And God, that time he showed up to the diner to yell at her. She remembers that.
I know you’re feeding that goddamn stray when I’m not home, Rosemary.
He’d convinced her that her sisters didn’t get her. Not like he did. They don’t have your best interests in mind. They hate me for no reason. But we don’t need them, he’d said.
So why can she still feel the happy memories, pooling inside her like warmth? How good it felt on the good days. Him teaching her to throw a spiral in the front yard, patient and laughing. Opening up about how horrible his dad was.
That explained a lot, you know? He didn’t have a role model for how to treat a woman.
She slams the door behind her, though she can already hear her sisters’ feet on the hardwood floors. The first sob comes like a hiccup. The second, a cracking open. Her knees bend, easing her to the floor beside the bed. For goodness’ sake, Rosie, she thinks, furious at herself. You’ll be no good convincing them that you’re fine if you cannot act fine.
“Ro.” Nova pounds a fist on the door. “Open it.”
The doors in the house don’t lock—never had. But the girls have a rule between them, for doors and for emotional boundaries: never barge in unless it’s an emergency.
“I’m fine,” Rosie calls. Honestly, can’t they ever understand when she just needs some quiet?
“Rosie,” Willa says, her voice breaking. What had she yelled outside, about the day she came to the house? God, Rosie had dragged her into such a mess. “Ro, come on. Please?”
“Fine.”
They stare. Rosie is clutching her midsection like everything inside of her is going to spill onto the floor.
“He poisoned everything,” she whispers. “He ruined me.”
“You are the furthest thing from ruined,” Novy says.
Willa frowns. “But we agree that he’s a snake.”
They help her onto the bed and squeeze in beside her.
“Of course I remember that day you came to the house,” Rosie tells Willa. “I should have apologized for it a long time ago.”
“What day?” Nova asks.
When Rosie nods, Willa takes a deep breath in, about to go underwater.
Willa
Four months after Rosie moved out, Willa took a bus to the next town over, then walked two more miles in the icy Wyoming winter.
She hadn’t believed Novy that Wyatt was bad news. She had chalked it up to Novy’s protectiveness of Rosie, to her cynical nature. Willa thought Momma was exaggerating when she muttered, There is a darkness in that boy.
But now Rosie wasn’t returning her texts or calls anymore. Momma assured them that Rosie was okay, though Willa had no idea how she knew. At first, Willa worried. Then, she got angry. At Wyatt for whatever part he played in this, and at Rosie. How could it be so easy for her to walk away?
Willa’s nose was pink and runny by the time she knocked on the door of the one-story brick house. She didn’t even feel the chill. She’d beat down hell’s front doors to get to her sister, even if Rosie didn’t want her there.
She glanced around, looking for clues. In the soil that should have been a garden, a black cat blinked at her. The door pounding hadn’t scared him off, apparently. He sat still as a decorative gnome.
“Rosemary! It’s me!”
Rosie pulled the door open, her arms hidden by an oversize sweater. “Willa! What are you...? Are you okay?”
Willa kept her face hard, looking at Rosie for...evidence. Of what, she didn’t know. Temporary insanity. Illness. Something. “Well, great. You are alive. Good to know.”
“Of course I am! I’m fine!” Rosie said, almost convincingly. Something was deeply off. Willa’s blood sang with warning.
“Well, that’s just great, Ro!” Cold wind hit Willa’s watery eyes, making them ache. “But I’m not. Everything is falling apart, and you’re nowhere.”
Rosemary stood there in the doorway of that house, looking shocked. Who had she become, holed up in this place?
“I’m so sorry, Will. Wyatt’s phone broke, so he’s been using mine. He must not have seen your messages.”
Willa’s cheeks burned with what he might have seen in those messages. Heard in her voice mails, increasingly upset. “But why wouldn’t you call me? I haven’t seen you in months.”
“I’m sorry,” Rosie said, sounding small. So very small. “I didn’t know you were—I didn’t know.”
