five.
She had always been told they looked alike, and it was fact. Both of them had olive skin that darkened to a gold by the end of the summer, the shades rooted in their Chinese blood. And while Marsden’s straight black hair was usually down to her waist because she was often too lazy to get it cut, her mother always kept hers nearly as long because she said it made her look younger. No matter how much certain men might want me for the shape of my eyes, it’s youth that keeps them around.
Marsden’s eyes were the same shape, too, but she liked that hers were even darker. So deep a brown they never altered, whatever the light—unreadable, hidden, a warning for others to not bother. Her being a skimmer would remain a secret, as long as she stayed careful.
Shine unhooked a coffee mug from the tree on the counter and filled it. Dressed casually because it was day, her makeup faint in the morning sun, she appeared too young to have a teenage daughter. Marsden had been unplanned, her parents both sixteen when she’d been born. As much as her coming along had derailed whatever plans they might have had, it had also forced them to stay together when maybe they wouldn’t have, until it all ended with the river. That had been worse.
“Did I just see you hide toast in your pocket?” Shine asked.
Marsden wondered if her mother had overheard any of her conversation with Dany. “I’m supposed to go feed a squirrel.”
“No pets.” Her mother’s reply was instant and automatic. “Nina’s rules.”
“Not in the house, Mom. Out in the covert.”
“Shine, not Mom.” Her mother took a long sip of coffee and stared out through the window at the ever-muddy Indigo. “Not Mom, not Mother, and, Lord”—a shudder, as though her coffee had suddenly turned repulsive—“never Ma.”
“Sorry.” Marsden still remembered when she’d been allowed. Those words sometimes felt foreign on her tongue, and sometimes completely natural—she missed saying them, as much as she resented them for what they stood for. Wynn, though, rarely needed reminding. “Shine.”
“I really wish you would stop going out to the covert so much.” Her mother set her mug down, lit up a cigarette, and looked at her daughter. “You go there every day. You even let Wynn go with you sometimes, letting her see God knows what. The girls tell me you do.”
The girls. Aside from Peaches and Lucy, the bulk of Nina’s prostitutes—including Shine Eldridge—were starting to slide into what Marsden had once heard johns call “well-done” territory. The light switches in the bedrooms having dimmers was no happy accident. Suddenly, the sun flowing in was more revealing than kind, and Shine’s face, beneath the careful makeup, showed the truth with each line.
Her mother did not know she skimmed. She did not know why Marsden would have any reason to make more money than she already did working in the kitchen. She might decide she didn’t know about skimmers at all, if she really did choose to ignore talk of the covert.
She also didn’t know that even as Marsden was on the lookout for bodies, her daughter strived to hear the dead. The sight of blood-splattered, heart-shaped leaves was easier to live with, it turned out, than the memory of a father saying he regretted her.
“I go there because it’s quiet, Mom—Shine. That’s all.”
“Do you know how unhealthy that is? Enjoying being in a place where people go to kill themselves?” Her mother blew out smoke, more anxious than angry. “Please, Marsden.”
Guilt—familiar, hateful, Shine’s most effective weapon against her—began to grind its way home, and Marsden sighed. She knew her mother had once actually mothered, that she would be better off simply forgetting most of that time. But Shine continued to try despite everything, and it only made it harder. Because crumbs still went toward hunger, still forced off starvation, even if that kind of mercy wasn’t necessarily kind.
“I don’t enjoy it,” she said. “I could never. But I have to find them.”
“Let the place be,” her mother pleaded. “Whatever happens in there is Hadley’s problem, not yours. You should be spending more time with your girlfriends, ones from school.”
She could not tell her mother that most girls talked about her, not with her. It’d been that way for nearly as long as she could remember. By the time they moved into the boardinghouse, Marsden had already been struggling to keep the few friends she had, each of them deciding hanging out with her would be dooming her own reputation at school. She recalled them the way she did favorite toys she once played with, before they broke and she could no longer play with them. Jessica, who liked Barbies, Jillian, who preferred Hot Wheels. Mattea, who had a tree house.
Marsden stopped fighting their withdrawal after a while. How do you fight fact? Her family did own the creepiest place in Glory, after all, had made it that way in the first place. What if whatever evil was in their blood could spread? She was the descendant of a madman, the protector of cursed land. She was one of the “Orientals” in town. Her mother becoming one of Nina’s girls—simply one more of Glory’s not-so-secrets—was, she supposed, the icing on a very ugly cake.
“It’s summer,” she said now. “People do stuff.”
“Fine. I mean when it’s not summer.”
“So ask me in the fall.”
“Don’t be glib. It’s not an appealing trait.”
