by Dia Reeves
Standing in the open doorway was a freakishly tall man-shaped creature that was so much taller than the ceiling, it had to curl downward like a hooded cobra. Red, lobsterlike armor covered it, except for its maggoty white arms and lower legs.
Lobsterman observed Asher lying stunned on the floor and fell on him, trying to bite Asher with its teeth like razor blades—sharp, white, and unbroken. Asher managed to hold it off, but he wouldn’t be able to for long.
I left the chair and crept to the cart, assessing the situation and pleased by how calm I was. I think I was smiling.
“Asher?” I said, lifting the knife Asher had used to cut up the plants. I rolled it thoughtfully between my fingers. “Why don’t we make a deal?”
Chapter Twenty-two
“I know you don’t like people wishing on your Key, but just this once, why don’t you make an exception?”
Fear had rounded Asher’s eyes, giving him an interested, focused look as Lobsterman tried to eat his face.
“I’m going to help whether you agree or disagree, but I want you to consider the great favor I’m doing you, particularly since I’m putting my life at risk to save yours. And since I’m only sixteen, my death would be the greater tragedy.”
As I talked, I circled behind Lobsterman, who whipped around to face me, blood on its odd, bladelike teeth from where it had managed to nick Asher’s cheek. Its yellow eyes glowed like sunlight. If I closed my eyes, I’d see spots.
I backed off and dropped carefully to my knees, still close enough to Lobsterman to see mites crawling in the gaps of its red-orange armor, but not close enough to cut it. I was, however, close enough to cut Asher.
I grabbed one of Asher’s thrashing legs and pared a substantial slice of hairy white skin from his calf muscle. Asher screamed, but I ignored him.
“Oh, Lobsterman.” I waggled the bit of flesh in the creature’s face and just managed to toss the skin into its mouth as it lunged at me, snapping.
I sliced another piece from Asher’s leg and fed it to Lobsterman as well. “Good boy,” I said, because there was something oddly doglike about the creature, the eagerness it displayed for the paltry scraps in my hand.
But after I’d sliced a third piece, instead of feeding it into Lobsterman’s wickedly sharp mouth, I turned and flung the meat.
I had meant to throw it out the door, but it landed on the door, on the Key, which was still sticky from Asher’s ministrations, and hung there like grisly, overcooked pasta. Lobsterman sprang after the meat with the helplessness of a dog going after a stick and lunged into the Key, face-first. While Lobsterman stuck to the Key, trapped and howling, I crawled to it and stabbed it in its soft, armorless parts.
Ripping the queen apart had been fun, but this was something else—killing something after you’ve fed it isn’t exactly a carnival.
Finally Lobsterman quieted, and its dead weight unstuck it from the Key.
Asher looked away from Lobsterman lying in a heap in the doorway and stood awkwardly, lifting his pant leg to examine the bloody area where I’d peeled his skin away in neat strips.
He frowned at me. “I don’t know whether to thank you or backhand you.”
After meeting his wife, Asher didn’t scare me. I tossed the bloody knife on his cart. “I’d rather you thanked me, if it’s all the same.”
“Thank you. I guess you earned it. In the most half-assed, unethical way possible.”
“I would have saved you, no matter what. I told you that.”
He was quiet a long time. “Go on,” he said, after he’d bound his wounds. “Make your wish. But you only get one!”
I had to tread on Lobsterman to get to the Key, which I reached for gingerly, afraid of more pain. But I touched it despite my fear, ignoring the zing in my elbow, hoping it wasn’t too late. When I saw Asher staring incredulously at his cart, wondering where he’d gone wrong, paying not the slightest attention to me, I whispered, “I wish Rosalee’s head wasn’t damaged.”
A brightness bloomed behind my eyes, like a camera flash.
When my vision cleared, I said good-bye to Asher and rushed to the car. After I finally made it home, I dropped to Rosalee’s inert form on the floor of the living room. I tested her head, the way I tested melons, feeling for overripe patches. Finding none, I whispered, “Rosalee?”