“Okay, well. Now you do. And I know you’re not dead. So, great.” Willa turned on one heel, marching off the porch.
“Wait!” Rosie stood there, a tremor running through her bony shoulders. “Please don’t go. It’s just so much harder than I thought, okay?”
This took Willa back a bit. It seemed like an admission. “What is? Being a grown-up?”
Rosie held her hands up, open-palmed, as if cupping the whole world—the air and the bare trees and the pearl clouds above. “Everything. Momma and Daddy made it look so easy.”
“So, leave, Rosie,” Willa pleaded. “Come home.”
“Oh, Will.” She ran a hand over Willa’s hair. “I love him. But I love you too, okay? For always. Will you please just come in?”
“Am I allowed?” Willa asked. When she’d asked to visit before, Rosie had told her Wyatt didn’t want company until the place was looking nice. Company, Willa thought. Is that what sisters are?
Rosie shrugged feebly.
They wound up at the little kitchen table with two cups of tea. Rosie didn’t offer up a house tour, and Willa didn’t ask. The kitchen and living room were outdated and beige but impeccably neat, filled with secondhand furniture Rosie had spruced up. But there wasn’t enough light. And no plants. It was inconceivable to Willa that Rosie could even breathe without flat green leaves, spiky ferns, without bunches of herbs in the kitchen window.
“Where are your plants?” Willa twisted around, wondering if perhaps the light was better at the back of the house.
“Wyatt has allergies,” Rosie said.
To...all plants and herbs and flowers? Willa frowned. But wasn’t Rosemary equally allergic to the taupe, lifeless house?
“Is that your cat out front?” Willa asked.
“Not mine, exactly,” Rosie said, wrapping her hands around her teacup. “So, tell me what’s going on. Everything is falling apart—that’s what you said.”
Willa covered her face with one hand. Maybe, just maybe, she could offer up this earnest, painful part of herself. And maybe Rosie, in turn, would do the same—tell the truth of what was going on in this house. “Well, I’m in love with my best friend, and I’m not sure why it feels like dying.”
“Ha!” Rosie said, a burst of total recognition. “Oh, Will.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know you are. So...Ingrid?”
Willa nodded. “I don’t know when it happened. But now, it’s like...when she texts me, it feels like a lightbulb flips on inside of me. Like something physical gets bright and buzzy. Sometimes, if we’re talking late, I can’t sleep because I feel like I could float above my bed.”
“Yeah,” Rosie said, pained.
“But she’s my best friend, and I feel like it isn’t right to think about her in that way.”
“Well,” she said. “Can you help it?”
No. And it hadn’t always been like this. She and Ingrid had been inseparable since seventh grade, when their schools merged and so did all their ideas and hobbies and inside jokes. Ingrid was guileless, quick to announce how she felt. The summer she went to sleepaway camp, Willa hugged her and accidentally felt her friend’s sadness at leaving, her nervousness about fitting in, her fear that Willa would find another best friend while she was gone. But Ingrid had already told her all those things. What a pair: a girl who could feel hidden emotions and a girl who never bothered to hide them.
But something had shifted in that easy comfort. Earlier this year, Willa found herself looking away shyly when Ingrid complimented her. Willa started wearing long sleeves all the time, for the moments when Ingrid linked arms with her. She wanted to protect her friend’s privacy. She wanted to protect her own pride, too.
“Do you think she feels the same way?”
“Sometimes I really do,” Willa admitted. “I think...if I wasn’t getting some undercurrent of feelings from her, I wouldn’t still feel this way?”
“Mmm.” Rosie nodded.
“But other times, I’m sure that I must be reading into it. She’s never talked about girls before.”
“Yeah, but have you?”
It was a fair point. “She did date a guy last year. And I think she really did like him.”
“Well, maybe she’s like Novy.”
