“Yes, ma’am.” One of the agents comes in and asks about the room I call the parlor. He nods. “Will you wait elsewhere, Ms. Rose?”
I nod, take myself to the small kitchen, and turn on the kettle. A big pot simmers on the back of the stove, filling the air with the fragrance of Willow’s magic—herbs and chicken and whatever else. I peek in and see rounds of carrot floating. It smells like healing, like hope, and I scoop out a small bowl for myself, then sit at the table to eat it while agents go through my precious, precious things.
Willow, my love, I think, stinging. I will miss you. Sam, I will miss you too. Kitchen, I will miss you. Teaspoons I bought on eBay, I will miss you.
I feel empty. How can I start again, so late?
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Willow
Sam has called ahead to have the super let me into her apartment so that I can get some clothes and toiletries for her.
The apartment is in disarray, untouched since the night she went to the hospital by ambulance. A small table has been knocked over, the bed is a tangle of covers, and there are take-out boxes on the counter, reeking. It’s going to take me a little while here, I can see.
First things first. I unzip the backpack and take out the hoodie I stuffed in on top. Rolled up inside are the paintings, the entire lot of them, and it’s surprising how little space they take up, considering how much they’re worth.
Which is a silly thought. Jewels are small too. Computer chips with secrets.
Shaking myself, I look around the place slowly. The loft is open, with lots of industrial-looking furniture, open shelves, not a lot of hiding space. I said I was going to put them under the mattress, but that would be too obvious. I open the cupboards in the kitchen, looking for possibilities. She doesn’t have much in the way of cookware, but the shelves are stacked with books and clothes. I could stash the paintings behind some of them, but that wouldn’t feel very secure.
The high, narrow closet in the bathroom has potential. The cupboard rises all the way to the top of the sixteen-foot ceilings, and if I could find something to stand on, I could hide the paintings all the way in the back of the top shelf. From here, it appears to be empty.
Still too obvious.
Holding the rolled-up paintings in the crook of my elbow, I return to the main room and look at everything. The TV is hung on the wall with a metal arm to move it various ways. Shelves hold stacks of video games and several gaming systems.
Nervous frustration raises the tension in my neck, and I nearly jump out of my skin when someone knocks on the door. “Willow!” a voice calls. “I came to help you.”
I’m still holding the paintings, and I don’t know where to put them, so I stash them back in the pack, hurry to the door, and unfasten the locks.
Asher is standing there, looking so fit and trim my mouth drops. “Hey! You look great.”
He gathers me up in a bear hug that lifts me completely off my feet. “I’ve missed you so much, kid!”
I hug him back, almost teary with the pleasure of his brotherly scent, the feeling of safety he brings with him. “Me too.”
He puts me down, and I wave him in. “Did Sam send you? She’s getting impatient, but I wanted to straighten things up a little.” I gesture behind me.
“Yeah.” He makes a face. “I’ll help. She just wanted me to get one of her old notebooks. We’re working on a new game.”
“That’s great,” I say, but I’m trying to think what to do with the paintings now. I can’t exactly hide them while he’s here.
He runs his fingers over a row of notebooks on the shelf opposite the bed. Pauses, flips one open, slams it closed. “Oops. Diaries. I need work notebooks.”
“Sam keeps a diary?”
“Yeah, she has since she was a kid. You didn’t know that?”
“No. She really doesn’t seem like the journaling type.” The multicolored row of volumes is one of the most tempting things I’ve ever seen. What would it be like to see behind my sister’s walls? What has she written in them? What has she written about me? About her dad and Asher and—
“Don’t even think about it,” Asher says.
“I would never,” I lie.
“Me either,” he lies back.
“What do you think she writes about?” I ask as I strip the bed.
Asher finds another shelf of heavy-duty spiral notebooks and takes a couple down, opens one, puts it back, opens the other. “Bingo.” He shucks his jacket and lays the notebook on top of it, then comes over to help me with the bed. “What does anyone write about in a journal? Feelings, observations, resolves.”
