“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.
“When did the whole thing with the birds start?” He turns his eyes from the dirt at our feet to the endless blue of the sky.
“I got a bird encyclopedia for my tenth birthday,” I say, stumbling over myself to change the subject. I’d almost forgotten—?that first encyclopedia had been from Juliet. I have a sudden picture of her eyes lighting up, pushing her hair behind her ears. She’d sent me on a treasure hunt to find it. “You would have liked it, actually. I had to follow a series of maps to get it.” Juliet had buried my bird encyclopedia under a tree. I looked at it so much over the years that some of the pages had fallen out of the binding.
I try to brush that memory of her away like an itch.
“Have you heard?” Phineas asks. “About the Stone?”
“No.” I toe the grass. “But I’ve been thinking—?what if the Disappearances could be made into something beneficial? I know you think you caused them, but I’ve been working on something—”
Phineas raises his eyebrows. “Don’t waste time with that. It’s not as important as the Stone. Just get the Stone.”
“Why?” I ask, my annoyance flaring. “Of course what I’m doing is important. Why do you care so much about the damned Stone all of a sudden?”
“Because.” His eyes are calm. “I’m dying, Stefen.” As if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
The air around me shrivels. I gape at him.
“That Stone might be nothing,” he continues, weaving a path back through the graveyard. “Just a piece of meaningless rock. But it might be much more than that. It might have the power to save me.”
As we walk back past my mother’s gravestone, I notice for the first time the space that’s been left there next to it. It is meant for him. My old anger at Juliet suddenly rages up, unchecked. Juliet, hoarding the very thing that could keep Phineas with me.
Phineas is right. The Virtues are secondary. And I am going to get that Stone from her.
Even if I have to rip it from her lily-white fingers myself.
Chapter Thirty-Two
When Miles was five—?young, but still old enough to know better—?he started knocking his drinking glass over. Mother was patient at first. Sopping up his tears first and then the spilled milk.
After a dozen more spills, though, she began to get mad. Made him clean up his own messes. Demanded that he stop being so clumsy. But spills kept seeping across the table as if Miles had brought them to life: rivers of water, moons of milk, paisley splashes of juice. He even broke a glass once when it rolled off the table and shattered in a cacophony of shards on the floor.
Mother became livid. He was clearly doing it on purpose. She’d threatened, in a moment of passion, to cancel his birthday. July 28. His favorite day of the year.
After that he’d gone three days without a single spill. Then Father had come home from work, and Miles, in his eagerness, jumped up from the table, sending his glass sailing. He’d frozen. Turned to Mother, his eyes full of fear. Because even though Miles was Mother’s favorite, there was a line you could not cross with Juliet Cummings Quinn.
But she hadn’t yelled that time. A line had been crossed—?for the first time, he hadn’t actually been trying to spill the glass, and it struck her as incredibly funny. She’d laughed, trying to smother it with a dish towel, and Father had come into the kitchen and loosened his necktie, his eyes crinkling and lighting up the way they did when she laughed like that.
I’m thinking of that when Miles brushes his hand against his glass on New Year’s Day and reaches to catch it just in time. I try to meet his eye, to exchange a smile, but he doesn’t look at me. It makes me wonder if he even remembers those days at all.
Will’s jaw faintly twitches when George pulls out a chair to stay for dinner again and volleys ideas to Dr. Cliffton over the table.
“Perhaps we look at something to do with Linus? Greek mythology?”
“Or the Chinese? Ling Lun?”
“Ah, yes, bamboo pipes?”
“Could you pass the rolls?” Will says.
“Did you see in Father’s letter about the pineapple spigots?” I ask Miles, trying to draw him out. He doesn’t look at me, so I turn to Will. “They stopped at a pineapple factory in Hawaii and filled up glasses of juice in spigots straight from the wall.”
