I tried to focus on his face. “Thank you,” I said.
I felt like a girl in a storybook, packing my bag. That’s the fantasy, right? Your parents need to be eliminated for your life to change, so you can go live in a boxcar or a cottage in the woods or a magical school for the broken. When I unzipped my suitcase on Fee’s bed, later, I knew by her expression I’d done it all wrong. I’d grabbed odd and senseless things and it made her worry about me.
My father died on a Tuesday and I moved in with Fee and Uncle Nestor that Thursday. I turned seventeen a few weeks later. It didn’t take long for my entire childhood to feel like a dream.
* * *
The fight Fee and I were putting off happened one year after the second summoning. The day before Marion would’ve turned nineteen. Fee woke me when the sky was still silver, whispering into my ear. Let’s go to the lake.
We snuck out together like we used to, like we hadn’t in months, walking east through the dawn. Fee dropped to her knees and looked over the water, toward the place where the world bent out of sight. Finally she sighed, running both hands through her tangled hair.
“Tonight. We have to at least try.”
“Try.” My head was still toffee-sticky with sleep. “Try what?”
Fee looked at me with a face so naked in its grief I finally saw how much she’d been hiding from me. “To find Marion.”
My heart started to pound. “What are you talking about?”
“I think about her all the time. When I look in a mirror. When I can’t sleep. When I, I don’t know, when I feel good for one minute, I think about how she doesn’t.” Her eyes were pleading. “I don’t think I can live with myself if we don’t try.”
“She’s dead,” I said shrilly. “My god, Fee—all this time you’ve been thinking she’s alive?”
“She can’t be dead. If she were dead, that would mean that you … that you…”
“That I what? Say it.”
She looked back at the water.
“Do you need me to be the bad guy?” I asked her. “I’ll do it. I’ll be that for you, if that’s what you need. But first you have to accept this: Marion’s gone. Dead. And it was either her, or all of us.”
She moved her head restlessly. “We don’t know that. We don’t know what Astrid would’ve done. We didn’t see Marion die.”
“We didn’t have to.”
“I replay it in my head, all the time, and I…”
“Stop.” I dropped my head onto my knees. “I replay it all the time, too. The only way out of that circle was to kill her. It was the only way out of the mess she made, that she refused to even try to clean up. Sometimes I think a knife would’ve been kinder. The way I did it…” I twisted my head to look into my best friend’s sorrowful eyes. “It probably wasn’t quick.”
I pictured it sometimes. If the fall didn’t kill her, Astrid would’ve kept her alive until she found a way to unbind them. Maybe she tortured Marion first. Maybe she left her to wander whatever half-world I’d banished her to until she suffered and faded and perished, like a girl in an old ballad.
But there was no death I could imagine for her that was worse than the alternative: that she’d actually survived.
“Honestly, Fee.” Suddenly I couldn’t speak above a whisper. “I couldn’t bear it if she were alive. It would be unbearable. To think of her alive, and trapped, and, and, kept, by Astrid. Alone. I can’t. She’s flesh and blood, Fee. She can’t have survived it.”
I looked at her for confirmation of what I knew to be true, needed to be true. For absolution. She took a shaky breath.
“Marion is dead,” she said. Gazing across the water proud as a figurehead, her voice so stern you would’ve thought she was the one convincing me.
I breathed in, the succubus weight of guilt finally easing. “She’s dead.”
We watched the gulls rise and fall, cartwheeling through the air and nipping at the waves. Fee whispered a prayer for Marion, and neither of us speculated aloud on whether she’d died in a place that prayer could reach.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The city
Back then
High school ended and Fee and I moved into a studio apartment on a grim block of Broadway, across from a century-old jazz club whose sign filled our apartment with green light.
She dove headfirst into real life. An apprenticeship with the yerbera in Pilsen, a job with the parks department, a series of relationships with girls who weren’t sure whether to try to win me over or keep an eye on me.