Sleight

  FISHING.

  They are fishing. The three of them wade out to the bone sofa of the fallen sycamore Nene dubbed Whale a decade before. Once they climb onto it, Clef, who doesn’t wear boots, pulls a leech from her calf and then rinses off the spittle of blood, pointlessly. It won’t stop.

  It is a long time in the morning sun. They never catch anything worth keeping, but Abra is addicted to the way nothing happens, then suddenly does. Abra is their coddle, and they baby her. She leaves next week for Boston—her first summer at the academy. Nene thinks twelve is too young, she has argued it with Clef. Clef thinks Nene should get out herself. Georgia has gotten inside Nene, is making her thick. Haunted.

  Nene smiles at her aunt. “It’s not the place, Red. It’s the ghosts.”

  “Why don’t you go stay with Byrne and T? They’ve offered so many times.”

  “You know why.”

  “Nene. That was a child’s crush.”

  “I would hurt them.”

  “Fine.” Clef can’t make way against Nene. She is hard, vain, unlike any seventeen-year-old Clef has ever known. Nene doesn’t doubt herself. She graduated high school three years early, yet Clef couldn’t get her to apply to college, let alone leave the house.

  When they’d first moved down, Nene had spent hours shepherding a then two-year-old Abra around the edge of the lake while Clef and Kitchen looked on. They had come temporarily to help Drew, because it was a big place for a man and his daughter alone, because Clef was done with performing, because they were all hoping Lark might somehow return. It was Clef who gave up first, when she realized she wasn’t hurting for no reason anymore. The men never admitted to it, but hoped longer. Then Kitchen opened a studio near the university. And Nene and Abra were riveted, fastened. Sisters. So Clef and Kitchen and Abra stayed, extending family.

  Clef unlocks the tackle box and the girls take their bait—finger-thick earthworms dug out of the compost heap early this morning. When she and Lark used to come out here with their father, he’d had one rule: they couldn’t fight. As a result, fishing mornings were nearly silent, barring the occasional Newtonian lecture on the perfection of fish as organism, needless of evolution. Her niece used to tell Clef stories about him—grandfather-as-child—but somewhere around her eleventh birthday, Nene had stopped. Clef had been glad. It hurt her: Nene talking of talking to the dead. Her dead. Clef threads her worm onto the barbed hook, savagely—it is now two worms. Nene never meant anything by it. Lately, Clef was wishing Nene still had an adviser, maybe an editor, even if he were spectral.

  “Abra, don’t go.”

  “But I want to, Nene. I’ll be back in six weeks.”

  “You’ll be different.”

  Clef has heard this litany pass between them before, and it is getting old. “Don’t keep making her feel bad, Nene.”

  “Why not? She’s going to learn how to drop off the planet. Do you want her to follow my mother?”

  “We never made Abra take. She wanted to, remember? We never made you either, and you never wanted to. Sleight isn’t the enemy.”

  “I’m going to Mexico.”

  “What?” Clef’s head snaps toward her niece. Abra looks down at the water. Nene’s secret had been making her cousin’s hands itch. Now they are burning. Abra dislikes the constant, prolonged battle between her two guardians. It feels like she should stop them, but she can’t think of a way. Other than Boston.

  Nene explains. “West wants to train me as a hand at the Dormitory.”

  “He’s not even sanctioned. It’s not sleight. You can’t go.”

  Since the International Board had relieved West of his stewardship of Kepler, he’d been in Juarez. No one had spoken with him in a decade, and then, last year, he’d called Drew. Said he’d been working with the girls there—that some of them had proved quite talented—but he couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened to Lark. After several conversations, over months, Drew agreed to talk to him in person. West had flown up at Easter. He’d worn a ridiculous white linen suit, and Clef had wanted to strangle him until he shit himself. She’d stayed out of the house for most of the visit.

  “He says we should stop ignoring the root. That it’s how things get exponentially worse. He says he lost her because he didn’t know enough about his materials. That he threw them against one another for flint. People. Without adequate research. He’s studying. He wants to put together an all-female troupe—Slit.”

  “What?”

  “Slit. Past tense of sleight.”

  “No.”

  “You’re not my mother. Drew says yes.”

  “What is he thinking?”

  “You know what he’s thinking, Red. That of anyone, I might be able to find out what happened to her.”

  “You won’t.”

  “I know that.”

  Abra speaks. She is shy, doe-eyed, constellated. Take away the thousand freckles, and she’d look like her father. But Clef is there, all over her skin. Abra is beautifully normal. Except she has been raised by Drew and Kitchen, Clef and Nene. And back at the house, on top of the bookcase in her room, she has four other hand-me-down parents: Newt, Fern, the Lacemaker, and Marvel, whose Soul is still red and orange but three years ago stopped breathing. She also has a box, inside of which a white knot cradles the corpse of Lark’s last Need. Nene gave all these to her when she turned four. Nene said she had her own things and reasons, but that Abra, more impoverished in that arena, might need to be amused.

