Those three faces, none alike in dignity or feature: Goose light and lanky and loud; Neirin dark and soft and innocent; and ginger red and freckled Patrick.
Patrick and Neirin seem frozen in time—their faces the same as they were nearly three years ago when I left Westminster. I see snapshots of memories with their faces: Goose flashing his middle finger at me in Yard; Patrick rolling his first cigarette with ferocious concentration; Neirin scratching at maths problems, his face pinched with concentration.
And then me, holding a champagne sabre, spraying hundreds of pounds’ worth down open throats. Putting my cigarette out in the horsehair pancake to the collective horror of the teachers and students assembled for the Greaze, and the four of us snorting lines of coke Patrick shyly produced from his pocket, off his iPad in his father’s study.
We were not a foursome. For that, we’d need to be bonded by secrets, and I shared none of mine. Secrets cut you off from everyone else, so I would always suggest the vast majority of our exploits to mask that I never could quite connect with them in the first place. Insert a stifled sob here, would you?
A forked tongue clicks beside my ear. “It’s almost time,” my grandmother says, looking at the valet for confirmation, then at my stepmother. With a tiny crunch of a nod she looks ahead, toward the manor house, toward the old stables, ancient but fortified over the centuries. From the gate, four glossy Friesians emerge, a driver in a top hat commanding them, and my father’s coffin encased in a black wood and glass hearse behind.
I can’t see all that well from here—my head is still fizzing with sounds, whispers and coughs and everything else. But not Mara.
The way she sounds, the way she’s always sounded—like one discordant note, twisted just enough to affect the notes surrounding it—is impossible to ignore. An aural fingerprint, distinctly her own, distinctly Mara. The first time I heard her, I never wanted to listen to anyone else.
I look and listen for that note as the horses’ hooves knock the ground in a steady, dignified trot, their large hearts pumping solidly with the effort. I can almost feel their boredom as they approach, which is why, halfway down the path, the ripple of terror and rage in their bodies reverberates in mine. They break their gait, stopping, stamping—one backs up, another sidesteps into another horse. Then one of them rears, nearly snapping the harness. The colour of Katie’s face is ash, her heartbeat racing the way the horses want to.
“It’s all right,” I say reflexively, and my sister snaps her head toward me and slits her eyes. There’s anger there, fighting for a place beside her sadness. Today is changing her, has changed her already.
My grandmother holds tight to my grandfather’s arm, her face a mask of placidity as her blood ices with anger. She looks to the priest, who says something to the people in a vain attempt to calm them, because the horses begin to thunder toward the chapel, eliciting screams despite being several lengths away. I can feel the power of them in the ground. They’re about to turn sharply to their right, cracking into the woodlands just before they do it, just before the hearse overturns.
I know what they’re going to do before they do it, because at that moment I hear Mara, see her running toward us, diagonally through the hedges that enclose the gardens and past the Atlas fountain, and as her path begins to converge with the carriage, the horses blaze with panic. My eyes meet Mara’s, and she stops short. Looks at the horses, then back at me.
It’s her they’re terrified of. I know it, she knows it, and so she vanishes as swiftly as she arrived.
I don’t wait for anyone to calm the horses, or for the pallbearers to fetch the coffin and bear it toward the church. I turn away from the priest, attempting to usher everyone away from the scene and into the chapel, and manage to slip away unnoticed. I glance back just once before I reach the woods, long enough to see Katie’s glossed head moving through the doors, her eyes vacant, her arms held by Ruth and my grandparents before the last knot of bodies passes inside. And then I turn away from them all, away from my father, away from the sodden remains of my family, to Mara.
2
BE NOT SIMPLY GOOD
PAVED ROAD TURNS TO GRAVEL turns to dirt path as my mind runs on seeing her again. We’ve barely had a moment alone since arriving in England—my grandmother fought the idea of her presence at the funeral, and Ruth tried to broker a deal: England yes, funeral no, but I held fast. I miss nothing about my father—he tortured people I care about, and Mara most of all. It felt right for her to bury him with me. To be rid of him together.
It’s been less than a year since Mara first asked about my family; I’ve become closer to her than I’ve ever been to any of them, but here, today, now, I can’t help but wonder if she’s ever regretted it. Of course our meeting had been engineered, though we didn’t know it then, and probably couldn’t have done much differently if we had, but if she could go back . . . would she have wanted to know me if she’d known where I would lead her? What I would lead her into?
The first time she asked about him, we were on our way from my house to our first date, and, unsurprisingly, he wasn’t home. Only my stepmother was.
“So where was Daddy Warbucks this morning?”
“Don’t know, don’t care.” Mara looked a bit surprised at that, and I remember being rather surprised at myself—I’m usually not so obvious. “We’re not close,” I finished, hoping to end that particular line of questioning.
“Clearly,” she said. Her eyes were on me, and she said nothing else—she waited expectantly for me to keep going. I hid behind sunglasses instead.
“Why doesn’t your mother have a British accent?”
“She doesn’t have an English accent because she’s American.”
“Oh my God, really?” I’d known the girl for half a second, and she loved giving me shit from the very first.
“She’s from Massachusetts,” I said. “And she’s not actually my biological mother.” Mara knew nothing about me, and all I knew about her was that she’d been the only survivor of some calamity that claimed three lives—and that I heard her voice in my mind the night that it happened, despite her being thousands of miles away. The second I saw her, I needed to know her. Which, I suppose, meant letting her know me.
“My mother died when I was five and Katie was almost four,” I said neutrally. I probably added some version of the standard It was a long time ago, I don’t really remember her line. I waited for her to offer the expected platitude, but she didn’t. So I decided to tell her the truth—some of it.
“Ruth spent high school in England, so that’s how she met my mother, and they stayed friends at Cambridge.” I searched for my pack of cigarettes almost reflexively, placing one between my lips as I told Mara about my parents’ and stepmother’s brief flirtation with civil disobedience. I still smoked in front of Mara then—I’d started at eleven and realised I could exhale through my nose like a dragon. Seemed like a good enough reason at the time.
I went on with carefully worded backstory for a bit, and when I finally risked a glance at Mara, she was curious. There was even a slight upturn at the corners of her mouth. I remember wanting to shock her, so I told her my mother was stabbed to death, thinking that would do it.
A thing I loved about Mara immediately, though—she looked back at me completely without pity.
“At a protest,” I added. Her brows drew together, but the wide-eyed look of horror mixed with Poor baby! I’d expected to see was nowhere to be found.