I shake my head, left and right. “Nope. I mean, I’m beat, but it’s the same level of beat no matter what shield we work. I haven’t had another weird spell since you took me to your aunt’s.”
His mouth relaxes in relief. “Good. I’m really glad to hear that. And I know that you’re worried about Loki, but Sakura would never put her in harm’s way.”
“I know that. I can…it’s like I can feel her. I don’t really know where she is or anything specific, but I know she’s fine.” I spread my hand flat on the seat between us. “It’s pretty much the only thing keeping me from going on some wild goose chase to find her.”
Jonas raises his eyebrows high and chuckles.
“What’s so funny?” My hand slides closer across the seat.
“Just that I’ve spent my entire life around shieldmaidens so focused they make Navy Seals look like lightweights. And they brag. Holy crap, they brag their asses off and it’s incessant. And here you are, hands down the most powerful shieldmaiden I’ve ever met, and you don’t have a clue how scary powerful you are.” A piece of his hair has fallen forward and landed on his eyebrow, next to the scabbed over slash on his forehead. I want to move it, but I’m too chicken.
Instead, I lean my head against the cool glass of the passenger window and try to wrestle my emotions under control. “Everyone knows more than I do. I never did anything special with Loki. I could just hear her in my head, and Sakura is all jealous, but about what? If she was raised to bring up these crazy witch foxes, why can’t she do more than me?” I glance over at Jonas, but he’s staring straight ahead. “And Magda and my mother trained their asses off, but apparently I’m some kind of prodigy who barely needs any training at all?”
I look at his fierce profile in the dark and, for a minute, I just want to make another boble and keep him locked in it with me for a nice, thoughtless, make-out-filled stretch of time. But hiding out with my sexy friend isn’t going to solve any of my problems. “Not that it matters, since my mother’s new favorite pastime is telling me what a complete failure I am. So here’s what I wish for. I wish it with my whole damn being, okay? I wish Bestemor was fine, my mom was getting her granola on in Colorado, and I was practically failing calc. That’s my wish!” I shout the last words to make them stick.
Jonas looks at me with sad understanding weighing down the sides of his mouth. “I understand exactly what you’re wishing for.” He sighs and rubs a hand over his face. “But wishing it away won’t change what you are.”
“Which is?” I don’t need to make the boble this time. The whole world fits inside the cab of this truck, right in the little bit of space between the two of us, no tricks or witchery needed.
“Amazing.” His frown loosens. “Unstoppable.” He puts one hand out and cups my face gently. “Shieldmaiden. Witch.” The way he says the last two words make them the sexiest compliments I’ve ever received. I feel the blush spread across my entire body.
I reach my hand out and run my thumb along the bristle on his jaw. “And you? Smart. Humble. Powerful. Magus.”
This time it is close—he’s close, I’m close. His eyes, so blue and squinty now that they’re not behind those adorably dorky glasses, are all mine and all over me. I just need to persuade his lips to follow his eyes and forget all our stupid hang-ups. It couldn’t be clearer that he and I are meant for each other, that no one else could understand just who we are or even what we are.
A tap on the windshield explodes the quiet, and I whirl around, scared out of my mind and sure I’m going to see a psycho murderer rapping the glass with a bloody hook instead of a hand.
What I see is even more frightening. My mother stands outside the truck, her face furious.
“Get. Out. Now!” she thunders, and the glass on the truck window shakes.
Jonas’s eyes are wide, the kiss hangs in the air, unreachable, and I stomp and slam out of the door, so mad at my mother all over again, I feel like I could scream, spit, throw a full-body tantrum.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I demand. “You fall out of my life for years and now that you’re back for a few weeks, you think you can smack me around and tell me what to do?”
She yanks my shoulder and drags me down the street. “Don’t even start with me, Wren! Do you know how worried I was? Do you know how many people I’ve called? I kept picturing your corpse in some field, you idiot!”
