Wink Poppy Midnight

by April Genevieve Tucholke

  “No you don’t. You don’t even know what the word means.”

  But she just shrugged, and laughed, and left.

  I SNUCK OVER to the Bell farm once a few years ago, and just watched the goings-on from the shadow of the woods. I was there for a while, and they never even looked in my direction, not any of them, like I was invisible, like I was a ghost.

  I had this idea that I’d catch Leaf off guard, and maybe a look would pass over his face, fleeting but there, really there, and then I would know. I would know that he thought of me.

  He and Wink were outside with their siblings, they had a picnic and then played some game with a lot of hooting and hollering, and he was different with them, so different, especially the pretty brunette sister, he was rowdy and loud and he laughed all the time. I’d never even heard his laugh, not his real laugh anyway. And after a while I started feeling bad about myself, standing alone in the woods while they all laughed and played together, and I’m Poppy, I never feel bad about myself, ever, so I went home and never did it again.

  The eighth time I followed Leaf to the hayloft, I kissed him with my whole soul, all of me, all the bad parts and the good parts too. I kissed and kissed him, his thin straight nose, his freckled cheeks, his wide bony shoulders, his hard white torso, but his green eyes never even met mine, not once. So I got naked, I thought I would stun him with my stunning beauty, but he only shrugged his shoulders and said I could be the spitting image of Helen of Troy for all he cared, I was still not worth the breath I breathed.

  His younger sister called out from somewhere in the yard and he went down to her without another word. I cried while I put my clothes back on, fast, fast, the hay caught up in the creases and scratching me all the way home, but it felt good, like the nuns and their hair shirts, a punishment on the path to redemption.

  WHEN THE HERO knocked on our old screen door at sunset I thought he was coming to get his fortune told, like everyone else who came to our house.

  He came bearing one pink little wildflower in his hand and he gave it to me when I opened the door. I didn’t know what to do with it so I just held it in my fist while he stood there looking pleasant and awkward like the ordinary farm boy before destiny knocks and he’s forced to pick up the sword and take to the road.

  I let him inside and then, before I could change my mind, I asked him if he wanted to go for a walk in the forest.

  He looked out the windows at the setting sun, and then said yes anyway.

  I planned to take him down the path that went right by the Roman Luck house. The Roman Luck house was full of bad things and sadness and unforgivables, but I wanted to see what would happen.

  Midnight waited in our kitchen while I got ready. The Orphans surrounded him, asking him questions he didn’t know how to answer, mostly about whether he’d seen the ghost of Lucy Rish yet in his house across the road, and if she threw apples at him or if they fell right through her old ghostly hands. He smiled and didn’t seem to mind all their asking.

  I put on a green cotton dress, because the tree spirits like green. It had been Mim’s dress when she was a girl, and had a white belt. There was only one little hole, in the back, where you could hardly see it.

  I forgot to brush my hair before we left, but I did remember to dust my arms and neck with powdered sugar. It made the mosquitoes come at you, but the night was blustery and I wasn’t worried. Besides, the unforgivables will feed on you, unless you give them something sweet. It distracts them and they leave you alone. Mostly.

  THE INSIDE OF Wink’s house was just as cluttered and chaotic as you’d expect a house to be with so many dogs and kids running wild. The kitchen was long and rectangular. I saw baskets of brown eggs on the wooden counter, and bowls of apples and bags of potatoes and onions. There were pots hanging from hooks on the ceiling, and a pile of folded laundry on the end of the table, and everything looked neat and tidy, in its own messy way.

  The walls were a bright turquoise blue and there was a working woodstove in the corner. Everything smelled like gingerbread, and Wink’s mother offered me a square piece as I waited. She was a short woman with big curves and wary green eyes and long red hair, no gray. She wore her hair in thick braids that crisscrossed her head in a style that looked both ancient and also sort of artsy and modern. She had on a black blouse-y shirt thing and a long skirt, lots of colors, and black boots with complicated laces. She looked like what you’d expect a fortune-teller to look like . . . but she also just looked like a mom. A mom who liked to dress interesting and cool instead of wearing beige pants and pastel-colored cardigans.

