The house was the same as it had been, mock-holy ephemera that at first glance felt tacky, but held more power than that. On closer inspection, the small painted Holy Virgins wept tears of blood. Had they always done that?
Mae scooped up Bobby in her arms, his purring a balm—until she was in the hallway and heard movement in the kitchen. She knew exactly who it was, no doubt preparing soup. Lighting incense. Boiling the kettle. She’d recognize that footfall anywhere: a deer in a forest looking up at the sound of a wolf stalking a mile away. Mae put her nose in the scruff of Bobby’s neck, her stomach a pit. The relief was nice while it lasted. But she kicked off her pumps and walked the long corridor towards the scent of herbs and garlic. Toward the barely audible choreography danced out in that kitchen day after day by Bevan Mulholland.
Rossa, somehow able to tell, leant over her shoulder and whispered, “She’s only a lanky bitch anyway, Mae.” And he meant it kindly, but Mae nearly turned on him. She drew a sharp breath and didn’t reply. Rita led them into the kitchen.
The patio doors were flung wide, the kitchen saturated with summertime, and there, at the stove, she stood, blond curls in bunches, too tall, legs tan and thick, a wooden spoon in one hand and a teacup in the other. Glasses she hadn’t worn the first summer, thick, framed in tortoiseshell, perched on her nose. Still the center of any room. Still making Mae’s whole stupid heart beat like a drum.
Bevan spun from the pot, a toothy smile across her impossible face. “Mae and Rossa! Would you look. You two are so tall now! C’mere, sit down—I’d say you’re starving!”
The thudding of Mae’s pulse dulled. Rita had reported that Bevan had “gotten over herself,” but this almost manic brightness was a little too much. It felt false.
Mae looked to Rossa to exchange a silent whaaat? look, but he was already helping the titanic girl gather soup bowls from the shelves, setting the table, suddenly quick and helpful, chirping small talk while Mae stood there, stock-still.
Bobby leant into her and said soft, in her ear, “It’s all over, Mae. Bevan’s unwound herself. She’s nothing to be afraid of anymore.”
Mae stroked him and nodded, but her eyes were on Rossa, whose eyes were on Bevan. She wasn’t afraid. She was kind of angry. The cat rumbled.
“I’ve missed you, old man,” Mae said to him, by way of distraction.
The four humans sat around the table, and Bobby padded over to lie in the shaft of light by the wide garden door. Bevan chatted brightly to Rossa and Rita: she’d decided to give up college, it wasn’t her style; besides, who would look after Rita? She wasn’t going to leave her here on her own. She was booked out the gills with readings and someone had to do the organizing, a little accounting, didn’t they? Bevan saw no point in being holed up down the country at some university when she had all manner of studies to undertake up here anyway. Rita bantered back with her, Rossa laughing along, charmed.
Mae blinked and absently dipped crumbling soda bread into red soup, the iced tea untouched by her side, dripping condensation. She felt like she was watching the whole scene unfold from the ceiling. Bevan talked so much now. Where was the scowling maelstrom Mae had fallen in love with? Had she made it all up? There was so much about that first summer that Mae could have made up, but if the talking cat was real—
“Are . . . are those tattoos on your hands? Do you mind me asking?” Rossa’s question snapped Mae back to the table.
Bevan raised her hands up to her eyes and there, on her palms, were two bright blue markings. Eyes in themselves, in inked dots and swirls over her lifeline, her love line—patterns obscuring the organic puzzle of her hands. She closed her fingers over her palm and opened them—a blink. “They are!”
Rossa laughed, Bevan laughed. Mae stared.
“My ex-boyfriend did them for me. Rita hates them, don’t you, Rita?” Another comic hand-blink or two.
Rita rolled her eyes, Rossa chuckled.
Mae didn’t know what shocked her more, the tattoos, the phrase “ex-boyfriend,” or the laughter. In Mae’s memory Bevan was largely a scornful giant, and here she was, giggling. Mae’s appetite evaporated, and she dropped her soda bread into the bright soup, surrendering.
“I just don’t know why you have to mark yourself like that,” Rita tutted.
