Ink Blood Sister Scribe, page 12
“Yes, sir,” said Collins, but the bodyguard’s eyes were not focused on Richard. They were focused on Nicholas. The expression on Collins’s face was unfamiliar, the twist of his mouth softer than his usual scowl, his chin tilted downward, and when he caught Nicholas’s gaze his own skittered away, as if he’d been caught out. It wasn’t a look of irritation. It wasn’t amusement. It wasn’t even pity.
It was guilt.
But what could Collins possibly have to be guilty for?
“Maram, darling,” said Richard. “My study.”
Maram touched Nicholas’s shoulder and followed Richard out, leaving Nicholas and Collins alone in the drawing room.
“What—” Nicholas started, but whatever expression he thought he’d seen on Collins’s face was gone, and his eyes were fixed on the floor. He looked bored, tired, grumpy. Normal.
“What?” Collins echoed.
“Nothing,” said Nicholas, and turned to leave.
8
Joanna liked dusting the books. It was satisfying to sweep the soft, luxurious paintbrush across their covers, along their spines. It reminded her of brushing Esther’s hair, which Esther, a glutton for touch, had always begged her to do when they were young. Each of the volumes in the collection felt to Joanna like old friends, all their cracks and blemishes well known and forgiven, and save for the book Abe had died with, she knew the story behind each one. This one, sewn loosely with silk thread and bound in red cotton, had been found by her late paternal grandmother in a market in Montreal in the sixties; this one with a stiff leather cover had been tracked down by her father via a classified ad in the early nineties; this one, an Arabic scroll from Palestine, had been Esther’s mother, Isabel’s, from before she’d met Abe. Some of the spells within the collection were used up, but those books sounded the same as any with still-dark ink, as if whatever power that had once filled them still lay coiled inside.
She did not dust the book that had killed her father.
She’d asked her mother about it many times. Cecily had remained silent though, either refusing point-blank to answer any of Joanna’s questions or lapsing into that infuriating cough she affected whenever she didn’t want to talk about something. Maybe Joanna would try again today, at her mother’s house for lunch. Probably it would end in an argument, but at least it would be a nice change of pace from the old standard they’d enacted the day before.
The note her father had left still lay beside it and she glanced at it quickly before moving on to the codex of wards, though the codex hardly needed tending; she used it too often for it to ever collect dust.
As she emerged from the basement into the kitchen she heard a long scratching sound in the foyer, and a pulse of hope beat in her throat. Hastily she emptied a can of tuna into a bowl and quieted her footsteps as she hurried across the kitchen, managing to open the front door so carefully it made no noise at all. There on the porch, like an expectant guest, sat the cat. He had one paw extended as if he’d been about to knock, but retracted it when he saw her and crept back a few steps.
Slowly, so slowly, she lowered herself into a crouch and set down the bowl of tuna. She put it halfway between herself and the cat and waited, breath held, as he craned his head forward ever so slightly and sniffed the air. He turned away toward the porch steps and her heart fell; he turned back, and it leapt. Then he was face-deep in the bowl making wet little gnashing sounds, and Joanna went to her knees to watch him eat. He was the color of autumn, all stripy silvers and swirling browns, and his eyes, slitted with pleasure as he ate, were apple-juice amber.
It was a cold morning. The temperature had dropped the previous night and Joanna had woken up shivering, the embers of the stove nearly banked under ash. Where had this little cat slept? His fur looked thick, but was it warm enough for the coming winter? She wanted to pet him very badly. He finished eating and sat back, licking his chops, eyeing her.
She held out a careful finger, pointing at his face. She had read once that cats liked this because the tip of a human finger looked like a cat’s nose, and the cat put out his own nose to sniff, tail twitching. Then, as if he’d decided something, he stepped quickly forward and butted his head into her hand.
