Roses and Rot (35 page)

That they are more than ash on the wind, more than a wish carried on water.

I wish. I wish. I wish.

I had let my guard down. Too busy thinking of everything else, of Helena, of a thousand improbable plots to save Marin. I wasn’t paying attention, and so, it was my fault, really. If I had been thinking clearly, I would have hit delete when I saw our mother’s name come up in my inbox, but I was only halfway paying attention, and so I opened it.

There was a friend who could get me a job teaching high school English, which was a real career, unlike fiddling about making things up. Never mind that I didn’t have the degree or qualifications necessary to teach in high school. That part was relatively benign, as messages from my mother went.

She still wasn’t sure why I’d run off to Melete, which, incidentally, had certainly only accepted me so that Marin would attend.
Everything she’d ever heard had said real writers could write anywhere, but since I needed the crutch, she hoped I was finally writing a novel while I was there. That lady on that morning talk show had written a novel, and it had only taken her three months and it had sold over a hundred thousand copies and now they were making it into a movie, and so it couldn’t be that difficult to write a book. Was I sure I was working hard enough?

I shook my head. It sucked to read, but mostly it was a version of the kind of thing I’d heard before, and not just from my mother, but from any number of well-meaning friends trying to help me hit the bestseller lists. Because of course novel writing was that easy, which explained why so many people had similar experiences. Then I made the mistake of continuing to read.

No matter what I was writing, I had better not make up any lies about her to put in it. One of the women in her neighborhood had said there was a very cruel mother in a short story of mine, and had asked if we were still on speaking terms, and she wouldn’t stand for people to be walking around thinking things like that about her. She had never done anything to me that I hadn’t deserved, that wasn’t my fault, and the times she was strict with me, it was for my own good. If I tried to play the victim card just so I could get on television, if I wrote lies about her to try and fool the people who couldn’t see me for what I was, she’d get a lawyer, and she’d sue.

She knew plenty of examples of people who had decided to trade on lies instead of talent, but she wouldn’t let me do that. She’d make sure I couldn’t. It might hurt me, but it was for my own good.

Hand shaking, stomach full of acid, I hit delete.

Everything had been for my own good. No matter what she had done. All the meals she had refused to let me eat had been missed
for my own good. I needed discipline. The books thrown in the trash, because I had to learn to live in the real world. Every memory relived the night of the selection—the sound of her voice, the feel of the scissors, the beating so visceral I had expected to be covered in bruises the next day, the shrieking, burning pain of my hand in the fire—all of that had always been done for my own good.

I felt horrible—flushed, and then chilled, like my legs couldn’t hold me if I stood, like I needed to run until my muscles burned. It was my fault. I should have known better. I knew what she was like. She wanted the reaction, even if she wasn’t there to witness it. She had already sent something ugly to Marin.

I scrubbed at my eyes and stood, light-headed from stress. Marin. Once might not have been enough. Our mother might have emailed both of us. I needed to check on my sister.

I stumbled and nearly fell on the top step, then clutched at the railing, made myself watch my feet as I walked down the twelve steps to the second floor.

Marin’s door was open. “Marin, did you—oh. Gavin. I’m sorry. I was just . . . I’ll.”

“Imogen, what happened?” Gavin rushed across the room and took my shoulders gently in his hands, keeping me upright. “Here, sit down. Marin’s in the shower. She’ll be right out. Or do you need me to get her?”

He helped me over to Marin’s bed, sat next to me, then stood again. “Let me go get her for you.”

“Gavin, I’m fine. Really. I’m so sorry for acting like that. I just. I’ll go back to my room.” Stupid. Stupid and embarrassing, letting him see me like this.

“Please, she’d want to know.”

She might not. We had hardly spoken over the last few weeks.
Maybe she thought I was a liar who had abandoned her. Maybe she’d think I deserved this.

Gavin knocked on the bathroom door before opening it, and a few seconds later, Marin stepped out, wrapped in her robe, a towel around her hair.

She sat down, put her arm around me. “Mommy Dearest?”

I nodded. “I’m sorry. I’ll go. I just wanted to make sure you were okay. I’ll go.” I tried to get up, but my legs betrayed me, sending me falling back to the bed.

“I’ve got you. You don’t need to go.” Marin wrapped me in her arms. “I’ve got you.”

The door closed softly behind Gavin. I leaned my head onto my sister’s shoulder, and I wept.

I cried until I felt as if I had been turned inside out. For the fact that my mother could still hurt me like this, years after I’d moved out. For my sister, because even though I could feel her heart beat, I had built a wall between us, and it was a wall I would most likely build higher before this was done. “I’m sorry I fucked things up so badly, Marin.”

“You really wrote me. When you left.” Her voice sounded high, hesitant. A girl’s voice, a child’s. “I saw it. That night. I saw then, and knew it was true. You didn’t think you were leaving me alone.”

“I did write. So many letters, Marin. I thought you didn’t write back because you were mad at me.” I didn’t tell her what I saw, her believing the lie that I hadn’t loved her.

“Do you think she enjoyed it? Putting us against each other like that? I mean, she must have, because why else would she go to the trouble, but I just can’t imagine. It’s like my brain all goes to spiders when I think about all the lies she told, trying to make it so we’d hate each other.”

“I’ve never hated you, Marin.”

“I’ve never hated you, either.”

“I know,” I said. “You sent me stars.”