“Worried?” I wrench my shoulder out of her grasp. We’re right in front of Bestemor’s house, the lights all shining. It looks like there are people in there. Part of me is so happy I could burst. A bigger part feels like this is the textbook example of too little too late. “Why are you so worried now? I couldn’t beg or lie or steal for your attention for years, and now it’s all changed?”
My mother’s blue eyes twinkle from tears she’s fighting hard not to let fall. “It’s changed because now all my worst fears came true, honey. When I was gone there was a chance, a slim chance that you could escape my fate or worse. That maybe you only had a touch of what I have. But Ryuu was right. He said that no matter what we did, no matter how far away we went, we’d never be able to stop your fate.”
“Ryuu?” If my mother is a blurry memory fading in and out through my childhood, my father is a ghost, a shadow, so fleeting and indistinct, I’m not positive I believe he’s real. I have only a coveted handful of memories of him. Those memories are like sweet-and-sour candies, and I’ve long since sucked the sweet shell off of them all.
“Ryuu, your father.” Mom wipes the remnants of the tears she managed to hold at bay and motions to the house with her head. “He’s waiting for you inside. Let’s go before he calls in the National Guard.”
My face flushes. A thousand marching bands stomp up the Main Street of my heart, and a thousand gymnastic teams quadruple backflip through main lawn of my brain. I feel hot in my face, cool in my limbs, and tingly all over my body. Over a decade. Over a million deflated dreams and inflated expectations, and now it’s real, solid, flesh-and-blood waiting.
My father is waiting inside for me.
Chapter 20
My father. I float up the walk like my brain is wrapped in fluffy, sticky cotton candy, so insulating I barely register the roar of Jonas’s engine as he pulls away. My mother, father, grandmother, and I are all going to be in one house together again. Even though I know the most likely outcome of this whole situation is complete and utter chaotic ruin, for a few minutes I let myself become a temporary resident of Lala Land, where the rivers run with Dr. Pepper, Bestemor and Loki putter around the house in happy camaraderie, there’s a 24-hour sushi bar where Jonas is always waiting for me with a bouquet of crocuses and hungry eyes behind those wire-rimmed glasses, and my parents live in bliss in the little room where Bestemor’s sewing machine currently catches dust.
Normal enough. Happy enough. Boring enough. Enough is sounding so delicious right now.
My mother pushes the door open and there’s a crush of bodies down the short hall towards me. Bestemor is among them, looking frail but bright-eyed.
I wrap my arms around her. “Bestemor, do you feel okay? You should be in bed.” I could count her ribs and the ridges of her spine under her soft, loose skin if I wanted to.
I don’t.
“Skaat, I’m fine. Shhh. I’m absolutely fine. I just had a bad spell.” She pulls away and smiles at me, but her eyes are scared and I can read exactly why. She doesn’t know if she’ll feel better for good or if this is just the upswing of a long, merciless yo-yo trick.
“I’ve missed you so much.” Never mind that I gave her a kiss on the cheek just an hour or so before my date with Jonas; she knows what I mean.
Her eyes glitter and the squeeze of her hand on mine becomes a boa constrictor’s hold. “Loki?”
I shake my head. “Sakura. And she wants me.”
Bestemor swings her head from side to side, but she can’t say what else she’s thinking, because the police and few neighbors and ambulance members are get
ting impatient and horning in to get a look at or a talk with or a piece of me. One voice slides against my ears like a song from my childhood, almost completely forgotten, but still buried, somewhere, right below the edge of lost memory. It’s bright and smooth as sea glass, melted caramel warm with good humor, and pickled with the tiniest vinegar pinch of disbelief.
“Wren?”
“Dad?”
He’s got the same wiry frame, but his shoulders stoop more than I remember, like he carries identical sandbags on each of them. His jet black hair is streaked with thicker strands of grey and his golden eyes are edged in spider webs of laugh lines. Mom looks at us for a long second, then begins herding the mass of people out of Bestemor’s house with murmured apologies and firm thank-yous, her eyes always fishing back to net me and my father.
My father is back.