Marsden’s hand squeezed the piece of toast in her pocket. Compulsively, like a muscle cramp. “To johns? Then oh well.”
Shine drew hard enough on her cigarette that it shook in her fingers. Her unending need for security filled her eyes, turning her expression both childlike and calculating. Marsden’s father had put that look there, Marsden knew, had taught his wife to fear being left alone as she dealt with his recklessness and inability to be responsible. His leaving had pushed her toward Nina and the boardinghouse, too. For that, she saw how her mother could be unforgiving. Just as she saw how it made her mother need too much protection to ever be able to protect anyone else.
“Those johns are what keep us fed, Marsden.” Ash fluttered to the ground from Shine’s trembling cigarette. Her voice trembled along with it. “But soon I’ll be too old for them. You know Nina knows this. And Nina . . . she’s asked me to come talk to you. She says it’s time you stop hiding in this kitchen.”
Marsden’s skin went icy, chilled with the revulsion of a touch she could already imagine. She’d known, but it was another thing hearing Shine say it out loud. “I won’t.”
“I know you don’t want to, but we owe Nina. She’s a business-person when it comes to this, not a friend. She covered those loans of your father’s that we’re still paying her back for.”
“Then go back to housekeeping. I’ll get another job somewhere else, on top of cooking here.”
Shine tried to smile then, of all things, and it was even shakier than her fingers around the cigarette. Her eyes simmered with panic. They said she was trapped and that she knew she was trapping Marsden along with her.
Something too close to pity flooded Marsden. An image of her mother at the window of their old duplex, watching for signs of her husband, flashed behind her eyes. One of her carefully counting bills before triumphantly declaring to Marsden that she could pick out ice cream.
She knew some of her mother had become an act, but not all of her, and it was terrifying how she blurred. Just how much could she let Shine need her? How much could her mother beg of her and still let her believe it came from love, not resentment? Her own selfishness?
“Housekeeping doesn’t pay as much,” Shine said. “And no one else in Glory would hire you. We’re not one of them, despite how long we’ve been here. Also, they know you’re already Nina’s; they won’t risk her coming after them. I’m sorry, but please, you need to consider—”
“I’m not Nina’s, and I’m not you. How can you not hate her for this?”
“Because we can’t afford to. And this place is still home for Wynn. Think of her when you tell yourself you’re too good for this town, when you’re out there with no money and nowhere to go.”
“I am thinking of Wynn. And I have money,” she blurted in a low rush. Surprise flooded her mother’s face. Marsden wondered if she would regret her slip; she’d never talked to Shine about her money before. But then she supposed it made no difference in the end—whatever her mother knew of her plans wouldn’t convince her and Wynn to stay. “You don’t think I’ve been saving as much as I can?”
“I just . . . I assumed you only wanted to leave,” her mother said faintly. “Not that you really could.”
“Well, now you know.”
Shine’s eyes glistened. Cigarette smoke haloed her head. Her despair made her stunning. “Then think of me. How could you make Nina wonder if I’m getting so useless I can’t even ask you to do this? How could you leave me when I was the one who stayed?”
Barely able to breathe, Marsden stepped back from the vortex that was her mother, the insecurity that turned her desperate. She didn’t need someone’s loneliness. And her mother was boxed into a corner of her own, forced there by her blood, her dead husband, her daughters.
“I don’t care if you don’t tell Nina no for me, then,” Marsden whispered, “as long as you don’t say yes. Can you at least do that? Until I think of something?”
Shine’s arm continued to shake as she reached for her mug of coffee. It would be close to cold by now. She took a sip and showed no reaction. Her face had gone pale. She set down the cup again. “I’ll see if . . . I will try—”
“Mars! Mars!”
Wynn’s bellow broke into the kitchen like a riptide as she burst in through the back entrance. Cradled in her arms was the old ice-cream maker—Marsden could tell with one glance that an attachment was missing. The observation felt vague, coming from a distance, as though she were merely watching the unfolding of a scene from someone else’s life. Her conversation with her mother still rang in her ears—her own plea, Shine’s struggle to remember her daughter.
“What is it?” she asked Wynn, the sister that she loved too much and wanted to protect more than anything. Who, because of that, was now being used against her.
“The covert!” From the corner of her eye, Marsden saw Shine go stiff. “There’s someone there!”
“You didn’t touch it, did you?” How much did you see? How much will you not be able to forget? “The body.”
“It’s not a body—it’s a boy!”
A boy. The two words seemed alien in the room, coming from another universe. “What?”
“And, Mars?” Wynn was frowning, her expression thoughtful as she absentmindedly cranked the handle of the ice-cream maker. “He looks kind of mean.”