Chapter Three #3
She sits down beside me on the carpet, straightening her nightgown and dangling her legs between the balusters of the stairs. I can count the knobs of her spine. “I’m going to leave him, you know. Philip.”
I wonder what he’s done to her. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know she’s been worked, but if it’s a love curse, maybe it’s wearing off.
They do, although it can take six or even eight months.
I wonder if I can ask her if she’s visited my mom in prison.
Mom has to wear gloves, but she could easily have picked out a few threads to let skin brush skin while saying good-bye. “I didn’t know,” I say.
“Soon. It’s a secret. You’ll keep my secret, right?”
I nod quickly.
“How come you aren’t down there? With the others?”
I shrug. “Kid brothers always get left out, right?” They’re still talking downstairs. I can’t quite hear the words, but I’m afraid to stop talking, for fear she might hear what they’re saying about her.
“You’re not a good liar. Philip’s good, but not you.”
“Hey,” I say, honestly offended. “I am an excellent liar. I am the finest liar in the history of liars.”
“Liar,” she says, a slow smile spreading across her face. “Why did your parents call you Cassel?”
I’m defeated and amused. “Mom loved extravagant names. Dad insisted that his first son be named after him—Philip—but after that, she got to name Barron and me whatever fanciful thing she wanted. If she’d had her way, Philip would have been Jasper.”
She rolls her eyes. “Come on. Are you sure they aren’t from her family? Traditional names?”
“Who knows? It’s all a mystery. Dad was blond and I bet he found the name Sharpe in a crackerjack box of fake IDs.
As for Mom’s side of the family, Gramps says that his father—her grandfather—was a maharaja of India.
He sold tonics from Calcutta to the Midwest. Makes some sense that we could be Indian.
His last name, Singer, could be derived from Singh. But that’s just one of his stories.”
“Your grandfather told me that someone in your family was descended from a runaway slave,” she says.
I wonder what she thought when she married Philip.
People are always coming up to me on trains and talking to me in different languages, like it’s obvious I’ll understand them. It bothers me that I never will.
“Yeah,” I say. “I like the maharaja story better. And don’t even get me started on the one where we’re Iroquois. Or Italian. And not just Italian, but descended from Julius Caesar.”
That makes her laugh loudly enough that I wonder if they hear her downstairs, but the rhythm of their voices doesn’t change. “Was he a worker?” she asks, low again. “Philip doesn’t like to talk about it.”
“Great-Grandad Singer?” I ask. “I don’t know.
” With the blackened finger stubs on his left hand, I’m pretty sure she knows that my grandfather’s a death worker.
Every kind of curse gives off some kind of blowback, but death curses kill a part of you.
If you’re lucky, it rots some of your fingers.
If not, maybe it rots your lungs or heart.
Every curse works the worker, my grandfather says.
“Did you always know you couldn’t do it? Could your mother tell?”
I shake my head. “No. When we were little, she was afraid we would work someone by accident. She figured it would come on eventually, so she didn’t encourage us.
” I think about Mom’s quick appraisal of a mark and the host of shady skills she did encourage us to learn.
It makes me almost miss her. “I used to pretend that I was, though. A worker. One time I thought I turned an ant into a stick until Barron told me he’d switched them to mess with me. ”
“Transformation, huh?” Maura’s smile is distant.
“What’s the point of pretending to be anything less than the most talented practitioner of the very rarest curses?” I ask.
She shrugs. “I used to think I could make people fall down. Every time my sister skinned her knee, I was sure it was me. I cried when I realized it wasn’t.”
Maura glances toward her son’s room. “Philip doesn’t want us to test the baby, but I’m afraid. What if our child hurts someone by accident? What if he’s one of those kids born with crippling blowback? At least if he tested positive, we’d know.”
“Just keep him gloved,” I say, knowing Philip will never agree to the test. “Until he’s old enough to try a small working.” In health class our teacher used to say that if someone came toward you on the street with bare hands, consider those hands to be as potentially deadly as unsheathed blades.
“All kids develop differently—no one can know when he’d be ready,” Maura says. “The little baby gloves are so cute, though.”
Downstairs, Grandad’s warning Barron about something. His voice swells, and I catch the words “In my day we were feared. Now we’re just afraid.”
I yawn and turn to Maura. They can spend all night debating what they want to do with me, but that isn’t going to stop me from scamming myself back into school. “Do you really hear music? What does it sound like?”
Her smile turns radiant, although her gaze stays on the carpet. “Like angels shrieking my name.”
The hair stands up all along my arms.