned
like a ten-year-old. “We ran. They didn’t see us.” “We flew,” Gracie said, eyes wide. She pointed at Finn. “We
have to sleep here tonight. In fact, we’re moving in. We’ll be
hippies and have a commune and raise chickens. And goats.” Topher put his arm around her. “Sorry, dude,” he said.
“She’s a little messed up.”
“You two,” Gracie’s swayed her finger back and forth
between Finn and me, “are good. Friends.”
“I made pancakes,” Finn said.
“Dude!” Topher let go of Gracie and headed for the
kitchen.
“Hurry up,” Gracie called after him. “I want to talk to
dead people.”
Finn looked at me. “What did she just say?”
By the time we finished eating, Gracie had somehow convinced Finn to take the big mirror off the wall of his mom’s bedroom and set it on the floor of the family room with a fat red candle in the middle of it.
Gracie curled up under an afghan on the couch, her head on Topher’s lap, her fogged eyes losing the fight to stay open. Topher tilted his head back and fell asleep, too. I thought about dragging the two of them outside and letting them sleep under the bushes, but that could create massive deposits of bad karma for me and I needed all the help I could get in that department. By the time Finn came in from the kitchen with the rest of the bacon and a small bowl of maple syrup, the two of them were snoring, Gracie’s soft alto alternating with Topher’s bass.
“Turn off the lights,” I said.
Finn muttered something I didn’t catch, but shut the lights off and groped his way back in the dark. He sat across from me, the mirror between us.
“Now what?” he asked.
“Haven’t you ever done this?” I wrapped my shawl of feathers around me to shield me from thoughts of Trish and my father. “The veil between the worlds is thinnest on Halloween night. We’re supposed to be able to see dead people in the mirror.”
Finn crunched a piece of bacon. “My mom would never buy a mirror that had dead people in it.”
“You can be an old fart sometimes.” I leaned forward and lit the candle, holding my shawl away from the flame.
He pointed at the mirror’s surface. “See? You and me, very much alive.”
“Take off your glasses,” I said. “Let your eyes go out of focus.”
“If I take my glasses off, my eyes go out of focus automatically.”
I snorted. “Just do it, okay?”
Finn removed his glasses. “All right,” he said. “Bring on the dead. They better not like bacon.”
I took a deep breath, half closed my eyes, and let them go blurry until I could only see shapes. Oval silver mirror. Square red candle. Circles and then crescents of flame colored blue, yellow, white, and then gray until it faded into the lanky Finn-shaped shadow that melted into the darkness.
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 it 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 arm 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 k now.”
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.