Bevan kept her eye-hands up. “She hasn’t even seen the other one yet!” Bevan said, and theatrically winked one hand, dipping her head and elbow for effect.
“Did they hurt?” Rossa asked. His eyes had almost left his skull, and Mae was half tempted to lean over and click his jaw closed for him.
“Not really,” Bevan replied, taking her hands down and presenting them to Rossa for examination. “I burned my hands years ago. I reckon since then my body doesn’t really, like, compute pain. Actually, you were here that summer, do you remember that?”
Mae was uneasy with this. She remembered one bad night, one weird breakfast, then moderate peace until her and her brother were shipped home. No burnings.
Rossa took Bevan’s hands and looked closely at the tattoos. Where was all this confidence coming from? How could he just reach out and touch her like that? Didn’t he just call her a lanky bitch, and now he was touching her? Reels of old dreams about Bevan’s large hands played behind Mae’s eyes, and there was her brother, just touching them like they were any old hands at all. Outrageous.
“They’re amazing,” Rossa marveled. “I’ve always wanted a tattoo.”
“Have you?” Mae couldn’t help but snap.
“Yeah, actually, Mae,” Rossa responded, not letting go of Bevan’s outstretched hands, looking his sister dead in the eye.
“Well, it’s the first I’ve heard of it,” Mae sneered. She knew she was being unfair, but she didn’t stop herself.
“I draw tattoos all the time, in my sketch pads. You’ve seen them!” Rossa was scrambling now, caught out in his flirtation. Stung, thought Mae. A minor victory.
“Oh! I totally forgot that you like drawing. Will you show me some of your pictures?” Bevan’s earnestness was utterly alien to Mae. She sounded like she was actually interested.
“Sure—my sketchbooks are in my case.” Rossa smiled at her, casting a split-second look to Mae that read I’m not stung. You’re stung.
“Right! Let’s go get them, yeah? I’m sure Mae won’t mind taking care of the dishes—will you, Mae? I’ll owe you one!”
“I suppose . . . sure . . . yeah.” Utterly blindsided, Mae watched Bevan and her brother stand up from the table.
“You’re such a dote! Come on then, give me a look at these notebooks, Leonardo.”
Rossa didn’t need to be asked twice—he and Bevan scarpered out of the kitchen so quickly that steam was still rising from the dregs at the bottom of their teacups. The kitchen door closed behind them, their footfall and chatter drifting away in the hallway. Two empty soup bowls and Rita and Mae remained, Bobby watching them from his panel of light.
A moment passed, too awkward for Mae. She looked at her great-aunt. “Rita, what in the fresh hell was that?”
The old woman was already lighting a cigarette. “Since her old bedroom closed that summer, she’s become more lively. I prefer her this way. I take it you don’t?”
There was something in Rita’s frankness that refreshed the air around them. Mae snorted a laugh, genuine. Trust Rita to treat magical catastrophe and violent spellcasting as a finishing-school technique making Bevan more palatable to be around. Trust Rita to clock that Mae was uncomfortable.
“I—oh, Rita, I don’t know.” Mae sighed, putting her face in her hands. “God, that was so weird.”
Rita chuckled, dragged on the smoke. “It’s been stranger than that around here.”
“I know.” Mae didn’t look up.
“Don’t be jealous,” Rita teased. Mae’s knuckles in her eye sockets pocked the black behind her eyelids with white.
“I’ll try.” Her voice came out very small.
“Have you had any time to practice with the
cards, with all the goings-on at home? I would have asked you on the phone at Christmas, but I didn’t want to draw too much attention to it.”
Mae lifted her head, the beginnings of a smile prickling the sides of her mouth. She’d been holding this secret close; she’d been waiting for this chat. “I have, actually. A lot.”
Rita slapped the table, the cutlery taking a small jangling leap up in the air from the shock. “That’s my girl! Show me what you can do?”