No response. Her head was perfectly sound, but she was as still as a corpse. Why hadn’t I wished she were alive instead of that her head not be damaged? Jesus Christ, how stupid was I?
“Rosalee?” I shook her, knowing it was futile, but helpless to stop. “Rosalee!”
Her eyes opened and locked on me. They were bright blue. Electric. She sat up and immediately seemed to regret the move, grabbing her head in her hands. “You’re not Bonnie.”
I recoiled, not from Rosalee—from her voice. It wasn’t Rosalee’s voice. Not her eyes and not her voice.
“And you’re not Rosalee,” I said.
“Ahh, yes,” said the voice, the intruder. “Her.” Rosalee slumped over to her side, unconscious.
Chapter Twenty-three
I pried opened my mother’s eyes, desperate to prove to myself that I hadn’t seen and heard what I’d just seen and heard, but her eyes had rolled to the whites, their color hidden.
I put Rosalee over my shoulder like firemen do. I had no idea I could do such a thing until I did it. But I was a sturdy enough girl. I hauled her to her bed and settled her in.
She looked like a sleeping princess against the fluffy pillows, cursed to lie dormant, to be admired but not met. I kissed her mouth. She tasted like cherries. “Momma?”
And like that I was staring into her own starry black eyes, stunned that such a fairy-tale ploy had worked.
“What?” she slurred, before drifting back to sleep.
I was so relieved she wasn’t comatose, so relieved to hear her voice, that I collapsed to my knees beside her bed and wept.
The weeping left me drained and tired, but I couldn’t sleep. I’d read enough to know that I couldn’t let a person with a possible concussion fall asleep without risking coma. I would have to watch over Rosalee all night and keep waking her at intervals.
But at least she was alive to be woken.
I shook her shoulder. “Momma?”
“What?” she grumbled, turning to her side away from me.
I stroked her hair rippling blackly across the pillow. Her curls were softer than mine, as if she brushed her hair more than I did, as if she didn’t mind battling our island-girl tangles.
“Momma.” But I didn’t say it loud enough for her to hear.
I just liked saying it.
When I opened my eyes, Rosalee was out of bed and it was seven in the morning. I rose to my feet from the hard floor, rubbing my sore neck, and went to the kitchen, where Rosalee was making breakfast, looking cheery and awake and Stepford mom-ish in her red apron. She glanced up from the boiling pot to look me over. “Hungry?”
I had to resist the urge to look over my shoulder; I couldn’t believe she was talking to me. “Yes.”
“Go shower and get dressed. Breakfast’ll be ready when you finish.”
I didn’t want to move, afraid I was dreaming and that if I even blinked, Rosalee would revert to the sullen, tight-lipped person from yesterday.
“Go on now!” Her voice brooked no argument, so I got on.
I showered and dressed in record time and went back to the kitchen. Rosalee set a full plate before me and joined me at the table. She sat in the red chair, but she’d brought in the garden chair for me.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
She swept her shadowy hair from her face, inviting me to look my fill. “What do you think?”
I thought she looked great. The feebleness of last night had sloughed away and left her glowing and bubbly as ginger ale.
“You up for school?” she asked. “If you wanna cry off, no problem; I know you had a long night.”
I had awakened her every thirty minutes be
fore dropping off myself at six a.m., barely an hour ago, but my continued insomnia sustained me.
“I’m fine.” A sudden thought occurred to me. “Where did you put that head from last night?”
“Buried it under the sweet gum,” she said, as if she did such things at least once a week. She poured me a glass of milk. “I’m surprised you stayed. After you hit your aunt, you ran away.”
“Where would I have run?”
“Back to her.”
“For the last time, she doesn’t want me.”
“You sure?” Rosalee said, handing me a cream-colored envelope. “That came in the mail yesterday.”
It was from Aunt Ulla. I read it, then laughed, muscles unknotting. “She just wants to know if I still want to go to Helsinki with her for Christmas.”
“Do you?”
“Of course.”
Rosalee stared incredulously. “I thought y’all hated each other.”
“We do, but that’s no reason to ruin Christmas. If you wanted, you could come with us.”
