“Found it,” he says, and his chin lolls against his chest. His eyes sink closed.
The surrounding night feels all-encompassing, so thick it could swallow me. For the first time, I wonder if I’ve spoken with him—Lucinda’s killer, whoever he is. If I’ve sat across from him and had normal conversations, both of us ignorant to the dark in each other. Cameron. Howie. Zap. Anyone. Me, and my stupid spell. I think of the man from Modern Witchcraft, hanging from the ceiling in a house of locked doors. Lucinda, holding her Degas notebook. You don’t even know him; he’s not crazy. And Cameron, standing on her lawn just minutes before she was smacked so hard that she fell and cracked her neck. And of course, Chapter Two: “Signs from the Dead.”
The Image.
A chilly wind slithers between Howie and me. I blow on my hands to warm them. I don’t bother to say good-bye, because Howie is gone, burrowed deep in his demented mind. I slide back into Ma’s freezing car. The simple rumble of its engine is a relief, company. And me? I am glass. A bristle. A stutter.
They’re at the dinner table. Terry has three cans of beer in front of him, which means the meal has already progressed into argument. Amy sits on the couch, curled up with a plate in her lap, earbuds in and bopping her head to her Discman, which is probably playing Kelly Clarkson. The house smells vaguely like Indian food.
“Look who it is,” Ma says from the head of the table. Her lips are stained purple with wine. She sips from a mug with a snowman on it. Presumably, the wineglasses are dirty. “Glad you decided to join us.”
“I was working at the hotel,” I say. “Like I do every Thursday.”
Ma is drunk. She runs her fingers through her frizzy, dyed hair, preening for an audience. When Ma is drunk, she stares at her own reflection in the kitchen window, puckering her lips, batting her eyelashes. Ready for her debut.
Terry tilts his beer can to examine its contents. This is his way of avoiding confrontation: Pick at the lint on your shirt. Scratch at a spot on the table. If no one notices you’re alive, maybe you aren’t, and maybe that’s for the best.
Ma hates when I call him Terry. But there’s no reason to call him “Dad,” even though he is my biological father. He’s home at nine every night and gone by six the next morning, always wearing some version of the same short-sleeved button-down, floating through the house like a ghost or an old Labrador.
When things get bad with Ma, Terry slinks up the stairs. He fakes yawns. His eyes rove over the bruises on our arms—Goodnight, girls, he says, and instead of looking at us he fiddles with the glossy fountain pens in his shirt pocket.
“You missed it,” Amy says, pulling out an earbud and twisting it around her pointer finger. She looks smug. “The neighbors have been calling all night. Apparently they have a lead. They’re arresting someone at Jefferson High.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know, but Zap has been in for questioning.”
“What?” I ask. “They’re arresting Zap?”
Amy shrugs and puts the earbud back in. Ma takes a gulp of wine, twirling a strand of hair with long plastic nails. The smell of Howie’s clothing is still in my nose, mingling with hours-old Indian takeout.
“Your food’s in the fridge,” Terry says.
“You can heat it up yourself,” Ma adds.
“I’m not hungry.”
Upstairs, I leave my lights off.
The bottle is on the top shelf of my closet, underneath a baby blanket Ma is too sentimental to touch. I’ve only got about three inches left, because half the bottle was payment to Howie for buying. I don’t like the taste of rum, but I don’t drink for the taste. And I don’t drink much. It’s only for nights like tonight. I twist off the top and take as much as I can, trying to usher it past my tongue, straight down my throat. It runs south. Moments like these, I morph into the spitting image of Ma; my hands just like hers, clutching the neck of a bottle. These are the moments I feel sorry for her.
I slump against the closet door and wait to feel better. Guilt isn’t something I feel often. It’s a pointless emotion—completely unproductive. I hate the way guilt festers, then absorbs.
I try to remember the Cameron I saw at the cafeteria table today, so lonely. Or the Cameron from the principal’s office yesterday, pressing his hair down over his forehead, fragile and nervous. Both of these images end in that of Zap, cuffs rattling on his wrists, hands behind his back.
Guilt reminds me: Cameron was a shadow shaped like a boy the night Lucinda died. She pried her bedroom window open and Cameron stayed, motionless, as Lucinda climbed to the roof of the porch. She jumped, landing on her hands and feet, crouched, a few feet from where he stood.
Wherever she is now, Lucinda knows this. The Image. She’s asking me something. But she should know by now—girls like me don’t answer to girls like Lucinda Hayes.
This is how it feels to be a stutter.
You’re walking down the street and the night hasn’t settled yet. It doesn’t know what it wants to be. You’ve lived on this street your entire life. Your family hates you because you’re an asshole. You genuinely enjoy being an asshole. This is why you have no friends except the homeless guy who lives behind the library.
People like Howie push you too deep into yourself. You sink this way often, and there are things you can do to temporarily soothe your mind: turn on new music, cut your bangs in the bathtub, pick at old scabs. But you’ll still itch. You itch, constantly, because even when you think you might be happy, these truths bubble up to prove you wrong. You’re fat. You’re angry. In a different world, you could be blond or kind or friendly, or all of the above. When you slept you could look like a porcelain doll. But this is not a different world, this is your world, and you have to find a way to deal with such irony.
You walk past the Hayeses’, the Thorntons’, the Hansens’. The night is clear. The neighborhood smells clean. The rum churns, hot against your ribs. Dashboard Confessional is blasting in your headphones, and you’re wishing you could live inside the aching lyrics, inside the guitar’s shriek, that violent voice box.
You want to know what Cameron sees when he walks down this street under the forgiving cover of night. What he finds so fascinating. You want to know how he can stand in one spot for so long, with the explicit knowledge that his wanting will never be returned. How he stands with his wanting on the lawn for hours, and how he retreats home with it, unable to stash it away.
Your tiny consolation: Magic can’t be real. This can’t be your fault.
Your feet are so heavy on pavement, you take up too much space.
You want to hear the ocean, because you never have before.
Russ