She gave me the most incredulous look for a woman who was normally allergic to sarcasm and tossed the book on my bed. “Sit down,” she said, gesturing to my mirror. “Vanity may be a sin, but there’s no excuse for going to your baptism homely.”
Moving cautiously, eyes on her, I edged to my vanity and sat in the pink padded chair.
She came behind me. Even though she’d just returned from the gulf, where Holy Fire Born Again held its baptisms, there wasn’t a speck of sand on her. Her navy dress was beautiful, the fabric richer than we’d been able to afford back when I was young and the church was still growing. Her white-blond hair daggered straight to her shoulders, a stark contrast to mine, long and scarlet and tangled from the outdoors. But our blue eyes were twins. They met in the mirror.
“Over and over, you girls.” She didn’t look away as she took a fistful of my hair, seized the hairbrush, and dragged it through. When it caught on a tangle, she wrenched harder and I bit my lip. “Why do you always want sobad to fall in love?” Disdain hollowed the wordsyou girls, as if she herself had never been such a creature. “Sickening, the lengths you’ll go to. And always with the wrong boys.” She ran the brush again, jerking my head. “It’s like there’s a switch in your brain once you hit a certain age, and you lose all reason. I was nothing like that when I was a girl. I never caused a lick of trouble. And look how I was rewarded.” She raised her hand at my room. “Look at this house. My husband. My standing. Do you think it came easy?”
She paused and met my eyes. “If you think I’m blind to what’s going on, you’re wrong.”
I blinked to clear the tears, being tender-headed. “You mean the book?”
She waved the brush. “The book, the boy. Thisobsession, Ruth. Why? What’s in it for you?”
The question was remarkable: a singular event. She’d never asked me to explain myself before. Suddenly I wanted to answer with the truth. I thought of Bella, how she’d given up everything for Edward, no hesitation. The other girls at school, falling over boys at Starry Swamp, then sobbing over them in the girls’ bathroom. Lila LeBlanc and her endless suitors, chasing their attention like she had a hole in her heart only they could fill. Beth Fortenot, always wanting boys she thought were bigger and better, trying so hard to escape herself. Whydidwe fall in love like lit matches dropped in kerosene?
The answer came to me easy as anything. And if I could’ve been honest with my mother, I would’ve said we loved like this, with an all-consuming passion, because our hearts had awakened to the truth of what we wanted for ourselves. The awakening itself was a miracle for those of us who had no map for love, who’d never once felt an emotion directed at ourselves as strong as the ones we gave to others. How do you draw a map of a place you’ve never been?Twilighthad been my map. I thought of my love for Edward Cullen at fourteen. Yes. That was my heart’s hunger showing its teeth.
Teeth. As if beckoned by his true name, Everett appeared in my mind, supplanting Edward.
“Well?” My mother smoothed my hair with cold fingers. “What do you have to say for yourself?”
Though I ached to tell her, I realized it might only be a trap. So I stayed quiet, hoping she’d read that as contrition.
But she wouldn’t be dissuaded. She plucked a silver comb from the table. “Choosing obstinance. Well.” She cleared her throat. “There was once another girl who was sullen and rebellious. Who didn’t listen to her parents.”
I was familiar with these cautionary tales. They all started the same way:There was once a girl… What followed was the same plot with different details: a girl who was headstrong and disobedient, whose great sin caused her life to end in tragic ruin. All these three-dimensional, living girls flattened into tales whispered by mothers to daughters. What did it feel like to become a warning? I imagined a great hand pressing me until I was paper thin, like Christ’s wafer body at communion.
“She thought she was in love,” my mother continued. “So even though he was older and refused to tell anyone they were dating, she gave herself to him. And do you know what happened? He left her pregnant and alone. Disgraced and untouchable.”
This was by far the most familiar story. I bit the inside of my mouth, waiting as she scored the comb across my scalp, then said, “You can skip ahead. I’ve heard this one.”
Our eyes met and held for a long time. Then she said softly, “I have one you haven’t heard.”
I couldn’t look away.
“There was once a girl who came from an old, old family, so poor they had to live out in the swamp and kill with their bare hands to eat. Everyone in town looked down on them.”
I was mesmerized by her eyes, focused on something far away. Already, this story felt different.
“As the girl grew up, she started coming into town. She was pretty enough to turn heads, and many men tried to court her. But she fell in love with the worst one. A dangerous man who made her big promises.” My mother’s hands tightened in my hair. “Everyone warned her he was masking his darkness while they were courting. But she ignored them and married him anyway. He bought her a pretty house right in town. And she became pregnant.”
A faint echo of grief flitted across my mother’s face. “Not long after that poor girl gave birth to their son, her husband came home miserably drunk and beat her to death in a fit of rage.” She stroked my forehead. “She had the most luminous skin. The things he did to it.” After a moment, her eyes refocused. “That’s what can happen to you.”
Luminous skin. Gave birth to a son. A drunk father.“It was Everett’s mom,” I breathed. “That’s who you’re talking about.”
I wanted her to deny it. But she said, “It’s a horrifying story. That’s why I never told you.”
In the thickness of my shock, I blinked at her. “But Ever’s mom died giving birth to him.”
She dropped the brush on the table. “That lie’s probably the only mercy that boy’s ever been given.”
Entire belief systems reordered themselves in my head. “Then why didn’t his father go to jail? Youknewthis happened and you let Everett live with him?”
“There was no police record,” said my mother coldly. “The Duncans stayed to themselves, anyway. Didn’t come to church. Had no community. Killian told everyone she died giving birth, and no one questioned him, not even her own family.”
My mind whirred. “But if you knew, you could’ve saved him—”
“Hush,” she hissed. “It’s not our place to interfere with heathens. Besides, I’m sure that boy’s as rotten inside as his daddy—and if he wasn’t born that way, he is now. That’s why you need to stay away. The Duncan line is darkness incarnate.”
