Pucker

by Melanie Gideon

  “She was dying here too,” he says quietly.

  FIFTY-NINE

  COOK JUMPS TO HER FEET when I step into the clearing. Misery distorts her features. “I’m coming with you,” she says.

  “I know,” I say.

  “I should have come years ago. I never should have let you and Serena go alone. You were too sick, both of you.”

  “Yes, all right,” I say. I just want her to stop talking. I can’t pay attention to her right now. I’m too focused on Phaidra. She’s sitting on a little boulder, her face turned to the side. Does she hate me?

  “Phaidra,” I breathe.

  Phaidra stands. I walk toward her. Pine needles crunch beneath my feet.

  “Stop,” she says loudly, holding up her hand.

  Desperation balloons inside me, filling me with white heat. There will be no taking back what I’ve done. No second chances. Then suddenly, miraculously, Phaidra’s face begins to soften.

  “Stop hating yourself,” she says.

  “I can’t,” I say. I shut my eyes. I want to be in the dark where she is. I would give up the light for her.

  “You have to,” she says. “It’s enough now. Enough,” she says, stepping forward.

  When I see her coming toward me, relief, ridiculous and uncomplicated, begins to wash over me. A gentle tide, it laps at my feet.

  Then she’s in my arms and there is one kiss, there is one girl—there is one love.

  PART FOUR

  SIXTY

  IT’S NEARLY MIDNIGHT WHEN WE get back to Peacedale. Cook, Phaidra, and I walk down the deserted streets in stunned silence. Dressed in our Isaurian garb, we look like refugees from The Scarlet Letter. I can hear Cook breathing heavily as she tries to take it all in: the streetlights buzzing, the July smell of fresh tar and creosote, the roar of I-95.

  I haven’t touched my face, but I know the scars have returned. I felt it happen as we traveled through the portal. There was something strangely soothing about it. It didn’t hurt; it felt tender, like somebody draping cool, wet gauze on my cheeks. I think of Patrick’s mother, Clara—the way she would warn me before she peeled off my skin with tweezers.

  Our house is just outside of town. About twenty minutes later I’m standing on my porch. I peer through the mesh of the screen door and slowly turn the knob. The floorboards creak, announcing my arrival.

  “Thomas?” My mother’s voice floats down the stairs. “Is that you?”

  “Yes,” I say, but I don’t move. Now I feel my face—the weight of the scars. They burrow themselves into my flesh. A sob escapes from my throat.

  “Oh, my boy,” my mother cries softly. And then I’m running up the stairs, I’m standing in the doorway of her room—I’m kneeling at her side.

  SIXTY-ONE

  I AWAKE TO THE SMELL of waffles and bolt upright. I have a hunch something is terribly wrong. My intuition is coiled up inside me like a spring.

  I jump out of bed and run into the kitchen. Phaidra, Cook, and Huguette are sitting around the table, talking. They dip back in unison when they see me standing there. I am not looking my best. My hair is flattened from sleep; my jeans ride low on my hips. I’m concave, a pile of bones. I’ve barely been able to eat since we returned.

  “What’s happened?” I ask hurriedly.

  “Nothing. She had a rough night, but she’s okay,” says Huguette.

  Cook gets up and pours me a cup of coffee. “Sit,” she says.

  I go over and kiss Phaidra on the cheek and she presses my hand to her face for a moment before letting it go.

  It’s been nearly eight days since I returned home, and my mother is still alive. She should be dead by now, but somehow she’s managed to hold on. She tells us it’s because we’re all here. That we’ve made a wall of love that keeps the visions out. But all of us know that’s a lie. The visions are sneaky and relentless. They will smother her one night when we step out of the room.

  Here’s how the days have passed:

  Cook makes breakfast. I bring in a tray to my mother. I sit down on the edge of her bed and we have long, winding, circuitous conversations that last hours, sometimes until dark. We’ve had a lot of work to do, peeling back the layers of truth. But we have: we’ve shed the layers one by one until all that remains is a shining nugget of devotion. Her devotion to me. Mine to her. This is undisputed. This is all that matters. Everything else we have done, all the mistakes we have made, all the lies we have told, all the ways we have hurt each other have ceased to matter.