“I could do a heap of things.” Rosalee stabbed her fork at my plate. “Why ain’t you eating?”
I looked at the food: sausages, biscuits, some white stuff. I tried the white stuff first. “What is this?”
“Grits.” She shook her head sadly at my blank face. “Figures you wouldn’t know about grits, that I’d have to feed you your heritage a spoonful at a time. So to speak.”
“Ah,” I said, making the connection. “It’s a black thing.”
“Mm.” Rosalee sipped her coffee. “Next week I’ll show you how to cornrow your hair. By the end of the month you’ll be ready for the naming ceremony. Hanna won’t do. Maybe LaJonda or Tyroniqua?”
“I didn’t know you had a sense of humor,” I said, pleasantly surprised.
“Well, I’m still not sure you have one. You’re like your father. The funnier the joke, the blanker his face would get, until I just had to smack some understanding into him. Maybe I should try that with you.”
“Smacking me?!”
“Sure. Aversion therapy. I’m not averse—ha, ha—to beating a sense of humor into you. If you’re gone stay with me, you’ll need one.”
“What about partiality therapy?” I offered, eager for alternatives. “Instead of smacking me, you could reward me. With gold stars and cupcakes.”
But Rosalee was implacable. “Not a cupcake in the place. No snacks. Just smacks. How ’bout I owe you one?”
“A snack?”
She smiled. I’d never seen her smile before. She was smiling at me. “You wish.”
When Wyatt showed up at the bike rail after school and begged me to let him take me to Smiley’s, I agreed, keen to go anywhere with anyone willing to listen to me talk about Rosalee.
Smiley’s, as always, was packed with kids yelling happily over one another and over the rusty old jukebox that played nothing but rusty old songs. A rich, battered smell permeated everything, as though the whole building had been deep-fried.
I was starving, so Wyatt and I split three orders of shrimp ceviche—unusual fare for a diner, but it was Smiley’s specialty. As I ate, I told Wyatt about Rosalee. Not about hitting her, but about how nice she’d been that morning. I had just launched into an explanation of partiality therapy when Wyatt began to laugh.
“Sorry. I just never heard anybody go on and on about her mother.”
“I’m boring you?”
“No, it’s great. And Rosalee’s great. I wish I got along with Ma like that.”
“Last night was so bad—you have no idea how bad—but today … what a difference. She likes me!”
Wyatt looked baffled. “What’s not to like? You’re amazing. Even though you were pissed at me last night, you still helped my dad. Even though the Key burned you.” He took my hand gently. “How is it?”
“Almost completely healed.” I shrugged it off. “How’s your dad?”
“He’s all right. Ma and me patched him up when we got home.” Wyatt took a deep breath and squeezed my hand hard enough to hurt. “Look, when I gave you that drink, I wasn’t trying to kill you. We all take turns being bait; I should’ve explained it first. I take all this shit for granted—hunting, all that—and I didn’t think how scared you might be. I’m sorry.”
I shrugged that off too. I just couldn’t dredge up any anger. Rosalee liked me.
What else mattered?
“Apology accepted.” I celebrated with another mouthful of ceviche and noticed him staring. “What?”
He looked thoughtful. “What were you gone wish for?”
I choked on the lime-flavored shrimp. “Pardon?”
“Touching the Key wouldn’t’ve burned your hand unless you tried to make a wish.”
“Jailhouse Rock” blared through the diner, soundtracking my scramble for an explanation.
“Tell me the truth,” Wyatt said, his eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Did you go to my house to turn me into a frog?”
I laughed and so did he. We laughed for a long time, but he was still waiting for an answer. Before I could think of one that wouldn’t be incriminating, a crash overrode all the noise.
A busboy had dropped the tray he’d been carrying, and its contents were now splattered across the peach and white tile. He turned red amidst the whistles and mocking applause. “You better stop clapping and start watching those milkshakes,” he yelled. “A milkworm’s loose.”
The taunting ended in a hurry as the diners inspected their food.
I frowned at Wyatt. “What’s a milkworm?”
