“And maybe . . .” He hesitates. “Maybe that made them a bit suspicious of her.”
He stands clumsily and carries his plate to the sink. “I go in early for practice tomorrow,” he says. “But I’ll probably see you in the halls.”
When he reaches the door, he turns. “Just remember that you belong here, too.” He rubs his hands along the back of his neck and looks at me as if he’s trying to be sure I’m not too upset. “They wouldn’t have even let you in the school if you weren’t Juliet’s daughter—?if you weren’t already tied to us somehow.”
I force myself to nod. “Good night.”
“’Night,” he says, and leaves me to stare at the deep line one of Genevieve’s knives has left scarred in the kitchen table.
I loved Dr. Cliffton’s library when I first saw the hundreds of books covering the walls, but now I fight the urge to scream and hurl every last one of them from the shelves. I fumble around, trying to make out the spine I’m looking for in the dark, until exhaustion sets in. I finally admit to myself that if Dr. Cliffton was so eager to hide the title in the first place, he wasn’t just going to leave it sitting out somewhere.
But I will find it. I’ll keep coming back to look until I do. Because as Mother always said—?with something between pride and embarrassment—?I inherited all my stubbornness from her.
I return to my room. Mother’s Shakespeare book is lying out where I left it on the nightstand. I pull it into my lap, opening it over my legs like a blanket, and trace my finger over the curves she left on the pages. I’ve opened to All’s Well That Ends Well. I read the words she circled with her pen:
Proud scornful boy, unworthy this good gift,
That dost in vile misprision shackle up
My love and her desert; that canst not dream,
We, poising us in her defective scale,
I read it again, my eyes narrowing.
Did these passages simply strike her because they reminded her of Sterling? Or are they supposed to be clues? Some sort of message? One of her beloved riddles?
I close the book and rest it on the pillow beside me so I can sleep next to the weight of it. Then I rummage through my knapsack for a pen. Seeing her marks on the page makes me realize that I almost forgot our tradition. On the night before the first day of school she always drew a small heart on the inside of my arm. Right at the curve of my elbow, where almost no one else could see it, but I could catch sight of it like a secret love letter throughout the day.
I uncap the pen. My fingers shake slightly on the outline, and the ink is gray, but when I examine the finished product, I’m satisfied. This doesn’t have to be one more thing that died when she did.
I slip into Miles’s room, take his soft arm in my hand, and trace a heart to mirror my own. He stirs only slightly when the ink touches his skin.
I hope when he wakes and finds it tomorrow, he will think that Mother came back to leave him one final mark, a kiss on his body to show how much he was loved. I hope it helps him remember the Juliet Cummings Quinn who lived and moved and breathed in the space of our lives.
It is a challenge and a promise I am making to him and to myself.
I am going to find out what really happened here and use it to clear our mother’s name.
Chapter Seven
Date: 8/29/1940
Bird: Magnificent Black-Winged Frigate
Forked tail.
Can stay aflight for more than a week at a time.
Forces other birds to regurgitate their food, then steals it for itself.
Phineas’s house is the strangest combination of sterility and disintegration—?not unlike Phineas himself. His hair is wild and his stubble is pricked with gray. His teeth are stained from tobacco and his knuckles are tattooed, so that they appear perpetually smudged with dirt. But his fingernails are picked clean and pink.
The night we meet, when he invites me in, I stay for dinner. We dance around all the important questions as he spoons red stew into two blindingly white chipped bowls.
“Smells good,” I say when he sets it in front of me. I don’t know why I say it—?a blatant lie. I can’t smell it at all. Maybe it’s just habit. Maybe it’s nerves.
“So you did all right?” he asks gruffly, and I fight the urge to laugh. I’d sent him a few letters in prison, until I realized they always went unanswered. Surely he remembers that I spent most of my childhood in a wheelchair.
I don’t tell him about the loneliness, how badly things ended with Juliet, or how I was planning to kill myself later tonight. I skate along the edge of that line with a cool, “I’m still here.”
Then I rest my spoon and watch in horror as the weight of it falls and splatters red stew on the tablecloth. Phineas jumps up, and I sit in agony as he spends several minutes scrubbing away at the stain as if it were blood.
“Sorry,” I say stiffly, and he waves it away. But I notice then how clean his house is. Spare and sterile, as if he cleans it every day with bleach.
“What were you in jail for?” I ask abruptly when he returns to his seat.
He pauses. “Robbery,” he says. Which is partly true.
“When did you get out?”
“Twenty-five years ago.”
“You never came back.” What I meant was, You never came back for me.
He grunts and scrapes the stain of stew from the inside of his bowl.
“And what of . . .” He trails off. I know whom he means. But I don’t want to tell that long, awful story. Not tonight. So I shrug and shake my head, and he doesn’t bring her up again.
The rest of dinner is filled with gaping, painful silences. This, I think: the culminating event, the bookend to my life. But when he walks me to the door, he gives me his telephone number on a scrap of paper. “I need some help with odd jobs,” he says brusquely. “Maybe you could come back again.”
Later, on the platform, when the train hurtles toward me, I stare down into the abyss of the tracks and rock on my heels. I have not written a note to leave; there is no one to leave it for. But I feel in my pocket for that one ripped scrap of paper.
Close my fingers around my father’s handwriting. When the train is almost upon me, I step safely back into the clear, starless night.
Chapter Eight
The morning Miles and I start school, Mrs. Cliffton is waiting at the bottom of the stairs, a coat slung over her arm and a leather pouch in her hand. William has already left for practice. “I’m sure you’re eager for a bit of this,” she says. She applies the Looking Glass Variants to a hand mirror so I can examine myself. Then, before I am quite done straightening my uniform and smoothing my hair, she ushers me and Miles out to the car.
“Don’t want to be late,” she says.