The Wise and the Wicked

by Rebecca Podos

  Suddenly, Cece sat upright, smiling politely at an approaching waitress. She kept smiling even after the woman plopped her paper basket of hash browns on the table and stalked away to fill Ruby’s order of an ice water. Then she leaned in. “If you don’t believe the bad guys are real, why do you believe any of the stories about us?”

  These were not new questions between the cousins, but very old ones: Do you believe? How much do you believe? In magic? How can you?

  Ruby had been trying to figure that out in earnest since she’d picked up The Demon-Haunted World in its plastic jacket the first time around, and with every Sagan book since, and each late-night Wikipedia binge, and even with Kerrigan Black, who believed that the legends, myths, and monsters people feared had a scientific truth at their center. Pearls form around a speck of grit to protect the oyster, and so to protect us from what we can’t yet understand, stories grow around a grain of truth was one of Ruby’s favorite Kerrigan quotes.

  And so, after years of careful consideration, Ruby had decided that she had no fucking idea.

  Maybe Kerrigan Black was right, and everything in the world really did break down into water and salt and the periodic table of elements. There were a lot of mysteries left in the world: Why did the sun’s corona blaze hotter than the fiery neon photosphere of the sun itself? Why did perfect ice circles form over slow-moving water, like glass mushrooms sprouting from the cold surface? What caused a hurricane on Saturn, where there were no oceans? And if monarch butterflies only lived long enough to migrate one way, how did their children find their way back to a home they couldn’t remember, but must somehow have felt in their small bodies, in their blood? Science had yet to solve these puzzles, though presumably, someday, it would.

  There were people, too, lots of them out there, capable of strange and “scientifically impossible” feats that were, nevertheless, possible. Ruby had looked for them, read all about them, collected them. Akira Haraguchi could recite the first 100,000 decimal places of pi from memory. Henrietta Lacks was the first known person whose “immortal” cells could divide forever outside of her body. A Dutch man named Wim Hof could control his autonomic nervous system to survive extreme cold through meditation—he’d climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in shorts—and a group of Tibetan monks could raise their body temperatures with meditation, enough to dry large towels soaked with ice water and draped around their shoulders within an hour. A karate expert, Masutatsu Oyama, had once killed three bulls with one punch each.

  And then there was magic.

  Ruby had done her research, read about voodoo and Santeria and the Vlach women of Serbia—witches who lifted black curses and told the future (or, depending who you asked, poisoned their enemies with coffee made from water used to bathe dead bodies). Common sense said they were just sharp, perceptive women who served as counselors in their small villages. Their advice was solid, and when people took their advice, their lives improved, which fed rumors of the witches’ powers.

  Wasn’t that exactly what her sisters did, under Polina’s tutelage?

  Still, if their great-aunt really had been holding on to some sort of ancient knowledge, family secrets that only she, as the eldest child of the woman in the woods, had been privy to . . . then maybe the stories weren’t just fairy tales, after all. At least, not totally.

  “‘We wish to pursue the truth no matter where it leads,’” Ruby quoted Sagan to her cousin.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I believe,” she said slowly, “that I don’t know exactly what to believe. But it can’t hurt to try and figure it out.”

  “Assuming there are no bad guys?”

  “I didn’t say there never were. And maybe they murdered the woman in the woods and drove out Polina and her sisters—fuck, women get driven out of their homes for having periods, never mind for magic. But this is America. This is Saltville. I don’t see any villains around here. Nobody worse than our Republican mayor and that religious guy who screams at women outside the Popeyes. So what exactly are we hiding from? I just . . .” She collapsed against the seat back. “I get that you have the normal family—”

  “I’m not—” Cece started, pink and indignant.

  “It’s fine, but you are, and you do. You get the mom and the dad and the two-syllable last name and you never have to fight the wasp uprisings. And your Time was probably awesome, and your future is, like, bouncy castles and champagne forever, and you die when you’re ninety, while boning one of the Hemsworths. Or both, and that’s great, ’cause you’re my best friend and I love you, and I’d be really, really happy for you. But that’s not what I—” Ruby drummed her boots against the booth in frustration. “If there’s even a little tiny particle of you that wants to be someone slightly different, why not try to find out how? So the rest of the family is too scared, but I think . . . maybe . . . we’re supposed to know. I think Polina would want us to stop being afraid.” Ruby wasn’t at all sure of that. Their great-aunt had never said as much. She’d only repeated the family lines: stay hidden, stay safe. But believing so made her next suggestion easier to say aloud. “I think we should go back to her house.”

