Iron Inheritance

by G. R. Fillinger

  I wiped my knuckles on my jeans again even though they were thoroughly clean by now. I’d rubbed every crack clean with a tissue and a water bottle as we drove, but they still felt dirty.

  Nate cut off the rumble of the engine, and my ears took a while to adjust to the lack of wind pounding into them. I exhaled slowly. Grandpa would be in the garden this time of day. I should just tell him now, whether he’d heard about it or not. The consequences didn’t even matter anymore. I had three months before I left to college, and I wasn’t going to leave things broken between us again. Not again.

  I rubbed my thumb over the broken blue stone of my half-wing necklace. I knew myself well enough to recognize that guilt weighed more heavily on me than most people. I had enough to deal with without adding anything more with Grandpa.

  “How about you two head inside or something while I talk to him,” I said from the back seat.

  Ria misinterpreted my intentions and widened her eyes in a psychic trance. “You have to tell him the truth. He’ll know. It’s like a Mom-mind-reading thing, except he’s older, wiser, and wrinklier.” Her face contorted. “He’s that tiny green guy in those movies with the laser thingies.”

  “Yoda?” I raised an eyebrow and couldn’t help a smile from creeping across my lips. “You think he’s Yoda?”

  She nodded, eyes still wide.

  I squirmed when she didn’t look away. “Stop it. You know that weirds me out.” I creaked open the side door. “I’m going to tell him exactly what happened. I deserve some kind of lashing for what I just did.” I swallowed, but a lump still stuck in my throat.

  Ria dabbed her eyes, careful not to smear her makeup, as she pretended to cry with joy. “My baby’s finally growing up.”

  I rolled my eyes and started for the garden. Nate got out too, his red hair bobbing up and down as he walked toward the workshop near the back of the property, his job of getting me home safely achieved. I’d known him for four years, and he’d always been that way—more like a loyal bodyguard than anything else…except for Ria. To her, Nate was a lot more than “anything else.”

  I walked carefully around the perimeter of our brown and tan single-story house, the paint peeling just enough so people thought someone either very trendy or very old lived there. A twenty foot ring of “treasures,” as Grandpa called them, were embedded in dry patches of grass and bare red soil around the house so people knew someone crazy lived there. Some of the treasures were old trinkets he’d collected from his travels in the military. Most of them were pretty nice too—old glass bottles from the early 1900s, rusted medallions, and coins with coats of arms and people I couldn’t even find in Google. But after the trinket stash was depleted, he’d started planting shiny rocks and things he found on the side of the road.

  Grandpa called it decorating.

  I called it hick-ifying.

  That had been in seventh grade before Ria told me about hickies.

  The total effect of whatever it was called was a minefield of objects to avoid with a game of skips, jumps, and treading lines so straight and narrow they could have been tightropes. The game started for fun when we were six. Now we kept it so we didn’t trip.

  I turned a corner and found Grandpa’s white shirt and beige Panama hat hunched over the garden—green tomatoes hanging from vines.

  I pushed down my nerves and forced a smile. “Those don’t look ready to pick.”

  “The vine will yield its fruit, and the heavens will give their dew.” His voice was deep and gravely, sinking into the soft brown earth he’d cultivated to perfection.

  “The dew might be a problem, seeing as we’re still living in the desert.”

  He turned and grinned, wrinkles around his eyes cracking into existence. The brim of his hat was smudged with dirt, and his gray mustache looked like a thick caterpillar on his upper lip. “God always finds a way.” He pushed up his hat as his old eyes were finally able to focus on me. “In all these years, I thought I’d taught you to block punches as well as throw them.” He looked sympathetically at my busted lip.

  A knot released in my chest. He already knew. I shook my head and exhaled through my nose. “You taught me a lot of contradictory things. Like learn every possible fighting style but never use them.”

  “I never said never.” He scowled and stood with a slight groan. “Only that you should exercise control.” He walked around the other side of the garden and inspected more of his parched crop.