Stubby cigarette pursed between her lips, Rita pulled that same old silken bag from her cardigan pocket and removed her tarot deck, corners softened and rounded from use, monochrome backs thumbed, faded, loved. Mae wished she could tell her all the hours she’d spent with her own deck, which still looked good as new compared to these old soldiers. Back home, Mae would sit with headphones in on the bathroom floor, the only door with a lock, and pull reading after reading while thunderous arguments raged elsewhere. She became fluent in the symbols of the cards, a private and soothing language as her home fell down around her, as her brother stormed out to stay at one of many friends’ houses night after night after night. It was just her and the floral bleach of the little gray bathroom and the security of the locked door.
Mae took Rita’s cards and performed a few shuffles, wrist tricks gleaned from internet videos digested on loop. For a second she was a card dealer in a casino, all paper flare, not a seventeen-year-old kid crumpled by the mere presence of her first crush.
Mae asked softly, “Should I read for you or for me?”
“For yourself, dear.”
Mae had been waiting forever to show Rita this one magic trick.21 Sometimes it gave her a migraine, other times it made her eyes water but it wasn’t water it was blood and she couldn’t think too hard about those times without feeling like she was going to faint. Regardless of what it took to get it right, this one good trick would blow her aunt away, of that she was certain. She drew three cards from the deck and placed them facedown on the tabletop. She gathered all of her focus, refused to allow the lurching dread of her brother and Bevan poring over sketchbooks in a room above them to intrude. She shooed it away, past the periphery of her mind’s eye, same as her mother’s roars, her father’s Olympian name-calling. Like a single beam of light, she pulled her strength toward the three cards. Three cards, facedown. She wouldn’t even need to touch them, she could feel them giving way to her already.
The Tower. The Two of Cups. The Fool.
“You three again,” she whispered. Mae had drawn these cards every day for a fortnight.
The images flicked in and out of her sight, not fixed necessarily, but in flashes they were crystal clear. She was certain. She said their names aloud.
Rita took a sharp intake of breath, and Mae smiled up at her, her ears ringing (another side effect, much milder than it used to be).
“Mae,” Rita spluttered, reaching across the table, her ringed fingers turning each card over.
“Not bad, right?” Mae gave Rita a wink. Rita’s eyes were wet, her freshest cigarette a long, untipped pillar of ash, drooping tablewards.
“I am sorry things have been so bad back home, but I am so proud of you for taking what this house gave you and nurturing it. It would have been so easy to forget.”
“I couldn’t forget.” Mae shuffled the usual three cards back into the deck. “Though . . . there’s less magic back home. I’m not sure there’s any at all.”
Rita rose from her place at the head of the table and embraced Mae tightly. “This house got into you. You have it, too.” She gave a deep, broken sigh and held her a second longer, before releasing her.
“You’ll have to describe your reading process to me.” Rita straightened herself out then, wiped her eyes, and shifted her demeanor up a few notches.
Mae began to clear the table. “Sure. And you’ll have to explain to me what exactly the story is with Bevan’s transformation into the Rose of Tralee!”
The two witches tidied up the kitchen, and Bobby rolled onto his back, showing his snowy belly to the sun. His ear twitched a little. Upstairs, there was laughter.
Chapter
Two
You unscrew the top of the bright blue pot of face cream. Rita swears by this brand, and of all the advice she’s given you over the years, “Moisturize. You’ll thank me later. Don’t forget your neck,” has sat with you. On the radio, Alan Maguire’s sharp, dismissive voice slices down another caller who became too aggressive on air. You love this show. The night shift, all yelling about whatever happens to be grating Alan on any given day, whatever’s splattered over headlines—long into the black hours. Your world is small, just how you like it—manageable—but the radio makes you feel a little less removed.
Your phone is off. You’ve been keeping it off more lately, especially since you and Gus parted ways. You prefer your days without it, the internet a hall of mirrors, the constantly open channel of conversation too overwhelming. After the breakup, Gus had posted a forlorn missive on Facebook—as if you’d been the one to jump ship. Not that that was the problem, more that every girl you half knew had rushed to your private messages with some prying variation of “You okay, hun?”
You hadn’t been okay, not for a while. Then, month by month, you were. You’d learned to keep away from the phone during your not-okay times: then, during the okay times too.
