Nothing bad happens at the Ren faire.
V
TAVIA
My dad doesn’t hear Effie and me come home. I know because he doesn’t change the channel until we’ve locked the door behind us, walked through the foyer, and are starting up the stairs. They curve away from the living room, which opens wide to the left of them, but we can still hear the TV.
It’s some prime-time procedural now, but I would recognize the previous jingle anywhere.
Lexi on a Leash.
My foot connects with the stair in front of it and I almost trip, but I don’t stop climbing. Not even when he’s suddenly standing at the bottom.
“Hey kids, have a good night?”
“Yeah,” Effie answers, slowing down. I can feel the way she looks between us, like she doesn’t know which way to go.
“Everything on schedule for the big day, Effie-dee?”
F-E-D, get it?
She’s smiling now; I don’t even have to check. In her phone, Dad’s saved as CeeBeeAy. It’s their thing. A dad joke turned nickname that earned him one from her.
What I wouldn’t give for dry skin and a pitiful past that makes fathers reach out instead of holding me at arm’s length.
I’m biting the inside of my lip so I don’t crumble. I don’t want to be this person who thinks horrible things about my sister just because she has something I can’t.
I don’t want to be this person, period.
In my bedroom, I lean against the closed door for a moment and close my eyes even though I never turned on the light.
I’m high on the hill, but I listen for signs of water anyway.
Nothing.
If pitiful’s what I’m going for, I feel like nothing less when I collapse onto my bed, fully clothed, in the dark.
“Gramma,” I whisper. Or maybe not. My vocal cords vibrate but only faintly. “I wish you could hear me.”
My eyes open, but it doesn’t make much difference. The space above my head is so dim I can barely make out the crisscrossing beams. Even the light outside the balcony door comes in dark enough to look almost blue.
That feels melodramatic even to me.
“I just wish you could tell me there’s a way out of this,” I whisper into the bluish darkness as though it’s deep water. “I don’t want to be estranged from Dad like you were. I don’t want him to think he’s better off without me. I don’t want him to love Effie more than me.”
I don’t know when I started crying, but it only makes the hurt worse.
“I just want a normal voice.”
But that isn’t all. I also want to know why—if Dad hates sirens so much—he was watching Lexi. Of course, I know why, or I think I do.
Lexi’s respectable. She’s found a way to silence herself—or accepted law enforcement’s way, which is to wear a call-dampening collar at all times.
I guess I could always do that.
I close my eyes again, but the blue is there, too. Only heavier somehow. There’s a feeling, too—a sensation of buoyancy, like I’m really underwater, somewhere in the middle of the deep. My whole body gently bobs and sways, and it’s like I’m back at Natural Bridges in Santa Cruz, riding the tide and barely needing to tread water. And something tells me the longer I stay here, the harder it’ll be to get free.
It’s like schoolwork when you’re tired. If I have a paper due the next day (because I procrastinated) or a presentation or I need to study for an exam, I can’t devote time to thinking about how tired I am or it’ll get worse. I’ll never get the momentum back. Better to get up and move around. Shake my legs, get some fresh air.
That’s what I do. I get up off my bed, wipe my face, and head for the door.
Effie and Dad aren’t on the stairs anymore, but they’re not far. I hear sounds of family and feasting from the kitchen, but I don’t investigate. I consider looking for my mom, asking her what I can’t ask my father; whether she knows anything about how to find Gramma’s voice so I can get rid of mine. But if Mom were on my side in any of this, I figure she’d have said so by now. So I speak to no one and head right back out the door.
On my porch, I breathe in the night’s chill. I pull the cold vapor into my lungs and look up and down my street before heading into the well-lit night. When I’m heading further up the hill, I glance back to see the house and our iron fence, and he’s there. The gargoyle. The claws that make up his feet are curled around the attic’s spire and it just really doesn’t look comfortable, balancing all those muscles and limbs and wings on something that looks like it should break beneath his weight.
Maybe it’s easy to look steady when you’re made of stone. Maybe if he animated right now he’d fall.
That’s when his head turns, slowly. Steadily. Like it’s on Mama Theo’s lazy susan, something mobile and separate from the rest of him.
I wish I hadn’t checked to see if he was there, but I’m glad I stopped walking before I did. Now that I’ve taken the time to really look, he is not the kind of hulking, menacing, nightmare-inducing creature I want chasing me down. I just want to get some fresh air. I want to get further into the hills, up an incline, away from the asphalt and streetlights, up the steps that lead between the trees and over the mulching groundcover. There are paths all through the neighborhood; they’re frequented by joggers and by cyclists with bikes so thin they almost look flimsy, their wheels so narrow I can’t imagine how they have any tread at all. But right now I’m standing in the middle of my street, not blinking because the gargoyle hasn’t. His head is still turned toward me and his chin is sitting on his shoulder like he can keep this up all night.
“I’m just going for a walk,” I say out loud. Can gargoyles hear well? How effective are stone eardrums? So I hold out my hand, flat palm facing him. Which is how I’ve seen people command dogs to stay, not the way I would sign to Effie. I don’t know whether that offends him, but he turns his head forward again and I guess that means I can go.
I’m up the street, onto the beaten path, and halfway up the concrete steps when I sit down. There’s a light on the street above, where this path lets out, and it shines down on me and the grass and the bramble and my own street below.
The Pacific Northwest is very season-fluid, and even though it’s spring, the chill hangs persistently in the air, nearly visible. I close the gap between my chest and my knees, aware of the strip of skin left exposed between my cuffed skinny jeans and my brogues.
The last time I was up here at night, I wasn’t alone. I’m not sure I wanna think about him, but I guess Priam is as good a distraction as anything else.
We came up here once or twice during the whole three months we were maybe-together. I’m less and less clear on that as time goes on, whether we were officially dating and I’m supposed to call him my ex. Now I think of Priam as my almost-ex, but that sounds like we’re together until I find a painless way to break it off. And I was definitely not the breaking-it-off party.
I was with Priam when the sprite touched my hair. We’d gone to a park near his house that evening, and I was sporting French braids.
“Can you teach me how to do that with mine?” he asked across the space between our swings.