I put one hand over my eyes and take a deep breath. I don’t want to snap again. I don’t want to fight.
“You okay?” Ruby whispers. She bends down and pushes my fingers away from each other, creates a little window to my left eye.
I manage a laugh, stand and swing her onto the bed. “I’m too tired to argue with you anymore,” I tell Ben. “We’ll start sparring nice and early tomorrow.”
“But I want to see more magic,” Ruby says as she kneels on the mattress. “Can you do another trick? Jed never does any tricks at home.”
“You want magic?” I face the little side lantern on the end table next to Ben. I point at it, close my eyes, and whisper, “Off,” and the lantern flickers out.
Ruby just giggles. “Too wild.”
She climbs over Ben as he grunts from the pressure. He steals a pillow and slides down to get comfortable on the rug on my floor, as I settle in on Ruby’s right side, into the sliver of space between her and the wall. It would almost feel like our cabin back home, except the window above my bed glows with light from the outside streetlamps, and the horns and engines on M Street chug a steady hum.
After a few minutes of silence, once Ruby burrows into her pillow and starts to lightly snore, Ben says from the floor, “You can’t protect us forever, Joan, you know that, right?”
I wait a minute before I answer, “Doesn’t mean I can’t try.”
Ben sighs. “I’m more grateful to you than words will ever do justice. But I need to make my own way in the world too.” I hear him turn over. “I can’t go back there, Joan. I can’t keep watching my father spiral into nothing.”
Of course I understand that. But even still, there’s no way in hell I want him working for Gunn. So I give him the line I’ve been giving him all my life, when we were smaller and in charge of watching the bar with nothing but Jed’s rifle as protection, when Jed showed up a few years back with a knife poking out of his left calf and was blubbering in fits and mumbles—even after Mama died, and I put that hard shell around myself, determined to keep moving forward, to use the future to right the past. “We’ll figure this all out, Ben,” I whisper. “We’ll get through it. We always do.”
But there’s no answer, except a small sigh from the floor.
I can’t sleep. I’m so worked up about all of it—our exchange with D Street tomorrow, my family, Gunn’s slow, careful needling, and Alex—that my stomach just keeps tying itself into one long, complicated knot. I feel trapped, even more so as my back is literally up against my bedroom wall. I get a vague, almost primal urge to jump out the window, run and never look back.
So I turn to face Ruby, to remind myself of who it’s all been for.
Her face is so soft, peach and plump under the light coming in from the street, and I can’t help but put my hand on her cheek, feel her still-baby softness, her perfection that the world hasn’t stolen away.
I am doing the right thing, aren’t I?
Ruby stirs a bit, smiles back at me. “I forgot what your smell was like.”
I smile. “I smell?”
“You good-smell smell,” she says. “I’ve really missed you, Joan.”
“I’ve really missed you, too.”
She looks at me a little longer, her eyes heavy and dreamy. A sudden shadow falls across her face and she stirs, gasps. “Who’s that man outside?”
I turn around, give a little gasp of my own.
“Is he real?” Ruby whispers.
“Hush, don’t wake Ben.” I move quietly to kneel, then press my face against the window. Alex Danfrey is on my fire escape, only an inch of glass between us. He looks like he hasn’t slept since I last saw him. Ruffled hair, shirt a mass of wrinkles, deep bags under his eyes that look almost purple.
Still, just seeing his face sends a current right through me, lights up every inch.
“He’s real,” I whisper back.
Alex finds my eyes through the shaded glass of the window and smiles. He waves me outside.
“Ruby, don’t say a word, don’t move, you hear?” I say.
“You’re going out there?”
“I’ll be right back.”
I unlock the glass pane and climb out onto the fire escape, and then close the window behind me.
“Is someone in there with you?” Alex asks as soon as I turn around.
“My cousin, and my little sister Ruby. Gunn brought them up here, to help remind me of my ‘priorities.’” Then I look away, ’cause I know how that sounds: exactly how Alex pegged it—that Gunn’s manipulating me, has me all turned around. “What are you doing here?”
“We need to talk.” Alex takes my hand, sits me down on the fire escape. The air is frigid, has to be below zero. My body tenses as I sit, and I wrap my cotton-pajama arms around myself.