Alan Maguire is talking about ways parents could stop teenagers from sending naked photographs of themselves to one another. A taxi driver with a booming voice named Carl is insisting that all cameras should be taken off all mobile phones and that anyone caught sending nudes should be arrested.
“We had plenty good sex before cameras were even invented!”
Alan quips back, “Sorry, how old are you exactly, Carl? A hundred and fifty?”
You chuckle. Alan talks about this at least once a week, it really gets people riled up. You’d never call him yourself, though you were tempted just after the end of things with Gus to plea out anonymously—how do you mend a broken heart?
(You know how to mend a broken heart. You keep all your fairy tales to yourself in the future so nobody thinks you’re crazy, or breaks up with you, then unbreaks up with you so you end up breaking up with them. You stay busy. You don’t try to touch the wall.)
You separate your hair down the middle of your scalp, comb out the tangles from your bunches. Three thick strands and you start to braid the left side—keeps it out of your face while you sleep. These quiet routines help you switch off in the evening long enough to get a full eight hours so you can be up in time to cook breakfast for the twins and Rita.
You can’t remember exactly why you were so irritated by the twins the first time they stayed here. Likely it was just because they were fourteen. You couldn’t have anticipated Rossa becoming the cute one and Mae becoming so grumpy—a little pang of guilt ripples through you as you remember what an awful bitch you were that first summer. You were thralled to the thing in the wall—you know that now—but still. The piercing. The tooth—God, the tooth—you’ll have to apologize. Make it up to them somehow. They know it wasn’t you, don’t they? They must know. Bobby talks to them. He must have told them it wasn’t all your fault.
You feel a little sick then at the recollection of how hungry the thing in the wall was for them. How desperate. How you caved so easily to whatever he wanted, fed him their pain, fed him your own pain. How for weeks after your old room closed down you lay in bed, bereft, hollowed, your mind not your own, just full of the brutal memory of him. It must have been so strange for those kids, all of it.
You fasten a bobbin at the end of one long, thick plait. You’ll make them some extra-nice breakfast to make up for it. Food is a good, quiet gift.
Alan is saying something, something like “You can’t protect teenagers, Carl, they’ll do what they want, they’re not really children anymore,” when his voice runs a shade deeper, repeating, they’re not children anymore. The radio crackles and hisses, you can’t protect, y
ou can’t protect, you can’t protect glitches like a record skip over the airwaves. The light flickers above you. An electric scent is in the air and Alan says, i’ve missed you, but it’s not Alan anymore.
You know who it is. Your palms are scorching from the inside out, you can’t keep braiding. You can’t scream. You know this feeling, this hit of something you’ve long stopped craving, this delicious, this awful.
You look at your hands. The blue pupils of your tattoos, perfect little rings, turn triangle. The triangles blink up at you. Through the mirror, you see the wall over your shoulder. The ivy leaves of the wallpaper flutter as though in a breeze, even though the air is so still you aren’t even sure if you’re breathing anymore. This is impossible. He’s gone. He’s with her. He doesn’t want you anymore. This is a different room.
Behind the ivy, something is crawling. Moths. Dozens and dozens of moths in the paper, gray wings patterned like more eyes, too many eyes. It’s not Alan on the radio, oh, no, no—it’s him, laughing sweet and low. You spin to face the wall as the moths begin to cluster, two vast eyes, one long beak. Like bone and mirror, hunger and sharp. Like you’re trapped.
“You didn’t want me anymore,” you whisper. “I have nothing left to feed you, I don’t want what you have to offer—I don’t want to go there again. Audrey took you away and you’re supposed to be gone.” You choke, you can’t sound brave, your voice is high and airless against the brutal melody of his laughter.
audrey stopped showing up for work, bevan. she did or i did or maybe we both did, but either way that isn’t how things are going to work anymore. if you don’t feed me, they’ll feed me. the girl will feed me.
“No, she won’t!” you shout to the moths that are almost his face. “She’s—she’s a smart kid. She’s too smart for your games!”
what about the boy, bevan? you like him, don’t you?
“You don’t know what I like!” You clench your burning fists, how dare he—
i know what you like, bevan. i always have. you should show him the other rooms. don’t you remember how that felt?
Other Words for Smoke Page 12
