INTERLUDE I
Before: The First Time
The first Maren ever knew of Lark was the noise.
It was a dead Tuesday at the parlor on Frenchmen Street, the summer Maren turned sixteen and was still mostly sweeping floors and tracing other people's flash.
The heat had emptied the street, and the shop sat in its own permanent smell, green soap and old ink and the sweetish machine oil Maren would carry on her hands for the rest of her life.
The owner was asleep in the back with a magazine over his face, the radio was doing all the talking, and Maren was at the light box redrawing a rose she'd drawn a hundred times, when the door went.
It went all at once: the bell, and a slab of street-heat, and a girl already laughing at something, holding the door with her hip while she finished a sentence to a friend who'd kept walking.
She had on a yellow dress that was wrong for the weather and right for her, and she came in still half turned to the street, so that the first thing Maren ever really saw of her was the back of her.
The nape of her neck under a mess of copper hair. The exact place a tattoo would go.
"You do walk-ins?" the girl said, turning round.
She had a gap in her front teeth and she led with it, grinning, as though a grin were a way of introducing yourself.
"Please say you do walk-ins. I decided this morning, and if I go home and sleep on it I'll talk myself out and be a coward about it forever. "
Maren said the owner was asleep but she could ask.
She did not ask. She would think, much later, that some animal part of her had decided in the first ten seconds not to let this girl back out the door, and had simply taken her mouth over to get it done.
It should have been an easy no. They were both a year short of legal, and it was the owner's license on the wall and her own apprenticeship on the line, and a sensible girl would have said come back when you're eighteen and bring a parent.
But Maren had been watching doors close since she was seven, since the morning her mother went out and did not come back and the lesson came down simple and permanent: people left, and the ones you wanted most left hardest. Some part of her had already done the sum and found a lost job the smaller loss.
She heard herself say she could do a small one, if it was small, if the girl didn't mind an apprentice.
The girl didn't mind. The girl, it would turn out, minded almost nothing.
She wanted a swallow, between the shoulder blades.
She'd thought about it for years, she said, which Maren would come to learn was the thing Lark said about decisions she'd made over breakfast. A swallow because they came back, she said.
However far out they flew, they came home to the same eave, the same nail, every year.
"I like that." She pulled her hair over one shoulder and bared the back of her neck without a second thought, the way most people would hand you a photograph.
"Coming home to the same place on purpose.
I think it might be the bravest thing there is. "
So Maren drew it on her in marker first, and then bent in close with the machine and started, and the girl talked.
She talked for the better part of two hours.
She handed Maren her whole life unasked: the strict house she'd grown up in and the hard God in it, the older sister who did everything right and got nothing back for it, the way she'd worked out young that she would rather be the bad daughter and at least be warm.
She talked about wanting to get out and not knowing how to want it quietly.
She never once asked Maren a question, and somehow Maren didn't mind, because underneath all of it she could feel herself being shown something true.
Handed it, the way you get handed a thing too heavy to be polite about.
The needle is an intimate business. People forget that.
You spend an hour bent over a stranger's bare skin with your hand flat on them, feeling them flinch and then settle, feeling the small animal of a person get used to you, and it does something to you both.
Somewhere in the second hour, with the swallow nearly closed and the girl finally gone quiet, her breath slow and her shoulders loose under Maren's fingers, Maren understood with a flat calm that scared her more than panic would have: she was finished.
Whatever this was, she was not going to get over it.
She had been chosen, without being asked, and without agreeing to it.
She cleaned the swallow up and held the mirror so the girl could see it over her shoulder.
The girl studied it a long moment in the glass, and then looked past it, at Maren, and her face did something Maren had never had a face do at her before.
It went soft and sure at the same time. "You've got the saddest grey eyes I ever saw," she said, like it was a discovery worth reporting, "and you cut your own hair, don't you.
I can tell. It's gone crooked at the back.
" Maren put a hand to the blunt dark ends of it before she could stop herself, and the girl grinned wider, pleased to be right.
"Lark," the girl said, sticking her hand out, far too late for a handshake to make any sense, and laughing at herself for how late it was. "I should've opened with that."
"Maren."
"Maren." Lark tried the name on like she was deciding to keep it. "I'm going to come back, you know. All the time. I've decided. You'll get sick of me."
She never did. That was the joke of it, the small unbearable joke Maren would take out and turn over for the rest of her life. Of all the leaving she'd braced for since she was seven years old, every door she'd watched for, she never once got the chance to grow sick of Lark.