  The doorbell rings. Huguette raises her eyebrows silently at me. I shake my head. I don’t want to answer it. It rings again, reverberating insistently through the kitchen. I frown and take a sip of coffee, waiting for the footsteps to go away.

  “Answer the frigging door, Quicksilver,” a voice yells. A hand rattles the knob impatiently.

  I freeze. It’s Patrick.

  “I know you’re in there,” he says. “There have been sightings.”

  “Damn,” I whisper under my breath. I went out last night for groceries. Somebody must have seen me.

  “I’m coming in,” he yells. “I’m using my key.”

  “Don’t,” I say, but it’s too late, I hear his footsteps racing up the stairs, and then he’s in the kitchen, bewilderment and hurt spreading across his face when he sees all of sitting around the table.

  “Guess my invitation got lost in the mail,” he says.

  He looks at Cook. She’s still wearing her Isaurian clothes: the long clay-colored skirt, the high-necked blouse.

  He turns to me. “How was Disneyland, asshole?”

  “I wasn’t in Disneyland,” I say softly.

  “No kidding,” he says, his eyes falling on Phaidra.

  “I couldn’t tell you where I was going,” I say.

  “Why not?” he fires back at me.

  “You wouldn’t have believed it,” I say.

  Patrick shakes his head. “You underestimate me,” he says. “You always have.” Then he clatters down the stairs again. A minute later we hear two sets of feet coming back. My hunch is uncoiling now, stretching to its full length.

  “Found her wandering around outside,” Patrick says. A young woman follows him into the kitchen. She’s dressed identically to Cook. My mouth drops open in shock—it’s Alice, the Maker. Patrick gives her a gentle push forward.

  “You feel things,” Alice says to me.

  “Uh, yes,” I stammer.

  “Like love?”

  “Yes,” I tell her. Why is she questioning me? Has she come to hurt us? To make us go back?

  “Regret?” she asks.

  I blink. I feel like I’ve stepped forward although I haven’t moved, not one inch.

  “I feel regret too,” Alice says to me.

  Phaidra unfolds herself gracefully and stands.

  “Why have you come, Alice?” She asks the question I can’t seem to get out of my mouth.

  “Because I have Serena’s skin,” Alice says.

  Phaidra gasps. “Where?”

  Alice frowns. “You can’t see it?”

  “I’m blind, remember?” says Phaidra.

  “I’m not talking about that kind of sight,” says Alice. She walks up to Phaidra and takes her hand. Gently she places it on her heart. Phaidra shudders, trying to pull her hand away, but Alice is insistent and then suddenly Phaidra’s face transforms. It glows luminously clear.

  “My God, Thomas,” Phaidra whispers. “She does have it.”

  Alice turns to me. “I’m wearing it.”

  SIXTY-TWO

  ON ALICE’S THIRTEENTH BIRTHDAY SHE was informed by the Ministry that not only would she be the next Maker, but she had been the lead candidate since the day of her birth. Candidate: a word that made her sick to her stomach, especially since she didn’t know that she had been in the running for anything.

  “Smile,” Otak said. Didn’t she know that she’d won?

  “Won what?” she asked belligerently.

  Otak considered h
er through the wreath of his pipe smoke. He was wondering if perhaps he had made a mistake. He had already foreseen that she would grow up to be a powerful Seer in her own right. She had that, and she had the right parents, and she had a kind of shine, an undeniable charisma.

  What he didn’t know (what he couldn’t know, because not even he was powerful enough to see into her cells) was that she was hard-wired for empathy—empathy that would one day put forth tentative little shoots, sprout tendrils, and grow like a weed, spreading through her, until the day she encountered me, looked into my past, and understood how we were connected. She knew who I was the moment she touched me. All of my efforts to keep my memories from her had failed.

  Something ended the day that she Changed me: her ability to keep things outside herself anymore.

  And just what did happen on her thirteenth birthday? What did Otak say to her parents? How did he break the news? For it was not widely known, in fact, it was a secret that Makers were made, that they were not some mutation, some natural evolution, but instead a result of something much darker. One Seer made twice as powerful by the sacrifice of another.

