by Dia Reeves
Around two that afternoon, a knock at the door nearly stopped my heart, but it was only Paulie in his Superman T-shirt, carrying a tray that was almost bigger than he was. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a handful of potato chips, three cookies, a huge glass of milk, and a carrot. Obviously he had put this feast together himself.
“Wyatt said to wait until Ma was doing her exercises and then bring you food, so I did,” he explained as I took the tray. “Wyatt said you’re a stowaway in our house and that you’re a secret.” He looked excited by the idea. “Are you a stowaway?”
“Sort of.”
“Nuh-uh.” He grabbed Wyatt’s footboard and swung on it, eyeing me skeptically. “Stowaways hide in boats, not houses, so they can go somewhere. You can’t go nowhere in a house.”
“Haven’t you ever wanted to be nowhere at all?”
He thought about it and nodded. “When I broke Ma’s BlackBerry. I made a wish on the Key to fix it, but the Key don’t work for us.” The memory seemed to make him bitter. “I wanted to run away. What did you break?”
“My mother’s head. I have to figure out how to fix it. Really fix it this time.”
I watched shock fill his face again. “Is that why you’re scared of your ma?”
I bit into the carrot. Nodded.
Paulie looked thoughtful. “Well, don’t use Elmer’s glue,” he warned. “It sure didn’t work on the BlackBerry.”
Rosalee woke me up. I was shocked to find her standing over me. I thought she would be angry at my having stayed out all night, and especially for not calling her to let her know where I was, but she didn’t seem angry, didn’t even look at Wyatt lying naked beside me. She made a shushing gesture when I tried to speak and pulled me out of bed. I threw on Wyatt’s ratty green robe and followed her downstairs.
My luggage was by the front door.
I turned to Rosalee, heart thumping. “What is this?”
“You have to leave now.” We were the same height, but she seemed to be staring down at me from some great distance, wholly dissatisfied by what she saw. “Nothing personal. I just can’t trust you anymore.”
“Why?”
“You came here and told that boy my secret.”
“I didn’t!”
“You did,” said the tall, smoke-colored man who drifted up behind her, looming over her shoulder, heaving and roiling like a thundercloud, blue eyes bright as lightning. “I’ll be needing that room now,” he hissed.
Rosalee smiled and clapped, turning to him. “We can make the bed rattle just like Linda Blair did! We can charge admission!”
“Only if you’re good, Rosalee,” said Runyon indulgently.
“You can’t choose the devil over me!” I screamed. But they’d already forgotten me. I was a ghost.
Rosalee and Runyon danced away and disappeared into Rosalee’s office. I tried to follow, but the door was locked, and despite being a ghost, I couldn’t pass through the wood. I didn’t have a key—one of those Mayor-issued keys that would prove I belonged.
I beat against the office door when I heard them laughing in there, beat hard until a piece of the door broke off, sharp and long enough to pierce my heart. I reached for it.
Little Swan flapped in a silver circle around my neck and got tangled in my collar. I wasn’t wearing a collar, but she was tangled in it nonetheless, tugging at the back of my neck. Irritated, I reached back to swat her away.
“Ow!”
The sound pulled me from a sleep as thick as quicksand, the room half-bright with moonlight. Wyatt turned over beside me—dressed in his bedclothes, unlike in my dream—rubbing his ear where I’d smacked him.
I hadn’t heard him come in last night; I barely remembered falling asleep myself. The best part of my brain had been hard at work thinking of a way to deal with Rosalee’s situation. I hadn’t had enough brainpower left over to notice trivialities like the passage of time.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
I turned to my side and snuggled into his back, forcing him to spoon with me. The best part of my brain prompted me to ask, “Do spirits … have spirits ever voluntarily left a person?”
“That was possessed?” His voice was gruff with sleep. “Hell, no.”
“Is there a way to get the spirit out without killing the person?”
“You have to kill the host. I told you that.”
“Why?”
