The Lingering Grace (2 page)

Her heart was pounding from half-jogging to the end of a row.

“Do you see it?” Alice asked, trying to read the call numbers on both sides of the row simultaneously.

Tony shook his head. “Not yet.”

“I don’t believe this,” Alice grumbled, sinking to her knees. “It’s got to be here. I can’t rewrite this whole paper—I don’t have time!” She ran her hands across the books on the bottom shelf, vainly hoping that the right one would just jump out and grab her by the throat. Tony scratched his forehead. Alice was starting to recognize these things he did. She knew now that when he scratched his chin, he was thinking deeply; when he scratched right below his hairline, he was worried.

“Maybe it was just shelved wrong,” he suggested. He turned around and started scanning the bookshelf behind him.

Though Alice worried it was useless, she re-scanned the spines on the shelf in front of her. Maybe Tony was right—maybe they had missed something. But she had that sinking feeling in her gut and her eyes were burning; she was frustrated almost to tears. Her sight grew blurry as she stared at book after book.

“The library will be closing in five minutes,” said a voice over the intercom.

Five minutes.

She blinked very quickly, trying to clear her vision. Her eyes stopped on a particularly tattered old book without a visible call number, and she reached out to grab it, glancing behind her at Tony, who still had his back to her.

Her fingers touched the binding and she gasped. It was the strangest feeling—a tingling in her fingers, a warmth that traveled up her arm and into her shoulder. Alice pulled the book from the shelf and felt as if all the hair on her body were standing on end. She shivered and stroked the cover, which was brown leather and plain. It was blind-stamped with three concentric circles, like a rounded eye.

Peeling the cover back, she scanned through a few pages at random and knew immediately what she was holding. There was a sharp tug in her abdomen, and she almost put the book back then and there. It wasn’t the first spellbook she had seen. She had discovered several while fighting for her life in the hotel last summer. They’d belonged to the witch who set the curse. One of them had been covered in scrawls and notes—an inconsistent, impossible mess.

This little volume was an entirely different story. It was printed; the old monospaced type left odd gaps between letters. Someone had carefully underlined a few sentences throughout, but overall, it looked nearly untouched. If it hadn’t been for the yellowed pages and the smell of rotting paper, she might have called it pristine.

Each page was laid out in the same way: a heading in large, capitalized type followed by an ingredient list and several paragraphs of instructions. To the left of each title were one to three small triangles. Some were colored in with solid black ink while others were empty. They were presented without explanation, but Alice felt sure they must be a scale of sorts: a rating to indicate how long a particular spell took to prepare or its difficulty or something like that. There were small sketches throughout. On one page, a tiny flower was drawn to the right of the ingredient list. On the bottom of another, a tiny frog, splayed out, cut open, its ink-drawn limbs hanging limply at its sides.

Her stomach turned; quickly, she shut the book. A shiver tickled her spine—the familiar sensation of being watched. Was it a coincidence that
she
had come across this book? Or could it be that the curse had left a magical stamp on her, a kind of otherworldly magnetism? Had she found the book, or had the book found her?

“I don’t believe it.”

Alice jumped, clutching the book to her.

“Hey—I found it!”

Tony was holding the book out for her to see, smiling widely. She took it from him with one hand; with the other, she slipped the leather book behind her back. The movement was instinctual. All she knew was that she didn’t want to return the book and leave so many questions unanswered. Nor did she want to explain to Tony why she had to know more.

“Thank God,” she said, grinning back. “You
are
a hero!” Maybe she could pass the book off as another ancient volume of literary criticism? Not a chance. Tony was too curious; he would want to look at it himself.

“See?” He helped her up and put his arm around her shoulders. “Told you it would be okay.”

“I guess you were right.”

He took the book back from her and examined it. Alice’s grip on the spellbook tightened. No, she definitely could not let Tony near this book if she didn’t want him to panic and light it on fire or something. “It’s kind of like finding buried treasure.”

“Except the treasure is a book and the only thing it was buried in was the library’s glitchy loan system.”

“Still—it feels good.”

“The library is closing. Please check out all books at the front desk,”
the intercom blared.

Alice and Tony jogged past row after row of dimly lit bookshelves. As they did, Alice slipped the leather-bound book into her bag before she could talk herself out of it. It wasn’t stealing, she told herself. Not really. She would take it home, glance through it, and return it to the shelf within a few days. It was just a quick investigation—albeit a secret one. But really, it had to be secret. Ever since the hotel, Tony couldn’t even watch a card trick without freaking out. If she told him a spellbook
might
have found her …
maybe
magically … well, she was doing him a favor by not mentioning it.

She was just being responsible. Really.

Tony dropped her off at home half an hour later. Still immensely pleased with his book-finding success, he’d suggested a celebratory dinner, but Alice insisted that she really
did
need to work on her paper. This was true.

She didn’t mention that she was far more anxious to crack open the book she hadn’t checked out than read the one she had.

