chapter fourteen

Daddy had an awful surprise for me when he went back to work. Leaving me to fill his thermos while he answered the door, he let Mrs. Thacker in and folded a thin stack of bills in her worn hand. Telling her that I’d been acting up, he warned her to check on me after I went to bed. I couldn’t go out; nobody could come in, either.

As soon as Daddy left, Mrs. Thacker turned on the television and smiled at me with her yellow, craggy teeth. “Did you miss me?”

I tugged my T-shirt over my knees and stared at the TV, offering up a noise that could have been yes or no, depending on how generous her hearing was that night.

“Tell me about your summer,” she said.

Curling my toes into the couch, I refused to look over. “It’s been all right.”

“Oh, but didn’t the police come?” Mrs. Thacker tried to make it sound innocent, like maybe she wasn’t sure if it had been my house or some other house on the street, but I knew better. She ate gossip like candy; she probably knew exactly how many rocks we’d found in my room and how many Old Mrs. Landry claimed I’d thrown at her windows.

When I didn’t answer, Mrs. Thacker patted the arm of the chair with her dry hand. Leaning her head back, she sighed. “If your daddy had any sense, he’d take a new wife.”

“He don’t need a wife,” I said sullenly.

“It’s my opinion,” Mrs. Thacker said, working into a full chorus of croaks, “that a man can’t handle a child on his own. They turn out funny without a mother’s touch.”

I burrowed into the couch; I wanted to stick cotton in my ears and drown her out. “In my opinion, we turn out just fine.”

“Look at poor Lee, living in sin with that man in Baton Rouge.” Mrs. Thacker ignored me, her finger bobbing like a metronome. “He wouldn’t be like that if your granny had lived.”

My mouth burned. I wanted to shout at her, Shut up, shut up, shut up!

I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I had to mind. I had to be good enough to get rid of her, for good. Reaching for the remote, I said, “I can’t hear the TV.”

Not that Mrs. Thacker cared. She found a special frequency that went right into my brain. No matter how hard I tried to ignore her, her voice came through. She went on about my daddy and about what a shame it was my mama had died so young, on and on until I was sick with it. My eyes dried out as I watched the clock, blue digital numbers creeping upward somehow slower than a minute at a time.

“. . . got laid up at the hospital. Of course, with that mama of his, he coulda had a whole boxful of reasons for doing something so foolish.”

I peeked around my arm at her, trying to decide if I wanted her to repeat that or not. It sounded like she was talking about Elijah, but she could have been talking about her Henry and his bullfighting days for all I knew. Forcing myself to sound disinterested, I leaned back in the couch. “What’d he go for, anyway?”

“Now you’re interested,” Mrs. Thacker said with a snide smile. “Nobody likes a gossip, Iris.”

She should know, I thought.

Mrs. Thacker thumped my arm waving her hand in a little circle between us, binding us to a secret. “Delinda Potts used to come in twice a week to clean because Babette always was too precious to do it herself. According to her, that boy swallowed a whole bottle of aspirin and had to have his stomach pumped.”

I stared at her. “Why’d he do something like that?”

“Haven’t you been listening? Love! It’s either love or money, and he wasn’t old enough to worry about money.” Mrs. Thacker dropped back in the recliner, cackling again. “It’s a good thing you look like your daddy, or we would have wondered.”

I knew she wanted me to ask more, but I’d heard everything I wanted to. Pulling my legs out of my shirt, I peeled myself off the couch with a fake yawn. “I better go to bed.”

With a frown, Mrs. Thacker turned to watch me go, raising her voice to call after me, “Don’t you lock your door; I’m going to be checking on you.”

As soon as I got the phone from Daddy’s room, I locked myself up tight anyway and shoved a book under the door just to make sure she couldn’t walk in unannounced. I had a notion to pour my box of marbles in the hallway as a guarantee, but a quick, vivid image of Mrs. Thacker lying at the bottom of the stairs, her head twisted the wrong way, turned me off that. I didn’t like her, but I didn’t want to kill her.

