Ink Blood Sister Scribe, page 16
“You didn’t finish your lunch,” Cecily said. “I could reheat the soup?”
“You can’t feed me into forgiving you,” Joanna said. Her voice was hoarse from yelling.
“I know that,” said Cecily, though her tone suggested she planned to keep trying. Joanna had been trapped behind her mother’s spell for over an hour and wore herself out in the first fifteen minutes, screaming and weeping and begging for an explanation, and all Cecily had said, over and over, was “I can’t tell you, I’m sorry, I can’t tell you.” She’d been crying, too, but neither of them was crying now. Joanna felt almost calm; perhaps she’d used up her yearly allotment of furious emotion. Cecily had positioned a chair in the doorway and was watching her daughter with sorry determination from outside the living room. Gretchen lay dozing at her feet.
“You want to steal the collection and sell it to the highest bidder,” Joanna said. She’d been throwing out guesses, though her mother wouldn’t tell her yes or no either way. “You’re going to retire to Paris and eat croissants every morning.”
“No,” said Cecily. “Too many pigeons in Paris.”
“You’re going to burn the house down so I’ll have nowhere to live and nothing to do and I’ll be dependent on you for everything,” said Joanna.
Cecily was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “I hope you can’t truly imagine I’d do such a thing.”
Joanna sat up against the arm of the couch. “I couldn’t have imagined you’d trap me in your living room, either.”
“It doesn’t have to be like this,” Cecily said. “I’ll end the spell right now and we can get to the house in time for you to set the wards, if you’ll only take me with you and let me in.”
“If it’s not the wards you want to get to,” Joanna said, “then what?”
Cecily set her mouth and shook her head and Joanna lowered herself back down, eyes finding the afternoon sky again through the window. “That’s what I thought,” she said.
There was a part of her, buried so deep in fear she’d need a shovel to clear its face, that was curious to see what would happen when the wards went down. A part of her that felt a strange, soaring interest—almost elation. The wards were a tether as well as a safeguard. What would happen when her tether was cut? The house hadn’t spent a night unwarded since Abe had first stepped foot in it nearly three decades earlier, infant daughter in his arms, the body of his murdered lover hundreds of miles away. What would happen when the protection he and Joanna had so painstakingly maintained, disappeared?
There were—or at least, had been—people out there who’d shown their willingness to kill for access to Abe’s collection . . . but that had been almost thirty years ago. The dropping of the wards would mean only that the house would be like any other house; visible and accessible if you had the address, and no one, to Joanna’s knowledge, had the address. So it was possible the cataclysmic event she’d always feared (swarms of armed men pouring through her windows? All her books carried off by malice and violence?) might not come to pass at all, or not anytime soon.
But what did Cecily want if not to expose the house to something, someone? In those weeks after Esther had left, Cecily had been like a person possessed, debating Abe constantly, trying to convince him to drop the wards, to leave the books, to give up his life’s work. But why? For whom?
Cecily was the only person who could give her those answers, and Cecily refused.
Joanna gave it one last try. “I’ll take you to the house,” she said, and her mother straightened, “if you answer three questions under a truth spell.”
Cecily’s expression, which had been hopeful and alert, fell instantly. “I won’t be able to.”
“That’s not possible,” Joanna said, exasperated. Abe had put her under one, once, to show her what it felt like. She’d been twelve or so and he’d asked simple, silly questions he already knew the answers to: How do you make a fried egg? What’s my favorite Allman Brothers song? Why did Esther get mad at you yesterday? He had told her to try to lie.
She couldn’t. It had felt like the truth was a ribbon that unfurled on her tongue anytime she opened her mouth. No sense of striving or discomfort: she simply told the truth, over and over, her attempted lies transforming somewhere past her voice box.
“It isn’t that I don’t want to give you answers,” Cecily said. “It’s that I cannot. I know you don’t understand and I’m sorry. If I could explain, believe me, I would.”
