“Don’t talk down to me. I know all of that. I know.” She releases her knees and presses clenched fists to her eyelids before looking up at me, her whole face brimming with that secret hope that’s so tender and naive it makes me sick. “Stop staring at me.”
“I’m not.” But of course I am. She’s beautiful even when she’s upset—with her feline, heart-shaped face, her baby-pink cheeks with their cherubic gleam, her puffy lips, and her oversize eyes—and that irritates me. Sometimes pain just shouldn’t be beautiful. But it’s more than that, of course: Everything about Tai annoys me now. Her hundreds of thousands of followers, and the fact she’s almost always putting on a show for them. It makes me half expect that she’s livestreaming this moment right now. I remain on edge with her—on the offensive, as always. “I’m leaving Stökéwood, and I’m not coming back,” I decide. “And you’re coming with me. We’re staying at the apartment in Limatra. I already made sure it’s habitable. This is done.”
I open my eyes, finding her blue ones set on me, sparkling with a sharpness I haven’t seen in months: She has an idea, and that idea is all that matters.
I know it’s the idea that our father just planted in her head, ready to sprout and grow thorns.
“This is bigger than you and me,” she says, staring me down. “Even if she isn’t alive, he believed someone might be responsible for what happened.”
And that thought sickens me. Of course it does. It took years of excruciating work to sit with my belief that she killed herself. And now, because of one letter, I can’t tear the image of Mama, bruised and battered, from my mind. It’s an amalgamation of her own movie clips, lines pulled from the tabloid report on White Fox, and my own imagination overheating. My pulse has run off; my skin is feverish. Of course someone malicious could have forced her to disappear, could have locked her up for ten long years, could have led Dad to believe she might still be out there, eager to return. It’s horrible, it’s nonsensical, and it’s all I want to believe.
“We can’t be here right now,” I whisper. I wanted to feel close to Mama again, but I wanted to do it on my terms.
“What if she found something out about Hero Pharm and they fucked her up?” Tai says, talking over me. “Imagine what she might have uncovered. Imagine what she might have left as clues in White Fox.”
My eyes flick to hers, then away. Tai, the expert manipulator. I know some of the men at Hero Pharm are bastards. But Dad was their leader. He was meant to know everything—to be responsible.
I thrust my bloodied hand into my pocket. “Why aren’t you listening to me? White Fox disappeared with her. And to look for her, we don’t have to stay here. You can be so thickheaded—”
“This is my home, Manon. I’ve only been on the grounds for ten minutes in the past decade, and pretty soon it’s going to be sold off. If Aunt Marion hadn’t refused to let us come to Stökéwood for Dad’s funeral, we would’ve gotten this note sooner. But now it’s been ten months since he left that note for us, even longer since he saw her, and every day that passes takes us further from her. Makes it more difficult for us to…” She rubs her eyes. “Sense her.”
I stare at her in front of me, sparrow small with her plane-matted black hair, and the edges of my coldness melt. I’m unable or unwilling to tell her that’s not how time and space work.
Because I get it: When a mother supposedly reappears, after ten long years away, surely her children should feel her warm presence, no matter how near or far, pulsing like a newly born star.
I don’t feel that.
“I’m not leaving,” she says abruptly, eyes ablaze, “and you can’t make me change my mind. I’m going to spend the night in this very, very special place where we made so many happy memories. I’m going to find White Fox.” She rises with a crack of her knees and storms toward the bathroom. “And tomorrow, I’m going to find Mama, because I know she’s still here.”
As if it’s as easy as that. As if we’re not going to find so much pain in our search, too much to bear.
Mama.
I walk the hall I walked countless times as a child, and I’m flooded by images of her, my chest filling with a choking glue.
Tai’s right: The Mama I knew is here, in a way, trapped in every stone of this place where good goes to die.
Coocoo! she croons, crouching to tickle me under the chin and read alongside me after she catches me poring over D’Aulaires’ Greek myths, pressed up against those very stones—even if it means less time at cocktails with the adults, even if it means smudging her lipstick and mussing the hem of her silk dress. Better to look lived-in, she says when Dad tuts at her.
The long meals in the dining room, just down there, where we sit in matching silk pajamas to learn to enjoy smoked Viloki sheep cheese and scallops and rock snails, where a shell slips the grasp of my tongs, flying straight at Dad’s face, and we all howl and double over with laughter, even him.
Skipping down the hall with her, hand in hand, my head still warm from where her fingers wove a French braid into my scalp. Napping together in the library—running my finger over the seam on her face made by the blanket we shared.
Mama, swiftly layering cream-colored makeup that smells of paint onto the fine, freckled skin of her chest with a blank stare into the mirror, until she glimpses me rounding the bend and drops the tube on the counter, her face cracking into a toothy, grateful smile, swirling around to hug me, kiss me, wrap me in her small arms in such a way that they felt more welcoming and generous than a cocoon.
And waking up that second morning after her disappearance, only to crumple by this very door in my sweated-through striped pajamas, hit by flashes of understanding all of that might just be gone forever.
I knock over one stack of paperwork, scattering the top sheets, and I pick them up with unsteady hands, squinting at the photo-copied text. Old documents eaten around the edges, section titles in bold beneath the retired Hero Pharm logo.
MEDICATION NAME
TRIAL #
DATE
RESULTS
I drop it like it’s singed me. I don’t need to be Dad to understand what he was collecting.
It’s a paper cemetery for the victims of his experiments over a multi-decade career. Tests gone wrong, side effects found too late. The man who told me to spend my life creating something greater than myself was living inside a cemetery of his mistakes.
Maybe neither of my parents were who I thought they were.
I find my way through the maze and to the front door before Tai can intercept me, heart pumping the blackest blood, and I break into a run to meet the car that dropped us off. It’s still waiting outside the front gates, as promised, to take me to the city apartment in Limatra.
Tai can enjoy her reunion with this broken place, with her so-called happy memories, barbed things doomed to hurt us. She’ll manage, by texting Saxim and Linos and the hundreds of vapid people in her orbit.
Tomí salutes me from the window of the guardhouse. I swallow hard, desperate to ignore the regret building in my chest—you shouldn’t leave Tai alone, don’t leave Tai alone—but … she thinks she’s an adult, right?
And she knows where to find me.