  “Put this on. It was meant for you,” Otak told Alice.

  He held out my mother’s Seerskin, draped over his arms like it was a great treasure: the royal robes of a monarch, the priestly garments of a pope. He did not tell her whose skin it was. He simply told her that this was how it had been done, for years, since the Great War. This was now her duty, her honor. From this day forward she would wear two skins, her own, which allowed her to see into the future, and a second one on top of that—my mother’s.

  “But why?” Alice asked him.

  Otak told her that during the Great War, when the first Seers were flayed of their skins, the Ministry hunted those skins down along with everybody else. They managed to recover a few that hadn’t already been shredded. They had every intention of returning them to their owners.

  “What happened next was an accident,” Otak explained to Alice.

  What the Ministry found out was that when one of their Seers handled those fragile flayed skins, when she so much as touched one, her powers grew much stronger. She could not only see into the future but into the past—and change it.

  And so the first Maker came into existence.

  The Ministry managed to recover five skins during the war. These skins were hidden away, and when the first Maker died, another one of the skins was brought out and a new Maker was made. This happened three more times, until Alice’s predecessor used up the last of the Great War skins. When she died, there was only my mother’s skin left, and it was given to Alice.

  Alice stares at us, miserable. “Am I too late?” she asks.

  I hear my mother coughing in the next room. “No,” I tell her.

  “All right, I’ll need a knife,” she says.

  Nobody moves as we all realize what she means: she’s going to have to cut the skin off.

  “Hurry!” Alice says.

  Huguette hustles to the counter. “Is this big enough?” she asks, brandishing a chef’s knife.

  Alice says fearfully, “A little smaller, I think.”

  Huguette gives her a paring knife.

  Alice grips it in her hand and then looks at me and Phaidra. Her face clouds with worry. “Before I take it off, I want to try and Change you and Phaidra again.”

  Patrick puts his hand on my back protectively. “Change them?” he says.

  “Heal Thomas’s face,” Alice says impatiently. “Give Phaidra back her sight.”

  I stare at her. I try to make a sound, but nothing comes out. I can’t allow myself to hope. But foolishly I do.

  “But my mother,” I protest.

  “Don’t you want to be healed?” Alice snaps. “I’m still a Maker. I can change you back before I take off Serena’s skin, but we’ve got to hurry. Her skin is losing its power. I’m losing my power!”

  Phaidra pushes me forward. “You first, Thomas,” she says.

  “No, you go,” I say.

  “Decide!” shouts Alice.

  “Phaidra,” I say, thrusting her in front of me.

  Alice nods and places her hands on Phaidra’s chest. Phaidra begins to quake and whips her head back violently. Once, twice, three times as the Maker reels back the years. Five long minutes pass. Then slowly Phaidra blinks and comes to.

  She searches for me first. Her eyes grow wide and then she quickly collects herself, but not before I’ve registered her shock at my burns. I remember the first time I saw Phaidra. My panic. She was so beautiful I couldn’t let her see me before I was Changed. I feel that same way now. I turn from her in shame.

  “Quick,” Phaidra cries. “Do Thomas.”

  But Alice is shaking her head and looking down at the ground. Alice is crying.

  “No!” shouts Phaidra.

  “Remorse,” says Alice, making a fist. “Heartbreak,” she whispers, her eyes studded with tears. “I’m sorry. Thomas, it’s too late.”

  I stare at her dismally. “I knew it,” I say softly. Here, then, is my fate. I cannot outrun it. I cannot outwit it.

  Alice thrusts the knife at Phaidra. “Quick, cut it off,” she says.

  Phaidra takes the knife and Alice walks forward, unbuttoning her shirt. I squeeze my eyes shut, but still I hear the horrible sound of the knife cutting into skin. It sounds exactly like fire. A gathering. A puckering.

  When I open my eyes, I see Alice stepping out of my mother’s skin like she is taking off a pair of stockings. She rolls the skin down her ankles.

  “Here,” she says, holding it out to me.

  It’s a weird, gelatinous thing, as soft as cashmere, as translucent as a jellyfish, powdery like a latex glove.

  “Quick,” she says.