The house was so quiet when she walked in that for a second she thought she was the only one home. Usually, the ruckus of her brother’s video games in the living room would be drowned out by the drone of her dad listening to NPR in his office. But the living room was empty and her dad must have stayed late at work because the doors to his office were open and the room was dark. Just the light in the kitchen was on, and it was only on second glance that Alice saw her mother sitting on a barstool, staring blankly at the faucet. Someone hadn’t turned it off completely and water was leaking out one drop at a time.

“Mom?”

Her mom jumped up.

“Oh, hi, honey. I didn’t hear you come in.” She walked around the counter and turned off the faucet. “Were you with Tony tonight?”

“Yeah, we were at the library.”

“Good … that’s good … ” she said absently before lapsing into silence again.

“Um … how was your doctor’s appointment?” Alice asked to alleviate the uncomfortable quiet.

Her mother’s lips twitched upward, then tightened. She abruptly turned her back to Alice and opened the fridge.

“Fine, fine … ” she said, her voice drowned out by the crinkling of plastic bags.

Alice’s worries about her paper were immediately replaced by deeper, more insistent fears. “What’s wrong?” she demanded.

“I can’t hear you, sweetie.”

“What happened?” she repeated. “Is something wrong?”

Her mom emerged from the fridge, holding some celery sticks and a jar of almond butter—her “guilty” snack. Normally she wouldn’t have had the almond butter. (She liked to remind Alice that too many nuts would make a person chub up like a squirrel before hibernation.) Her eyes briefly met Alice’s as she turned to the sink and started to rinse off the celery.

“Oh, just a sad story in the news today.”

Alice’s heart immediately slowed. “See, this is why I never read the news.”

Her mom scrubbed the hollow of the celery stalk with one thin finger. “A single mom just moved into a new house with her two young girls. The girls went swimming unsupervised. The six-year-old drowned.”

Alice’s chest constricted, but she tried to brush it off. “They didn’t know how to swim? Why did they get in the pool?”

“Really, Alice.” Her mom’s voice went snappish. “You of all people should know—these things can happen to anyone.” She grabbed the celery stalks and the jar of almond butter and walked out of the room without another word. Alice heard the bedroom door close.

Alice sat still on the bar stool for a moment. A weak trickle of water was leaking from the faucet; she got up and turned it off.

You of all people
.

A final drop of water hit the sink like the tiniest of hammers. Last summer, at the cursed hotel, she had nearly drowned in a swimming pool. Tony had pulled her out just in time.

She could remember all too clearly the press of water in her lungs. Not everyone knew the craving for air—the feeling that your head was being squeezed and squeezed until finally, in the last moments, when you thought you were going to explode … an arm around your waist pulling you up. A hand clapping you on the back, a voice telling you the coughing was okay, telling you to breathe when that was all you wanted to do until the end of time … just breathe.

Tony had saved her life. But the little girl would have felt the tightness, the void in her chest that nothing could fill, until the darkness came slowly in—not a stranger knocking down the door, but a cool-headed thief waiting for the window to fall open. Rushing into the opening, filling the lungs with cold black water … and then darker and darker until there was nothing—no space left.

“It’s okay. I’m okay.” Alice refused to turn into her mother, having panic attacks every time she heard a bit of disturbing news. She took a deep breath, shook her head, and walked slowly up the stairs to her room, pretending she was empty as a balloon floating higher and higher … out of her body, out of everything.

She really tried to forget about the poor drowned girl.

Poor drowned girl
. It sounded so empty—so distant. But the girl had a name. She’d had a favorite color. A best friend.

Alice opened her laptop and stared at the screen, her fingers poised over the keyboard.
No
. She pulled away. She didn’t want to know. A second later, though, she grabbed the mouse.

It didn’t take much effort to find the story, and Alice skimmed five news articles in a matter of minutes. There weren’t many details, not even the girl’s name. Just the hospital where she’d been airlifted, the time she had been declared dead, and a link to a website on pool safety. There wasn’t a picture, but Alice thought she could see the small figure, her wispy little-girl hair making swirls on the surface of the water.

She realized that she was clutching the edge of the desk so hard that her knuckles were white. Her phone buzzed and she jumped, eagerly snatching it up. Any distraction, anything to get her mind off of this.

Tony: Did you hear about the little girl drowning? It’s sad. It made me think of last summer. I’m so glad you’re ok. -Tony

He often signed his texts like that: “-Tony.” Did he think she wouldn’t know it was him? But it was the funny things he did, things like this, that made her smile at the strangest times. She smiled now, though her lips quivered.

Alice: It’s sad.

She stopped typing. A girl was dead and all she could say was that it was sad? She tried again.

Alice: It’s very sad. I’m glad to be ok too.

Then, smirking, she added “-Alice” to the end. She was about to press send when she reread his message and a surge of something—gratitude or love—made her face go hot. Backspacing quickly, she replaced the dash with an emotiheart.
<3 Alice
. She sent it before she could change her mind.

She threw her cell phone onto her bed, where it landed safely out of reach. Neither of them had dared use the L word yet, but an emotiheart was hardly a declaration of undying affection. Still, her heart was pounding.

“It doesn’t matter,” she muttered to herself, reaching for her backpack. Her paper—that was what she
should
be panicking about. In some ways, worrying about her homework was a relief. At least
that
was totally under her control.