  I waited for him to say something more. Everything was a test with him—could I exercise enough self-control not to say anything to defend myself? Could I be patient?

  I liked it better when these games ended in him giving me a cookie.

  He adjusted his hat again and looked up at the sky with a sigh. “Do you remember what set you off? What triggered it?”

  My moment of indecision resurfaced with the burden of guilt. “He hit her,” I said, pushing the feeling back down into the pit of my stomach. “I tried to stop him, to get her to come with me, but then—” I remembered his finger flicking my shirt. “Until that point I was fine—in control. Then he broke her nose and I blacked out.” I flinched, wishing I had left out that detail like I had with Ria and Nate. Blacking out only made this whole thing worse—like something was wrong with me. “When I came to, he was down.”

  I turned away as Grandpa looked at me intently with bright blue eyes, waiting for me to say something more.

  “Did you take any hits to the head? If you blacked out, maybe we should take you to the hospital. Get an MRI.”

  I looked up skeptically. “You want me to go to a hospital? This coming from the same man who refused to get me immunized as a kid? The same man who set my bone and made a cast out of newspaper and cardboard when I broke my arm doing back flips?” Each memory came flooding back with a soft smile.

  He shrugged. “Last time I went, they did all right.”

  My shoulders dropped.

  He softened the intense gaze of his blue eyes. “Evey, you have to stop blaming yourself for that.” He stepped forward and put his dirt-caked hand over mine. “This old ticker was bound to have a hiccup sooner or later. Just like that head of yours.” He wrapped his knuckles on my head softly.

  “I don’t, I just—” I pulled back, wanting to forget this ever happened. “What’s my punishment?”

  He crunched his brow until the wrinkles strained. “You promised me no partying, no more immature teenage antics, if my memory serves me correct.”

  His memory always served him correctly; it was like having a computer at my side at all times, recording every mistake and thinking up corresponding consequences. When we were younger, Ria had convinced me to put pudding in another girl’s hair at the park. Each day for the next month I’d learned how to make every dessert imaginable and had to bring it to her family’s doorstep.

  He brushed a stray hair out of my eye and smiled. “How ’bout we skip the usual formality tonight and just forget this?” He turned and started back toward the porch, taking his hat off and wiping his short gray hair with a handkerchief.

  I raised my eyebrows into bewildered confusion. “What do you mean forget about it?” The concept was as foreign as Ria turning down dessert or Nate cracking a joke unrelated to Indiana Jones.

  Grandpa stepped up onto the porch without answering and found Ria practicing her knife throwing—a common past-time at my house. She released just as he walked up.

  A millisecond later, there was a sharp pop as the glass bulb overhead shattered, and the knife thudded down, point-first, by Grandpa’s toes.

  Ria flashed a sheepish grin. “Sorry, Grampy.”

  “Maria?” he said testily, his deep voice like a low wave rolling over the shore.

  “Yes, sir.” Ria looked down, defeated.

  Grandpa stepped around to her side and handed her the knife. “How many times will I have to remind you?”

  “Just one more?” She peeked out of the corner of her eye, pursing her lips into inquisitive
cuteness.

  He smiled and turned her shoulders toward the round, wood target at the end of the porch. It’d been there since I was a kid, and there were thousands of dents and sliver-sized holes to prove it. “Release at shoulder level.” He guided her arm back into a throwing position. “Ready?”

  She nodded, eyes set with determination.

  Her wrist and forearm flung forward, and the knife sailed toward the target, ending up sharp-end-first in the radio three feet to the left.

  “I did it!” Ria screamed and smiled as she ran to retrieve the knife.

  Grandpa sighed and shook his head. “That girl has absolutely no coordination.”

  I laughed, forgetting my day for a brief moment that washed over my entire body like cool water.

  “Your turn, Evey.” Ria returned and thrust the knife into my hand.

  I shook my head. Having the knife in my hand felt wrong, like I’d lose control again—black out, wake up, and see something more horrific than I could bear.

  Maintain control. Never let your emotions get the best of you. That’s when accidents happen. Grandpa’s voice rang in my ears even when he wasn’t speaking.