The delight she felt at this unexpected touch was so entire it was almost painful. She stroked his head, his cheeks, she scratched behind his ears. He was so warm and soft, so present, his eyes inquisitive, and she found herself beaming down at him as he came closer, his tail trailing along her kneeling legs. She felt a hum beneath her hand and for a moment she thought it was the books, that same many-timbred murmur, then she realized he was purring. For some reason this brought tears to her eyes.
She pet him for as long as he let her and when he wandered away she stood up with the half-eaten bowl of tuna. Holding it out, she backed into her house cajolingly.
“Here, kitty, kitty,” she said. “Come inside where it’s warm.”
But he turned his head sharply at a sound she hadn’t heard, leaped off the porch steps, and dashed across her muddy garden into the trees.
She watched him go, feeling a bizarre joyful pride that he’d let her touch him. It was rapidly overtaken with worry. Worry he’d be caught by a coyote, or hit by a car, or that it would snow overnight and bury him, frozen, before they’d even gotten a chance to get to know one another, before she had a chance to care for him.
There was a ragged comforter in Esther’s old bedroom—perhaps if she put it out on the porch, he could make a kind of nest for himself, a place to get warm. He’d associate the porch with food and comfort, and by extension, Joanna, and soon enough he would deign to come inside.
She left the front door slightly ajar in case he changed his mind and hurried back into the house. In the living room she pushed aside the heavy wool army blanket she’d used to cover the stairwell and creaked her way up to the second floor, which was notably colder and darker. In Esther’s room she found the overhead bulb was blown, but it didn’t matter. It was still midmorning and the big window let in a milky light, so she could see her way to the closet just fine. Esther’s bed was as it had been when she’d lived there, made up with the first and last quilt Cecily had ever made before deciding it wasn’t a hobby for her, and a Nirvana poster curled on the wall. Otherwise, it looked like what it was now: a storage room.
Sometimes it was hard to remember a time when her whole family had lived under one roof, when her sister was in her life and her parents got along. In the months before Esther had left home without warning, Abe and Cecily had fought near daily, and for a while Joanna had blamed those fights for pushing Esther out. Abe and Cecily made an effort to keep their arguments from their daughters, sometimes even taking their fights into the forest so they could have it out away from any human ears, but the tension between them was so thick and sticky it was almost visible, like layers of cobweb.
From what Joanna and Esther could eavesdrop, the gist of their conflict had been this: Cecily was tired of living behind the wards. She was tired of living beholden to Abe’s books. She wanted to drop the wards and sell the books and open their doors to the world. Abe thought this was patently insane.
Esther and Joanna had discussed their parents’ fights but carefully avoided mentioning their own opinions, in part because it wasn’t necessary—each knew whose side the other was on. Despite the fact that her own mother’s murder could have been prevented by the wards, Esther had always made it clear that she did not plan to stay in Vermont forever.
When she left, she’d been making noises about applying to college—somewhere in Massachusetts or New York, she’d promised Joanna, somewhere close by. She’d buy a beater car and come visit, or pick up Joanna to take her away for long weekends.
“You can ignore your calling for a few days, I’m sure,” Esther had said. “Long enough to go to a party or two.”
But then, in early November, a few weeks after she’d turned eighteen, Esther came into Joanna’s bedroom. It was late at night and Joanna remembered thinking it was strange that Esther was fully dressed in black jeans and combat boots, her hair pulled back. Joanna was already tucked beneath the covers, reading a novel about faraway misty islands and magic none of her father’s books could ever summon.
“Excuse you, you didn’t knock,” Joanna said, so teenaged the memory still made her wince.
Esther came and sat on the side of the bed. Her face was eerily still. Joanna laid her novel facedown on her quilted lap. The air around her sister felt charged.
“Esther, what is it?”
“Nothing,” Esther said. “Just wanted to say good night.”
“Good night,” Joanna said, half echo, half question.
Esther leaned forward and wrapped her in a hug, awkward because of the angle, her sharp chin digging into Joanna’s shoulder. “I love you, Joanna.”
“Love you, too,” Joanna said, bemused, patting her back. “Are you okay?”
“Fine, fine, fine,” Esther said.
