by Libba Bray
“Good afternoon, Mr. Beaton. May I get an ammonia Coke, please?”
“Yes, Mrs. O’Neill. Coming right up.”
The bell sounded again. It was Harold Brodie’s mother, along with two of her country club friends. As she spied Evie’s mother, a terrible delight showed in her eyes. “Why, hello, Mary. How are you feeling, dear? Must be such a shock to hear about Evangeline. And after all you did for her,” she tutted with fake concern.
Evie’s mother looked stricken. “Yes. Well. I-I’m afraid I’m not feeling well. Mr. Beaton, I believe you’d better forget about that ammonia Coke. I’d best go home and rest.”
“Of course, Mrs. O’Neill.” Mr. Beaton took note of Evie for the first time. “Can I help you?” he asked tersely.
Evie shook her head and strutted a funny strut, and Mr. Beaton snorted and went back to stocking the shelves. “Circus people.”
Evie’s heart ached to see her mother having to leave the shop with her pride in tatters. She knew how much her mother enjoyed being seen as a good, pious woman with a sterling reputation—a pillar of the community. Evie hadn’t made it easy for her, she knew, and she wished she could take back some of her antics. Not all of them, just the really stupid stuff. Mostly, she wished she could ease her mother’s shame over it all. She wondered if her mother finally understood that these Blue Noses she’d been trying to impress all these years weren’t worth impressing. They were just scared little people letting fear dictate their lives and the lives of others.
“Scared little mice with their twitching mice noses,” she whispered to herself as she narrowed her eyes.
With Evie’s mother gone, Mrs. Brodie and her cohorts dug in on their gossip. “I always knew something wasn’t right about that family. That daughter! An anarchist! Good luck removing that stain from their reputation, I say. You know she accused my son publicly of doing something unspeakable to a chambermaid at our hotel? Why, when I think of the way he suffered from that indignity. She was always a bad egg, if you ask me.”
“Loose and wild. And that comes from a mother not having a firm hand,” said pinch-faced Mrs. Wylie. “I’ve never had a day’s trouble from my Isabel.”
That’s because Isabel can scarcely think for herself enough to order an ice cream, Evie thought. She was glad that her makeup hid the heat in her cheeks. On her way out of the shop, Evie swiped her palm along her grease-painted jaw and pressed her messy hand against Mrs. Brodie’s beautiful camel coat, leaving an indelible mark. It was juvenile, of course. Horrible, really. And very, very satisfying.
Out on the street again, she smiled for the first time. “Good luck getting that stain out of your coat, you old witch.”
At the corner of Elm and Poplar, Evie saw her mother heading up the hill toward home. Evie followed from a safe distance. When her mother reached the front steps of their house—their house!—Evie stepped through the gate and into the yard. Her mother turned around, brow furrowed above her cheaters in a disapproving look Evie had come to know well over the years. “May I help you?”
Evie took a few steps closer. “Mama. It’s me.”
And if Mrs. O’Neill hadn’t been holding on to the railing, Evie was fairly sure she would’ve fainted dead away.
The house smelled like her childhood, a combination of coffee, the morning’s bacon, bleach, and a mustiness the bleach could never touch. Nothing had changed. There was her father’s chair by the fireplace, just like always. There was her mother’s chair across from his, a knitting basket on the floor beside it. A tiny museum of middle-class domesticity. Everything preserved as if to move even one thing might upend the fragile order and send the whole house crumbling to dust.
They sat at the kitchen table. Evie’s mother had offered her tea, which Evie did not drink. Touching the cup would overwhelm her with memories she could not bear.
“Did you do those terrible things they’re accusing you of, Evangeline?” her mother said.
“No, Mama. I promise.”
“That isn’t what they’re saying in the newspapers and on the radio. In town.”
“We didn’t cause the trouble, Mama. We’re trying to stop the trouble!”
“Then why don’t you turn yourself in to the authorities and explain it to them? They’ll help you.”
Evie shook her head. “That’s what you want to believe, because you’ve never been on the wrong side of the law.”