“Do you keep one?” I shake the pillow out of its case.
“No. I did for a while in high school, but it was all about the same subject, all the time, and I just got tired of myself.”
I smile. “What subject? How to get into video game design school?”
He scoffs, tossing a pillow on the couch. “Hardly. It was always Sam. Sam, Sam, Sam.”
For a moment, I stare openmouthed. “What?”
“C’mon,” he says, gathering the sheets into a ball and carrying them around the corner. He opens the bathroom closet and takes out fresh linens. “Everyone in the tristate area knew I was in love with her.”
“I didn’t.”
“You’re kinder than most people,” he says, tossing me one end of the fitted sheet. “You take people at face value.”
“Do I? That’s a nice thing to say.” We stretch the sheet, very sensibly white, high–thread count cotton, and fit it over the corners. I shake out the top sheet, and he grabs the other side.
He gives me a half grin. “You’ve always been the nicest of all of us, including G and me and everyone in my family.”
“Well, I don’t know that it’s done me a lot of good.” I frown, shaking a pillow into a fresh case. “But don’t get me off track. You were in love with Sam in high school?”
“High school, middle school, grade school, college.” He scowls. “This is weird. I don’t want to talk about it.”
I shrug, pulling the duvet up and folding the top neatly. I’m intrigued and have to give this some more thought. How did I never notice?
When did he stop?
Together, we clean up the apartment for when she returns, and I gather underwear, toothbrush and toiletries, and some comfy pajama bottoms and T-shirts, which I neatly stack on the bed while I try to decide what I should do with the paintings. Asher washes the dishes, fills a trash bag, polishes the sink, and then just stands there with an expression on his face that I can only call sad.
“What’s up, big brother?” I ask, touching his upper back.
He starts a little, as if he’d forgotten I was there. “We haven’t been talking,” he says. “Did she tell you?”
“Gloria did. But you’re the one who got her to the hospital, right?”
He closes his eyes. “Yeah. Barely. She was so sick when I got here, out of her head. It scared me so much.”
My gut lurches. “I know. I came by here, too, but I was too afraid of her getting mad at me to call the super.” I cover my belly with a palm. “I would never have forgiven myself if she had died because I was afraid of her.”
He touches my hand. “It wouldn’t have been your fault, Willow.”
I shrug. “How did you know to come if you haven’t been talking?”
“SOS.” He gives me a rueful little smile. “From the Batman movies, a signal that we needed to come now. Right now. I tried to call her back and just couldn’t rouse her, so I used our old Friend Connection, and it said she was home.”
He doubles over, his elbows hitting the counter with some force, but he doesn’t even seem to feel it. He buries his face in his hands, pushing his glasses up his forehead. He is silent, almost as if he’s holding his breath. “She nearly fucking died.”
My body reacts with a rush of nausea, and I have to breathe slowly, in, out, in, out, to halt it. The comma of his back clearly expresses grief, shoc
k, horror, and I move a little closer so I can rub my hand on the place between his shoulder blades. That’s when I realize he is silently crying, his sobs so small and intense that it almost breaks me too. “She didn’t, though,” I say quietly. “You saved her.”
“I almost didn’t come. I thought it would serve her right.”
I’m not following this exactly, but I keep my hand on him, proof that I’m here and listening and it’s okay.
“And then I got here, and she’s babbling about being married and who is going to take care of our kids, and . . .” He takes a deep breath, makes himself do the man thing and stop feeling the full roar of his grief. “She was so sweet, so vulnerable. She forgot everything that has happened and somehow made up a story to fit why I was there, and it just broke my damned heart.”
I nod. Listening. Confused, but that doesn’t matter. He just needs to say whatever it is that’s bugging him.
But he stops talking, straightens up. “Sorry.” He takes off his glasses and wipes his face with a paper towel. “I’m such a fucking idiot.”
