The Night Country

29

The bartender sliced his finger halfway through my mother’s telling, shouted once, and disappeared into the back. The drunk in the corner groaned as the jukebox clicked to life, playing an old Flamingos song. The Spinner was gone, but her stories weren’t; they could still leak poison into the air.

“So you think that the Spinner—and now you think someone’s trying to…”

“I don’t know what I think.”

The bleak landscapes of the tale pulsed in my mind in shades of red and gray. The Trio said it first: what if the dead weren’t victims but martyrs? What if their deaths meant more, and their desecration had some vast, impossible purpose?

“A night country. What did Althea think of that? Did she tell you?”

“My mother.” She said the words like a curse. “It’s just good she heard it when she did. Any earlier and she might’ve tried to make one herself. We always lived in Althealand anyway, she would’ve loved to make it literal.”

Two hands, two feet, a tongue. Two eyes, a heart, and blood to cover them. This was it. The piece I’d been looking for. But I had to get my mother clear of it.

“Or maybe,” I said, my voice rusty, “it’s just a story.”

Ella fixed me with a stare that could wither an acorn. “So says the literal Story.”

She never referenced my origin like that. It stopped me short.

“I’m not saying someone didn’t hear it and believe it,” I said. “That they’re not trying, even, to do what she did. But the Spinner told a lot of tales.”

“And all of them true.”

And all of them true.

We looked at each other, but I wasn’t seeing her. I was trying to picture it, to imagine its outlines: a night country. A world built on carnage and sacrifice, made to order—but by who?

Ella swallowed the last of her whiskey. “I know you’re not at the Best Western.”

My eyes refocused on her tired face.

“I called the front desk, asking for you. Didn’t want to tell me one way or the other, but I figured it out.”

I caught a drop of condensation as it ran down the side of my cup. “Why didn’t you believe me?”

“I just had this feeling you were lying to me.”

“Why didn’t you say anything till now?”

“I wanted to see your face, I think.” She studied it. “I wanted to see if you’d try to keep lying.”

“Why—”

“Enough with the questions. It’s time for you to come home.”

“When this is done. When this is done, I’ll come home.”

She cursed softly, looking at the ceiling for strength. I wondered who she was looking for up there. Certainly not Althea.

“What does done look like to you?” she began quietly. “Is done when you’re dead? What will you do if you figure out who’s doing this—turn them in? Stop them? You think they’d put up with that, any of them? It’s time to stop playing at whatever it is you’re playing at. It’s time for us to go. You don’t owe anyone here shit. Anyone but me.”

“You just said they might be trying to make a whole new world,” I said incredulously, my act cracking. “You think I can just walk away?”

“You might be a Story,” she said, ignoring me, “but I know Stories. Sophia and the rest of them are not like you. They’re as different from you as an eagle from a canary. They’re not built to survive here, and honestly? Good riddance.”

“Mom, just stop!” I grabbed her wrist hard. And though it was her bones in my fist, it was my wrist that ached, where Sophia had grabbed me at the diner. As fast as I reached for her, I let go. I could taste acid in the back of my throat.

Blank-eyed, she rubbed her wrist. Rolled it.

“You know what,” she said. “No.

“I’ve always excused your temper. It was easy to blame it on what you were. But now this is you. Just you. The Hinterland is gone, and neither of us can blame the Spinner anymore for how she made you. We are done with that.” Her eyes were darker than I’d ever seen them. “If you touch me in anger again, I will fucking touch you back.”

“I messed up,” I said, low. “I did. I wasn’t thinking, I—”

My breath gave out before my words did, juddering away as the panic rose, nibbling at the edges of my vision. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Just, just wait.”

I bolted for the bathroom—tiny, rank, walls papered in ancient stickers. I thought I’d vomit, but I couldn’t. Bent over the sink, I palmed cold water onto my face, breathing out, breathing in. I looked like shit in the mirror, my pupils sharpened to black beads and my skin yellowed by the light.

I stared at my face, hating it in pieces, all the parts of me that would never look the way I felt. Mouth that would’ve been sweet set in anyone else’s face, the heart curve of my hairline. Eyes like a creature of the woods, set to startle. At least the hair was right, the kind of untamed mess that happens when you leave short hair to its own devices. It was choppy and rangy and in between, and it looked like me.

“What are you?” I asked my reflection in a choked whisper. “What fucking are you? What do you want to be?”

I had a vision then, a memory so saturated in color and sensation you could almost call it a flashback, of my mother cutting my hair in the bathroom mirror. A photo of Jean Seberg propped on the sink and the burn of her exhales wafting past my eyes, when she used to smoke while she trimmed.

I breathed in, breathed the memory away. Then I tucked my overgrown ends behind my ears and left the bathroom. But my mother was already gone.

I was walking back toward the bookshop, along the rustling edge of Washington Square Park, when I felt something in the air. A funny cold little poke, as if someone had pushed aside the atmosphere like a curtain and stuck a finger through. A moment later, a paper airplane pirouetted over my shoulder like a Blue Angel, landing nose first in a laurel bush.

I looked back, just in case a little kid was about to come running after it, but the sidewalk was empty. I swore I smelled a sinuous note in the air, the scent of not New York. Not laurel leaves or pollution or street food or perfume, but something compounded of the molecules and stardust of far, far away. Maybe I could catch it next time, I thought. Catch that little rift in the air with my fingernails, and peel it back to find him.

For now, I could unfold the airplane and read his letter.