“I should say not!”
“The law works for the powerful.”
“Well.” Her mother pressed her lips tightly together, cutting off whatever she had been about to say next. She peered into her tea. “You don’t know what this has done to your father.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’ve given up garden and bridge club. I can’t show my face in town.”
Oh, why couldn’t her mother just once believe in her? Why couldn’t she listen? “The people who are after us are the people who killed James!”
Her mother’s eyes narrowed. “You’re being deliberately cruel, Evangeline. You know that James was killed in the war.”
“He was, yes. But not in the way you think. Not in the way they told you. I need to tell you something about James. And Uncle Will.”
Her mother’s lips quivered. “Poor Will. Poor, poor Will.”
Evie swallowed hard. “Do you remember those vitamins Uncle Will gave you when you were expecting James?”
Her mother’s expression suggested she was searching her memory. “Yes, I do. What of them?”
There was nothing but the truth now. Evie told her mother everything about Project Buffalo, and Will’s part in it, and her mother’s unwitting part as well. How those vitamins had turned her children into Diviners experiments, how James had died during a top secret military operation at Jake Marlowe’s estate during the war. She spared her the grisly details of Marlowe’s Eye. No mother should have to hear that.
When Evie had finished, her mother looked worn out from the force of so much truth all at once. She shook her head and waved her hands as if pushing that truth away. “Will would never do such a thing!”
“But he did, Mother. He did.”
“No. He wasn’t that sort of person.”
“He was a lot of things. Most people are.” How easy it was to absolve yourself. “We all are,” Evie corrected.
“You’re telling me that my brother had something to do with James’s death?”
“Yes,” Evie said, so softly it was almost as if she hadn’t spoken at all.
“I just can’t believe it,” her mother said, shaking her head again. And Evie wondered if that was an affirmation or a denial. Her mother’s face crumpled. “Why did you come?”
The lump in Evie’s throat hurt as she swallowed. “I wanted you to know that I’m not a criminal. I… I wanted you to know that you were a good mother, and that… I love you.”
Her mother’s eyes filled with tears, which she blinked away quickly. She folded the hem of her napkin over twice. “Well. I appreciate that.”
The disappointment stung. Deep down, Evie had known her mother was who she was. She was never going to sweep Evie into a warm, motherly hug and tell her daughter that she loved her no matter what. But knowing this didn’t stop Evie from wanting that elusive affection. Hoping for it. This time.
She’d come home, she told herself, so that she might tell her mother that she loved her. Now she realized that she’d lied to herself. She’d come home because she’d hoped at last to feel loved.
“I must be getting back,” Evie said numbly. “I have a show to do.”
“Evangeline!”
“Yes, Mother?” Evie said, letting the hope back in.
“You might use the cellar door. So no one sees.”
Evie passed through the house one last time, stopping next to a side table that held a picture of James in his uniform. He was so beautiful, and so young. Evie renewed her determination to save him from the Eye’s awful torments. There were bare spots on the wall, and Evie real
ized that those were the places where pictures of her had once been displayed. They were all gone. She had been erased from the family story.
Evie cried the whole way back to the circus camp. When she arrived, Sam was sitting on the steps of Zarilda’s wagon in an undershirt and trousers. “Hail, hail, the conquering Zenith hero!” he called. “Did they give you the key to the city? Better yet, did your folks give you any rubes for the road?”
Evie kept walking.
“Aw, c’mon, Pork Chop. I was only teasing. Hey, Baby Vamp?”
Evie did not break stride. The circus went blurry. She blinked but it only happened again. She didn’t know where she was going. The fields were loud with barkers enticing folks into tents. All these people. Did any of them feel truly loved?
“Baby Vamp?” Sam had caught up to her outside the empty elephant cage. “Aw, Sheba. You’re crying.”
“You’re very observant,” she shot back, and then she couldn’t stop herself from sobbing. Sam pulled her to him and wrapped her in a hug.
“It’s okay, Doll. It’s okay,” he murmured and kissed the top of her head.