He yawned, and his hot breath whooshed against the back of my neck. “Because even if you remove the spirit, which is so close to impossible it might as well be impossible, the spirit leaves bits of itself behind. Like a virus that can build itself up again. What it leaves behind, the body has no way to fight off; the immune system can’t handle it, so the person gets sick and dies anyway.”
“If it’s just a virus, couldn’t you cure it?”
He was silent a long time, as though the idea had never occurred to him.
“Wyatt, if you can make a card that can blow up leeches and lure, why not a card to heal someone?”
“Healing someone and getting rid of spirit leavings … it ain’t even in the same universe … unless …” He went silent again. I could almost hear the gears in his brain turning.
“I’d have to think about it.” He squeezed me around the middle. “After I wake up.”
“Wyatt Reynaldo Ortiga!”
I rolled over and bumped sleepily into Wyatt, who sat beside me, wide-awake and nervous, the early morning sun lightening his brown eyes. I armed my hair out of my face. “Reynaldo?”
He turned to me. “Hide! Quick!” But before I could move, he pulled me to the floor and rolled me under his bed. Seconds later, as I lay among dust bunnies and old socks, I heard Sera’s voice, saw her feet encased in black Doc Martens.
“Why are you still in bed? You know you have to meet the Mortmaine.”
Wyatt didn’t answer.
“Loafing around up here ain’t gone change what happened to that girl.”
“Her name was Petra.”
“You know the Mortmaine don’t believe in pining after—”
“Don’t tell me what they believe in. To hell with them. They won’t even let me mourn her.”
“Let her people mourn her. You don’t have that luxury.”
“Because I killed her.”
Something thumped loudly, out of my limited line of sight. Sera yelled, “I’m sick of this self-pitying bullshit, Wyatt. Petra was dead the second she let that breeder within two feet of her; it had nothing to do with you. The only thing you’re responsible for is doing your duty to this town.”
“If one more person says that to me”—it sounded like his teeth were clenched—“I swear to God—”
“Do you think your nana would’ve neglected her duties to hide in her room and mope?”
“Of course not. Bitches don’t mope.”
Sera slapped him, an unmistakable sound, as loud as a gunshot. “You don’t deserve to wear her locket.”
“I never said I did!” Wyatt’s bare feet hit the floor as he jumped out of bed. Sera stepped back, away from him. “You want it back, take it! I’m nothing like her, and I don’t want to be like her. Some hard-hearted, unfeeling—” I jerked as something smashed, broken shards falling to the floor across the room.
I held my breath in the deep silence that followed.
“Wyatt,” said Sera soothingly. Her feet moved close to his. “It’s okay. Calm down. I’m sorry. I know the Mortmaine push you hard, but it’s only—”
“I know, Ma.” He sounded defeated. “Please, just … stop.”
Sera gave a deep sigh. “I’ll talk to your elder. I’ll tell him you need a day. Isn’t Carmin having his party tomorrow? Why don’t you go and have fun with your friends? Get some perspective back. Sound good?”
“I guess.”
“So today and tomorrow, and then business as usual.”
“Thanks, Ma.” Wyatt’s feet moved toward the bed, then disappeared from view as the mattress sank beneath h
is weight.
When the door closed behind Sera’s Doc Martens, I came out from under the bed.
Wyatt sat cross-legged against the headboard like a skinny, angry Buddha. “I get so sick of her throwing Nana in my face, like she was a saint.”
I sat beside him, plucked the locket from inside his shirt, and opened it. The photo showed a young woman, but the picture was old, from the sixties, maybe, judging from the hairstyle. Words were engraved on the back, stark and deep: Ojos que no ven, corazón que no siente. “What does that mean?”
Wyatt plucked the locket from my fingers and closed it, stuffed it back inside his shirt. “What the eyes don’t see, the heart can’t feel. If you don’t see the bad things in the world, you won’t feel bad about them. It’s such a joke. If you knew my nana—” His voice broke, and he was silent a long time.
“She never felt bad about anything,” he whispered. “Not anything.”
“Why?”
“Nana was Mortmaine,” he said, as though that explained everything. I guess it did.
