“The twenty-ninth?” I ask, my head jerking up.
“Yes,” she says, “the Harvest Fair is on the twenty-ninth.”
“Every year?”
She nods, then continues on with her list. “We’ll pick up some honey and figs. And Malcolm will need to bring his telescope.”
But I’m not listening. My mind is traveling back to three years ago, when Miles was five. The first year he insisted we do something special for birthdays other than his own. He helped Father and me make a lemon sponge cake topped with glazed strawberries. Talked Father into getting us all tickets to the cinema to see The Wizard of Oz, even though the flying monkeys gave him nightmares for weeks after. At the end, Miles had the whole theater sing to Mother. The way she smiled let me know she was doing it for us, not because she enjoyed it. In fact, she’d never really liked her birthday, and I’d never understood why.
But I do now.
My mother’s birthday was October 29, 1907.
She was born on the first Disappearance Day.
Chapter Twenty-One
Date: 7/28/1941
Bird: The Fulmar
Means “foul gull” in Norse.
Nauseating smell acts as a defense against predators.
But it’s a poor defense, as many birds can hardlysmell anyway.
I can tell that Phineas is starting to sense that something is off. There’s the cut on my cheek I can’t see. I nicked myself shaving and didn’t realize. “You slice yourself?” he asks, gesturing to his own whiskered mouth one morning. I probe the crusting of dried blood with my tongue until it starts to bleed again.
“Don’t know how I missed it,” I say lightly. Phineas fetches me a bandage. Carefully covers the cut himself.
The gesture startles me. It’s the first time in years someone has touched my face.
There are bloody tissues in the waste bin again, folded beneath other trash. I find them when I’m emptying the can. There are too many to just be mine.
My mind keeps going over it while I grate potatoes to make hash for our dinner. I put the first few on the stove to fry and turn to grate another. My eyes begin to burn and smart. As if I’m cutting onions. I don’t stop to think about why. I’m still mulling over those bloody tissues.
When Phineas appears in the doorframe, I look up just in time to see his face change. Go wide and wild with shock. “What the devil?” he yells.
I turn to see flames behind me, yellow and blue. It wasn’t onions that had bothered my eyes. It was smoke.
I snatch a pan cover and drop it over the blaze. Throw a handful of salt on the flames that are escaping around its edges. Like fire-dousing Variants, I think blurrily. The smoke is like gravel in my throat. Makes me cough like Phineas. He flings open the window, sending the smoke rushing out into the cold air. The flames in the pan finally weaken and go out.
When the smoke clears, I can see what I’ve done to Phineas’s pristine kitchen.
Black singe marks shoot up the wall behind the ruined back stove burner. Flakes of white ash settle around us like snow. I managed to contain the flames just before they reached the curtains.
The apology I attempt sends my lungs into a fresh coughing fit.
But Phineas isn’t listening. He is looking intently at a spatula that sat near enough to the heat to melt into a pool of rubber.
I think I read somewhere that melting rubber smells horrible. All of a sudden I can’t remember. Especially when Phineas fixes his eyes on me. Glittering and cold.
He ignores the mess and pours two glasses of blood-red claret. Sets the larger one in front of me and gestures for me to sit.
“Talk,” he commands.
“I can’t smell anything.” I bow my head in confession, like this is somehow my fault. “I haven’t been able to since the day I was born.”
Phineas rights the chair again and sits down heavily. Heaves a sigh. Rubs his temples with the knuckles marked for each year that he was behind bars. I gulp down the wine, wondering what he’s thinking. If the fallout from my Disappearances will be worse than I’d feared.
But he suddenly opens his palms to me in a gesture of admission, clean and white against the background of the blackened stove. When he shrugs, my understanding dawns.
“You . . . can’t either?” The wine, the realization . . . they make my mind spin.
He gives a single curt nod. “Anything else unusual ever happen to you?” His voice has grown dangerous and low.
“The Disappearances,” I breathe. I check them off my fingers, and his eyes darken with each one: the lost colors and dreams, the starless nights, the missing reflections. Something new vanishing every seven years, like clockwork.
He’s chugged two glasses of wine by the time I finish. “All this time,” he says, his voice already slurring, “I thought it was only me.”
I fight the strangest urge to laugh. “You and the population of three other towns.”
“What do you mean?” His voice is too loud. “Which towns?”
“Sterling, Corrander, and Sheffield.”
By this point we’re both drunk on a bottle of wine and no dinner. But I can tell he is thinking hard about something. Like a puzzle he is trying to figure out.
“I left a ring with you. A stone,” he finally says. “With a teardrop in it.” The corners of his lips are stained.
“Yes, I remember,” I say, leaning a steadying hand against the table. “But I don’t have it.”
Phineas strokes the stubble on his chin. It is no longer pricked with gray, but is being consumed by it. Or maybe the color is simply draining out of him. “Then who does?”
My voice is hoarse. “I’ll get it back.”
The room spins slightly off its axis, as if Phineas were swirling it along with the wine at the bottom of his glass. “Everything is forgiven,” he says, vaguely nodding at the destruction I’ve caused. “Just get that stone for me.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
What can it mean, that Mother was born on Disappearance Day?
Her incriminating ties to the Disappearances are growing harder to dismiss. I flinch every time someone mentions the Harvest Fair. October 29.
Stop being ridiculous, I tell myself. Stop being disloyal. Maybe being born on Disappearance Day isn’t incriminating—?maybe, in fact, it’s the reason why she was able to leave.
Yes, I think, glancing up from the words she’s circled in her Shakespeare book. Maybe that’s all it was. Some supernatural transaction, some magic in the air that made her immune because she was born the same day it happened—?something akin to being struck by lightning.
I scratch out another entry to my growing list. Either way, I don’t want anyone else to know the connection. Mother must have been quiet enough about it growing up that people didn’t know—?no one’s said anything about it yet, and even the entry in the Council book made no mention. I’m certainly not going to call attention to it.
But the realization makes me even more anxious for Disappearance Day to be behind us.
Four more days.