Bad Luck Girl (16 page)

We did. None of us said anything much. Mama just hummed and cleaned, like with enough noise and soapsuds, she could fill the hole made by my father’s leaving.

Finally, we got the last dish dried and put away, and the dish towels all neatly hung up. Jack, though, took an extra-long time drying his hands on the last one.

“Listen, Callie, Mrs. LeRoux … I gotta go take care of some … stuff.”

“You want me to come with you?” I asked immediately. The thought of being left alone with Mama was suddenly driving something close to panic under my skin.

“Uh, no,” said Jack without even looking at me. “I just gotta … I’ll see you at supper, okay? Thanks for the breakfast, Mrs. LeRoux. It was terrific.”

And Jack was gone too. The door shut behind him as solidly as it had behind Papa. I couldn’t believe Jack had just gone and left me like that. He didn’t even try to come up with an explanation. Worry settled in. He was mad at Papa, and at me. Just how mad was he? And what was he gonna do about it? Jack was the person I knew best in the world, or at least that’s what I’d thought. Now I wasn’t so sure.

None of this was helped by the fact that I was alone with my mother for the first time since this whole long nightmare began. As soon as I turned around, I’d have to say something to her, and I had no idea what it should be. I had too many feelings jumbled up inside me, and not one of them would settle down enough for me to take hold of. The longer I stood there, the less I wanted to turn around at all.

“Oh, Callie,” Mama breathed. “Just look at you.”

I was sure she meant look at your skin, how brown it is. Look at your hair, all kinky and woolly and black. Look at all my work to make you into a white girl undone.

“You’ve grown into such a fine young lady while I’ve been away.”

I about choked on my own thoughts. “You think so?”

She nodded. “I do.”

We were silent again. Slowly, I realized there was only one thing I really wanted to say to her. It was the one question that had been boiling inside me since this whole long nightmare began. Until I asked it, I wasn’t ever going to really sort out any kind of understanding of my life, or hers.

“Why didn’t you tell me? About Papa?”

Mama let out a huge sigh. The strength seemed to leave her with all that breath, and she sat down heavily in the nearest chair. “Callie, you can’t imagine how many times I’ve asked myself the same question.” Slowly, she ran her thin hands across her hair, slicking it down and away from her creased-up forehead. “For a while I told myself you were just too young. Then I told myself that you were already keeping so many secrets, it wasn’t fair to ask you to carry one more. After that I told myself if he never came back … if he never came back …” She shook her head and stared down at her fresh-scrubbed table. “But the truth is, I thought if you knew about them … about the king and queen and the Midnight Throne, that you had magic inside you, you’d want to find them.” She lifted her tired eyes. “I was afraid you’d leave me, Callie.”

I wanted to throw my arms around her. I wanted to hug her and say it was okay. We were together now and I’d never leave her alone.

But I didn’t do any of those things. I couldn’t. There was a whole well of anger inside me, and I didn’t know where it
came from or what it was doing there. But it bubbled up until I was full to overflowing just from looking at my skinny, worn-out mother sitting in this borrowed kitchen.

“You lied so you could keep hold of me,” I croaked. “You’re just like the rest of them.”

“No, Callie, never. I …” She stopped. She didn’t look at me. She plucked at a tear in the lace place mat, trying to get the edges to match up. “When I was little, there was a girl I went to school with … Rebecca Swenson. Her father was a no-good. Always on the bum. This was before the depression, you understand, when being out of work wasn’t something that just … happened to a man. Mr. Swenson would come back every so often, take her mother’s money, knock her around a bit, and run off again. Everybody knew about it. My parents felt sorry for Becky. Mother would let her work in the kitchen for a little money, and regular meals.

