We stop at the hospital for Nick’s cell phone. When we walk in Jilly’s room, she clucks at the gore all over my derby clothes, and she hands him the phone.
“I thought you youngsters couldn’t be without your phone for five minutes,” she grumbles.
“Is that why you picked my pocket?” Nick says. “To make sure I came back?”
“Of course,” Jilly says.
“I’m fine, Ma, since you asked,” I say pointedly.
“Of course you are, darling. Now. What have I missed?”
I tell her about the morning’s work, and that now we are headed over to the lab to look at our auras on Katterfelto’s rainbow machine because — I falter.
“I know, honey,” Jilly says. “I sort of always knew.”
I open my mouth and give up. As usual, Jilly’s got me speechless.
“Nick told me about the coin,” she says.
I turn a look of dumb agony on him, like a retriever waiting to be chloroformed.
“She found it first,” he says.
That shocks words out of me. “She what?”
Jilly says, “I spotted the coin at work. It was on another girl’s table, but I saw it first, and it spoke to me, and I swapped it for a quarter out of my apron.”
“Somebody left it as a tip?” I can’t believe this.
Nick says, “Once it gives you something, it wants to meet someone else. It fools you into giving it away, or spending it, or losing it.”
I stare at them, Jilly, Nick, Jilly. I’m trying to process this. “What did you ask for?” I ask my mother.
Jilly shrugs. “I asked to be lucky.”
“Lucky,” I say numbly.
“It’s always better to be lucky than smart,” says my mother, the queen of dumb luck. “If you’re smart, you have to act smart. You always have to be thinking.” This is so Jilly.
Well, that explains that.
She says, “I’m sorry your wish didn’t work out for you, honey. Has Nick told you about his wish?”
I remember that Nick has the coin in his pocket.
My blood goes cold. I turn on him. “What did you ask for?”
“I didn’t. Not this time.”
I glare at him. Don’t tell her you have it! “Wait. What do you mean, not this time?”
He says, “This isn’t the first time I’ve held it. When Sageman first dropped it on us, it offered me whatever I wanted. But I recognized the voice. I’d heard it once before. In Pittsburgh.”
“Oh,” I breathe.
“Yeah. I was pawing through a desk drawer in a burnt-out convenience store manager’s office, and I heard a voice. It was like listening to myself. Only a few hours before that, I’d found my house was a smoking hole in the ground and my family’s bodies outside. I was blaming myself. I was crazy with guilt. The coin offered me anything I wanted.”
I swallow. “Well?”
“You remember how you said to me, ‘what if someone offered you your heart’s desire? Would you ask for what you want? Or would you ask for the means to get it for yourself?’ Well, that’s what I did.”
I don’t say anything.
“I knew I couldn’t bring them back. I thought the coin was the voice of God. So I prayed for the strength to fight the magic. And I prayed that I could know, know beforehand, when it was going to happen and where.”
“So you could save somebody else,” I say, getting it.
“We wish alike.” He takes my hand, smiling in that way that makes me want to cry and hit him and make love to him all at the same time. “You’re so damned independent. It must be why I loved you instantly.”
Jilly says, while I’m all soppy and reeling from this, “I need to apologize to you.”
Uh-oh.
If I ever get too sentimental, my Ma can always scare it out of me.
“What now?” I say cautiously.
“I realized something, talking to your boyfriend here today.” Ma looks at her lap and fiddles with the nurse-call button on its cord. “I knew what happened to you, back then. I figured it out, when the neighbor boy went missing and you got so cold and distant and afraid to touch. And I didn’t tell you.”
She takes a big breath — Jilly being brave.
Looking me in the eye, she says, “I should have reassured you. You didn’t want me to know, and I let you think you were keeping your secret, and that was wrong. I told myself you wouldn’t want my sympathy.”
My throat is closed tight around a hot lump.
She says curiously, “You could have asked the coin to stop me from drinking.”
“Could it have done that? Really?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “But because you didn’t, I have a chance to find out if I can do it for myself.” Her smile twists. “Better late than never, huh? I haven’t had a drink in eleven days.” Her expression brightens to its usual dippy sunniness. “And Roger says I’m in remission!”
The door opens. “Roger says what?” In comes Jilly’s stolen chief surgeon, all red face and bonhomie.
Jilly introduces Nick to Doc Roger.
“Back up,” I say faintly. “You haven’t had a drink for eleven days?”
“I found out how far my luck would take me,” she says. “I decided I don’t like liver cancer. But I guess my luck still works, if I meet it halfway. Roger,” she adds, simpering at the chief surgeon, “says the damage is reversing itself.”
“Oh, come on,” I say. But I believe it. That’s Jilly’s luck.
“It’s a miracle,” Doc Roger says, taking my mother’s hand in his and looking sappy. He’s got a big, noisy aura, and his prana is almost as happy as Jilly’s. That must make it fun to have him for your doctor.
“If I’m really lucky, maybe it’ll reverse enough that I can drink again,” she says.
I roll my eyes.
She waves her free hand. “Okay, maybe not.”
“She’s my problem now,” Doc Roger says to me, kissing Jilly’s hand. She has a major diamond on it, I now notice.
Holy moses. My mother’s engaged.
I can’t believe my luck.
“Now can we go home?” Nick says behind me in something perilously like a whine.
I get up and go to kiss Jilly. I’m careful at first. Forty-three years of habit.
But she smells wonderful.
I relax, very slowly, in her baby-powder-smelling embrace. A few tears leak out of me. She’s so happy.
I’m so happy.
Nick comes and lays his hand on my back and I feel something inside me leap toward him. It’s the part of me that has been sucking away strangers’ lives all these years. But for once that part is not unhappy or angry or terrified or forlorn or starving.
Nick has given me something so precious, I don’t know if I can tell him yet. He’s given me the chance to hold my mother, really hold her and feel her love for me. That’s what this happiness is. It’s me and Jilly, touching.
I’m aware of a strange feeling. It’s not fear and it’s not worry and it’s not the rush of relief I get when I’ve finally drunk enough to go numb.
It’s as if somewhere far ahead of me, not quite out of sight, a door has opened where there was no door before. Light is leaking through the crack. Now I notice how dark I am. How much I’ve taken that darkness for granted.
I feel my own energy field pop open, like an umbrella opening halfway down a cliff in a road runner cartoon.
A hysterical sob comes up inside me. I give Jilly a quick smooch and back off.
I can see it in her eye. That wasn’t so bad, was it?
“Don’t starve yourself anymore, sweetie,” she says. “I’m begging you.”
I pat her arm and gulp, feeling the love, the safe love.
“Gotta run, Ma,” I whisper. “Call you tomorrow.”