I CLOSED Margaret’s diary and crossed my arms over it against my chest. Robert wasn’t there. He’d been 285 miles away the night Margaret died, working in Kandahar. I didn’t need to look at my map of Afghanistan to remember that. I knew it by heart.
But now Margaret was telling me that in December, three months before she died, Robert was in the Realm.
He was the one who killed Margaret.
“What?” Neil said. I must have spoken out loud.
My coffee was cold mud. I noticed that dimly and then realized I was staring at Margaret’s blue handwriting without seeing the words. I reached up to the lamp and fumbled until I found the switch. Darkness was what I needed. I made my way to the kitchen and poured my coffee down the drain. I leaned against the sink and told my lungs to release the air they were holding hostage. The tulip light over the kitchen table was still on. I turned away from it.
A normal person’s reaction would be to cry, I told myself when I felt a bite in my palms and realized I was clenching my fists until the nails threatened to break the skin. Really cry, not stand there numbly with my face wet, miles from my body.
My eyes landed on a spoon in the dish drainer. I wished it was a steak knife. I picked it up and bit it crosswise, the way you’re supposed to brace the tongue of someone having a seizure. I made the pain grow from my molars until it bloomed all the way up my skull.
The yellow light that fell on the floor in front of me went black. Neil was behind me. Friend distance, a few inches. I could feel his hands wide around the space of my shoulders, not touching them. “Hey, hey,” he said in the voice of Ariela’s big brother.
“Neil, he—my brother.” And my throat closed. I turned around to look at him, and in his face, I saw how bad it must be.
His arms went around me, and it was like being hugged by an eagle—he was all fierce grip and pointy shoulders and hair gelled to stiff points. He released me and stepped back and told me, “It’s worse than we thought.” Which I already knew.
“Can you just read it? I can’t—” My voice was thin, too much milkshake sucked through too narrow a straw. “—tell you. I can’t read it out loud. I’ll just go all Johnny Cash or something if I try.” Laughing hurt. And nothing was funny.
“Sure.” But he didn’t move. I led him to the couch and picked up the little turquoise grenade of a book. My legs felt like statues, and I couldn’t feel my stomach when I tried to breathe. My whole body was turning to granite right here in my living room. I’d be a tombstone soon. They’d have to wheel me out on a dolly.
He looked at me with black eyebrows in high half circles, and I said, “It’s the last entry.” Spoken like I was a librarian. An archivist cataloging a crime that happened in the last century.
A crime. What Robert did was a crime. I knew that already. I’d always known. But what Margaret had told me and Laura was pretty vague. He’d touched her in a way he shouldn’t have. That was all I really knew.
Now I stared at the wavy yellow light reflected in the kitchen window and watched the movie in my mind, where Margaret was trapped between Robert and the garage door, him wrenching off his belt with one hand. Other boys waiting their turn.
She wasn’t a virgin anymore by the time she was nine.
Robert was in the Realm. Margaret’s safe place. The place she’d run away to.
Crazy, violent Robert was in the Faerie Realm.
He’s the Woodcutter. He’s the one who’s going to kill Laura and me.
I kept trying to pin that thought down to the surface of my brain, but it kept wriggling away.
Neil stood lamp-straight, with only his long head bent, and read the diary, bracing the book’s edges with his fingertips like he didn’t want to get it dirty. Him reading it made it true. It was in someone else’s hands now.
He looked at me when he was finished. Opened his mouth like he was going to talk about it, and I didn’t know if that would even work, because of the spell. But then his phone rang, four or five stretched-out notes from “Black Coffee.” He waved to dismiss it.
“Dude, it’s your mom.”
“All right. Mama,” he barked into the phone like it was a police radio. Then, “I’m at Josy’s.” Pause. Neil turned his body away from me. “Si, Mama. Okay.” He flipped the phone closed and slid it into his front jeans pocket without looking at me again.
“You have to go.”
“It’s Sofia. Mom has to take her to the ER because she thinks she swallowed a nickel. So I have to watch Ariela. You should come. Might be better than being alone here.” He cast his eyes around my living room. It felt too small and too bright here now, like the house could not contain what had happened in it.