  “You want to break into Polina’s house?”

  “Break in? No.” A touch dramatically, she slid the heavy key ring out of her pocket and slapped it onto the tabletop. The brass medallion with its curled P glinted under the diner lights.

  Cece shook her head. “I love you, and I’m not saying that you’re being sociopathic. But our great-aunt just died in that house. And you want to sneak in and root through her stuff for, like, clues?”

  It did sound sociopathic when a nice, normal person said it aloud. “It’s not like that,” Ruby protested weakly.

  Screwing her eyebrows up, Cece stared at Ruby in a way she rarely did. “Your Time wasn’t bouncy castles and champagne, was it, Bebe?” she asked.

  Deep inside of Ruby, something rattled. It was the truth, she knew, caged for three long years, but never peaceful in captivity. Awake and wild, it crashed against her ribs like a zoo animal mangling itself on the bars of its pen to break out.

  “Bebe,” Cece repeated softly.

  Bursting through in a spray of bone shards, the truth clawed its way up her throat, swollen and raw-feeling in its wake.

  “Bebe, come on!” Cece’s foot nudged hers below the table. “Forget the deal. Just because I can’t . . . Because I’m not ready . . .”

  Impossibly heavy on her tongue, now it pounded against her teeth, and if her cousin said one more word—

  “You don’t have to keep the secret. You can tell me anything.”

  She let her mouth fall open, and the truth broke free.

  • Eleven •

  Entry in the Chernyavsky Recordings

  February 11, 2016

  I’m in Ginger’s car, the Malibu, except I’m driving. I’m young, maybe seventeen or eighteen? I can feel it. Plus there’s a Physics 2 textbook on the floor of the passenger seat with a badger sticker on the cover, and that’s the Saltville High mascot. So unless it’s seriously overdue, I’m still in high school.

  It’s morning, and the sun is coming up through the windshield, but I know I’m not driving to school. I’m on a street I don’t recognize, and I’m drinking gross coffee out of a foam to-go cup from a diner I’ve never heard of, so I don’t think it’s in Saltville. There are empty ones just like it stuffed into every cup holder and side pocket, and crumpled up turnpike tickets, too. Like the kind we got that summer Mom took us to Pennsylvania on vacation, when it was my job to hold onto them for her between the tollbooths.

  This okay band, Creatures Such As We, comes on the radio, and I turn it up. Somebody’s waiting for me. I’m singing along to this song, even though it’s not my favorite, but I’m really excited to get where I’m going and see them.

  Then I don’t see anything else.

  —Ruby Chernyavsky, age 13

  • Twelve •

  She’d expected Cece to fling herself across
the tabletop, scattering hash browns in her haste to comfort Ruby.

  Instead, her cousin retreated, shivering right down to the tips of her braids as she pressed herself against the seatback. “Oh, Ruby . . .” Cece said, her name an almost-soundless exhalation, a wisp of breath.

  “It’s okay,” Ruby lied.

  “Do Dahlia and Ginger know?”

  “I never told them.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they couldn’t change it,” she said. But that was a lie, too, or at least it wasn’t the whole truth.

  Despite the new lightness in Ruby’s chest, she already regretted telling Cece. Though she’d wanted her cousin’s help, needed it—this was too big a mystery to solve alone, and how could Cece deny her now?—she’d never told her sisters because she hadn’t wanted them to look at her for the rest of her life like she was dying. She didn’t want them to treat her like she was . . . weak. To look at her with trepidation, as though inspecting fruit in a bowl for signs of rot, or watching for a tiny crack in a glass to star and shatter, the way she knew they would.

  Why had she thought her cousin would be different?

  “We should tell your mom,” Cece whispered.

  “What?” Ruby hissed in return. “Why?”

  “She grew up with Polina. Maybe she knows something. She might—”

  “If she thought Polina could change Times, why would she have run away from hers? She would’ve just asked Polina for help. She doesn’t know anything,” Ruby insisted. She was scrambling to justify herself, but as she spoke, she knew the logic was sound. “Evelina can’t help us, and we can’t trust her.”

