Cinders

by Cara Malone

  Drew just sat there with his mouth open as the waiter returned with his margarita and a refill for his mother. He’d hardly gotten his wits about him before she turned her irritation on Cyn.

  “And you,” she said. “You can sit there and look innocent all you want, but we all know you’re a pot stirrer. I knew it as far back as your teenage years. I go out of town on a business trip and what’s the first thing she does? Abduct her father.”

  Drew sat back in his chair with a satisfied smile. He was hoping to get more sympathy from his mother after his little run-in with Cyn, but if she was going to jump straight to the infamous cemetery incident, this was okay too.

  Cyn sat back, her arms crossed defensively over her chest, and said, “I didn’t abduct him.”

  “Then why did he come back to Grimm Falls in a taxi?” Drew challenged her.

  As much as he hated sharing memories with Cyn and her father, this was one of his favorite family stories. Cyn was sixteen and Drew was just out of high school. She’d just gotten her driver’s license and his mother rewarded her with a ridiculous, pink Volkswagen Beetle. It wasn’t the most expensive car in the world, and it was cheaper than the shiny, fully loaded Lexus that Drew had insisted on for his sixteenth birthday – and then proceeded to wrap around a telephone pole a few years later. Easy come, easy go.

  But much to Drew’s annoyance, Cyn loved that pink car. The color was no accident – it was intentionally chosen to force the femininity on her that Drew’s mother wanted to see, but Cyn managed to look past it.

  That’s what made this story so delicious.

  The very first time Drew’s mother went out of town after she bought Cyn that car, Cyn dragged her dad with her to trudge up old memories and visit her mother’s grave in Lisbon. He didn’t want to go, but she refused to turn the car back around. When she stopped for gas, her dad called a taxi, and when Cyn finally came home late that night, Drew’s mother was waiting up for her, ready to take away her keys.

  She never saw that pink Beetle again, and Drew didn’t stop smiling for a week.

  Cyn wasn’t smiling now, and that’s how he liked it. Why should she smile after what she said to him last week? She had a lot of nerve threatening him like that, and he knew she didn’t have anything on him.

  She looked slightly tearful as she said, “That’s not how I remember it.”

  Twenty-One

  Cyn

  You forget a lot of details in five years – more than you think you will.

  By the time Cyn’s sixteenth birthday rolled around, she couldn't remember the exact sound of her mother's laugh. She knew it was beautiful, but no matter how hard she tried or how many times she closed her eyes and tried to trigger the memory, it wouldn't come back. She knew her father was forgetting these details too, but whenever Cyn asked him, he didn't want to talk about her mother.

  "It's not fair to Samantha," he would always say. "How would she feel if she knew I was waxing nostalgic about my previous wife?"

  "I’m sure she thinks about her own late husband," Cyn mentioned once, but it did no good. Her father was a stone wall when it came to her mother, and Cyn knew he was protecting his own heart. He loved her too much to think about her, but Cyn loved her mother too much to forget.

  Maybe it was selfish of her to try to take her father on that road trip. She had been dreaming of the day when she could go home to put flowers on her mother’s grave, and just be near her again. When Samantha gave her that pink VW Beetle, Cyn had all the pieces – everything but her father.

  She dreamed of a road trip with him. They’d spent so little time together since they moved to Grimm Falls and Cyn kept trying to be okay with it. Everyone grieved in their own way and avoidance was her father’s way. But she wanted to remember her mother. She wanted to hear stories about her, and she thought her dad could jog her memory about her mother’s laugh.

  A couple months after Cyn’s sixteenth birthday, Samantha went to New York to see to the construction of a new shop. Drew was busy with the police academy, and all the pieces fell into place. Cyn didn’t want to make the trip alone, so she told her father a little lie.

  She said it was a college scouting trip, and she kept up the ruse until they were halfway to Lisbon.

  "What college is all the way out here?" her father asked with a curious chuckle. "Are you considering agricultural programs?"