Beneath a stack of covers, I made myself small as I picked up the phone and dialed. After Collette got done hassling me for missing our date at the cemetery, she settled in to listen. She made soft, surprised sounds as I talked, and I could practically hear her nod over the line. I kept my latest Elijah sightings to myself, though. I wanted to work out his riddle on my own.

“You ought to tell your daddy what she said about your family.” For some reason, Collette had jumped back all the way to the beginning instead of saying anything about my new evidence. “That woman’s mean as a scorpion.”

It felt good to have her on my side again, and I nodded. “She is. And she’s got a nasty mouth for an old lady.”

“They ought to lock her and Old Mrs. Landry in a cage together. They could sting each other to death.”

“You think she’s lying, though? About Elijah, I mean. I know she was lying about my mama.” I popped my arm out of the covers, trying to make a little hole for fresh air.

“I don’t know.” Collette hummed softly, then added, “Swallowing pills doesn’t sound like something a boy would do. A boy would want a gun, I’d think.”

I rolled Collette’s point over in my head. It sounded right, and I couldn’t argue it, but then I remembered something. “Miss Nan said he wasn’t allowed to go hunting, though. If he didn’t have a gun, he might take pills.”

“Well, Miss Nan said he wasn’t allowed to have a girlfriend, but there she was,” Collette said.

Annoyed, I frowned. “You can sneak and have a girlfriend. How do you sneak and have a gun? I think Mrs. Thacker’s right.”

Another hum crackled over the line. “We should ask Ben; he’d know.”

Throwing the covers off my head, I swabbed the sweat from my face and let loose on her. “He wouldn’t know any better than you would, and I asked you. You can think just fine without running to Ben to ask if it’s all right, you know.”

“I know I can, but he’s a boy, so he would know about boys.”

“He knows about himself, and that’s it!” Sliding out of bed, I stalked over to turn up the box fan. Its whine filled my room, white noise that cleared my head like cool water. “I think we’re about done playing magic, Collette.”

Collette answered with a gasp that sounded like a hiccup. “You’re the most jealous thing I’ve ever seen, Iris.”

“Maybe I am, but some stuff was just ours—the spellbook and all that. But it’s not anymore.” Tempering myself, I leaned against the wall. “I’m not saying don’t be my friend.”

“Yes you are, too.”

I slumped against the wall and sighed. “If that’s what you want to think, I can’t stop you.” I wasn’t mad anymore, just tired. “I’ll be here if you want to watch movies or listen to music or talk about anything, but I’m done acting like we have powers. We don’t; we never did.”

“You just want to keep Elijah to yourself.” Collette’s voice sounded thin and wet, like she’d started crying. “You go on ahead and see if I care, because I don’t.”

Emptied of everything, I sat at my desk, curling one arm into a pillow so I could rest my head. “Nobody said you had to. I’m going to bed now, Collette.”

She sniffled, the line going fuzzy, then clear again. After using that moment to calm down, Collette tried to put on her best queen voice. It didn’t work; she didn’t sound chilly or regal or even hard—she just sounded sad. “Well, then good night.”

“I’ll talk to you later,” I said, then hung up the phone. I sat there for a long time, rearranging things on my desk before going back to bed.

When I told Collette I’d talk to her later, I meant it. I didn’t know how to be a person without my best friend; Collette knew me from the inside, all my dumb details and the good ones, too.

I had to believe she’d still like me without our spells and swords. I had to believe we were more than make-believe.

Elijah walked through my bedroom door and started pulling books from the shelves. His hair looked mossy, his skin mint green and mottled, but his mouth was red as an apple.

Pages flapped when he tossed books over his shoulder. Carefully, he pulled the prayer book Daddy had given me for my First Communion from the shelf and sniffed it. I liked to do that, too; it was bound in white leather, and the pages were edged in gold.

Elijah stroked it for a minute, but instead of just dumping it over his shoulder like the rest, he wound up and threw it hard. It turned into a rock and shattered my window. Still, he didn’t seem to enjoy destroying my things; he frowned and thumped the wall, like he expected it to open or something.

