“No, I like that.”
“The rhymes?”
I hadn’t noticed the rhymes doing me ill or good. I shrugged.
“The shunt?”
I leaned back and studied her face. I wanted that shunt gone.
“I could coopt that. Make it mine.”
I waited.
“What the thing said is true. If you give me your energy, you won’t have to worry about what to do with it.”
I would have to worry about what she would do with it.
“You don’t even have to know.”
I glanced at Mama and Tobias and Jasper.
“I froze them,” she said. “This conversation is just for us.”
“You froze them?” It was true. They weren’t moving. Their eyes didn’t track. They hung there in mid-motion, stuck in a moment that didn’t move. I stared at Altria. She had taken Jasper’s power and this was what she did with it? I didn’t even know it was possible to freeze Mama or Tobias.
“Just for a moment,” she said.
“Altria, please destroy the shunt.”
She sighed. “Kiss me again.”
I pressed my lips to hers. Something else splintered and broke in my mind, and then power flooded into me.
“Look at that,” Altria said, breathless. “That little machine was sucking so much out of you that it increased your flow.”
Just what I needed. More curse power.
She smiled. “Have fun.” She went to frozen Jasper and kissed his mouth, too, then faded away, and the world ticked forward again. Jasper frowned and glanced around. Tobias blinked three times and stared at me. Mama looked ready to explode on somebody.
I stood there, tension ratcheting my shoulders tight, and smiled at my family.
“Where’d she go?” Jasper said. He stroked his index finger across his lips. “I feel—huh? I’m back to full strength.”
“Are you all right, Gypsum?” Tobias asked.
I almost said “Fine,” but decided against it. They wouldn’t know I was back to being me if I said that. “I need coffee. I need something to eat. Then I need to go recurse that damned computer.”
Nearby wallpaper singed and curled off the wall in strips. Smoke rose from the carpet under my feet.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Fix that,” Mama told me.
“I don’t know how.”
“You’re going to learn.”
“All right. Teach me.”
“Don’t you get sarcastic with me this morning. I’ve already put up with a lot from you.”
“Mama—”
Jasper grabbed my arm. “Let’s go downstairs.”
“THANK you,” I told my brother. “Thank you. Thank you.” I averaged one thank-you per stair step.
Mama and Tobias stayed back in the hall to talk about something. I was glad to get away from Mama. Her explosions always terrified me, even though I couldn’t seem to stop myself from saying things that set her off. Right now I had rivers of heat carving canyons in my shoulders, and I needed to set myself off sometime soon. What if Mama exploded at me and I exploded back? Would the world end? I wasn’t ready to find out.
Jasper said, “Okay. Okay. I’m sufficiently thanked. Is she going to haunt me, Gyp?”
“I don’t know. Thank you for risking it.”
“She terrifies me. And I, I—she fascinates me.” He frowned. “She shouldn’t. I have Trina.”
“We’re venturing into strange territory here.”
“I know. She looked just like you, and she kissed you.”
I didn’t tell him she’d kissed him too. He had been frozen. Maybe he’d never know. “I don’t think she’s me.” It was a question that had been on my mind since Tobias had suggested it the night before, that she was some other part of me I had split off. In a way I wished it were true. She was so confident in her power, so effective in her actions.
“I don’t think she is either. I wonder what she really looks like.”
A woman the size of an elephant, who could catch flying people in midair in the middle of an explosion?
I said, “What happened with Trina, anyway? I forgot to ask yesterday. You drew her in chalk, her head came to life, then you left—”
“Oh. It was historic. Flint was right again. I went to the club, and there she was, asleep with her head on the table while the band was in the middle of a set. I woke her, and she told me about the extremely strange dream she had had. That was it. We watched the rest of the music together and I took her home, and—” He shrugged.