“What’s the matter?” Theta’s voice.
Evie was still crying and so didn’t know what Sam whispered to Theta over the top of her head. She only knew that now there were two sets of arms around her, holding her close, holding her up. She only knew that she had family after all.
ONE OF THEM
The towns began to blur together. Evie read so many objects she lost count. Time and again, she was struck not by the specifics of the object itself—bought on a whim at a department store, inherited from a beloved grandfather, given in love, given begrudgingly, stolen from an enemy, stolen from a complete stranger—but by what the objects meant to those who held them. How the objects revealed the yearning of those people who were so much more alike than they ever realized. If they had, Evie wondered, would it have made them kinder to one another?
Sometimes, though, reading objects had the opposite effect. Artie Wilson’s pocket watch was just such an example. Evie had lifted it as part of her act with Zarilda; making a show of pretending not to understand how a pocket watch worked, she swung it in front of her face, pretending to hypnotize herself, much to the amusement of the audience. The entire time, she read for information she could pass along to Zarilda. Artie Wilson was a loan officer at a bank in Marion, Indiana. He was also a Grand Exchequer for the Marion KKK. There’d been a meeting recently, and at that meeting, they’d discussed the manhunt for the Diviners. She could see Artie Wilson palming that pocket watch as he talked with the other men. “One of our brotherhood is looking for his wife. Seems she fell in with those Diviners on that manhunt list. He wants her back—wants to clear her name and help her get right again. Theta Knight. Pretty. Be on the lookout.”
Evie came out of her trance. Artie Wilson was laughing at her antics along with everybody else. She forced herself to look deep into his eyes and found that the most terrifying thing of all was just how completely ordinary he looked.
Evie grabbed Theta as she was on her way into the Big Top. “There’s a fella here. I read his watch. He’s with the Klan.” Evie took in a couple of steadying breaths. “Roy’s put out the word to the Klan everywhere. They’re looking for you. They’re looking for you here!”
Fear flooded through Theta, making her want to curl up in a ball like a frightened child.
“If they try to touch one hair on your head,” Evie was saying, “I will… I will… pos-i-tutely do something they will not like!”
“You’re in a clown suit,” was all Theta could say.
“I will do something, Theta. I don’t know what, yet. But mark my words, I’ll do it.”
Petite Evie looked so thoroughly ridiculous in her baggy clown costume with the painted face and straw hat that it sideswiped Theta’s fear for a moment. More than that, though, she was struck by the love and fierceness of her friend. She knew Evie meant it. Evie would fight by her side to the death. Theta hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
“I love you, Evil,” she said.
Evie grinned and squeezed Theta’s hand. “Oh, mercy! I’m almost on! My big entrance!” Evie said and ran off to take her place inside the tent.
“Ya know, you’re supposed to say ‘I love you, too,’” Theta called after her.
Roy was hunting her. It made Theta’s palms catch like kindling. She couldn’t possibly go into the Big Top just yet. Not like this. A quick walk would calm her down. She marched toward the animal cages when she heard a woman cry out.
“Please, Billy. Don’t. Please!”
The woman’s pleading, frightened voice lit a fuse inside Theta. She’d said those words, in that tone, enough to Roy to know that this woman was in trouble. Theta came around the side of the tent. The woman wasn’t much older than Theta. She was on the small side, and already a bright red splotch marked her face where he’d slapped her. The man, bigger, older, still had his hand raised. With the other, he held the woman tightly by the arm.
“Please,” the woman whimpered.
“You’ll do as I say, Wilma!” the man said through his teeth.
Theta could practically feel the sting of his grip; she’d felt such a grip on her own arm plenty enough. Her heart raced in sympathy. “Let her go.”
“This is none of your business,” the man growled at Theta.
The heat moved through Theta. If she used it, she might get all of her friends in trouble. If she didn’t, this woman… well, Theta had a very good idea of what would happen to her when they got home, if this bastard even waited that long.
“I said, let her go,” Theta said, more forcefully.
The man prowled toward Theta like one of the circus lions spying a pigeon outside its cage. “Who asked you?”
