Viloxin is a fourteen-hundred-square-mile lush volcanic rock the size of Long Island, vaguely shaped like a heart. Its people, my mother’s people, fiercely love their own. When Mama, Tai, and I walked around Limatra—the largest (and only) city on the heart’s bay, crafted from black basalt and sole-worn cobblestones—people would stop and kiss her hand and cheeks, stroke our black hair, run out from shops and homes to feed us chestnut-flavored sweets.
They paled and shook in front of our father, praising him in low tones.
They mobbed Tai and me, sobbing and supplicating at our prepubescent feet as we entered and exited friends’ homes and therapists’ offices, hollowed out, in the weeks after Mama disappeared.
“Aunt Marion only let us spend three days in Limatra for Dad’s funeral, Manon,” Tai says, reading my mind. She slurps down champagne to stem the tears lacquering her eyes. “Dad’s fucking funeral.”
Three days was more than enough last summer, in the place where Mama disappeared, where Dad became sick and paranoid, dying very much alone. Three days was all that was safe. If we went back for longer, it would mean facing too much pain at every turn. But Tai doesn’t get that, because I’m the one who always shields her from it.
I pluck the phone from her hand and keep reading the invitation. “‘Cochaired by Antella Arnoix’”—my blood runs cold, and she glares at me—“and Tiro Nítuchí?”
Nítuchí. Our father’s right hand, once upon a time. Evil in human form, the bogeyman in our most vivid nightmares. I will never forget Nítuchí’s first visit to Stökéwood after Mama disappeared.
The company offers its condolences, he’d said in Vilosh, standing at the threshold of her library and casting a long shadow.
My stomach slowly roiled with hot glue; Tai whimpered beside me. I refused to answer, choosing instead to stare at him and scowl. The little man had blinked at me and paused for several seconds. I felt better, for a moment. But then I detected the smallest smug smile growing on his face, a tumor of a thing. It wasn’t just telling me he had suspected she would abandon us—so many of our father’s colleagues had wondered aloud if dedicating herself to motherhood and her Foix Institute would be too banal and dry a life for her. Taking a flighty actress for a wife was an imprudent risk our father had been warned about, I’d come to learn from gossip rags years later.
No—on Nítuchí’s smirking face I saw pure, unadulterated satisfaction that Mama was gone. She was a problem, neatly solved. A mistake, corrected. His malevolence was as easy to detect as Mama’s presence in her lavender smell.
You should learn how to speak Vilosh and English in the presence of your father’s colleagues. Your mother was not sufficiently concerned with your education. But you are, after all, only female.
The thought of him filled me with a sense of doom.
Now he’s the acting CEO of Hero Pharmaceuticals, ever since he forced Dad to step down. And apparently the cochair of this retrospective, for reasons I don’t want to think about.
“Forget about them,” Tai says. “We’re not kids anymore.”
But seeing him and his cronies wouldn’t be the worst part of returning to Viloxin. No.
Going back would mean seeing all the places where our mother loved us so much that I still remember to this day how safe and content I felt, something I have yet to feel again.
Going back would mean seeing where she left us for good because that love wasn’t enough for her. Seeing the place where I know, in the deepest, darkest sticky pit of my soul, that she killed herself.
I guzzle down some champagne, setting the glass on the mirrored table before us, and Tai’s petal-pink lip juts.
“C’mon, you know it’s bullshit that Marion is keeping us from Viloxin, Manon.”
“Are you seriously pouting?” I cross my arms and shiver, even though the bar is too warm now and sweat’s slicking my neck. Because I have a secret I haven’t told Tai.
I kind of, sort of, want an excuse to go back to Viloxin, too. Not to be the toast of the town, the cultural princess of Viloxin back on home turf, like I’m sure Tai wants to be. But to get to know Mama and our homeland again, on my own terms. Not the shiny, flat versions everyone thinks they know.
I’ll write her truest story into a book, so everyone can understand just how deep her magic ran, how we’ll never find anything like it again.
I sigh and uncross my arms. I pick up my coupe of champagne and extend it toward my sister, ready to clink.
Her face spreads into a wide, easy smile. “You’ll do it? You’ll help me convince her?”
My lips quaver into a small grin, and for the first time in years, we are smiling at each other. We clink glasses, the deal sealed.
That’s when the music shifts up-tempo and sparklers burn into the frame of my vision. Three waiters in tuxes, Dom the bouncer, and a posse of effortlessly cool people approach our corner, holding the fizzing fireworks with toothy smiles and bearing a frosted cake full of burning candles.
“What is happening?” I hiss at Tai.
But she’s already hopping onto her heels and clapping her hands, cheek-kissing everyone and anyone, by the looks of it. Even strangers are turning and breaking into grins. “I didn’t even dress,” she says, in between smooches and squeals, and I’m left alone at knee level with the cake. The hastily applied icing on it reads: A very, very special happy birthday to our favorite Foix Hammick!
Her birthday isn’t even for another two weeks.
I wonder if ulcers can instantaneously crop up and burn your stomach lining.
“We know it’s only a matter of time until everyone in the world knows you’re just as special as your mom and, you know, breathes this collective sigh of relief that the Foix Hammick magic isn’t gone forever,” an older woman in black leather and gold cuffs says in a low rasp, rubbing Tai’s back with her skeletal fingers. “Just you wait.”
And Tai’s smile doesn’t even waver as she replies, “Oh my gosh, no, stop; she may be back some day; I know my mama better than anyone, just you wait—”
That’s when I smell Kell’s perfume, and I see my classmates approaching my sister like they’re worshipping at the altar of her.
Tai kisses them before gesturing to me and saying, “Kell, you know Manon, right? You’re her year!”
Then all three swivel and blink at me in tandem, their faces little perfect pored games of shadow and light in the presence of Tai’s shine, and I wish I could melt into the cushions below me like the stubby candles on the very, very special cake.
Not a day goes by that I forget just how different Tai and I are, because every time I look at her, I know.
THE ETHER
TAI
thais: Who’s the fo(i)x on viloxin now—cc: mama’s outrageous spring ’92 oscar de la renta outfit
1 hour ago
3,893 likes
241 comments
botbabe123: Pretty! <3 <3
kellyinnyc: Enjoy x
linos.is.bae: Is Linos with you?
basickitty123: I mean I DIE for that skirt
saxim: I can’t wait to see you, Basil!
thais @saxim see you soon Monty:*
manonymous: This was clearly taken at JFK