“Baby,” she says.
“Mom,” I say, trying to slide past. I want her away from me. I already feel too much. I can’t bear feeling anything more.
“I know that you always looked up to Philip,” she says, as though the last six months never happened. As though the last three years never happened. The smell of liquor is strong on her breath. “But we’ve both got to be strong.”
I say nothing. I don’t trust myself to speak.
“Barron says I should move in with him. He says he worries about me being alone.”
“That’s great,” I say, and mean it. Maybe he can distract her.
One of the casserole-makers comes in and wants to console Mom. I get out while the getting’s good. Sam follows me, looking a little shaken. I don’t think he’s used to so many criminals displaying their scarred throats in one place. Daneca stays in the dining room, clearly in awe of being in the center of a worker party in one of the best-known worker towns.
I prepare to get blind drunk in the most efficient way possible. Taking a bottle of vodka out of Grandad’s liquor cabinet, I grab three shot glasses from the kitchen and automatically head to the basement.
The basement is just like I remember it from all the summers I spent here. Cool and damp, with a slight smell of mildew. I flop down onto the leather couch in front of the television.
I set up the glasses on the coffee table, pour a shot into each one, and grimly down the whole line.
I feel better, but also worse here. Better because the memories are so close. Worse because of the memories themselves.
“Oh,” I say, looking over at Sam. “I should have gotten another glass for you.”
He lifts his eyebrow and picks up one of mine. “How about I just take this one at the end.”
“Lila and I used to come down here a lot. Watch movies,” I say, waving vaguely toward the set.
Philip and Barron and I spent a lot of time in this room too. I remember lying on the floor and playing Battleship with Philip, laughing so hard I was afraid I was going to piss my pants. I remember a teenage Anton and Philip forbidding us to come into the room while they had on a horror movie. Barron and I sat on the stairs instead, not technically in the room, watching from the dark so we wouldn’t get in trouble, utterly terrified.
I pour myself two more shots. Grudgingly I pour one for Sam, too.
“What’s going on with you and Lila?” he asks. “I thought you liked her—you know, last year, when we pulled the thing. But you’ve been avoiding her since she started at Wallingford.”
Self-revulsion lets me gulp down the booze without wincing.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” I say, shaking my head. “Not here. Not tonight.”
“Okay,” says Sam, with a false reasonableness in his voice. “What do you want to talk about?”
“My new career,” I say. “I am going to help the Feds catch my brother’s killer. It’s going to be just like Band of the Banned .”
“No one watches that show,” Sam says. “No one under fifty.”
Someone is coming down the stairs. I pour another round of drinks in case the newcomer is planning on stealing my booze. In this crowd one can’t be too safe.
“A wonderful piece of cinema verite,” I declare. “It is going to be my new life. And I am going to get a badge and a gun and hunt down evildoers.” I am flooded with a sense of well-being. Everything sounds perfect. Like a dream I don’t want to wake from.
“Did you just say ‘evildoers’?” Daneca asks, flopping onto the couch next to us. “Did you know Betty the Butcher is upstairs? And she’s wearing a gold mask. That means it’s got to be true! Killing her last husband must have rotted her nose off.”
I point to the shots I have lined up. She takes one. I feel quite magnanimous. Also kind of light-headed. “That’s what I plan on calling them when I apprehend them. Evildoers, that is, not Betty. I would call only Betty by the name Betty. Well, I call her Aunt Betty, but still.”
“I’m not really sure,” Sam tells Daneca, “but I believe our drunk friend here is claiming that he was approached by federal agents.”
“They gave me files,” I say delightedly.
“You really do have all the luck,” says Daneca.
We sit in the basement, drinking steadily until I pass out on the old leather couch in front of the television. The last thing I remember is blurrily noticing Sam and Daneca kissing on the floor. I want to get a glass of water, but I don’t want to disturb them, so I stay where I am and close my eyes as tightly as they will go.
