The Time of Two #6
Jace raised an eyebrow. “I’m not leaving my weapons,” he said. “This is the suburbs. Do you know how dangerous the suburbs are?”
Max looked at Clary, who just shrugged. A moment later, Max sighed and unlocked the car, beckoning them over. Clary scrambled into the passenger seat quickly, before he could change his mind.
—
Max Trueblood might have seemed like the minivan type, but it turned out he drove a squat, turquoise Mini Cooper. Clary had never ridden in such an aggressively adorable car, or such a tiny one.
“I feel like this car belongs to the Flintstones,” Clary said, squeezed into the front seat.
“Who are the Flintstones?” Jace asked, from the back. “Did you meet them in Idris?”
Max caught Clary’s eye and grinned, and for a moment, she felt like they were on the same team.
It didn’t last. Clary made a couple stabs at what she thought was polite small talk, asking Max about his mundane life.
Most questions he answered monosyllabically—many he refused to answer at all.
He allowed that he was a classics professor at a local university, but wouldn’t tell them which one.
He said he’d lived in several cities since leaving Idris, but wouldn’t say where.
And when Clary asked whether he had any children, he shut her down cold.
“I don’t want the Clave knowing anything about my life.”
“We’re not the Clave,” Jace pointed out. “We’re family.”
“You’re not that either,” Max said. He turned on the radio. Then turned it up, loud. The harmonies of various interchangeable boy bands carried them the rest of the way to Costco.
—
It had been years since Clary had been inside a Costco. She’d always thought of it as a store for giants, one that sold the reverse of dollhouse furniture. Instead of everything being scaled down, it was scaled way up.
Still, since she’d been absent from things like big box stores for such a long time, it now felt exotic—like they’d stumbled onto a vast dragon’s hoard, an echoing chamber piled high with colorful treasure.
Except in this case the treasure was all made out of plastic, and on clearance.
To their right were pallets of produce, stacked with enough fruits and vegetables to feed an army.
To their left was the appliance section.
Clary had no idea there were so many different kinds of washing machines.
Jace paused in confusion as they passed an immense collection of scented candles.
“Who would want a candle that smelled like asparagus?” he said, reading one of the labels.
“O brave new world, that has such people in it,” Max said, with a wry smile. “Anything you can imagine, there’s someone out there who wants it. And eventually they all find their ways here.”
Max, apparently, was here for breakfast cereal. In multiple sugary varieties. The kind a child might root for his father to bring home, though Max hadn’t admitted whether he had any kids or not. There hadn’t been anything about his house to suggest the presence of children, but you never knew.
“So Maryse adopted you?” Max asked Jace. “How old were you when it happened?”
“I was nine. The Lightwoods took me in when—”
“Actually, don’t tell me. The less I know, the better.” Max started tossing boxes of cereal into his giant cart at what seemed like random, then pushed it into a different aisle without waiting to see if they would follow.
Jace rolled his eyes. “Sure, great plan. Let’s peruse all six hundred varieties of available toilet paper in hostile silence.”
Secretly, Clary agreed with him, but she followed Max into the next aisle anyway. Jace followed. They found Max staring blankly at huge bottles of ketchup. “Oh, look,” he said, when they appeared. “You again.”
The corner of Jace’s mouth had twitched down. “I’m going to go look at the knives,” he said, whirled around, and left.
Max’s shoulders sagged. “I didn’t mean to upset him.”
“The knives will cheer him up,” Clary said.
“He likes cooking?”
Clary smiled. “He likes knives.”
Max shook his head ruefully. “Of course he does.” He started pushing the cart again, but this time, he and Clary walked side by side.
He seemed slightly less tense without Jace there.
Strangers were easier than family sometimes, Clary thought.
Even family you’d never met. There was no pressure to have any kind of feeling about them.
No pressure to stop feeling. “Look, I’m not a terrible person,” Max said.
“I know what happened to me isn’t your fault, or Jace’s. ”
“You’re just taking it out on us because we’re the only ones around?” Clary suggested.
“Exactly—well, all right, that sounds awful.” He nearly rammed his cart into a large display of cat litter, and sighed. “You think I don’t miss my sister?”
“Do you?”
He looked like he couldn’t believe she’d asked. “Of course! Do you think I wanted it this way? Do you think I chose this?”