  "Actually," Cyn said, her heart climbing into her throat, "we're not going on a college tour. I want to visit mom's grave."

  She saw the bulge of her father's eyes – sheer terror at the prospect – and she knew right then that she had made a mistake. She overestimated his ability to deal with this, and underestimated his dedication to avoiding the topic.

  Cyn hurried to add, "I've been doing some reading about the stages of mourning and I think we both skipped some steps when we came to Grimm Falls. I thought it would be good for us to visit her.”

  "I can't," her father said. He looked like he might tear open the car door while the Beetle was hurtling down the highway at sixty miles an hour, so when he told her to pull over, she did. Then she watched him pace up and down on the side of the road in front of a soybean field for the next fifteen minutes.

  She’d never seen her father have a panic attack before, and he hadn’t had one since then.

  "I just wanted to remember her," she said. "I thought we could share some memories while we drove. It's only thirty more minutes to the cemetery."

  “No,” her father said. “No, it’s not a good idea. We need to go home.”

  "Daddy,” Cyn said quietly, “I'm not going home until I do what I came for.”

  “I’m sorry, honey,” he said, then he took out his phone and dialed the operator. “If you won’t turn around, then I’m getting a cab back to Grimm Falls.”

  Cyn watched her father get into a yellow cab fifteen minutes later, then she continued to the cemetery alone. It was just as she remembered it – she might forget her mother’s laugh, or the exact recipe for her sloppy joes, but the day of the funeral would be forever seared into Cyn’s memory.

  She stayed at her mother's grave for a long time. She’d picked up flowers from a gas station that she passed on her way through the quaint town of Lisbon, and lay them carefully at the base of the grave marker. Then she ran her fingers over the etched words carved into the gray stone.

  Isabelle Robinson. Loving mother and wife. 1974 – 2007.

  “Hi, Mama,” Cyn said, tears threatening to choke her as she sat down cross-legged in front of the marker. She kept her hand on the stone. It was warm and Cyn knew it was just because it had been baking in the sun, but it helped her feel closer to her mother. Her words came out watery and unsteady. “I miss you so much. You told me to be good and I’m trying, but it’s so hard. Samantha and Drew don’t want me and I wish you were here.”

  Cyn stayed until dark, telling her mother everything that she couldn’t bear to tell anyone else – how desperately she wanted to win her stepmother’s approval and how disappointed she was in herself every time she failed to live up to Samantha’s expectations of her. How she wished her father could be the smiling, spirited man that he was in her childhood. How the only person who she’d ever felt able to relate to, Marigold Grimm, had frozen her out after just a few weeks of friendship.

  How, the older she got, the more Cyn wondered if Grimm Falls itself was rejecting her.

  She put her hand on the marker again and asked, “Should I even go back? Or should I just keep driving until I find a new life somewhere else?”

  She didn’t expect an answer. She was talking to a stone, after all. But no sooner had the question left her mouth, a bird swooped down from a nearby hazel tree. Cyn ducked, shielding her face in alarm, and when she looked up again, the bird was sitting on her mother’s grave marker.

  Looking at her.

  Its feathers were a beautiful, pure white and it cooed softly as it sat no more than two feet away from her. Cyn looked around the cemetery, but t
here was no one else there to witness it. Then she turned back to the bird and asked, “Mama?”

  In a flutter of wings, it took flight again, disappearing back into the trees and leaving Cyn to feel rather foolish. Thank god there was no one here to see that. They’d think I lost my marbles. She gathered her wits about her and drove back to Grimm Falls, where Samantha was waiting to take away the pink Beetle. Cyn never saw it again.

  Cyn didn’t have much to say during dinner. Samantha’s mention of the cemetery incident, as it had come to be known in their family, had put her in a brooding mood so she picked at her meal and watched Drew repeatedly run his index finger over the newly smooth patch on his bare chin.

  At least he wasn’t completely ignoring her warning.