  I run into my mother’s room, everyone following at my heels. My mother looks up at me, delirious. She doesn’t know if she’s dreaming or this is real. She reaches up and tenderly touches my face.

  “Thomas,” she says. Then her eyes grow wide as if she doesn’t recognize me. She stares at me in amazement. “Shining Thomas,” she whispers.

  Then she passes out.

  Hurriedly I drape the skin over her body and press it down into her flesh, trying to make it stick.

  “Nothing’s happening,” I cry out.

  “Give it a moment to remember her,” says Cook, and then finally the skin sinks down into her, enveloping her body like a caul.

  The transformation is immediate and profound, and we all stare at her in awe. She is beautiful. She is protected. A hundred tiny stars sewn into her flesh. In front of our eyes they sink in, fade, until there’s nothing there but the faintest memory of their glimmer.

  My mother turns onto her side and sighs. She drifts off into sleep, peaceful and without visions for the first time in eleven years. She has finally got what she wanted. Everyone has gotten what they wanted.

  Except me.

  SIXTY-THREE

  ALMOST SIX WEEKS LATER I wander into the kitchen and pour myself the last dregs of the coffee. It’s late August. In a few days I start my senior year of high school.

  I have the house to myself. My mother and Cook have walked into town.

  Phaidra moved out last week; both she and Alice are staying with Huguette. I wanted Phaidra to live with us, but our apartment is too small. She’s going to attend my high school in the fall, and, apart from the seven hours or so we sleep each night, we are inseparable.

  “Thomas!” I hear Cook yell from outside.

  I look out the window. She holds up a pink cardboard box from the doughnut shop. “Breakfast,” she sings.

  They clomp up the stairs and when my mother enters the kitchen and sees me, she gasps.

  I pat my head, trying to smooth my hair down. “That bad?”

  “It’s not your hair,” whispers Cook. She, too, is staring.

  My mother nods, her eyes moist. “It was my last vision. I didn’t dream it, Adalia,” she says.

  “Dream what?” I ask, slig
htly annoyed. It’s entirely too early in the morning to be getting so emotional.

  “Go look in the mirror,” she says.

  “I don’t want to go look in the mirror,” I say, but my heart is beginning to thud against my ribs.

  “Humor me,” she says.

  In the time it takes me to walk from the kitchen to the bathroom, I have a hunch. My hunch is that I will be having many more hunches. Hunches that are right most of the time, because this is what happens to Isaurian Seers who live on Earth. They can’t see into the future anymore, but they still have their intuition.

  What I see when I look in the mirror is that while I’ve slept, I’ve started to grow a Seerskin. A skin that, while it doesn’t completely hide my scars, softens them somehow, makes me look almost normal.

  My mother walks into the bathroom and strokes my cheek softly.

  “You have the kind of beauty that only comes from having suffered,” she says.

  My eyes fill with tears and I wipe them away savagely with the back of my hand so I can gaze at my image and see that it’s true, that it’s not a dream.

  I have gotten my face, finally. It’s not perfect. It’s not without flaw. But it’s the face that I’ve earned.

  Suddenly the phone rings, startling us all. “I’ll get it,” says my mother. She walks briskly away. I hear her pick it up, listen for a while, and say nothing in response. Slowly she puts the receiver back in its cradle.

  She walks back into the bathroom. “That was a crank call,” she says softly.

  I close my eyes, the old despair weighing down my limbs.

  “I’m sorry, Thomas. I didn’t know what to tell them,” she says.

  “What did they want?” asks Cook.

  My mother pauses. “They wanted to know if our refrigerator was running.”

  It’s Cook who cracks a smile first. Then my mother. And then we begin to laugh, and once we start, we cannot stop.

  It’s as if we’re laughing ourselves alive.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Abiding thanks to my editor, Eloise Flood, and all the folks at Razorbill. I am deeply grateful to my agent, Charlotte Sheedy, and to my writing group: Caroline Paul and Eric Martin. Also, a heartfelt thanks to everyone who helped along the way: Elizabeth Leahy; Joanne Hartman; Renee Schoepflin; Debi Echlin; Dominique Niespolo; Cindi Brogan; my parents, Sarah and Vasant Gideon; and my two Bens.