I woke up.
It was the middle of the night but it could’ve been high noon. My brain switched on like a lamp. I climbed from bed holding delicately to the thought I’d had.
My bare soles on the carpet felt nervy, strangely tender, my vision scalloped at the edges with light. I crossed the hall and eased open my parents’ bedroom door. My dad was facing away from me, keeping neatly to his half of the bed. I crept past him to the vanity and picked up the old framed photo of my mom and Aunt Fee at sixteen.
I moved to the light coming through the window to confirm the hazy recollection that had come clear to me in dreaming: one half of the photo lay flat. But the other bulged outward, against the glass.
And the best friend hearts around their necks, broken into thirds.
I unclasped the back of the frame and flipped the photo out.
I was right. The photo pushed against the glass because one third of it had been folded under, tucked away, by someone who didn’t want to look at it anymore but couldn’t bring themselves to scissor it free. A wave of queasy revelation broke over me as I saw what had been hidden.
My mother and aunt leaned into each other, but the third girl stood straight as a fingerbone. Heavy eyeliner, naked mouth, a length of green ribbon tied around her throat like an urban legend. Hanging below it, the other edge of the Best Friends heart. You could have daubed her face into an old painting—something Dutch, maybe, with peasants or saints—and aside from the eyeliner nobody would’ve blinked.
She was less raw-boned here. Less leached and furtive. But she was absolutely the girl who’d appeared on the road in front of Nate’s car. The specter who’d paced ahead of me through Woodbine’s night-lit streets, all the way to our door. Twenty-five years after this photo was taken, her face as untouched as a time traveler’s.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The city
Back then
Friday morning. We hadn’t talked to Marion or Sharon since the shop. But we knew they’d be waiting at the occultist’s house tonight, Marion all fairy-pinched with bruises.
“At least we’ll get to sleep again,” Fee said. It was just past eight in the morning and we were walking back from the McDonald’s. “Whatever happens tonight, tomorrow we sleep.”
Warily I slid my apple pie from its sleeve. Nothing gross came with it, or at least nothing grosser than a McDonald’s apple pie. “So true. I hear you get the best sleep ever when you’re dead.”
“Don’t be fucking funny, Dana,” she said. “Can you imagine what would happen to our dads if we were dead?”
“Mine would sell my shit and buy a Trans Am.”
“What do you have that’s worth anything? He’d buy a Trans Am decal.”
“Who’s being funny now?”
She wrung her hands. “I don’t want to be another one of my dad’s saints. I don’t want to be on his sad wall between my mother and the Virgin for the rest of my dead life.”
“All soft focus. Velvet hair bow, crucifix on.”
“He asked about the crucifix, by the way. I told him you were borrowing it. I told him you needed it to pray for your dad.”
“Uncle Nestor! He believed that?”
She pressed her palms together and looked up. “Perdóname, Padre.”
“Oh, my love,” I said. Joking as I began, and then very much not, my throat drawing tighter with every syllable. “My beautiful Felicita. You know if anything actually happened to you I would go full-on Orpheus. I would drag you back. I would…” Melt into sand without you. Disintegrate into stars.
“Me, too,” she said, and cinched an arm around me. “My one and only sister.”
I think we really believed that love could work that way. That we could hold each other fast to the surface of the spinning world.
* * *
We shaved the hours away, minute by endless minute, until seven p.m. came and time started melting like a sno-cone.
It was eight and we were trying to fill our stomachs, enough so we wouldn’t be trembly but not so much that we’d barf. Nine p.m. and the sun was gone. We blinked and it was 10:30 and we were waiting for the bus, so twitchy a woman waiting with us—clear vinyl backpack, green powder to her brows—offered us some pretzels. Half past eleven and we were lost in the scented shade of the occultist’s house, combing the grass for four-leaf clovers.
Sharon arrived just behind us. She saw what we were doing, dropped onto the grass, and joined the hunt. None of us found any luck before Marion showed.