“Laura’s home. Go hug those baby children. And don’t hide your cigarettes from your mom this time. She needs them more than you. Go!” I repeated when he didn’t move.
“How are you going to deal with Laura?” Telling her, he meant. He paused with one arm in a jacket sleeve to soulful-eye me.
“Tell her, I guess. I mean, get her to read it. Shit. This is so—shit. I’m sorry. Go.”
“We’re going to talk later tonight, okay?” he said. I nodded into the dark air of the driveway as he loped to his mom’s car. Oh, little Hernandez girls. He was their ride to the hospital. I swallowed a wave of guilty nausea. We were the siblings nothing happened to, Neil and me. We were never the ones in trouble.
Behind me, I heard the kitchen door open: Laura, finished with her phone call. I couldn’t face her yet. I stepped down into the dark yard, feeling with my feet for the bottom step. My stocking feet. Crap. But I didn’t want to go back inside for shoes and have to talk to Laura, not just yet. Dampness soaked into my socks as I crossed the grass and weeds. Inside, I heard the piano keys being attacked in the opening tha-thump of the Schumann concerto.
Without paying attention to where I was going, I found myself at the back of the house, standing on the bricks that Dad had laid in a fan shape in front of the kitchen door. I rested the back of my head against the little squares of glass in the door and looked out at the leggy black shape that I knew was the cherry tree, midway back in the high grass.
Oh, there’s the real crying, I thought when it occurred to me why I couldn’t breathe. I slid down the door and sat on the cold bricks. I tugged at a loose brick until it started to wrench up with a satisfying resistance. It’s like this. The bottom of the house just opened up, and there’s nothing underneath. All there is under this whole family is empty sky.
I yanked up a sharp-smelling plant that I crushed in my fist and tossed away. It didn’t make any noise. I needed something to make a noise. I needed to damage something. I rocked the loose brick and felt something crumble, a handful of dust and kernels of hard stuff that I threw down with a dull plunking sound. I grasped the base of the step and wiggled, kneeled over it, and hauled up until my shoulder screamed with strain. A rough triangle came up in my fingers, and I stumbled backward, out of breath. I could see in the light from the window that my knuckles were scraped raw. I leaned back as far as I could and hurled the brick chunk into the darkness. A heavy thud, and the branches of the cherry tree shook. I must have hit it.
I heard somewhere that even the most unbearable emotions only come in waves of twenty minutes at a time. You think you’re going to die, that you can’t contain in the finite space of your body the fact that your brother is capable of evil. You think you’ll disintegrate like a piece of bread in water. But even when you know you won’t be able to survive it, the crying eventually stops.
I was still holding the book. I’d been gripping it in my left hand since Neil handed it back to me. I was pushing it into the step now, like it could drill a rectangular hole down to the center of the earth. My palm was flat and satiny when I finally took my weight off it. I ran my thumb over the dent in the shape of a heart where the metal lock had imprinted itself on my hand.
I couldn’t avoid talking to Laura any longer. I stood up and brushed dirt off my pants and pulled the door open, and the piano music grew louder. The kitchen smelled like corn oil and coffee and gas, warm after the chilly outside air. I shoved the door shut slowly with my foot, telling myself to breathe.
The living room was bright, too bright for me just yet. I stood beside my chair at the kitchen table and steeled myself while the first movement of the Schumann circled the runway. Above Laura’s head, above the peach shawl that covered the peeling paint on top of the piano, there was a framed picture of us four kids: Robert leaning back in an armchair with Laura standing between his knees, solemn Margaret standing beside him holding a chubby toddler—me. That would have been taken about the time Margaret was nine. I felt my face crumple as a breath shuddered in. Robert was stocky, built on the Dad-Josy body plan instead of the slender Mom-Laura-Margaret plan. Thick hair stopped at his glasses, and his mouth was a laughing gap. I’d never known him, not really. He hadn’t lived with us since I was little. I looked at my teenage brother, younger in the picture than I was now. And already a monster.
Laura stopped playing. “Lor,” I said. She flipped pages back, flitted her hands over her wavy pompadour, rolled her polka-dot shoulders. She was getting ready to plunge back in. “Laura.”