“I think you made a choice you should never have been asked to make,” Clary said, carefully. “I can’t imagine how angry I would be. How heartbroken. But a lot has changed in the Clave since you left.”
“I know.” Looking slightly chastened, Max admitted that he’d been keeping tabs on the Shadow World.
There was a barbershop in Willow Grove run by a werewolf who liked to gossip.
“He moved there because he thought a place named Willow Grove might involve trees. Classic suburban story. Came for the nonexistent forest, stayed for the fro-yo.”
Max explained that wherever he’d lived, he’d always managed to find some source of information on the Shadowhunters.
There were certain things a person needed to know—like whether their family was alive or dead.
But he’d resisted the temptation to ask too many questions.
The more details he had, the more he kept up with the world he’d left behind, the more it hurt.
“Then came the Dark War, and the Cold Peace, and…everything after,” he said.
“So much loss. So much grief. So many people I’d once cared about dying for a cause they believed in.
I couldn’t fight by their side, obviously.
” Max looked down at his unmarked arms. She wondered how long it had taken him to stop feeling like he’d lost a piece of himself.
Like the armor that protected him from the world had been stripped away.
Maybe he never stopped feeling it. “It wasn’t my war anymore.
But learning the names of the fallen, paying tribute to their sacrifice, that seemed like the least I could do. ”
The thing about Max, Clary thought, was that she liked him.
It was easy to imagine him fitting in with the Lightwoods.
Imagine, she thought, if he had kids. They’d be older than Alec’s children, but still, there would be cousins to visit.
The Law was softer than it had been, with Alec as Consul.
Knowing Alec, he would probably recuse himself from any official verdict on Max’s exile.
But the whole Council was different now. Everything had changed.
She just didn’t know if those changes had come too late for Max.
—
Next they went to a mall. Even cranky, Jace was amused by the enormous indoor atrium of stores and the strange food items—like Dippin’ Dots—that no one would ever try to foist upon the inhabitants of Manhattan. Although he was confused why the mundanes needed both a mall and a Costco.
“Sometimes you want a specific store just for knives,” Max said, and Jace nodded, as if this indeed made sense.
The mall smelled like cheap perfume and soft pretzels.
Clary wondered if Max missed Idris as much as the Lightwoods did.
And if he took any satisfaction from knowing most of the Clave had also been forced to choose a kind of exile.
He’d made a life somewhere that felt about as far from the glittering spires of Alicante, the lush forests and emerald plains of Idris, as a person could get.
Clary had grown up in a city of glamours, an artificial scrim laid across reality that kept her from seeing the world as it really was.
But the suburbs felt like glamour on top of glamour.
A willful embrace of the artificial, the illusion, and she wondered if that was what Max liked about it.
If living inside a bubble of plastic and Astroturf, where everyone was hiding from some kind of reality, made him feel less alone.
Or maybe I’m just a Brooklyn snob, she thought ruefully, as they passed a store that sold cookies the size of her head. Maybe Max just liked having a pretty lawn and easy access to oversized baked goods, and who could blame him.
Max led them to a store that sold devices Clary couldn’t believe someone had actually invented, much less fooled someone else into paying for: a wearable automated back scratcher for mid-sized dogs, a levitating alarm clock in the shape of Saturn that announced the time in astronomical units, a pillow that would wake you up if you started snoring.
(Clary teased Jace that actually that one might come in handy.) Max selected a telescope, portable enough—according to the box—to take into the wilderness in search of darker skies, strong enough to see the cloud belts of Jupiter.
“You must really like astronomy,” Clary said, glimpsing the price tag.
“It’s a gift.”
“For who?” Jace asked.
Max ignored the question, and asked the woman behind the register if they could wrap it.
“I remember when my father taught me the names of the stars,” Jace said.
Max stiffened, but again, pretended Jace had said nothing. “You called Robert Maryse’s husband,” he said, after a moment. “But I was under the impression they’d gotten divorced?”
It was a transparent attempt to change the subject. And it worked.
“I thought you didn’t want to know anything about your sister,” Jace said.
“I thought so too.”
He’s so sad, Clary thought. We knew he might be angry, but he’s also just so…sad.
“They were separated,” Jace said.