“I was so scared when I did that. I thought you’d return them unopened or something. But I saw them, and I remembered the Star Princess stories, and I just missed you so much.”

“The first thing I did when I got them was put them up. I take them everywhere. Looking at them is how I know I’m home.”

I dragged in a breath. “I wrote you the Star Princess stories.”

Her hand tightened around mine.

“I was going to give them to you. For Christmas, that first year.”

“Do you”—she sniffled—“do you still have them?”

“They’re in storage. But I still have them.” Tears leaked hot from my eyes.

“Maybe I could read them sometime?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’d be good.”

“I’m sorry I let things get so fucked up between us,” Marin said.

“We’re okay?” I asked, knowing it wasn’t that easy, that this wasn’t the kind of thing that magic words made better, knowing that they had to be said all the same. There had to be a start.

“We’re okay.”

The run felt like purging poison from my system. My head was clear, and I had figured out a new scene, a way to make something that had been too flat more emotionally complex. I was going to ask Marin to read my draft before I sent it to Beth, but I thought it was close to being ready.

I ran up the stairs and into the house, got halfway down the hall, and then stopped. Walked backward, slowly.

“Oh, good, Imogen, you’re here.” Marin’s voice, but she wasn’t the only one in the front room.

“It will make it much easier if I explain to you both at once.” Janet. Smiling. My skin broke out in gooseflesh.

“I know a good deal about the tithe, having watched Thomas go through it, and then of course being chosen myself. And I know that the Fae can be so scrupulous about their honesty that details get left out. There is so much that’s important in the details. I want to be sure you know what to expect.” Her smile was a witch with a poisoned apple in her hand, a forgotten fairy extending a spindle.

“I think we both know what to expect,” I said.

“I’m quite certain you do, Imogen. It was Marin I was concerned about. Concerned that she might have had second thoughts, and asked you to try to rescue her, not knowing what she’d be giving up if you succeeded.

“You do know, right, dear?”

Marin looked at me, looked at Janet. She shook her head. My unsaid words rose up in my throat to choke me.

“Ah. Perhaps I thought you were closer than you are. The kind of sisters who shared the important things. Well, I hope there are some things that you share, because if Imogen breaks the tithe, you get nothing that you were promised, Marin. None of what you’ve agreed to risk yourself for. She gets all of it.”

“Nothing?” Marin asked, her voice shaking. “I’ll be nothing?”

I closed my eyes.

“But I know how close you are. I’m sure Imogen will take care of you.” The comfort of serpents, poison and green.

“Did you know?” Marin’s voice, sharp as knives. “Imogen, did you?”

“Oh dear. And I was only trying to help. You two clearly have a lot to talk about. I’ll see myself out.” Janet smiled at me on her way out the door.

“Marin, I’m sorry. I—”

She held up her hand, stepped back. “Don’t. Until you decide that you want to support me, that you’re happy for me finally being the best, being better than you, until you can watch me cross that bridge into Faerie and cheer for me while I do, you stay the fuck away from me, Imogen.”

She followed Janet out of the front door, closing it between us.

I went upstairs. Took off my shoes. Didn’t even shower, just crawled into my bed. Pulled the blanket over me until everything was dark, until I couldn’t see the stars on my ceiling, until I was completely cocooned.

“Get up. Away from the desk. Let’s go.” Ariel stood in the doorway, holding my jacket out to me.

“Where are we going?”

“Out. To the Market. To There, if we have to. I don’t care, as long as it’s somewhere that doesn’t make me feel like I am the neutral country in a war zone. Come on. Now.”

All of the progress that Marin and I had made was destroyed. She was convinced I was jealous of her, that I wouldn’t be happy until I had stolen all of her chances for success. Impossible to tell her “I am trying to save your life” when my reward for doing so would be exactly the thing she was most afraid of.

Plus, I still wasn’t sure I could save her. The Fae’s magic, or PR savvy, or whatever it was that kept the responses to Melete so uniformly positive in the press, had also all but obscured whatever happened when the tithe was broken forty-nine years ago. I could find traces of the fallout, but nothing of the actual events.

“Okay, you’re right. I could use the air. And the company.” And the mad glitter of the Market. I pulled on my boots, shrugged into my jacket.

The sky was late-evening lavender-blue, and almost warm enough to make the jacket unnecessary. The greening trees were dotted with birds.

“I can’t see them anymore without wondering if they’re real birds, or if they’re Fae,” Ariel said.

“There’s no reason for them to be watching now, though,” I said. “They know who they’re getting.” Everything smelled like spring. The dark richness of the earth, the green sweetness of the grass.

“Unless you steal her away from them.” Ariel looked at me sideways. “Is that still the plan?”

“If I can figure something out by May first,” I said. The birds lifted from their trees, flocking ahead of us. “Even if I can’t.”

“Do you ever think, ‘Fuck it, it’s only seven years, her boyfriend can handle this, I’m out’?”

“All the time.”

Ariel stopped walking. “Really?”

“She’s so angry at me. And I pretty much have no idea how to pull this off. Which makes me wonder if I’m throwing away our relationship, my future, for nothing.

“But I have to try, Ariel. She’s all I have.”

Her arm around my shoulders. “I know.”

The Market opened before us, in all its color and chaos. But this time, I no longer held the key to the treasure trove of wonders. The Market, the people in it, they didn’t want me there.