I become so still I can hardly breathe. Look out through the screens I hung at waves as black as pitch. Moon like metal overhead. “But I was still in jail when I realized that whatever was happening to me was going to keep happening,” he says. “I woke up in my cell one day and couldn’t see my reflection.”
The porch has grown so dark I can hardly see him. “That’s when I knew I couldn’t come back for you anymore. Thought I was going mad. Or that I ran afoul of someone who had cursed me. Not so hard to believe when you’ve spent years doing what I did.”
What a waste. To spend all those years waiting for him. And all along he had been trying to protect me from a curse I was already under.
But something inside the inky, clotted part of my heart melts at those words. To know that he had stayed away to protect me. It almost burns at first, the warmth returning where frostbite had long ago set in. Then it begins coursing thick and gold in my stomach. Like I’ve taken a deep swig of alcohol.
I pet Vala that night as I’m falling asleep. A few days later I return to my experiments.
In Sheffield, the pile of mouse bodies grows.
It takes almost three months to track down Juliet.
“She’s in Gardner. Connecticut.” My contact repeats the address twice, and I promise to do his next job for free.
“Dear Juliet,” I write. Gritting my teeth.
“I know things ended badly between us.
Can we put it in the past?”
It is a lie, of course. There was too much damage done too long ago. As immutable as fossil by this point. But Phineas wants the Stone. He thinks he started the Curse. He thinks he might know how to end it. I’m not convinced. Even more—?I don’t know if that’s even what I want.
But I’ll go along with Phineas for now. See where this takes us. After all, I think, smiling a little at my joke as I slide my needle into the next mouse.
Patience is a Virtue.
Chapter Thirty
With the snow falling outside and the fire sparking from the hearth, Christmas is both cozy and muted. The tree smells rich with pine and sap but only for the short time after we’ve sprinkled it with Variants. No carols play. None of Mother’s drawings are sketched across stark brown wrapping paper. None of her riddled clues were hidden around the house, leading to a single present for Miles and me to open on Christmas Eve. My father doesn’t come down the creaking staircase to make waffles for breakfast in his red pajamas and a beard of shaving cream.
But sitting around the fire with the Clifftons, exchanging gifts and overstuffed stockings, eating ham ringed with pineapple, green beans sprinkled with almonds, mashed potatoes layered with cheese, and vanilla meringues that are lighter than air, I find a strange sense of hope where I had feared would be only a gaping sadness. It feels half like a betrayal and half like the deep exhale of a breath I’ve been holding for too long.
I glance around the table at the faces that surround me. I think of my father, how I don’t even know where he is right now, and consider how much difference a single year can make. I never would have chosen this. Yet somehow there are hints of green coming up through the scorched earth.
We exchange gifts, but there’s a conspicuous lack of one from Will. I bought him a model set of the Golden Gate Bridge, something full of intricate pieces he’d have to construct. It admittedly cost much more than I spent on anyone else. “Until you get there—” I’d written on the tag, and I knew I’d done well by the way he flushed when he opened it.
I unwrap the final gift with my name on the tag, a pair of soft gloves the color of butter that Mrs. Cliffton must have picked out on Father’s behalf. They are beautiful, and I look down at the mountain of torn paper at my feet and tell myself it’s silly to feel disappointed.
We’re cleaning up the paper, gathering the ribbons to save for the next celebration, when Will brushes my arm.
“I do have something for you,” he says, and he runs his hands along the hair at his neck, almost as if he is nervous. “It’s not done yet. But it’s probably close enough. Do you want to see it?”
We put on our coats, and he leads me outside through the gardens and tells me to wait as he disappears into the shed. Our feet leave deep prints in the snow. It takes me a moment to figure out what I’m looking at when he comes out. I walk toward him, playing with the sleeves of my coat, my hair tangling with the wind.
“Merry Christmas, Aila,” he says.
It’s a wooden box with beautiful bronze hinges. “To hold Variants someday,” he says. “Or letters.”
He’s carved a word into the bottom, swirled into it where the wood looks like cream. I squint at it to make sure I’m reading it right.
LUMOAVA, it says.
“What does it mean?” I ask, running my gloved fingertips along the grooves.
“You’ll figure it out,” he says with a devious little smile that thrills me in a tangle of hope and confusion. “Eventually.”
“Thank you,” I say, clutching it, and that single smile is all it takes for me to decide that maybe I don’t hate riddles as much as I thought.
Chapter Thirty-One
Date: 4/21/1942
Birds: Vultures, buzzards
Carrion birds are carnivorous scavengers. Can be found near the decaying flesh of animals and, occasionally, poorly tended graveyards.
My mother’s gravestone is polished granite that’s stuck into the grass like a comb. ADA BLYTHE SHAW. How strange to see my own beginning, the date of my birth, etched there as her ending. The one day on earth we shared.
I stand next to Phineas and fidget with my hands. Look around at the things I’ve been taught to notice about graveyards. The newer gravesites, where the earth is still tilled and brown without the shawl of green grass. The graves so carefully tended that someone would surely notice if they were disturbed, and the ones whose wilted, shriveled stalks scream of neglect. I never knew how much Phineas had loved my mother until I saw her gravesite.
If anyone touched it, he would know.
“How did you meet?” I ask.
“We grew up together,” he says. “I’d loved her since she was five years old, and never anyone else.”
I think, of course, of my own little red bird.
“She was buried here?” I ask. “Not in Sterling?”
“She was originally,” he says. “But I wanted her closer to me.” And he leaves it at that.
A pair of song thrushes fly over our heads.
“Good thing she died before she could see all that happened.” His voice thickens as he scrapes his fingers along the soil. “She would miss the stars, especially.”
I nod, thinking about how his head is always down, looking at the dirt, while my eyes train skyward like my mother’s. He reaches down and rubs the earth until his hands are as dark as the crude tattoo marks nicking his knuckles.
Then he sniffs. Straightens. Walks past me.
“I’m sor—” I start to say, but he interrupts me.