“A parasite,” he said calmly, “that likes calcium. The kind in milk, but especially the kind in your bones. Trust me, you don’t wanna swallow one of those. Gotta be careful drinking milk or anything made with milk.”
“First I had to give up coffee; now I have to give up milk?”
“You don’t have to give it up,” said Wyatt. “Milkworms’re easy to avoid. If your food or drink looks like it’s boiling or bubbling, toss it.”
We only had ceviche and slushies at our table, not to mention the fact that I was sitting with sharp-eyed Wyatt, so I stopped worrying.
“So what were you gone wish for?” Sharp-eyed and persistent. But I couldn’t tell him I’d bashed his hero on the head.
Wyatt’s annoying persistence made me feel crazy reckless. I couldn’t tell him about Rosalee, but I could tell him about me. When “Tell Him” started playing on the jukebox, I took it as a sign.
“Hanna?”
“I’m manic-depressive, and sometimes when I get really worked up I hallucinate.”
“What?”
Did he really want me to repeat it?
“You hallucinate?” he said, like he was testing it. “You mean, you only think you see things? Like your dead father?”
“No. That’s real. He’s the one who told me about wishing on the Key and about the panic grass. Poppa was only a hallucination before I moved here. That’s why Aunt Ulla sent me to the psych ward that first time. I kept telling people he wasn’t dead because I could still talk to him. So they locked me away.”
“Damn, Hanna.” He looked stunned. “In an insane asylum? What was that like? Were there mean orderlies? Did they tie you in a straitjacket?”
“It’s only like that in the movies. I was there a whole month this one time, and the worst that ever happened was some kid threw a tantrum when a bee got onto our floor. That kid did not like bees.” I took a sip of my slushie. “It’s like nursery school. Except even nursery school kids get to go to the bathroom without adult supervision.”
“So it’s not that bad?”
“It’s horrible! People telling you where to eat, when to sleep, when to bathe, what you can have, what you can’t have. People even telling you how you feel, like they have any idea. All they do is make guesses. Mostly the wrong ones. Do you know how many times I was misdiagnosed before they finally figured out what was wrong with me? But Aunt Ulla didn’t care how incompetent the doctors were. She used any exc
use to send me back to that place.”
“Why?”
“Because she hates me. And because …” The old bitterness was forced to scooch over to make room for chagrin. “Sometimes I think I’m okay, and so I stop taking my pills. And when I stop taking my pills, sometimes I do bad things.”
“Like?”
A slew of criminal and immoral activities stirred in my memory. So many that I was surprised at myself.
It had been a busy year for me.
“What?”
I smiled at Wyatt. “I don’t want to blow your mind—”
“Aw come on.”
“—but the last thing I did that set Aunt Ulla off wasn’t even that bad. About a month, maybe two months ago, I decided to start wearing purple to honor Poppa’s memory—because it was his favorite color. And so I needed to buy purple fabric. I borrowed Aunt Ulla’s credit card and bought five thousand dollars worth of purple everything. When she got the bill, all hell broke loose and she tried to send me back to the psych ward. Forever.”
“What did you do?”
“I ran away to Rosalee,” I told him, skipping the part about the rolling pin. He didn’t need to know everything. “I figured small-town life would be restful and restorative.”
We had a good laugh over that one and then sat in a comfortable silence. For me, a relieved silence. It felt good to disclose your darkest, innermost secret to someone and have him still like you after hearing it. Almost as good as having a mother who liked you.
Wyatt smiled at me speculatively. “I bet you have some kick-ass pharmaceuticals.”
“Define kick-ass.”
“Valium?”
“No.”
“Prozac?”
“No.”
“Ritalin?”
“Yes.”
“Score!”
“It’s old, from when I was thirteen. That’s when they told me I was hyper. And then one day I smashed out all the lights in our house and all the lights up and down the street because I was scared all the light would attract something bad from outer space. Like a giant alien moth or something. That’s when they decided I was suffering from anxiety, if you can believe it, and started feeding me Xanax. Stupid doctors.”