Joanna felt a wave of helpless anger surging through her, and she shut her eyes tightly and held her breath against it until it passed. She’d tried anger, she’d tried tears, and neither had worked. Maybe part of her was curious, yes, but the rest of her was her father’s daughter. She could not let the wards fall.
Cecily had refused the truth spell, but she’d seen her mother’s posture change at the hope of a bargain, which meant Joanna could hope, too. For Joanna, a bargain was a chance to reach the wards in time; for Cecily it was a chance to restore some fragment of the relationship she’d broken when she’d drawn her blood across that door.
She stood from the sofa and crossed the room to stand in front of her mother and the invisible barrier, arms crossed. Cecily shifted in her chair as if she, too, might stand, but she didn’t, just looked up at Joanna with wary eyes.
“You say you haven’t done this in order to destroy the wards.”
“I have not,” Cecily said immediately. “I only need the wards down so I can get in. You can put them back up tomorrow, I swear it.”
“But you won’t tell me what it is you want to do.”
“I can’t tell you.”
Joanna took a frustrated breath. Cecily kept repeating that word, can’t, can’t, can’t, as if her silence were a matter not of will but of ability. Joanna decided to take this at face value. “Is it something I’d stop you from doing, if I could?”
Slowly, Cecily said, “No. I don’t see why you’d stop me.”
“Would you let me watch you do it? If I took you into the house?”
Cecily went very still, attentive like a dog in sight of a rabbit. Joanna could see her thinking, eyes darting back and forth as she considered this. “Yes,” she said, finally.
Joanna felt a swell of triumph. She could set the wards and get some insight into her mother’s motives at the same time.
“Here is my proposal, then,” said Joanna. “We have about two hours before I need to set the wards. In those two hours, you will end this spell, let me blindfold you, and I’ll take you to the house and let you in. You can do what you need to do and then I’ll drive you back. If you try anything at all with the wards, or if you try to get into the basement, or if I tell you not to do something and you do it anyway, I’ll never speak to you again.”
Cecily started to respond and Joanna cut her off.
“I mean that, Mom.” She weighed her voice with conviction. “And if you decline, if you leave me trapped in here while the wards drop and you break into my house, it will be the same. You will lose me as completely as you lost Esther, and you will never get me back.”
The threat was sticky on her tongue, rotten. She said it knowing it was her mother’s deepest and oldest fear. Cecily’s eyes went shiny with tears and Joanna knew her own face likely reflected some of the grief she’d wielded like a weapon at her mother’s underbelly. She’d never been able to hide her feelings, not like Esther could, but it didn’t matter. She let her mother see.
“Okay, my love,” Cecily said. “I will make that deal.”
She licked her thumb, bent down, and wiped away the barrier of blood.
12
Esther did not know how to confront Pearl about what she suspected, or whether she should even try, but as it turned out, the decision was made for her.
She hadn’t left her room after discovering the absence of her mother’s book, nor had she slept. She’d locked her door and shoved her dresser in front of it then sat on her bed, so alert it felt almost like hypnosis. She’d been stolen from twice before: once in Buenos Aires by a group of eleven-year-olds who’d menaced her with broken bottles, and once in Cleveland by a guy who was disgusted to find that the only thing in her pocket was a cheap pay-by-the-month flip phone. “Man,” he’d said, “you should be robbing me,” and they’d both surprised themselves by laughing. Both of those times she’d felt frightened and pissed off. She hadn’t felt violated.
She did now.
Whether Pearl had taken the book to re-sell online or because she was somehow connected to the people who’d been after Esther all these years hardly seemed to matter. Either way it was a betrayal. Maybe, Esther thought, dull and staring at four a.m., she could avoid Pearl completely for two days, get on that plane, and leave without ever having to confront her, without having to face the fact that one of the only true relationships she’d had in her life had been a lie.