  “Okay, I get it. I just don’t know what we can find out by ourselves.”

  “Let’s go there and see!”

  “We can’t go now,” Cece said, aghast. “We have school.”

  Ruby rolled her eyes. “Tonight, then.”

  “Maybe . . . I promised Talia I’d come over.”

  “So? Is that really more important?”

  Cece blanched and flushed at the same moment, her round cheeks marbled. “No, of course not,” she said quickly, quietly.

  Ruby paused to take a breath. If she didn’t want Cece treating her as if she were dying in the next twenty-four hours, she probably shouldn’t act like it. “Sorry, that was rude. What if . . . we could go together?” she suggested as sincerely as possible.

  “To the Mahalels’?” Her cousin’s eyes widened.

  “Yeah, why not? It’s not like you’re on a date. We could, like, watch a movie or something. You’re always asking me to hang out with you guys, right? So I’ll come, and then we’ll go to Polina’s.”

  Cece’s mouth fell open while Ruby drank her ice water as casually as possible.

  It was true that Ruby had little use for non-Chernyavskys.

  But right now, she very badly needed a Baker.

  • Thirteen •

  That evening, Ruby tried to smuggle herself out the door before her sisters asked too many questions about her plans, but was stopped by a puzzling sight: Dahlia, cleaning the kitchen. She knelt in front of the refrigerator, from which every rotten lettuce head and flat soda can and jar of long-expired mayonnaise had been exhumed. In elbow-length rubber gloves, she scrubbed at the drawer that had been sticky with spilled syrup since Ruby could remember. Even Ginger wouldn’t touch it. She’d claimed the middle shelf for her fancy Icelandic yogurts that were twice the cost of American yogurt—her one indulgence, and not an exciting one at that—but had washed her hands of the rest after the Great Maple Syrup Spill of ’17.

  “What are you doing?”

  Dahlia sat back on her slippers, rubber-gloved hands held up like a surgeon’s. “Chores. You look nice.”

  Ruby wore a slouchy black sweater, one of Ginger’s old ones, with embroidered skulls the size and colors of candy hearts, and her own scuffed black skinny jeans. She meant to say thanks. Instead she asked, “Why?”

  “Why do you look nice?”

  “Why are you doing chores?”

  “Because that’s my job, Ruby.” Dahlia wiped an elbow across her sweaty brow, lilac bangs plastered to her forehead. “I take care of things. Who else will do it if I don’t?”

  By her sister’s uncharacteristically barbed tone, Ruby guessed Ginger wasn’t the correct answer. “Sorry, I was just . . . surprised.” Though the way to the door was clear and the night beyond beckoned, she hesitated, even as Dahlia dove back into the refrigerator. “Hey . . . are you okay?”

  “Of course,” her big sister’s voice echoed around the vegetable crisper.

  It was rough, and Ruby suspected if she were to turn around again, tears would hover in her eyelashes, sand-colored without makeup. But Dahlia didn’t turn, and Ruby didn’t ask the next question on her lips: Is this about Mom? If Ginger was wrong, if Dahlia had reached out to their mother or planned to, she hadn’t told Ruby about it.

  Instead, she rushed to the hook beside the door and grabbed her keys, and Polina’s where they hung beside them.

  She’d have to wait to use them. The plan was for Cece and Ruby to meet at the Mahalels’, since Dov and Talia lived only a short walk from Cece on Oak. Ruby parked outside a tall red saltbox house with an antique plaque that read 1886 beside the door. She’d seen the place before, driving through the nice part of Saltville a few months back to look at Christmas lights with her sisters. All the houses around them were decorated with classy white string lights and bushy evergreen wreaths, while the saltbox had been a glitterless island. That made sense now. Ruby knew they were Jewish—Talia had been talking Hanukkah plans around the lunch table when everybody else had been obsessed with Christmas—but even so, the Mahalels’ still looked like a gingerbread house. One in good condition, with its round shrubs, and neat stone path, and the warm golden squares of the windows. She parked against the curb just as Cece came strolling up to the driveway.

