Look again, said the House.
I was on the floor. A knee was on my chest. My brother cried and began to cough, his face paling. My mother rose from the table, annoyed, grabbed my brother’s inhaler from inside one of the dark-brown cabinets. She threw it at his feet. She did not look at me as she retreated into the dark.
“Why are you laughing at me?” said my father. “You think it’s funny that I work all day to put food on the table—”
We were only play wrestling, a lion and its cub, our foyer a vast Serengeti—
No,said the House.
I opened my eyes. A wall of a thousand thorns surrounded the secret inside me. The thin gauze I stretched over my childhoodripped, and in the holes, I saw what I had not forgotten but willfully misplaced. I knew why we had to run.
But where did he run to?
One might think this knowledge would lay waste to me. But I had years of practice when it came to avoiding what I knew, and so I held it away from me, to feel at a later time. A time that, if I did not play this game correctly, might never come to pass.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Azure
In the days following Tati’s injury, I struggled to process the truth of it, to call it an “accident,” though it never sat right in my heart. I would find myself repeating everything the doctors had said—she worked late in the night, she was getting older, she was confused.
She must have slipped and fallen in her studio and a bottle of bleach fell into her eyes and blinded her. She must have hit her head for that skull fracture. She must have, for now she was concussed, so confused, and she would never be the same.
Indigo had a few weeks left before she officially aged into her trust, but she took over the household responsibilities when Tati returned from the hospital. For the first week, there was no silence to be found. Workers moved through the House, rearranging furniture, cushioning all the edges. Tati’s workshop was sealed, her inventory emptied, her commissions delivered in whatever state she had left them.
In the mornings, Indigo and I would go to Tati’s bedroom. We would slide braided bracelets around her wrists and hang woven blond and brunette pendants from her neck. We wrapped her in memory and hoped that she would return.
I was never sure if it made a difference though. Tati seemed almost comatose during our visits. One day, while Indigo ran to the kitchens to fetch her a bowl of lukewarm broth, I watched Tati’s face closely. Her eyelids were closed tight. Indigo and I used to do that when we were pretending to be asleep.
“Tati?” I whispered, placing a hand on her wrist. “Are you awake?”
She looked different now. The stark lights leached the cinnamon warmth from her skin. Her body was too slender, hollowed out by the loss of her sight and her mind. Her shorn head was bandaged and stippled with age spots that I’d never realized were underneath those beautiful headscarves. I ran my fingers over the velvet nap of her scalp, wondering if I might feel the hard outline of the secret she kept in her skull. Tati’s last words had carved a space out of me, and in that new darkness, something I could not bring myself to look at bloomed—I saw it all wrong.
I wasn’t sure what I’d seen that night. I caught a flash of Indigo’s white nightdress in the hallway after I found Tati, but that couldn’t be right. The moment I’d screamed, Indigo appeared at the base of the stairs. She was wearing black. I had been out of it before I found Tati, dreaming, and sleeping in a pile of petals. I must have been confused.
“Tati.” I leaned in close and whispered. “What did you see?”
Her eyes opened. My face was only a few inches away from hers. Tati’s lips smacked wetly. Her milky eyes landed on nothing. And then, she opened her mouth and screamed.
Mrs.Revand threw open the doors, rushed inside. Indigo stood outside the threshold, her face curiously blank.
“Give her time,” said Mrs. Revand as she reached for a syringe and grabbed Tati’s thrashing arm.
“I saw nothing!” Tati bellowed. “I don’t want to see!”
“Shhh, MissHippolyta, there’s nothing to see,” murmured Mrs.Revand. She glanced at me over her shoulder. “You girls go play. I’ll take care of this.”
I met Indigo outside the door. I could feel the House’s worry—the floorboards vibrated, tapestries slipped off their hooks, the walls sagged. I rubbed my palm along the banister and tried to soothe it.
Beside me, Indigo was quiet. We hadn’t been alone in a while. At night, Indigo fell into an exhausted, dreamless sleep and in the morning, solicitors and agents clamored for her attention. We hadn’t been back to school in the two weeks since the accident, and though arrangements had been made so my grades wouldn’t suffer, those two weeks melted into one long, terrible night without the rhythm of schoolwork. Even my mother did not try to summon me home. When she heard about Tati’s misfortune, she had only closed her eyes.
Take all the time you need with her, she’d said.
I’d always thought I’d feel relieved—victorious, even—the day I saw guilt in my mother’s eyes, but when it finally happened, all I felt was exhaustion.How did we come to this?I wanted to ask her from where we stood on opposite ends of the dingy kitchenette. But Tati, the one who had kissed my scraped knees since I was ten years old, needed me, and so I left.
“It’s Tati’s fault, you know,” said Indigo as she brewed us cups of hibiscus tea.
I was the one who had found Tati screaming and scratching at her face. I didn’t see any signs of fault. Only pain.