Jasper held the kitchen door open for me and followed me in. Flint and Beryl were eating cereal at the kitchen table. Mama liked it better if everybody ate all their meals at the dining room table, but that involved placemats and carrying everything from the kitchen across the hall to the dining room, and then carting it back and wiping everything down afterward. Eating in the kitchen was a lot easier.
“Jeeze, Gyp!” Flint said. “You changed again? What’d I miss this time?”
“What are you doing in Opal’s dress?” Beryl asked, anger in her voice. She took a hard look at me and jumped to her feet. “What are you doing in Opal’s makeup? If she were here, she would kill you!”
“Would she?”
“You know she would!”
“She could try,” I said. My shoulders twinged. I had to get outside. Only I had no idea what to curse this time, or how. I needed a plan!
“You better stay out of my things!”
My little sister was threatening me. I was in a bad place for that. I wanted to curse her; the energy had so much momentum I wanted to fling it any direction, and she was acting like a target.
“I—Flint, you busy?”
“No.” He jumped up.
“Let’s go bake something.”
“What about the computer?” Jasper asked.
I shook my head. “I can’t wait long enough to think about anything. My flow is accelerated.”
Flint grabbed my hand and pulled me through the house and out back. “What do you want to make today?” he asked.
“Let’s not make creampuffs. This is going to be a lot. Let’s make bread.”
“Bread?”
I didn’t have as many bread recipes on tap as I had other things. It was so much easier to buy bread than to make it. Dad had talked about a bread machine, but we had never gotten around to getting one.
I knew basic steps in breadmaking, and I knew which kinds of bread I loved to eat.
“Bread,” Flint said again. “Okay.”
We sat on the lawn facing each other and holding hands again, and I thought of bread. I dropped almost at once into a trance, where I went through mental motions over and over again. Mix up warm water with yeast and sugar and leave it somewhere warm for fifteen minutes. While it was sitting, go whip up a batch of blueberry muffins. Then make up the dough in a big bowl and add the yeast mixture. Beat the dough, add flour, mix . . . knead the dough. Oh, I felt my shoulders ease while I thought about kneading, kneading, kneading. Then more waiting time while the dough sat under a damp cloth and grew twice its size, might as well make some cupcakes. Punch the dough down to get rid of air bubbles. Knead. Cut in half, form loaves, set the loaves in loaf pans, let them grow again someplace warm. Ahh, so many warm places in this recipe. Bake. . . .
I thought of oat bread and rye bread and pumpernickel, seven grain, sprouted wheat, sourdough and honey bread, cheese bread, banana bread, cornbread and zucchini bread and pretzels and English muffins and bagels and croissants. Muffins. Pita bread. Lovely bread.
FLINT squirmed, woke me out of my trance. I glanced at him, realized I was hot hot hot, and tried to slow my thoughts down, but it was difficult.
At last he said, “Stop, Gyp. Stop it.”
I blinked out of a dream of popovers and looked at him.
There was bread everywhere. It covered the back lawn, stacked chest high in some places. We were cocooned in the aroma of fresh-baked bread. My mouth watered. I let
go of Flint’s hands and grabbed a muffin, peeled it out of its paper petticoat, and ate it. Blueberry. Moist, crumbly, sweet, and satisfying. I grabbed a small loaf of banana bread and bit into that. Delicious, though heavy. Yes.
Flint blew on his hands. Tears tracked his face.
I dropped the little loaf and looked at my brother’s hands. They were angry red and blistered.
“God. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Flint.”
“I was going to figure out a system where this wouldn’t hurt me, but I didn’t have time,” he said. “What happened to you? You’re spilling way more energy. This is too much. I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure how long I can keep this up.”
“My curse bounced back on me.” I tested my shoulders. Still tense, but not very. “I have to go find out what happened with it. Without your help, things I curse turn into people who do things to me. Yesterday was interesting. Today was awful.”
“What did you curse?”
“Aunt Hermina’s computer.”
He glanced toward the guest house. I did too.
Even from here I felt curse heat against my face.
