I think of Mother’s past, how its branches always seem to be reaching up to touch my own future.
“Maybe,” I say. “Maybe something I’m not sure I want to catch.”
“How intriguing.” He turns to face me, teasing now. “Maybe your Finnish word should be guarded.”
“I prefer reticent,” I say. I lean toward him, closing the distance between us to say something in his ear.
“You like a good chase, do you, William Cliffton?”
He nods, his right eyebrow raising. His eyes have returned to their regular blue.
“Then why don’t you catch me?” I ask, digging my boots into the powder beneath our feet. “Variants are cheating!” I add, taking off.
I can hardly believe my own boldness. Especially when I see Will’s smile just starting to bloom behind the sprays of my pure, white snow.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Date: 1/13/1942
Bird: European White Stork
Chicks unhappy with the provisions of their parents will abandon them and try to sneak into another nest.
I rent a small abandoned cabin with a cellar in Sheffield for my experiments. I line my pockets with money from the robberies Phineas sets up; then I travel to Sheffield and watch the cages teem with mice bodies, hating the way they shudder and whimper, the way their nails catch in the cage wire. I’m glad no one witnesses my first attempt at extraction. Jumping and sweating like a faint-hearted coward.
They’re just mice, I tell myself, and hold the first one, squirming and soft, as I pick the spot to insert my needle. But I save one mouse. I name her Vala. She climbs the length of my arm and nestles into the space below my ear. I like the soft warmth of her, the feel of her tiny breath and beating heart.
I return home after a week with a bag packed full of my failures. I throw the dead mice from the cliff for the birds to pick apart. Then I join Phineas on the porch as evening falls, and I ask, “Where were you when you realized the scents had gone?”
“I’m not really sure.” He sits back. Puffs on a cigar until he is engulfed in a wispy cloud. “It all happened around the same time. Losing your mother. Becoming a father. I was in such a daze. Heartbroken, acting sloppy and careless. The cops caught up with me not long after.” He snorts. “Not being able to smell in prison wasn’t much of a curse.”
He is quiet for a long time. “They took me away when you were just a baby,” he says, “and I knew you might not even want to know me. But I was always planning to come back for you.”
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.
