So I handed her the box. She couldn’t take anything back now, my words couldn’t be unspoken. She looked like she wanted to slap it to the floor but she took it instead, bringing her mouth in close and whispering something I couldn’t hear.
The box began its work. It was horrible to see, but sometimes the only way to show your reverence is to witness. By the end of it I was holding my mother’s hand, and my aunt’s, all of us watching together as the golden box snapped shut and Marion lay down to sleep.
We took the box and left her there on the moonlit floor. Stripped of her vengeance and who knew what else. It didn’t feel good to do it. We didn’t know whether we were abandoning an amnesiac or a round of live ammunition. Maybe both.
And maybe I was finally old enough for magic, because I was starting to reckon the costs of it. That I’d carry around this guilt, and a piece of the witch who’d forgotten me, until I was dead.
CHAPTER FIFTY
The suburbs
Right now
Billy and I lay on our backs in the creek, watching the stars. The water was just this side of too cold, glowing Pop-Ice blue.
That was Billy’s idea. He showed me pictures online of a bioluminescent bay, so I could put one into the dream.
“Are you ready to wake up?” I asked.
“One more minute,” he said, squeezing my hand. “Hey. Look.”
He pointed to a place where the stars were bending closer, too close, as if they wanted to watch us, too. My shoulders tensed and gently I pushed them back into their places.
Sometimes my dreams did things I didn’t ask for. I figured it was my subconscious at play. But I knew it hadn’t happened that way before the golden box.
Outside the dream our bodies were asleep in Billy’s tree house. None of our parents had caught on yet that it was back in use, the one place that was just ours. My dad had been overprotective of everyone since the morning I returned home with Mom and Aunt Fee, all of us shell-shocked, smeared with scrapes, sweat, bruises, blood. And Billy’s dad still hadn’t forgiven me for ditching his son five years ago. Since we couldn’t tell him what really happened, I was trying to win him back over slowly.
For now, we had the tree house. Billy’s car. And my dreams.
I held his hand in the luminous water, closing my eyes as it eddied around us, lifting me up.
“Ivy.” His voice was level, but sharp enough that I dropped my feet to the creek bed—disgusting in life, paved with green river stones in the dream—and looked to where he was pointing.
The stars were watching us again. Really watching us, their alien gazes prickly sharp. It was a sky identical to the one I’d almost drowned beneath, panicking in the swimming pool after I opened the golden box.
Billy planted his feet beside mine and put his arms around my waist. “Let’s wake up now, okay?”
I nodded, focusing on my breaths. Then I looked down at the water and cried out. The vivid blue creek was gone. We were submerged waist deep in pliant mirror glass.
“Look at me.” Billy’s voice was soothing, firm. He was the solid point around which the dream pulsed. I clung to him.
“Let’s wake up,” he said.
And we did.
Outside the tree house the mourning doves were calling their peaceful calls and the sky looked like silver paper. I rolled over and buried my face in his chest. “I’m sorry,” I said, muffled.
He kissed my temple. “Nothing to be sorry for.”
We held on until the last possible second. Then we climbed down from the tree house and parted ways at the gate, to sneak back into our beds.
* * *
Three weeks had passed since the longest night of my life. I kept an eye on the news, but so far nothing had come up that fit any description of Marion: no unexplained mysteries, no wandering amnesiacs found, no prodigal, supernaturally ageless daughters returned.
For my family it was three weeks of a new kind of honesty, which—in the interest of total honesty—wasn’t entirely a good thing. My dad thrived in the new normal, all of us alive and together and the worst of our secrets flushed out of hiding. For Hank, though, looking reality in the face was an adjustment. He walked around all dazzled and skittish, like he’d accidentally stared straight at the sun.
And then there was my mom and me. I guessed things would be weird between us for a while. Too much had been revealed at once. But she tried. She was trying.
The thing that worked best was for us to not speak. To work together, side by side. Little spells, mainly, magic for children. Things she’d taken from me, that Marion helped me get back. Sometimes Aunt Fee was with us and sometimes we were alone.