PROLOGUENINAseventeen years previous
Ma and I were the only ones in church with the coming of winter. I hated her for it.
The walk was slushy, the building jarringly cold, the pews merciless. I wriggled my backside against it and whined to holy hell.
“I want to leave.”
“I know you do.” My mother’s voice was distant. She looked to the altar as though she saw something else entirely. She only ever wore her best clothes here; a white dress turned yellow at the armpits and hem, a woolen hat low over her ears, earrings her own mother had given her on her wedding day.
There was no one in the parish more religious than my mother, it seemed. Not even the pastor rose on Sundays while snow was falling. No one but her and I to light the candles and converse with Idia, or pretend to. In Scurry, there was not much religion to be had at all. I knew for a fact that Pastor David liked to take God’s name in vain. I heard it through the walls of our apartment when he visited Mrs. Flamshank in the night.
The other children of Scurry were not freezing on hard wood benches every week. They were under blankets in their beds, staving off the morning chill. They wouldn’t be back in church until the snow had melted and the Scurry ground was full of widow’s lace and wildflower.
“It’s cold.”
“Just a little longer.” She scooted me closer to her, so I was tucked under her arm. I went reluctantly, wanting to reproach her, but gravitating toward the warmth. “It’s important we come, even when we don’t want to.”
“But why?”
“Because it takes sufferin’ to have your wishes answered,” she said. “That’s what God wants. He wants to know we’ve earned it.”
“Is that why the seats hurt so bloody much?”
“Yeah. Don’t swear.”
I frowned at the little statue on the altar. Shorter than me, hollow-eyed, bone-white. Idia, frozen in her suffering. How much had she had to endure before God was finally satisfied?
“What do you wish for?” I asked Ma now. Whatever it was, she wanted it badly. Badly enough to wake me at dawn every week. Badly enough that tears filmed her eyes when she prayed to that ugly statue.
Her smile was as weak as they came. “When God grants it, I’ll tell you.” She kissed my curls, the same as her own: golden in sunlight, dull there in the nave.
“Pastor David says that God loves us all, even if we don’t come to church.”
“Well, Pastor David is a pig.”
We sat in silence for a moment. Me fidgeting, Ma reveling in whatever evangelical reassurance she found in a place that smelled of tobacco and damp wood.
“Wishes ain’t real,” I said eventually, and only because I wanted to poke a hole in her peace. The bones of my backside pulverized further.
“I wished foryou, and here you are. What say you to that?”
“All the women have babies, even the ones that don’t want ’em. That ain’t a real wish.”
She scoffed. “And if you could wish for anythin’, Nina, what wouldyouwish for?”
What a question to lob at an eight-year-old. I wanted for more things than I knew how to voice. All that wanting had become an unrelenting ache in my fingers. Sometimes it was hard to tell exactly what it was I longed for.Desserts? Toys? A big house with twelve rooms? Or was it tied more closely to the things I was afraid of? Vacant eyes. The tremor in Dad’s fingers. The shake of Ma’s frame when she lay aside me in bed.
“I’d wish for magic,” I said. It seemed the only answer to encompass the whole lot.
She nodded, looked back to that sorry statue. “Me own Ma used to tell me a story about wishes. Do you want to hear it?”
I nodded.
She licked her cracked lips in readiness. “Let’s see now. God bestowed three daughters to Earth—”
“God only had one daughter,” I interrupted haughtily. “Idia.”
“But in this story, there’rethree,” she winked at me. “Idia, Joan, and Dione. The three daughters were sent to Earth with powerful gifts. In their blood was a magic no man or woman had ever seen. They could bend rivers, plunder the earth, levitate any matter they set their mind to. They held the world in the palm of their hands, and the humans, those greedy blighters, they wanted that power for themselves, didn’t they?”
