I wished that I could grab her hand and plunge it into the dark spaces between my bones. What lived there would bite at her fingers and maybe then she’d know the weight of my mother’s hands in my hair for the last time or the peppercorn cologne Jupiter sprayed onto his chest.
But nothing could bite Indigo.
Indigo shrugged and hung Tati’s fur coat back on the rack.
“I just don’t get it,” she said, pursing her mouth. “If you hate him so much, then why go home? He’s going to be there. Waiting for you.”
But that’s where she was wrong.
“You know why,” I said, not looking at her directly. “I made a promise to my mom, and I don’t want to break it... not when we’re so close.”
Indigo sighed, nodding. “Be here tomorrow at sunset.”
“I will,” I said.
My lies wriggled on my tongue, flirting with the tops of my teeth. I blew her a kiss, shut the door behind me, and clamped my lips together. I told myself that my lies were a penance, a way of keeping this darkness to myself until I understood what to do with it. That I had come to enjoy the time with my mother was another thing I dropped into that yawning space within me.
The whole time I walked home, I imagined entering the Otherworld. I pictured the turret iced over, thick snow on the ground, the apple branches snapped off from the cold, and Indigo howling that I alone had killed it.
Tomorrow would be a reckoning, and I was not ready.
By the time I reached my mother’s house, the sky was beginning to darken. I found my mother sitting at the dining table. Over the past month and a half, she had changed. Her hair was washed, curled neatly around her shoulders. There was color in her clothes and cheeks, and her eyes held a new brightness. She welcomed me with a smile before quickly putting it away. This warmth between us was new and it spooked easily.
“I wasn’t sure you were coming here today,” she said, careful not to say the word “home” because we both knew this had not been one for me.
I shrugged, waiting.
Slowly, she slid something across the table. Her car keys. She looked up at me through her lashes. “You ready to go?”
“Yeah,” I said, and when I smiled, I let it linger on my face.
Here was something Indigo didn’t know about me, something I didn’t even know about myself until my mother asked if I wanted to learn:
I liked driving.
I liked putting distance between myself and the world. I liked the way the asphalt rumbled beneath me, the stubborn yield of the gear shifts, the way I could sip the perfume of honeysuckles through a rolled-down window. When the stars blurred overhead or the sunshine lanced through the windshield, I turned winged and sleek, a creature climbing through the sky beholden to no place on earth.
“You’re a fast learner,” my mother had said after my first lesson. She let out a breath that might have been a laugh held tight in her chest. “Next time I’m going to have to bring a helmet, won’t I?”
We spoke around what we wanted, and in this, I’d heard another question—Can we do this again?
So we did.
Our island wasn’t big, but the roads were long and empty, yawning past bridges that had fallen into creeks, snaking between spruces and firs tall as giants and outlining hidden coves that clung to secret beaches I’d never seen before.
Driving made everything seem large and within reach, andwhen I sank into my mother’s rusty sedan and heard the engine roar and felt the afternoon warm the back of my arms, I imagined I was the one pulling the sun across the horizon. Because with every drive, the world I did not know was illuminated.
My mother climbed into the seat beside me and for the rest of the evening I guided us down the winding roads. My mother didn’t say much during these drives, but the air rushing through the windows reassembled the space between us, rubbing out the edges so it didn’t hurt to sit so close.
When I sat in the car that day, I pulled the night alongside me. And in that shadow, my mother spoke:
“Not long left until graduation,” she said, then added, “and your birthday.” I could hear her mouth crinkle in a shy smile.
I heard her question between the things she said aloud:Have you thought about what you will do? Whether you’ll take the money I’ve saved for you and go elsewhere?
“I know,” I said.
And I knew she heard my answer:I don’t know yet.
