But that was a lie.
I had felt Indigo braiding each strand, looping it around the metal bars of her headboard. I felt her gently brush the hair from my face, the weight of the bed shift as she rose to her knees andlowered herself slowly onto my body. I felt the scratch of her bare legs, prickled from her last shave even though she still hid her razor.
“I wouldn’t worry too much,” said Indigo lightly. “In a few weeks we’ll be one of them.”
I closed my eyes, imagining what that would look like. I saw our days melting together from the sunlit hours beneath the apple blossoms. Indigo braiding violets into my hair. The Otherworld slowly sipping away our mortal flaws until our bones were rendered to glass and our black hair resolved into shadows, our teeth grown animal-sharp, and our human lives turned to woodsmoke—a flimsy echo of a fire that had already died.
Indigo watched me from her bed as I dressed for my mother’s house.
“Ugh,” she said, flopping back into the pillows. “You must hate it.”
I dragged a brush down my long black hair. It hung to my waist now, and I’d begun to hate how it was always in my face, how I kept rolling over it in the night.
“Yeah,” I said, staring at my hair. “I hate it.”
The House of Dreams grew agitated when I left. The staircase lengthened; the halls darkened. It knew I was eager to leave.
“Shhh,” I soothed, rubbing its walls. They prickled beneath my palm.
I held my breath as I walked to the front door only to hear a sound behind me.
“You’ve got your eyes open now, don’t you, child,” said a voice.
I whirled around, but there was no one there. I looked up.Tati was leaning over the stair railing. I wasn’t used to seeing her awake this early. Her sedatives were powerful and often kept her in bed for days at a time.
Tati’s blind eyes were fixed in a direction where I wasn’t. Mrs.Revand had bound her hair in a polka-dotted silk scarf, and her nightgown was buttoned wrong, revealing the coarse, wrinkled brown of her chest and part of her breast. I didn’t answer as I reached for the front door and ran out into the early spring sunshine.
Tati was right. My eyes were open, and with every day, I grew more frustrated. My powers of invisibility had faltered. More and more, I stood in stark relief against the world. Even my shadow had thickened. I wanted to say that it was Tati’s fault. She’d told me to open my eyes, and maybe the more I beheld the world outside the House of Dreams, the more the world beheld me.
... and I liked it.
I thought maybe I could wait for the right answer to come, but my hand was forced.
That day, I went to my mother’s house. She was not sitting at the dining table with the car keys in her hand and a plate of snacks for us. Instead, she stood in the doorway, her shoulders narrowed, tugging at her hair. Her clothes hung off her.
“He’s coming back,” she said without looking up at me.
I was glad she didn’t say his name. The air between us was frail as glass, and we had taken such pains not to let it break. I couldn’t speak around it anymore:
“What do you want?”
My mother looked at me, bewildered. When was the last time someone had asked her this? She blinked a couple times, then swallowed hard.
“I want to sell the house. I want to”—my mother gatheredherself—“I want to leavehim. I can do it now. I know it. If you don’t want to see me again, I’ll understand... but if you want me, Azure...” She held my gaze: “If you want me, I can stay. We can... we can try again.”
My mother’s words filled me with light. I knew my answer. I smiled, and she smiled back, and I was Helios in his chariot, pulling the sun behind me so today could become a tomorrow.
But I’d forgotten about the other story. The one of Phaethon, the son of the sun, who yoked his father’s fiery steeds and crashed into constellations, scorching the Earth until he was thrown from his blazing path by Zeus hurling a lightning bolt at his head.
Perhaps Phaethon didn’t know that bolt of brightness would be his death.
Perhaps he couldn’t tell all that splendid illumination apart.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The Bridegroom
My story was nearly over.
