AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Who knows? It’s all a mystery. Dad was blond and I bet he found the name Sharpe in a crackerjack box of fake IDs. As for Mom’s side of the family, Gramps says that his father—her grandfather—was a maharaja of India. He sold tonics from Calcutta to the Midwest. Makes some sense that we could be Indian. His last name, Singer, could be derived from Singh. But that’s just one of his stories.”
“Your grandfather told me that someone in your family was descended from a runaway slave,” she says. I wonder what she thought when she married Philip. People are always coming up to me on trains and talking to me in different languages, like it’s obvious I’ll understand them. It bothers me that I never will.
“Yeah,” I say. “And don’t even get me started on the one where we’re Iroquois. Or Italian. And not just Italian, but descended from Julius Caesar.”
That makes her laugh loudly enough that I wonder if they hear her downstairs, but the rhythm of their voices doesn’t change. “Was he a worker?” she asks, low again. “Philip doesn’t like to talk about it.”
“Great-Grandad Singer?” I ask. “I don’t know.” With the blackened finger stubs on his left hand, I’m pretty sure she knows that my grandfather’s a death worker. Every kind of curse gives off some kind of blowback, but death curses kill a part of you. If you’re lucky, it rots some of your fingers. If not, maybe it rots your lungs or heart. Every curse works the worker, my grandfather says.
“Did you always know you couldn’t do it? Could your mother tell?”
I shake my head. “No. When we were little, she was afraid we would work someone by accident. She figured it would come on eventually, so she didn’t encourage us.” I think about Mom’s quick appraisal of a mark and the host of shady skills she did encourage us to learn. It makes me almost miss her. “I used to pretend that I was, though. A worker. One time I thought I turned an ant into a stick until Barron told me he’d switched them to mess with me.”
“Transformation, huh?” Maura’s smile is distant.
“What’s the point of pretending to be anything less than the most talented practitioner of the very rarest curses?” I ask.
She shrugs. “I used to think I could make people fall down. Every time my sister skinned her knee, I was sure it was me. I cried when I realized it wasn’t.”
Maura glances toward her son’s room. “Philip doesn’t want us to test the baby, but I’m afraid. What if our child hurts someone by accident? What if he’s one of those kids born with crippling blowback? At least if he tested positive, we’d know.”
“Just keep him gloved,” I say, knowing Philip will never agree to the test. “Until he’s old enough to try a small working.” In health class our teacher used to say that if someone came toward you on the street with bare hands, consider those hands to be as potentially deadly as unsheathed blades. Even grubby, sticky toddler hands can be dangerous.
“All kids develop differently—no one can know when he’d be ready,” Maura says. “The little baby gloves are so cute, though.”
Downstairs, Grandad’s warning Barron about something. His voice swells, and I catch the words “In my day we were feared. Now we’re just afraid.”
I yawn and turn to Maura. They can spend all night debating what they want to do with me, but that isn’t going to stop me from scamming myself back into school. “Do you really hear music? What does it sound like?”
Her smile turns radiant, although her gaze stays on the carpet. “Like angels shrieking my name.”
The hair stands up all along my arms.
4
IN MY PARENTS’ HOUSE, nothing was ever thrown away. Clothes piled up, formed drifts that grew into mountains Philip, Barron, and I would climb and leap from. The heaps of garments filled the hallway and chased my parents out of their own bedroom, so that they eventually slept in the room that was once Dad’s office. Empty bags and boxes filled in the gaps in the clutter, boxes that once held rings and sneakers and clothes. A trumpet that my mother wanted to make into a lamp rested atop a stack of tattered magazines filled with articles Dad planned to read, near the heads and feet and arms of dolls Mom promised she would stitch together for a kid from Carney, all beside an endless heap of replacement buttons, some still in their individual glassine bags. A coffeemaker rested on a tower of plates, propped up on one end to keep coffee from flooding the counters.
It’s strange to see it all, just the way it was when my parents lived here. I pick up a nickel off the countertop and flip it along my knuckles, just like Dad taught me.
“This place is a pigsty,” Grandad says, walking out of the dining room, clipping a suspender onto his pants.
After spending months living in the orderly dorms of Wallingford, where they give you a Saturday detention if your room doesn’t pass semi-regular inspections, I feel the old conflicting sense of familiarity and disgust. I breathe in the moldy, stale smell, with something sour in it that might be old sweat. Philip drops my bag onto the cracked linoleum floor.
“What’s the chance of me borrowing the car?” I ask Grandad.
“Tomorrow,” he says. “If we get enough done. You make a doctor’s appointment?”
“Yeah,” I lie, “that’s why I need the car.” What I need is to have enough time alone that I can put my plan to get back into Wallingford into effect. That does involve a doctor, but not one who’s expecting me.
Philip takes off his sunglasses. “Your appointment is when?”
“Tomorrow,” I say impulsively, shifting my gaze to Philip and elaborating. “At two. With Dr. Churchill, sleep specialist. In Princeton. That okay with you?” The best lies have as much truth in them as possible, so I tell them exactly where I’m planning on going. Just not why.
“Maura sent over some stuff,” Philip says. “Lemme bring it in before I forget.” Neither of them suggests coming with me to the completely fabricated appointment, which fills me with profound and undeserved relief.
Someone could cut through the mess in our house and look at it like one might look at rings on a tree or layers of sediment. They’d find the black-and-white hairs of a dog we had when I was six, the acid-washed jeans my mother once wore, the seven blood-soaked pillowcases from the time I skinned my knee. All our family secrets rest in endless piles.
Sometimes the house just seemed filthy, but sometimes it seemed magical. Mom could reach into some nook or bag or closet and pull out anything she needed. She pulled out a diamond necklace to wear to a New Year’s party along with citrine rings with gems as big as thumbnails. She pulled out the entire run of Narnia books when I was feverish and tired of all the books scattered beside my bed. And she pulled out a set of hand-carved black and white chess pieces when I finished reading Lewis.
