She pulls me tighter, tucking my head beneath her chin. Her hand rubs circles, first on my scalp, then my goose-bumped arm, then my back. With each pass, her palm anchors me to the earth, like she’s scared I’ll float away. “We do, Fawny. Some things are invisible and true at once.”
Inside the caravan behind us, the crackle of our neighbour’s alarm interrupts the silence. I know without looking that if I checked it, it would be after midnight and before dawn. The timecaught between dreams and responsibilities. I don’t enjoy sleeping anyway, not when the moon is up and bright.
“Why do we believe, then?” My teeth chatter, but I don’t care. “Because if you believe, Mum, then I believe.”
Mum releases a little laugh. “Because I think we can see it. It’s all a matter of perspective.” She lifts her finger and points at the moon. “The no-magic people, the ones who think they know everything, they say everything can be explained by math and atoms and science. But look at the moon. It’s exactly the right size and exactly the right distance to cover the sun during an eclipse. It gives us tides, it gives us the months, it gives us something to wish on. Isn’t that magic?”
She always talks about things like this. Like the world is a puzzle built for two—me and her. And if we squint hard enough, we will see the bigger picture.
“But isn’t it just an accident?” I ask, parroting something I once heard, that a no-magic person said.
Mum shakes her head. “Science can explain the what, but not the why. Or the how. How did the moon get there, perfectly balanced? Why does it haunt us, call us, make poets out of eccentric nomads? That’s what the magic is. It’s in the not-knowing, the in-between.”
I thread my fingers through hers, studying the way her nails are bitten down to the quick, while mine are filed and neat. “Will it always be there?” I ask.
She smiles, and it’s the saddest, bravest smile I’ve ever seen. “For as long as you want it to be, Fawny.”
A sudden heaviness settles on my left hand, familiar but out of place. I lift it to examine it, and there, crowding my knuckle, is an enormous ring—with a blue diamond. It’s not my mum’s. It’s mine. It’s the one Clay Butcher gives me, and suddenly I realize I’m dreaming.
I know I’m dreaming because my mother is dead. She shotherself in the head less than a week after this night under the moon. Our last moon together.
Tears fill my eyes.
I don’t miss her, not really.
Yes, I do. Especially now that I am a mum. Especially now that I am learning how to do the thing she couldn’t, the thing she gave up doing.
I look up at her through puddles of sorrow. At the dimple in her chin. The slope of her cheek. The way her near-white hair falls in unkempt waves over her shoulders. She is so alive now, so real, that I’m terrified to breathe in case she disappears. Disappears and becomes a butterfly. Does she know how beautiful she is? Did anyone ever tell her?
“You’re beautiful, Mum,” I say.
She blinks, startled. The memory I’d forgotten until now shifts, rewriting itself in real time. She looks down at me, brows furrowed in confusion, then touches a trembling hand to my cheek. “Thank you, baby. And you look just like me now. So grown-up.”
I want to say the things I never said when I was little, the questions that have haunted me through the years. Like, why did you do it? Did you really want to leave me?
Wasn’t I enough?
I force the words out. “Why did you do it?”
She closes her eyes, holding them like that, then opens them again. “I was sad.”
“But why?”
“I’m not sure I know. Sometimes it’s just a mood that rolls in like fog, and you can’t see anything but the next five minutes. Sometimes you think everyone else would be better off.”
My lower lip wobbles. “I couldn’t make you happy.”
She hugs me to her side. “You did, baby. You always did. It was the rest of the world I couldn’t bear to be around. All lies. Politicians,the media, doctors, who to trust, what to believe. It was too much for me to handle.”
I want so badly to forgive her. I twist the ring, feeling its weight, and ask what matters now. “Have I changed? Am I different?”
She looks down at me. “Look at you. I’m so proud of you. Of who you’ve become. Of all you have survived. There isn’t anything in this world that can stop you now.”
Sighing, I stare at the moon, then at her, then at the ring, as if the three connect—pieces of past, present, and future.
“You don’t know the people here,” I whisper. “They are elite. They’re in the Mafia. The kind you wanted to keep me away from. Dangerous men. Men and women, smart, elegant, with sharp tongues and impossible expectations. Sometimes I think I’m just a stray cat in a palace of wolves.”
She laughs. "Oh, baby. Those wolves were born with their power. You? You clawed your way up from nothing. While they were learning which fork to use, you were learning how to survive without one. They inherited their teeth—you sharpened yours on concrete.”
