Chapter 27
They rolled north from the slaughter, and for a while Donna dozed with her head on her brother’s shoulder and his arm around
her. In the months to come, she found that Van was often there, close beside her, when she was nodding off. He waited for
her at the edge of sleep, standing on the lonely strand between wakefulness and dreams, his jeans rolled up and his feet in
the surf of an ocean big enough to make the Atlantic look like a child’s wading pool. He wore a necklace of sand dollars.
She woke once and glanced into the rearview mirror and saw Van looking back, eyes narrowed in amusement beneath his slender
eyebrows. That was the other place she could find him, in the months after his funeral, after Erin Oakes delivered the eulogy
at his graveside. If Donna looked at her own reflection and focused only on her eyes and narrowed them ever so slightly; or
if she entered a darkened bathroom and saw the shape of herself in the mirror, just the outline, if she stood a certain way,
with her head cocked just so.
Donovan had looked back at her from inside a cracked mirror, the night they called King Sorrow forth from the Long Dark. They
had passed that cracked mirror around the table (although Allie insisted it was a big conch shell, like out of Lord of the Flies, and Arthur seemed to believe they had passed a World War II–era Russian helmet filled with tap water).
The door to the hallway kept flying open and then slamming shut.
Each time it slammed, it frightened her all over again.
Donna wanted to believe it was a prank, it was Colin playing a stupid, mean prank, that he was controlling the door with a button under the card table.
Only she knew he wasn’t, and not just because Colin kept his hands firmly in sight the whole time.
She knew because once she looked at the door when it flew open and saw a sky full of strange, wheeling constellations where the hallway should’ve been.
She knew because another time she looked through that open door and an eye as big as a tractor tire was staring back.
At some point Allie got up to play piano. Not long after that Arthur went outside through the French windows into the snow.
The mirror was passed to her and Van was squeezed in on her left, so they could both look into it at the same time. A crack
ran down the center of the glass, dividing it into two sections, and when Donna stared at her half of the mirror, she saw
Van, and when he stared at his half, he saw her. The version of Van in the mirror smiled at her (the Van beside her was not
smiling at all) and held up a card: the dragon of hearts. The version of her in the mirror showed Van a dragon of spades.
And she understood what they were being asked to do. They both did, knew without discussing it.
Van found two decks of cards and shuffled them together. They sat on the floor, across from one another, and they began to
play War. Their oldest game, and one they had never really grown out of. They had been at War with each other since the beginning.
Allie pounded out the melody to “Puff the Magic Dragon” over and over on the player piano. Colin sat away from them, at the
French doors, blowing smoke rings. Van took her ten of hearts with a queen of hearts. She took his king of clubs with an ace
of spades.
“If dragons are real, then what else is?” Van asked.
“What do you mean? Like maybe Santa is real?”
“Or giants and shit. We ought to summon a giant instead of a dragon. Tall women turn me on.”
“How the hell would that work? You aren’t going to have sex with a giant. I guess you could go spelunking in her pussy, but
it ain’t going to be sex, old son,” she said.
She played a three of clubs, he played a two of diamonds, and she won the trick. He played a king of clubs and she played
an ace of clubs and won the trick.
“Fuck you,” he said.
“Incest is best,” she said.
Outside, in the snow, Arthur Oakes was pursuing someone in a slow-motion chase. Donna had watched them both go by a couple of times, a hundred feet apart. The stranger fled across the snow and Arthur followed. Colin blew a smoke ring that widened until it was the size of a manhole cover.
“You and Colin got a thing going?” Van asked.
“No,” Donna said. “Just fucking.”
The next card Donovan played was a star from the Zener deck, but she beat him with three wiggly lines. She played a plus sign
and he beat her with a circle. They did not discuss which card was higher, they just knew. In fact they did not discuss anything
at all. It came to Donna then that they hadn’t opened their mouths once the whole time they were playing War, had been carrying
on their conversation in their minds.
“Oh, shit,” she said without opening her mouth. “Oh, shit, oh, shit.”
“You’re just noticing now?” he asked without opening his mouth, and gave her that smile, the one that made her brother one
of the handsomest men in the world. “Twin telepathy, baby. Twin telepathy for real.”
And she played the dragon of spades and he played the dragon of hearts. They held the cards up to show each other, both of
them beaming, exhausted, and happy. They kept holding them, even when the cards began to burn. Donna’s burned from the inside
out, a red lace of flame widening and spreading toward the edges. Van’s smoldered and ignited at the left corner, began to
burn down.
“Who won?” she asked her brother, but she had to say it aloud, the connection broken.
“Game suspended on account of dragons,” Donovan told her.