“No,” Marigold lied.
“Then is it that time of month?”
“Ma!”
“What? Your father’s not here. There’s nothing embarrassing about woman talk. Come here, let me see if you’ve got a temperature.”
“I’m fine,” Marigold asserted again. Really,she meant to add. But her mother was already leaning forward.
“No, don’t touch me—”
Too late. Helen’s hand came clapping down on her forehead.
It was like being suddenly thrown underwater. Marigold’s vision blurred and her lungs burned, guarding a precious breath as she tumbled off the bridge leading from her world to her mother’s. Except, unlike what had happened earlier in the gym, she didn’t emerge into a memory.
She’d arrived at . . . nothing. Truly, nothing.
Marigold was in a black, infinite abyss where the air was so brittle it circulated in shards, and the sensation of piercing cold was her only validation of still being alive. She’d become weightless, and she found herself floating, untethered and drifting, deeper into the void.
Fear gripped her.Mama?
Marigold did not exist in these memories. She had neither voice nor body, yet she was real enough that the cold knew where to find her, that she could feel the darkness closing in, that she had—a shadow?
It was here, lurking beneath her, cast by the feeblest band of light. Drawn to it by a magnet, she stopped drifting. Cautiously, she touched it.
What she saw—what shefelt—
With a gasp she resurfaced back to the kitchen in Three Flowers—and promptly blacked out on the floor.
The doctor diagnosed low blood pressure. Which, on top of her asthma, led Helen to take her out of school for a month and move her into the attic, where it was warmer. Protesting was futile. Philip liked to say that Peony was water, Marigold wind, and Rosie fire, but none of them could change their mother’s rock-hard mind once it was madeup.
The attic was barely fifty square feet, smaller if you considered the slanted walls that closed inward to make the pitched roof. It had a window facing east, a pot of artificial flowers, and a cot that Helen had purchased in Chinatown. At first Marigold resented being alone, far from the bedroom she shared with her sisters. But the privacy was an opportunity to figure out what was happening to her body.
She’d previously found no analogues of her affliction in the medical books she’d perused in the library, nor in the catalog of fantasies she read for fun, so it hadn’t come as a surprise that the doctor couldn’t make heads or tails of what was wrong with her. But Marigold knew it wasn’t just low blood pressure, and she’d ruled out hallucinations. The sparks were real. If no physician would believe that, then she would find a way to understand and stop them herself.
To do that, as painful as it would be, meanttouching.
She touched everything in the attic, from her father’s old blender to the vinyl records he kept in a box. She touched her baby shoes and the rattle Uncle Francis had given herand the ragged blankets from her mother’s first harsh winter in Kansas City. Not all objects triggered a spark, she learned—such as food or water or the wooden beams in the attic and the glass windowpanes—things that either bore no history or were seldom interacted with. In a notebook, she recorded what she experienced: Touching a vinyl record sent a wave of disappointment, paired with the briefest glimpse of Helen shutting off a phonograph. The blankets prompted feelings of forlornness but no accompanying memory. So on it went, until Marigold concluded that objects evoked only one or two of the most salient feelings attached to their existence, and sometimes scant memories. Never was her entire consciousness thrust into another person’s experience of the past as it was when she touched someone.
Even so, sweeping across multiple objects wasn’t a good idea and cost her an unpleasant bout of vertigo that didn’t go away until she slept. After continued experimentation, she deduced that all of her skin was receptive to the sparks, but her fingers were the most sensitive, reaping sparks with the most intensity.
Next, she found a brown leather suitcase tucked under some loose floorboards. Locked, of course, but Marigold wasn’t deterred. After reading all seventy-eight Nancy Drew novels, she’d flirted with the idea of becoming a detective, and the fine folk at Berkeley Public Library had sent her home with a basic but thorough manual on lockpicking written by a former policeman.
With the help of a bent paperclip and a few minutes’ patience came the click of success.
Inside was a treasure trove from her mother’s mysterious past: a miscellany of coarse sweaters and cotton dresses, most in shabby condition; a half-finished English workbook; and a wooden comb small enough to fit in a box of playing cards.
Marigold laid everything out, swept her fingers across every wrinkle and fold. Not a single spark. Last was a yellow dress with polka dots, bright and busy and unlike anything Marigold could imagine her austere mother wearing. It felt different from the other dresses, its thin cotton stitched with memories old and buried deep; like an inexperienced pianist, she could only grasp at the notes. Giving up, she noticed a pillowy lump in the dress’s pocket and fished out a carefully rolled pair of long white gloves. They smelled musty and parts of the lace trimming were already fraying from age, but the weave of the fabric was fine. Good quality.
Warily, she poked a glove.
The spark was quick, a gentle staccato note on her fingertip. The vision, as swift as the throw of a dart. She glimpsed a young girl climbing down the downspout on a stately white house, giggling boisterously.
That was all. It was over.
Marigold poked again.
No spark, only the soft silk tickled her fingertips. She heaved a sigh of relief, then gently picked up the gloves. They hadn’t been worn in years. Whatever emotion they’d once carried had faded away—which made them perfect.