“We have to go check on it,” I said. I had left my aunt alone with that machine, left the machine primed to help anyone it could get its hands on, left it without a clear idea of what “help” meant.
And I had left Jasper and Mama and Tobias to stew about it while I had a bake attack.
Sixteen
“GYP,” said Mama. “What have you done this time?” I glanced up at the back porch. Everybody else was there, even Dad.
“Goodness,” he said. “Guess I won’t have to stop for pastry today.” He came down the steps, surveyed the piles of bread, and selected several fruit muffins.
“Where are you going to put all this?” Mama asked.
“We’ll take it to the shelters,” said Flint. He conjured ice and rubbed it across his palms, winced when he pressed down on blisters. “I’ve got a babysitting gig at the Toussaints’ tonight. I’ll take them a couple loaves. We can freeze some of it. Maybe we could take some to the neighbors. It’s that time of year.”
I stood up. “But first we have to go see what happened to Aunt Hermina. That thing took a lot of energy out of me. What did it use it for?”
The rest of them came down to the walk, where the chalk drawings from two nights ago were wearing away, and peered toward the guest house.
“Dad, you should stay out of this,” I said.
He stared at me.
A sudden gust of misery swept through me. I’d heard the others say things like that to Dad, but I’d never said it before. Now it was out in the open. He was different from the rest of us. I had joined the other side.
“Okay, honey.” He came and kissed my cheek. “I’ll see you all later. Call if I shouldn’t come home tonight. I can go stay with the Kingstons.”
“Take some bread with you,” Flint said. “Give it to anybody you like.”
Dad laughed and grabbed an armful of loaves. He disappeared inside the house.
“Fix your lipstick,” Mama said to me.
“Huh?”
“Here, I’ll do it.” She flicked a finger at me. I felt faint heat on my lips. “You always want to look put together before you go to war,” she told us all. Then she smiled. “What a fine bunch of kids I have.”
I checked us out. Me, Jasper, Beryl, and Flint; we didn’t all stand together very often. I did think we looked like a fine bunch of people, though I couldn’t see myself. I had my memory of Altria in the upstairs hallway, though.
“Let’s go,” Tobias said.
I held back for a second as the others headed down the walk toward the guest house. I looked at the sidewalk chalk. I focused. “Damn,” I whispered, and the pictures vanished, left the walk clean and white.
The walk led past Mama’s roses around the side of the house. Near our kitchen/laundry door, there was an array of doors: one to the multiroom basement under the big house, one to the basement of the guest house, and then a staircase led up to the hall between the guest house and the kitchen. A small fenced yard between the staircase and the house wall held our garbage cans.
We studied the guest house. My face felt hot. I held up my hands, and felt curse heat against my palms.
Plants grew out of the guest house windows, twined around them, sent runners up to the roof and down to the ground.
“What kind of plants are those?” Beryl asked.
“Hermina’s plants,” answered Flint.
“Yeah, but what kind is that?”
“She’s been working to raise more vigorous and powerful strains of medicinal herbs,” Tobias said. “She thought if she could get herbs to fix some kinds of magic so that they were resident in the herbs until applied to medical problems, that would be very handy.”
“Wonder if she’s got something for burns,” Flint muttered.
“Regardless of what kind of plants they are,” said Mama, “they’re not behaving as they should. I told Hermes she could do anything she liked out here so long as she kept it quiet and inside. This violates our covenant.”
“It’s not her fault,” Jasper said.
Mama looked sideways at him.
“It’s my curse.” I stepped past Mama and Tobias and climbed the stairs to knock on Hermina’s door.
No one answered.
Everyone moved up around me. I knocked again. “Aunt Hermina?” I called. “You in there? Are you okay?”
A voice answered, but I couldn’t understand what it said. I checked with my relatives. Jasper shook his head.
“We’re coming in,” I said. I tried the doorknob. It turned, but when I pushed on the door, there was resistance. Had something fallen across the door in the hallway? I pushed harder. The door opened a crack, and leaves rustled and shifted in that gap.
