I held the paper at arm’s length. Back when I compelled Miles to create this drawing, part of me hoped it could lead to justice, that a sympathetic police officer might use it to track down my abductor. After my education on the mountain, I understood that it didn’t matter how compassionate any individual officer might be, or how unfair it was that perpetrators walked free while girls’ lives were ruined. The whole system, the entire structure of our society, was built around protecting men instead of girls.
This man, I told myself as I stared at the drawing, didn’t matter. He was one man, but he was also all of them, every last abductor who took liberties with a changeling. And I rejected them all. I wanted to tear this paper to pieces. I wanted to rip that man’s face and reduce him to a pile of scraps, to go on tearing and tearing until I tasted only smoke, ember, rage.
But I couldn’t do it. With shaking hands, I replaced the drawing in the box and sealed it up again. Even if no one believed me, this was my only bit of evidence. Holding on to it gave me hope that one day, things could be different. With enough time and analysis, maybe that chart in Julia’s office would reveal a different kind of future for girls. Maybe, in the wildest version of the world to come, it could even open a new future for me.
* * *
* * *
I dreamed about my mother all that night. In the morning, I went downstairs to find my father making breakfast: pancakes, scrambled eggs, toast sliced on the diagonal.
“Thanks.” I poured a stream of syrup on my pancakes. “This is nice.”
He nodded. His eggs were slathered in hot sauce, a taste I’d never taken to. The plate looked bloody.
“Miles left early this morning,” he said. “He mentioned that he needed you.”
“Yes. We’re working on something.”
I waited for him to ask a follow-up question, but he merely opened the newspaper in front of his face, cutting me off. I felt hurt that he wasn’t curious, that he didn’t seem to care.
Or maybe he knew us better than I thought—that Miles and I were siblings bound together so tightly that there was no use trying to break his way in.
I washed my dishes and set out for Julia’s. As I walked, I listened to the sounds of the neighborhood—distant passing cars, a neighbor raking leaves—and tried to see everything through my younger eyes. There were the stone lions with their cracked-open mouths. There was the shop where Miles and I bought candy and gum. And there, if I turned left instead of right, was the street where Marie lived. I paused at that juncture, thinking of Marie, of Cassandra, of all we once shared and how we’d grown distant from one another. How I’d never told them the truth.
After a moment of consideration, I turned left instead of right and walked to Marie’s house. She and her mother lived in a squat ranch house on the corner. Their yard was overgrown with weeds, the crooked stone pathway leading me drunkenly to the front door. The door knocker was shaped like Pegasus with a chipped wing. I rapped three times, hard.
Marie’s mother opened the door. She wore a long, heavy skirt, a turtleneck with sleeves flaring like bells over her wrists, and delicate gloves. Her hair was wrapped in a pretty blue-and-white scarf. Not a single marking was visible.
“Celeste?” She took a step back, but then seemed to remember herself and came forward to hug me. “What a surprise. Wait right here. I just put some tea on.”
When she reappeared, she brought a china teapot and two matching cups to the rickety table set up in the corner of the porch. I lowered myself into a chair, wondering if I wasn’t welcome in their house because I’d been abducted. That didn’t seem likely, but then I didn’t know what to think about modest women.
“Marie’s not here, I’m afraid,” her mother said. “She’s off for the weekend with her girlfriend. Are you home for a visit?”
I let the word girlfriend hang in the air. Did she mean it in the way I was thinking?
“I just got back from the mountain yesterday. An early graduation.”
Marie’s mother congratulated me. She poured the tea—white tea, for the antioxidants, she said—and told me that Marie was preparing to move in the fall. She’d earned a scholarship to a university in a larger city a full day away by train. And Cassandra, she added, was spending the summer in a special premed program before beginning her own university studies.
“Cassie surprised us all,” Marie’s mother said. “Ever since she switched to that private school, she’s been focused on nothing but schoolwork. She and Marie don’t see each other much.” She frowned, setting down her teacup. “But you were always special to Marie. She misses you. When she’s back, you’ll have to meet her girlfriend, too. Louise. They’ve been together for a few months now. I’ve never seen Marie so happy.”
“I’m glad.” I was trying not to stare at the gloves covering her hands, trying to reconcile how she could be modest but also accept that her daughter was dating another young woman.
“Graduating early from the Mountain School is quite the accomplishment,” she went on. “What are your plans?”
“My brother and I are working with an interpreter to help girls.” I’d meant to offer a white lie, but the truth came out instead. Still, I didn’t care, didn’t regret my indiscretion. I realized I wanted her to know. “Especially girls who have been, or who might be, abducted,” I added. “We want to change things in the future. For them and for as many girls and women as possible.”
A silence overcame our table. I didn’t dare make eye contact.
“I’ve heard the rumors,” Marie’s mother said quietly. “People have noticed that girls from out of town are seeking out our interpretation district. I just didn’t realize that you and your brother were mixed up in this.” She paused, studying me. “But I want you to know that you have my full support.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. I wasn’t even sure what her support might mean.