When I wake up, Sam and Daneca are curled up together on the rug under an afghan. I go to the kitchen, sticking my head under the sink and guzzling as much water as I can get down.
Out the window I can see by the light cast from the kitchen that it has stopped raining. I can also see Grandad sitting on a lawn chair, a beer in hand, looking at the dark expanse of his muddy backyard and ramshackle shed. I still feel a little tipsy.
I let the screen door slam behind me as I join him. He barely even looks up.
“Hey,” I say as I fumble to unfold another chair.
“You look a little worse for wear,” Grandad says, pulling out a pipe from his pocket and packing it with tobacco. “Better sit down before you fall down.”
I sit unsteadily. The chair creaks. “Since when do you smoke a pipe?”
“I don’t,” he says, lighting a match and touching it to the tobacco. “Quit years ago, after Shandra was born.”
“Right,” I say. “Silly me.”
“We couldn’t have kids, me and your grandmother. Mary kept having miscarriages. She really took it hard—went on bed rest as soon as she thought she might be pregnant. The doctors said we had the Rh factor, but I kept thinking that it was really because of my death work. I thought maybe the blowback made it so I couldn’t make healthy babies. Could be superstition, but when I stopped killing people with curses, your mother got born.”
“I didn’t think you were allowed to quit that kind of job,” I say.
“The Zacharovs wouldn’t have let me stop being a killer, but no one gets to tell me how to kill.” Sweet smoke rises from his pipe. “A man’s got to be an expert at his own trade.”
“Ah,” I say. Even though I saw him kill Anton, it’s still hard to think of my grandfather as really dangerous. But I have to remember that he was already an assassin when Lila’s scary dad was still a boy.
“Magic gives you a lot of choices,” Grandad says. “Most of them are bad.”
He takes another sip of his beer.
I wonder if that’s my future. Bad choices. It certainly feels a lot like my present.
“If I’d done things different,” Grandad goes on, “maybe your brother would be alive right now. Me and Mary spoiled your mother rotten, but I didn’t keep her out of the life the way I should’ve. We thought that because she never officially joined up with one of the families, that meant you kids would have a chance at another kind of life, but then I let you all come down here in the summers. I wanted to see my grandkids.”
“We wanted to see you, too,” I say. My voice sounds a little slurred. For a moment, I miss being a kid with a painful intensity. I miss my dad being alive. I miss running around on Grandad’s lawn under the sprinkler.
“I know.” He claps his hand against my shoulder. “But I didn’t keep you three out of the life either. I guess I thought that even though I was leading the horse directly to the water, it didn’t mean I was making it drink.”
I shake my head. “We were born into the life. Just like every other curse worker kid in the world. You couldn’t have kept us out if you tried.”
“Philip’s dead at twenty-three. And I’m still around. That’s not right.” He shakes his head.
I have nothing to say to that, except that if I had to pick him or Philip, the choice would be easy. I’d take him any day. Since I know he doesn’t want to hear that, I take a sip of Grandad’s beer and join him in contemplating the muddy lawn and fading stars.
CHAPTER FIVE
I WAKE UP SUNDAY MORN-ing with a pounding headache and a mouth that tastes of death. I get up out of the lawn chair in the chill sunlight. Grandad’s not there. When I head to the basement, I see that Daneca and Sam are gone too, but at least they’ve left a note:
SEE YOU BACK AT WALLINGFORD.
—S & D
I stumble back upstairs and realize that for some people the wake is still going on. The dining table is in bad shape, hunks of macaroni and cheese oozing onto the tablecloth, mingling hideously with blueberry pie filling. Bottles and cans litter all surfaces. I see Barron in the living room, his arm around an elderly lady I don’t know. She’s telling him about how back in her day, if you really wanted to make money, you went into opium. Clearly she doesn’t know that today all you need for meth is a hotel coffeepot, but I’m not going to be the one to tell her.