  I turned to him. “Why are you teaching us all this? We could kill somebody.” I set the knife down on the railing.

  The jubilee of Ria’s progress evaporated. Grandpa narrowed his eyes like the answer to my question should have been apparent my whole life. “So you can defend people. Protect them, and yourselves, from those who mean you harm.”

  The words sunk in without having an effect. I took a deep breath and tried to remind myself that it was only a few more months. The past two years felt like I’d been living someone else’s life, like none of this made sense anymore—how could it? It wasn’t just the combat training—his term, not mine—it was the trinkets around the yard, the knives and swords around the house, the nuclear drills that sent us to the bunker under the workshop. This wasn’t normal, and a part of me had finally woken up to that fact. It wasn’t just something to laugh at and call crazy. It was dangerous in the wrong hands. My hands.

  Grandpa spoke before I looked up again. “I think some French toast is in order.” He clapped his hands together, a bit of youthful energy enlivening his old limbs. “I’ll tell you girls when it’s ready.”

  I narrowed my eyes at his back even as Ria smiled and followed him in. Now I knew something was off. French toast was the meal of comfort, of sweet maple syrup and powdered sugar, of special occasions in this family, odd as that may sound.

  What was so special about now?

  CHAPTER THREE

  “I could definitely go for some French toast, Mr. B.” Ria went into the cupboard and pulled out a Pop Tart as the squeaky screen door slammed shut behind me.

  “Remind me when your mother is coming home again, Ria,” Grandpa said serenely.

  She shrugged and took another bite. “Said she wouldn’t be back until after graduation.”

  “Ah.” Grandpa nodded. “Then you’re still staying here, and your bed’s not made.”

  Ria swallowed and gave him her best bear hug, her bronze arms wrapping around his belly. “I love you too, Grampy. See what I did there? It’s like the male form of gramy.”

  He kissed the top of her caramel head and waved us both out of the kitchen. I followed Ria a few steps and looked back before I went down the hall. Grandpa stood at the sink, massaging the back of his neck and looking out the window intently.

  Something’s definitely off right now.

  “Race!” Ria yelled into my ear and shot toward my bedroom.

  I lunged forward and grabbed her shoulders.

  She pulled me like a sled and slammed her hand into the doorframe. “Chicken winner buy me a dinner.”

  “How long are you going to keep butchering that?” I rolled my eyes and followed her into my room, which might as well have been hers, too. She’d had her own room in our house since we were in junior high but only used it long enough to keep it in a state of perpetual chaos.

  That was Grandpa’s term, anyway.

  “What do you want to do tomorrow?” She plopped down on my bed, staring up at the paste-and-stick stars on my ceiling.

  “I don’t know.” I lay down next to her, tracing three intersecting constellations as I tried to figure out why Grandpa was acting so odd. I’d mapped out the stars to mirror the ones over our house when I was seven. When I turned off the lights, they still glowed a faint green. Twinkle lights crisscrossed the rest of the room from my bed to my desk, and back. A soft golden glow warmed all the mismatched movie posters on the walls, the NYU flag, and the rainbow of paperback spines Jenga’d into my disorganized-to-anyone-but-me bookshelf.

  Ria rolled off the bed and rifled through her pink shopping bag from earlier in the day. She pulled out three dresses, modeling each one in front of her in the closet mirror. She flicked her hair playfully with a practiced, seductive nonchalance—butt and ample chest sticking out far beyond the laws of gravity. Her tiny denim skirt and mint green halter might have helped the illusion.

  I looked in the mirror at myself. Dark brown eyes that matched my hair stared back at me. I ran my hand over my stomach and down my hips, more angles than curves.

  My knuckles came into view, and I pulled my hand back suddenly. “I’m going to take a shower.” I grabbed another pair of jeans and a V-neck shirt.

  The warm water helped me relax—a brief reprieve from the questions and guilt coiling inside of me. I still couldn’t understand how I blacked out, and I wondered if something was really wrong with me.

