Chapter 43
Over the next few days, time organized itself again, days and nights following one another with hardly any missing hours.
My family began visiting in force. We’d given a lot of money to the hospital over the decades, and visiting hours did not apply.
Passels of cousins, aunts and uncles, Grandpa Dwight with fresh flowers.
Veronica, bringing me yarn and needles, homemade food, a new phone.
Cyrus, unmarked by the crash except for his right arm in a sling. Still no Sebastian.
These visitors unnerved me.
They looked like my family, spoke in familiar ways, but my blood refused to recognize them. Each visiting Morton moved as if their skin belonged to someone else. Us, transformed into not-us.
Bellamy visited me several times a day, always avoiding them. She made me anxious too, though in an opposite way. We were connected, as if my heart was outside my body, fragile and exposed. Another car crash waiting to happen.
“Your cousins remind me of slongers,” Bellamy said one day, having come in to steal a flower from my nightstand.
“Slongers aren’t real.”
“Exactly.” She took the flower—brilliant purple wolfsbane—and went away.
A search on my new phone found a condition called Capgras syndrome, in which the patient believes that a close relative (friend, pet) has been replaced by an impostor, a perfect copy.
I saw how we didn’t fit in among the nurses, the doctors, the other patients. Even the two members of Gertie’s pod who came to visit (bearing a Get Well card that read, “Alas, no flowers, but one couldn’t find the right shade”) seemed normal compared to my cousins, aunts, and uncles.
But my family weren’t impostors. They—we—were the same as always. It was my eyes that had changed.
A day before I left the hospital, Thomas came to visit.
When he appeared in my doorway, I expected to see an elder behind him. But Tom was seventeen now—he’d done his first wrack, and would be at Helshire in a month. He’d driven himself.
He dragged a chair to my bedside and unpacked a picnic. Early harvest apples—Gravensteins and Cox’s Orange Pippins. Bacon sandwiches, on sourdough bread from a Civil War–era starter kept in the darkness of the Great House’s wine cellar. Sweet, raw milk from Beatrice’s cows.
“What classes should I take?” he asked before his first bite. “And don’t say Accounting.”
I put my knitting aside. “Accounting.”
He rolled his sharp blue eyes. “Because we all want to work in art galleries.”
“You can launder money anywhere. That’s the beauty of math—it works the same throughout the universe.” The milk tasted of grass and sunlight. “Are you asking for the best combat course?”
“No.” He took another bite, chewed it thoughtfully. “History.”
This was new. Tom loved driving fast cars, hunting turkeys, and washing down the killing floor with a pressure hose.
“The history of what?”
“The Late Bronze Age,” he said. “The Uffington people, when the Romans invaded. How we survived.”
I remembered little Thomas on his first nightwalk, worried that we’d run into a coven of urban witches in Central Park. “Since when do you like druids?”
“They weren’t druids. They were us.”
That’s when I noticed—Tom didn’t look like the rest of my family. His eyes were right-side up. His skin was his own. Maybe my head was clearing.
Or maybe Tom was different.
“You should study ordinary history first,” I said. “That’s what Hendrik Wolvaardt told me, freshman year. I scoffed then, but now I think he was right.”
Thomas’s eyes drifted up to my shorn hair, like this was my injury talking.
“The world is ordinary,” I said.
“That’s why everyone takes No Drama.”
“That class is bullshit.” The word came out with an unexpected intensity. “In New York, I kept saying the wrong things. There was so much I didn’t know.”
He sighed. “So I have to take some class about World War Two?”
“Thomas, your Great-granduncle Mark was killed in the Blitz. Ordinary history is our history.”
“We’re not like them,” Tom said. “You should see my roommate’s file. Scared of everything. Social anxiety, test anxiety—total basket case.”
“We need them.” I could feel it again, the ache in my chest where something was missing. Sharper with every word.
“Like we need food,” he said.
“Without ordinaries, there is no us.”
Thomas, always respectful, was trying to understand. He glanced up at my shorn scalp again. The spiky growth of hair, the half-hidden staples. (Sometimes I could taste them, like coins on my tongue.)
“Aunt Jessica,” he said. “What happened to you in New York?”
My brain snagged. Orrin had called me Aunt Jessica too—I’d been blooded again. In that small room.
But something bigger had happened in New York.
“Oh,” Tom said. “You haven’t been debriefed yet, have you? I shouldn’t be asking. And you haven’t eaten anything.”
I regarded the apples and sandwiches. Crunchy, sweet tartness? Or chewy, salty meat?
“But there’s a photo of you…” Thomas began.
Xavier Lindqvist opened the door. He was holding a bouquet of rosebuds.
“Flowers?” Tom asked, his sardonic tone exactly like Sebastian’s. “Black flowers?”
“They’re a deep burgundy when the bud opens. Much like my heart.”
“Hearts are all the same color,” I said.
Tom groaned. “How did you get in?”
“Through the door.”
“It’s after hours,” Tom said. “Only family allowed.”
“The staff must think I look like a Morton.” Xavier helped himself to a bacon sandwich and sat on the other side of my bed.
His eyes were also where they should be. His skin was his own. My brain was settling—except for this strange need to convince Thomas that ordinaries were important.
“Short hair becomes you,” Xavier said gallantly. “The nose too.”
“And the staples in my head?”
“You just need matching earrings. I’ll see what I can find.”
“You don’t look like a Morton at all!” Tom said to Xavier. They both wore cotton T-shirts and beaten-up jeans. But it wasn’t the clothes that made them the same, it was their legacy certainty. We are better than you. We belong in every room.
“Tom wants to know,” I said, “which classes to take.”
“Wise to ask your elders, young Thomas.”
Tom scowled.
“Archery, because your form is terrible. Latin, because it’s a key to many languages, like this one.
Mandarin, because it’s ancient, yet widely spoken.
Legacy Chemistry, for the hottest professors, the quietest poisons, the loudest bombs.
Avoid Accounting, forensic or otherwise.
Though, as a Morton, how could you resist? ”
“We’re not all—” Tom began.
“I miss Ms. Delicato,” I said.
“You would.” Xavier leaned back. “But some of us prefer the older forensics—blood and sinew, spread across a granite slab. I’m sure young Thomas here does. You run hot, don’t you?”
“He does not,” I said, though Xavier was right—he was the perfect candidate for a Hefnd. What I meant was You can’t have him. “Thomas adores accounting.”
Tom paused, not wanting to contradict his elder.
“Math is universal,” he said at last, delivering a you-owe-me glance.
Xavier smiled. “We’re looking forward to having another Morton join us.”
“At Helshire,” I finished for him, though I knew what he really meant.
“Yes, Aunt Jessica.” Xavier reached for an apple. “At Helshire.”
How did he know I was an aunt?
That’s right—by now, Bianca had told her family I’d killed Peter.
And what I’d done in New York was all over the fucking news.