A swift gust tugged the dandelion from my hands, disrupting my concentration, and the light burned out. I was dark inside, as though the fire had been snuffed and suffocated without my approval, but it wasn’t the same cathartic relief as yesterday.
“Hmm,” Nora said thoughtfully. “Your eyes are blue again. What did you do?”
“No idea. It’s gone though.”
“What is?”
I patted my chest, unable to put my ailment into words. “Whatever this is.”
Nora scooted over to me and offered her hands. “Do you want it back? I’ve depleted myself before. It’s not permanent.”
I hesitated before placing my hands in hers. I wished that the lack of energy was permanent. It would save me a whole lot of hassle. On the other hand, I felt nauseous in the absence of the familiar smolder. As Nora infused me with some of her own power, the light turned back on. My stomach settled, and comfort washed through me at its return.
Nora squeezed my fingers reassuringly. “The good news is that you didn’t blow anything up,” she said. “But the bad news is that you didn’t blow anything up.”
“I’m not sure which is worse.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll practice together. I can teach you.”
She resumed her lunch, finishing off the cheese and chugging a bottle of fresh lemonade. Her confidence both inspired and worried me. Maybe Nora was right. Maybe the reason for my bad luck was that I’d never attempted to master my abilities. Now that Nora was determined to teach me her ways, I wasn’t so sure. While the thought of living a normal life was more than enticing, there were risks involved. It wasn’t lost on me that the one and only time I’d accessed my energy was during a complete failure to manage my rage. If unstoppable anger was what it took to fuel that power, I refused to put Nora in the crosshairs. For now, it was okay to entertain her, but at the first sign of trouble, I intended to shut our “lessons” down before either one of us could get hurt.
By the time we rode back to the house, I was sweaty and tired. Nora offered to put the horses away. I insisted on brushing my borrowed buddy down, but he apparently belonged to Adrienne, who followed a specific routine to take care of him, so I left Nora to it. In the backyard, the swimming pool glimmered like an invitation. I knelt alongside the bordering brick pavers and dipped my fingers in the water. It was heated, just tepid enough to offset the cool wind but refreshing enough to soothe my skin. I stripped out of my new clothes, slid in, and swam a couple of laps. Like last night’s bath, the water calmed me. I automatically felt more at ease, floating on my back as the sun danced on my eyelids. The guest house hid the pool from view of the main house. Otherwise, I never would’ve dared to jump in. Unless Adrienne fancied a dip, we wouldn’t run into each other.
I lay on the patio for a bit and let the sun dry me out. Then I tossed my new jeans and sweater over my shoulder, snuck past the windows of the main house, and scaled the ivy that led up to my secluded bedroom on the second floor. The longer I could avoid that talk with my father, the better. The climb busied my mind as I sought handholds and strong roots to hoist myself upward. My back and shoulders spoke to me, happy for a challenge that differed from the usual calisthenics I did every day. I reached the window and somersaulted in, puffing out a laugh. It felt good to move. Between the horseback riding, the mid-morning swim, and the improvised rock wall, my muscles sang in perfect harmony with each other. For a brief moment, I savored the sweetness of being alive. Then I noticed that the bed had been stripped. The sheets and duvet were gone, along with the pillow that I’d hidden the necklace in.
I ripped the mattress cover off to search underneath it. Then I checked under the bed, behind the headboard, and in the drawer of the side table in case Helen had found the necklace herself. It was empty save for a few dust bunnies, so I thundered from the room, raced down the corridor, and took the stairs two at a time, not caring about who I might interrupt in my haste. The laundry room was next to the kitchen. I blasted through the swinging doors, nearly decapitating Helen as she carried a load of towels in a laundry basket.
“Helen!” I took her by the shoulders. “Did you find a necklace in my room? Zipped into the pillow protector?”
Helen looked as though all she wanted to do was fold her towels in peace. “No, Miss McGrath.”
I tore past her into the laundry room. The royal purple duvet cover spun in the window of the dryer. I pressed the pause button and yanked the damp linens onto the floor. The pillow protectors shook free of the duvet cover, but when I overturned each one to look inside, there was no hint of the tree pendant necklace. I threw everything aside and searched through the dirty sheets waiting to be washed. No glint of gold greeted me.
“Looking for this?”
Adrienne’s chilly voice turned my bones to ice. The necklace dangled from her slim fingers, the tree pendant swaying back and forth like a tiny pendulum.
I held out my hand. “Give it to me.”
Adrienne laughed without humor, cupping the necklace in her palm so that it was no longer visible. “Say please.”
“Don’t mess with me, Adrienne.”
“What are you going to do?” she teased. “Run to Daddy? To Nora?”
She wanted a rise out of me. While Nora did everything in her power to keep me cool and collected, Adrienne prodded and poked me like a bull in a pen. It had been that way since I was a child. Adrienne provided snide remarks and sidelong glares and sickening insults until I learned to tune them out. At some point, I shut down completely. I was an empty frame, sitting at the same dining room as my parents but never truly present. For years, I was vacant and emotionless. Otherwise, my luck worsened and my hate for Adrienne bubbled over. I would not give her the satisfaction of angering me after the first few hours during which I’d actually enjoyed myself in over a year.