  My own mother was a cool dresser. She was a writer and wanted people to know it. She had big round tortoiseshell glasses and thick brown hair and swooping, draping clothes that she wore with plain brown cowboy boots. People used to stare at her when she went grocery shopping, and she liked it that way. So Wink’s mother made me feel right at home.

  The cake was dark, almost black. It tasted like ginger and molasses. I ate it at the counter. Sticky little hands kept reaching up to the cake pan as I stood there, and it disappeared, piece by piece. The Orphans asked me questions as they took the gingerbread, fast, one after another, not waiting for my answers, like the questions were the only thing that mattered—

  What’s your name?

  Do you believe in ghosts?

  Have you seen the ghost that lives in your house?

  How fast can you run?

  Have you ever played Follow the Screams?

  Do you have any dogs?

  Do you like sailboats?

  I tried to count the kids. I did. But they all kept moving around, and they all had red hair and green eyes, except for one dark-haired, brown-eyed girl who smiled at me sweetly as she took her second piece of gingerbread. I decided there were five of them, give or take. They ran circles around Wink’s mother as she started making soup on the stove, and eventually ran out of the house, screen door slamming, followed by three smiling dogs, two big golden retrievers and one small white terrier.

  And after my life so far, after all the quiet, especially now that Alabama and my mother were off in France . . . you’d think the pandemonium would have stressed me out. But no. I liked it.

  I heard footsteps on the stairs, and Wink returned, wearing a green dress that seemed kind of old-fashioned. But what did I know about clothes. I usually just wore black pants and black button-downs, like Alabama. He liked to dress like Johnny Cash, or a gunslinger, minus the guns, and I figured if it was good enough for Alabama, it was good enough for me.

  Wink’s red hair was still crazy and wild. It bounced out around her little heart-shaped face and made her look even smaller and younger. She smiled at me, and I smiled back.

  “How was the gingerbread?” she asked.

  “Great.”

  “You met the Orphans.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can Mim read your cards?”

  To my credit, I just nodded.

  Wink’s mother spun around from the stove and ushered me into the closest chair at the long wooden kitchen table. She pulled a stack of worn tarot cards from some hidden pocket near her hipbone and held them out to me.

  “Pick three.”

  I did, and set them on the table. Wink and her mother leaned over me.

  Wink pointed to the first card. “The Three of Swords.”

  “The Three of Swords is the card of loss, and broken relationships,” Mrs. Bell said. Her voice wasn’t dreamy or mystical, it was practical and matter-of-fact, like she was talking about the weather. “Things that are missing will not be found again. The Two of Swords is the card of tough choices, but the Three of Swords . . . you’ve already come to terms, and made your decision. Your feet are set on a path. Whether the path will be the right one . . .” She shrugged.

  Wink pointed to the next two cards.

  A naked man and wo
man looking up at an angel.

  A crowned king in a chariot, two horses in front.

  “The Chariot and the Lovers.” Wink smiled.

  “What do they mean?” I asked. But Wink just shrugged and kept smiling a mysterious Mona Lisa smile.

  My mother had written a mystery a few years ago called Murder by Tarot. She visited several tarot readers in Seattle for research. She later told me and Alabama that some of the readers had been charlatans, some had been keen observers of human nature, and some had been inexplicably and eerily accurate. And as far as she could tell, the true readers had no connecting factors. Some were old, some young, some were bright-eyed and animated, some were quiet and detached. One of them had even guessed my mother’s deepest secret . . . a secret she’d never told anyone. When Alabama and I asked her what the secret was, she just turned away and didn’t answer.

  Mrs. Bell, job done, lost interest in me and went back to the stove. Wink stood by my chair, not saying anything.