Novy’s biggest relationship in high school had been with a girl, but in college, with a boy. She was never one to have faraway crushes with longing looks. She fell as she got to know someone, when they made her laugh and proved they could show up. It wasn’t like that for Willa; at least—it hadn’t been so far. Only girls had ever given her that happy, woozy feeling.
“Did you ask Novy for advice?”
Willa snorted. “Yeah. She said, I dunno, Will, ask if she wants to make out. Very helpful.”
Rosie smiled sadly into her hand. “I miss her.”
“Me, too. Both of you.”
“I’m right here,” Rosie said.
Are you? Willa wondered.
Rosie studied Willa’s face. “I know you wouldn’t, but is it tempting to touch her? To see how she feels about you with no risk?”
In some ways, of course. Willa feared that confessing her feelings would make Ingrid uncomfortable. And, at the mere touch of a hand, Willa could know how Ingrid felt without risking their friendship. But of course there was a risk. Because Ingrid wouldn’t be able to hide her disgust or disinterest, if that’s what she felt. She could break Willa’s heart without ever knowing. “I’d never violate her privacy like that.”
Wyatt came in just then, Rosie startling a little at the sound of the door.
“Hey, babe!” Rosie called. “Guess who’s here.”
Wyatt turned the corner with a tight smile. “Willa! This is a surprise. You came all the way from Grander?”
“Sure did.” Willa wanted it to sound like it wasn’t hard. Like she could do it any old time she wanted, when he wasn’t expecting her. “Easy trip.”
“Well, nice to see ya. Sorry the place is such a mess. I was hoping we’d have it looking nice for company.”
Willa glanced at Rosie, whose smile was stretched so taut. Like it would snap.
“I think it looks great. And I was just going,” Willa said. Her smile, however, was genuine. Because she was going to get the last thing she came for.
She hugged Rosemary and walked toward the door.
“Take good care of her,” she told Wyatt. And she shook his hand, though she basically had to lift it from his side. It was such a weird thing to do, but Willa didn’t care. Means to an end.
A dust storm of feelings rushed in: his scalding resentment toward Rosie—God, it was like he hated her. His suspicion about why Willa was here. And this...this self-righteousness, as if he had been wronged. A pride that all his feelings were justified.
Willa dropped his hand and spun to Rosie, eyes full of tears. “Ro.”
“I’ll call you soon,” Rosie said, chipper, but that was for Wyatt’s benefit. Her eyes bore into Willa’s with absolute fury. Willa had broken Rosie’s trust in one touch.
Nova
“That’s why you left,” Nova says. She’d wondered, and been too scared to ask, what finally made Rosie walk away. She was afraid the answer would compel her to lace a pan of spicy enchiladas with arsenic and leave them at Wyatt’s front door. “Because Will knew how bad he was?”
“I stayed for fifty-four more days,” Rosie says quietly.
After a long while, Novy sits up from the bed. “I’ll put the kettle on.”
Rosie is staring into nothing, the same milky-eyed gaze she came home with after that horrible half year in that horrible house. “Tea won’t make it not true.”
Of course it won’t, Novy wants to snap. Tea doesn’t fix anything. It’s just comfort you can hold.
Three minutes. That’s how long it takes the copper kettle to boil. And it’s the time Nova needs to compose herself, to cool down. Sometimes she stares at the kettle and imagines that it’s her anger—not the stovetop burner—that creates the steam. She transfers the heat, releases it.
She wishes that Rosie could sip the tea and feel anger blooming inside her chest, as red and bright as hibiscus.
Novy waits for the tea to steep, remembering an argument she had with Rosie like watching ghosts. The signs were right here, just before Rosie moved in with him.
He has a temper. Novy had kept her tone even, as if stating it casually.
Rosie pushed off the counter. He hasn’t had an easy life. You don’t know anything about him. There’s a lot going on.
Okay, Novy said. But none of that is your fault.
Rosie told her later, after everything, that she did know that his temper wasn’t her fault. But sometimes, she didn’t help matters, she added. Sometimes, she just didn’t know how to be a good girlfriend to him. She misread his moods. She clicked through options like tumblers on a lock—listening as he spoke, kissing him meaningfully, staying in another room to give him space. But a combination that worked once didn’t always work the second time.