The next morning, she was gone. So were all her favorite clothes and Abe’s new station wagon. No note, no explanation. In her wake, the house turned into a battleground. Abe went around with his eyes rimmed red, his jaw clenched against tears, while Cecily followed him, keeping up a relentless argument that varied in volume and pitch but had one central theme: lowering the wards.
“This is no way to live,” Cecily would say, her voice hoarse from shouting, begging, crying. “One child lost, wandering the world, no home, and the other locked up in this dungeon forever. It isn’t life, Abe! Let them come, let them come and take what they want, anything is better than this hell!”
During this time, Joanna stopped going to school. It would have been her sophomore year, but she couldn’t gather the energy to care, or leave the house. It felt like someone had reached into her chest and turned her heart to cold cement. There was a crushing weight in her lungs, and she couldn’t catch her breath. She got winded just walking down the stairs, so she mostly stayed in her bedroom, staring at the ceiling, replaying that last conversation she’d had with her sister, trying in vain to find clues.
In the chaos Esther had left behind no one noticed Joanna’s absences until it was too late for her to make up the classes she’d missed, and by then she’d decided not to return. Neither Cecily nor Abe could convince her otherwise, and later that year she got her father to sign the parental waiver so she could get her GED in Burlington . . . but in those long weeks after Esther left, school—and the future in general—had been the furthest thing from her mind.
Now, only half present, Joanna opened Esther’s closet door. She jumped violently back when something moved inside, but a second later laughed, hand on her heart. It was her own reflection. She forgot she’d pushed Esther’s old mirror in here, an enormous floor-length glass with a heavy wooden frame carved with grape vines. Cecily had loved this mirror, polishing the glass regularly and oiling the wood till it glimmered. Now it was dull with disuse. Joanna swept a hand over the dust and saw that her cat-induced smile still lingered on her face, her dimples coming out from hiding. They made her look young in a way she normally found off-putting, but today she didn’t so much mind. She let them stay as she dug around for the comforter.
Arms full of down, she paused on the landing. Her own bedroom was at one end of that hall, her father’s on the other. The only time she’d been in his bedroom since he died had been to search for his journals. She’d rarely gone in when he was alive, in fact, though she had paused at the door often enough to say good night, Abe nearly always awake no matter the hour, propped up in bed with his clunky laptop or a stack of documents or sometimes a novel—a book with a very different kind of power. Joanna would push the door open, lean in, and blow him a kiss.
“Get some sleep, Dad.”
“Right back atcha, Jo.”
If the cat came inside, her dad never would.
It was a nonsensical thought, but she felt herself having it all the same.
When she spread the comforter out on the porch, coiling it up so it looked inviting, it felt like she was making a choice. Making, perhaps, a change.
It was just after two by the time Joanna pulled up in front of her mother’s place. When Cecily first moved out a decade ago, she’d lived in a bottom-floor duplex that was dark no matter the hour and smelled relentlessly of vinegar. Now she lived in a small, neat farmhouse on two acres of open land. Usually the land—and the house that sat on it—seemed staged by the Vermont bureau of tourism, so perfect was the image: the flat expanse of field stretching to the mountains, a sugar-white farmhouse with a pillared front porch and slate roof, a perfect little red barn.
Today, however, the uniform pewter of the sunken clouds overhead made the house look lonely and bare, the barn a smear of red adrift on an achromatic sea. One single alpaca stood in the pasture, head lowered to the brown grass. The rest of the herd must be in the barn.
The alpaca did not belong to Cecily—she rented out the barn and the fenced-in pasture to the animal husbandry department of the tiny college two towns over, and occasionally Joanna arrived to find students on the grounds, young people with bright eyes and loud, bossy voices who chattered about camelid vaccinations and toenail trims and other incomprehensible subjects. They treated both the alpaca and one another with competent, familiar affection, always laughing though Joanna could never figure out at what. Cecily kept inviting the students inside while Joanna was there, especially the shaggy-haired young men, but neither they nor the girls held any appeal; they all seemed somehow much younger than her, and much older at the same time, and looked at Joanna like they were taxonomizing her.