  “What did happen to Nene’s mom?”

  “You know this. She never came back from a wicking. She stayed out.”

  “But how?”

  “She chose to.”

  Nene lays her rod across the crotch of the bleached tree and walks out. Once the water hits her hips, she dives, and with piercing strokes it takes her only a few minutes to cross this slowest edge of the green lake. Mother and daughter watch her go, watch her turn, watch her head back. She stands up. As she trudges the last few steps toward them, she squeezes out her thick rope of braid, winding it around her head like a halo, or a noose.

  “Forget catching anything now, Abra.”

  “Yep. Thanks, Nene.” Abra is used to her cousin’s profound shifts of mood, has found it useless to let them rile her. She’s also learned how to punish. “So … you don’t think your mom left on purpose?”

  This exchange nearly breaks Clef. They are not at all replicas of her and Lark. Nothing like. Nene is self-assured, Abra is patient. But the energy they pass between them. The system of pain. She and her sister might have patented it, it was that identifiable. The lake water is bathwater, but Nene trembles.

  “She didn’t choose to leave me. It wasn’t simple.”

  Clef can’t unsay it.

  “She loved you, Nene. I didn’t mean …”

  Nene stops her. “I am leaving. On purpose. I’m going to Mexico.”

  “Why Mexico?” Clef knows it’s already done. Her line is slack in the water. She hates when there’s no fight. She has always loved and succeeded at fight.

  “Because I want to be a cowboy.”

  Nene and Abra apparently share this joke. First, they shake. They start rocking and cannot stop. Abra drops her line. Nene’s hair comes undone, lashing out across her shoulders. Lasso. Eel. Abra’s giggle is punctuated with hiccupping intakes of air. They laugh and laugh. Their bodies are wracked and reeling and no fish. They are the fish. They fall into the lake and they’re leaving her, and Clef watches them flop, flash, wrestle in the silt like boys, and she works very, very hard to feel tragic.

  Instead—always and where it should not be—there is joy.

  COLOPHON

  Sleight was designed at Coffee House Press, in the historic

  Grain Belt Brewery’s Bottling House near downtown Minneapolis.

  The text is set in Perpetua. Additional fonts include Kepler, Futura, and 20,000 Dollar Bail.

  FUNDER ACKNOWLEDGMENT

  Coffee House Press is an independent nonprofi
t literary publisher. Our books are made possible through the generous support of grants and gifts from many foundations, corporate giving programs, state and federal support, and through donations from individuals who believe in the transformational power of literature. Coffee House Press receives major operating support from the Bush Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, from Target, and from the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation from the Minnesota State Legislature and from the National Endowment for the Arts. Coffee House also receives support from: three anonymous donors; Elmer L. and Eleanor J. Andersen Foundation; Around Town Literary Media Guides; Patricia Beithon; Bill Berkson; the James L. and Nancy J. Bildner Foundation; the E. Thomas Binger and Rebecca Rand Fund of the Minneapolis Foundation; the Patrick and Aimee Butler Family Foundation; the Buuck Family Foundation; Ruth and Bruce Dayton; Dorsey & Whitney, LLP; Mary Ebert and Paul Stembler; Fredrikson & Byron, P.A.; Sally French; Jennifer Haugh; Anselm Hollo and Jane Dalrymple-Hollo; Jeffrey Hom; Stephen and Isabel Keating; the Kenneth Koch Literary Estate; the Lenfestey Family Foundation; Ethan J. Litman; Mary McDermid; Sjur Midness and Briar Andresen; the Rehael Fund of the Minneapolis Foundation; Deborah Reynolds; Schwegman, Lundberg & Woessner, P.A.; John Sjoberg; David Smith; Mary Strand and Tom Fraser; Jeffrey Sugerman; Patricia Tilton; the Archie D. & Bertha H. Walker Foundation; Stu Wilson and Mel Barker; the Woessner Freeman Family Foundation; and many other generous individual donors.

  To you and our many readers across the country,

  we send our thanks for your continuing support.

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  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Half Title Page

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Book 1

  Pain.

  Naming.

  Calling.

  Recovery.

  Pilgrimage.

  Soul.

  Lark’s Book.

  Cell.

  Share.

  Notes from a Lapsed Hand.17

  Lark’s Book.

  Compound.

  Lark’s Book.

  Mission.

  Book 2

  November.

  November.

  Lark’s Book.

  November.

  Schooled.

  Churched.

  Wedded.

  Familiar.

  The Other Quartet.

  A Pair of Solos.

  First Duet.

  Second Duet.

  Third Duet.

  Opening.

  Closing.

  Fishing.