A Broken Fate
Page 42
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I got up early on Saturday morning, made a pot of coffee, and got back to work. Ari joined me an hour or so later.
“Did you find anything?” he asked, taking a sip out of my coffee cup.
“Not really, but look at this,” I slid the journal across the desk at him.
“Look at the back page,” I told him, nodding my chin at the book.
He stared at the back cover for a long time before he finally spoke.
“Is that your tattoo?”
“Mmm hmm.” My mom had doodled all over the inside of the back cover. One of her drawings was an almost perfect small-scale replica of my bird tattoo. Next to it, she had also sketched six tally marks. Five of them were two inches long just like mine, and then the sixth one was longer and jagged.
“Look in the corner,” I said to him quietly.
There were three dates written in perfect handwriting in the upper right hand corner: 09/03/2011; 08/04/2012; 10/07/2013. “The first is the day my mother died; the second is the day we got married.”
“And the third?” Ari asked a bit shaky.
“I don’t know,” I bit the inside of my lip. “We have about ten months to find out.”
Ari flipped the page; on the other side were numerous tally marks. In fact, my mother had added tally marks all throughout the journal, in the margins and in corners.
Ari looked down at them and then back to me. “You do this, too.”
I blinked at him.
“I’ve seen you do it. Sometimes I don’t think you realize that you are making the marks, but you do make them, though not as much as you used to. Whenever you have a pen and paper in your hand you make tally marks.”
“Force of habit, I suppose.”
“That’s an odd habit.”
“Mmm,” I agreed. “I started to make tally marks when I was young; when I first began to dream the scissor dream. It scared me when I was little; people screaming, pleading with me behind closed doors, people crying in obvious pain. I began to tally up how often I would have the dream. When I moved from Chicago to California, I had to pack my bedroom up and I found pages and pages covered with tallies.” I shrugged.
Ari frowned at me. “We will figure this whole thing out, Ava. It won’t be like this forever.”
“I know.” I nodded and then got back to work.
Ari and I spent the rest of the morning in the study and uncovered a few actual words, but we didn’t know where to put them in the progression of the note.
At four thirty, Ari stood up.
“We have to get moving, Ava.”
“Why, what are you talking about?”
“We have to be in L.A. at eight. It takes over an hour to get there and you take ages to get ready.”
“L.A?” I scrunched my nose.
“Margaux,” he said, reminding me of her silly dinner party.
“We’re still going to that?”
“We have to, Ava. I’m sorry, there is no way I can cancel.”
He wiggled his fingers, I took his hand, and he pulled me to my feet. We walked back to the bedroom and I threw open the closet doors.
“I have no idea of what to wear.”
“Um,” Ari said, rubbing the stubble on his face, “Margaux sent home a dress from her new line that she really wants you to wear tonight.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“I’m not, but it’s really pretty, Ava; you’ll like it, so don’t freak out. I left it in the car.”
He went to get the dress and I climbed into the shower and let the hot water run down my back. I heard the bathroom door open a few minutes later. My stomach did little somersaults and a giggle escaped my lips as the shower doors opened.