  I took a deep breath before I came back in the room, my hair wrapped up in a towel.

  Ria was still standing in front of the mirror with a slinky green dress pressed up against her. “The queen of ASB wants us to do a conga line.”

  “So?”

  “So one dress is for under the grad robe, another’s for the after party, and this one with the slit up to my thigh is for the conga line. I want to be able to kick when everyone yells, ‘Hey!’ You know.” She put her arms on my shoulders and marched me around the room as she sang, “I’m gonna grad-u-ate, Hey! It’s gonna be so great, Hey!”

  I laughed, unable to hold it in. Ria was involved in nearly every club and sport on campus—a social hummingbird whose mouth beat faster than her wings. Even when we were little, this kind of infectious excitement was enough to lift me out of a bad mood. I looked sideways at her and grabbed the bag. It was nice having a friend who knew exactly what I needed even when I didn’t say it.

  I pulled out the only cloth still in the bag—a knee-length, strapless, red dress. I held it over my thin frame and took my hair out of the towel as I looked in the mirror. It was already starting to form funky waves as it dried.

  “Damn, girl. You look good. You must have a best friend with good taste.” Ria bumped her hip into mine.

  I shook my head and ran my hand over the fabric, the price tag getting in the way. I looked down at it and scoffed. “I still can’t believe you spent this much on a dress. You know I’m only going to wear it once.”

  Ria’s brow furrowed. “Don’t test me, Evey. You know I hate tests. Besides, my mom bought today, remember? She’d want to, trust me. We talked a couple months ago, and I distinctly remember her saying to go crazy with graduation.”

  “Probably more like ‘don’t go crazy.’”

  “Minutia. Nothing but minutia.”

  I snickered. “That Word of the Day app seems to be going well.”

  “Eh. It’s only been two days.” She glanced at the NYU flag on my wall. “Graduation’s a big deal, isn’t it?” she said heavily.

  “Yeah, graduation, then college, then a job, then we die. Life complete.”

  “How nice.” Ria sighed but rebounded with a forced smile. “This summer’ll be great though. Just me and you and Nate. No interruptions.”

  A pang of regret flashed across my chest. “Except NYU starts in August.”

  Ria’s lungs stopped inhaling mid-bre
ath.

  Smooth move, Eve. Real smooth.

  “End of August?” She smiled again, ever hopeful.

  I nodded and forced a smile similar to hers. “Plenty of time for us to hang out. Besides, I bet your mom would let you fly out for the breaks. Maybe even consider a community college around there…?”

  I’d tried to let things like that slip out every few weeks for months. Ready as I was to get out of here, I wasn’t ready to leave her. I knew her mom’s preference was for Ria to come work with her, but every time I tried to bring it up, Ria changed the subject.

  “Maybe.” Ria fiddled with the price tag on my dress. “I’m surprised Grampy is even letting you fly at all, the way he talks about planes.”

  I nodded, noting the change in subjects and yet another oddity with Grandpa. “He’s slipping in his old age, isn’t he? First school, then malls, now planes?”

  “Yeah, that’ll be the day.” Ria scoffed and plopped down on my bed again, what was truly bothering her written on her face. “Do you really think Nate’ll go into the Marines?”

  I lay down next to her.

  “No.” I shook my hair out of my eyes. For both our sakes, I hoped not. He might be an overprotective guard dog, but he was ours. “I know it’s his goal; that’s why he hangs out with Grandpa and spends hours in that shed pouring over old war journals. But honestly, I’m never really convinced when he talks about it—not passionate, you know?”

  “Yeah, but he’s dedicated.” Ria picked at a loose string in the quilt on my bed. “Once he says he’s going to do something, he won’t back down.”

  “Bit like someone else I know.” I nudged her and bit my lip at the prospect of losing him, too. He was the first boy Ria had introduced me to in her high school—now my high school. He was the first boy I’d called up on the phone just to say, “Hey.” He was the first boy I’d kissed on a dare from one of Ria’s friends—not Ria’s favorite moment. He was—