  Although she’d only admitted her Time this morning, and they’d seen each other at lunch like always, Cece had somehow found time to text her between classes all day, each message more painfully heartfelt than the last.

  Cece: Hey, how are you?

  Cece: Are you okay?

  Cece: Thank you for telling me

  Cece: About your Time I mean

  Cece: How are you feeling?

  Cece: Sorry, you don’t have to answer that

  Cece: Don’t worry, like you said, we’ll figure it out!

  Cece: I love you Bebe

  Now Cece held her arms out to Ruby, gloves grasping and sympathy in her eyes.

  Ruby raised her own cold hands to slow Cece’s approach. “I have a proposal.”

  Her cousin stopped in her tracks. “Okay?”

  “I will allow this one hug, and it can last as long as you want and I won’t even fight it. But after that, let’s just . . . press pause on the whole ‘Ruby’s dying’ deal. We don’t have to ignore it”—she hurried to speak over Cece’s objections—“but could we just . . . not talk about it or act like it’s happening in any way, unless whatever we’re doing is directly related to it?”

  After a moment, Cece nodded. “I can do that.” Then she wrapped herself around Ruby. At least she didn’t hug delicately, as if Ruby’s bones were paper and might fold under the slightest force.

  When she’d gotten her fill, Cece backed away, though she held Ruby’s cold fist in one fuzzy gloved hand as they crossed the lawn side by side.

  It was Dov who answered the doorbell, shivering in the gust of cold wind that accompanied them. He tugged down the sleeves of a baggy henley, crisp white against his tan skin, and swooped the unsettled hair back off his face. Cece wasn’t wrong—he had a good face. Features you’d call “fine.” Better than Levi Dorgan’s, which was all teeth, his dull blue eyes trained always on Ginger’s ass, like a crocodile watching an innocent zebra as it approached the water to drink. Dov’s big brown eyes flickered between the cousins, so it was hard to tell which of them his smile was meant for. Probably
Cece, whose pounds of hair rippled free around the shoulders of her pristine white wool coat, her lipstick bright and glossy so her lips looked like dewy peach slices.

  Ruby’s heart betrayed her without warning, pumping bitterly. All the hot blood in her veins—red cells and white cells and plasma and platelets—vibrating with one poisonous thought: Why not me? The feeling passed just as quickly. But she clutched Cece’s hand even tighter, disgusted by the small, secret, sour chamber of her heart that wanted to take something, some boy she barely knew, from Cece. As if anything or anybody mattered more than family.

  Cece squeezed back, probably mistaking it for nerves. “Where’s Talia?” she asked Dov.

  He stepped back to let them inside the mudroom, neatly lined with sneakers and boots and very tall heels. “Basement. You guys can go down. I’ll tell you guys when the pizza gets here.”

  “You’re not watching the movie?”

  “Oh, hell no. I don’t do horror.” As Cece went in, he turned back to Ruby, still shuffling out of her snow boots. “What’s up, Sir Charles Lytton?”

  She paused, standing in a single boot. “Who?”

  “He’s the thief. The Phantom. From those movies. I looked it up.” Dov blushed through his tan but finished bravely, “It’s funny if I don’t have to tell you.”

  You went home and looked up my stupid Pink Panther reference so you could make an equally stupid reference the next time we met? Ruby could have asked. You were at home, after you saw me, still thinking about me? she wanted to ask.

  “Where’s your bathroom?” she asked instead.

  She needed a moment to collect herself, let the strange flush fade from her cheeks. But as Dov deflated a bit, she deeply wished she hadn’t been such a nerd about it.

  He led her down the hallway, jewel-purple walls lined with family photos. A man with smile lines cut like dried riverbeds around Dov-ish eyes, his skin a shade darker than his children’s, and a pretty, pale, blue-eyed woman with long auburn hair. There was a constellation of pictures of Talia—in long black pigtails on a park swing; as a skinny tween, angular limbs poking out of a pink princess dress; in a sleek gown at a high school dance with her arm slung around a girl in a tux—but only two of her brother. A baby portrait of him and Talia in matching white onesies; and a teenaged Dov sitting astride a Jet Ski in a short-sleeved wetsuit and life vest, beaming beneath mirrored shades, hair wet and messy, the ocean vast and sequined with light behind him.