“Uh . . . how?”
“Do you know who her doctor is? Of all the people in the world? That bastard Eric.”
“I know! Right? I chased him out of her room when I saw him. How dare he?”
“Yeah, well, I think—” He halts, shakes his head. “Never mind. I’m just not doing all of this again.”
“Okay.” I hold up a palm. “I’m sorry, but I am completely lost. Doing what?”
“I want to get married, have kids. I’m forty years old, and I don’t want to be a grandfather dad. I want to be a dad-dad.”
“That makes sense.”
He bows his head. “As long as Sam and I were ‘best friends’”—he puts the words in quotes—“I was never going to look for a woman who wanted to settle down. I’d just keep . . . hoping.”
“That Sam . . . ?”
He gives a humorless laugh. “I know. Pathetic.”
I scowl. “So you told her you didn’t want to be friends anymore? Broke up?”
He nods. “And you know, Willow, it’s been good for me. I’ve actually been dating, sometimes anyway. And going to the gym, and eating right, and treating myself the way I always should have, instead of pouring the best of me into Sam.”
“You do look pretty good.”
“Thanks. You don’t, by the way. You look half-starved.”
“Thank you.” I shrug. “It’s been a rough few months, but it’s better now that I’m home.” I fold my arms. “Except that my sister, who still hates me, is sick, and my aunt is in trouble.”
“Trouble?”
“More on that in a minute, but Asher, what happened to you and Sam?”
His expression is sad. “Ask her.”
I nod slowly and change direction, thinking of the paintings. I make an executive decision. “I need your help with something.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Sam
It’s well past dark by the time Willow loads me into a cab bound for the apartment. She brought a notebook, the excuse I had for getting Asher to come back to the hospital, and it irks me. That she interfered with my plan. “I wanted Asher to bring that to me,” I say, and even I am embarrassed by my petulance.
“I’m sorry.” She clears her throat. “He . . . uh . . . had something to do for Gloria.”
I lift my head. “Gloria? What?”
She takes in a breath, sighs it out. “It’s complicated, and a long story.” She looks toward the hallway. “I don’t want to tell it here.”
Even in my weary bad mood, I feel a whisper of worry. “Is she in trouble or something?”
“Kind of.” She touches my shoulder. “Let’s focus on getting you back to the apartment, and then we can talk.”
I want to push for more, but it takes all my energy to walk with her to the cab, then stay upright and not crumple over sideways into her lap. My head hurts, and a slight roar has filled my ears, as if I’m wrapped in cotton balls. Lights reflect off the wet pavement, and the sharpness is too much.
I close my eyes.
“Asher said you guys broke up as friends,” Willow says next to me. “What happened?”
“I don’t know,” I say. My head rocks back and forth against the back of the seat. It’s weirdly soothing. The traffic is heavy and full of honking horns and tires swishing and the sound of the rain. I think about telling my app everything and not Willow, and it seems absurd. “That’s not true. We had a really bad fight after Tina’s wedding.”
“You’ve had plenty of fights.”
“Not like this one.” It flashes through my memory, full of hurled shouts and misunderstandings on both sides and so much hurt. “We said things we can’t take back.”
“What things?”
I shake my head, but I think of the insults I flung—needy, cloying. I squeeze my eyes tight. Fat.
So fucking mean.
She’s silent. “Why then? What happened at the wedding?”
I flash on sleeping against his chest, waking up to make love again. “So many things.”
“Like?”
“I can’t talk about it.”
“Wait,” she says. “Did you guys have sex?”
I squeeze my eyes tight. “Yes, and it ruined everything.”
“Was it the sex, or did you shove him away?”
“Don’t.” I hold up a hand. “This is none of your business.”
“Maybe not.” She takes my hand and draws me down until my head is cradled in her lap, and I feel like a woman in a Pre-Raphaelite painting. She strokes my forehead with cool fingers.
