“Don’t you at least want your bracelet back?” she whispers.
“What?” My heart. Suddenly pounding inside me.
I feel her smiling on the phone. “I saw you,” she says. “That night in the garden.”
“What are you talking about?” A flash of red petals. My feet in the cold black soil. My heart beating hard in the dark, like it’s beating now.
“My mother’s really fucking pissed at you, by the way.” She sounds happy about this. “What were you doing out there, anyway?”
I see myself running under a low red moon, the slick grass sinking beneath my feet, while a voice called after me. I shake my head. “I don’t know what you’re—”
“Never mind, I know.”
“You do?”
“Sure. You were trying to see me.” She lowers her voice again. “Weren’t you?”
I close my eyes. “Yes.”
“I knew it. Look, just come over, okay? We’ll just have to plan it for when she’s not home. Because if she sees you, she’ll fucking freak. She doesn’t want me dancing for you anymore.”
“I have to go,” I tell Stacey, and the phone makes such a click when I hang it up.
And Grand-Maman nods her head. Thwack go her cards on the table. Whisper, whisper to the dead.
I never see Stacey again.
* * *
The air grows colder. I watch the flies disappear from the window. Then the leaves are the color of fire and they’re falling. One by one by one. At night, the wind makes a howling sound and the air smells like smoke. I close my eyes. Sometimes I see Mother. Sometimes a man made of smoke. When I open my eyes, the trees are bare and snow is falling slow and fat. It falls forever. And the ground glitters cold and white like Mother’s skin. Christmas comes and Mother sends me a card with a palm tree covered in Christmas lights. Happy Holidays, it says. XO, N. Mother’s first XO. A good sign, Grand-Maman says. For Christmas, Grand-Maman gives me a Good News Bible, a necklace with a little gold cross, and a brush that works on my hair. She brushes it for me while we watch the ball drop in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. The gold cross glitters on my neck. It makes me remember my bare wrist, where Father’s eye bracelet used to go. And in my mind, there’s a rose garden. A bed of black soil. A flash of gold glinting there. Now is the time to bury, I think, watching the snow fall thick and slow. Now is the time to forget. And for a long time, the world stays white and shimmering and cold.
* * *
Four times the flies darken the window. Four times the river turns the color of mud-blood. Four times the world turns the color of Mother and melts away again. And then the buds are on the branches, and they give way to green leaves. I’m fourteen years old going on fifteen in three weeks. I’m sitting with Grand-Maman in her bedroom watching Wheel of Fortune, watching the rickety wheel turn and turn. I’ve made us dinner. I know exactly what jars to use now. Spring is in the window. Looking out at the blue sky over the drab apartment buildings, I feel alive and awake in a way I never have before. Grand-Maman is telling me that Mother wants me to be with her in California. She’s all settled in a place called La Jolla now. There’s a high school I will go to in the fall.
“What about Hollywood?” I ask.
“Well, that didn’t work out quite like Mother planned,” Grand-Maman says. Now she has some sort of shop. Dresses.
“Like Ladies Apparel?”
“Like your mother’s idea of it. You know.”
I nod at Vanna White. Yes. I know. Sometimes I play a game where I flip through Vogue magazine and I imagine Mother somewhere among her palm trees, the sun in a different place in the sky, flipping at the very same time as me. What would she call style? What would she call a fucking eyesore? What would she point to and say, Now that’s sharp. I never knew before. I’d look at the glossy page of a girl Mother was pointing to and have no idea what she was talking about. Now I see. It’s in the cut and how it falls. It’s in the clothes and the girl and the spirit they make between. I wish I could tell Mother how I can see it from a mile away now. What’s sharp.
I stare at upside-down Vanna White on the television screen. Still clapping her hands. Still smiling white and wide. I had a feeling this was coming. Mother has been signing Love next to the N. She’s been addressing the postcards Dear Belle. She even called once. How are you? she said.
I’m okay, I answered in French. I’m going to school on the island.
Mother was silent at first.