“Listen, Adrienne.” I crossed the small room in long, languid strides until my face was inches from Adrienne’s own and smiled down at her. It delighted me that she had to look up if she wanted to challenge my glare. “I’m going to stay here as long as I want. I’ll swim in your pool and sleep in your sheets and eat the organic food from your table. I’ll talk to my father like I haven’t seen him a year—because I haven’t—and I’ll laugh with my sister without the looming feeling that I’ve done something wrong because you don’t approve.” Adrienne’s sneer deepened with every declaration, but I wasn’t done yet. “I don’t have a lot of things that I care about. Nora’s one of them, and I will forever question why you think that’s such a terrible quandary. But that necklace—” I pointed to her clenched fist “—is something else I never intend to give up. Yesterday, someone tried to steal it from me. Can you imagine what I did to him?”
I was exaggerating, but the lethal tone of my voice and the quiet calm with which I spoke spread like a thick fog through the cramped room. A quick flash of something—fear or uncertainty or utter hatred—turned Adrienne’s green eyes sour. It lasted less than a second, but it lit the torch in my core again, and I pinned Adrienne’s hand to the door frame in order to pry the necklace from her polished fingers—
A hot burst of power ruptured through me, and a cloud of utterly black darkness mushroomed outward, sweeping to the far corners of the laundry room and the kitchen. The washer and dryer shut off. A value-sized container of soap fell off a shelf and cracked open. Dishes in the rack next to the sink shattered, while a collection of pans that hung from a contraption bolted to the ceiling rattled in place as though an earthquake shook the ground below. I half-expected Adrienne to drop, knocked unconscious like Chad, but she remained standing and steady. Before either one of us could acknowledge the damage, the door to the kitchen swung open. My father bolted in, followed closely by Helen and Nora. The three of them stood dumbstruck as they stared at the wreckage. Adrienne’s grip on the necklace loosened, and I wrenched it free while everyone was distracted, hiding the humble piece of jewelry behind my back.
“What the hell happe
ned down here?” Dad demanded. He clapped a hand over his eyes as he caught sight of me and Adrienne nose-to-nose in the laundry room. “And Kennedy, why are you only half-dressed?”
My father’s study remained mostly unchanged in the past thirty years. His book collection expanded, the leather sofa was reupholstered once, and the comforting scents of pipe tobacco and mint fluctuated in intensity, but the dark quiet room was safe from Adrienne’s devilish effect. It was the one place in the house she allowed to exist separate from herself. I assumed it was because my father had an acute obsession with rugby and the tendency to shout profanities at the players on the screen during games. The large flatscreen in the corner of his office allowed him to do so in the comfort of his own space, and the large oak doors prevented his booming voice from carrying to the rest of the house.
As I waited for my father, I perused his bookshelves, looking for new acquisitions. My father hadn’t passed his love of reading on to me. As much as I wanted to dive into tales of adventure and swashbuckling, especially as a child, the words weren’t enough to keep my attention for long, at which point my fingertips seared cigarette burns into the precious pages of expensive first editions. My father never questioned why or how his books were marred, and I had no intention of telling him. When your child was accused of arson so often, it wasn’t exactly a mystery. I picked up a novel by Joseph Conrad and leafed through the first few pages. The door to the study creaked open, and my father walked in. He ducked his head to look at the cover of the book.
“Who knows what true loneliness is?” he quoted. “Not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.”
“Cheery,” I said, snapping the book shut and returning it to the shelf. “So Conrad was an optimist?”
My father chuckled. “Do you know why I remember that excerpt?”
“Why?”
“Because you burned a hole in that page.”
I grimaced. So he did know. “Sorry about that.”
He caressed the leathery spines of his collection, sending dust swirling into the air. “Every time you leave, I spend hours combing through these old books. Do you remember how often you hid in my study?”
“It was the only place Adrienne wouldn’t hound me,” I told him. “When she was chasing after me to hem yet another uniform skirt or punish me for spilling a glass of apple juice across the upholstery, I would come in here to escape.”
My father nodded solemnly. I was accustomed to his inability to process the feud between his daughter and second wife. He preferred to avoid the matter rather than confront it, which was fine now that I was grown and able to defend myself, but in my youth, I would have liked a father who did more than feebly attempt to keep the peace.
“You said you wanted to talk,” I reminded him. “What about?”
“We’ll get to that in a minute. Take a seat.” He sat in the chair behind his desk and propped his feet up on the ink blotter. I plopped down on the leather sofa. My father sighed wistfully. “Less than a day, Kennedy. You’ve been home less than a day, and my kitchen is already demolished. You want to fill me in on that fiasco?”
No matter how many times I had a conversation just like this one, my reaction never changed. I was at a loss for what to say. Yes, I had somehow managed to annihilate an entire room of dishware and appliances without making physical contact with anything. There was no explanation for that. There was no lie that might serve as an explanation for that. As usual, I contemplated my lack of answers quietly and waited for someone else to fill in the blanks.