I let him fold me into his arms, not sure why I don’t feel that red hot anger I felt when I saw my mother. Maybe it’s because when I’m in front of my father, he really takes a good long look, as opposed to just glancing then moving on to the vastly more interesting subject of himself. Or maybe it’s because his eyes glow with pride instead of continuous disappointment. Whatever it is, warmth and happiness simmer together and season my whole entire body.
“When did you get so big? Where did my little girl go?” His fingers tug at the ends of my hair the exact same way he used to tug the paintbrush-pointed ends of my braids when I was tiny.
“If you’d visited me in the last decade, how old I am might not be such a huge surprise.” Happiness bursts out of me like candy out of a piñata, but there are other things mixed in with the sweets; burrs, razors, tacks, nails…the sharp, hard shrapnel of a life with absentee parents.
He and my mother have a long, wordless argument across the room and over my head, composed of flared nostrils, widened eyes, lowered eyebrows, and tightened lips. When he turns his gaze back at me, the brown of his eyes is pixeled with dull tones of regret and worry.
“Point taken. But I’m back. We’re back. And, if all goes well, there’s a chance we might be able to stay together.” He takes my hands in his, and I remember back to the days when he used to grab me by the hands and swing me in dizzying, nauseating circles, my wrists and elbows almost at the point of dislocation, the ground whirling under me, my father’s hands the only tethers that kept me from shooting into the unknown distance.
My mother’s symphony of snorts, stomps, and huffs makes the elusive memory flee like a spooked doe. I fall back to reality with a thump so heavy, it’s like having the wind knocked out of me. My eyes follow her as she slams into the backyard, probably trampling the rosemary Bestemor just put in.
Bestemor presses her index and middle finger to her temple, and I jump up and lead her gently to her bedroom, shouldering her weight and wishing I could do more.
“Thank you, elskede.” I help her arrange her stiff limbs on the blizzard-white bed. She looks out the window, where she can see the top of my mother’s blond head stalk, first one way, then the other. “There’s so much we never told you. So much that now, I think, we should have let you know. No good came from keeping you in the dark.”
“Shh.” I tug the covers from under her thin legs, blue-green from all the fat veins, and gather the soft fabric up around her shoulders. It’s pretty warm out, but Bestemor gets chilled easily, and the stress of the last few weeks has made her skin even thinner and less able to deflect the arrows life has been shooting her way. “Whatever I need to know, I’m going to know. Even if Robin doesn’t want to tell me.”
When Bestemor grabs my hand, her grip is so hard and tight, it’s almost like she has an iron knight’s glove under her skin. The bite of her squeeze makes me wince and pay attention to her words. “You cannot judge her harshly. She had to make a decision…she had to turn on her own powers, her own mind for you. I know how it must appear to you. But that’s only a mirage, Wren. Don’t be fooled.”
Her grip loosens and she drops my hand. Her head falls back on the starched white pillow case. I run my hand over her forehead, which feels too warm and dry, but I’m not experienced enough with sickness to know if I should worry.
“Do you feel okay? Do you need something? A drink? A cool washcloth?” I have no clue, no clue at all what to nurse her with. She’s always been the one who cared for me, and now I’m the only person available to care for her. And I’m so inept I couldn’t even play an extra in a hospital soap opera.
“I’m fine. Just fine.” Her eyes droop shut, and she fights hard to keep them open.
“Rest,” I whisper, close to her ear. Outside the window my mother paces like a frantic goldfish circling its bowl. I kiss my grandmother’s forehead and try not to get bitter over the fact that my mother should be here, in the room, telling me if Bestemor has a fever or needs something.
Whatever my mother’s secret, whatever her sacrifice, I know down to my marrow that Bestemor and I were the ones who sacrificed the most and paid the highest price.
I leave my grandmother, already in a deep sleep, and find my father watching my mother intently out the back window. Most of the rooms in our house have windows facing the tiny garden, so making a spectacle in that particular space kind of guarantees a captive audience. Not that my drama queen mother has an issue with that.