  “By the way, Cyn,” Samantha announced as the waiter carried away their empty plates at the end of the meal, “I decided it would be wise to make a last-minute run to the New York boutique to make sure everything’s in tip-top order the weekend before my Nylon photoshoot. As much as I’d love to meet your firefighter buddies, I won’t be able to attend the service awards. Your father has agreed to take my place.”

  “Oh,” Cyn said. “Okay.”

  Samantha loved to drop bombs like this on her at the last minute, and Cyn wondered why she couldn’t have mentioned it privately. She looked at her father, wondering if he felt slighted because she hadn’t asked him in the first place. She’d wanted to, but this event meant more to Samantha than it did to him.

  “I’ll be happy to go with you, pumpkin,” Cyn’s father said, and Samantha simply looked annoyed. She never liked it when Cyn and her father spent time together, ever since the cemetery incident, but in this case, her hands were tied – unless she wanted to force Drew to attend the event, and in that case, Cyn really would put her foot down.

  Not on my watch.

  When the meal was over, Cyn chased Drew into the parking lot. “Hey, wait a minute. Can we talk?”

  Drew glared at her. "I thought we already did that."

  "I was thinking about what you said at your apartment," Cyn said. "About how I stole your life. I understand how you could feel like that. I lost my father when he married your mother, and I know you feel the same way.”

  Drew scoffed at her. "Was that an apology? Because if so, it was the worst one I've ever heard."

  Cyn’s fists clenched involuntarily, then she worked at uncurling them. Ten years was a long time to tiptoe around her stepbrother and she was so tired of it. She was ready to do whatever it took to smooth things over once and for all – and get him to stop being a menace to Grimm Falls and to Marigold. But it would be a cold day in hell before she apologized for doing her best to survive in a terrible set of circumstances.

  She wanted to make all of it go away, once and for all, but she couldn't do that if she let Drew get under her skin.

  "It's an acknowledgment," she said, hoping it would be enough. "I had an idea - a way to make things right between us."

  "I'm listening," Drew said, crossing his arms over his chest.

  “I know it was really hard on you when you couldn’t finish the police academy,” she said. When you got kicked out of the academy because you’ve never taken anything seriously in your life, was what she wanted to say, but that wouldn’t serve her goal of building bridges, so she bit back the truth in favor of a softened version. “What if I could get you a job in the police department, as a dispatcher or something like that? I’ve got friends there and I bet I could pull a few strings to get you an interview.”

  “Why would you do that?” Drew asked.

  “Because whether you like it or not, you’re my brother,” Cyn said. Then she took a deep breath and said what she really chased after him for. “And because if I do this for you, you have to promise there won’t be any more fires. You’re going to get caught sooner or later anyway, so just quit while you’re ahead and I’ll do what I can to help you with your career, okay?”

  Drew narrowed his eyes at her and for a second, she thought she’d made a mistake. He was going to throw the offer back in her face and stubbornly insist on making his own way. But then he surprised her and said, “Fine.”

  “Good,” Cyn answered. “I’ll make the call tonight.”

  She went straight home and called Gus. Her palms were slick and she wondered if she was making the wrong decision, but this seemed like the best way for everyone to get what they wanted. Drew could live out his dream of being a police officer, at least to the extent that was possible without having graduated from the academy. Cyn would know that Grimm Falls was safe, and she could face Marigold again knowing that there was no further risk that Drew would take out his impotent rage on her poor garden again.

  Gus, on the other hand, had been skeptical.

  They talked for more than twenty minutes while he tried to figure out why Cyn was suddenly advocating for a step sibling that had never been anything but a terror to her.

  “You remember the barn incident in your freshman year, right?” he asked. “He humiliated you, and that was far from the only time.”

  “I know,” Cyn said. “He may not be blood, but he’s family, and family always deserves another chance.”

  “No, they don’t,” Gus insisted. “You’ve done enough for them – more than enough.”