At eight a.m. after a sleepless night, she was still wide-awake, and so on edge that when someone banged on her door it felt like a forty-volt blast to the chest. She stayed motionless, clutching her knees, praying that whoever it was would go away, but the banging started again and to her horror it was Pearl’s voice that spoke.
“Esther, I know you’re in there! Open the damn door!”
Esther stood and took a deep breath, allowed herself to close her eyes, to feel her breath coursing through her body, to feel her feet on the ground. Then she opened the door.
Instead of letting Pearl inside, she edged out into the hallway. She didn’t want to be close together in a small room with this person she thought she’d known. Pearl’s face was twisted in an unfamiliar expression that Esther belatedly identified as rage; she’d never seen good-natured Pearl truly angry before.
“Can we go in your room?” Pearl demanded.
“No,” said Esther.
Pearl’s nostrils flared and something moved in her chin. Esther, taken aback, realized she was about to cry.
“You weren’t at breakfast,” Pearl said.
“I’m not hungry.”
Pearl’s chin puckered again, and she said, “Were you ever planning on telling me?”
“Telling you—?”
“Don’t, Esther. Don’t. I saw Harry from the office today and he asked me how I felt about you leaving. I laughed and told him you weren’t leaving, I said we’d decided to stay on another season together, and he looked at me like I was a sad little idiot. I feel like a sad little idiot.”
This was not at all how Esther had pictured their confrontation going. “I—I’m not leaving, I—”
“No?” Pearl said. Her lashes were wet. “Why would Harry lie to me? I mean, either he’s lying or you are, which is it?”
Esther re-centered herself, tuning in to her breath, moving in and out. It wouldn’t help to get emotional. “Is this why you took my book?” she said. She wanted Pearl to know, unequivocally, that she knew.
“What are you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about. La Ruta, the novel I’m translating. The one whose price you were so interested in.”
Pearl’s face lost some of its anger and began to look frightened. She dropped her eyes from Esther’s and then seemed to force them back up. “I didn’t take your book.”
“Did they tell you it would stop me from leaving?” Esther said, so calm, so quiet. “Is that why you took it, to stop me?”
“No, Esther, what?” Pearl’s voice was rising in pitch, and a couple curious people had paused at the end of the hall, drawn by the drama. “I’m not trying to stop you, but I don’t understand what’s happening. We agreed to stay here, we agreed to stay together, and now you’re leaving? Without even talking to me about it? I don’t understand your reasoning or this . . . this reaction you’re having!”
“Who are you working for?” Esther said, still very quietly.
Pearl’s eyes went wide. “You’re not making sense.”
Esther wasn’t going to get anywhere, she could already tell. This interaction had spun so far beyond her control she didn’t know how she’d ever rein it back in line. It was a brilliant tactic on Pearl’s part, to throw Esther so off-guard she’d be on the defensive instead of the attack, but she wasn’t going to play into it. Defensiveness made a person say things they’d regret.
“We’re done here,” she said.
Pearl was crying now, tears streaming down her cheeks, and it was harder than Esther had expected to keep the sight from affecting her. You don’t want to make Pearl cry! bleated her stupid, soft heart. Apologize!
“Fine,” Pearl said. “I’m going skiing with Trev, so you have a few hours to decide if you want to talk to me like a human being. If you do, I’ll give you one more chance to explain yourself, because I love you. But only one chance. I don’t deserve this.”
Because I love you.
Esther hated her for saying that. Slowly but firmly she stepped back into her room and closed the door in Pearl’s tearstained face.
“Fuck you!” Pearl said, and there was a thud as if she’d kicked the wall, but Esther stood still, her entire body at alert, inches from the door she’d just closed. After a long minute she heard Pearl walk away, footsteps fading down the empty hall. She didn’t move for a long while afterward, and when she finally did turn away, it was to sit on her bed and resume staring at the door.