“But … Becky would spin these stories about her papa being a traveling man, and how he was off in some big city, like Memphis or New York. Whenever she got something new, a ribbon or new shoes—and it wasn’t often—she’d parade around telling everybody how her father had sent her the present. It got to the point where she really believed what she was saying. It made me angry to hear her going on about it. I don’t know why, exactly, but it did. One day … one day I just couldn’t stand it anymore. I yelled at her to stop it. I told her that her father was a bum and everybody knew it, and the reason he wasn’t home was that he was probably
dead in a ditch. I’ll never forget the look on her face.…” Mama’s voice wavered. “She ran out of the kitchen, and I never saw her again. No one did. At least, they never said. I think … there were rumors … she’d killed herself.” She stopped. “That day you turned on me, when you yelled at me, that I was crazy … all I could think of was Becky and how she’d talked herself into believing her own lies about her father. I was afraid … I was afraid I’d done the same thing. That I really was crazy, that I really had killed you by keeping you in the dust.” She lifted her eyes. “That’s why I had you play the piano and break the protection. I had to know if it was real or if I’d … if I’d just …”

She was trying. I felt it. Now, in this little space of time where there was just me and her. She was trying to explain and to say she was sorry. I wanted to forgive her, right then and all at once. I hated the anger that was all knotted up inside me. But it had been there for so long and had been built up so big over years of wishing and wondering and being afraid that it wasn’t going to shift itself anytime soon, not for all my wishing, or hers.

But at least she was ready to talk. I shuffled my questions around in my mind, with more than a little guilt, because I knew I was trying to pump her for information, like Jack had tried to with Papa.

“Did he tell you anything about … about the Unseelies?”

“Not much. He had to show me enough magic to prove what he said, of course, and he did his best to explain that his
people were powerful, and that he had to make a clean break with them or there would be more complications to a situation that was already more than a little complicated.” Her smile was weak and had no warmth in it at all.

“How about the Halfers … the Undone?” I asked the question fast, before I could talk myself out of it. “Did he ever say anything about them?”

“I never heard about them before now. Callie,” said Mama, suddenly stern, “what are you thinking?”

“I just wondered.” I was lying and doing it badly, of course. “If he’d said anything, because, well, your baby … me … I’m …”

She took my hand and squeezed, as if contact could force belief into me. “He didn’t know about you, Callie. When he left, neither one of us knew I was pregnant. And you are nothing like those creatures.”

“How do you know? You don’t know what they are.”
You don’t know what I am either
. I bit my lip again.
Stop this
, I told myself. Things were getting better. I had to shut up now, before they jumped the track again.

“I know they tried to kill you and then they snatched you away from us,” said Mama quietly. “Even without that, your father says they are dangerous.”

“But you don’t know why!”

“It doesn’t matter why, Callie.” Mama pushed herself to her feet. “I’ve seen what they are capable of with my own eyes and that’s more than enough.”

Her voice had turned to iron, and there was more iron behind her eyes. She really didn’t care why Touhy or Dan Ryan or even Stripling had done what they’d done. She didn’t care whether the Seelies or the Unseelies were behind it. She just saw yet more danger to me and Papa. If I kept on trying to push her into seeing what was on the far side of that danger, we’d end up shouting at each other, again. I didn’t think I could stand that.

So I closed my mouth and turned away. My eyes were stinging. But I couldn’t tell if the tears were building up because Mama wouldn’t understand what I was feeling and thinking, or because I couldn’t seem to manage to just tell her about it.

“Callie.” Mama moved up behind me and laid her hands on my shoulders. “It’s all right, Callie,” she said. “There have been so many mistakes … we’ll just have to do our best. But promise me you’ll try, all right?”

“I promise,” I said, and I felt that promise take hold inside me. With a start, I realized I was glad for it. Maybe it would get me to do what I couldn’t seem to do on my own. Maybe it would find me the words to tell her what I was thinking.

Mama held out her hand, and this time I took it and let her pull me close so we could put our arms around each other and just hold on for a time.

“So.” Mama finally let go and smoothed her dress down. “What shall we do first? Wash the windows? The whole
room needs a good dusting and …” She stopped and watched me shifting my weight from side to side. “You want to go out too.”

I nodded. Mama gave a wan smile. “And if I asked you to stay? If I said it was dangerous?”