“She had to go to this guy’s house once,” Wyatt continued. “This guy who’d been killing people, except not on purpose. Nobody could understand it, but everybody the guy touched died within three days. So he needed to be dealt with, because no one knew whether he was some rare kind of creature or had some weird disease. It could’ve been anything, so to be safe, the Mortmaine decided to send Nana after him.
“The man’s sons were home when Nana showed up, these two little boys, and they begged her not to hurt their dad. But she did it anyway, stabbed him right in the heart. And then she killed the little boys, just in case what the guy had was genetic. She died three days later. Died a hero. Do you understand? That’s what it means to be Mortmaine.”
He had started to cry, and though he tried to choke it back, he couldn’t. “Fuck.”
“Cry if you want.” I wrapped my arms around him. “Who cares?”
“I care! The Mortmaine care, Ma cares. I’m not supposed to be this. I just … keep waiting to feel cold or uncaring, but then I remember I ain’t supposed to feel anything. I just gotta get the job done.”
“How do you know your nana didn’t cry after she killed that family? Or when she realized she had only three days to live? Maybe she felt the same way you do. Maybe she just sucked it up and did what she had to do.”
A light went on in my head.
As Wyatt cried himself out against my chest, the best part of my brain found a solution to Rosalee’s problem. Maybe. I had to figure out one thing first.
“Poppa?”
He came in through Wyatt’s door, like he’d been waiting for my call. He sat at the foot of the bed, his ice-cream suit blending in with the bedspread. He waited patiently for me to speak.
“Is there a way to make wishes besides the Ortiga Key?”
“All five of the Keys grant wishes,” he said. “I told you that.”
“Which one has the quickest and”—I clenched my newly healed left hand—“least painful way to get a wish?”
I listened as Poppa explained what I had to do, but after he told me everything I needed to know, about Wet William and Evangeline Park, he frowned at me, albeit rather awkwardly—the chewed-up side of his face wasn’t as mobile as it used to be.
“You could call for me to talk,” he said, “and not just when you want something.”
Guilt hit me like a kick to the chest. “Don’t be mad at me, Poppa. You know you don’t have to wait for me to call you. Just come.”
He smiled and pinched my big toe. “It’s been better for us since we moved here. Hasn’t it?”
I wiggled my toes at him. “I think so too, Poppa.”
“What’re you saying?” asked Wyatt, startling me.
“Ah …” I looked down into his face where it rested against my breasts and had no idea what to tell him.
“All that Finnish,” he said, shamelessly using my bodice to wipe his tears, his eyes as bright and fresh as a street after a hard rain. “What does it mean?”
“I was praying,” I lied. “For forgiveness.”
“For me?” He seemed touched by the thought.
I looked at Poppa. “For all of us,” I said gravely.
Chapter Thirty
Carmin’s birthday was Saturday, but he’d canceled his party the day after Petra died. “It’s stupid, I guess,” he explained as he, Lecy, Wyatt, and I drove way upsquare to Evangeline Park. “But what’s so great about turning sixteen? Petra made it to sixteen—and look how that shit turned out.”
Now it was two in the afternoon, and the four of us lay together on a blanket on the shore of the Nudoso River, tall spider lilies nodding over us, menacing and ghostly. I shivered, but not from cold.
From nerves.
“You okay?” Wyatt was warm beside me, wearing the green coat I’d made him.
“No,” I admitted. “I feel weird.”
“Pet made it weird when she left,” Lecy said on my other side. She had on a black peacoat with white buttons, and she’d pinned one of the spider lilies in her black hair. The effect was disturbing, as though the lily was swallowing her head. “She left a hole in the world. Can’t you feel it? The empty space?”
We digested this in silence, listening to the river trickle behind us.
“Pet liked coming up here,” said Wyatt softly, watching the sky. “She was born near a river. The Rio Grande, I think. The sound of the water spoke to her.” He grabbed my cold hand and squeezed it, his skin oven-warm. “Did you know she liked to come up here?”
