Page 111 of The Reveal
If I start letting all these feelings win, who knows where it will end?
I feel Augie’s gaze on the side of my head, but I don’t look at him. I don’t ask anyone what they want to eat, I just bustle around like it’s one of those nights back before. When there were still too many thingsno one wanted to talk about hanging heavily in the air, but we would gather around the kitchen table, determined not to fight, and figure out how to enjoy each other for a while.
I break out the eggs that I buy in bulk from one of my neighbors on the hill who figured out a way to enclose a chicken coop in her house to keep the predators out, now that it’s not foxes she worries about. I whip up golden, fluffy scrambled eggs, get some cheese on there too, and I find a fresh loaf of bread in the freezer that a previous version of me cut into slices so I could make toast whenever I pleased.
If I could high-five previous me, I would.
I find some sausages and a rasher of bacon, and when I’m done, I’ve created the breakfast-for-dinner feast of my dreams.
“Now it feels like a homecoming,” Augie says when I start ferrying the plates over to the table, where he and Gran have been talking intently, but only about easy topics. Her health. His take on the state of the house. The weather.
Breakfast for dinner was how Gran made it fun when our mother was too high to take care of us after school, or up and disappeared altogether. She would gather us in the kitchen, act like it was a holiday, and then we would pull out all the breakfast food we could find.
Sometimes we even forgot to be sad that our mom wasn’t there.
Even Gran cackles with glee when I slide her plate in front of her, piled high with eggs and buttered toast. She spears a few sausages and tucks in, acting as if she hasn’t been fed in months.
I sit down with my plate, and I see Augie studying his eggs as if he thinks they might bite him. It occurs to me that he might not eat food in his current state.
But when he catches me looking, he digs in.
And because I’m pretending tonight, I let him do it too. I don’t ask about the ghosts in his eyes. I don’t mention our last meeting or what I saw there. I don’t look too closely at the watchfulness he wears too easily, then hides too quickly.
For a while, then, the only sound is the three of us not only eating but seemingly taking pleasure in it as we do.
There weren’t a lot of safe spaces for me growing up, and I understand now, finally, that this quiet sort of moment—when there was family together with no yelling, no dramatics, no upset or acrimony—is the only thing that got me through.
Once again, I feel tears pricking at the back of my eyes, because I couldn’t possibly have imagined that this would ever happen. It wasn’t that I’d given up on Augie, because I never did. I never will. I can’t, physically. Unless and until he’s dead, it’s like the very cells in my body refuse.
But I’d long ago given up onthis.
On ever feeling anything like happy with my family again.
For a long while, all I do is bask in it. In them. Inus.
“So you’re the oracle now,” Augie says when we’ve all finished eating and have all gone back for seconds, too. When he looks at me, and I see Gran doing the same, I think about the fact that all three of us have the same indigo eyes.
“Mom’s eyes were blue,” I say. When both of them blink at me, I make a face. “Am I remembering that wrong? A pretty blue, but just blue. Not like ours.”
“You’re remembering it right,” Augie says.
“The indigo eye has always indicated that the sight can or could be evident,” Gran says. “It has been handed down for centuries, with little attention paid to scientists and their recessive genes.”
Augie laughs that delightful, infectious laugh of his, and I tell myself I can’t hear the strain in it. I pretend I can’t see that he’s acting the part, maybe partly because that’s a major upgrade from some of his visits home in a lot of dark years. “I guess I’m the exception that proves the rule.”
“I’m not sure even you know what visions might have come to you in the state you’ve been in the past few years,” our grandmother says tartly.
Ordinarily, this would set Augie off. Even when he’d come back claiming he was balanced and good and ready to change, a comment like that would send him off into a spiral. I brace myself, but all he does is smile wider while he fidgets around with his fork.
Maybe we’re all onstage tonight, but I can’t bring myself to hate it.
“Yes,” I say, jumping back to the original question before this shifts and that twitch I’m sure I see in his eye makes him explode. “I’m the oracle, I guess. Fun fact—not only did I not sign up for the honor, you apparently can’t opt out, either.”
“It’s a gift.” Gran eyes me, but I’m sure I can see the rare hint of her smile on her lips. “Surely, I raised you to know that returning a gift is rude. As is refusing it outright.”
“I have no choice. The cards never leave me alone.” I don’t give them the satisfaction of moving them from where they’re pressing hard against my solar plexus. “That vision didn’t ask me if I was in the mood either. It came for me, no consent, like it or not.”
“That’s a goddess for you,” Gran says matter-of-factly, as if she has spent her life—born at home in the tiny town of Ruch out in the Applegate, then come all of eight miles into Jacksonville, where she’s remained ever since—neck-deep in too many pantheons to name. “They always think that all the world is their shrine, and woe betide you if you don’t worship them precisely the way they like. Wearisome, every one of them.”
