“I won that day, too. And a lot of other days.”
Funny, though. Mac almost seemed to enjoy her wins as much as his own.
“Yeah, you sure did.” Her dad said this with relish. He was every bit the competitor she was.
“I beat him at least half the time. Bike races, checkers, foot races, burping.”
“That’s because everything you ever did, Avalon, whether it made any sense... well, you’ve never half-assed a thing in your life.”
She gave a short, surprised laugh.
She also often tried too hard and overshot her mark. Her dad refrained from saying that.
She sat down on the bed, cradling the flannel nightgown.
“Dad... what made you think of that suddenly? Devil’s Leap and all of that?”
He paused. And then one side of his mustache hiked with his rueful, crooked smile. “I was just thinking you never were afraid of a damn thing.”
His tone was richly complicated: loving and wry, proud and resigned. It contained everything he knew about her and everything he suspected she’d go on to do.
It was his way of telling her that she would emerge triumphant, even if they had to pick her up and bandage her first. Or get the paddles.
So like her dad to compress a long, heart-searching, girlish talk into just one sentence.
Suddenly she couldn’t speak over the throat lump.
He gave the door frame a brisk, conclusive pat. “Night, pumpkin. We’ll feed you breakfast tomorrow morning at the Misty Cat if you don’t have to head back to work right away. Want the light off?”
“Not yet.”
He pulled the door most of the way closed and flicked off the hall light.
She sucked in a long, long breath and blew it out again, then she stripped off her sweaty, crumpled clothes and pulled the giant nightgown over her head, where it settled over her like a fragrant hug. She was too physically drained to contemplate a much-needed shower and still too wired from shock to actually sleep.
Should be a fun night to get through,she thought dryly.
Her eyes darted to her silent phone and her stomach knotted violently at the notion of texting Corbin, as if it was literally attempting to shrink farther away from him. But the GradYouAte staff would expect to see her tomorrow, and doubtless a hundred-some-odd emails awaited her, too.
She could leave the phone off for the night. But she was going to have to face it all tomorrow, regardless.
She could handle it. She was a big girl. She’d just turned thirty.
And yet whenever she visited her parents she always felt as though this twin bed was gradually molding her into her teenage self, the way a mouthful of braces had reined in her overbite just inside a year back when she was twelve.
She finally burrowed under the covers, shoved her feet down, and discovered her mom had put the purple-flowered sheets on her bed. They were percale and worn to soothing, buttery smoothness with age and a decade’s worth of kicking Harwood feet, and like hot tea with lots of milk and Graham Crackers, they were whipped out when someone had the flu or a broken bone. Her mom had clearly decided the pain of her condition warranted it.
Did it? While she could practicallyfeelthe outline of a sort of icy, furious shock extending from her clavicle to her belly button, shouldn’t she feel... devastated... right now? Shattered? Destroyed? Or other words that featured hyperbolically in her teenage diary?
Maybe her mom was right: maybe she was numb.
Or maybe she just didn’t feel thingsseismically, anymore.
Maybe age and the march of time just naturally leached potency from emotions, flattened the peaks and filled in the valleys. Maybe a relentless inflow of reality on the way to adulthood diluted magic the way she and her sister, Eden, had once sneaked water into their parents’ bottle of whiskey until they’d inevitably gotten caught.
“Mac Coltrane is a wizard,” she’d once gushed to her diary. His eyes were the green side of hazel, and in them flecks of gold floated like autumn leaves on the Hellcat River. No one else she knew had eyes like those. With just alookhe could turn her blood to sparkling cider, or make her breath go short and shuddery, or make her feel... cherished. It had certainly felt like alchemy then. He could say so much without saying a word.
Like the day of the squirrel funeral. They’d wrapped Trixie in a velvet shroud, which was really a Chivas Regal bag he’d stolen from his dad, and put her in a shoebox, and she and Mac had silently hiked out deeper onto the Devil’s Leap land to a spot Mac had scoped out earlier, where two tall, beautiful blue spruces grew surrounded by smaller ones, like a little tree family. He’d produced from his pocket a perfect heart-shaped rock he’d found, gray, like Trixie’s fur, a little smaller than Avalon’s palm, and they laid it on the grave. Somehow no church or hymn could ever hope to be as comforting as the quality of his silence and presence.