Chapter Two
The door scraped open reluctantly, leaving a sweeping arc in the dust on the floorboards. Ms. Renard, the property manager, stepped through in front of Ivy, and sneezed. The place smelled of dust, and old paper, and neglect. Something musty and animal, too. Ivy noticed a pile of old furs behind the cluttered counter, and scrunched her face up in disgust. One of them, from the faded russet color, had belonged to a fox. Poor little thing.
“Well, it’s yours now.” Ms. Renard said, handing over the keys. From the tone of her voice, she might have been disposing of a dead mouse.
And to be fair, the thought didn’t make Ivy want to jump for joy. Actually, it made her want to turn straight around and run screaming down the road.
Instead, she took a deep breath and stepped inside her mother’s shop, closing the door behind her.
“Well,” she said brightly. “I’m sure with some hard work and a lick of paint…” She trailed off.
…it will be an absolute dump, she thought.
Ms. Renard’s expression told her that she agreed. She was a fussy, sharp-faced little woman in a boxy business suit. She had an expensive-looking scarf knotted at her throat.
Suddenly, her pinched expression irritated Ivy. The shop wasn’t much, okay, but it had been important to her mom.
Her mom had called it The Antique Boutique, but it was a junk shop, the shelves piled high and overflowing with unloved toys, mismatched china, costume jewelry, and revoltingly cute ornaments of simpering shepherdesses and rabbits in waistcoats. She knew the living area upstairs was even worse, stacked high with old newspapers that formed the walls of a maze, with little rat-runs between the tiny bathroom, the stairs, the cooker, and the fold-out couch where her mother had slept.
Ivy’s mom had showed signs of being a hoarder since she’d first met her ten years ago, at the age of fifteen, after growing up in the system – sometimes in a succession of short-lived foster situations, but more often thrown in with a bunch of equally spiky and defensive kids in a group home. It seemed like she’d gotten worse over the years, though, and by the time she’d died the shop had been running at a loss for years, too full of old junk for even the keenest bargain-hunters to want to bother rummaging through it.
Now it was up to Ivy to clear the place out, put it on the market, and hope the purchase price would be enough to cover her mom’s debts. It’d probably be a better idea just to put a match to the place and walk away. It’d go up like dry tinder.
She realized Ms. Renard was still looking around the room with a critical eye, pointed nose turned up, her body language practically screaming “Yuck”.
“Yes, thank you, that’s fine,” Ivy said. “I can take it from here. Let me have a business card, please.”
The property manager jumped, then rummaged in her purse. She handed her card over with a distinctly sour expression, then strode towards the door, heels clacking.
Ivy sighed and rolled up her sleeves. She’d start upstairs, where she’d be more likely to find anything of sentimental value that she might want to keep. She doubted she would, though.
She trudged up the stairs, stacked on both sides with pairs of old shoes that “still had some wear in them”, in various sizes. The steps creaked and groaned under her feet. It was the only sound she could hear, since the noise of traffic from outside was muffled by the stacks of paper and the piles of clothes pushed against the walls.
She knew her mom had never been altogether stable – there was a reason she hadn’t been able to raise Ivy, after all. She’d had various diagnoses over the years, none of which had stuck, and she hadn’t been the greatest about taking her medication. Lately Ivy had been wondering if her…eccentricity was something genetic. If her mom’s fragile mental health might have been passed down in her blood. Bluntly, she was starting to wonder if she was losing her shit.
First of all there were the dreams. Dreams about completely mundane things – a broken coffee cup, a brief conversation, the specific piece of muzak playing in an elevator. She’d certainly had much weirder dreams, but the thing about these particular dreams was…she thought they were coming true. She remembered the feeling of numb shock as her coffee cup had slipped from her fingers and seemed to be falling in slow motion, before hitting the floor and cracking down the middle, spilling its contents in a constellation of fat dropletsjust so, just like it had in her dream.
But they couldn’t be coming true, of course, because that was nuts. Which meant she was nuts.
She shook the thought away. She’d got a busy few hours ahead of her, and spending the time fretting wouldn’t make it go any faster.
* * * * *
Two hours later, and she’d cleared away most of the stacks of paper between the cooker and the couch. Her hands and forearms were filthy with newsprint, and her hair was sticking to her sweaty face. She ran the back of her hand over her forehead, then swore when she realized she’d probably just smeared herself with ink. She flumped down onto the couch. It coughed out a cloud of dust, making her choke.
Next to the couch, she spotted a pile of clothes – relatively clean; presumably the things her mom had actually worn day-to-day rather than “stock”, which was how she’d referred to the rest of the junk she hoarded. Ivy reached down, intending to find something to tie around her mouth and nose before she tried to tackle the couch, but instead her fingers encountered something cool and smooth – a little wooden box.
She picked it up and looked at it curiously. She knew it wouldn’t contain a wedding band - her parents had never been married. In fact, she didn’t know very much about her father at all. Usually when she’d asked about him, her mom had changed the subject, or got either snappish or sad. The only times she’d talked about him had been when she was off her meds, and then the things she’d told Ivy had been… Well, obviously unreliable. Delusional. She’d said he was an—
She opened the lid of the box and gasped as she hooked her finger into the delicate chain and lifted the pendant from the box. It looked like real gold. It depicted the shining form of an angel, its head bowed, a glittering crystal sphere cradled between its tiny hands. Its wings swept up behind it, as if it was preparing for flight.
As the jewelry spun on the end of its chain, she saw that the other side of the pendant depicted the towering form of a bear, rearing on its hind legs, its jaws open in a ferocious bellow. Its eyes were tiny chips of the same crystal.
She lifted the piece, watching as it twisted on the end of its fine gold chain, first the angel, then the bear, then the angel. She felt hypnotized, as if an old-timey stage magician were swinging a watch in front of her eyes. Angel. Bear. Angel.
Ivy let the pendant dangle just above her hand, hesitating for a moment, then lowered it onto her palm. It felt cool and heavy.
She jerked as though a bolt of electricity had gone through her, and her fingers spasmed shut around the piece of jewelry. Her hand locked into a fist. She tried to cry out, but the sound choked off in her throat.