Grandad is asleep in his recliner, the steady rise and fall of his chest an indicator that he’s okay.
A few other people are sitting around, mostly young mobsters still in their rumpled suits, collars loose enough to show their neck scars. When I pass, I hear them talking about a big job involving a bank, thirty feet of rope, and a lot of WD-40. They are red-eyed and laughing.
I go into the guest bedroom and find my mother sitting in front of a television, watching the soap opera channel. “Oh, honey,” she says when she sees me. “I never met those friends of yours. They seemed really nice.”
“Yeah,” I say.
She studies me for a long moment. “You look terrible. When’s the last time you ate?”
I lean my head against the wall, arching my neck. “I have a hangover.”
“There’s aspirin in the bathroom, but it’ll tear up your stomach if there’s nothing in it. You should eat.”
“I know,” I say. She’s right.
I get into my car and drive to a diner I remember from the summers when Philip, Barron, and I lived with Grandad. The waitress doesn’t seem to be bothered by my wrinkled day-old suit or by the fact that I eat two breakfasts, one right after the other. I cut the eggs and watch the yolk run across my plate in a yellow tide. Then I pepper the mess and sop it up with rye toast. By the time I get through a pot of coffee, my head stops hurting.
I leave some bills on the table and head for school. The steering wheel of my car has been warmed by the sun, and as I cruise along the highway, I roll down my windows to drink in the last rain-soaked breath of summer.
The last thing I expect when I walk into my dorm is to find Daneca and Sam with a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew and all of the files the Feds gave me spread out across various surfaces of my room. I freeze with my hand on the door frame.
For a moment all I can feel is blind, unreasoning rage. Those papers are mine.
“Oh, hey,” Daneca says, looking up from the floor, where she’s sitting with her back braced against my bed. She’s looking pretty casual for someone who is courting a demerit just for being in here. She grins. “Nice look. I can’t believe you were telling the truth about the Feds.”
“That’s because after Barron’s eulogy, you have all new trust issues regarding my family,” I say, as casually as I can manage. I take off my jacket and throw it onto the bed. Then I roll up my shirtsleeves. That’s about as together as I can get myself without a shower and a change of clothes. “And now I have all new trust issues with you. What exactly do you think you’re doing?”
“Wait, you’re saying that thing Barron told us about the Himalayas and saving that goat wasn’t true?” Sam asks. He’s got on a black T-shirt and jeans. His hair’s still wet.
I am almost one hundred percent sure he’s messing with me.
I roll my eyes. “Anyway, just because I said I had files—during a period, I will remind you, when I was severely compromised by drink and grief—doesn’t mean I gave you permission to read them.”
“Evildoers don’t care about rules,” Daneca says, and then has to snicker for a while.
“Oh, come on,” Sam says. “You hid them under the mattress. That’s like begging for someone to find them.”
I have a bad feeling that Sam is quoting something I said back at me. I groan and slump into my desk chair, then realize I am sitting on a stack of papers. I pull them out from under me.
“So, what are we looking at?” I ask them, peering at what I’m holding. There are pictures clipped to the files, a bunch of tough-looking guys clearly getting their picture taken because they were busted for something. And then, candid shots of those same guys drinking coffee in cafés or reading the paper on the balcony of a hotel, a woman in a bathing suit beside them. Surveillance shots.
“There are six victims here,” Daneca says. “All workers.”
“All dudes,” puts in Sam.
Daneca stretches, grabbing one of the pages. “Giovanni ‘Scars’ Basso. He’s in the real—and fake—amulet trade. Was apparently shorting some people money. As far as the Feds know, he didn’t work directly for Zacharov. Probably did deals with a bunch of the families. No body. No nothing. One night he was just gone.”
“So we don’t even know that he didn’t just skip town,” says Sam.
“Yeah,” I say. “Maybe they all skipped town.”
“Together?” Daneca asks Sam. “Like now all six of them are living in a villa in the south of France like in a wacky TV sitcom?”