Unsure if this was a dream, I didn’t try to move, but I shuddered when he turned to shake out my desk. He only wore half a face; the other side was bone, gray and dirty, barely held together. His bright lips stopped exactly in the middle, and I could see a black tongue filling his mouth.

“Don’t ask me where I’m at,” I said, wrapping the covers around me tight. “You already know.”

His face melted from green to gold again, from half to whole again, a feathered sweep of hair falling into his eyes. When he leaned back, his jersey shirt pulled tight across his shoulders, showing off fine, sculpted muscles beneath. “You already know,” he echoed.

Shivering, I tried to rearrange the blankets to cover me, but I couldn’t get warm. Rocks filled my bed. Breath frosting in the air, I shook my head. “That’s what I said.”

“You already know,” he repeated, and reached to grab something off my desk. He threw my spellbook toward me, and its white pages rose and fell like a bird’s wings before it landed silently in my lap.

The book flipped over and spread itself open. I closed it and frowned when it popped open again. A red drop splattered in the middle of the page, and I reached up to scrub at my nose as the blood smear crawled across the page and formed neat block letters.

You found me where I’m sleeping.

Reading the blood note, I held both hands against my nose, swallowing the iron tang sliding down my throat. I lifted my head to tell Elijah I still didn’t know what he meant by that, but he was gone.

I threw the covers off when an awful flash of heat swept over me. Humid night air choked me as I struggled free from the tangle of sheets around my ankles. Just to make sure I’d been dreaming, I looked up to find my room the way it had been when I fell asleep.

Outside my window, angry clouds blotted out the moon. I felt the static hum of a coming storm in everything I touched, and fighting a low, sick feeling in my stomach, I rolled out of bed. I needed to get the fan out of the window before the rain came.

As I reached for the fan, something loomed behind me, something that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. More stupid than brave, I looked over my shoulder and almost lost my legs from under me.

A black pool of blood stained my sheets, and a single rock fell from nowhere. Uneasy, I looked down and saw blood on my legs. I could smell it, a dead, heavy scent that turned my stomach. I backed toward the door, touching myself, trying to find where I’d been cut.

Another rock fell, sounding almost hollow as it rolled off the bed and onto the floor. I didn’t know if it was the storm or something else, but papers rustled on my desk, and as I reached blindly for the doorknob, I watched my drawer work itself open.

I screamed when the drawer exploded out, showering my room with crayons and books and pictures and every other little thing I’d tucked away in there.

My door wouldn’t open. I ducked when my spellbook slammed against the wall beside my head. Struggling for another breath I screamed again. Mrs. Thacker was about the worst babysitter in the world if she couldn’t hear this.

I damned her and the television set blaring downstairs. I damned Daddy for working nights, and Mama for driving in the rain, and Collette for growing up, and Ben for coming between us. I damned them for leaving me all alone with this when it wasn’t a dream.

The storm in my room raged for a second; then suddenly the phone rang and everything stopped. Pens and boxes and books began raining down like hail again as I dropped to my hands and knees, crawling through the mess to get to the phone.

“Collette,” I whispered, panicking when a warm, wet stream trickled from my nose. I swabbed at it, relieved that it was snot instead of blood.

The line crackled with soft static, and then a voice murmured, “Where y’at, Iris?”

I threw the phone and scrambled to my feet. With both hands, I yanked at my bedroom door, but it stuck fast. I tore around, searching for a way to escape, and my gaze landed on the window. I pulled the fan free, pushed my screen out, and slung my leg outside.

My bedroom opened onto nothing. Clinging to the sill, I kept telling myself it wasn’t far to the ground; all I had to do was let go. My fingers didn’t care; they dug in hard, and I dangled there with the wind clawing at me until a bright crack of lightning scared me into letting go.

The ground rushed up under me, shoving the air from my lungs when we collided. Eyes crossing, arms spread out wide, I watched the sky go blurry, then sharp above me.

All I wanted was to go to sleep, but spatters of rain hit my face. Those cold little drops jerked me sensible again, and suddenly I knew.