Pearl had specifically told her she was going skiing with eager, flirty Trev, a fact that seemed unnecessary to share unless she thought Esther would be jealous, but that would be the hurt pettiness of a spurned lover, which wasn’t really who Pearl was. She would know that the first thing Esther would want to do would be to search her room looking for the Gil, and this declaration of her intent to be absent all day had to be nothing less than an invitation.
Which meant, probably, that the book was not in Pearl’s room at all—but something else was. A trap.
Pearl had a mirror above her sink, same as Esther did. This must be a trick to get Esther to go into Pearl’s room where she could be observed, where whoever was on the other side could verify that she was on to them.
She gripped her head, which felt like it might split in two. This paranoia, these cyclical thoughts, this was how her father must have felt most days of his life. She was still so angry at him, but for the first time she understood viscerally the fear he had lived with and understood, too, that it was a fear she had always trusted, deep down—until she had decided to stop trusting it and called this chaos down upon herself.
I’m sorry, she told her father, tears welling in her eyes despite herself. She would’ve given anything to be able to call him, to hear his voice, deep and attentive. He used to go into town and use the public library computers to Skype her, and she’d talked to Joanna like that sometimes, too. Cecily, who’d gotten a cell phone the week she’d moved out of Abe’s house, had often called and texted her, and twice flown across the country to see her for the weekend, against Abe’s nervous wishes. She’d been in contact with her family until she’d decided that contact was too difficult. Until it had become easier to cut ties on purpose instead of struggling to maintain thinning threads that would someday break and her heart along with them.
Esther stood up, frustrated with herself for sinking into maudlin tears at precisely the time they were least helpful. She might be paranoid, like her father, and for good reason, like her father—but she was not Abe. She couldn’t operate on supposition and inklings. She had to know.
She waited, pacing, for another thirty minutes, enough time for Pearl and Trev to bundle up and be on their way, and then she went by the equipment room to see if Pearl had checked out skis and walkie talkies yet. She had, which meant they were out of the station.
Esther had been in Pearl’s room countless times and had no trouble imagining the layout. She would be able to open the door, crouch low, and enter without any fear of being reflected in the mirror on the dresser, and if she positioned herself at the correct angle, she thought she’d be able to see the mirror’s surface well enough to know if there were any telltale blood marks on it. She’d see the marks, but the mirror wouldn’t see her.
Esther crawled through the door as quietly as she could and closed it behind her with a barely audible click. She was kneeling on the floor in the darkness of Pearl’s bedroom, the overhead off, no window. She could just make out the looming form of Pearl’s dresser and the glint of the mirror atop it, but it wasn’t bright enough to see what might be on the glass. She reached up and opened the door again, only an inch, letting more light spill in. It wasn’t enough.
So she stood up, dusted off her knees, closed the door, and turned on the light. Let them see her. It wouldn’t make a difference. Whatever they were planning to do to her, they planned to do it regardless.
And, despite the evidence, despite all her suspicion and paranoia, she realized there was still a part of her that trusted Pearl; a part of her that trusted, when she turned to face the mirror, that she would find nothing except clean, absolving glass. She’d crossed her fingers without realizing she was doing it and her breath caught high in her chest, unmoving as she scanned the glass. Empty, empty, empty. A sweet, melting relief began to spread through her limbs—and then she saw it.
The rusty smear of blood, at all four corners.
Her breath came out in an explosive curse and she staggered backward onto Pearl’s bed, a place she’d been many times before, a place she’d so recently been happy. She had not truly believed in Pearl’s betrayal until she’d seen the blood. She hadn’t wanted to believe it. But the evidence was there, clear as anything.
Well, if those assholes were watching, whoever they were, let them watch. Esther began tearing Pearl’s room apart with no regard for order or stealth, looking not only for her own book but for the book Pearl must have used to activate the mirror spell. She searched the bed, the pillowcase, beneath the mattress, upturned all of Pearl’s drawers. She pulled the meager furniture away from the walls, looked behind the mirror, went from corner to corner in that little white box, searching . . . and found nothing.