I pulled the door shut. I looked at Uncle Tobias.
“What’s your sense?”
“It’s my energy.” I felt it pulse at me through the door.
“Your mess. You clean it up,” Mama said. “We’ll help you. This time.”
I bit my lower lip, shoved on the door, and pushed it farther open, fighting back a wall of too-mobile plants.
The hallway between the bedrooms had turned into a jungle. As soon as I got the door all the way open, vines sent runners out to explore the outdoors.
So much lively life! Like Beryl’s chalk plants. I stepped into the hall, crunching stems and leaves under my high heels as I went; there was no place to step without stepping on plants. Scents of fresh rosemary and thyme, basil and peppermint, a mingling of other strong scents I didn’t recognize rose from the crushed leaves and stems. These plants didn’t curl around and trap me. After I took a few steps among them, they tried to move out of the way.
I gave them some time. They cleared a narrow pathway to the back bedroom for me. I stepped carefully, and everybody else followed me single file into the house. “Aunt?” I called.
She answered, but not in words. A smothered cry. I pushed past hanging plants, plants that didn’t naturally grow that way, but plants that grew that way now.
The foliage was even thicker in her office. The plants had blocked all the windows so that most of the light was dim and green, though there was a faint haloed blaze of synthetic light where her desk used to be. I pushed and picked my way that direction; the curse heat was stronger there.
Aunt Hermina sat at her desk, her hands flat on top of it. The computer rode her like a child playing piggyback, its long thin white legs tight around her waist, its arms around her neck. Its hands reached up to cover her mouth. Its keyboard pressed against the back of her head, and its screen peered over the top of her head at us. Her own eyes were wide. When she saw me she struggled, tried to lift her hands, but they were snugged down, like the rest of her, by vines and roots and rampant vegetation. Or maybe some of the white threads that tied her to her chair came from the computer’s body. It was hard to tell in the dim and denseness.
“This isn’t the charge I gave you,” I said to the computer.
Its pale face stared at me. “I’m helping. I’m working.”
“You’re hurting!”
“No. I’m helping her realize her dreams faster than she ever thought possible.” It frowned. “You cut off my power. How could you cut off my power? Now we won’t be able to pursue our studies. Why did you reject my help?” It lifted a hand and reached for me, and Hermina shook her head, managed to get the other hand away from her mouth.
“Get it off me!” she cried.
I didn’t know how to shield myself the way Tobias and Jasper did. I focused. I hunched my shoulders. I narrowed my concentration. “Damn,” I murmured.
The computer incinerated, disintegrated, ghosted away in a second. Hermina screamed.
I stumbled forward. “Did I hurt you?” I had tried to keep my curse confined just to the computer itself. I didn’t want any of the fallout to hit her. But it had been on her back. Had I burned her?
She screamed again, and started crying. She struggled, tried to lift her hands. Her plants still bound her. I went to her and pulled at the trapping plants, but she said, “Get away from me!” and turned her head.
Stung, I backed up, right into Jasper. He gripped my shoulders and edged me around, then helped me out of the room. “Go on outside,” he said. “We’ll clear up the rest of this.”
Somehow I made it to the kitchen. My hands trembled as I poured coffee. I loaded it with sugar and milk and sat at the table, sipped until I stopped sobbing.
I had the power of curses. I could either destroy things utterly, or change them so they hurt people I loved. Or, if I could get someone or something to sit still long enough, I could launder my power through someone else and then it could do good things. And burn the people who helped me.
I wished I knew how to fix all the things Mama wanted me to fix.
She would probably tell me to clean up the guest house, too. I could damn all those plants into oblivion. I would hate that. It wasn’t the plants’ fault they were made to grow. But I could do it. On the other hand, maybe Aunt Hermina never wanted to see me again, and somebody else would have to clean things up.
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