Beads of sweat pimpled Theta’s upper lip and along her brow. The fire was coming. If she ran, she might be able to stop it. She didn’t want to stop it. He was almost to her when it tore through her body, engulfing her hands in orange-blue flames. The man fell back, afraid. The voice coming out of Theta crackled with fire as well. “If you ever touch her, I will come for you. I will find you. I will burn you for every woman who has ever been hurt by men like you.”
Theta lifted her hands in front of her, mesmerized by the sight. Her rage was intoxicating; she felt as if she might let the fire blaze until it consumed every bit of her.
The man turned and ran across the fairgrounds, screaming for help from “a crazy woman!”
The slapped wife fell to the ground, also afraid. “Please. Please don’t.”
“I won’t hurt you,” Theta promised. Already, her fire was ebbing. She trembled from the might of all that anger as if she had run for miles. The skin along the backs of her hands had begun to hurt. She raced to a bucket of water sitting outside the lions’ cage and stuck her hands inside, sighing with relief.
“You need to leave him. He’s a bad man,” she said, removing her hands, which hurt, and helping the woman to her feet.
“He isn’t bad all the time,” the woman said. There was an old bruise below her eye.
“That’s what I used to tell myself, too,” Theta said.
The woman’s face crumpled. “What choice do I have?” she said. She straightened her dress and smoothed her hair. “Billy! Billy, wait!” the woman called and ran after him.
“I shouldn’t-a done it, Evil,” Theta said later. Evie had found a nail file, which she was calling a “blessed miracle,” and she was shaping Theta’s ragged fingernails after having doctored Theta’s hands, which looked sunburned. “I put us in danger of being found out. And for what? She just went right back to him.”
Evie paused. “Round or pointy?”
“Surprise me,” Theta said.
“Pointy it is,” Evie said and scraped the file against the side of Theta’s index fingernail. “Oh, Theta, honey, it isn’t as if you meant to hurt him—”
“That’s just it, Evil: I did want to hurt him. I wanted to hurt him real b
ad. I wanted to see him scared, and when I saw that fear, it felt so good I wanted to do it some more. I wanted him to be scared the way I was scared all those times before.” Theta stared at her hands as Evie worked some cream into her cuticles. “I don’t know if I should be trusted with this power. I-I couldn’t stop and it bit me back.”
“Well, it is your power. It lives in you, and it isn’t going away. We’re just going to have to figure out how to control it some, I suppose. Though I don’t mind if certain terrible men are afraid of you,” Evie said.
“Boy, do I know how to make an entrance,” Sam said, barging into the room. “What’s this about terrible men?”
“Nothing,” Evie said, then added, “Don’t be one.”
“Wasn’t planning on it.” He pulled up a chair and sat down.
Evie batted her lashes. “Scram, Sam Lloyd. This is a private conversation.”
Sam got up and put the chair back. “Fortunately, I also know when to make an exit.”
Isaiah wandered the fairgrounds. He bought himself some Cracker Jack and fished out the prize, a little toy soldier he put in his pocket for later. Isaiah frowned as he passed a Fitter Families tent. He’d been to one of those at the Future of America Exhibition, and he hadn’t liked it. The people weren’t nice. They had mean ideas about who mattered and who didn’t. Isaiah looked at all the pamphlets they had stacked on the table. One of them was a WANTED poster with pictures of him and his friends: HAVE YOU SEEN THESE ANARCHISTS? Isaiah didn’t know what an “anarchist” was, but he understood the five-thousand-dollar reward.
“Please don’t touch that,” a white man in a brown suit and wire spectacles said to Isaiah. He was balding a bit.
Quickly, Isaiah put the WANTED poster back down. The man didn’t seem to recognize Isaiah. For that, he was glad. Unsatisfied with Isaiah simply putting the poster back, the man came over to escort him away from the tent. But no sooner had he taken hold of Isaiah’s hand than a vision came down over Isaiah, and there was no stopping it. He could see this man’s future playing out on the picture screen in his head.