  Cyn pinched the bridge of her nose between her fingertips, staving off a headache. This conversation would be so much easier if she could explain the whole thing to Gus, but if he found out what she’d done, he wouldn’t hesitate to bring Drew’s name to Detective Holt. The investigation would turn on him and everything Cyn was trying to do to preserve the peace would be for nothing.

  “Look, all I’m asking for is an interview,” Cyn said. “If Drew blows it, then that’s on him. Do you think you could talk to the police chief about it in the morning?”

  “Fine, but I don’t understand you,” Gus said.

  When Cyn hung up, she found a text message from Marigold that brought a smile to her lips.

  The bluebells are thriving in their new plot. Can I take you out to dinner tomorrow night to thank you for them?

  With that, the tone of the whole evening turned around. Cyn couldn’t wipe the smile off her lips if she tried, and she sent back three words that made her stomach tingle with excitement and desire.

  It’s a date.

  Then she stripped off her clothes and crawled naked between the sheets of her bed. It had been one of the longest and most taxing weeks of her life, and between the firehouse and her desire to fill up every spare moment that she could with Marigold, Cyn had hardly slept since the first fire at the museum.

  She was asleep the moment her head hit the pillow, and in her dream, it was the night of the service awards. The Grimm House ballroom was decorated to the nines and the room was filled with row upon row of chairs. Every one of them was filled with important people from the city administration, and at the front of the room stood lovely Marigold in a shimmering silver evening gown.

  She held a stack of envelopes in her hands – the names of all the award winners that would be announced that night – but when she looked out at the audience, her eyes rested solely on Cyn. When she leaned forward, her plump lips forming the name of the Firefighter of the Year, it was Cyn’s name that she called.

  The room erupted in polite applause and Cyn stood, floating more than walking as she made her way to the front of the room.

  When she turned around to accept her award, she saw that she’d been wrong. The room was not quite full. There was a sea of faces she didn’t recognize looking back at her, and at the very front of the crowd, there was a row of empty chairs with a banner draped across them – reserved for the family of Cyn Robinson.

  When she turned again, Marigold was gone.

  Twenty-Two

  Marigold

  Mari picked Cyn up for their date in her emerald green BMW. They met at the firehouse at the end of Cyn’s shift and when Cyn hopped in, she leaned across the gearshift to kiss Mari
gold. Then she asked, “So, where are we going?”

  “I actually had an unconventional idea,” Marigold said. “Do you know the teen center downtown?”

  “The one that works with underprivileged youth?” Cyn asked. “Yeah, my crew got called out there about six months ago when they were doing a cooking class for the kids and they took a little detour into the art of flambé.”

  Mari laughed, then said, “I’ve been volunteering there over the last couple of summers to teach the kids about container gardening. I’m due to drop by again and I thought if you liked the idea, we could go together and harvest some veggies.”

  “Sounds good,” Cyn said, “although I’m sure you’ll be teaching me just as much as the kids. I’m not sure I’ve got a green thumb.”

  “You will if you keep seeing me,” Marigold said. “I’ll get you up to speed.”

  “Let’s do it, then,” Cyn said. She slipped her hand into Mari’s as she drove down the road. When Marigold pulled into the small parking lot behind the teen center – an unassuming cinderblock building – Cyn asked, “Can I tell you something honestly?”

  “Anything,” Marigold said.

  Cyn looked serious, taking her hand back. For an instant, Mari felt nervous. Then Cyn said, “I was a little worried about going on a date with you. You’re Grimm Falls royalty and I was picturing a fancy restaurant with a thousand forks to choose from. This is much more my speed.”

  “Well, I was planning to take you to the fancy restaurant after we finished up here,” Mari said, “but if you’d prefer, we can just go get a pizza instead.”

  “I’d like that,” Cyn said.

  They went inside, where Marigold introduced Cyn to the center director, Garrett, and his second in command, a raven-haired woman named Kiera. Kiera led them through the building and out a side door, where there was a small patio with about a dozen twelve-inch pots brimming over with greenery.