There were no cars parked here today.
Gretchen came running out to meet her, barking exuberantly, and Joanna tousled her brown ears, smiling at the dog’s excitement. Cecily had wasted no time in getting a pet once she’d moved out, and though Gretchen was getting on in years, the border collie mutt still moved like a puppy, play-bowing and leaping in excitement. She pranced around Joanna’s heels as they headed up the porch together, and Joanna let them both in after a quick rap on the door.
“In here!” Cecily said, and Joanna followed her voice to the kitchen, where Cecily was bent over the oven, peering inside. The whole room was warm and smelled deliciously like bread, a welcome change from the austere chill outside. “Almost done,” Cecily said, straightening, and came over to kiss her, then wiped her own lip prints off Joanna’s cheek. “Take off your coat, angel baby.”
Joanna removed her coat and unwound the scarf from around her neck, hanging them over the back of a chair. Cecily’s books hummed along the edge of her awareness, as they always did, though they seemed louder today. Maybe Cecily had moved them from their usual place in her upstairs bedroom.
“Coffee?” Cecily said, already pouring her a cup, then topping up her own mug. Joanna thought her mother might’ve had enough caffeine already—she seemed on edge, slamming the cream too hard on the table, rattling the cup in its saucer, glancing repeatedly over her shoulder as she moved around the kitchen. The dog seemed anxious, too, and paced a few times before she thwumped down at Joanna’s feet, her body curled but her head still upright, alert.
The odd energy was contagious, and Joanna fought against a sudden feeling of disquiet. She took a sip of her coffee, told herself to relax.
Once it had astonished Joanna to see her mother here, astonished her to see any member of their family in such an ordinary, unhidden life, but now she could hardly remember what Cecily had looked like in the kitchen of Abe’s house. Her memory of living with her mother was dimmed, or maybe her mother had been dimmed by that life. Now Cecily had a job, friends, a sweet dog, she’d been dating a horticulturist from the university. Oftentimes Joanna felt like a relic of her mother’s old life, like a walking talking piece of the house Cecily had been so happy to leave.
“What’ve you been doing today?” Cecily asked, sitting across from Joanna. She was focused on Joanna’s face, yet Joanna felt her attention elsewhere, one of her legs jiggling slightly.
Joanna thought back on her morning, which had been quite nice, really. So nice it made her tired to think of packaging it for her mother. One thing she knew would make Cecily happy, though, so she told her about the cat. Cecily was a great believer in animals for the soul.
“I don’t think he was expecting how much he liked to be pet,” Joanna said. “Tonight I’m going to see if he’ll come inside.”
Cecily smiled, but she seemed distracted, standing to check on the bread.
“What will you call him?”
“I don’t know,” said Joanna. “He’s a tomcat, brown and sort of stripey, with really lovely amber eyes. Any ideas?”
“Well, I’d have to meet him,” said Cecily. She said it lightly, but still Joanna’s defenses began to creep up. Cecily ladled two bowls of carrot soup and refilled Joanna’s coffee, and the two went quiet, eating.
“This is delicious,” Joanna said eventually, an attempt to bring her mother out of whatever stressed-out funk she was in. “I made it at home, and it came out all watery.”
“I add a mashed potato,” said Cecily.
“I read online that chefs in Antarctica only get a shipment of fresh vegetables once a season,” she said. “In the winter it’s too cold for planes to fly—the jet fuel congeals. So if the summer season just started, Esther’s probably eating fresh vegetables for the first time in months.”
Cecily paused visibly, her spoon halfway to her mouth. “Yes,” she said. That one syllable was so saturated with anxiety that Joanna, too, stopped eating.
“What is it?” she said, gentling her voice. She didn’t like seeing her mother so agitated, especially when she didn’t understand the cause. “You’re always saying it makes you sad, that Esther moves so much, that she can’t put down roots. I would have thought you’d be happy to see her staying put, for once.”