Nova felt relieved, in that moment, that she had cut her hair off. What that boy did to her sister made her want to tear it all out.
The kettle whistles, and Nova reaches for it.
She still isn’t entirely sure why she shaved her head. Those idiot kitchen bros, that’s what she thought at first. They were either hitting on her or talking down to her like a little sister. Maybe she thought, on some level, shaving her head would break the connection: I am not your sister or your girlfriend or your mommy.
Or maybe...maybe it was because college spent with a boyfriend had made so many people assume. They were wrong, and she wanted them to second-guess.
In her peripheral vision, Willa flies past like a spirit, a blur of color on her way to the study. She emerges with a stack of Momma’s notebooks. Some are ancient, with cracked binding—passed down through generations. Others are newer and jammed with leaves of paper, handwritten by great-aunts. All of their relations, documenting how these powers seem to tick.
Willa drops the notebooks to the counter with an unceremonious thud. Her eyes are full of furious tears. “You should have seen him, Novy. Looking at her with that cocky smile. How dare he? And what if he stays here? What if he moves back?”
She flips through the pages, not gently. “We have to know someone. There has to be a gift that can hurt him. Or that can make Rosie forget. Something.”
Nova stirs the tea, giving Willa a moment. Finally, she says, quiet, “It doesn’t work like that, Will. There aren’t shortcuts for this. You know that.”
“Then I want to curse him. Isn’t there, like, voodoo or something?”
“That is not ours.” Nova’s jaw clenches. “You know that, too.”
But Nova holds out one hand for her sister to take. Willa grips it, eyes closed, and Nova knows she can feel the fury and despair. Nova, in turn, makes a note to brew more tea—chamomile for Willa, with honey.
Willa pulls her glasses off, drops them on the counter. She rubs her eyes hard enough to smear her mascara. “What then, Novy? What?”
“I don’t know.” She wraps one arm around her sister. “I just don’t know yet.”
Later that night, Novy stares up at her ceiling. When her phone rings at 1:17, she knows whose voice s
he will hear.
“Hey,” she says, settling back into her pillows.
“Hey, kid.” Sometimes she hates it, the way he calls her that. He’s only a few years older. But other times, when she’s feeling cramped inside being the eldest sister, it’s nice to think that someone sees her as the younger, less burdened person.
“How’s the restaurant?” she asks.
“Same. New roasted chicken special, good stuff. But Holmes, that dumb asshole, nearly cut his thumb off tonight. You gotta come home,” he says, as he has every other night. And then he qualifies it with some restaurant talk, to make it clear he wants her home for work. “This temp can’t slice radishes for shit. Thick as a coin. I’m like, ‘C’mon, man. They should be so thin I can see through them.’”
“That sucks.”
“No kiddin’. But you’re back tomorrow, right?”
“I was supposed to be. But my sister, she um—”
“Which one?”
“Rosie. She had this bad boyfriend, a year or so back...”
“I remember,” Hunter says. Does he? Nova remembers telling him. At the bar after work, just the two of them. She was the sickest type of homesick that week. Teetering on the bar stool, tipsy and blubbering about her sisters like a fool.
“Gherin?”
“Yeah, I’m here.” She sighs, rolling over to her other side. “He’s back in town. She saw him.”
“Shit.” Nova knows Hunter DeLuca well enough to know he’s scrubbing a hand over his short hair. “Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, lemme know if you stay. I’ll vouch for you to Chef.”
Oh, really. He hates excuses, hates to look bad at work. All kitchen, all the time. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I’ll let you know.” She’d never abandon Rosie—never, ever. But sometimes? Well, sometimes Nova thinks Rosie needs her to step away.
“You’ll come over here? When you get home? I’ve been working on this breakfast empanada like you showed me, and—”
Toil & Trouble Page 29