“Oh crap, how long have you been—what’s wrong?” She took in the mess my face must be, and her protruding eyes bugged out even more.
My voice was barely there. “I have some bad news. It’s Robert. He, um…. He did something bad. It’s about Margaret.” Please don’t make me start singing again. I just need to get this out. I wasn’t whispering, but I could barely hear my own words as they came out. If I didn’t say it too loud, maybe it wouldn’t be too true.
“I know about Margaret,” she said in an I’m-busy voice.
“Not this.” So now I can talk about it? Does that spell only work once?
“Is he in trouble again?” Trouble. He should be punished. My mind skidded over arrest-trial-prison-suicide, and I pushed my freezing fingers against my eyelids to try to focus my snowy vision.
“No. He did—can you just—I can’t talk about it. I actually, ha, I really can’t. Can you just read this?” I thrust the terrifying little book at her. Frilly little-girl book. Satin-covered bomb. Secrets like that should be wrapped in crime-scene tape, not shiny fabric with fans and flowers on it.
“Um, you can’t just tell me?” One long hand actually fluttered over the yellow music book on the ledge above the keys. She wouldn’t do that if she knew what was in the satin bomb. Some things were more important than the first-year San Francisco Conservatory Piano Competition. She’d know soon enough, and then she wouldn’t be so arrogant. Or so innocent. My fingers curled around the cardboard edges of the book again. Maybe I should keep it. Summarize, if the spell would let me. Or just keep the whole bomb to myself.
I unpeeled one finger at a time and set the book on the table, in between Mom’s wheel and the mason jar pyramid, where Laura wouldn’t be able to miss it every time she walked past to go to the bathroom. I did it without looking at my sister again. I couldn’t take the imperious look on her round face anymore. Little Miss Do-it-for-me. You’re going to be glad I didn’t just tell you. Have your own freakout. I’m leaving.
My shoes were under the couch. I carried them outside to put them on, so I wouldn’t have to be in that house with Margaret’s diary anymore. I couldn’t be in there for one more second.
I should have stayed home, I thought as I pounded up Key Street. The pavement was bumpy through the soles of my high-tops. The breeze was cold for September. I smelled stony damp, low nighttime fog, and under the whoosh of tires and the thump of someone’s car stereo, I heard the scritch of an animal in the dry leaves of a sycamore overhead. My senses felt heightened, like every receptor was taking in information at twice the normal rate.
I was walking to Fern’s, I realized as I turned onto Broadway, and then I noticed my craving for curry sweet potato fries. Noise and strangers and some hot sugary drink and crispy fries with little nubs of garlic and the silly horoscopes in the Fishwrapper. Maybe I could find someone there to bum a cigarette off of. Or possibly introduce me to crack. Today is the first day of the rest of your life. And it’s all going to be like this. In all of it, Robert is going to be a murderer. I forced myself to roll that word around my brain, to see if some of its brick corners would rub smooth against the hard diamond surface of my thoughts. They didn’t.
I slowed down past the butter yellow Vespa locked up in the front of Satan Is My Motorcade and then looked in the Prom Girl window at the Halloween display. A smiling vampire wearing a bow tie held a pair of oversized scissors over the faceless heads of a row of accordioned paper dolls cut from a children’s book. I mentally zipped off all their heads, quick and painless.
A band was playing at Fern’s. I saw them in the big front window with their backs to the street: a gray-haired man in an aloha shirt with one arm around a double bass, a woman whose cropped auburn head was bent toward her guitar neck, and a mandolin player with the kind of fine-boned face I had learned to associate with the fey. I hoped she wasn’t fey. I needed to get away from the fey. Just for a minute. Then I’d go try to find them. I’d call Nicky. I’d tell them I knew who the Woodcutter was. And whatever they were going to do about it, then they would swing into motion. It would be out of my hands.
I pulled the side door open and felt the warm puff of baked goods, coffee, and Dial soap that was the smell of Fern’s. I should have looked in the mirror before I left the house to see how bad my face was after all that crying. I dug through my bag for lip gloss as I made my way between tables to the counter. The place wasn’t full, but there was someone at every table. The song slowed to a dignified end, and applause buried it. “Yeah baby!” shouted a man in a crocheted rainbow beret and stringy facial hair, directly under my elbow. I edged out of the way.