“You know what?” Dad said, raising his hands in defeat. “I don’t want to know. Honestly, I think we’re past the point where I need to know. Just—can you keep the vandalism at a minimum while you’re here, Ken?”
“While I’m here?” I repeated. “You’re not kicking me out?”
My father looked taken aback. “Kick you out? Why would I do that?”
“I thought when you said we needed to talk—”
“You thought I was going to tell you to leave?” he finished for me. “Kennedy, I would never ask that of you.”
While it was comforting to hear him say it, doubt lingered in the back of my mind. “Then what is it?”
He released a gusty breath, setting his feet on the floor as though he needed sturdy ground to support himself. “Listen, Ken. I worry about you. Day after day, year after year. You can’t live your life like this. You can’t flounce from one job to the next, one city to another. You can’t keep coming back here—”
Dad cut himself off, his eyes snapping up to catch my reaction to the words he surely didn’t mean to let slip out.
“So this is that conversation,” I said.
“No, I—”
“Is it Adrienne?” I asked. “Did she finally convince you that I’m the spawn of Satan?”
“Don’t say that, Ken.”
I stood up and tossed the knit blanket to the floor. “I’ll pack my stuff.”
“Don’t you dare.”
The order rumbled across the study before I reached the door. I stopped. While I had no misgivings about disobeying Adrienne’s requests, my father was different. For one, I retained a certain amount of respect for him, even if he didn’t entirely deserve it. And two, if I committed to my declaration, I really would be homeless. I’d probably end up hawking the pretty sweaters and designer jeans that Nora had bought me in exchange for a place to sleep and a couple cans of instant soup.
“I’ve struck a deal with Adrienne,” my father said. He was tired. I could tell by the slump of his shoulders. Less than a day, as he’d so recently reminded me, and I’d wearied him already.
“What kind of deal?” I asked, apprehension building in my wary tone.
“She’s been wanting to hold a gala,” Dad explained, waving a hand to indicate the silliness of such desires. “Originally, I put my foot down. This year has been trouble enough without cake tastings and doily comparisons and ‘shall we have cream napkins or off-white napkins?’”
“I quite enjoy the cake tastings actually.”
He silenced me with a look. “I told her that if she left you alone to do whatever you need to do in order to get back on your feet, she could have her gala.”
“You did?”
“I did.”
I was stupefied. For once, my father had actually stood up to Adrienne. He’d told her to cut me some slack. That alone was enough to raise questions. That alone made me ask, “What’s the catch?”
“Why would there be a catch?”
“Because it’s Adrienne.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “It has to be different this time, Kennedy. I don’t care if you stay here for a month or a year, but when you leave this house again, I need you to be able to take care of yourself once and for all.”
It was the final inning. That’s what my father was telling me. This was my last chance. If I struck out again, I could no longer fall back on Dad and Nora. I nodded, accepting the terms and conditions without reading the fine print, but I had one final question.
“Hey, Dad?”
“Yes, Kennedy.”
“Do you ever get tired of choosing your wife over your daughter?”
He was too mentally exhausted to start a sparring match with me. Instead, he afforded me a long, tired look. “Ken, between the two of you, I don’t know what to choose anymore.”
“She’s unbearable.”
“She’s different with you,” Dad said. “We’re fine otherwise. It’s just you.”
I turned to leave. I’d heard enough.
“Ken?”
I nearly ignored him. One foot was already in the hallway. “What?”
“Why did you argue? What was the nature of the kitchen confrontation?”
I swallowed hard, wondering if I should tell him or not. It was a sore subject to say the least, but my decision solidified as the words It’s just you echoed th
rough my head.
“She tried to take Mom’s necklace.”
I escaped into the hallway and eased the door to the study shut before my father’s dumbfounded expression caused me to say something stupid. In his world, and in Adrienne’s, my mother didn’t exist. It was as though I’d simply appeared on the scene as a collection of cells without explanation. My mother was a modern-day mystery. I didn’t know who she was, what she looked like, or how my father had met her. I didn’t even know her name. My father didn’t keep pictures or trinkets. The tiny tree pendant was all I had of hers. I had no memory of how I’d acquired it, but for as long as I’d been on the planet, the necklace remained with me as the sole indication of my heritage.
“Oomph! Nora!”
My little sister lurked out of sight just beyond the study’s doors—most likely eavesdropping—and I’d bumped right into her.
“What’d he say?” she asked. “Can you stay?”
“Yeah, I can stay.”
She pumped her fist in a gesture of victory. “Yes!”
“Don’t get too excited,” I warned her, leading her away from the study so that our voices didn’t carry through to the other side of the door. “I have a feeling you won’t be seeing me much once I leave.”
Nora sobered immediately. “Why not?”
I looked down at her. My heart tightened at the sad shape of her eyes. “They’re tired of me. Hell, I’m tired of me. I can’t keep coming back here.”
Nora hugged me from the side, and we walked up the stairs to my room attached at the hip. “I’m not tired of you.”
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