My father takes my hands when he sees me, but I don’t have that free-wheeling courageous calm that surged through me before.
“What’s her deal?” I tug my hands out of my father’s grasp, because I’m my own tether now, but my gaze meets his, and I expect, at least, some ‘aw shucks, your mother and drama’ understanding to pass between the two of us.
Instead he looks like a guilty kid watching some innocent dummy catch the brunt of his rightful punishment. “Your mother has reasons for the way she is, Wren. And some of those reasons…some of them are so beyond her control, it’s frightening. For her, for all of us. We never know when we can lose our own free will or what it will do to us.”
“I don’t understand.” Worries, thoughts, partial clues, and messy emotions crash in my brain, a fifty-car pileup of explosive disaster that I don’t want to face but can’t resist rubbernecking.
“It’s a lot. And we’ll tell you everything. From the beginning. But not tonight. We’ve all been through so much today. Maybe you should get some rest. We all need some rest.” My father glances down the hall as if to check and make sure that, yes, there still is only one guest/sewing room. The couch in the living room is a dusty old loveseat that wouldn’t comfortably sleep a toddler, and it doesn’t look like he packed a sleeping bag.
He and mom aren’t actually divorced. Not that an unnourished, only-applicable-on-paper marriage equals harmony, bliss, and the ability to sleep in a full bed together happily. I decide that, like so many things in our life together, it isn’t my business to ask and they don’t have an inclination to tell me, so I throw my father an awkward, unsatisfying wave and head to my room. I stop halfway down the hall and turn on my heel to offer him one small shred of comforting help. Despite all reason, I’m having a hard time dealing with the idea of him sleeping uncomfortably.
“My old sleeping bag is in the hall closet. It’s kind of short and has Barbie and the Rockers on it, but you can use it if you need to.” He gives me a puzzled look, and I catch the tip of my tongue between my teeth and bite down hard. Not my business, I remind myself.
He takes a half-step in my direction, then seems to think better and makes do with a little nod/smile combo.
Besides every other aspect of my life going rotten and falling apart, when I open the door to my room it smells like the stall at the tri-county flea market where they sell socks and eggrolls. I throw up the sash on my window to let some fresh air in and hear the screen door slam. My mother gives a little shriek and says, “Ryuu! You scared the shit of me!”
Maybe a decent person raised with moral parents would close her window and not eavesdrop, but I’ve been lied to and kept in the darkest-of-all-
dark-under-the-stairs cupboards for long enough. If they won’t tell me any answers, I will absolutely spy for information, no guilt.
“I love your hair like that,” my father flirts, his voice sweet and smooth. “You always had fantastic hair.”
My mom’s laugh clinks out light and girlish. “I had this crazy hope Wren might inherit it. She’s gorgeous, but I look at her, and it’s like I see a mini-Ryuu. Am I in there at all? Is there any part of me in that gorgeous girl we made?”
“You’re a shieldmaiden, not a witch. Even you can’t override dominate DNA. And she’s one hundred percent yours, right down to her stubborn, defiant toes.” I hear one or both of them sit on the creaky swing that hangs off the questionably-sturdy rusted frame in the backyard. “Come sit by me,” my father invites my mother.
The creaks get dangerously loud, but then fade into a steady back-and-forth squeak as they, presumably, enjoy a warm evening in the backyard, swinging. I lie on my bed and hold my breath tight in my lungs, listening to the parents I’ve never really known and wondering if they still love each other, if there’s still enough love and happiness left between the three of us to squeeze into some kind of family unit.
“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” I know she’s not lying because her voice has this purr of self-satisfaction. Which makes sense, since she did contribute to fifty percent of my looks no matter how much she sees just my father when she looks at me. But it’s still irritating. “Dangerously beautiful. I don’t know about that Balto boy hanging around.”
My father’s grunt is so paternally pissed off, I turn my ear for more, as excited and pleased as I am furious and indignant. “You’re damn right about her being too beautiful. And powerful. Do you think the boy has any ulterior motives?”
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