  I got up and took her hand. We walked through the kitchen, out the screen door, slam, across the yard, dogs barking happily, and headed into the deep dark woods, toward the setting sun.

  A MILE OF pine needles crunching underfoot, darkness descending, trees tall and black, twisting forest path, cool night air. It got cold at night up in the mountains. Even in summer.

  Wink was holding my hand and not saying a word.

  Poppy had said I should get to know Wink. That we should be friends. But I wasn’t just obeying her orders. There was really nowhere I wanted to be more than walking side by side, step by step, with this Bell girl.

  Her fingers moved in mine. Tightened.

  “Wink?”

  She looked at me.

  “What’s it like? What’s it like growing up on a farm with a bunch of brothers and sisters and a mom that reads tarot cards?”

  She shrugged. “Normal.” She paused for a second. “Isn’t your mom an author? What’s it like to have a mother who makes up stories for a living?”

  I shrugged back at her. “Normal.”

  I didn’t go into it all, about Mom leaving with Alabama. I just didn’t feel like making myself sad. And Wink was bound to guess anyway, when she didn’t see my mom or brother around all summer.

  The creepy mansard-roofed Roman Luck house came into view, four tall chimneys pressing at the dark sky. I stopped and caught my breath.

  Maybe it was because we were in the middle of the woods, near an abandoned house, trees on all sides and no-one-to-hear-you-scream, but I got a bad feeling all of a sudden.

  Everything was dark. Thick, thick silence.

  And then I heard a laugh.

  And another.

  Muffled voices.

  More laughter.

  And then came the flames. Orange and silky, waving at the sky.

  A kid stepped back from the pile of wood, smiling, the way boys do whenever they manage to start a fire.

  I looked around.

  Damn it.

  We’d walked right into the middle of a Poppy party.

  Poppy’s parties were quiet, secret things, made up of the Yellow Peril and a few sycophants. The parties moved around. Sometimes they were in Green William Cemetery, or on the overgrown main street of one of the nearby abandoned gold rush towns, or by the Blue Twist River.

  Sometimes I was invited to her parties. Mostly not.

  The Yellow Peril were Poppy’s inner circle—it was a reference to opium, because, you know, Poppy. But everyone just called them the Yellows. Two guys and two girls and none of them half as evil or as beautiful as her. Poppy liked to lead the guys on and would give all her attention to Thomas one week and then Briggs the next. Just to keep them on their toes. The girls were Buttercup and Zoe. They dressed like twins, though they weren’t. Always in black dresses, red lipstick, striped socks, and a twin set of cunning looks in their eyes. But Buttercup was tall and had black hair to her waist and Zoe was tiny and had short brown curly hair and both were pretty but definitely not sisters. I’d never spoken directly to them in my whole life. They didn’t matter. Not when there was Poppy.

  Poppy.

  The Yellows surrounded her like rays around the sun. She wore knee-high boots and a short, swinging yellow skirt that barely covered the parts it needed to cover. She had a blue silk scarf around her slender neck, and her thighs were long and so damn creamy it made me feel sick.

  God, I hated her.

  I longed to grab Wink and run back the way we’d come.

  I shook it off, and kept walking.

  The Yellows all looked at me in that pitying way, like usual, but I just gave Poppy a cool nod and marched right on by, Wink at my side, like we were welcome. Like we’d been invited.

  The bonfire was now six-foot flames clawing up, almost reaching the sagging roof of the Roman Luck porch, but not quite. We went up to it and the heat hit my skin in a rush. It felt good. I looked down at Wink, and she had her eyes closed, facing the warmth.

  I didn’t look back at Poppy and the Yellows.

  I saw five or six non-Yellow kids from school. Perfect clothes and perfect shiny hair. The only time the Yellow-wannabes had ever noticed me was when Alabama was around. Then the girls would talk to me in a really sweet voice, to show Alabama how nice they could be to his unpopular brother.