Out of sweet potato fries, proclaimed a neon index card taped to the pastry case. I gulped back irrational tears and ordered a Hungarian mocha from the dimpled boy behind the counter. If he wore glasses, he would look like Robert. I didn’t want to think about Robert. I leaned back to wait and listened as the bass player laid out two slinky measures. The guitarist wasn’t playing now, just nodding in rhythm, and then she shut her eyes to sing. I expected one of those dark smoky voices. She had the luxe look that Neil liked to call “old Hollywood,” in a drapey satin dress and sparkly earrings, but her voice was clean rain. The words were something about back home or long ago, and when the song ended, I felt the whole room let out a breath.
Those were the Laura seconds. She loved those seconds between the end of the music and the applause. She said the audience told the truth then. My stupid sister is going to hear those seconds again. She is going to live through this. And so am I.
Then the milk steamer behind the counter kicked into life, and I swallowed and came back down to earth. Back home, long ago. That was not anything I wanted to think about right now. A murderer grew up in my house. That’s the Grant family back home. That’s who Laura and I are. Sisters of the murderer.
I carried my dented tankard to the darkest table in the back. My first sip was whipped cream, flakes of bitter chocolate, and an aftertaste of espresso and paprika. I closed my eyes. Brain, brain, go away.
“I don’t know how they do that. Sugar and spice and everything nice,” said a caramel voice near my left ear. I looked around, but it was dark back here. The folding chair next to me moved back, and Nicky slid into the seat. She was wafting air toward her face from my drink and sniffing deeply.
“Oh my God, I was going to call you.” I pushed the cup away to make room and reached across the curve of table to take her shoulders in my hands. I kissed her and tasted cigarettes.
“Mmm, hi.” She lifted an eyebrow toward my drink, and I slid it toward her. Should I not have kissed her? My body was leading tonight. That was good. I was done with my brain. My brain wasn’t working for me. “I’m glad I found you. In fact, I have some news. Blossom says to tell you it’s all golden.”
I had news too, and I didn’t want to talk about it. I wanted to shake it off, dance, do something dangerous that would make me forget the last two hours. I wanted— “Can we go somewhere in the, the other place? The Realm? I could really use something to take my mind off some stuff tonight.” My mind cleared for a second. “And what do you mean, golden?”
“Sugar plum, where do you think we are?” Nicky waved her hand behind her. I knew Fern’s had an outdoor patio, but I’d never noticed the big French doors before. They stood open, with gauzy curtains blowing in a breeze that did not feel cold, unlike the street when I’d walked in. Past the palm tree with the spiral of Christmas lights all along its trunk, the tree I’d sat under to do my homework dozens of times, there was a tent as big as my house, whose billowing walls glowed orange and red. I knew there was no room in the Fern’s patio for anything that big. The canopy shapes of fruit trees flanked it. I could make out dark globes in the nearest one: peach. My mouth watered before I realized I was smelling warm fruit.
“Come on, that’s impossible.” I looked at Nicky in the late-sunset light from the high doors—but it was dark when I got here—and her face was wild with delight: chin lifted, mouth open, eyes wide and round.
“I love it here. It’s like a bridge between worlds. You get the best of both.” She raised my tankard in a toast and took a long two-handed drink.
“How does it work?”
“Oh, it’s the music. Kind of a come-hither thing for the Folk.” As she said it, I listened to the sounds coming from the front of the café and heard instruments that hadn’t been up there when I came in: brushes on a snare head, the chalky pink-pink-pink of piano keys way up in the high end of the keyboard.
“Look at the accordion player.”
I peered around a customer’s bat-eared hat to see. Red lace-up boots and red stripes like veins in the white hair of a girl who could not be older than me. Red ribbons even hung from the neck of her sweater. “It’s the girl from the revel. That night.”