“When Marie gets back,” her mother continued, “I’m going to send her to you. Maybe she can help.” She paused, staring out at the empty street.
Was it really as simple, I wondered, as whispering the plan to other women and waiting to see how they responded? To give them the opportunity to be stronger and more determined than the rest of the world imagined.
“I wish I could help, too, but I don’t think I’m capable of it.” She held up her gloved hands and studied them, as if mystified by what she’d become. “But you are, and Marie, and Louise.”
“I hope so.” I picked up my cup of tea, which was rapidly losing heat. I could see it escaping in narrow threads of steam. Everything was so fragile, so susceptible to decline.
Marie’s mother freshened my tea to heat it up. I raised my eyes and studied her, every covered inch of her being. She looked at me in return, considering my uncovered hair and neck and clavicle. We sat like that for what felt like ages—long enough, perhaps, for the world to change around us.
* * *
* * *
As soon as I made it to Julia’s, Angel ushered me back to the office, where Miles and Julia were waiting with a girl who looked to be about thirteen years old. I was meant to read the markings by her left elbow to determine whether she was fated to be abducted.
At first I felt nothing. I closed my eyes and pressed a little harder, but I felt only static, echo, rainfall. When I applied more pressure, the girl wrenched her arm away.
Miles guided her arm back to me. “Try again. Softer this time.”
I held her arm again and focused all my attention on this girl’s markings, on her future, and still I came up blank.
“I don’t feel anything.” I looked up helplessly. “I can read the markings, but nothing is jumping out at me related to that prediction.”
“That’s because she’s clear,” Miles said. “Nice work, Celeste.”
I studied my hands. They were trembling slightly.
“Am I done?”
the girl asked.
“You’re free to go,” Miles told her.
After the girl left, Julia walked over to the chart on the wall. In the prediction column, she wrote negative in careful lettering. When I scanned the list, all the negatives ran together, girl after girl assured of her freedom.
I thought of the fantasy novel. I thought of possibility. I held up my hands again and saw that they were strong, capable. They were instruments of the future, providing a way to continue my brother’s work through my own body.
When I closed my eyes, I saw ice: the heavy, gradual advance of a glacier.
Addendum X: Abduction Prediction in Juvenile Girls
Category—Abduction
Location—Elbow, left outer
Diagram Variations: This pattern can assume various forms. In some cases, individual markings will cascade from left to right while decreasing in size [A, B]. Other variations are possible, however, including a spiral pattern [C]. Please note that these pattern examples are not exhaustive.
Interpretation: This marking pattern is unlike others and, as such, relies more heavily on the sense of touch. To obtain an accurate reading, run the pads of your fingers over the marking in a clockwise motion, softly at first, then firmer. Exhibit care. Close your eyes if need be. Wait to feel it—sun flare, vibration, a quivering sense deep in the stomach. Be patient, be steady. If no sensation arises, the subject may be clear. Read again to be sure. Read again, and think of her not as a subject but as a girl, as a body holding breath, as a future independent of prediction and prophecy.
27
I worked for hours that day. All the while, my mother drew closer on the train. She was due to arrive that night, but I wouldn’t let myself think about what would happen when that moment came. Instead I read girl after girl, and I came to believe my skills were improving, that I might have a future in this. I started to believe in something bigger, too—that the maps of fate were open to gentle revision if we only reimagined them. A road might be erased and redrawn a few degrees to the left, or an obstacle removed from the route. As girls, we were taught that our fates were set and any change was impossible, but that was a lie. I could feel the truth through my fingers as I worked.
The rest of the day passed in a haze. Eventually, Miles and I walked home together. We had dinner with our father, a meal he’d made from the garden. Then we waited. We’d planned on going to the station to meet the train, but it must have been ahead of schedule. Our mother showed up in a taxi, its headlights glaring through our front window as it pulled into our driveway.
I stood to the side of the window and watched my mother emerge from the car. Her heels made dull, jarring sounds on the paving stones as she walked toward the house. Miles and my father hurried to the front door to greet her, but I remained by the window.
“Home at last,” my mother said as she crossed the threshold. She dropped her bag and embraced Miles. I witnessed it, the final moment before I cracked the world apart for her.
When my mother let go of Miles, I finally moved toward her, drawn by a potent combination of instinct and memory and love. She engulfed me in a hug and we clung to each other for a long time. I could feel her heart beating, which reminded me of hugging Cassandra as a changeling—two female bodies connected to each other and to the larger, mysterious forces of life.
* * *
* * *
“I have to show you something,” I told my mother when we finally pulled away. “It’s serious.”
She and my father both faced me with weariness, patience, love. They waited as if they’d known this was coming. I steadied myself, then pulled up the hem of my shirt to reveal the prediction on my ribs. The marking pattern that foretold the death of their son.