  Everyone was whispering instead of yelling and laughing, and there was no music playing—the Yellows wouldn’t stand for it. Poppy liked quiet at all her parties.

  A girl named Tonisha was handing out mason jars of frothy, amber-hued beer from a nearby keg. I knew it was probably a micro-brewed IPA, because the Yellows didn’t drink anything cheap, but I declined to take one, and so did Wink. A wind came up out of nowhere and leaves rustled on the trees, whoosh, all at once, in that way that always gives me goose bumps.

  Wink’s fingers tightened again. I looked down at her.

  The contrast with Poppy was profound.

  Straight, blond, shining hair.

  Red, frizzy, curly hair.

  Tall, thin.

  Short, small.

  I knew one’s body, every dip, every inch, every toe, every bend.

  The other had her hand in mine and it was the first time we’d ever touched.

  Both were a mystery.

  “Wink?”

  She glanced up at me.

  “I think I’m going to like having you Bells as my new neighbors.”

  She nodded, face very serious. “We’ll be good for you.”

  I smiled at that.

  “Your brothers and sisters ask a lot of questions.”

  She nodded again. “They do that to people they like.”

  We were speaking in short snappy statements, and it was nothing like before, on the steps of my house, when Wink was either sweetly talking on and on about The Thing in the Deep or being calmly silent, the breeze in her hair. I supposed she was hating it here, at Poppy’s party. I sure as hell was. What was so fun anyway about standing in the dark, whispering and drinking beer?

  Maybe I’d made a mistake, not turning and running back down the path. But damn it, I didn’t want Wink to think I was a coward. I’d been a coward long enough.

  “This is a bad house,” Wink said suddenly, looking up, way up, at the sagging roof. “The Roman Luck house is not lucky. It never was.”

  The Roman Luck house was a mile from town, and a mile from the Bell farm, right in the middle. It had sat empty for years, and houses went downhill fast when no one was taking care of them. All the bushes were overgrown, the front lawn covered with pinecones. The gravel road that led to the house from town was nothing but a stretch of brown pine needles and saplings, struggling to grow in the gloom.

  I joined Wink in staring up at the house. Big and gray and going to ruin. The bay windows were broken, and I could see the shadow of the dec
aying grand piano that I knew was inside. We’d all explored the Luck house when we were younger. Dared each other to go in, to put our fingers on the chipped ivory keys, to climb up the wobbly, creaking stairs, to lie down on the dusty, rat-chewed quilt that still covered the master bed.

  I’d been surprised that Poppy wanted to have her party here. Fearless Poppy, who wasn’t afraid of anything . . . except this, the Roman Luck house. Not even the Yellows knew how much she hated the place. Just me. I’d been with her last summer, right beside her as she’d climbed the porch steps and then refused to go past the doorway, like a dog catching a bad scent. She laughed and said haunted houses were stupid. But her perfectly painted toes in their delicate, expensive sandals never crossed the rotting threshold.

  Roman Luck’s disappearance was our town’s greatest mystery. He’d been young, and single, a doctor at the hospital where Poppy’s parents worked now. And when he bought a grand house outside of town, in the middle of the woods, and filled it with grand things, people thought he was going to marry some pretty girl and live happily ever after. But he never did. He lived in the house for two years, and he never threw a party, or invited people over for supper. And then, one morning, he didn’t show up for work. Days went by. When the police finally broke down the front door they found the inside frozen in time, as if Roman had just stepped outside for a breath of fresh air. There was a coffeepot on the table, stone cold, and a plate with a moldy, half-eaten sandwich. The milk had curdled in the fridge. The radio was even still on, playing sad old Delta blues songs . . . or so went the rumors.

  “If I told you what happened to Roman, you wouldn’t believe me,” Wink said out of nowhere, like she could read my mind. Her shoulders shrugged up and disappeared into her messy red hair.

  I took the bait. “Yes I would, Wink. I’d believe you.”

  Wink shook her head, but she was smiling.