I think that’s what Wink wanted, anyway.
Thomas found another girl to love, a sweet girl named Katie Kelpie who had nice curves and a nice smile and who was always laughing. She drove him around town on the back of her red Vespa and had started to teach him to play the tin whistle so he could join her Irish punk band. Katie talked a mile a minute, only pausing long enough to gaze up at Thomas and make sure he was happy, and he usually was.
I sometimes saw Buttercup and Zoe in the cemetery when I walked into town, taking gravestone rubbings and whispering in each other’s ears, like always, like nothing was missing.
Briggs.
I ran into him in the woods. It was a windy day, almost dusk. He was sitting beside a green tent and small fire, staring into space.
“If being alone out in nature is good enough for Poppy, it’s good enough for me,” he said, after a while.
I just nodded.
“She never loved us, you know. Not any of us.”
I nodded again. “How long you plan on being out here in the woods, Briggs?”
He shrugged. “As long as it takes.”
I left him by his fire.
I went over to the Bell farm and walked right through the kitchen door, no knocking, because that’s how things stood now. Mim was melting something over the stove, something that smelled like butter and honey and roses. Her red hair was tied back with a green scarf, and the sleeves of her black shirt were rolled up to her freckled elbows.
“Hold out your hand,” she said without looking up.
I did. She dropped a creamy dollop in the middle of my palm.
“It’s shea butter dream cream. It helps you sleep.”
I rubbed my hands together. “It smells good. What will it make me dream?”
Mim didn’t answer but she flashed me a mysterious smile over her shoulder. And she looked so much like Wink when she did it that I got goose bumps.
“It’s so quiet,” I said. “Where is everyone?”
“Felix saw that white deer this morning and they all ran off to follow him. Wink packed a picnic for the Orphans, so they could be a while.”
I sat down at the table. There was a freshly shelled bowl of sugar snap peas and I picked up a handful of the little green guys and put them in my mouth.
Mim started filling clear glass jars with the dream balm, one careful teaspoon at a time. She paused for a second, hands on her hips. She turned away from the counter, leaned across the table, and moved the bowl of peas out of the way.
“I’m going to read the cards for you, Midnight.”
“All right,” I said.
“No, I’m going to read Wink’s cards for you.”
That got me. “But Wink told me that you won’t read your kids’ cards anymore, ever since you read Bee Lee’s once and learned she was going to die young.”
Mim looked at me and frowned, deep, lips tucking in at the corners. “Those weren’t Bee Lee’s cards. They were Wink’s.”
My heart stopped beating.
It did.
I put my palm to my chest and pushed in.
“I never told her,” Mim said. “But she started reading cards at twelve, and she learned it for herself. I thought knowing her future might help. Might make her embrace life, live it to the fullest. I was wrong. And then her father up and left too, and they were so close.”
I pressed harder, my whole hand into my chest.
“I don’t believe in tarot,” I said. “I don’t believe in fortune-telling.”
She pulled the cards out anyway, a quick tug of the hidden pocket. She laid them on the table.
A skeleton.
A dead man pierced with swords.
A cloaked figure, five gold goblets.
Two dogs howling at the moon.
A heart with three daggers, sunk to the hilt.
“Yes,” Mim said quietly.
I didn’t know what the cards meant, or what Mim saw in them, but there was sadness blazing in her Wink-green eyes.
“The cards could be wrong,” I said.
“Maybe.” Mim swept up the cards with one hand and put them back in her pocket. She turned to the glass jars and the dream balm, paused, and then looked at me over her shoulder. “Right or wrong, Wink believes them. And that changes everything.”
I FOUND WINK in the hayloft. The Orphans were put to bed at midnight and then it was just the two of us and a blanket on the hay and the moon shining in. We talked for hours. All truth, no fairy tales.
I was almost asleep when she kissed me. She kissed my neck and my chin and my ears and everything in between. She unbuttoned my shirt and I unbuttoned her strawberry overalls. She wrapped her bare arms around me and gripped my back, hard, and I swear I could feel her freckles pressing into my skin, every last one of them.
She didn’t arch her spine or flip her hair.
I pulled away. I looked at her, and she smiled. She smiled right into me—I felt it echo in my ribs, like a shout, like a deep, deep sigh.
Her body curved into mine, chest to chest, my face in her hair.
“Wink,” I whispered, sometime close to dawn, everything quiet but the sky still black. “Wink.”