I shifted my weight and looked out the filthy window. Mama sighed and smoothed her hair back again. “And that’s the way it is. Here.” She held out a scrap of paper. “I had Mrs. Burnstein write down the telephone number. Will you at least call if … if you need anything?”

I took the paper and tucked it into my pocket. I was going to need to start carrying a purse. I had wishes and presents and now my mother holding out an attempt to touch me without holding on too tight, and I didn’t know where to keep it all.

She tried to smile. “Go. I’ve got plenty to do. There’s no reason this can’t be a decent place.” By decent, of course, she meant clean.

I started for the door. I shouldn’t have looked back, but I did, and saw her sit down heavily. Thin, alone, and bone tired, my mama stared out the grimy window, and I felt her wondering if any of us was coming back.

Thing was, as soon as I got onto the street, I had a problem. I didn’t know which way I should be headed. Jack was long gone, and I didn’t know the first thing about the city around me. I tried to put on a face like I knew what I was doing, so the skinny kids and hard-eyed old ladies wouldn’t stare too much, and started walking.

I might have been on my own, but there wasn’t any reason I actually had to be lost. If I was stuck with being an Unseelie princess, I might as well get some use out of it. I put my hand into my skirt pocket and touched Jack’s notebook. Then I eased open my magic.

Jack Holland
, I thought.
Jack, where are you?

Probably, I should have just waited for Jack to come home. But I was worried. It just wasn’t like him to do a little stammering and take off. He should have spun some kind of story, no matter what he was up to. And sometimes he got
ideas stuck in his head that weren’t the best kind, especially when he was mad. He could get really stubborn about them too. Besides, I needed to talk to him without any chance of my parents overhearing. I still had this idea I’d come up with out on the porch while we’d been talking to Touhy, and I was itching to hear how it sounded out loud. It made sense, I was sure it did, but I could already tell Papa wasn’t going to like it. To have any chance of getting my parents to give it a try, I needed Jack to back me up.

Jack, where are you?

And just like that, I knew. I couldn’t see him, exactly, but I knew where he was all the same. More than that, I knew the way he’d walked to get there. I felt it in my bones, and there was nothing in this whole city that could shake it out of me.

I smiled to myself, and started walking.

I probably shouldn’t have been so confident about slinging my magic around after just one real lesson. It sure did feel strange at first, to be so certain about where to go without knowing the first thing about the streets or the buildings. But after a couple blocks, I’d settled into it. With my magic open, I could feel more of the currents around me than ever. This time it wasn’t just the wishes and feelings of the people I was aware of, it was the city itself. I could feel the boundaries Papa had talked about, the places where territory and feeling began and ended. There were buried histories here, layers of life and wish and creation piled up like Mama’s griddle cakes. They pushed and pulled on the people who moved through them. The city was living jewels and pretty
puzzle pieces under my fingers. It was dazzling and chaotic, but it all fit together, and I found myself scrabbling at the pattern, trying to understand it. Was this what the full-blood fairies felt like when they came to the human world? If it was, I could understand how they might become fascinated by it. Even when I passed the newsstand and saw the papers with headlines screaming
MGM OFFERS REWARD FOR INFORMATION ABOUT VANISHED STAR
, it was just one more piece of the shimmering whole.

I was grinning and I knew it. I had Jack’s present in one pocket and my papa’s wish in the other, and my magic in my bones. I knew just where I should be going. I could feel the tug of the right path under the soles of my shoes. I could take on the world.

It was the cool of the metal door handle under my hand that brought me to myself, hard and sudden. I knuckled my eyes and stared around me.

Sooty brick buildings crowded on either side, and sooty striped awnings stuck out over doorways that didn’t need them because the sun wasn’t ever making it down here anyhow. The store in front of me had its shade pulled down and
LESTER & SHALE
painted on the glass in neat black lettering. The green door had been freshly painted and had another shade pulled down behind its double row of square glass panes and the
CLOSED
sign hung out.

I’d walked right down this alley off the main street, and I had my hand on the curving brass handle. I heard all the city noises, the voices, and the traffic, and I smelled all the smog
and the trash. It was hot. I was perspiring. And I wasn’t anywhere near Jack.