Sage sighs and puts her hand on her head. “I don’t want snakes around my baby, Sky.”
I shake my head. “I mean, Geri…she won’t—”
Sage moves her fingers to my arm—the one without anysnakes curled around it. She makes her voice gentle and sweet-sounding, but I can feel the frustration beneath her tone. “Sky. I know that what you want, more than anything, is for people to treat you normally. To take you seriously. But that means you need to stop—” She lifts her hand once more and points to Geri. “You have to stop doing things like wandering around with animals wrapped around your body.” She furrows her brow and frowns. “Especially to see ababy?”
I shake my head. “I mean, I don’t get groceries with snakes wrapped around my arms.” Though, come to think of it, if I did, I bet people would actually treat me better than they currently do, considering how ubiquitous snake phobias are. “And I know she wouldn’t hurt Oak. You know how it is with our gifts. Weknowthese things. We canfeelthem.”
“It’s not just that. I heard about the birds you sicced on Grayson Baker.” Sage folds the cloth napkin over the rolls, covering them once more. “This isn’t how you’re going to win over the town. Besides the fact thatno one is supposed to knowabout our gifts like that.” She hisses this last part and it’s so weird how she morphs into a person I don’t recognize at all. Sage has always been the soft one, so soft that she struggles with nonconfrontation and people-pleasing.
I kinda wish she were struggling with nonconfrontation and people-pleasing right now, to be honest. It’s hard to pinpoint my emotions, but it kinda feels like she just drop-kicked me in the stomach.
My mouth opens and closes. I have no idea what to say, but somehow, with effort, I form words. “You heard that Grayson Baker took a bet from his friends to fuck me to see if I had antlers coming from my vagina and you think…Ishouldn’thave called the crows to scare him shitless?”
Sage’s eyes widen. “Wait, what? No! I didn’t hear that version. Jesus. He did that to you?”
I am somehow feeling even more small than usual. I begin to pick up the pieces that I was left with from my last text messages with Sage and Teal. How consistently Sage has blown me off, even though I have far more free time than Teal does for helping her. “You haven’t wanted me to see the baby, have you? That’s why you never accept my offers for me to watch him.”
Sage sighs, but she doesn’t deny it. “Look, you spend all your days in the woods with animals that are covered in ticks, and I get that this is ourgift, I understand more than anyone, Sky, but I’m also a mother now. I don’t want the baby to get sick. And I didn’t want to tell you all that because I knew you’d give me that kicked-puppy-dog face you’re giving me right now, and I can’t. I can’t take care of you and my child at the same time.”
All her words turn into arrows and slice right through my chest into my heart. “Oh.”
In the distance, Oak begins to cry.
Sage sighs. “Hold on. Just a second.”
But I don’t wait for a second, or even half a second. I turn and walk out the door, making sure it’s locked behind me. And then I run to my car and slide in. I squeal my tires leaving her apartment complex’s parking lot, Geri’s smooth, cool scales against my arm the whole while.
8
Our mother left us whenI was a baby. Teal was five, and Sage was seven. I don’t even remember her, not even the suggestion of a memory. No hint of a fragrance note. No distant lullabies. Nada. But her abandoning us, it hit Teal and Sage hard. Especially Sage.
We were left with Nadia, who, for some ungodly reason, decided Sage was old enough to raise me and Teal. Atsevenyears old.
Sage potty-trained me and introduced me to solid foods. My first taste of something not puréed was Nadia’s famous caramel flan. Sage laughs when she tells the story. Me, sitting in a scuffed-up high chair in Nadia’s yellow-walled kitchen, my eyes fluttering as I tasted heaven in flan form. And my next move was to grab the rest of the piece of flan in my little fist and shove it in, and all over, my face.
Until I was sixteen, Sage was, for all intents and purposes, the only mother figure I knew. Me and Teal, we got to be the kids.Sage’s childhood was stolen from her, first by our good-for-nothing mother, and second by Nadia’s neglect.
Sage always said she never understood why she and I were connected when I was a ghost. Why when she cried, I appeared to her, looking as though I had never been anything but alive, solid with matter.
But I always knew why. When a child becomes frightened, that child always longs for her mother. And though it wasn’t either of our choices, Sage raised me. Me and Teal both. That’s how we were connected. If our biological mother had loved us properly, and if I had still fallen, I’m certain I would’ve come to her via her tears. But that’s not what happened.
As I fell, I screamed for Sage. Not our mother. Sage.
I probably shouldn’t have run out of Sage’s apartment like that. But I’ve worked really hard on not burdening Sage anymore, not after everything she has gone through for me, including having to deal with me when I was a ghost for all those years.
I made her old room my safe place. I got a real, grown-up job. Every time she and Teal ask me if I’m okay, I give them a big-toothed smile and sayYeswith as much feeling as I can muster.
But finding out that despite that, Sage still feels like I need to be parented. Emotionally coddled.I can’t take care of you and my child at the same time.Shame runs over me, warm and clammy, like a sudden fog descending on an unbearably hot beach day.
I make it back to Nadia’s, and when I check the time on the dashboard, I gasp when I see it’s taken me fifteen minutes less than usual. I wonder how many traffic laws I’d accidentally broken as I drove home in this somewhat hysterical state.
Since it’s Sunday, Nadia will be at church all day and probably till late in the night, too. So that means that after placing Geriback in the garden, I can stomp and sob as loudly as I want, up the stairs and into my bedroom.
When this was Sage’s room, it was decorated with a botanical, rustic, cottagecore style. The walls were white and chipped, the windows always had plants in front of them, and there were paintings of leaves and flowers over the bed. It was understated, allowing the view of the distant ocean through the balcony French doors to be the main feature of the whole room.
When I moved in, the first thing I did was take a few days off work to apply wallpaper over the too-much-white of the walls. (I told Anise I was going on vacation. I hated lying to her, but also the truth seemed a bit pathetic. Luckily I had and have plenty of PTO.)
The wallpaper pattern I had chosen was of a forest. It wasn’t a landscape—no, you didn’t get the feeling like the forest was somewhereout there. Instead, my bed felt like it was placed right in the middle of the gently swaying, birdsong-filled woods. Trees grew out of the ground all around me in curvy, stylized linework, their green, soft-looking leaves highlighted in flecks of gold, the canopy filled with a pale blue, magical fog. Animals watched from secret places—the big eyes of an owl behind the leaves of an oak. A fox curled up in a thicket of ferns, taking a nap with one ear turned toward the viewer. A serpent, spotted with yellow and red, curved on a branch, its black eyes glittering with copper flecks.