I held my shirt and breath and waited. A long beat of silence followed. I closed my eyes and waited more. My mother was the one to step forward and trace my markings. She did so with caution, as if she thought they could spark into flame. My father did not touch my skin. He did not say a word.
After what felt like a long time, I lowered my shirt and wrapped my arms around my chest. I pressed hard, as if trying to contain the whole of the future inside my body.
* * *
* * *
Like my abduction, like other traumas of its kind, the conversation that followed left me with few concrete memories. One minute our parents thought our family was whole, and the next, I tore it down by revealing Miles’s fate. A family wasn’t a static, solid thing as I had once assumed. Instead it was moveable, breathable, breakable. It would expand to make room for the coming loss, and it would also collapse on itself under the weight of grief.
“We’re here now,” our mother kept saying. We sat on the couch, all four of us, crammed together thigh to thigh. “This is not the future,” she went on. “This is right now, this instant, and we’re together.”
She was right, but then time never stopped, and the future never ceased advancing. It was inescapable—and yet I continued to blame myself for the fate that awaited my brother and our entire family.
I apologized once and then again until my father asked me to stop.
“You had no control over this,” he told me. “What is marked on your body, what is fated, is nothing you could prevent. You have no reason to be ashamed.”
“But I separated Mom from Miles.” I felt wrung out, emptied. My throat was scratchy, my eyes swollen. “I sent her off to become a humanitarian so I could go to the Mountain School.”
My mother turned my way. Already she looked at me differently, like I was all she had left. “This is a shock,” she admitted. “I wish I’d had the full story back then. But I don’t regret becoming a humanitarian. My job didn’t just benefit you, Celeste. I helped girls. I had a purpose.”
“Exactly,” Miles added. “Which is why we’re working with Julia—we want to help girls. We want to change the future. That is our purpose.”
Purpose wouldn’t keep my brother with us. But as my mother had said, we were all together in that moment. Four bodies pressed on a couch. Hearts beating, lungs expanding. One day, Miles would be gone, my family contracted until I found my husband—because I’d marry eventually, just as my markings predicted.
In that moment, however, we were still a family. Mother and father, brother and sister. As it had always been. As it would never be again.
* * *
* * *
The next day, Miles and I took a brief break from our work to stay at home. Our father spent hours cooking for us. He made soups and casseroles and breads and a blueberry pie. He said, in fact, that cooking was the only way he could take his mind off the news about Miles—news he said he couldn’t ever accept.
“You will,” Miles told him. “It seems unbelievable now, but one day, the fact of my absence will be just that: a fact. One day you won’t believe that you never knew it.”
That was my older brother, so calmly philosophical about his own death, while I’d had nightmares all the previous night. I dreamed of Miles hit by a car, plugged into machines in a hospital, falling down a great crack that opened in the earth at his feet. My anxiety would only grow, I knew, as our shared birthday drew closer in the coming months. Miles was fated to lose his life sometime in his twentieth year—it could be only days after he turned twenty, or it could be months. We had no way of knowing.
My mother unpacked and delivered her suitcases to the basement. She didn’t discuss the assignment she’d left behind when she resigned, other than to assure me that another humanitarian had taken her place, and that she hadn’t abandoned the girls and women she’d been helping. When I found myself alone in the living room with her purse that first day, I peeked into it. I wasn’t sure what I expected to find. A diary, perhaps, or notes from the girls she’d helped. The purse held nothing but her wallet and a new notepad, just waiting to be filled.
For most of the day, my family stu
ck close together. We ate meals in the kitchen and sat together in the living room. We talked, and we sat in long stretches of silence. Finally, by late afternoon, my mother went upstairs to take a nap. My father headed to the kitchen to scour the dirty pans. And Miles—Miles retreated to his room, and came out again with red eyes, and smiled at me loopily. I wanted to tell him that bloodflower took part of him away from us, made him feel already departed. I wanted to tell him I feared for not just his life but also the loss of our life together, as a family. But my brother was not clearheaded enough to listen.
I went to my own room. On the wall above my bed was the framed impression card my friends had given me for my sixteenth birthday. A black-and-red lick of fire. I stared at it until the image blurred and I started to imagine it into something else. Not a flame, but movement, like wind. Like coming change.
At my desk, I pulled out a notebook and a pen. I remembered what it was like to read Victoria’s markings, that trembling, treacherous sensation when I came up against her abduction prediction. If I could only express what it felt like, what mix of instinct and magic led to that interpretation.
I sat at my desk and wrote for hours. I crossed out and recast and doubled back. I consulted the back of Mapping the Future, where the addenda were published. I recalled the revision requests Miles had sent the Office of the Future, how he’d tried but failed to describe the abduction marking. I also made lists of every class I’d ever taken on the mountain, every lesson that had been most important to me. I considered what other kinds of classes could be helpful—classes for boys, for instance, to help them understand how to interact with girls and treat them with respect. A class to prepare girls who were fated for abduction, and another to support those who returned. Unlike the Mountain School, these offerings would be available to girls of all economic classes.
Body of Stars Page 26
