The cashier began to say something, but nothing came out of her mouth, her face drooping. Blood threaded from the corner of her mouth, slipping, bright and hot, down her chin. Just like Black Shoes.
I shouted Isabelle’s name. The blood dripped onto the cashier’s polyester blouse, staining the yellow with little blossoms. I grabbed Isabelle’s hand and tried to pry her fingers open, but she was too strong, gripped with some wiry strength I hadn’t known she possessed.
I was frozen, conflicted. I didn’t want to turn my powers against the others. It felt wrong, much worse than when I’d unthinkingly used them on Tom. Before I had to make a choice, Isabelle let go and abruptly stepped away. The woman gasped, fell back, looking from one of us to the other. Her chest heaved.
“You need to get control of yourself,” I said, careful not to frame it as a directive. “We need to focus. Are you sure it wasn’t the Bellangers who came after your mom?”
“No. The news showed the security footage. I recognized the truck. It wasn’t the red car that’s been following us.” I should have known that Patricia Bishop would have outfitted her home with cameras to complement the barricade of NO TRESPASSING signs. “They know what I did to that man and they came after me. But they only found her.”
Patricia, her serious eyes. I’d walked into her life wearing my mother’s face and I’d taken everything from her all over again.
Isabelle turned her head back toward the TV screen. “I wanted to be special,” she said. “I wanted it more than I wanted her. You don’t even know what I did to my mother before I left.” Her voice was growing in urgency. “Did you think she’d just let me leave?”
Outside, the sky was rosy with sunrise. On the TV, a woman in a bathrobe smiled at her daughter over a cup of coffee, the two of them pressing their foreheads together. The cashier ran her hand under her mouth, stared at her blood-dipped fingers. We couldn’t stay here.
Looking at the woman, I groped for the words that would fix this. “I’m sorry,” I said. “She’s not well right now. Please just—just forget this happened.”
She didn’t answer.
I wrapped an arm around Isabelle’s shoulder, and together we walked away from the counter. I guided her. Slowly. Slowly. Past the obnoxiously cheerful candy, cheap penknives, pastries inside humidity-dewed wrappers. When I opened the door, the cool morning air landed on my skin and I could breathe again.
“It’s my fault.” Isabelle’s voice had softened, like she was just waking up. I pushed her into the Volvo and climbed in myself, both of us crushed into the backseat with Cate. I patted the back of the driver’s seat like I’d thump on a horse’s flank, urging Tom to go.
My breathing didn’t settle until our car had vanished into the flow of vehicles heading toward North Carolina. Morning commuters. Truck drivers. We fit in, anonymous, harmless.
“My mother was going to lock me in my room,” Isabelle said. Cate started to speak, but I hushed her with a lifted hand. “She forbade me from going,” Isabelle said. “I didn’t even want to go with you. I just wanted to see you one more time. But my mother wouldn’t listen. She talked over me. She was going to lock me in my room until I got my head on straight. I grabbed her and begged her to stop,” Isabelle said. “Suddenly she was coughing, and there was blood.”
Outside the car windows, towering trees grew wild. A little beige brick church squatted in the dip of a valley, only the cross jutting above the guardrails.
“It felt so natural,” Isabelle said. “Like I’d been doing it my whole life. I could make her stop yelling. Just by touching her. After all those years, I’d finally become special, and what had I done with it? I’d hurt my mother.”
I thought of Black Shoes in Kithira, glassy-eyed on the bed. “Isabelle,” I said gently.
“When I touch people,” Isabelle said, and held up her hands, “I can feel their insides. The veins and the bones. I can just”—she demonstrated, a delicate pinching gesture—“twist them. I can make the blood come right to the surface. I can pull it right out of people.”
I squeezed her hand, trying to soothe her. Her pulse was wild against my palm.
“When I saw my mother on the TV, I thought I’d killed her myself.” Isabelle turned an agonized gaze to me, like she knew I’d understand. I did. Of course I did. The two of us had passed our daughterly guilt between us like witches fumbling over their shared eyeball.