“Will you sing to me?”
And of course she does, a lilting lullaby about a girl who can’t marry the love of her life, so she weaves him a shirt of the hair she cuts from her head.
“You have a real pretty voice, young lady,” the cabbie says over his shoulder.
“She made an album,” I say, half-hypnotized by her fingers, her sweet voice. “You should buy it.”
“Is that right?”
But I drift off, and the next thing I know, Jorge is holding an umbrella over my head as I get out of the cab, his strong hand hard on my arm. It’s a cold, hard, miserable rain, and I’m glad to get inside. Willow comes behind with all my things. “Thank you, Jorge. I’ll get her upstairs.”
“Hey, how’s your auntie doing? All those paintings—” He tsks.
“What?”
“Never mind,” Willow says, and I see her give a hard look to Jorge, shaking her head fiercely at him.
The simple trip from hospital to here has taken all my reserves, and I lean against the wall of the elevator, staring at the polished brass decorations, which are just the same, as if nothing ever changes inside this cramped, ornate cage.
Hmmm, says my creative brain, tucking that away. An elevator toward new things . . . ? A place of return?
Willow hustles me in, and the apartment looks messy, with empty picture frames stacked up against the wall and a coat knocked down from the tree. Willow says “Shit” under her breath and picks up the coat while still holding on to my arm. “Gloria! We’re home.”
I’m dizzy, but I right myself with a hand to the wall, surveying the disarray. “You said Gloria is in trouble,” I say. “What kind of trouble?”
Willow pauses. “Let me get you to your room and find G, and then I’ll tell you everything.”
“Tell me.”
Willow raises her eyebrows and takes my arm. “You’re the color of the moon. You need to lie down.”
The journey from the hospital was as arduous as climbing a mountain, and I feel like I might pass out. “Okay. I need to lie down.”
“Lean on me.”
So I do, and she walks me down the hall to my old bedroom, where the sheets smell fresh and crisp, and the light from the stained glass lamp I’ve always loved shines on the nightstand. A water bottle is there, and my brush, and as I fall into the bed, I feel her cover me up. “Thank you,” I whisp
er.
Willow sweeps her hand over my hair, touches my earlobe just as my mother used to, and I want to weep for missing her, Billie, who has been gone for a thousand years. Why don’t any of the ballads resurrect dead mothers? I wonder.
Then I grab Willow’s hand. “Promise you’ll come right back.”
“I promise.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Willow
I find Gloria in the greenhouse, of course, where she’s writing frantically on a piece of paper. Loud classical music is blasting on the speaker system she installed a couple of years ago. And I do mean she installed it. It’s the kind of thing she does so often, reminding you that she’s not only a knockout and really smart and funny and a million other amazing things, but she’s also handy and likes doing that kind of work.
“What are you doing out here?” I ask. “Did Balakrishna take the paintings?”
“Yes.” She straightens, gestures around the greenhouse. “I’m making lists of what to do in here. You know most of it, but—”
I feel winded. “Are you going to be arrested?”
“Very likely.”
“But surely you won’t be there long. We can bail you out.”
“Maybe. It’s possible the bail will be quite high, considering the possibility of flight risk.”
“We’ll just tell them that you have this apartment and me and Willow, and where would you go? Surely. You’re seventy-four. What judge would keep you locked up?”
She smiles sadly. “I’m sure they will just believe us if we’re earnest enough.”
I sink onto a bench. “I see what you mean. But G—”
“Shh.” She raises a hand. “Let me get this written down while I have a chance.”
The greenhouse for her is what music is for me, the calm amid the storm. “What’s this?” I ask, jumping up to sit on a wooden table. The sprouts are small and colorful.
“Begonias. I ordered a bunch of seeds a few months ago, and they’re all coming up at once.” She doesn’t look at me. “They like to be damp but not too wet, and they like light but not too much direct sunlight.”
“Like . . . all begonias?” I ask with a grin.
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