Ivy gasped. “Can you…” She coughed the nervous scuzz away. “Can you see me?”
Of course she couldn’t, scrying was a one-way mirror. But the girl said, “Yes.”
Just one word, in a voice that sounded like something dug up from the back of a basement.
They watched each other a while, the patient apparition and the child with the butterfly bandage stuck to one knee.
“Who are you?” Ivy asked. She tried, but the command she had summoned was gone.
“I’m an occultist.”
Ivy drew back, impressed. Occultist. Definitely a cooler term than her mom’s bland, beloved worker.
“What’s your name?”
The girl’s dusty voice was gaining strength. “What’s yours? Name for a name.”
Ivy narrowed her eyes. “I bet you already know it.”
“Clever Ivy,” said the figure in the mirror. “I’m Marion.”
The compliment gave Ivy a shot of blunt courage. She squared up. “What do you have to do with my mom’s secret?”
Now the girl—woman? Ivy couldn’t decide—smiled for the first time, dry lips stretched around even white teeth.
“I am your mother’s secret.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The suburbs
Back then
Something was up with Ivy. She hadn’t been easy for a while but at least she’d always talk to me. But after I got home from having my appendix out she wouldn’t even look at me. It was late summer and she should’ve been running around with Billy, frantic to drink up the last drops of the season. Instead she was holed up in her room.
On the third day of this I marched in and closed the door behind me.
Right away she was furious. “Get out of my room,” she hissed, slapping shut the notebook she’d been writing in and clutching it to her chest. I’d come in ready to be patient, but her tone rocked me back on my heels.
“Your room,” I snapped, my own father’s words clawing out of me, back from the dead. “When did you start paying rent?”
Her face reddened and she sprang to her feet.
“I said get out of here! You … you … monster!”
The world spun. One dizzy turn, and on the other side of it my life had changed.
“Why did you call me that?” I said, when I could speak again.
“You know why.”
Of course I did. The real question was how she’d learned what I had done. I gamed it out and saw a dozen ways to make things worse. The only trick I had left was the truth.
I showed her my hands. Gently I pressed one to my belly, above my stitches, and layered the other on top. Then I backed up until I was pressed against the wall. “Talk to me, Ivy-girl. What happened when I was away?”
“Nothing,” she said, her voice full of adolescent rage. “Something happened twenty years ago.”
“Who told you that? Who?”
Something in my voice must have cut through, because her expression flickered with an emotion other than fury. “I got a letter. There was no name on it. I burned it, you can’t see it.”
Goddamned Sharon. I closed my eyes, relief and terror running through me like spiked lemonade. “Tell me what you think you know, and I’ll tell you the truth.”
“Yeah, right.” Savagely she bit a piece of skin off her lip. “I don’t want to hear anything from you. Except…” Her eyes flared with hope. “Tell me it’s not true. Tell me you didn’t push your friend into Hell.”
I used to be so good at lying. When it was a mechanism of survival, growing up with my dad, it came to me like breathing. All it took was absolute commitment and the kind of steel-cut nerve nobody expects to see on a girl. But I was rusty these days.
“I did what I did for a reason,” I began, and Ivy’s eyes widened.
“Oh, my god,” she said. She’d wanted me to deny it.
“Baby, let me finish—”
“No!” she said, so loud it surprised both of us. Then, “Get out!” she screamed, and flung up a hand. I staggered back, into the hallway, the door clipping me hard on the bridge of the nose as it slammed.
* * *
She wouldn’t let anyone in. She turned her music up if we tried to talk to her through the door.
Fifteen years into our marriage, I finally told Rob what happened with Marion. I gave him the shape of it, the worst details scrubbed away. His response wasn’t what I expected.
“This is what you were referring to, wasn’t it?” He had his glasses on but his eyes looked unfocused, grave. “All those years ago, before Hank, even. That night I wanted to tell you I loved you.”