I hadn’t thought about it one way or the other, even though coming here had been my idea, but now that he mentioned it …
“I remember her saying she liked to come to Evangeline when she was scared,” I said. “I thought we could all use the closure.”
Lecy shifted beside me. “Where are they, Carmin?”
Carmin sat up, braving the wind, hair aflame against the cold gray sky. He removed a bundle of flowers from his toggle coat and passed one to each of us. The flowers were a lighter, gentler shade of blue than Carmin’s glasses.
“These were the only fresh forget-me-nots I had on hand,” he said. “I already processed the others.”
I held the flower to my nose. “What are these for?”
“To remember Pet,” said Carmin. “You eat the petals off it, and it helps you remember the people you loved who died.”
It seemed mean to say I hadn’t loved Petra, so I only said, “I hardly knew her, except that she had a mouth on her. And she was a coward.”
“Not at the end,” Wyatt exclaimed, turning to me. “You saw. Petra was badass at the end, holding on to Frankie’s foot so he couldn’t get away.”
“Everybody’s got some kernel of bravery,” Lecy said. “Even somebody like Pet had a little.” She turned to Carmin. “You should have made pills. Fresh flowers wear off quick as spit.”
“I did make pills.”
“Well, share, baby!”
He removed a handful of blue, liquid-filled capsules from a plastic bag and handed two each to Lecy, Wyatt, and me. “The pills last a long time. Maybe a little too long. About an hour. So only take one at a time.”
Wyatt gave his two to Lecy. “Who wants to be unconscious out in the wild for a whole hour?”
“So take ’em at home, genius,” said Carmin.
“I’m on call twenty-four/seven, smartass.”
“Nobody’s forcing you to take the pills! Why do you think I brought the flowers? Excuse me for being thorough.”
“So we’re going to be unconscious?” I said, interrupting their bickering.
“For a little while,” said Lecy. “Like dreaming awake.”
I had planned to sneak off under the guise of needing the restroom, and once out of sight, I would do what I had to do. But this forget-me-not thing was perfect.
Carmin lay back down, and they all ate the flowers. I only pretended to eat mine, holding the petals in my cheek. The flowers affected e
veryone almost immediately, and in minutes they were out of it, staring dreamily at the sky.
I passed my hand over Wyatt’s open eyes. When he didn’t blink, I spat out the petals and leaped to my feet, removing my indigo coat as a rush of anticipatory heat swept me. I trod through the cold spider lilies to the edge of the dark, colorless river, where I knelt and pricked my finger on the safety pin I pulled from the pocket of my violet pencil skirt. Remembering Poppa’s instructions, I used my bloody finger to spell out a name in the cool, gently flowing water: William.
The name hung redly in the river before slowly dissolving. I waited, gazing into the water as the wind rustled through the oaks, but for the longest time, all I saw was my reflection staring back at me, waiting impatiently.
And then my reflection came to life. Instead of lying still on the water, my image arose rippling and wet from the river, like something from a funhouse mirror. I stared at myself, and my self stared back.
Damn, I was pretty.
But then the water fell away in a great splash to reveal an older boy standing on the water, staring down at me.
He wasn’t as pretty as I was, but he was all right. Eighteen or nineteen, with skin as brown as river silt. He had sad eyes, like a lost dog, and he was looking at me expectantly, like I could tell him the way home. I opened my mouth to speak.
“Hanna!”
I looked back … into Wyatt’s eyes. He sat wide awake on the blanket, but before I could reassure him, Wet William snatched me into the river.
I went down streaming bubbles in the dusky blue water as Wet William, his arm circling my chest, dragged me to the river bottom, the laces of my violet oxfords trailing in the cold water like sea worms. By the time Wet William set me on my feet, my chest had begun to burn with the effort of holding my breath.
Wet William was much taller than I was, his shirt billowing in the current. “I guess you know the drill,” he said almost playfully, despite his sad eyes, his voice as clear as a bell. “Just take a deep breath and ask. But just so we’re clear, you’d better look down.”