Nicky nodded in the corner of my vision. “And look at that guy.” She pointed at Bat Ears in front of us. That wasn’t a hat. It was a curly-haired boy wearing a tuxedo jacket and cutoff shorts, with what looked like a second length of thigh extending from each knee. One too-long leg stretched out under the table beneath him, and the other was tucked up under him, with the foot sticking out into the aisle. His ears were almost as big as his face, leaf-shaped and tufted at the tips.
“And look at the piano.” I didn’t want to. Nicky was drawing circles on the space between the knuckles of my right hand. The pleasant ticklish sensation on my skin made my stomach do a dance. I nodded in time to the beat and captured her hand to tangle my fingers in with hers. “He’s here because the guards are at your place. They’re cool, don’t stress. Laura won’t even know.” She inclined her head toward the front, where the tables had filled up.
I half stood up to see what she was looking at. Hunched on the stool in front of the upright piano was an old man with elaborate sideburns. “Hill,” Nicky announced.
I’d seen Professor Hill at a school concert of Laura’s before Mom left. Before any of this happened. I remembered his mushroomy ears from that night. I knew he was a dwarf now, but I didn’t know it then. I looked at him and wondered how I could ever have thought he was human.
Laura knew, even if the glamour didn’t let her think clearly. And now her bodyguard was here, enjoying a night off while the Lady’s guards beefed up whatever security Nicky had put on the doors of our house.
I was relieved, but I wanted Laura to be here too, all of a sudden, instead of home alone. Thunking her way through the entire Schumann concerto again from the top, probably. Ignoring the diary.
The diary. Why did I have to let myself think about it? Couldn’t I just lose myself in the music and the dizzying offer that was in the pressure of Nicky’s fingers on my wrist and the—is that really just coffee? I picked up the cooling metal cup and sniffed. It only smelled like what it was supposed to be. But I was getting that under-a-spell feeling again, like when I was with the Summer Queen, or at the revel when I’d eaten the peach. Tipsy, suggestible.
Maybe that was just being next to Nicky. She had drawn her chair close enough to mine to put her arm around my waist, under my jacket. I nestled deeper. “So everything’s good, right?” she murmured to my hair.
“Um. Weird, I didn’t expect to see Professor Hill here.”
“He’s wherever the music is. But Laura is safe. She has the guard with her, whether it’s him or other ones of the company. And when she’s with you—” She dropped her eyes from my face to her hand, played with a napkin on the table.
“What?”
“She has the protection of the Lady’s chosen mortal. You command the respect of all the Summer Folk. It’s not just the guard. Look.” She gestured over her shoulder, and I looked past her to see the fleeing backs of two ring-around-the-rosy girls diving around the maze of wooden chairs. Nicky bent down to scoop something up from beside her chair and presented it to me with a flourish. “A gift.”
It was an empty burlap sack. “Huh?” I touched it with one index finger. Nothing happened. I lifted the drawstring lip and looked inside. Black and empty.
“Make a wish,” Nicky said in a voice full of laughter.
I wish Robert was dead? I wish he was not a sick bastard? I wish he had never been born? “It’s not working,” I said. I knew my voice was shaking.
“Hey. Is something wrong? Just—here.” She covered my hand with hers and laid it on the empty sack. “Sorry. I should’ve explained. It has to be a wish for something to eat.”
So I conjured up Monday rolls. They were steamy wheat rounds we used to get for afternoon snack in grammar school once a week, fresh out of the oven. You dug a hole into the shiny crust with your thumbs for honey butter. I was always craving them, but I hadn’t eaten them since fourth grade. What made me think of Monday rolls? The taste memory was so strong that my mouth filled.
Nicky opened the sack. There was a hand-sized round of bread sitting in it. It had the hollow weight and slightly oily feel of having just come out of the oven, and it burned my fingers when I eased it out onto the table.
“Well wished, mortal,” she said and broke the roll in half. She bit into the steaming crust and closed her eyes.
I cupped the other half in my hands and held it near my face. “Is it safe?”
“I don’t know. You might end up getting caught up in some fey war or taking a lover from the other side,” she said. When I was too slow to react, she said, “Teasing. It’s not like the peaches. It won’t interfere with your judgment. It’ll just satisfy your hunger. Body and spirit.”
I bit into the moist bread and tears sprang up. I was a child, it was a winter afternoon full of cold fog and dead trees, and I was sitting in the school library window seat with The Little Princess propped up on my knees and both hands full of hot smuggled bread. I shivered the way you do when a deep chill leaves you and you finally get warm.
I said, “All this for me? Seems extravagant.” We were half whispering over the sound of the band. Her hair tickled my cheek when I leaned in to talk into her ear.
She met my eyes then. Eyebrows and lips quirked up, wide nose spread out as her cheeks lifted. She was going to say something irreverent, and we were going to sink into a long kiss like falling down a well, and I was going to forget all about whatever question I’d just asked.
But she said, “You’re their hero now.”
“Oh come on.” I edged around to look at her, trading touch for a better sightline. I wanted to be touching every bit of her and looking at her face at the same time. I settled for locking my fingers in with hers. Her hands felt dry and cool where mine were hot. I spun one of her fat silver rings with my fingertips.
“You’ve proven you can take the Winter henchmen. At the Winter Queen’s stronghold—her seat of power, where her forces are strongest. That was no small thing. Your sister is already in better hands with you than just about anyone, fey or mortal.”
“That was an accident! I didn’t knock him out or anything. That guy was going to—” And the flow of words died in my throat as my vision filled with nine-year-old Margaret, making a run for the locked garage door.
“Oh, my sweet thing, I’m sorry. You were hurt. And scared. You never should have been drawn into this conflict.” Nicky’s brows drew in together over squinting eyes, head angled to one side. For a second she sounded just like Blossom.
“It’s not that. It’s my—family. I found out tonight that my brother is—that he—my brother Robert, I haven’t even talked to you about him.” I swallowed hard on the burning coal that was stuck in my throat. Do not start singing. “He raped my sister. Our sister, Margaret, he—when she was little. Him and his friends. Over and over. I always knew something happened,” I added when I saw the alarm in her face. “It’s just that it turned out to be worse than I thought. Way worse. And now I just found out that he was up in the Realm. In the Winter Court.” And that was all I could get out. No more air would come up out of my lungs. I felt a squeezing sensation on my temples, like they were caving in, and huge black spots grew in the middle of my vision. I guess the spell on the diary does only work once, I thought distantly. I unhinged my clenched teeth and commanded my nose to work until air flowed in. “Seems weird, all this battle danger stuff, and now some old nightmare from my plain old family just springs up. And Robert. He just shows up there?” It’s not fair, I wanted to say, but I was ashamed to. The Realm is supposed to be just mine. Mine and Margaret’s. Not his.
Nicky’s arms were around me, and she was talking to my hair, whispering things I couldn’t make out. I breathed in her cigarette-cinnamon smell and rested my damp face on the soft wool of her collar. I felt utterly beaten down, bruised and lost and incapable. I laughed weakly. “I could handle the whole fairy underworld thing, but this Robert shit is blowing my mind.”
“You think he’s the Woodcutter.” Her voice floated on the air, light enough I could pretend I hadn’t heard.
I couldn’t say it out loud, not yet. My brother killed my sister. And he was going to kill me and Laura. I nodded. I didn’t have to speak, not just yet. Nicky would let me sit here for another minute before I had to answer that question out loud.
I didn’t think about Margaret’s heart then, outside her body where it didn’t belong. I thought about the time at the county fair when I was six, and Dad dared all of us to go on the big roller coaster, and Robert held my hand. He didn’t say anything. But he didn’t let go until we were back on the ground and I finally opened my eyes.
“’Scuse me, lovebirds?” It was a tenor voice, high up somewhere behind me. I untangled myself from Nicky and turned around to see Timothy, his floppy hair edged in flame by the apricot light from behind him.
Timothy, whose tree house I’d just been in. Where I’d found the same kind of poison the corn goat had tried to take me out with. Whether or not Nicky thought that was innocent, I knew he could use it on me. He knew we’d broken into his place, because we’d set off his trap. By now he must know what we’d found there. Fearful, I watched Nicky’s face to see what my next move should be.
To my surprise, Timothy bent to grip Nicky’s shoulders with both hands. “You need to come. They’ve struck,” he said, and his expression was steel.